Royal Mint Street, E1 (Part Two)

It’s not often that I have returned to a London street in this series but Royal Mint Street, formerly known as Rosemary Lane until 1850 and the home of the Rag Fair, has such a rich and varies history that I cannot let it go.

One of its residents in the 1640s was one Richard Brandon, a ragman. His claim to fame is that he is thought to have been the man who beheaded King Charles I, the only person, so far, to have removed an English monarch’s head from his neck. He is said to have been paid £30 in half-crown coins for his work – there may be a pun or a hint of irony in the choice of denomination or the coins may just have been easier to spend – and Brandon took an orange stuffed with cloves and a handkerchief from the king’s pocket as his body was being removed from the scaffold. Offered twenty shillings for the orange by a gentleman in Whitehall but Brandon refused to sell, although he did later cash in on the orange by selling it in Rosemary Lane for ten shillings.

Two Colchester weavers, Richard Farnham and John Bull, died of the plague in a house in Rosemary Lane in January 1641. They were in London because they believed themselves to be the two great prophets who must visit Earth, as foretold in the Book of Revelations, before the world came to an end. They had spent some time in the gaols of Old and New Bridewell for their pains and although their efforts came to naught, they had planted the seed of religious dissension in the area.

Their baton was taken up a decade later by cousins and tailors, John Reeve and Lodowicke Muggleton, who not only lived in Rosemary Lane, it is tempting to think the same house, but also believed themselves to be the great prophets referred to in Revelations and set about, in public houses, proposing a new religion.

They were fervently anti-Quaker and roused the fury of the authorities, Oliver Cromwell ordering them to be whipped through the streets and, after Reeves had died in 1658, Muggleton spent some time in the stocks. But their sect, known as Muggletonians, took root and, although avoiding all forms of worship, preaching and proselytising, met for discussions and socialising. They were egalitarian, apolitical and pacifist, the latter trait, though, not precluding them from gaining some notoriety by cursing those who reviled their faith, a practice they continued up until the middle of the 19^th century. One of the last to be cursed in this way was Sir Walter Scott.

Political activism is often a bedfellow of religious dissension and so it is no surprise that the area was the centre of Chartism. Some of the leaders were men of colour and two such, David Duffy and Benjamin Prophet, hailed from Rosemary Lane. Duffy was described as “a determined and powerful-looking fellow”, was known to the police for vagrancy and went around the area “without shirt, shoe or stocking”. The two men were among the ringleaders of the demonstration in Camberwell in March 1848 which developed into a riot. They were both arrested and transported, Duffy for 7 years and Prophet for 14.               

At No. 41, Royal Mint Street was to be found a warehouse for the United Sponge Company, it was demolished in the 1970s, and stored sponges and chamois leather later sold in stores on the Minories. This was an organised successor to one of the trades that Henry Mayhew described in 1851 for which Royal Mint Street was known; sponge selling “is one of the street-trades which has long been in the hands of the Jews, and, unlike the traffic in pencils, sealing wax, and other articles of which I have treated, it remains so principally still”.

The arrival of the railway in the 1860s didn’t do much to improve the area, Henry Wheatley rather sniffily commenting in his London Past and Present of 1891, “Royal Mint Street has hardly so evil a reputation as Rosemary Lane, but it is a squalid place..”   

Today, it may not be squalid, but it has lost much of its character from former times.