34 • Beginningscrisis. They also expected to benefit commercially by wounding Dutch ship-
ping—the archrival of London’s maritime trade. Finally, they knew any
money they spent on the king’s war would help remove the last vestiges of
mutual distrust left from the revolutionary era, when radicals had taken con-
trol of the Guildhall and financed much of the civil war that had toppled
Charles II’s father from the throne and taken his life.
The Guildhall’s rapprochement with Whitehall had begun with Charles
II’s return to the throne of his Stuart forebears in 1660 and his subsequent
marriage to the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza. The drab gar-
ments of the Puritan Interregnum were shed for the finery and flash of the
restored court. The city fathers joined in the fun by opening wide the city
coffers, which they usually guarded jealously, for the royal coronation. The
city chamberlain spent almost £ 5 , 000 just for “His Majesties entertainment
at ye guildhall.” Another £ 1 , 000 went to Charles and Catherine as a freewill
gift. The “show upon the river Thames” when the king and queen came to
Whitehall cost more than £ 500 , and entertaining the royal couple at Cheap-
side came to £ 112. By the time the chamberlain counted up his expenses for
the royal couple, the sum reached a whopping £ 8 , 044 and one penny. This far
exceeded the city’s entire yearly budget.^43
On coronation day, city dwellers turned out to watch the royal procession,
swelling with pride at such a sight. “It is impossible to relate the glory of this
day, expressed in the clothes of them that rode,” Pepys wrote. “The king, in a
most rich embroidered suit and cloak, looked most noble. The streets all
graveled, and the houses hung with carpets [from balconies and windows]
... and the ladies out of the windows. So glorious was the show, with gold
and silver, that we were not able to look at it, our eyes at last being so much
overcome.”^44 The parade of twenty thousand persons on horse and foot be-
gan at the Tower at the eastern end of the old walled city and arrived seven
hours later at Whitehall Palace.
Charles and Catherine settled into the immense spread of Whitehall, a
maze of buildings on both sides of Westminster’s King Street that included
galleries, apartments, a chapel, a tennis court, and Inigo Jones’s Banqueting
House, the architect’s masterwork.^45 Southwest of Whitehall, the buildings
in the palace yard served the high justices and Parliament in Saint Margaret
parish, which was also home to Westminster Abbey. To the west of White-
hall, in a gigantic private park enclosed by an immense wall, Charles II’s
brother and presumptive heir, James, duke of York, and his duchess, Anne
Hyde, daughter of the lord chancellor, resided at Saint James Palace, await-
ing the birth of their child.