many other radicals over many centuries had stood where they now stood.
In the stillness of that night at St Paul’s, after the tents were erected, it was possible to imagine that the tolling of the bell was not that of the modern Cathedral but the sound of the Great Bell of the Jesus Tower, a free-standing bell tower in the courtyard of the medieval Cathedral, summoning the citizens of London to the one of the thrice yearly folkmoots at St Paul’s Cross, the open-air pulpit. Attendance was compulsory until the fourteenth century and here papal bulls, news of military victories or royal marriages, excommunications and proclamations were read out. News of the victory of Agincourt was read on the Cathedral steps. William Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible was burnt here, so were the works of Martin Luther. Martyred Bishops Ridley and Latimer preached here. St Paul’s Cross was only removed by order of Parliament in 1643 during the English Revolution.
Josh’s seventeenth-century precursors, the apprentices of the City of London, were at the heart of the mass mobilizations that made the English Revolution. The ‘apron youths’, as the Leveller leader John Lilburne called them, would swarm St Paul’s Churchyard. They were looking for print. By the time of the English Revolution St Paul’s churchyard was a hive of political radicalism, the very centre of the printing industry. The houses around the Churchyard contained stationers’ premises, including printing presses. Booths around the Cathedral itself sold the pamphlets and newsbooks that were pouring from the presses in unprecedented numbers. The printed declarations of the Agitators in the New Model Army could be bought here. So could the pamphlets of the Levellers. So could the revolutionary works of John Milton, resident around the corner in Aldersgate Street. The nave of the Cathedral was used as a cavalry barracks for Cromwell’s army, and the statues of Charles I and his father, which had stood in Inigo Jones’s portico, were destroyed by troopers. The Levellers had particular reason to remember St Paul’s Churchyard: one of their heroes, Robert Lockyer, was executed by a firing squad of musketeers for mutiny there in 1649.
It is unlikely that one of the actors in the drama of the Occupy movement, Canon Chancellor Giles Fraser, was not aware of this history. Long before he resigned as a result of his defence of the Occupy movement’s right to remain outside St Paul’s he was based in St Mary’s Putney, the venue for the great ‘Putney debates’ in which the Levellers and their allies in the New Model Army confronted Cromwell over the future direction of the revolution in 1647. He remains a supporter of the Leveller Association.
In the late 1830s the first great working-class movement, the Chartists, adopted an unusual agitational strategy: mass attendance at Sunday sermons. St Paul’s Cathedral was one of their targets. On Sunday 11 August 1839, some 500 Chartists assembled in West Smithfield and marched to St Paul’s. They wore, as protestors still do today, ribbons in their buttonholes to show support for the cause. At first they refused to take off their hats as they entered the Church but ‘after some remonstrance from the Vergers, they submitted’.2
Not all protests at St Paul’s have been as peaceful as the Chartists or the Occupy movement. In 1913 the Suffragettes planted a bomb under the bishop’s throne in the Cathedral. It failed to explode because the clockwork arming mechanism had been wound in the wrong direction. The Morning Post for 8 May 1913 reported that ‘there is no doubt in the minds of the authorities that the contrivance was designed and placed there by someone associated with the militant Suffragist movement’, since it was ‘carefully wrapped in brown paper and in part of the recent issue of the militant newspaper The Suffragette’. In the light of this careful police work there was, of course, outrage. The bishop of London preached a sermon in which he gave ‘our thanks to Almighty God for taking care of His own Cathedral (cries of “Amen”) against the machinations of some miscreant who tried to wreck it last night . . . it was only an accident that the lever was turned by mistake to the right instead of the left . . . and therefore, we know that those who set themselves to do the Devil’s work often even cannot do that right.’
An unusual amount of London’s history has happened in and around St Paul’s. But there is barely a street in inner London that cannot tell at least one tale like this. Here we set out to capture just some of this past. Partly we try to do this through describing the social circumstances of the poor and the working class in London down the centuries. But this is not in the first instance a social history; it is mainly the story of London as a theatre of political activism, told, as much as is possible, with a focus on the lives, actions and words of the actors themselves. Why does London have such a history of radicalism?
LONDON AND GOVERNMENT
The things that make London a centre of wealth and power have also made it a centre of dissent and radicalism. As the home of national government, London is the focal point for protest. This has made London politics peculiarly volatile. In Roman times London was a seat of imperial government and from then on, with the exception of the Saxon period, it has been the site from which the national and international power of the nation’s ruling classes has been projected. Any seat of government and power will dictate much of the political discourse in the city. As a result the city’s churches and chapels, mosques and synagogues, coffee houses, taverns, meeting halls, parks and squares have all acted as hotbeds of dissent.
Controlling a city the size of London requires a high degree of repression and regulation. The historian E. P. Thompson describes how by the late eighteenth century ‘the British people were noted throughout Europe for their turbulence, and the people of London astonished foreign visitors by their lack of deference’.3 Those who controlled the wealth and power of the city ensured that those who did not were aware of the penalties for infringement of legal codes. Repression was met by resistance.4 Prisons loomed large in the popular imagination, especially Newgate (which met the same fate at a similar time to the Paris Bastille, but with rather different political consequences). It was very easy to get into prison if you were poor, and pretty easy to be hanged. ‘In the years between the Restoration and the death of George III the number of capital offences was increased by about 190 . . . no less than sixty-three of these were added in the years 1760–1810.’5 By the mid nineteenth century there were the beginnings of a modern police force, aimed at preventing at least some crime from taking place, and centrally involved with the protection of property. Their role, and that of the law more generally, seems to have remained constant from that time on – up to and including the student protests of 2010 and the London riots of 2011.
London government is not only the national government, however. London politics has long had a peculiarity that no other city in England can boast: the City’s own local government exists alongside the national government. And London local government is not just any local government. The modern all-London authority rules the richest and most populous city in the nation. The older government of the City of London, roughly the ‘square mile’ of the modern financial centre, arose from the elders of the city that King Alfred established when he repopulated the area within the old Roman walls. This ‘council’ developed into the medieval City administration which came to represent the commercial interests of the traders and manufacturers of the area, chiefly the interests of the richest of them. City government was not, even at the very beginning, all of London’s government. It did not exercise power outside the City walls. Westminster, growing from 1066 as the centre of national government, was obviously beyond its power. So too was Southwark, facing it on the south bank of the Thames just across London Bridge. And the areas which grew up beyond the walls, the Tower Hamlets in the east, the ribbon development along the Strand towards Charing Cross and Westminster to the west, were also beyond City jurisdiction. Even within the walls, the City authorities had powers over some aspects of life but not others – and where City ‘liberties’ began and ended was a matter of repeated conflict with the Crown and the national government.
This relationship between Crown and City was not always contentious; quite often they needed each other. Monarchs needed City money, and the City needed a stable and effective national government that could control the environment in which money was made from trade, manufacture and commerce. But if the City was never really democratic in the modern sense it did at least, for
