Dan Snow's History Hit - The Heiress, the Kidnap, and the Making of London

Episode Date: June 14, 2021

After the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666 London was on its knees with its population decimated and the heart of the city burnt out, but from the ashes, it would rise phoenix-like to become one of the world's dominant economic and cultural centres. Dan is joined by author Leo Hollis for a walking tour of London and they visit the key locations in London's flourishing after the tragedies of the 17th century. Along the way, they discuss how London was rebuilt, where the money came from to do it and the architectural ambitions of those involved. They also explore the life of Mary Davies, a relatively little known and tragic figure, who's life is absolutely central to the rebirth of the city. The land she inherited after the death of her father to the plague came to form what is today some of the most valuable real estate in the world. But this inheritance was a curse for her involving becoming a child bride, being kidnapped, declared mad and much shady dealing along the way.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody, welcome to Down Snow's History. We've got it all in this podcast.

I go for a walk around London with Leo Hollis. We start next to Temple Church where William the Marshal's buried, but we only did that because I love William the Marshal. But anyway, we start essentially at the edge of the limit of destruction of the Great Fire of London in 1666. And on this walking tour, we talk about the plague of 1665 that killed, I don't know, one in three Londoners? Totally insane. We talk about the Great Fire of London. And then we talk about the rebuilding, how London suddenly became the world's biggest port, the world's biggest city, one of the world's dominant economic and cultural

centres. And essential, essential to that was the rebuilding of London, the recasting of London in the shape and some of the architectural styles that we still recognise today. An early modern city rose up on the ashes of the medieval, sadly, because I like medieval architecture, and there's very little in London. And the Yannick is going to at me now and terrify me, but there's very little in London. Let's just say that. This is a great walk. And we talk about as we cross over Bond Street, which is now one of the poshest shopping streets in London. It used to be a river. And as you cross over Bond Street, you enter a huge estate that fell to an heiress. That heiress was called Mary Davis, and she had a terrible life. It was a curse,

folks. It was a curse. Her father died in the plague. She inherited it, had an arranged marriage to some aristocrat, was then kidnapped, forced married to someone else. I mean, it's unbelievable. This story is quite extraordinary. So this is us walking the mean streets of london talking about the birth of london an heiress a kidnap and a lot more besides if you want to go and watch some documentaries we've got a lot of documentaries about london let me tell you during lockdown we had to make a lot of documents about london and i mentioned ellen yanaga earlier her series of medieval histories are storming the top charts of historyhit.tv, the only charts that matter in this world.

And you go to historyhit.tv, you can watch all that wonderful London history over there. All you do is sign up, very small subscription, and you join the club. It's going to be awesome to have you. Historyhit.tv. In the meantime, here is Leo Hollis taking me on a big walk through central and west London. Enjoy. So Leo has brought me to this very quiet, wonderful area of London. It's where the barristers are usually very busy working away. It is the temple. I'm standing now beside Temple Church. It's famous circular shape reminding us that it was originally a Knights Templar church.

William the Marshall buried in there, but let's not worry about that. This podcast is about the 17th century and Leo and I get off on our walking tour. Okay, so why are we down this little alleyway? Why does our great tour start here? So we're starting here in the temple. The temple sits halfway between the city, so the

financial capital, and Westminster, which was the royal and political centre of the city. And in the middle were this kind of, this line of lawyers. Making money is the letters go both ways. Absolutely. It's also here where all the banking was started. But if we think about what was happening here just before the Civil War, one of the main characters of our story was Hugh Audley, who was a lawyer who lived his whole life within these alleys. He was one of the most extraordinary Londoners, in some ways, one of the first capitalists.

So if you imagine a character like Thomas Cromwell or John Gresham, here was a man who was a commoner but became one of the most influential people as a financier, as a money lender and also as a property speculator. And it was here while he was a lawyer that he bought the land that would later become the Manor of Ebury and Neathouse. This guy Audley, there's always been money men who emerge and are able to sit between the merchants and the aristos, but what is it about the timing of that generation? Why were they able to leave a stamp on this city that would last till this day?

I think at the broadest this was a time of global expansion. You see trade routes going all across the world London specifically had started to transform during the Elizabethan period and there had been a concerted effort to make London a trading center rather than becoming dependent on Antwerp or Amsterdam so London with the formation of things like the Royal Exchange became the heart of a trading empire. And so Audley takes advantage of that. One of his early ventures was investing in trips, voyages across the seas for goods,

and he made fabulous profits out of it. And so this was happening just as the 17th century was changing, the city was becoming increasingly more powerful and seeing itself in opposition to the old legitimate powers of Westminster and the Crown. So somebody had to sit between those two points of power? Well law was the thing that controlled everything in many ways and this was true of international trade as well as property. So London is on its way to becoming the biggest port in the world, financial centre, England's a trading power. But you've also got some politics going on.

You've got wars against the Dutch, kings being restored. It's all happening. Plague. Well, exactly. I mean, as London is emerging as a modern sort of city, it's also completely on its knees. So in the 1660s you've had nearly 20 years of civil war and the interregnum and then you have charles ii coming back you have plague in 1665 and then you have the great fire which totally devastates the whole landscape of the city so the fire itself which started in september 1666 came all the way up to the edge of the temple, just where Chancery Lane is there.

It destroyed everything and it transformed everything, because the rebuilding of the city really established London as the first modern city. Wow, so if we'd been standing here in late 1666, it would have just been a barren wasteland, just from almost the end of that block there. Exactly. If you were here on September the 6th, 1666, you would have seen a fight between the future James II and the lawyers because as the fire was coming over the wall of the temple, the lawyers refused James to come in and they dealt with the fire themselves. But it literally burnt the outer edge of the temple.

They had his number. They had James Duke of York's number, years before the rest of us realised what a ne'er-do-well he was. OK so you've got old London completely destroyed, what proportion of the city killed in the plague the year before? There was about one in three people who were killed in the city, I mean a lot of the rich and the powerful left, leaving the majority of the citizens pretty much on their own. There was very little help.

There was probably two or three doctors that were left to tend hundreds of thousands of people. And by the end, they estimate it's probably over 100,000 people were killed. You've got a plague, devastating effects of a plague, fires incinerated most of the city. It doesn't feel like the ideal setting to build one of the world's great cities. No, and that's exactly, it's that kind of dilemma and that kind of catastrophe that did allow the city to be reborn because it wasn't reborn just in terms of its fabric. It's not just the buildings that matter, it's what was needed to be transformed in order to allow that rebuilding to occur.

And that questioned power, it questioned politics, finance, the way things were made and who made them. And these lawyers who had to make sure the boundary disputes were all settled. Well absolutely. I mean every single house needed to be remeasured and set out and at this time you also see the development of a new scale of private property as well as things like mortgages and leaseholds so the rebuilding reinvented the idea of what property was. So why when we're talking about a city that's been incinerated there does all the attention shift west to this dazzling new wealthy suburb of London in the west?

I think you get two things. Firstly, you get a third of the population that never wanted to go back. So they were looking for new places to live. I think secondly, you get this emerging bourgeois class. So the merchant class and the professional classes. They're looking for new ways of living. So new types of living so new types of housing and once the old city had been rebuilt you have a new industry a whole new construction

industry that wanted to continue growing the city and so they start moving westwards and up to the north and to the south building brand new types of terraces types of squares where this new class would be able to express themselves and live in new ways okay so we, types of squares, where this new class would be able to express themselves and live in new ways. OK so we've got lots of builders, we've got lots of moneymen who want to lend money, big opportunities, where are you taking me next? OK we're going to head north towards Lincoln's Innfield and there we're going to start the story of Mary Davies as well.

Let's go. So what's the significance of this square that we're in now? So we're in Lincoln's Innfield which is in some ways the very first square that was built in London. It was built in the 1630s. It came out of a private property scheme by a man called William Newton. He had hoped to build a square like the ones that you would find in France or in Italy, but he had to build around this large field. So you get this expanded space but with a series of houses around it.

And this really is in some ways ground zero for the redevelopment of London. And so what is it about the 17th century? Is it just fashion, taste, powerful people moving in, building techniques? Why suddenly do you get the construction of these squares? I think first you get demand. You get a new class of people who want to live outside the old city. You then get speculators, businessmen and investors and builders who are willing to put up money up front. And then finally you get the land itself. So this land would have been owned by the Crown or by an aristocrat

who would then want to make profit out of it. And the way that they thought of doing it is firstly putting their own house as part of the sort of square and then you sort of see the major, most elegant sort of Parisian hotel and then surrounding it you sort of see an escalation of terraces. And so this is a completely different way of thinking about the way that people lived because they're living next door to each other. and this is to do with the way that the buildings were actually made themselves so the aristocrat would make money by putting as many houses as possible along a street front so the London Terrace

House is narrow and tall and deep and that's because the person who owned the land wanted as much ground rent as they could possibly get. So just to go back a stage though, Lake Tudors, Queen Elizabeth, this was countryside and you'd have just seen the smelly smudge of London over in that direction. Yes, pretty much. By about 1630, 1640 there had been a growth of the city and it's been pretty informal and so around this area in what was called St Giles by the Field you start to get kind of slum areas but also the odd house the odd sort of street but it's disorganized and it's on its knees by the 1660s and this was really the crucible

for the plague in 1665. This was ground zero for London development, but also the plague? Yeah, around here was all the kind of informal housing that really allowed the plague to absolutely rip through the neighbourhood. Are there any buildings left now from that original square along the edge? It's said that this house over here, which was designed by Inigo Jones, so Inigo Jones is an essential name in the sort of development of London in the 17th century. He was first off a designer of masks for James I. He then went to... As in not face coverings but as in dramatic opportunities?

That's right yeah yeah so sort of court plays which were incredibly expensive and incredibly ornate. He then went off to Italy and it blew his mind. He saw things and architecture that he was desperate to bring back to London. So the villas of Palladio that he saw in the Veneto and also places like the square at Leghorn or Livorno and he came back to London in the 1610s and started transforming the odd piece so you've got queen's house down in greenwich you get the banqueting hall down in whitehall and this house here is said to be one of the very first terraced houses in london tell me about mary david okay so audley died in 1662 the person that we saw over by the temple. His lands, his London estate, is handed to his scrivener,

so somebody who works in his office called Alexander Davies, who moves into this square in 1665. He has a daughter called Mary, and she grows up for the first four or five months of her life here, and then they finally move to a house that Alexander is building down in Westminster. Suddenly he dies in July 1665 of the plague and she becomes the heiress of the estate at five months old. Right, you might say that's an amazing legacy or you might say it's a bit of a curse. Well inheritance is both a curse and a blessing. And what we'll see as we sort of follow Mary Davies' life

long is this plot of land determines her life. It is the compass for which every decision that is made for her and about her and by her becomes central. The Drury Lane we're on now, it's the Theatre Street of London. Exactly, this is also one of the epicentres of the plague in 1665. Less cheerily. Less cheerily, but if you imagine this was in some ways an informal settlement. There were houses higgledy-piggledy all the way up and it

was here that really the disease caught hold and was like a fire throughout the whole neighbourhoods. And the conditions were horrific. There's an extraordinary account on this street of a family that was locked up. So a guard was put on their door, but the local people just rushed the guards and got a baby out of the house and took it to another neighbourhood. Any house that was caught with the plague on it was closed up. A nurse and a guard were put inside and essentially the family had to wait until everyone had died. A cross was put on the door as well and Lord have mercy on our souls. And this happened all the way

through 1665 and spread from here into the city. And during that summer, the bills of mortality just grew from tens to hundreds a week. By the summer, it was almost like a ghost town. So what do we think the population of London was after the fire and after the plague, as it was beginning its period of regrowth? Well, we know that at the beginning of the century it was about 250,000 people. By the end of the 17th century it was about half a million. So it had doubled in size. It was now massive compared to any other city in the world, even Tokyo which was at that time the largest city in the world. But there's one thing that I do want to show you on this before we head off which is this lovely little detail.

Oh yeah. It's called a Mercer's Maid. Okay. And it's the sign of the Mercer's Company. So one of the 12 great guilds of the city. And it shows that this was owned by the Mercer's Company and they still own it and they still look after it. And if you go around the city and you find the Mercer's Maid,

it means that that property is owned by one of the guilds. Still to this day. If you're listening to Dan Snow's history, I've got Leo Hollis telling me about the explosion of London in the 17th century. More after this. Romans, gods, Spartans,

the wars of Alexander the Great's successors in incredible, entirely necessary detail. The Ancients podcast, it's kind of like Dan's show, except it's just ancient history. We've got the leading experts. We've got the big topics from ancient Vietnam to the fall of Rome. Subscribe to the Ancients on History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone.

Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. OK, we're in Covent Garden, right? This is the beating heart of London's after-hours activities in the 18th century. Yes, so this is the beautiful Covent Garden, built exactly the same time as Lincoln's Inn,

but this was the project of the Duke of Bedford and Inigo Jones. Inigo Jones, as I said, had visited Italy and he came back and he brought almost an exact design of the piazza in Livorno and this is what he tried to build here. It was going to be a housing project but very quickly, because it bumped into the civil war, it fell apart and as a result they had to change it into what became the food market of the city. So that's how Covent Garden became the vegetable and fruit market of the city. So you never got grand people living in these houses around the edge?

Not as grand as they should have been. That was in some ways the problem. Every developer's... Every developer's nightmare. And so very quickly, by the time you get into the 18th century, this was the sort of centre of licentiousness and pleasure. But you also get this gorgeous church which was the very first Anglican church to be built in Britain. The very first church after the Reformation. Really? Yeah. So it was built by Inigo Jones and the Duke of Bedford who didn't care much for religion sort of said just build me a barn and Inigo Jones said I'll build you the best barn England has

ever seen and he spent a fortune building this sort of Tuscan order. Wow very cool right let's keep going west. Okay. Some of these buildings look pretty old here don't they? Yeah very much we're now entering Chinatown this was a scheme that was created in the 1670s, 1680s by a speculator called Nicholas Barbon, who is one of the most fascinating characters in London's history. This was all in some ways fields, but he bought the lease to the land and he started developing these houses. Now, Barbon was a fascinating character. He was baptised. If Jesus had not died for me, thou would be Now, Barbon was a fascinating character. He was baptised

as, if Jesus had not died for thee, thou would be damned, Barbon. I know, it's one of my favourite names in British history. He was the son of, praise God, Barbon, who was a Baptist preacher. But Barbon, he worked in London during the plague. He then started rebuilding the city after the Great Fire. And this kind of scheme was how the city was rebuilt and how it expanded into the 18th century. So you get these narrow houses built high and these were the kind of housing that was absolutely perfect for the new merchant classes. So this is another one of your squares that was built in this period, is it?

This is Golden Square, which came about in the sort of second half of the 17th century. But we're here really because of an event that happened in the beginning of the next century. And we go back to the story of Mary. Right, who we left as a five-month-old with a gigantic fortune. So she is this heiress and very quickly her mother decides that

the best way for her future and the estate to be preserved is to put her daughter up onto the marriage market. So the very first time she starts negotiating with Lord Berkeley when Mary is 10 that deal falls through but two years later she does negotiate a deal with Sir Thomas Gravesner and they marry when Mary is 12. What's the deal look like? Is there money? Did the mum get money? Or how's that negotiation take place? Absolutely there was a lump sum up front, there was paying off the family debt so over £5,000, there was an annual income for Mary, there was money put aside for Mary's aunt, who was also her governess, and then there was planning for the future. So what would happen if there were daughters, whether there were sons, so the inheritance going on down the generations.

So the Grosvenors get their hands on this gigantic estate to the west of London. Yeah, and it's still at this time, it's still a long way out from the development of the rest of the city so the city is growing westwards but it hasn't yet reached the boundaries of the estate. So Mary as a 15 year old moves up to Chester to the Grosvenor family and there spends 15 years or so she becomes a mother to five boys and a girl. Two of the sons die and then suddenly in 1700 she becomes a widow. Sir Thomas Grosvenor dies and this is when the drama completely changes. She goes on a European tour. She goes to Paris and then Rome with her confessor, so her chaplain, and potentially they go and visit James II

or the exiled king in Paris and then they go down to Rome and go and visit the papacy there. However, when they're making their journey back, Mary falls ill and by the time that she arrives at Paris she is not well at all. And so they book into the Hotel Castile in the Rue Saint Dominique on the left bank of Paris and over the course of the week there are these extraordinary events that occur which the book kind of in some ways unpacks but by the end of that week she wakes up and finds a man in her bed who

turns out to be the brother of her chaplain, a man called Edward Fenwick. Within hours, they have married. And so the news and the gossip of this marriage spreads throughout the English community in Paris. And within three weeks, Mary has escaped and has moved back to London. And she claims that the marriage never occurred and that there was no

wedding there was nothing of the sort. Edward Fenwick follows on and starts treating her land as his own and there you get a crisis because this estate this extraordinary fortune might be lost to the Grosvenor family so what are the family to do and so in this period Mary comes to Golden Square and she comes to visit her lawyer Mr Andrews and she's meant to step out of her coach and go to the house and to stay here because they were worried that Fenwick was going to kidnap her but she refuses and instead she leaves London goes up to Chester and never comes back to the city again. Those details are kind of known about what you explore so beautifully in the book is the impact on her because she may very

likely have suffered sexual assault and she has a catastrophic breakdown almost immediately after this, hasn't she? Yeah I mean it is a tragic story with Mary right at the heart of it that she was somebody who did show signs of mental illness and that this was something that was potentially exploited by Fenwick in order to get her into that sort of situation. And so this question, whether she was mad or not, would be at the heart of the court case that took place in 1703, which is really the centre of the book.

And it's lots of men fighting over her patrony, her inheritance. She's absent from that whole trial, so the person that it's all about doesn't get a voice in the trial. Well, that's what's so extraordinary. If Mary had been born a boy in 1665, there would be no story. The fact that she was a woman, and the fact that at all stages of her life, her property was looked after by her mother, her husband, by a guardian, and then by her children, meant that, in some ways, this was a woman's burden during this period. The relationship between her body and her land are utterly intertwined. What's tragic is despite the fact that she was this heiress and she was in possession

of this extraordinary fortune, she only ever signed one land contract. And that land contract, which is now in the Westminster Archives, showed that there was one tiny period of her life when she was in control of what was hers. The rest of her life, she was always, in some ways, under somebody else's shadow. So I always feel when you cross Regent Street there, it feels like you're moving to just part of London.

Was that a boundary in the old days? Completely. I mean, where we were in Golden Square, that was sort of 1680s. We're now entering the 18th century. So this is around sort of 1710s. We're here just at the south of Hanover Square which is just over in that direction. This was the sort of entry point coming up from Piccadilly and with St George's Church right here. This was revitalisation, a new century of building as the city started to grow westwards.

And all these people were sort of merchants, people taking advantage of the burgeoning industrial revolution, the trade going around the world. This is new money here, was it? This was both new money and old money. What was very interesting is that the development of the city was actually breaking up between Whigs and Tories. So you had particular squares where the developer would have his mates and then just across the way there would be another one.

So Cumberland Square over there, what's fascinating about that is it was deeply involved in the South Sea bubble. So that was the sort of financial speculation on a vast new scale. And it had an absolute physical impact upon the rebuilding of London. Okay, so let's plough on deeper into the 18th century. Head this way.

Yep, so we're just on the verge of the Grosvenor Estate. So we're gonna move westwards and on Bond Street, we move from this old estate into the Gravesend estate so Mary's inheritance is suddenly on the edge of the city itself. And increasingly valuable. And so if you imagine by about sort of 1710, 1720 the city had come to this point here and there down Bond Street that exists today was the Tyburn River. Really? So this was the edge of the city?

This was the edge of the city and as we cross the street we cross into Mary's inheritance. Okay let's cross into her patch. There's a Fenix shop there, that's rather good. Yes! There you go, Grosvenor Street, we're on the patch. This is now some of the most expensive real estate in the world, but it was all potential back then. That's what they were fighting over, they were fighting over the potential of this.

Exactly, so if we go back to that wedding, or supposed wedding, between Mary and Fennec, that ended in a court case in 1703 where they tried, both sides tried to prove whether a marriage had taken place in that hotel in Paris. If Fenwick won he gained the whole estate. If Mary could prove that she wasn't married then all the lands would return to the Grosvenor family. And so they deliberated over a course of 14 hours and in the end they decided that actually there had been a marriage and Fenwick won. However, nothing happened. There was an appeal two years later and finally the Grosvenor family regained their estate and the thing that they did immediately after that was to ensure that Mary was

declared as a lunatic so she could no longer look after the property and she was no longer the property owner. And as a result, the estate was saved. It was 15 years later, as London started to grow westward, that they started to develop that original land. And Grosvenor Square, where we're standing right now, was the beginning of the development of the Grosvenor estate and it would over the centuries reach all the way down to the Thames but here in 1720 they built this square

which at the time was the most exclusive address in London. So I'm so interested we walked all the way from the east there central old London at the temple where the lawyers are we come all the way out here but the lawyers play a We come all the way out here, but the lawyers play a critical part in the development of this site as well. Law feels important in this story. Absolutely, it's not just the law. I mean, we look at London,

and so much of what we see is bricks and spaces and streets, but actually it's law, it's finance, as well as construction that transforms the city. And that's really what that period from the Great Fire to here into the sort of 1720s that really made London modern. It's the invisible as well as the tangible development of the city. Because, yeah, you can't invest in creating a palatial square here unless you can borrow money, get some insurance,

and you know who owns the land. It's not gonna be taken off you. Exactly. England's story is the story of property law. It's what really distinguishes us from pretty much every other country. We were there incredibly early, and Mary's life is absolutely dominated

by the emerging rules of property ownership, of who can own, what is owned, and what you can give to the future. Well, thank you very much for taking me on the trip. If we want to walk to the edge of modern London now, what, it's another 20 miles that way? At least 20 miles, yes. The M25 is probably even further than that. That's for episode two.

Right, let's do it. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country,

all were gone and finished. Hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber

or pay me any cash money, makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.

boosted up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers

in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.