On 30 January 1637, England's Privy Council met to discuss the governance of the realm. The council, as usual, consisted of the kingdom's greatest office holders and noblemen: the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud; William Juxon, who served at once as bishop of London and as Lord Treasurer; the Lord Privy Seal the Earl of Manchester; Thomas Howard, the fourteen Earl of Arundel and Earl Marshall of England; Edward Sackville, the fourth Earl of Dorset; and so on. At the head was King Charles I himself. The council neither considered whether to engage in Europe's perennial religious wars, nor did Laud discuss his campaign against Puritanism in the church, nor did the king demand a judicial opinion regarding ship money, though such an order was only days away. Rather, sitting as the Committee of Trade, they discussed economic and financial policy, including import duties, the export of gold bullion, the price of gunpowder, and how best to regulate the grain and the cloth markets. But before turning to these questions, the council discussed coal smoke. “His Majesty began,” Secretary Windebank noted, “with the brewers in Westminster. The judges have delivered their opinion that none near the king's house can brew to the annoyance of the same. That none shall brew with coal.” An “Act of State,” he recorded, was to be issued on the subject the following week.Footnote ¹ Within days Westminster's justices of the peace were amassing evidence against local polluters, while the brewers scrambled for ways to defend themselves.

This incident was part of a campaign against the nuisance of coal smoke, what we might now call air pollution, in certain parts of Westminster and London. Charles's predecessors, Queen Elizabeth and King James I, had acted on a few occasions to regulate and restrict smoke; Elizabeth, for example, was said in 1586 to be “greatly grieved and annoyed with the taste and smoke” caused by coal-fueled beer brewing.Footnote ² This was in part a response to the change from small- to large-scale and capital-intensive industrial brewing, as modestly sized ale brewers of the medieval city were increasingly overtaken from the mid-sixteenth century by brewers of hopped beer.Footnote ³ Such expanded breweries became the leading consumers of fuel in the early modern city, burning thousands of pounds of dirty Newcastle coal every day.Footnote ⁴ Their clouds of smoke were new under Elizabeth, but by the 1630s they had already been familiar for at least two generations. At least some of the brewhouses cited in 1637 would have existed during the reign of Charles's father, causing the same smoke clouds to drift over royal palaces and gardens. Domestic coal burning was also new during the later sixteenth century, as the quarter million inhabitants of England's metropolis increasingly used mineral coal rather than wood to heat their homes. Such household consumption, in fact, burned the majority of the capital's coal and hence caused most of its smoke. Governmental reform, however, only addressed large industrial coal burners, which were the most visible, but not the most important, sources of smoke in the seventeenth-century city.Footnote ⁵

It is therefore necessary to go beyond material conditions in order to explain why the years of Charles I's personal rule witnessed the most sustained and serious attack on urban air pollution of the entire early modern period. This article will argue that for a few brief years in the early seventeenth century, the English Crown found that the reform of urban air was an important aspect of its governmental program, a part of attempts to create a beautiful, orderly court and capital as central showpieces of a well-governed kingdom. The state pursued this policy using an assortment of political weapons: the royal courts, local magistrates, and the temptations of cooperation. Its goal, an urban setting worthy of a strong monarchy, purged of offensive smoke, foundered in part on the resistance of those manufacturers whose businesses required intensive fuel consumption and whose interests were thus opposed to the Crown's. But despite its limits and failures, this campaign demonstrates not only that environmental concern was possible in early modern England but also that it was defined by characteristics that modern environmentalism would rarely accept: the push for clean air in early Stuart Westminster was explicitly political, part of a broader project to strengthen and glorify the Crown. As such, it was emphatically not a reaction against urban pollution more broadly. Dirty air was denounced because it was a threat not to all of London, nor to the natural world, but rather to specific places centrally important to a political ideology that defined order through differentiated spaces of display, beauty, and health.

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Asserting what might be called an environmental policy in early Stuart England may be surprising both to students of early Stuart Britain and to scholars of environmental thought, but it builds on recent initiatives in both fields. The traditional interests of historians studying the politics and culture of the early seventeenth century have increasingly embraced aspects of spatial organization, representation, and display. Revisionist skepticism regarding the importance of the House of Commons before the civil wars turned attention toward the royal court as a permanent focus of governance, factional infighting, policy formation, and the arts of power.Footnote ⁶ A number of scholars have sought to cross the divides usually separating history from literary studies by exploring the highly political nature of much contemporary theater, and especially of the masque, that form of early Stuart drama in which the court was at once cast, setting, audience, and subject.Footnote ⁷ The built environment, including architectural design, urban form, the social geography of who belonged where, and the cultural geography of what all of the above meant are increasingly understood as part of political life.Footnote ⁸ Most recently, Kevin Sharpe has argued that control of the royal image was a central concern of government, as it hired artists like Anthony van Dyck to represent Charles as the living embodiment of order, a ruler whose person resonated with a charisma that simultaneously demanded obedience and taught virtuous moderation.Footnote ⁹ The Caroline state, such work has emphasized, deployed imagery, architecture, and public visibility as points of contact through which English people would have learned how their government understood itself.

This appreciation of the political implications and possibilities of spatial organization, representation, and usage has not only been confined to work on the court. London in general, as well as highly charged spaces within it such as Cheapside, St. Paul's Cathedral, and Covent Garden, came under the reforming and improving eye of the regime, even as all such spaces and neighborhoods were also subject to divergent and ambivalent representations by residents, magistrates, and authors.Footnote ¹⁰ The production of space as lived experience is perhaps always political, but recent work has shown that governors and subjects in early Stuart London considered the arrangement, accessibility, and meaning of space to have had clear implications for royal power. In early Stuart London, space not only contributed to the micropolitics of daily life but also was entangled with ideologies and agendas pursued by those at the center of government. The story told below builds on these findings, stressing in particular that unlike the theatrical worlds conjured up in court masques, reforming the real urban environment on the ground in Westminster was complicated, difficult, and divisive.

In contrast to these directions, historians of environmental change and thought have been almost entirely uninterested in the course of early modern urbanization in England. Cases of rural environmental change, above all the extended conflicts surrounding the drainage of fenlands, have long been studied in detail.Footnote ¹¹ Fen drainage's central place in grand narratives of environmental change results, however, from a certain transhistorical approach to its significance: it is often seen as the first in a long series of victories for the modern, rational, capitalist, alienating, mechanist, universalist, statist, extractive approach to economic life over a traditional, symbolic, subsistence, immediate, local, vernacular, and sustainable understanding of and engagement with the land.Footnote ¹² As such, it can be seen as a conflict that has been and continues to be reenacted around the world, with twenty-first-century clashes between large corporations and local communities over land, water, and resources figured as so many reiterations of fen drainage. It is a story about technological modernity and its translatability around the globe down the centuries. Such a story may well be defensible, but it is not the only way, nor even a very good way, to approach many of the environmental changes and challenges brought to England by early modernity, especially those arising from less sudden forms of growth and change.

A few historians have, however, argued that early modern developments prompted specifically early modern responses to environmental change. Keith Thomas contends that the gradual conquest of nature in England was rooted in hard-headed and anthropocentric drives to control and exploit, but then led to increasingly tender appreciation for animal intelligence, the pleasures of natural history, and the beauty of wild nature.Footnote ¹³ Richard Grove claims that imperial expansion and contact demanded new reflections on environmental management.Footnote ¹⁴ Others have shown how European states' naval and mercantile ambitions prompted sophisticated management of forest resources.Footnote ¹⁵ Similarly, continental states sought to manage and tame rivers, marshes, and deltas, rendering watercourses agents of improvement.Footnote ¹⁶

Despite such examples, however, environmental historiography overwhelmingly stresses the vast gulf separating the modern from the premodern world. Historians of modern urbanization and industrialization in Britain and Europe have found that, before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, environmental degradation existed to such an insignificant extent in comparison with the enormous problems of modernity that no one was yet concerned about pollution.Footnote ¹⁷ John Evelyn's famous 1661 denunciation of London coal smoke, Fumifugium, is dismissed from this perspective as a protoenvironmentalist voice shouting in the wilderness without influence or importance.Footnote ¹⁸ Studies of premodern cities do regularly invoke—and sometimes positively revel in—dirtiness. But as Mark Jenner has recently argued, descriptions of the messy, mucky, smelly premodern world tend to draw excessively firm distinctions between modern and earlier sensibilities; before the Industrial Revolution, we are often told, people simply were not yet so intolerant of stinks, smells, and dirt because they were then closer to nature. Jenner rejects this, comparing it to the naïve belief that Native Americans lived in happy harmony with their wild environment.Footnote ¹⁹

Some studies have acknowledged that premodern people could show concern for urban dirt, but these are often presented as constant aspects of everyday life. For Emily Cockayne, as for Keith Thomas, attitudes shifted slowly and unevenly over two centuries, gradually responding to long-term changes but unmoved by the conflict and contingency of politics.Footnote ²⁰ For Christopher Hamlin, preindustrial nuisances were policed through local structures that had no need for specialized medical knowledge and no role for top-down bureaucratic control. Communities decided what counted as nuisances according to the immemorial customs of the locality or the precedents of common law. This contrasts, Hamlin argues, with the swift action in the name of public health characteristic of the powerful Victorian state. Premodern nuisance is therefore a part of the bourgeois public sphere, a matter of negotiation and low-level contestation between neighbors but unconnected to statecraft or high politics.Footnote ²¹ In contrast to such approaches, this study proposes that to recover how pollution could be perceived as a problem in a preindustrial world, it must be placed firmly within its contemporary political, as well as material, cultural, and economic, context. Politics, we will see, was an essential aspect of how the environmental consequences of social and economic change troubled certain conceptions of property, beauty, and order.

While a number of studies of early modern cultural or social history have noted in passing Caroline measures against specific brewhouses, none have seen this as part of a deliberate campaign.Footnote ²² The two authoritative studies of the early history of the British coal industry, by J. U. Nef and John Hatcher, remarked that some preindustrial people maintained a “prejudice” against the smell of coal smoke, but their accounts render this as a minor obstacle on the road toward fossil-fueled modernity.Footnote ²³ England's precocious consumption of mineral coal is well known and has been particularly influential for economic historians interested in comparative development and the “great divergence” of the British economy during the Industrial Revolution.Footnote ²⁴ London burned far more coal during the early modern period than did any other European city. In England's capital, mineral coal was already widely used by 1580, and by the 1630s, Londoners consumed many times more coal than did the entirety of the Netherlands around 1700.Footnote ²⁵ Burning what Londoners called “sea coal” emitted smoke that was blacker and more abrasive than wood or charcoal.Footnote ²⁶ It gave off a “brimstone fume,” according to one character in a 1627 play, while in a 1644 pamphlet a charcoal merchant called it a “sulfurous, pitchy-faced rascal.”Footnote ²⁷ It was said to damage bodily health, the stone of old buildings, the decorations within doors, and even the flora of London: “wherein neither herb nor tree will long prosper, nor hath done ever since the use of sea coals began to be frequent.”Footnote ²⁸ For contemporaries, the switch to coal was not just a rational substitution of one form of fuel for another; it also changed the urban environment. The reception of this newly smoky air, then, may usefully be described as an episode in environmental thought or environmental concern. This is true despite the fact that Caroline environmental policies did not promote clean air for all, nor were they concerned with the conserving nature—all early modern environmental thought being, in Keith Thomas's phrase, “breathtakingly anthropocentric.”Footnote ²⁹ It is quite true that early modern people were not concerned with the natural environment for its own sake. If, however, we accept that nature and culture are and were intertwined, and further accept that the environment is part of human affairs, then it becomes possible to appreciate how and why dirty air became a key concern of the English state during Charles I's personal rule.

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In the spring of 1624 Charles, Prince of Wales since the death of his older brother almost twelve years previously, made his debut as a leading force in English government. After an ill-fated and rather ridiculous journey to Madrid in order to woo the Spanish princess in person, his safely unmarried return to England helped make him a hero of Protestant public opinion and a leading figure in the Parliament that quickly followed. Through his anti-Spanish, pro-war agenda, as well as his substantial resources as a patron, Charles played an important role in managing and directing what became the most constructive meeting of Parliament during the entire early Stuart period.Footnote ³⁰ At this moment in which he was first able to promote legislation through his own influence, Prince Charles began his attempts to reform London's air.

A bill, recorded as being especially recommended by the prince, was introduced first into the House of Lords in March.Footnote ³¹ It declared that there were brewhouses in London and Westminster that burned “extraordinary great fires made of seacoal,” yielding “such abundance of unwholesome and unsavory smoke and stinks as doth greatly diminish not only the pleasure and delight but the health and soundness of the said cities.” This was a problem in particular because it annoyed the “places of principal resort of other persons of the best rank and quality, but also . . . places near adjoining to His Majesty's court, and the court of his most dear son the Prince of Wales.” Smoke, therefore, was not a general problem of public health, but nor was it only a problem for the monarch himself. Rather, it was inappropriate for the spaces in which “his Majesty, the prince, the nobles, and other most eminent persons of this kingdom are occasioned to be so often.”Footnote ³²

Industrial smoke, according to this bill, was to be banned from a royal court that was broadly defined to include the chief residential and professional spaces of England's ruling elite. No breweries, therefore, would be permitted to burn coal within one mile of the palaces in Westminster, nor anywhere in the city west of London Bridge. If enacted, the brewery bill would have ordered a smokeless zone encompassing most of London within the walls and all of its western suburbs. The eastern rump of the city, the southern neighborhood of Southwark, and the eastern suburbs would remain areas where such manufacture was acceptable. The bill, in other words, would have created a statutory division between a clean and airy West End and the dirty industrial areas in the East End and urban periphery decades before such distinctions actually came about through more gradual processes.

The breweries bill was passed with no sign of protest in the House of Lords, but then it stalled. “The Commons hesitate to pass it,” Member of Parliament Francis Nethersole noted in a letter, “as it will damage the estates of many.”Footnote ³³ Some of those whose estates were to be damaged, furthermore, were well positioned to bury the bill. The members to whom it was committed included not only the burgesses for Westminster, London, and Southwark, all of which contained substantial brewing interests that would have been threatened, but also John Lowther, whose brother Richard was retained by the Brewers Company.Footnote ³⁴ Because there were only a few days between its commitment and the king's suspension of Parliament on 29 May, it is unsurprising that there was no action. While the brewers watched the bill carefully, they did not expend large sums on the bribes that would have been necessary had they felt truly endangered.Footnote ³⁵ Even if its passage never seemed imminent, the company could not afford to be complacent regarding a measure that would have made brewing in a significant portion of the capital difficult. They therefore acquired a copy of the bill and a list of the members to whom it was committed, with a delegation of leading members appointed to “follow” the bill's progress. There was reason for the Brewers Company to monitor proceedings carefully because, according to Nethersole, passage of the breweries bill could have been possible if it became entangled in broader negotiations between the Commons and the Crown.Footnote ³⁶ Nethersole concluded that, while the Commons hesitated to pass it, yet “they may do so to please the Prince, who, in St. James's Park, is annoyed with the Tothill Street brew houses.”Footnote ³⁷ Pleasing the prince was a major consideration in 1624; as the heir to an aging monarch, he constituted a reversionary interest, and he was furthermore the primary manager, along with the Duke of Buckingham, of parliamentary business.Footnote ³⁸ While other issues such as taxation, foreign policy, and trade dominated parliamentary discussion, Charles made it clear that the beauty and health of his court, which was also to be “the principal resort of other persons of the best rank and quality,” was now a priority.

After succeeding to the throne, Charles quickly established that the decorum, order, beauty, and cleanliness of his court and capital would be central pillars of his rule. This was not merely an expression of Charles's personal interest in art and in a more formal personal style than that preferred by his father. Rather, it amounted to an ideological commitment. Such a vision of order required careful distinctions among persons: household ordinances described who could and could not attend the king's meals, prescribed that all who attended the chapel royal should process so as to allow rank to be easily “distinguished and discerned,” and forbade “beggars, idle and loose people” from approaching the king or even entering within his palace.Footnote ³⁹ During the first few years of his reign, Charles's government took many steps to reform and improve the court's organization and appearance, to prevent illegal urban sprawl in and around London, and to ensure that those areas of the metropolis regularly used by the king remained clean.Footnote ⁴⁰ Official statements connected the beauty, regularity, strength, and cleanliness of the built environment directly to the nobility of royal government. London, the Crown proclaimed only a few weeks into Charles's reign, was “our chamber and seat of our Empire [and therefore] should be kept with most state and order.”Footnote ⁴¹

In the spring of 1629, just weeks after the dissolution of the last Parliament until 1640—and hence the very beginning of the personal rule—the king's council showed that smoke was part of these concerns. When the Privy Counsellor William Cecil, the second Earl of Exeter, sought to repress smoky brewhouses and a smith's forge near his home in suburban Clerkenwell, he pointed out that the house had been visited by “their majesties.” The council arrested the offenders, including the brewer William Sedgewick, and made it clear that such an “annoyance” to aristocratic and sometimes royal spaces would not be tolerated.Footnote ⁴² Other brewhouses, according to the king's instructions to the Privy Council in 1632, were among the problems that “annoyed and prejudiced” the houses of the royal family and so required attention.Footnote ⁴³ From 1625 to 1632, then, smoky air was occasionally found to threaten Caroline standards of urban cleanliness and courtly decorum. But it was not until the fall of 1633 that Charles's government initiated sustained pressure on those beer brewers who operated closest to the royal palaces in Westminster.

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In September of that year the council charged that the king “hath taken notice of a great nuisance and offence caused by the sea coal smoke of certain brewhouses in Tothill Street, Westminster” and summoned their three operators. The brewers Abraham Bradshaw, George Prynne, and Bartholomew Parker, as well as William Hatton, who maintained a nearby brick kiln, were informed that their businesses were displeasing to the king, acted against the laws of the realm, and even posed a threat to the Stuart dynasty. The Crown's use of the term “nuisance” implied both a general and a specific meaning. Generally, a nuisance was then, as now, anything displeasing, a synonym for the “annoyance” of which Exeter complained in 1629. To displease a king was rarely good, but it was not obviously illegal. Nuisance also, however, was a category of legal offence that encompassed anything preventing the use of private property or of public spaces.Footnote ⁴⁴ Recent precedents had established the principal that access to reasonably clean air was an aspect of property tenure that could not legally be infringed upon by a neighbor.Footnote ⁴⁵ It was also recognized, of course, that many important trades produced unpleasant by-products and that this was a necessary fact of life, especially in towns. But deliberations between the justices of the King's Bench during Jones's Case of 1628 established that while it could often be difficult to decide when a resident's claim on clean air should take precedence over a neighbor's need to pursue his trade, a smoky or smelly trade situated near a royal palace offered a paradigmatic example of what was undeniably illegal.Footnote ⁴⁶ By referring to Westminster brewing and brick burning as nuisances, therefore, the council was claiming that it could rightfully abate the annoyance and punish those responsible.

The law of nuisance was not so much executed here, however, as selectively deployed. The council never elaborated, for example, to which of the two varieties of nuisance it referred. Public or common nuisances, the common-law tradition agreed, were offenses that damaged the community in general and might be legally abated by anyone. Private or special nuisances, by contrast, were specific injuries to specified property, and might be remedied through judgment in court for damages. The council's language suggested throughout the 1630s that smoke in Westminster damaged the king in particular, rather than the collective welfare, but it also acted to correct it through magisterial power. It thus used the rhetoric of a private nuisance but pursued the remedies of a common nuisance, without explicitly defending either approach. This may be seen to derive from the ambiguity of the king's person itself, which was neither wholly public nor private but always in some ways both. When common-law justices discussed nuisances against the Crown, they did not address this ambiguity, preferring instead to see royal spaces as places where the law was unusually clear. Instances of industrial smoke near to royal houses, they argued, were obviously illegal nuisances and therefore helped to elucidate general principals that could then be applied to less straightforward disputes. The Crown, therefore, was not merely using the common-law principle of nuisance against the brewers. It was also helping to shape that law by asserting the special legal status of royal palaces and houses.

A crucial part of the council's complaint was its assertion that intensive coal smoke was a threat to health. As in the text of the breweries bill, it was again not said to threaten public health. Such a claim was not unthinkable during this period, as others, including the pioneering demographer John Graunt, did argue that London's smoke was a general danger and raised urban death rates.Footnote ⁴⁷ Here, however, the council's concern was limited to the royal family. The offending smoke, it stated, was “very offensive and noisome to the queen's majesty, being now with child, and may endanger the health of both their majesties and the princes their children, as their majesties have found by their own experience.”Footnote ⁴⁸ There was good medical authority for the claim that London's smoky air was unhealthy. In 1635, the court physician William Harvey referred to the capital's “insalubrious” air “engendered by the general use of sulfurous coal as fuel.” One not accustomed to it, like the French-born Queen Henrietta Maria, might be considered additionally vulnerable.Footnote ⁴⁹

In September of 1633, furthermore, his family's health was much on the king's mind. Prince Charles, then not quite three years old, had been sick for several days in May, caused, one physician argued in a letter to the king, by exposure to cool evening air.Footnote ⁵⁰ The queen was announced to be “quick with child” during Charles's journey to Scotland that summer, after which he seems to have been particularly concerned for her health and safety.Footnote ⁵¹ In late August, Henrietta was reported to have suffered from numbness in her arm, and news that she had a cold brought Charles home early from the hunt.Footnote ⁵² In mid-September she was at St. James, following the advice of her physicians, and by late September it was reported that the king would not leave London until she “be delivered of her princely burden.”Footnote ⁵³ Such considerations, clustering during the summer and early autumn of 1633, are likely to have heightened concern over the healthiness of her immediate environment and to have elevated Westminster smoke from annoyance to danger.

Moreover, despite the lack of records from the brewhouses in question or of any rigorous data regarding their effects on local air, there is evidence that royal apprehensions drew on genuine material realities. Breweries were the only manufacturing or industrial facilities in the early seventeenth-century city that consumed hundreds of tons of coal per year, between two or three tons per day at many locations throughout the metropolis. They were therefore uniquely smoky and were widely recognized as such.Footnote ⁵⁴ In 1626, for example, Sir William Boswell, a clerk of the council, had described a prodigious storm on the Thames that included, so Boswell wrote on two separate occasions, “thick smoke, like that of a brewer's chimney.”Footnote ⁵⁵ A decade earlier Thomas Dekker had offered a Dantesque description of the underworld in which “[t]he Grand Sophy of the Satanical Synagogue” breathed out fumes “blacker than sea coal smoke out of a brewhouse chimney.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Westminster brewer Abraham Bradshaw's own brother claimed in a parliamentary debate of 1628 that the family's Westminster brewhouse operated on a scale that, if Bradshaw was not grossly exaggerating, would have made them one of the capital's leading brewing establishments.Footnote ⁵⁷ Bradshaw's colleagues were also prominent brewers, and they probably consumed comparable quantities of fuel. Bartholomew Parker (along with an unnamed member of the Bradshaw partnership) had attended the Commons in 1624 to lobby against the breweries bill, and in 1636 Parker was named master of the Brewers Company.Footnote ⁵⁸ George Prynne, whose brewery stood at Castle Lane, held other real estate in Westminster and was similarly wealthy.Footnote ⁵⁹ These brewers, then, were indeed quite likely Westminster's leading consumers of smoky coal, but they were also among its more prosperous citizens.Footnote ⁶⁰

Given their local prominence, the brewers perhaps expected some reasonable consideration for their business interests. The council allowed them to present their case, and while it is unrecorded, it seems quite likely that they would have pointed out the scarcity and relative expense of wood and the universal use of coal within the London brewing trade.Footnote ⁶¹ Perhaps they behaved with proper deference and signaled their willingness to accept whatever the council decided. A more confident tone is also possible, however. George Prynne had once opposed an imposition on brewers' malt by a royal patentee on the grounds that such unparliamentary taxation was a violation of “the ancient common laws of this realm and [his] birthright,” a claim that stands out among dozens of other defenses against the same tax that use no such constitutional language.Footnote ⁶² Bradshaw's late brother Joseph was royal brewer and participated in James I's funeral in 1625.Footnote ⁶³ He was then a member of Parliament in 1628, helping efforts to oppose the imprisonment of the “five knights” who had refused the forced loan and protesting against the malt imposition on the floor of the House of Commons.Footnote ⁶⁴ Prynne, Parker, and Bradshaw each, therefore, had some personal experience of opposition to early Stuart extralegal taxation and other policies associated with arbitrary government.

In any case, because their offense was annoying the king and his family, the council offered the brewers a choice. They could remain in their current premises if they used wood fuels rather than coal while the king was in residence, or else they could continue to brew with coal but only in “such other houses as they can provide, so that they be seated in such remote places and at such a distance as they be no way offensive to Their Majesties or their court.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Given the added expense and difficulty in pursuing either of these options, Bradshaw, Parker, and Prynne were unlikely to have been very satisfied with their situation. The council, furthermore, signaled its seriousness by ordering the local justices of the peace (JPs) to “cause their fires to be presently put out and quenched” and to report back regarding whether there were further brewhouses in the area that should be similarly suppressed.Footnote ⁶⁶ These JPs, Lawrence Whitaker and Peter Heywood, had extensive experience policing the city. They were to be assisted, furthermore, by Surveyor General Inigo Jones, who served the Crown as classicizing architect, stage designer for court masques, and magistrate in charge of limiting urban building and improving sanitation, a career that nicely encapsulates the connections between court propaganda and urban governance.Footnote ⁶⁷ A few weeks after the brewers' initial appearance, and likely following a report from the JPs, the council again noted that the brewhouses were nuisances and therefore ordered the attorney general to proceed against them in the court of King's Bench. Suppressing coal smoke at court, the council made clear, was an important matter to the king and his family, and would be enforced as part of broader efforts to police and improve urban order, cleanliness, and beauty.

It is unclear how rigorously these 1633 orders were executed, but there is evidence that they did achieve at least some partial and temporary success. Parker was issued with a pardon early in 1636 for a fine of £300 that had been levied against him in the Court of Exchequer.Footnote ⁶⁸ The pardon notes that Parker had also been committed to the Fleet prison, suggesting perhaps that he had not readily complied with the council's earlier warnings against smoke. He was therefore ordered to provide security that he would not “brew in Westminster any more with coal.” This order may have worked; if he had continued to evade the council's orders, it would have been strange to complain, as he did in March of 1640, about the evasions of other brewers. It may be, then, that by 1640 at the latest Parker was in fact successfully pressured into conformity with the council's instructions.Footnote ⁶⁹ Bradshaw certainly did continue to brew, at least in the short term, as is shown by a court case recording a delivery of over one hundred pounds worth of beer to one Westminster customer in December of 1633.Footnote ⁷⁰ Nor, unlike in Parker's case, is there any evidence that he had been imprisoned. But a 1637 survey by the Westminster JPs of fuel consumption by local brewers found that neither Bradshaw nor Prynne were actively brewing by that date, and it made no mention of Parker at all.Footnote ⁷¹ This suggests, perhaps, that over time the council did dissuade each of the three brewers cited in September of 1633 from further brewing with coal in Westminster.

It did not, however, end brewing itself, and from late 1636 the council renewed its efforts to suppress smoky industry from areas around royal palaces. This renewal coincided with, and should be understood as a facet of, other initiatives during the later 1630s to renew the court as ideological and physical center of government. One well-informed correspondent claimed early in 1636 that Whitehall “in most places is so decayed, that it is held unsafe, therefore it is thought it shall be new built, with much beauty and state, and that suddenly.”Footnote ⁷² A petitioner in 1638 similarly referred to “the re-edifying of Whitehall, which they say His Majesty hath a desire to build new in a more uniform sort.”Footnote ⁷³ The apotheosis of such ambitions were expressed in masques like Inigo Jones and William Davenant's Britannia Triumphans, performed early in 1638, at whose climax Britanocles, a ruler embodying light, order, and virtue, emerges from “the glorious Palace of Fame” to drive away “those misty clouds of error clear,/ Which long have overcast our eyes,/ And else will darken all this Hemisphere.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The literal clouds that darkened Charles's actual palaces, then, could easily be seen as obstacles to the image of order that royal spaces should have presented to the king's subjects. In addition, the return of plague to London in 1636 and the arrival of further royal children late in 1635 and early in 1637 may have prompted heightened concern over the healthiness of the royal palaces. The 1636 outbreak prompted the execution of measures, developed during many previous outbreaks, focused on the cleansing of dangerous places and microenvironments such as streets and sewers, as well as preventing the spread of contagion through careful segregation of the sick from the well. For Paul Slack such initiatives were closely connected to other goals of social policy, part of “a new drive to cleanse the metropolis of public nuisances and make it a capital fit for an absolute king.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Though not discussed by Slack, coal smoke was part of this drive. It constituted both a medical and metaphorical problem for the Caroline regime, mutually reinforcing threats that, during the last years of the personal rule, prompted persistent attention to Westminster's leading coal burners.

At the Privy Council meeting of 30 January 1637, Secretary of State Windebank noted that “the judges” had delivered their opinion “that none near the King's house can brew to the annoyance of the same,” and on the basis of that ruling the council planned further action.Footnote ⁷⁶ Exactly which judges Windebank refers to is unclear, because by January of 1637 a number of precedents had become available. First, there was Jones's Case of 1628, which became a key precedent in the English common law of nuisance, informing legal doctrine into the modern period. In that case, the justices acknowledged that coal was necessary for carrying on many trades, but they found that the exercise of a trade should cause no damage and must be undertaken in “fit” places. While fitness could be a vague criterion, the social geography of London provided spaces like Cheapside and Ludgate Hill (respectively, the sites of London's leading goldsmith bankers and St. Paul's Cathedral), which were cited as places obviously unfit for dirty industry.Footnote ⁷⁷ Similarly, the report of a 1638 case, Morley v. Pragnell, cited a recent finding in Tuffnell's Case, in which a tallow furnace near the queen's residence at Denmark House had been prohibited.Footnote ⁷⁸ Both Tuffnell and Jones could have provided the council with a precedent with which to justify suppression of smoky industries near St. James or Whitehall, and from summer of 1638 so could Morley.

Beyond these three cases, however, there is evidence of further legal proceedings against polluting brewhouses. Windebank's notes stated that brewers must not annoy the king's house. Jones's and Tuffnell's cases both developed nuisance law in ways consistent with this claim, but neither stated precisely that brewing near a palace was illegal. Parker, as we have seen, was convicted in the Court of Exchequer, but Windebank's notes seem to have been referring to something more recent. He could have been thinking of the case against the brewhouse owned by Louis Young and his partner and son-in-law, Alderman Isaac Penington, a rich London merchant, future lord mayor, leading member of the Long Parliament, and member of Cromwell's Council of State. According to their later petition to Parliament, during the summer of 1637 one John Collins, butler of the Inner Temple, accused their brewhouse in Whitefriars, near the Strand, of annoying its neighbors, both the Inner Temple and nearby Serjeants Temple.Footnote ⁷⁹ Penington and Young did not precisely assert that they were victims of royal policy, but they did claim that the earls of Arundel and Dorset (both Privy Counsellors) attended the trial as interested neighbors and exerted pressure on the justices, and the petitioners dropped further hints that their trial was a miscarriage of justice comparable to the recent findings regarding ship money.Footnote ⁸⁰ Around the same time yet another Whitefriars brewer, Thomas Mathews, also claimed that by “oppression and power of some great lords my brewhouse was suppressed.”Footnote ⁸¹ Mathews did not cite any involvement by the court or council in his case, suggesting that he suffered “oppression” privately at the hands of unnamed mighty neighbors, perhaps once again Arundel and Dorset. Thus the suppression of two brewhouses in Whitefriars may have arisen primarily through the concerns of neighbors acting more as gentlemen than as agents of the state, but it is nevertheless quite possible that others at the center of power considered such private suppression of nuisances to support the king's agenda. Even if one were able clearly to distinguish Arundel and Dorset's private interests from their public authority, judicial opinion during Charles's reign blurred such distinctions in nuisance law. It would have been easy for Windebank or his colleagues to interpret a private nuisance verdict as a victory for the court: if the crowded streets between the Strand and the Thames were legally unfit for smoky industry, how much more so must have been the palaces and gardens of Westminster.

In addition to Penington, Westminster brewers Michael Arnold and Edward Bond also claimed to have been prosecuted later in the 1630s. Finally, during the 1633 proceedings against Bradshaw, Parker, and Prynne, the council had stated that the attorney general was to proceed against them in King's Bench. Parker's fine in the Court of Exchequer suggests that he did not do so, but it remains possible that there was yet another case. Thus, if all of these references to court cases are genuine and all refer to separate proceedings, then there were eight cases—nine, if Windebank's note is taken to refer to yet another—during the reign of Charles I that either could be taken to support, or were specifically intended to endorse, the Crown's right to prevent heavy smoke emissions near royal palaces.Footnote ⁸²

Whichever precedent the council considered most powerful, in early 1637 it renewed its program to remove smoke from Westminster and ordered JPs to survey the coal stocks of local brewers. They found that four had already converted to alternative fuels or else were armed with plausible stories to explain away their substantial coal supplies.Footnote ⁸³ While the JPs' survey found some evidence that the council's policy was working, it also uncovered signs of evasion. In particular, Arnold and Bond, two of the brewers concerned, became frequent objects of the council's attention over the subsequent three years. Bond, according to the 1637 survey, had taken over the Bradshaw brewhouse, somewhere near Tothill Street on the southern edge of St. James Park. Arnold seems to have been brewing primarily on the Millbank, at a site now overlooking Victoria Palace Gardens, little more than a hundred yards to the south of the House of Lords.

Both Arnold and Bond, however, are difficult to pin down during the late 1630s, because they were repeatedly cited by the council for illegal brewing only to move their operations elsewhere or to brew for other proprietors. They were among the four men ordered by the council not to use coal in February of 1637, only a few days after local JPs had examined their stocks of many tons of mineral fuel.Footnote ⁸⁴ Arnold later claimed, without giving any details, that he had already been prosecuted by Attorney General Bankes around 1634, but that in the Michaelmas term of 1637 he, “amongst other brewers in Westminster,” was brought before the barons of the exchequer and “constrained to acknowledge a judgment without any legal course of trial.”Footnote ⁸⁵ A few months later, he further claimed, Bankes again accused him of annoyance, this time against Archbishop Laud, whose palace at Lambeth lay immediately across the Thames, a quarter mile or so downwind. After still further pressure by Bankes, Laud then summoned Arnold and suggested that an annual contribution of £20 to the repair of St. Paul's Cathedral might suffice to remove the king's displeasure. Despite Arnold's willingness to grease the necessary wheels, late in 1638 a sheriff arrived to arrest him, and he narrowly “escaped at a back door over a wall.” A few months later, his wife, Mary, who seems to have taken over brewing in Arnold's absence, was successfully arrested and confined to the Fleet for six days.Footnote ⁸⁶ By the late spring of 1639 Arnold complained that his trade was ruined and he was left in debt to unsympathetic landlords.Footnote ⁸⁷

Arnold's petitions, however, paint an exaggerated picture, because other records suggest that he adapted to these setbacks by establishing new partnerships. He and Bond were hired by the courtier Sir William Brouncker and Dr. Thomas Cademan, physician to the queen, to brew and distill in a place sufficiently “far remote” from the court so as not to annoy the palaces.Footnote ⁸⁸ According to a 1640 complaint to the council from Parker and Edward Hammond, now described as “late brewers of Westminster,” Arnold and Bond were then illegally brewing in yet another Westminster location. This house, cited in the 1637 survey, was owned by John Ayliffe and operated in the late 1630s by his creditor Thomas Bennett. Its precise location is unknown, but Ayliffe owned other property along the Millbank in 1647, which may suggest that it stood near to the house from which Arnold had bothered Laud.Footnote ⁸⁹ A final record states that in 1639 Arnold and one Thomas Hammond had taken over the brewhouse recently operated by John Sedgewick, perhaps identifiable as the Fleet Bridge establishment from which John's father, William Sedgewick, had provisioned the Royal Navy in 1625, or else as the same operation of which Exeter had complained to the council a decade before.Footnote ⁹⁰ Whatever its precise location, the Sedgewick house seems quite likely to be distinct from Ayliffe's, from Brouncker and Cademan's, and from Arnold's own on the Millbank. Far from being ruined, therefore, by the unwelcome attention of the king, the archbishop, the attorney general, and the Privy Council, Arnold spent the late 1630s busily seeking and finding new opportunities in the brewing trade.Footnote ⁹¹ Since the king and council's purpose was to end or limit smoke emissions from specific brewhouses rather than to regulate individual brewers, nor much less to police brewing in general, other victims of royal policy probably shared Arnold and Bond's resilience.Footnote ⁹²

Arnold's partner Bond underwent a similar series of persecutions and business disruptions during these years. He too was visited during the JPs' survey of 1637, called before the council and ordered not to use coal, and arrested in 1638 for noncompliance.Footnote ⁹³ Along with Arnold, Bond was threatened further by the council in 1639, was bound for £500 not to brew with coal, and was employed and defended by Brouncker and Cademan.Footnote ⁹⁴ Like Arnold, Bond claimed that Crown officials, particularly Attorney General Bankes, Solicitor General Littleton, and groom of the bedchamber Endymion Porter, had pressured a jury of the Court of Exchequer into finding against him. And, also like Arnold, much of what we know about Bond's ordeal derives from his own evidence at the treason trial of Archbishop Laud in March 1644.Footnote ⁹⁵ There, Bond sought to associate the Crown's suppression of Westminster coal smoke with Laudian tyranny and popery. Bond, like Arnold, claimed that Laud tried to extract a large contribution to St. Paul's Cathedral, and added a suggestion that the archbishop then sent him to see the queen mother, Marie de Medici, who promptly sought his conversion to Catholicism, a charge Laud vigorously denied.Footnote ⁹⁶ Hence in Bond's testimony at Laud's trial, like Arnold's, the Crown's campaign against Westminster coal smoke was reframed as extralegal and subtly popish. Bond too escaped ruin; though he did not take on as many new projects as Arnold, he nevertheless continued brewing into the 1640s and held property in Westminster at his death in the 1650s.Footnote ⁹⁷

While Bond and Arnold were the leading objects of the council's attention during the late 1630s, there were others as well. In August 1637 a brewhouse south of Charing Cross, which had been operated for at least eight years by Robert Flood, was the subject of an additional complaint from the court regarding “annoyance of the king's house.” On this occasion the comptroller of the household, Sir Henry Vane, went through the Brewers Company rather than the Privy Council or the Westminster magistrates. Flood was called before the company court and “promised to conform himself to [Vane's] pleasure therein.”Footnote ⁹⁸ There is no further record of Flood disturbing Vane, the king, or the council, but this same brewhouse was later subjected to particular condemnation by Evelyn in his 1661 antismoke tract, Fumifugium.Footnote ⁹⁹ Another example, away from Westminster, was the case against Penington and Young's Whitefriars brewhouse, already discussed. Penington's petition to Parliament for restitution implied that he was a victim of politically motivated proceedings. His descriptions of where each justice stood regarding his case seems likely to have been meant to draw a parallel between his case and ship money, and he further cited judicial instructions to the jury suggesting that they were being pressured into finding him guilty. Furthermore, according to Bond, it was Penington who offered him shelter when he was persecuted by the council.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ There are good reasons, then, to suggest that the proceedings against Penington and Young's brewhouse, as well as those against the brewery operated nearby by Thomas Mathews, were at least partially motivated by the wishes of the court, though not in so straightforward a manner as in the case of the brewers of Westminster. If Penington, Young, and Mathews were all considered in some ways victims of royal policy, in addition to Flood, Bond, Arnold, Ayliffe, Hammond, Bradshaw, Prynne, Parker, and Sedgwick, this would make twelve known brewers whose operations came under the scrutiny of the king's council during the personal rule.Footnote ¹⁰¹ There were dozens more completely unaffected by this campaign, but these probably constituted most of the large-scale producers along the Strand and in Westminster.

The testimony of Bond and Arnold has led some scholars to accept their claims that measures against coal smoke were primarily driven by Laud himself, and even to conclude that opposition to such precocious environmentalism was an important cause of Laud's execution in 1645.Footnote ¹⁰² This, however, is misguided; Charles's patronage of the 1624 breweries bill, the multiple sources citing the king in particular as expressing a grievance against smoky brewhouses, and the many Crown officials beyond Laud who were also involved in policing smoke nuisance all suggest that it was the king himself who was primarily responsible for the campaign against industrial smoke in Westminster.Footnote ¹⁰³ It was a royal policy, but one whose successful execution, like all other tasks of early modern government, would require cooperation from office holders, magistrates, and subjects. Yet while smoke policing was not a Laudian initiative, it was a policy that the archbishop probably was happy to implement. He criticized the cathedrals of Norwich and Chester for allowing smoky trades to be practiced near church closes, and he never denied Arnold's claim that smoke annoyed his garden at Lambeth.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It is possible, but not demonstrable, that Laud may have nudged Charles toward acting more vigorously against Westminster nuisances.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ More broadly, the emphasis on the “beauty of holiness” that characterized his primacy in English religious life was pursued on many fronts. Some of these policies, like his promotion of railed-off altars rather than communion tables, proved highly controversial. Other aspects of the politics of space, however, including the renovation and decoration of church fabrics, met with wider acceptance even by those who rejected some of Laud's theology and liturgy.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Caroline antismoke policy, then, might be seen as trying to do for the court what Laud was trying to do for church interiors: create decorum and order in spaces that were special. It was another aspect of the politics of space and display through which the English monarchy sought to represent itself.

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This campaign—the harassment, fining, and arrest of large-scale beer brewers with the intention of improving air quality—was thus part of a much broader initiative to reform and improve the kingdom from the center outward, an example of the attempt to turn a messy metropolis into an image of virtue.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ “The government and order in our Court,” according to the Crown's own household ordinances, should “spread with more honor through all parts of our kingdoms.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In some aspects of governance the court was clearly to be a model for change elsewhere; the Chapel Royal, for example, lent authority to Laudian reforms in liturgy and church decoration throughout England. But in other ways the court was meant to sit atop a hierarchy of places, to create order through difference as much as through imitation. Thus Charles's government issued numerous proclamations and orders in council regarding the nature of royal space. It sought to keep the streets clean, the water pure, and the air clear, but also to keep the poor, the sick, and the dirty away, except under carefully controlled circumstances like the ceremony of the royal touch. In all of these ways order was pursued as separation, with the king distinct and apart from his subjects even as he sat in Britain's metropolis, surrounded by over a quarter million of them.

Even though many scholars have recognized this desire for order, examining attempts to improve air quality reminds us that translating such an ideology into facts on the ground was never straightforward. It is here that exclusive attention to prescriptive literature and political culture gets us only so far, because rhetorical endorsements of order and beauty could provide ample cover for diverse, even divergent, interests. The Crown's language of smoke as a nuisance was adopted and repeated back by a group of projectors who sought to turn concern over dirty air to their own advantage. A series of proposals during the mid- and late 1630s argued that new techniques for treating coal could remove the offensive smoke, rendering it both a useful fuel for industry and inoffensive to the king. These projectors sought partnerships with the Crown and often repeated the rhetoric of smoke as “annoyance” in their pursuit of lucrative patents.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Among such projectors were two of Westminster's leading brewers, Michael Arnold and John Ayliffe.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Arnold's attempt to reconcile the council's mandates during in the 1630s with his own business interests clearly failed: a few years later he was literally running away from attempts to enforce royal antismoke policy, and by 1644 he presented his experiences as part of the struggle against Laudian tyranny and popery. The case of Arnold, then, offers an example of a man who was in some ways both a partner of royal initiatives against industrial smoke and also one of its leading victims.

Arnold can therefore be seen to exemplify both the possibilities and the weaknesses of the government's antismoke program. He was capable of using the same language of nuisance with which the council denounced his livelihood, and he saw the need to adapt to legal and political pressure by pursuing projects and relocating his brewing and distilling operations. Arnold's case shows how by the end of the 1630s the overt application of power and the attractions of collaboration had allowed Charles's government to make some real progress in limiting large-scale beer brewing in Westminster. This initiative, like the personal rule itself, enjoyed a success that was real and yet limited and fragile. The campaign against smoky brewing had achieved some victories, rhetorical and material, and yet it was suddenly halted, again like the personal rule itself, in the spring of 1640. Arnold reframed his experience, in his testimony before Parliament, by complaining against tyrannical disregard for property rights, inflected by illegal religious innovation. Historians who seek, in the Whig tradition, to denounce the regime of Charles I, as well as those revisionists who stress its well-intentioned paternalism, could thus both support their cases through the activities of Michael Arnold, ally and victim of Caroline environmental policy.

The key point, however, is not Arnold's protean flexibility, nor that history is not an exact science, but rather that the politics of order and display was both a positive program and one that necessarily entailed exclusions and losers. It aspired after new types of public spaces to be characterized by the regularity and rationality of Covent Garden, St. Paul's new portico, and, it was hoped, a newly designed Whitehall itself. Spaces characterized by beauty, cleanliness, spaciousness, and immediately legible social differentiation did not exist and so would have to be made using the powers of government. Westminster's brewhouses, the largest sites of fossil-fueled industrial production in the premodern city, stood in the way of that. The creation of a beautiful capital looked, from the perspective of its victims, like the destruction of prosperous businesses. Even the politics of display and of orderly space, in other words, were divisive. Furthermore, clean air in Caroline London, like access to the monarch's person, was not to be for everyone. The Crown was not in any way opposed to industry or coal burning in general, but rather their effects in certain locations and around certain people. Cleanliness, health, and beauty were politicized.

The project during the personal rule of Charles I to reform smoky air in London and Westminster suggests that we can talk about early modern environmental thought as long as we define its specifically early modern assumptions and applications. Unlike some varieties of late modern environmentalism, seventeenth-century English people were not concerned with the preservation of nature for its own sake, nor did Charles's regime ground its policies in an ecological vision of mutually dependent life. Urban problems like smoky air were rarely described as “pollution” during the early modern period, and scientific experts did not establish precisely what levels of toxicity a healthy body could endure. In other ways, however, this episode shares much with later environmental dilemmas. London's breweries operated on a new scale, and much of their efficiency was made possible by the expanded use of cheap, abundant, and dirty fossil fuels. This dirtiness was perceived to be unpleasant, ugly, and a threat to health. In these ways, Londoners of the 1630s shared some of the challenges as well as some of the responses of inhabitants of the shock cities of the industrial era.Footnote ¹¹¹

From this perspective it is misleading to claim, as many environmental historians have done, that air pollution specifically, and the pollution of natural and built environments more generally, are intrinsically modern problems and concepts, meaningless before large-scale industrialization. But nor does Charles I's harassment of smoky brewing, nor even does John Evelyn's more famous attack on London smoke in 1661, make them environmentalists before their time, especially if that tradition is taken to embody ideals of equality and justice. Evelyn was not a proto-green but rather the culmination of the Caroline tradition that saw clean air as an important part of political order and renewal.Footnote ¹¹² This tradition was emphatically not concerned with smoke's impact on the poor, on industrial neighborhoods, or on the powerless. Clean air was desirable as an aspect of royal self-representation rather than as an ingredient in public health or as a basic human right. For even as Charles's government sought to reduce coal smoke in Westminster, even as it fined and imprisoned those who belched dirty black clouds into the king's gardens, it simultaneously used the resources of the state to promote coal consumption elsewhere in the capital. The campaign against the brewers of Caroline Westminster thus offers the rather uncomfortable possibility that concern for the health and beauty of the natural and built environment can serve the values of a monarchical—even perhaps an absolutist—state just as easily as it can the progressive and democratic ideals usually associated with modern environmentalism.Footnote ¹¹³ Early modern England's most sustained and serious initiative against urban air pollution was wedded to a politics of courtly display and hierarchy, of distinction and exclusion.