Following the Great Fire that ravaged the city in 1666, London’s rebuilt streets accommodated growing numbers of coffee-houses whose clientele was dangerously well informed and keenly interested in state affairs. The year before the Fire, the delegation of three French envoys attending Charles II’s court had objected to Louis XIV’s secretary for foreign affairs that, in England, ‘everybody thinks it his right to speak of the affairs of state, and the very boatmen want the milords to talk to them about such topics while they row them to Parliament’.

Clare Jackson, Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688 (2021)