Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  The sight of the Great Fire of London was so awe-inspiring that only biblical analogies seemed to reflect the drama of the spectacle and its catastrophic meaning. It was likened to Judgement Day and the destruction of Sodom. The sky was said to be aflame and the cries and wailings of the people added to the sense of apocalyptic doom. There are fine eyewitness accounts, that by Samuel Pepys being possibly the best known. One of the most vivid was by the Presbyterian Thomas Vincent, its title, Gods terrible voice in the city, proclaiming what many Puritans and nonconformists preferred to believe, and many moderates too: that plague and fire were the deity’s punishments for the iniquities of a dissolute court and a people gone astray. Evelyn, who had warned the government in 1661* about the fire risks of this unplanned, overcrowded, polluted, jumbled-up city built of wood, was less impressed by the theories of foreign arsonists or supernatural wrath. Instead he brought his scientific eye and a sympathetic heart to his shocked, on-the-spot reporting:

  The fire having continued all this night [3 September] (if I may call that night, which was as light as day for 10 miles round about after a dreadfull manner) when conspiring with a fierce Eastern Wind, in a very drie season … The Conflagration was so universal, & the people so astonish’d, that from the beginning … they hardly stirr’d to quench it, so as there was nothing heard or seene but crying out & lamentation, & running about like distracted creatures … so as it burned both in breadth and length, The Churches, Publique Halls, Exchange, Hospitals, Monuments, & ornaments, leaping after a prodigious manner from house to house & streete to streete, at greate distance one from another, for the heate (with a long set of faire & warme weather) had even ignited the aire.

  The smoke reached Oxford where the sunlight by day was dimmed and the moonlight murky with the dust: the night sky was lit up for a radius of forty miles. While the fire continued to burn, the displaced Londoners, the rich among the poor, had retreated to the commons of St George’s, south of Lambeth, and Moorfields, to the north of the city, and as far as Highgate, huddling under tents or in whatever makeshift shelter they could find. The slow but inexorable progress of the fire meant there was very little loss of life; it was estimated that about four people died as a direct result of it. However, more than 13,000 houses and 100 churches were burned in an area of one and a half miles along the river to a width of about two-thirds of a mile.

  The most distressing sight of all was the burning of St Paul’s, the city’s great church. It was already under repair, and the wooden scaffolding poles surrounding it fuelled the fiercest blaze: ‘the stones of Paules flew like granados, the Lead mealting downe the streetes in a streame, & the very pavements of them glowing with a fiery rednesse’. As he walked about the city, the soles of his shoes disintegrating in the heat, Evelyn saw stone fountains calcified and ruined while the water in them boiled, and basement warehouses ‘still burning in stench & dark clouds of smoke like hell’. The fire was eventually halted by blowing up the buildings in its path with gunpowder: the abating of the driving wind also helped. King Charles and his brother James had been tireless in their efforts to arrest the blaze, managing on the ground the workmen’s efforts to make firebreaks, sometimes working alongside them themselves and regaining a wave of popular affection in the process.

  Only when the fire had nothing more to feed on was it possible to examine the full extent of its reach. The air was suffocatingly hot and toxic and everything was reduced to great smouldering heaps, with only the occasional spire or tower as markers in a devastated landscape. Many of the streets and alleys were blocked and unrecognisable under the rubbish and ash. Nothing had withstood the onslaught. Massive prison gates had melted, even the stones turned white in the heat of the furnace and ‘the people who now walked about the ruines, appeard like men in some dismal desart, or rather in some greate Citty, lay’d wast by an impetuous & cruel Enemy’. The incineration of St Paul’s somehow stood as a dreadful symbol of the implacable force that had swept their city away:

  It was astonishing to see what imense stones the heate had in a manner Calcin’d, so as all the ornaments, Columns, freezes, Capitels & proje[c]tures of massie Portland stone flew off, even to the very roofe, where a Sheete of Leade covering no lesse than 6 akers* by measure, being totally mealted, the ruines of the Vaulted roofe, falling brake into St Faithes† which being filled with the magazines of bookes, belonging to the Stationer[s],‡ & carried thither for safty, they were all consumed burning for a weeke following … Thus lay in ashes that most venerab[l]e Church, one of the antient[est] Pieces of early Piety in the Christian World.9

  St Paul’s, founded at the beginning of the seventh century, had been burned down twice before in the following three and a half centuries, the latter time by the Vikings in 962, after which it was rebuilt in stone. Now more than ten and a half centuries since its foundation, Sir Christopher Wren would have to raise St Paul’s anew and in the process create the great cathedral recognised around the world today.

  William and Dorothy first heard officially of the Great Fire from Arlington and William could hardly believe what he read. In his reply he seemed to struggle with the fact that it was not some nightmare but a barely imaginable reality. Dorothy and Martha reacted emotionally with immediate shock and amazement but he was keen to go and discuss the whole thing rationally with his colleagues and sort out his thoughts. Tending always to the optimistic, William was soon arguing that the catastrophe was a chance for a new and better city to rise phoenix-like from the old, quoting Augustus’s boast that he had found Rome a city of brick and left one of marble: he, like Evelyn, urged that it should be a healthier, better planned city with promenades, gardens and open spaces.

  As he strolled through Brussels’s clean, spacious streets, it was hard to imagine the devastation of his own city, but its pleasing design made him hopeful for the rebuilding of London. The year his family spent with him was a happy one for everyone. His and Dorothy’s baby daughter Diana flourished and began to enchant them all. Their son John, always so good and quiet as a small child, was now nearly eleven and must have delighted in the novel pleasures and curiosities of Brussels life. Houseboats on the canals were a striking sight, the welcoming living quarters kept so bright and clean. Even more exciting, perhaps, and amusing to a child were the working dogs, usually great mastiffs, harnessed up like small horses in teams of four or six, pulling carts transporting children or filled with produce sold by traders on the street.

  William wrote to Lord Lisle, their neighbour at Sheen, about the pleasures of his current life but his appreciation of his home and friends there: ‘in the midst of a town and employment entertaining enough, and a life not uneasy, my imaginations run very often over the pleasures of the air, and the earth, and the water, but much more of the conversations at Sheen’. He then revealed his own eye for a beautiful woman and an affectionate and playful concern for his friend’s lack of company in the country: ‘I wish I could give you [trouble] of another kind, by sending you a little Spanish Mistress from hence, whose eyes might spoil your walks, and burn up all the green meadows at Sheen, and find others ways of destroying that repose your Lordship pretends alone to enjoy.’10

  During the year in Brussels, Dorothy conceived and gave birth to another son, their ninth child. She was forty and this was her last pregnancy. Apart from his return to England soon after his birth, there is no further mention of this son and the likelihood is that like six of his siblings he died in infancy. He was however a babe-in-arms when William’s concern for their safety meant his mother, baby sister and elder brother had to return to England in May 1667 as the French, long intent on invading the Spanish Netherlands, were sweeping through the southern towns and threatening to overrun Brussels.

  In order to safeguard her journey, Dorothy had to ask for a passport from the United Provinces. It actually arrived too late and she boarded one of Charles II’s yachts instead, ‘trusting, next to God Almighty, in the protection of his royal name’. William, careful of diplomati
c punctilio, apologised to the Spanish ambassador at The Hague who had gone to some trouble to provide this now redundant document: ‘Your Excellency, I am sure, will excuse the care of a mother, in providing all that lay in her power for the safety of her children, and who to ease herself in it has (methinks) considered so little to whom she was troublesome.’11 He was outraged that the Dutch should treat his wife as they would a merchant by demanding an inventory of her luggage. But his overriding concern was for her safety and that of their small children in this time of increased danger. Dorothy disliked sea travel and had suggested shortening this passage as much as possible by sailing only the last leg, from Calais.

  In just over twelve years of marriage Dorothy had given birth to nine babies. Having been almost continually pregnant it was perhaps significant that she did not become pregnant again after the age of forty. Certainly menopause was earlier then but could it have been that her uxorious husband had acted on his own much broadcast dictum, ‘that no body should make love after forty, nor bee in business after fifety’? By make love, of course, he meant woo, but in a larger sense this suggested he thought that sexual and romantic love belonged to a more youthful generation. Certainly his sister Martha, who reported this saying, also declared that part of William’s intention in retiring sooner than he might was in ‘makeing good his owne rules’,12 one of which was this imposed age limit on erotic love.

  He was an intuitive and emotional man and his and Dorothy’s experiences of the last twelve years of almost continual childbearing followed seven times by the pain and blighted hopes of an infant’s death, either immediately or in early childhood, left their mark. Inevitably sexual love came to mean pregnancy and too often pregnancy brought foreboding, suffering and death. High as infant mortality was in the seventeenth century – on average a third of all infants died within two weeks – Dorothy and William endured even greater losses, with only two of their nine children surviving childhood and only one living to maturity.

  While Dorothy and their children returned the long way to Sheen, Martha stayed on in Brussels to keep William company and to manage his domestic affairs. Informing most of William’s diplomatic work at the time was the necessity of maintaining amicable relations with Spain and monitoring the expansionist ambitions of France’s king, Louis XIV. With the war against the United Provinces in alliance with France, the results of the plague and the Great Fire, Charles II’s coffers were running dry. He could barely afford to repair the fleet after the last excursion and the fire had decimated his revenues: the rebuilding would place an almost unbearable burden on the depleted exchequer.

  William was gloomy about a war that seemed to be dragging on to no great purpose and thought negotiation was the obvious way forward. But largely unknown to him, Charles was playing a double game, having approached Louis in search of a peace treaty, with the proviso that Britain would remain neutral in any future French invasion of the Spanish Netherlands. He was simultaneously sounding out peace with the Dutch through Lisola, the Holy Roman Empire’s ambassador to London, a man deeply suspicious of French ambitions. Charles’s chicanery did not work but his willingness to do business with the French was at odds with William’s gut feeling that the Dutch were much better potential allies.

  As negotiations with the Dutch faltered, their fleet, on a long-planned raid, sailed up the Thames in mid-June, catching the English unawares. They stormed the fort at Sheerness and then with reinforcements headed up the River Medway, breaking the chains set across the river to halt them, and on 13 June audaciously penetrated the inner sanctum of the British navy, the dockyard at Chatham, ‘doing us not onely disgrace, but incredible mischiefe in burning severall of our best Men of Warr, lying at Anker & Moored there’. This caused the most enormous panic and consternation. The traumatic shock of the Great Fire less than a year before was still raw, and there were wild rumours that the Dutch had not only burned the fleet but fired London: ‘every body were flying, none knew why or whither’.13 There were fears too that the real enemy, the French, were poised to invade. Money and valuables were hurried out of London for safekeeping. Samuel Pepys, with irrepressible self-interest and pragmatism, had made an unwieldy girdle in which he stuffed £300 of gold (worth the equivalent of £35,000 today) and wore the uncomfortable contraption while he carried on with his daily work ‘with some trouble’.14

  To increase the nation’s humiliation, the Dutch fleet triumphantly blockaded the Thames for more than two weeks. It is easy to sympathise with John Evelyn’s sense of outrage at this inescapable trumpeting of his navy’s defeat and shame: ‘a Dreadfull Spectacle as ever any English men saw, & a dishonour never to be wiped off’.15 More practically, the blockade meant he, like most other Londoners, was running out of fuel. William, so far from home, was nevertheless far from immune to the general gloom, and admitted that he thought the burning of the fleet was the greatest humiliation in England’s long history. As with everything, he took it so much to heart that he questioned if he really had the right temperament for the job: ‘I must confess this of all our misfortunes is that which has gone nearest to me, and taught me what some of my friends have often told me, that I am unfit for public business by concerning myself too deeply in the success of it.’16

  Pepys also felt the visceral shame of it and wrote that the incompetence of the government in deciding to lay up the fleet that year, leaving the country undefended, had so infuriated the people that there was violent talk of treason and of papist conspiracies. Bloodshed did not ensue, however, since English sangfroid prevailed, a national characteristic that impressed the patriot in him: ‘in any nation but ours, people that appear (for we are not endeed so) so faulty as we[,] would have their throats cut’.17

  By the following month, with the Dutch fleet still in victorious evidence at the mouth of the Thames, the Treaty of Breda was signed on 21 July, marking the formal end of the second Anglo-Dutch war. In hindsight it was significant in legalising Britain’s ownership of New Amsterdam (to be renamed New York),* snatched from the Dutch three years before. The trading concessions that Britain had to make to France and the United Provinces did not please everyone, not least the merchants who, along with much of the country, had fallen out of love with their self-indulgent king and looked askance at his licentious court which they believed, according to Pepys, had become even more remarkable for ‘gaming, swearing, whoring, and drinking, and the most abominable vices that ever were in the world’.18

  William had often expressed his dislike of court life and although he found Charles II personally beguiling he had no desire to be part of his increasingly cynical and dissolute set. He deplored the decline of intelligent debate and respect, even within court circles, where anything serious was derided and mockery took the place of wit: ‘Whilst making some of the company laugh and others ridiculous is the game in vogue, I fear we shall hardly succeed at any other, and am sorry our courtiers should content themselves with such victories as those.’ He was particularly disturbed to hear how the death of Captain Douglas at Chatham, ‘who stood and burnt in one of our ships … when his soldiers left him, because it should never be said, a Douglas quitted his post without order’, was traduced into burlesque by the court wits. William admitted he was not sure that such extreme action as Douglas’s should be recommended but he felt that such a man deserved public esteem for his principled stand and his loyalty, even if in private the ‘wise men in their closets’19 might have laughed at his misplaced sense of honour.

  Once the treaty was signed, William turned again to investigate his favourite hobby of fruit growing and had worked out how to make sure he had a continuous supply of his favourite fruit from early summer to autumn by planting a succession of different varieties of cherry trees in his garden at Sheen. He told Lord Lisle that he longed to return home for a month towards the end of the year to rejoin his family and plant these experimental new species of tree himself, together with the new improved grape vines he intended to bring with him.

 
; Before he could escape there, however, William escorted Martha on a trip north into the United Provinces towards the end of September. She ‘took a very strong fancy to … see a country she had heard so much of’ and William, who had always favoured an alliance with the Dutch against the French, thought it might be useful to sound out the situation on the ground. It seemed politic to travel incognito with only their personal servants, a lady’s maid for Martha, a valet for William and a page, all of whom spoke Dutch, as they headed for Amsterdam and then The Hague. Martha was excited by everything and particularly delighted by the warehouses full of exotic goods and spices imported by the Dutch East India Company.*

  William, who had seen the sights on his earlier trips, was most struck this time by the freedom of political debate and the straight talking. This was all the more enjoyable because his disguise as an ordinary traveller, rather than in his full panoply as a British diplomat, gave him the chance to mingle: ‘The chief pleasure I had in my journey was, to observe the strange freedom that all men took in boats and inns, and all other common places, of talking openly whatever they thought upon all the public affairs, both of their own State, and their neighbours … and I think it the greatest piece of the liberty that country so values.’20 Such openness was all the more refreshing to a man who himself valued candour and philosophical debate and had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the faction-ridden court back home. Apart from his good working knowledge of French and Spanish, and use of Latin as a lingua franca, it was probable that he also understood Dutch if he was able to listen with such ease and pleasure to casual conversations around him.