Arthur Perry -- your question made a new thought clear to me. The Hydes and the Wilmots (and the Villiers and the Apsleys and the Hutchinsons and the Gorings) were all cousins - maybe 2nd, or of the once-removed variety, I can't remember (I think they are all of St.John stock, which happens when you marry off six fertile daughters).
Henry Wilmot died before the Restoration when John was a few months old. After the Restoration, John's mother, Anne St.John Lee Wilmot, Countess of Rochester persuaded her cousin, Chancellor Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon to give her a Court appointment; she became Groom of the Stole to Anne Hyde, Duchess of York.
Being a relative, Hyde also looked out for young John -- no easy matter -- and it was John who said that his "uncle," Chancellor Hyde, was "his second father," having never known his own.
Charles II was therefore keeping the title 'in the family' when he made Laurence Hyde the next Earl of Rochester.
One of the "joys" of British nobility is that they recycle the names. It is confusing.
Henry Wilmot helped Charles II escape after Worcester, and was rewarded by being made the 1st Earl of Rochester. His son, the libertine, John was the 2nd Earl. But he caught the pox (SURPRISE!) and died aged 33.
Charles II "recycled" the title of Earl of Rochester, and Laurence Hyde became the next 1st Earl. His family became the Lords of Clarendon and Rochester and died out in the mid-18th century.
For whatever reason, the title has never been used again ... Henry and John Wilmot were such iconic characters I suspect it won't be. (Sort of like retiring an outstanding basketball player's number.)
I've been looking into this Earl of Berkshire, and it seems we have got three people combined into one.
Thomas Howard, 1st Earl of Berkshire 1587–1669 was a Royalist a friend of King Charles, tutor to Prince Charles, and went to Jersey with him. He tried to stop Charles from going to Paris, failed, so he went to The Hague, and then went home -- where he seems to have been left alone by Parliament. As an old man, there's no mention of his being active in the Court of Charles II -- see https://www.historyofparliamenton…
His son, Charles Howard, 2nd Duke of Berkshire 1615 – 1679 who, as Lord Andover, raised a regiment of 500 horse during the 1st Civil War, He was an influential member of the Catholic nobility, Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Charles II in exile and a supporter of the Duke of York. He succeeded as the 2nd Earl in 1669, and was implicated in the Popish Plot. Charles Howard, 2nd Earl of Berkshire fled to Paris dying there in 1679. I suspect this is the Earl we are dealing with tonight -- but Pepys should have called him Lord Andover.
Charles Howard was succeeded by his brother, Col. Thomas Howard MP, as 3rd Earl of Berkshire 1619 -1706. He was a thorn in Parliament's side, as he was the fighting leader of Lord Andover's regiment. According to Pepys, his illegitimate daughter, Moll Davies, was one of Charles II's mistresses.
Lodestones are lumpy and slate-gray, but their “magnetic intelligence” made them fabulously expensive in the Early Modern era.
Author and scientist William Gilbert thought that magnets had souls. At least, that was the accepted explanation for magnetism circa 1600, as explained in his influential De Magnete. Gilbert experimented with lodestones, lumps of magnetite that, after being struck by lightning, turn into natural magnets.
As he watched the lodestone pull the iron to it (or the iron leaping to the lodestone), Gilbert imagined them possessed of a magnetic intelligence that drew them together, like lovers. "Our planet is no mute lump of rock, but an animate creature, turning over in space like a sunbather who wants to get tan on both sides," he wrote.
William Gilbert was no crackpot. He was the first to propose the existence of the Earth’s magnetic field. For him that meant the Earth was imbued with a living soul.
William Gilbert was a Copernican, and he attributed the Earth’s rotation to its magnetic intelligence: “Were not the earth to revolve with diurnal rotation, the sun … would scorch the earth, reduce it to powder, and dissipate its substance … In other parts all would be horror, and all things frozen stiff with intense cold: hence all its eminences would be hard, barren, inaccessible, sunk in everlasting shadow and unending night. And as the earth herself cannot endure so pitiable and so horrid a state of things on either side, with her astral magnetic mind she moves in a circle … So the earth seeks and seeks the sun again, turns from him, follows him, by her wondrous magnetical energy.”
His book, De Magnete, ushered in a burst of magnetic enthusiasm. Lodestones ranked among porphyry and jasper as precious stones in this era of obsession with the wonders of the natural world. No alchemists' laboratory was complete without one — in part because they were fabulously expensive.
The price commanded by a powerful magnet meant that sailors, who really needed them for their compasses, had to make do with weaker lodestones.
Lodestones were also thought to have healing powers. Gout sufferers wore magnetic rings; poultices of pulverized lodestone were used to draw out bullets and arrowheads, and Queen Anne used a lodestone to heal sufferers of the King’s Evil (she was too squeamish to lay her hands directly on her scrofulous subjects).
"(I having desired Sir W. Coventry in his chamber to read over my paper about the victualling, which he approves of, and I am glad I showed it him first, it makes it the less necessary to show it the Duke at all, if I find it best to let it alone)"
That was smart, Pepys. York couldn't care less about your annual victualling report right now. Now the man who needs to know, does know.
Pepys says, "And so every body to the Parke [St. James's], and by and by the chappell done, and the King and Duke into the bowling-green, and upon the leads, whither I went, ..." https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
This plus the annotations lead me to think there was a public Bowling Green in St. James Park (Henry VIII's orchard converted after the Restoration).
And there was also a Bowling Alley surrounded by houses as part of the Palace of Whitehall ("the Overseer's Books of St. Margaret's parish for 1565 the 'Myll next to Bowling Alley" is rated' and where Blood died).
"... so back toward Westminster, and there met Mrs. Burroughs, whom I had a mind to meet, but being undressed did appear a mighty ordinary woman."
What, no fractured French? Is this the first time you've seen the lovely Elizabeth Burroughs in the all together? -- and please share with us: what did she make of your physique?
"I away to Mrs. Martin’s new lodgings, where I find her, and was with her close, but, Lord! how big she is already. She is, at least seems, in mighty trouble for her husband at sea, when I am sure she cares not for him, and I would not undeceive her, though I know his ship is one of those that is not gone, but left behind without men."
Pepys being a cad again. And no, Mrs. Martin isn't getting fat -- she's 5 months pregnant.
"He would have me to dine where he was invited to dine, at the Backstairs. So after the King’s meat was taken away, we thither; ... where we dined with the meat that come from his table; which was most excellent, with most brave drink cooled in ice (which at this hot time was welcome), and I drinking no wine, had metheglin for the King’s own drinking, which did please me mightily."
Dining in the Backstairs dining room would be the best -- apart from having to put up with the Chaffinch family. How surprising Pepys came away with no gossip ... perhaps he was too busy eating to hear anything worth remembering.
Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Berkshire, Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Charles II -- Per L&M Companion -- (1590 - 1669). Clarendon scornfully writes of him that 'his interest and reputation were less than anything but his understanding.' Parliament did not trouble to keep him under constraint during the Civil War since he was 'a man that could do them no harm anywhere.' He was possibly Mary/Moll Davies’ father, and rumor had it he was a pimp for Charles.
The old boy is 76 years old. His arthritus means he's hobbling around slowly, and his eye sight means he's bumping into things. And, by the sound of it, he wasn't very smart to start with. Perhaps all the other Gentlemen of the Bedchamber are away fighting, and Berkshire's the only one left to wait table.
Curious timing to send a self-congratulatory report to the boss: The fleet is either fighting today or tomorrow ... so when it lands on York's desk, he's not going to pay much mind to it.
If England wins, York will be celebrating for a week, and by the time he gets back to his desk there will be 100 more important self-serving reports on top of Pepys' missive.
If the United Provinces win ... York may be looking for someone to yell at ... fall guys will be lined up and decimated. Pepys called attention to himself.
And York owes the Navy 200,000l. (round number only) from the last budget agreement - you just told him what a great job you have done with one third of your ask.
Only a pencil sketch of the tower records the Priory of St. Mary which stood for 400 years on the site of Spital Square until Henry VIII ‘dissolved’ it and turned the land into his artillery ground. The area was full of grass meadows and gardens until the first roads came in the 17th Century.
Henry VIII is referred to in Kingsland Road where he had stables for hunting when there was still forest, recalled today in Forest Road.
"Modern" Spitalfields comes from those refugees who, in defiance of Elizabethan building regs., and to escape the City Guilds regs., settled in Bishopsgate Without and the Liberty of Norton Folgate. It lies at a junction between the settled, indigenous English, and waves of immigrants. By the 18th century it was called ‘The Weavers’ Parish,’ but it was still hospitable to others.
In John Stow’s ‘Survey of London’ (1601) Spitalfields appears as a trading point “for fruit, fowl and root.”
"A New Wonder, a Woman Never Vexed" (performed 1610–14; printed 1632) by William Rowley, was a dramatization of the foundation of St. Mary Spital;
Nicholas Culpeper (1616–1654), botanist, herbalist, physician, and astrologer was born at the Red Lion Inn, when Spitalfields was still semi-rural. Culpeper found love in 1640 when he married Alice Field who had inherited a fortune. Using her dowry, Culpeper built a house on Red Lion Street and set himself up as an astrologer and herbalist, not charging the poor for his help. In 1651 he completed "A Directory for Midwives", an unusual subject for a man, never mind an herbalist and astrologer, but tragedy had focused him: by his 14th year of marriage they had had 7 children, but only one outlived him. In 1652, Culpeper published his master work “The English Physician” AKA “Culpeper’s Herbal” which became the standard work for 300 years and is still in print. Ten years after his death, Culpeper’s name was so respected that Lord Mayor of London, John Lawrence, used it in a pamphlet about ways to avoid the plague.
Thomas Helwys (1575 – 1616), a religious reformer who fled to Amsterdam in 1607/8, but returned in 1611 to found the first Baptist congregation in Britain -- in Spitalfields. He died in prison for advocating religious liberty, regardless of creed, including Jews, Muslims and atheists.
A market sign was incorporated in the coat of arms for the Liberty of Norton Folgate in 1660, and Spitalfield's market’s Royal Charter dates from 1682. The market claims to be Spitalfields’ original core. The market continued as a collection of ramshackle sheds and stalls until it was rebuilt in the 1870s.
By 1700 there were 9 Huguenot churches in Spitalfields.
The Huguenots brought the silk industry to London, making Spitalfields arguably the oldest industrial suburb in London. It was already “almost entirely built over” in 1701 when Lambeth was still a marsh, Fulham a market garden, and Tottenham Court Rd. a green.
Johan de Witt controlled the Netherlands from c. 1650 until 1672, working with factions from most of the major cities. As a republican he opposed the House of Orange
After attending the Latin school in Dordrecht, de Witt studied maths and law at the University of Leiden. He received his doctorate from the University of Angers in 1645.
He practiced law in The Hague until, in 1650, de Witt was made leader of the deputation of Dordrecht to the States of Holland, the year the stadtholder William II of Orange died.
In 1653 Johan de Witt became Grand pensionary of the State of Holland. Since Holland was the Republic's most powerful province, he was effectively the leader of the United Provinces.
Together with Pieter de Graeff, after the 1st Dutch War, de Witt negotiated the Treaty of Westminster in 1654. Cromwell attached a secret Act of Seclusion, forbidding the Dutch ever to appoint William II's son as stadtholder. Cromwell feared the Prince of Orange, a grandson of King Charles I, might gain power and threaten the interests of his own republic.
On 25 September 1660 the States of Holland under Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt, Pieter de Graeff, Andries de Graeff and Gillis Valckenier decided to educate the Prince of Orange so he would have the skills to serve in a future — undetermined — state function.
De Witt's power base was the wealthy merchant class into which he was born. This class coincided politically with the "States faction", stressing Protestant moderation and a pragmatic foreign policy defending commercial interests.
The Orange faction, the middle class, wanted a strong leader from the House of Orange as a counterweight to the rich upper-classes in economic and religious matters, although the House of Orange were rarely strict Calvinists.
Following the Treaty of Westminster, the Republic grew in wealth and influence. De Witt created a strong navy, appointing a political ally, Lt-Adm. Jacob van Wassenaer Obdam, as supreme commander of the confederate fleet. Later De Witt became a personal friend of Lt-Adm. Michiel de Ruyter.
The 2nd Dutch War, 1665 - 1667, ended with the Treaty of Breda, where De Witt negotiated favorable agreements for the Republic (De Witt initiated the raid on the Medway).
Also in 1667, De Witt reconciled the States Party and the Orangists over the position of the Prince of Orange. He proposed William be appointed captain-general of the Union on reaching the age of 23, on condition that this office would be declared incompatible with that of stadtholder in all of the provinces.
During 1672, which the Dutch refer to as the "year of disaster", the French and English attacked the Republic during the Franco-Dutch War and the Orangists took power by force, deposing Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt.
Recovering from an attempt on his life in June 1672, de Witt was lynched by an organized mob after visiting his brother Cornelis in prison.
Comments
Second Reading
About Thursday 26 July 1666
San Diego Sarah • Link
Arthur Perry -- your question made a new thought clear to me. The Hydes and the Wilmots (and the Villiers and the Apsleys and the Hutchinsons and the Gorings) were all cousins - maybe 2nd, or of the once-removed variety, I can't remember (I think they are all of St.John stock, which happens when you marry off six fertile daughters).
Henry Wilmot died before the Restoration when John was a few months old. After the Restoration, John's mother, Anne St.John Lee Wilmot, Countess of Rochester persuaded her cousin, Chancellor Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon to give her a Court appointment; she became Groom of the Stole to Anne Hyde, Duchess of York.
Being a relative, Hyde also looked out for young John -- no easy matter -- and it was John who said that his "uncle," Chancellor Hyde, was "his second father," having never known his own.
Charles II was therefore keeping the title 'in the family' when he made Laurence Hyde the next Earl of Rochester.
I should read my own annotations more often!
About Thursday 26 July 1666
San Diego Sarah • Link
One of the "joys" of British nobility is that they recycle the names. It is confusing.
Henry Wilmot helped Charles II escape after Worcester, and was rewarded by being made the 1st Earl of Rochester. His son, the libertine, John was the 2nd Earl. But he caught the pox (SURPRISE!) and died aged 33.
Charles II "recycled" the title of Earl of Rochester, and Laurence Hyde became the next 1st Earl. His family became the Lords of Clarendon and Rochester and died out in the mid-18th century.
For whatever reason, the title has never been used again ... Henry and John Wilmot were such iconic characters I suspect it won't be. (Sort of like retiring an outstanding basketball player's number.)
About Wednesday 25 July 1666
San Diego Sarah • Link
oooooopppps ... "His son, Charles Howard, 2nd Duke of Berkshire"
should be 2nd EARL of Berkshire. Sorry
About Wednesday 25 July 1666
San Diego Sarah • Link
I've been looking into this Earl of Berkshire, and it seems we have got three people combined into one.
Thomas Howard, 1st Earl of Berkshire 1587–1669 was a Royalist a friend of King Charles, tutor to Prince Charles, and went to Jersey with him. He tried to stop Charles from going to Paris, failed, so he went to The Hague, and then went home -- where he seems to have been left alone by Parliament. As an old man, there's no mention of his being active in the Court of Charles II -- see https://www.historyofparliamenton…
His son, Charles Howard, 2nd Duke of Berkshire 1615 – 1679 who, as Lord Andover, raised a regiment of 500 horse during the 1st Civil War, He was an influential member of the Catholic nobility, Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Charles II in exile and a supporter of the Duke of York. He succeeded as the 2nd Earl in 1669, and was implicated in the Popish Plot. Charles Howard, 2nd Earl of Berkshire fled to Paris dying there in 1679. I suspect this is the Earl we are dealing with tonight -- but Pepys should have called him Lord Andover.
Charles Howard was succeeded by his brother, Col. Thomas Howard MP, as 3rd Earl of Berkshire 1619 -1706. He was a thorn in Parliament's side, as he was the fighting leader of Lord Andover's regiment. According to Pepys, his illegitimate daughter, Moll Davies, was one of Charles II's mistresses.
These last two come from http://wiki.bcw-project.org/royal…
I'm sending these clarifications to Phil in hopes we can sort out our Encyclopedia.
About Terrella
San Diego Sarah • Link
Lodestones are lumpy and slate-gray, but their “magnetic intelligence” made them fabulously expensive in the Early Modern era.
Author and scientist William Gilbert thought that magnets had souls. At least, that was the accepted explanation for magnetism circa 1600, as explained in his influential De Magnete. Gilbert experimented with lodestones, lumps of magnetite that, after being struck by lightning, turn into natural magnets.
As he watched the lodestone pull the iron to it (or the iron leaping to the lodestone), Gilbert imagined them possessed of a magnetic intelligence that drew them together, like lovers. "Our planet is no mute lump of rock, but an animate creature, turning over in space like a sunbather who wants to get tan on both sides," he wrote.
William Gilbert was no crackpot. He was the first to propose the existence of the Earth’s magnetic field. For him that meant the Earth was imbued with a living soul.
William Gilbert was a Copernican, and he attributed the Earth’s rotation to its magnetic intelligence: “Were not the earth to revolve with diurnal rotation, the sun … would scorch the earth, reduce it to powder, and dissipate its substance … In other parts all would be horror, and all things frozen stiff with intense cold: hence all its eminences would be hard, barren, inaccessible, sunk in everlasting shadow and unending night. And as the earth herself cannot endure so pitiable and so horrid a state of things on either side, with her astral magnetic mind she moves in a circle … So the earth seeks and seeks the sun again, turns from him, follows him, by her wondrous magnetical energy.”
His book, De Magnete, ushered in a burst of magnetic enthusiasm. Lodestones ranked among porphyry and jasper as precious stones in this era of obsession with the wonders of the natural world. No alchemists' laboratory was complete without one — in part because they were fabulously expensive.
The price commanded by a powerful magnet meant that sailors, who really needed them for their compasses, had to make do with weaker lodestones.
Lodestones were also thought to have healing powers. Gout sufferers wore magnetic rings; poultices of pulverized lodestone were used to draw out bullets and arrowheads, and Queen Anne used a lodestone to heal sufferers of the King’s Evil (she was too squeamish to lay her hands directly on her scrofulous subjects).
More from https://daily.jstor.org/the-souls…
About Wednesday 25 July 1666
San Diego Sarah • Link
We have an encyclopedia page for the St. James's Day Battle:
https://www.pepysdiary.com/encycl…
About Wednesday 25 July 1666
San Diego Sarah • Link
"(I having desired Sir W. Coventry in his chamber to read over my paper about the victualling, which he approves of, and I am glad I showed it him first, it makes it the less necessary to show it the Duke at all, if I find it best to let it alone)"
That was smart, Pepys. York couldn't care less about your annual victualling report right now. Now the man who needs to know, does know.
About Bowling alley (Whitehall Palace)
San Diego Sarah • Link
Pepys says, "And so every body to the Parke [St. James's], and by and by the chappell done, and the King and Duke into the bowling-green, and upon the leads, whither I went, ..." https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
This plus the annotations lead me to think there was a public Bowling Green in St. James Park (Henry VIII's orchard converted after the Restoration).
And there was also a Bowling Alley surrounded by houses as part of the Palace of Whitehall ("the Overseer's Books of St. Margaret's parish for 1565 the 'Myll next to Bowling Alley" is rated' and where Blood died).
Anyone have a guide to the Palace of Whitehall?
About Leads
San Diego Sarah • Link
Walking the leads of Hardwich Hall, courtesy of Bess of Hardwick:
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/…
About Wednesday 25 July 1666
San Diego Sarah • Link
Mary K -- I think you are right. That makes me feel better about Pepys, whose behavior today left a lot to be desired for me.
About Wednesday 25 July 1666
San Diego Sarah • Link
"I did this afternoon call at my woman that ruled my paper to bespeak a musique card, and there did kiss Nan."
Good lord: Tension gets you in the pants every time, Pepys. Grooming another one!
I bet you go home and ignore Elizabeth.
About Wednesday 25 July 1666
San Diego Sarah • Link
"... so back toward Westminster, and there met Mrs. Burroughs, whom I had a mind to meet, but being undressed did appear a mighty ordinary woman."
What, no fractured French? Is this the first time you've seen the lovely Elizabeth Burroughs in the all together? -- and please share with us: what did she make of your physique?
About Wednesday 25 July 1666
San Diego Sarah • Link
"I away to Mrs. Martin’s new lodgings, where I find her, and was with her close, but, Lord! how big she is already. She is, at least seems, in mighty trouble for her husband at sea, when I am sure she cares not for him, and I would not undeceive her, though I know his ship is one of those that is not gone, but left behind without men."
Pepys being a cad again. And no, Mrs. Martin isn't getting fat -- she's 5 months pregnant.
About Wednesday 25 July 1666
San Diego Sarah • Link
"He would have me to dine where he was invited to dine, at the Backstairs. So after the King’s meat was taken away, we thither; ... where we dined with the meat that come from his table; which was most excellent, with most brave drink cooled in ice (which at this hot time was welcome), and I drinking no wine, had metheglin for the King’s own drinking, which did please me mightily."
Dining in the Backstairs dining room would be the best -- apart from having to put up with the Chaffinch family. How surprising Pepys came away with no gossip ... perhaps he was too busy eating to hear anything worth remembering.
About Wednesday 25 July 1666
San Diego Sarah • Link
Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Berkshire, Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Charles II -- Per L&M Companion -- (1590 - 1669). Clarendon scornfully writes of him that 'his interest and reputation were less than anything but his understanding.' Parliament did not trouble to keep him under constraint during the Civil War since he was 'a man that could do them no harm anywhere.' He was possibly Mary/Moll Davies’ father, and rumor had it he was a pimp for Charles.
The old boy is 76 years old. His arthritus means he's hobbling around slowly, and his eye sight means he's bumping into things. And, by the sound of it, he wasn't very smart to start with. Perhaps all the other Gentlemen of the Bedchamber are away fighting, and Berkshire's the only one left to wait table.
Pepys can be so smug and judgmental.
About Tuesday 24 July 1666
San Diego Sarah • Link
"... there to set up again my frames about my Platts, which I have got to be all gilded, and look very fine, ..."
Good busy work ... women move the furniture and spring clean.
About Tuesday 24 July 1666
San Diego Sarah • Link
Curious timing to send a self-congratulatory report to the boss: The fleet is either fighting today or tomorrow ... so when it lands on York's desk, he's not going to pay much mind to it.
If England wins, York will be celebrating for a week, and by the time he gets back to his desk there will be 100 more important self-serving reports on top of Pepys' missive.
If the United Provinces win ... York may be looking for someone to yell at ... fall guys will be lined up and decimated. Pepys called attention to himself.
And York owes the Navy 200,000l. (round number only) from the last budget agreement - you just told him what a great job you have done with one third of your ask.
Write the thing, yes ... date and mail it, no.
About Spitalfields
San Diego Sarah • Link
Only a pencil sketch of the tower records the Priory of St. Mary which stood for 400 years on the site of Spital Square until Henry VIII ‘dissolved’ it and turned the land into his artillery ground. The area was full of grass meadows and gardens until the first roads came in the 17th Century.
Henry VIII is referred to in Kingsland Road where he had stables for hunting when there was still forest, recalled today in Forest Road.
"Modern" Spitalfields comes from those refugees who, in defiance of Elizabethan building regs., and to escape the City Guilds regs., settled in Bishopsgate Without and the Liberty of Norton Folgate. It lies at a junction between the settled, indigenous English, and waves of immigrants. By the 18th century it was called ‘The Weavers’ Parish,’ but it was still hospitable to others.
In John Stow’s ‘Survey of London’ (1601) Spitalfields appears as a trading point “for fruit, fowl and root.”
"A New Wonder, a Woman Never Vexed" (performed 1610–14; printed 1632) by William Rowley, was a dramatization of the foundation of St. Mary Spital;
Nicholas Culpeper (1616–1654), botanist, herbalist, physician, and astrologer was born at the Red Lion Inn, when Spitalfields was still semi-rural. Culpeper found love in 1640 when he married Alice Field who had inherited a fortune. Using her dowry, Culpeper built a house on Red Lion Street and set himself up as an astrologer and herbalist, not charging the poor for his help. In 1651 he completed "A Directory for Midwives", an unusual subject for a man, never mind an herbalist and astrologer, but tragedy had focused him: by his 14th year of marriage they had had 7 children, but only one outlived him. In 1652, Culpeper published his master work “The English Physician” AKA “Culpeper’s Herbal” which became the standard work for 300 years and is still in print. Ten years after his death, Culpeper’s name was so respected that Lord Mayor of London, John Lawrence, used it in a pamphlet about ways to avoid the plague.
Thomas Helwys (1575 – 1616), a religious reformer who fled to Amsterdam in 1607/8, but returned in 1611 to found the first Baptist congregation in Britain -- in Spitalfields. He died in prison for advocating religious liberty, regardless of creed, including Jews, Muslims and atheists.
A market sign was incorporated in the coat of arms for the Liberty of Norton Folgate in 1660, and Spitalfield's market’s Royal Charter dates from 1682. The market claims to be Spitalfields’ original core. The market continued as a collection of ramshackle sheds and stalls until it was rebuilt in the 1870s.
By 1700 there were 9 Huguenot churches in Spitalfields.
The Huguenots brought the silk industry to London, making Spitalfields arguably the oldest industrial suburb in London. It was already “almost entirely built over” in 1701 when Lambeth was still a marsh, Fulham a market garden, and Tottenham Court Rd. a green.
About Jan de Witt (Grand Pensionary of Holland)
San Diego Sarah • Link
Johan de Witt was a financial wizard and wrote treatise on things like mathematical curves and annuities with Descartes.
About Jan de Witt (Grand Pensionary of Holland)
San Diego Sarah • Link
Johan de Witt controlled the Netherlands from c. 1650 until 1672, working with factions from most of the major cities. As a republican he opposed the House of Orange
After attending the Latin school in Dordrecht, de Witt studied maths and law at the University of Leiden. He received his doctorate from the University of Angers in 1645.
He practiced law in The Hague until, in 1650, de Witt was made leader of the deputation of Dordrecht to the States of Holland, the year the stadtholder William II of Orange died.
In 1653 Johan de Witt became Grand pensionary of the State of Holland. Since Holland was the Republic's most powerful province, he was effectively the leader of the United Provinces.
Together with Pieter de Graeff, after the 1st Dutch War, de Witt negotiated the Treaty of Westminster in 1654. Cromwell attached a secret Act of Seclusion, forbidding the Dutch ever to appoint William II's son as stadtholder. Cromwell feared the Prince of Orange, a grandson of King Charles I, might gain power and threaten the interests of his own republic.
On 25 September 1660 the States of Holland under Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt, Pieter de Graeff, Andries de Graeff and Gillis Valckenier decided to educate the Prince of Orange so he would have the skills to serve in a future — undetermined — state function.
De Witt's power base was the wealthy merchant class into which he was born. This class coincided politically with the "States faction", stressing Protestant moderation and a pragmatic foreign policy defending commercial interests.
The Orange faction, the middle class, wanted a strong leader from the House of Orange as a counterweight to the rich upper-classes in economic and religious matters, although the House of Orange were rarely strict Calvinists.
Following the Treaty of Westminster, the Republic grew in wealth and influence. De Witt created a strong navy, appointing a political ally, Lt-Adm. Jacob van Wassenaer Obdam, as supreme commander of the confederate fleet. Later De Witt became a personal friend of Lt-Adm. Michiel de Ruyter.
The 2nd Dutch War, 1665 - 1667, ended with the Treaty of Breda, where De Witt negotiated favorable agreements for the Republic (De Witt initiated the raid on the Medway).
Also in 1667, De Witt reconciled the States Party and the Orangists over the position of the Prince of Orange. He proposed William be appointed captain-general of the Union on reaching the age of 23, on condition that this office would be declared incompatible with that of stadtholder in all of the provinces.
During 1672, which the Dutch refer to as the "year of disaster", the French and English attacked the Republic during the Franco-Dutch War and the Orangists took power by force, deposing Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt.
Recovering from an attempt on his life in June 1672, de Witt was lynched by an organized mob after visiting his brother Cornelis in prison.