came to be known as the Light Royal, a lamp that was made entirely of glass
and cast no shadows.^142
Several promoters were thus at work in the City by 1690 developing oil lamps,
setting up experiments, putting lamps up in public places to attract patrons and
customers, and signing contracts with small groups of local householders to re-
lieve them of the trouble of maintaining a lantern and candle outside their
houses on certain nights during the winter. A complex competition to get the
City to grant a monopoly can be followed in the records of the Court of Alder-
men, the Common Council, and in the minutes of the committee set up in 1692
to ‘improve the revenues of the City’.^143 One aspect of this story that I cannot fol-
low in detail, but that should not go unmentioned, is its political dimension, at
least the possibility that political conflicts in the City and parliament played
some part in the way the competition among rival companies worked out. It is
clear that Vernatty stood little chance so long as whig aldermen dominated the
bench. And while it is not likely that support for or opposition to improved light-
ing was a narrow party issue, when Hemings argued that the Common Council
undoubtedly had the right to increase the number of hours oflighting that each
inhabitant of the City was obliged to provide he was making a contentious point
that was likely to divide the Court of Aldermen; whigs tending to favour enter-
prise and innovation, tories the customary arrangements.
That is not likely to have been an entirely rigid and settled division, nor would
it have prevented whig and tory aldermen who were also members of parlia-
ment from uniting to protect the City from threats to its autonomy. In the
manœvring over the first such contract in the early 1690 s, for example, one of
the contending parties appealed to parliament in 1692 in an attempt to pre-
empt the competition by asking for a monopoly over the lighting of public places
throughout the kingdom for fourteen years. The City authorities were united
Policing the Night Streets 213(^142) For these inventors and inventions and the companies that formed around some of them, see
Scott, Joint-Stock Companies, iii. 52 – 60 ; De Beer, ‘Early History’, 315 – 20 ; Falkus, ‘Lighting’, 255 – 6 ;
CLRO, Misc. MSS 16.12. Hemings had also proposed better methods for cleaning and carrying away
the City’s night soil and other filth in 1688 and sought permission of the Court of Aldermen to make con-
tracts with ward authorities. His men would work at night, he said, beginning at 10 p.m. They would
wear badges with numbers and be supervised by overseers to be approved by the aldermen and—in a re-
vealing comment on the authority of the office and of the anxiety about street crime and burglary in this
period—he proposed that if the aldermen would appoint them constables they would be part of the
City’s policing forces. Such an appointment, he was confident, would ‘wonderfully prevent House-
breaking and many other Roguerys, by Reason the Men will be in all parts of the Citty at worke, Ready
to suppress any suspitious persons, and deliver them to the care of the Watch; and upon any disorders
that shall happen in the Night, be a strength to the watch, and must consequently prove a safety to the
Citty’. Hemings saw his two projects as intimately related. ‘The Cleansing of the streets well’, he argued,
‘will Incourage another usefull undertakeing, which is the Lighting of the Citty, for if the Wards I Light
are kept Cleane, it will Incourage other Wards to be lighted and cleansed by the same Methods.’ The
result will be that ‘this will be the Happiest, safest, and best accommodated Citty in the World’ (CLRO,
Papers of the Court of Aldermen, 1688 ).
(^143) CLRO, ‘Minute Book of the Committee appointed for to consider and endeavour to discover and
improve the revenue and estate belonging to this City’, 2 vols. ( 1692 – 6 ).