Chocolate was advocated by the learned physicians of those times as a cure for many diseases, and it was stated that Cardinal Richelieu had been cured of general atrophy by its use.
From France the use of chocolate spread into England, where it began to be drunk as a luxury by the aristocracy about the time of the Commonwealth. It must have made some progress in public favour by 1673, for in that year "a Lover of his Country" wrote in the _Harleian Miscellany_ demanding its prohibition (along with brandy, rum, and tea) on the ground that this imported article did no good and hindered the consumption of English-grown barley and wheat. New things appeal to the imaginative, and the absence of authentic knowledge concerning them allows free play to the imagination--so it happened that in the early days, whilst many writers vied with one another in writing glowing panegyrics on cacao, a few thought it an evil thing. Thus, whilst it was praised by many for its "wonderful faculty of quenching thirst, allaying hectic heats, of nourishing and fattening the body," it was seriously condemned by others as an inflamer of the passions!
"The drinking here of chocolate Can make a fool a sophie."
In the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth, tea, coffee, and chocolate were unknown save to travellers and savants, and the handmaidens of the good queen drank beer with their breakfast. When Shakespeare and Ben Jonson forgathered at the Mermaid Tavern, their winged words passed over tankards of ale, but later other drinks became the usual accompaniment of news, story, and discussion. In the sixteen-sixties there were no strident newspapers to destroy one's equanimity, and the gossip of the day began to be circulated and discussed over cups of tea, coffee, or chocolate. The humorists, ever stirred by novelty, tilted, pen in hand, at these new drinks: thus one rhymster described coffee as
"Syrrop of soot or essence of old shoes."
The first coffee-house in London was started in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill, in 1652 (when coffee was seven shillings a pound); the first tea-house was opened in Exchange Alley in 1657 (when tea was five sovereigns a pound), and in the same year (with chocolate about ten to fifteen shillings per pound) a Frenchman opened the first chocolate-house in Queen's Head Alley, Bishopsgate Street. The rising popularity of chocolate led to the starting of more of these chocolate houses, at which one could sit and sip chocolate, or purchase the commodity for preparation at home. Pepys' entry in his diary for 24th November, 1664, contains: "To a coffee house to drink jocolatte, very good." It is an artless entry, and yet one can almost hear him smacking his lips. Silbermann says that "After the Restoration there were shops in London for the sale of chocolate at ten shillings or fifteen shillings per pound. Ozinda's chocolate house was full of aristocratic consumers. Comedies, satirical essays, memoirs and private letters of that age frequently mention it. The habit of using chocolate was deemed a token of elegant and fashionable taste, and while the charms of this beverage in the reigns of Queen Anne and George I. were so highly esteemed by courtiers, by lords and ladies and fine gentlemen in the polite world, the learned physicians extolled its medicinal virtues." From the coffee house and its more aristocratic relative the chocolate house, there developed a new feature in English social life--the Club. As the years passed the Chocolate House remained a rendezvous, but the character of its habitués changed from time to time. Thus one, famous in the days of Queen Anne, and well known by its sign of the "Cocoa Tree," was at first the headquarters of the Jacobite party, and the resort of Tories of the strictest school. It became later a noted gambling house ("The gamesters shook their elbows in White's and the chocolate houses round Covent Garden," _National Review_, 1878), and ultimately developed into a literary club, including amongst its members Gibbon, the historian, and Byron, the poet.