In 1652, in a shed in St Michael's Alley off Cornhill in the City of London, a Greek servant named Pasqua Rosée began selling a bitter black drink his merchant employer had acquired a taste for in the Ottoman port of Smyrna. Nothing about the premises suggested a revolution. Yet within a generation London held hundreds of coffeehouses, and inside them, over a drink that sharpened the mind rather than softening it, Londoners assembled a startling share of the modern world: the insurance market, the stock exchange, the newspaper, and a new kind of public conversation that made kings nervous.
The formula was simple and radically democratic by the standards of the age. A penny bought a dish of coffee, which included admission and access to the room. Inside, printed news-sheets lay on the tables, strangers shared benches, and — in theory at least — a tradesman could argue politics with a gentleman, because the price of entry was a coin rather than a pedigree. Contemporaries called the coffeehouses "penny universities", since a penny spent listening to the talk was reckoned a better education than months of formal schooling. There were house rules posted on the walls: no swearing, no quarrelling, and anyone who started a fight was to buy coffee for the company. Compared with the ale-soaked tavern, the coffeehouse was sober, wordy and ferociously well informed.
What made London's coffeehouses historically decisive was their specialisation. Merchants and ship-owners with an interest in marine risk gravitated to the house Edward Lloyd opened on Tower Street in the 1680s, because Lloyd made it his business to collect reliable shipping news; the underwriters who did their deals there evolved into Lloyd's of London, still the world's most famous insurance market. Stockjobbers, expelled from the Royal Exchange for rowdiness, decamped to Jonathan's Coffee House in Exchange Alley, where dealers posted prices of stocks and commodities; from that room descends the London Stock Exchange. Garraway's hosted auctions "by the candle", in which bidding lasted as long as an inch of candle burned. Writers claimed their own territory too — Dryden held court at Will's, and when Richard Steele launched the Tatler in 1709 he datelined its sections from different coffeehouses, an admission that the news was made in them.
The king blinks
All this talk unsettled the authorities, for the coffeehouse was also where governments were criticised by men sober enough to remember the arguments. In December 1675 Charles II issued a proclamation for the suppression of coffeehouses, denouncing them as nurseries of idleness and sedition where "false, malicious and scandalous reports" were spread. The response was an uproar from drinkers and from the trade — and a quiet warning from his own lawyers that the ban stood on shaky legal ground. Within eleven days the king backed down, and the proclamation was withdrawn before it ever took effect. It was a telling defeat: the public sphere had become too valuable, and too caffeinated, to shut.
Not everyone was charmed. A famous 1674 pamphlet, the Women's Petition Against Coffee, complained — in terms too bawdy for most Victorian reprints — that the drink was making husbands spend all day talking and rendering them useless at home; a Men's Answer swiftly followed. The petition was almost certainly satire rather than a genuine campaign, but it captures how completely the coffeehouse had rearranged male social life. It is worth remembering, too, who was excluded: women were largely absent from London's coffeehouses except as proprietors and servers, a limit on all that celebrated openness.
The drink itself had travelled a long road to Cornhill — from Ethiopia, where the coffee plant is native, through Yemen and the Sufi monasteries that used it to fuel night prayers, then via Mecca, Cairo and Constantinople into Europe. England's first recorded coffeehouse actually opened not in London but in Oxford around 1650, and Oxford's scholarly coffee crowd included men who would found the Royal Society. The Society's fellows carried the habit to London, continuing experiments and arguments over coffee — Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley talked planetary orbits in such rooms, and the wager that helped prompt the Principia was struck among coffeehouse companions. In the eighteenth century the coffeehouses slowly declined as private clubs skimmed off the gentlemen, ticker tape and offices absorbed the business, and Britain — thanks to the East India Company's trade — switched its national allegiance to tea. But the institutions born over those penny cups outlived the rooms. When you insure a ship, buy a share or read a newspaper, you are drinking, in a sense, from Pasqua Rosée's shed.
Quiz nuggets
- London's first coffeehouse was opened in 1652 by Pasqua Rosée in St Michael's Alley, off Cornhill.
- Coffeehouses were nicknamed "penny universities" — a penny bought admission to the room and its conversation.
- Lloyd's of London grew from Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse; the London Stock Exchange traces back to Jonathan's in Exchange Alley.
- Charles II's 1675 proclamation suppressing coffeehouses was withdrawn within eleven days after public outcry.
- The satirical Women's Petition Against Coffee (1674) claimed the drink was ruining English husbands.