London - Edward Rutherfurd [452]
True, there was always trouble brewing abroad, as the various powers of Europe ceaselessly watched for advantage but since the triumphs of Marlborough a generation before, England had suffered no cause for alarm. As for the spreading British colonies, their rich trade, from America and the Caribbean, to India and the fabulous Orient, brought an ever-increasing flow of wealth, while at home, improved agricultural methods were increasing the income of many landowners.
Only one event had taken place which might have shaken the confidence of the English themselves. In 1720, in the first massive stock market madness of the new, all-capitalist order, the entire London Stock Exchange first inflated and then collapsed in the disaster known as the South Sea Bubble. Great men and small, who had speculated in largely bogus companies, convinced that prices could only rise, lost all they had. So many were hit that the government had to intervene. Yet so vigorous was the nation’s growth that a decade later it was almost as if the Bubble had never happened. Business was booming again.
Small surprise, then, if London was growing to match. The expansion begun by the Stuarts outside the city walls had continued. In a broad and splendid sweep towards the west, aristocrats, gentlemen, speculators, were all busy building. And if the motley, house-by-house ownership of old London had stymied any grandiose town planning within the city walls, the big landholdings of this new West End were a very different case. Nobles with estates could lay out whole areas of splendid squares and streets with vistas, which bore their family names: Grosvenor Square, Cavendish Square, Berkeley Square, Bond Street. Nor was it only individuals: livery companies, Oxford colleges, the Church and the Crown all owned land in the West End. Westward into open country therefore – parkland, field and pasture recommencing wherever the building ended – the broad and handsome streets and squares spread out. The houses, for the first time in history, were numbered. Their terraced façades were simple, inspired by classical antiquity, and because the Hanoverian kings of that time were all called George, their style became known as Georgian.
It was a classical age. Aristocrats made the Grand Tour and returned with Italian paintings and Roman statues for their houses; ladies and gentlemen went to the old Roman spa of Bath to take the waters; and great writers like Swift, Pope and Doctor Johnson modelled their poems and satires on those of Augustan Rome. It was an age of reason, when men aimed, at least, to possess the same restrained dignity and sense of proportion as the Georgian squares where they lived. It was, above all, an age of elegance. And elegance was everything, at number seventeen, Hanover Square.
At one o’clock, Lady St James was reviewing her plans.
Balthazar the hairdresser had arrived. His work would take an hour, so she had let the lady’s maid go downstairs to join the other female servants for their dinner. Balthazar inserted a pad. The design he had concocted for today would raise her golden hair a foot above her head, to be surmounted by a tightly drawn bun and a little circlet of pearls, to match the pearl choker she would wear around her neck.
Nearby, on a French gilt chaise, her dress was laid out. It was made of stiff silk brocade, its gorgeous design like a rich, dark forest of flowers, from the Huguenot silk weavers of Spitalfields. God knew what it had cost per yard, nor how many hours her dressmaker had spent, double-stitching every seam – my lady would spot it at once if she hadn’t.
Before her rendezvous, Lady St James had to attend a dinner party, then an assembly. The fashionable world was a ceaseless round and those, like Lady St James, who were invited everywhere, had a duty to be seen.
“It is,” she would say with a bright smile, “why God placed us where we are.” The splendid squares