The Royal Image and the English People by Nicola Smith

Author:Nicola Smith [Smith, Nicola]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367249533
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 48635060
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2001-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5

Reconciliation and rivalry

For London’s buildings and monuments, the Great Fire of 1666 was a far worse calamity than the Civil War. Damage was extensive, though remarkably few lives were lost. More statues were burned than people. The figures of kings at the Royal Exchange were all destroyed, though the founder’s statue survived. Pepys briefly described the scene: ‘The Exchange a sad sight, nothing standing there of all the statues or pillars but Sir Tho. Gresham’s picture in the corner’.1 The Exchange, the commercial hub of the City, was quickly rebuilt to a new classical design by Edward Jerman in 1667–69. As before, statues of the kings of England were to stand in niches around the courtyard. And, also as before, this part of the project was not achieved so swiftly, though the statue of Sir Thomas Gresham which had survived the fire was reinstated without delay.

In 1671 John Bushnell made a new stone statue of the founder of the Royal Exchange, to stand over a secondary entrance, and figures of Charles I and Charles II for niches to either side of the main entrance, on Cornhill. Like his figures of the same kings on Temple Bar, Bushnell’s Charles I and Charles II for the Royal Exchange are in classical dress, but these twist and gesture more dramatically (Figure 5.1). Such Baroque-looking figures must always have appeared constrained by their niches.2 Bushnell hoped to win the commission for the statues within the courtyard too, and he made models for at least six of them, but in this he was unlucky. Other sculptors had their eye on the same job. Caius Gabriel Cibber, always short of money, had been angling for the commission since the beginning of the rebuilding project, but he was equally unsuccessful. It cannot have helped his case in the early 1670s that he was locked up for debt in the King’s Bench Prison in Southwark.

For some years the niches around the courtyard of the new Royal Exchange remained empty. In 1684 a free-standing stone figure of Charles II in Roman dress, paid for by the Merchant Adventurers of Hamburg and made by Grinling Gibbons, was set up in the centre of the courtyard.3 This seems to have galvanized the City into action, and in the same year various individual City companies agreed to sponsor statues of various individual historical monarchs for the niches. Agreement over who was to be responsible for which was not achieved easily in every case, as some monarchs were much more popular than others. Nobody wanted Mary Tudor but as both the Mercers and the Fishmongers wanted Queen Elizabeth it was resolved that the two companies should jointly take responsibility for both sisters. The task as a whole still seemed burdensome, nonetheless, and by 1708 only 14 of the 24 niches had been filled. As it turned out, the empty spaces originally intended for some of the more obscure or less popular medieval kings meant that there was plenty of room for the addition

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