The Streets Of London – Part One Hundred and One
Royal Mint Street, E1 (Part Two)
It’s not often that I have returned to a London street in
this series but Royal Mint Street, formerly known as Rosemary Lane until 1850
and the home of the Rag Fair, has such a rich and varies history that I cannot
let it go.
One of its residents in the 1640s was one Richard Brandon, a
ragman. His claim to fame is that he is thought to have been the man who
beheaded King Charles I, the only person, so far, to have removed an English
monarch’s head from his neck. He is said to have been paid £30 in half-crown
coins for his work – there may be a pun or a hint of irony in the choice of
denomination or the coins may just have been easier to spend – and Brandon took
an orange stuffed with cloves and a handkerchief from the king’s pocket as his
body was being removed from the scaffold. Offered twenty shillings for the
orange by a gentleman in Whitehall but Brandon refused to sell, although he did
later cash in on the orange by selling it in Rosemary Lane for ten shillings.
Two Colchester weavers, Richard Farnham and John Bull, died
of the plague in a house in Rosemary Lane in January 1641. They were in London
because they believed themselves to be the two great prophets who must visit
Earth, as foretold in the Book of Revelations, before the world came to an end.
They had spent some time in the gaols of Old and New Bridewell for their pains
and although their efforts came to naught, they had planted the seed of
religious dissension in the area.
Their baton was taken up a decade later by cousins and
tailors, John Reeve and Lodowicke Muggleton, who not only lived in Rosemary
Lane, it is tempting to think the same house, but also believed themselves to
be the great prophets referred to in Revelations and set about, in public
houses, proposing a new religion.
They were fervently anti-Quaker and roused the fury of the
authorities, Oliver Cromwell ordering them to be whipped through the streets
and, after Reeves had died in 1658, Muggleton spent some time in the stocks.
But their sect, known as Muggletonians, took root and, although avoiding all
forms of worship, preaching and proselytising, met for discussions and
socialising. They were egalitarian, apolitical and pacifist, the latter trait,
though, not precluding them from gaining some notoriety by cursing those who
reviled their faith, a practice they continued up until the middle of the 19th
century. One of the last to be cursed in this way was Sir Walter Scott.
Political activism is often a bedfellow of religious dissension
and so it is no surprise that the area was the centre of Chartism. Some of the
leaders were men of colour and two such, David Duffy and Benjamin Prophet,
hailed from Rosemary Lane. Duffy was described as “a determined and
powerful-looking fellow”, was known to the police for vagrancy and went
around the area “without shirt, shoe or stocking”. The two men were among
the ringleaders of the demonstration in Camberwell in March 1848 which
developed into a riot. They were both arrested and transported, Duffy for 7
years and Prophet for 14.
At No. 41, Royal Mint Street was to be found a warehouse for
the United Sponge Company, it was demolished in the 1970s, and stored sponges
and chamois leather later sold in stores on the Minories. This was an organised
successor to one of the trades that Henry Mayhew described in 1851 for which
Royal Mint Street was known; sponge selling “is one of the street-trades which
has long been in the hands of the Jews, and, unlike the traffic in pencils,
sealing wax, and other articles of which I have treated, it remains so
principally still”.
The arrival of the railway in the 1860s didn’t do much to
improve the area, Henry Wheatley rather sniffily commenting in his London Past
and Present of 1891, “Royal Mint Street has hardly so evil a reputation as
Rosemary Lane, but it is a squalid place..”
Today, it may not be squalid, but it has lost much of its
character from former times.
