by Don Jordan
The second weapon employed was the fire hook, a pole eight to ten feet or more in length with an iron hook on the end. These were used to pull down buildings or sections of buildings that were already on fire. Third was the demolition of buildings not yet touched by the fire, either manually using fire hooks or by gunpowder, to create firebreaks, spaces across which the flames could not reach.
In the case of the fire in Pudding Lane, the first method was late in deployment because the fire began in the middle of the night. As was usual in case of fire, the mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, was roused from his bed. Sir Thomas had recently taken over the post from Sir John Lawrence, who had acquitted himself so admirably during the plague. Now it was Sir Thomas’s turn to be tested. If property needed to be destroyed to create firebreaks, his permission was required first. In major cases, the King’s permission needed to be sought. Bleary-eyed from his bed, Bloodworth was not impressed by what he saw. Inspecting the fire, he famously offered the opinion that a woman could piss it out’ and returned to his bed.7 Pleas to pull down houses to create a firebreak were ignored.
In his home in Seething Lane, under the walls of the Tower, Samuel Pepys was roused from his bed with news of the fire. At first his reaction was much like that of the mayor. Fires were a frequent occurrence – and anyhow, Pepys felt his home was safe as the fire was to the south-west of his house and the wind in the east. He went back to bed. At dawn, with his head clear, Pepys had second thoughts and climbed the battlements of the Tower to look west towards the fire. What he saw shocked him. The fire was out of control, spreading out from Pudding Lane in a V-formation, south towards London Bridge and north towards the centre of the city. From what Pepys could see, no one had issued orders to make a firebreak.
Pepys had little time for the Lord Mayor, having previously encountered him on Admiralty business. On those occasions Pepys had been concerned by the numbers of London men being press-ganged for the navy, a major cause of dispute between the city and the navy. At meetings with Bloodworth, Pepys got little response from the mayor; he recorded Bloodworth as being a mean man of understanding and despatch of any public business’. ‘They were prophetic words.
When Pepys went to the front line of the fire, he found his assessment to be correct. Bloodworth was dithering and indecisive. Pepys then went to the river, took a boat to Whitehall and informed the King of the situation. It was not yet midday. Knowing that Pepys was an able man, Charles listened to his assessment and realised instant action was necessary. He dispatched the Earl of Craven to the city with orders for the mayor to tear down houses. Craven, who had acquitted himself with honour during the plague, was an ideal choice, being both an able soldier and a privy councillor. He therefore had the capacity to assess the situation for the King and the ability to organise firefighting, as well as having previously demonstrated his love of London.
Pepys returned to the city. There he found Bloodworth in Cannon Street crying that people would not obey him, that the fire was spreading faster than it could be contained and that he was off to ‘refresh himselP as he had been up all night. The King had sent an offer of troops via Lord Craven to back up the men at the mayor’s disposal. Bloodworth turned them down. Pride might have been at the heart of his refusal, but there was also the longstanding desire within London’s governance to be seen to be able to manage its own affairs. An historic independence of spirit meant that royal troops were generally unwelcome. Despite Bloodworth s refusal of help, the King dispatched a troop from the royal barracks.8
As the fight to save something of medieval London continued, looting took place across the wider city. Thieves pillaged parts of the palaces of St James and Whitehall. The fire grew so fierce that it created vacuums and surged in eddies, sometimes swirling back against the wind and consuming buildings not directly in its path. The majority of London’s population flooded out through the medieval gates or took to the river to escape the unpredictable course of the fire. They made for the outlying villages and countryside to sleep in makeshift dwellings. Along the quays, spices stored in the great warehouses vaporised in the heat, sending a heavy aroma over the city. The water wheel at the end of London Bridge burnt down, as did some of the bridge itself. Parish church spires erupted into fiery candles pointing to the sky, the lead from their roofs flowing down their flanks like grey rain. Stone disintegrated in the extreme heat and turned to cinders. The flames spread west along Cornhill, taking with them the rows of goldsmiths’ workshops and houses, and along Cheapside, consuming the grand bankers’ houses. Sir Robert Viner’s great house in Lombard Street, The Vine, from which he ran his banking and goldsmith’s business, was destroyed (but not before he had rescued his gold), as were the house and surgery belonging to the doctor Nathaniel Hodges. John Graunt’s haberdasher’s shop and home were destroyed.¶
Finally the flames reached the eastern flanks of St Paul’s. The great east windows shattered in the heat, and the flames illuminated the altar, the choir and the nave. The conflagration swept through it all. The ancient cathedral, no stranger to fire, was set alight once more. Flames raced through the choir and up the nave to Inigo Jones’s west front. Under the ferocious heat, the classical stonework crumbled and fell. Somehow, the medieval nave was left standing, hollow and open to the sky.
On Tuesday, the King instructed the Duke of York to take charge. Despite Bloodworth’s refusal of the deployment of troops, the Duke gathered more men from the palace barracks and rode up the Strand and into the burning city through Ludgate. He quickly deployed his men to protect property against looting. With the fire raging, the King joined his brother and soon they were both involved in organising the struggle against the fire. James ordered troops into eight firefighting bases, each with thirty soldiers and a hundred volunteers. Ordering fire hooks to be used to create firebreaks, James rode between bases to coordinate their actions. Charles took it upon himself to ride through the streets, cajoling Londoners to join the firefighting crews, doling out money from a bag in encouragement. This was the sort of situation in which the King was at his best. Charles had not had a chance to show his personal bravery since his heroic but futile stand among his men at the Battle of Worcester fourteen years before. Now, in the midst of physical hazard, he became a man of action once more, rather than one of mere administration. Dismounting from his horse, he joined a crew operating a fire engine for hours at a time.
In the west, the fire had leapt the city walls and was heading towards Whitehall and Westminster. James commanded that gunpowder be used to create more firebreaks, ordering streets of houses blown up to stop the fire spreading north out of the walled city and west towards Whitehall. The fierce wind carried burning embers as far as Whitehall and the Banqueting House was thought to be at risk. In the east of the city, troops stationed in the Tower, said to be acting on their own initiative, but possibly on the orders of the Duke of York, blew up more houses, preventing the fire from entering the fortress, where huge supplies of gunpowder were kept.
By Wednesday the fire was under control thanks to the combined efforts of troops, aldermen, yeomanry, the King and the Duke, and many ordinary Londoners who finally tore down and blew up houses to stop the flames. The fire came to a stop in an arc that ranged from the Middle Temple in the west, then north and east to Holborn Bridge, through Cripplegate, Aldersgate, the northern end of the great thoroughfare of Bishopsgate, the end of the once beautiful Leadenhall Street, to the medieval church of St Dionis Backchurch at Fenchurch Street, and down to Tower Basin in the east. It had been brought to a halt with gunpowder and fire hooks. The London Gazette reported, ‘On Thursday by the grace of God it was wholely beat down and extinguished.’9
At least sixty-five thousand people were displaced from the city. In all, five-sixths of the buildings inside the city walls were destroyed, along with many outside the walls to the west – some 13,500 houses in all. Along with St Paul’s. Cathedral, eighty-nine of the ninety-seven parish churches inside the walls were destroyed. The Gui
ldhall was ruined, reduced to a shell. The Exchequer, the Royal Exchange, the Custom House and Goldsmith’s Row, the city’s financial centre, had all gone, reduced to rubble. The great merchants’ warehouses along Thames Street had been incinerated, along with their contents, tar and tallow providing the kindling. Workshops and factories were wiped out, destroying London as a working city. Near the Tower, Aldersgate had perished, its buildings reduced to smoking ruins; they included the grand home of Sir Thomas Bloodworth, the man knighted by a king but who failed to save his city.
Astonishingly, few people died in the fire. An old woman, one of the hundreds who had sought refuge in St Paul’s before the fire surrounded it, was unable to move further and perished by the west door along with scores of dogs. Including Farriner’s maid, the official death toll was put at six. In all, fewer than twenty died inside the city.10
These figures did not take account of the many who died after fleeing the city. Untold numbers of those made homeless died of exposure, hunger or poverty. The winter of 1666-7 was exceedingly cold, as would be the following one. Evelyn recorded that he saw 200,000 people of all ranks lying among their few belongings along the roads and ditches of Islington and Highgate. A programme of aid to the homeless was put in train. The government issued a series of orders for the relief of the homeless and hungry. The Corporation of London had to dig deep into its resources, as did the guilds, to provide shelter and food for the stricken. With many bivouacked outside the walls in the open fields and commons, and many more in hastily erected makeshift camps in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Covent Garden and Moorfields, the suffering was great. In the confusion no record of deaths was kept.
It was the end of medieval London. On 6 September John Evelyn took a wherry up the Thames to see what was left. His aesthete s eye was hurt by what it saw. Gone were ‘the exquisitely wrought Mercer’s Chapel, the sumptuous Exchange, the august fabric of Christ’s Church, all the rest of the Companies’ Halls, splendid buildings, arches, entries, all in dust’.
Scapegoats were sought, and found: it had all been a Catholic plot, with even John Graunt suspected; or the Dutch had started it. The latter theory was much favoured, seen as an act of revenge for Admiral Holmes’s raid on the Dutch coast two weeks before, during which the entire town of West-Terschelling was burned down during an attempt to destroy most of the Dutch merchant fleet. Neither of these theories was correct, ‘t here remained one other possibility: that God had chosen to punish London for the sins of its inhabitants. On Friday 7 September, tlie King ordered soldiers to be withdrawn from the city. He then rode around the makeshift camps to give heart to the homeless. At Moorhelds, Charles visited the huge encampment containing many thousands who had lost their homes. In a speech to give the people heart, he told them the fire had been created by ‘the Hand of God’ and there had been no plot’.
Sir Thomas Bloodworth, now a figure of scorn, was placed on a committee to buy new equipment for firefighters. With commendable gallows humour and a nod to Bloodworth’s already infamous remark on how the fire might be quenched, the committee ordered the purchase of‘receptacles’, suggesting chamber pots as much as buckets.
* According to Liza Jardine in-her biography of Wren, he had probably visited Paris once before, on his way bach from a trip to Heidelberg. Previously, it was thought the 1665-6 visit was his first. Jardine argues persuasively that for Wren to have begun building as he had, he must already have seen the new F.uropean ideas in person.
† In the then current Julian calendar the date was 2ÿ July, St James’s Day.
‡ The discrepancy between seventeenth-century English and Dutch sea power led directly to Britain later spending much more on its navy and becoming the greatest sea power in the world.
§ After the fire of 1212 thatched roofs were banned in London, in favour of shingles or tiles.
¶ Graimt never recovered financially from the disaster. The fire, along with other business disasters, some of which were to do with his conversion to Catholicism, reduced him to penury and he would die eight years later in poverty.
CHAPTER 13
THE AFTERMATH
Much of old London had gone, and with it many important administrative buildings, including the Navy Office, the tax office and the Royal Exchange. But the country was still at war. Buildings in the wider city were requisitioned so that government could continue. The Dutch and French were anxious to know what effect the fire would have on England’s ability or desire to wage war. The answer soon came. Both ambassadors reported that Londoners rose in fury over their destroyed city and wished for retribution against the enemy who had done this terrible thing to them. The Venetian ambassador reported that despair might drive the people of London to invade Holland.1
The wish for revenge was one thing; the ability to carry it out quite another. The Royal Navy’s fighting power was severely hampered by both fire and plague. The Navy Board’s great victualling yards to the north-east of the Tower had survived the fire, but the ability to fill them with supplies had been harshly affected by the plague. Livestock were scarce, as was flour to make bread. Beer was in short supply because so many of the coopers who made the barrels were dead. In the vast sprawl of the sailor-town downstream of the Tower, huge numbers of those able seamen not on board their ships when the plague hit had been struck by the contagion. Mercantile trade also suffered. There was neither the money nor the men to send as many ships out into the world as there had been before the twin disasters. In the five years following the plague and fire, the numbers of slaves shipped across the Atlantic by London vessels almost halved, from 10,049 t0 5947.2
Looking back over 1666, the last thing Londoners would have thought of describing it as was an annus mirabilis, or year of miracles. Yet this is just what John Dryden called it in a poem he wrote at the beginning of 1667. Dryden was driven by a desire to be cheerleader for the stricken city, and to express his feelings about what had passed. As in all ages, there were many who looked for portents that gave meaning to what had happened. The very number of the year of the plague – 666 – was seen as a reference to the beast in the Book of Genesis. Many thought the comet sightings during the winter of 1664 and the spring of 1665 were portents of dreadful events. Dryden would have none of it:
The utmost malice of their stars is past,
And two dire comets, which have scourged the town,
In their own plague and fire have breathed the last,
Or dimly in their sinking sockets frown.3
Dryden’s ode to London looked to the past and to the future, both to victories against the Dutch at sea and to the opportunity to build a glorious, resurgent city:
Methinks already from this chemic flame,
I see a city of more precious mould:
Rich as the town which gives the Indies name,
With silver paved, and all divine with gold.
Metaphorically, Dryden’s vision would come to pass, but before that could happen there was much work to be done and great hardship to be endured. Charles and his government recognised that order had to be imposed on the rebuilding of the city. On 13 September, Denham, the Surveyor-General, sent out an instruction that no one could rebuild his or her house until a survey had been carried out and a master plan devised. On 10 October, the King and the Privy Council met to decide how to measure the damage. They appointed a group of four experienced surveyors and draughtsmen to survey and draw up a plan of London, showing the scale of the devastation. Along with this, a Rebuilding Commission was set up under the combined authority of the King and the city’s Corporation, Among those appointed were the two old friends and collaborators Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke.4 Wren was appointed by the King, and Hooke by the Corporation. Now they would use their combined ingenuity to restore London – although Wren would have to wait several years before the full realisation of his fortunes under the patronage of Charles II.
The winter was severe. The Thames froze over. Homeless people froze to death. In Chatham, the sa
ilors starved, paid by neither Parliament nor the King, Thanks to the fall in tax revenue following the plague and the fire, both were broke. There was also an increasing realisation that public funds were habitually diverted into the extravagant royal household. While the king’s mistress Barbara Palmer craved and was given ever greater gifts, there was no money to feed the navy’s sailors or send the fleet to sea.5 The mood of Londoners turned from hostility to foreigners to.hostility towards the Stuarts.
The keenest minds had known for years that something had to be done about London’s ancient fabric. The King and the city corporation called the most imaginative minds to come up with plans to rebuild the city. All agreed that a more salubrious city should be built, with houses made of brick rather than timber, and with wider streets and better sewerage, as had already been built in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and parts of Covent Garden.
There was no shortage of designs. As John Kvelyn put it, ‘Everybody brings in his idea.’ Among those who offered their plans was Richard Newcourt, a cartographer who knew London intimately. His detailed map, made in 1658, is the only remaining representation of the city as it was before the fire. Newcourt suggested a city on a Roman grid pattern. It would-be extended to the north and east as far as ‘tire windmills on Finsbury Fields’ so that it would end up a handsome oblong square’.6 On the southern edge of the city, following the line of the river, would run a continuous row of elegant buildings elevated on arches. Behind the arches, streets would run northwards into the city. Access to the Thames would be through the arches. Beyond this line of buildings was to be erected a great dockside, sixty yards long to the water’s side’, which would not be pestered with any buildings or other impediments to obscure the beauty of the arched work’.7