The Great Migration to America from the UK - Coronation in Scotland of the English king, Charles I

petitioncrown · August 10, 2017 12:53PM

An Artist’s View of London, AD 1633

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During 1633, two significant events took place which had such historical impact that the modern world still feels their influence. The first was the coronation in Scotland of the English king, Charles I. As important as this was at the time, an even greater event occurred whose influence would carry forward not for decades but for generations, and this was the Great Migration of ordinary souls to America from England.

We should remember we are now just 33 years before the Great Fire of London that started in a baker’s shop on 2 September 1666, in Pudding Lane, close to London Bridge. The Great Fire of London raged for four nights and days. Over 13,000 houses, 87 churches and the main buildings in the City, including Old St Paul’s Cathedral, were destroyed. Incredibly, only six deaths were recorded, but as many as 200,000 people were left destitute. The great diarist and literary man, Samuel Pepys, recorded the events as follows:

“It is the year is 1633 in the 8th. year of the reign of our King Charles I of England. Know body had thought when our Charles ascended our British thrown in1625 in all ‘pomp and glory’, our British monarch would in the near future bring civil war to our Island and in the end he would lose his head in 1649. The King clearly believed in the divine right of Kings. Oliver Cromwell is a commoner and a Puritan; he changed the face of British history. Before you ask, yes Cromwell would have liked his son to be King of England but alas he was not for the thrown of England he was a farmer and was not interested in being the King of England, hence Charles II was welcomed back to England to be its King after Cromwell.”

The Great Migration to America

The year 1633 saw the beginning of the “Great Migration” to the New World, and this continued until the Civil War began almost a decade later. More than 30,000 emigrants in the nine years prior to the Civil War sailed from England to New England. They were from the English middle-class as desperate to find a place where they might live, worship, and raise their families without government harassment. In England there was church and government which was hierarchical, tyrannical, and tax-hungry. This resentment among the people led to the English Revolution beginning in 1642; and seven years later King Charles lost his head by the axe “for treason,” in 1649, after secret agents had intercepted his private invitations to foreign kings and their armies, asking that they invade England, finish off Parliament and terminate the English Constitution.

These, however, were affairs of the nobility, the rich and mighty. They were beyond the ken of the common man, the uneducated masses who laboured in the fields, who fought for king and country, who lived and died namelessly. Yet these people were the backbone of England. Many left for America, and became the backbone of the colonies, later of the new United States.

They left behind an England, a London, that has been idealized for centuries in the minds of countless millions of people. But it was not an ideal time. It was a moment in history when the very fabric of English life, and English law, was about to change forever. Within a few short decades it would no longer be the king who would make the laws and the parliament who would rubber-stamp them, but the reverse.

In 1633 began a great migration and a great transition. But what “hard memory” of these events has been left to us? What numismatic relic? Any?

Shown here is a superb medallion that was struck to commemorate our King Charles I who had travelled to Edinburgh in Scotland to have his Scottish Coronation, and was issued when he returned to London. This visit to Scotland was the King’s first since he left his native Scotland at the age of three with his family. His father was James VI of Scotland, and when his father came to England in 1603 he became James I of England.

Charles now was 33 years old, born in Fife, Scotland, on 19 November 1600, the second son of King James. Charles was a devout Anglican and married a Roman Catholic, Henrietta Maria of France, which was not popular at the time when anti-papist sentiment ran strong. He became King in 1625.

At this time Edward Greene was the king’s master engraver at the mint. When Greene died there came along two talented young men, Thomas Simon and Edward Wade, who were appointed joint mint masters under Parliament. Thomas Rawlins was the king’s own master engraver, and during the Civil War Rawlins resided at Oxford, where his intricate skills and inimitable style flowered. Doubtless, this master engraver was the artist of his time, and in fact his works on coins of the 1640s have secured his reputation as one of the finest of all artists who have worked in metal. Over the centuries, an artist’s skills are either forgotten or they become measures of their eras. We have only to think of the Greek engraver Kimon and of the Roman and Renaissance engravers.

Medallic London in 1633

The medallion illustrated here was struck, but a number were also cast. The reverse image depicted by the artist is of mid 17th-century London prior to the plague and great fire of 1666, a town made largely of wood, while on the obverse our king is seen triumphantly riding back to his capital city.

Only 11 years after Charles’ return from his coronation in Scotland, the engraver Rawlins would be resident in the king’s new capital city of Oxford, as the Civil War broke out. During this turbulent period, with battles raging all around him and the city fortified, Rawlins found time and inspiration to engrave the only English city scene known on a crown-sized piece, today known familiarly as the Oxford Crown. We may well ask, given the circumstances of its issuance, was Rawlins really not aiming to impress only his king but, also, his colleagues in Europe? I mention the Oxford Crown as there is an affinity between this city-view medallion of 1633 and his crown of 1644. And this leads to an even more important question: who influenced whom in the design? Compare the two pieces, and it must be asked: could Rawlins have engraved part of the 1633 medallion? It has long been attributed to Nicholas Briot, but was it really entirely his work?

The medallion is of simply magisterial quality, showing King Charles I riding his horse, holding his baton in his right hand and the reigns of his stallion in the other. The horse itself is of magnificent proportions, riding over arms and the grassland. The date 1633 is pronounced. The Tudor Rose and Crown appear on the rear of the horse’s upper hind quarter. The horse’s long main and flowing tail, and his mean proportions, with his front hoofs slightly lifted, present a monarch striding with great confidence, as one well mounted on his horse–and by extension, metaphorically, well in command of his State. Surely the king himself viewed this piece as a superb piece of propaganda.

On the reverse one can relive in one’s mind life in London in 1633: observe the small wooden houses, with peaked roofs, built closely together in the narrow streets of London; the fields and woods on the south side of the Thames; look carefully, there are people going about their daily lives, a man mending a boat, another with his scythe in the field, yet another sitting on a rock below a tree, another standing on a rock facing the Thames. See the small houses made of wood and the powerful cobbled entrance to London Bridge.

The picture is developing from a view that you would have seen from a small hill on the south bank of the River Thames looking towards London Bridge and the City of London in 1633. As your eyes scan the Thames, you focus on the wooden bridge spanning the flowing waters and you can see the six thick wooden pylons that supported the structure in the middle, the heavily built entrances that would have stood the strain of the Thames water which never stopped flowing and also the icy rigors of the winter which would surely come. The small boats have to manoeuvre in the strong current of the Thames in between the structure to pass through London Bridge. South of the bridge you see a small rowing boat, the high masts visible from our viewpoint, with the houses closely built on the embankment whose services are given to the sailors and the ships. This tall-mast ship could not go north of the bridge. North of London Bridge daily life continues: you can see several small boats, a few with people in them and the oarsman doing his duty. Even the odd couple of boats moored on the other embankment, and the detail of a rope, can be seen with the inside the boat waiting for its oarsman.

The Thames and its surroundings can be seen on this mid-summer day, with three pairs of swans swimming upstream, a different time from today on the way to 400 years later. You can see the balconies of the wealthy overlooking the Thames; these houses with their wooden foundations into the Thames, showing their steps down to the water’s edge where they would moor their small boats. Then the waters were fresh with fish. The sea gulls would fly above, and a light cloudy sky’s sun would shine down on a kingdom that would welcome its monarch upon his return.

The Houses of Parliament, St. Paul’s Cathedral, church steeples among the closely built wooden houses near the embankment and the city of London–the charming things of a “city view” which would all perish in the coming Great Fire.

These details will remain the same for future generations, whether 500 or 1000 years after the event. The artist captured on a piece of silver an ideal image taken from a period of time, a “snap shot” of the year 1633 in London! Now look at the medallion again, study it a moment, then close your eyes, and London of the early 17th century will come alive as if by magic.

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**Technical data for use in captions: **

Medallion struck in silver of extra thickness.
Weight: 54.7 grams. Diameter: 51 mm.
3.5 mm-thick edge and 5 mm thick in the centre.
Edges rounded.
Unique. Ex Hyman Montagu cabinet, late 19th century.
Most known pieces were cast. A few survive on struck, thin flans.

petitioncrown · August 10, 2017 1:36PM

Hi Mike I hope this answers your mail -

At the start of the seventeenth century, the English had not established a permanent settlement in the Americas. Over the next century, however, they outpaced their rivals. The English encouraged emigration far more than the Spanish, French, or Dutch. They established nearly a dozen colonies, sending swarms of immigrants to populate the land. England had experienced a dramatic rise in population in the sixteenth century, and the colonies appeared a welcoming place for those who faced overcrowding and grinding poverty at home. Thousands of English migrants arrived in the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Virginia and Maryland to work in the tobacco fields. Another stream, this one of pious Puritan families, sought to live as they believed scripture demanded and established the Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, New Haven, Connecticut, and Rhode Island colonies of New England.