But I (most righteously) am proud of thee.
Sir William d’Avenant, ‘To Henry Jermin’.
The Great Fire ravaged the City of London at the start of September 1666. The stone walls of old St Paul’s Cathedral exploded in the intense heat, and molten lead from its roof flowed through the nearby gutters like lava. Panic spread in waves among the terrified Londoners as the flames rampaged through their homes and shops.
Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans, heard news of the fire from mariners along the quayside at Calais, where he waited impatiently for the wind to change so that his ship could set sail and carry him home. Behind him in Paris fretted Henrietta Maria, the Queen Mother, whom he had served with such loyalty that most people assumed he was her secret husband and even the real father of her son the King, Charles II.
Around Jermyn, on either side of the Channel, spread a vast spider’s web of informants and agents, Freemasons and Presbyterians, junior British courtiers in his pay and French officials who smuggled him news of the business of Louis XIV, the Sun King. But none of them now could speed him information on what he most wanted to know.
How far west had the fire spread, and how many Londoners had been killed? Had Whitehall perished, with its marbled Banqueting House where the previous king, Charles I, Henrietta-Maria’s husband, had been beheaded in 1649? And what had happened to the embryonic new city he was building on the Queen’s dower lands in St James’s which, by a series of leases and freehold grants, were now his too?
Since the 1660 Restoration, which he had done so very much to bring about, Jermyn’s masons had applied their set squares and compasses to the work of planning, levelling, squaring and civilizing the rough fields beyond the western edge of London. He had laid out the ground-plans of elegant straight streets of fine, classically-styled houses around one magisterial square, St James’s Square, all so radically different to the old hotchpotch of the City.
Much of the City was indeed devoured by the fire. But at the same time Jermyn set sail, his new city was being saved both by the wind and the unstoppable energy of Charles II. The King fought the Great Fire like a military campaign, creating a successful firebreak beyond the Strand between old London, and the new London in the West End.
Over the heady Restoration years which followed, Jermyn’s St James’s continued to rise up, a new city whose broad, paved, clean, well-lit streets became the blueprint by which the City of London itself would be reconstructed. Inspired by Jermyn’s vision for a new Rome, and for the new Empire which Britain’s overseas colonies were soon to become, the fields spreading north and west of St James’s blossomed under a new patchwork of squares, each vying with Jermyn’s original to become ever more liveable, elegant and refined.
It is easy to find a single word or phrase to sum up the lives of the subjects of most biographies, because often they have only been one noteworthy thing: ‘writer’, ‘prime minister’, ‘general’, ‘artist’, and that says it all. Jermyn defies such an easy description. One of the many inspiring things about him is the way his career was so multifaceted, opening up many fresh windows into the riotous and turbulent world of Stuart Britain.
‘Favourite of Queen Henrietta Maria’ is one phrase sometimes used about Jermyn. From 1626, until he broke his wand of office over Henrietta Maria’s open grave in 1669, Jermyn served continuously in the Queen’s household. Unofficially, she had known and trusted him eve
