Monday , September 3, 1666 marked the beginning of organised action towards the Great Fire of London , even as order broke down in the streets, especially at the gates, and the fire raged unchecked. Bloodworth was responsible as Lord Mayor for co-ordinating the fire-fighting, but he had apparently left the London; his name is not mentioned in any contemporaneous accounts of the Monday’s events.
In this state of emergency,King Charles again overrode the City authorities and put his brother James, Duke of York in charge of operations.
James set up command posts round the perimeter of the fire, press-ganging into teams of well-paid and well-fed firemen any men of the lower classes found in the streets.
Three courtiers were put in charge of each post, with authority from Charles himself to order demolitions. This visible gesture of solidarity from the Crown was intended to cut through the citizens’ misgivings about being held financially responsible for pulling down houses.
James and his life guards rode up and down the streets all Monday, rescuing foreigners from the mob and attempting to keep order. “The Duke of York hath won the hearts of the people with his continual and indefatigable pains day and night in helping to quench the Fire,” wrote a witness in a letter on 8 September.
On Monday evening, hopes were dashed that the massive stone walls of Baynard’s Castle, Blackfriars would stay the course of the flames, the western counterpart of the Tower of London. This historic royal palace was completely consumed, burning all night.
A contemporary account said that King Charles in person worked manually, that day or later, to help throw water on flames and to help demolish buildings to make a firebreak.
Tuesday, 4 September was the day of greatest destruction.
The Duke of York’s command post at Temple Bar, where Strand meets Fleet Street, was supposed to stop the fire’s westward advance towards the Palace of Whitehall. He hoped that the River Fleet would form a natural firebreak, making a stand with his firemen from the Fleet Bridge and down to the Thames. However, early on Tuesday morning, the flames jumped over the Fleet and outflanked them, driven by the unabated easterly gale, forcing them to run for it.
There was consternation at the palace as the fire continued implacably westward; “Oh, the confusion there was then at that court!” wrote Evelyn.
Ludgate in flames, with St Paul’s Cathedral in the distance (square tower without the spire) now catching flames.
Working to a plan at last, James’s firefighters had also created a large firebreak to the north of the conflagration. It contained the fire until late afternoon, when the flames leapt across and began to destroy the wide, affluent luxury shopping street of Cheapside.
Everybody had thought St. Paul’s Cathedral a safe refuge, with its thick stone walls and natural firebreak in the form of a wide, empty surrounding plaza. It had been crammed full of rescued goods and its crypt filled with the tightly packed stocks of the printers and booksellers in adjoining Paternoster Row. However, an enormous stroke of bad luck meant that the building was covered in wooden scaffolding, undergoing piecemeal restoration by a relatively unknown Christopher Wren. The scaffolding caught fire on Tuesday night.
Leaving school, young William Taswell stood on Westminster Stairs a mile away and watched as the flames crept round the cathedral and the burning scaffolding ignited the timbered roof beams. Within half an hour, the lead roof was melting, and the books and papers in the crypt caught with a roar. “The stones of Paul’s flew like grenados,” reported Evelyn in his diary, “the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness, so as no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them.” The cathedral was quickly a ruin.
During the day, the flames began to move eastward from the neighbourhood of Pudding Lane, straight against the prevailing east wind and towards Pepys’s home on Seething Lane and the Tower of London with its gunpowder stores. The garrison at the Tower took matters into their own hands after waiting all day for requested help from James’s official firemen who were busy in the west. They created firebreaks by blowing up houses on a large scale in the vicinity, halting the advance of the fire.
In a letter to William Coventry, Pepys wrote that he “saw how horribly the sky looks, all on a fire in the night, was [sic] enough to put us out of our wits; and, indeed, it was extremely dreadful, for it looks just as if it was at us, and the whole heaven on fire.”
Pepys visited Moorfields, a large public park immediately north of the city, and saw a great encampment of homeless refugees, “poor wretches carrying their good there, and every body keeping his goods together by themselves”.
He noted that the price of bread had doubled in the environs of the park. Evelyn also went out to Moorfields, which was turning into the main point of assembly for the homeless, and was horrified at the numbers of distressed people filling it, some under tents, others in makeshift shacks: “Many [were] without a rag or any necessary utensils, bed or board … reduced to extremest misery and poverty. Evelyn was impressed by the pride of these distressed Londoners, “tho’ ready to perish for hunger and destitution, yet not asking one pennie for relief.”
Fears were as high as ever among the traumatised fire victims, fear of foreign arsonists and of a French and Dutch invasion. There was an outbreak of general panic on Wednesday night in the encampments at Parliament Hill, Moorfields, and Islington.
A light in the sky over Fleet Street started a story that 50,000 French and Dutch immigrants had risen, widely rumoured to have started the fire, and were marching towards Moorfields to finish what the fire had begun: to cut the men’s throats, rape the women, and steal their few possessions.
Surging into the streets, the frightened mob fell on any foreigners whom they happened to encounter, and were appeased, according to Evelyn, only “with infinite pains and great difficulty”and pushed back into the fields by the Trained Bands, troops of Life Guards, and members of the court.
The mood was now so volatile that Charles feared a full-scale London rebellion against the monarchy. Food production and distribution had been disrupted to the point of non-existence; Charles announced that supplies of bread would be brought into the City every day, and safe markets set up round the perimeter. These markets were for buying and selling; there was no question of distributing emergency aid.
Deaths and destruction
The LONDONERS Lamentation, a broadside ballad published in 1666 giving an account of the fire, and of the limits of its destruction.
The fire was fed not merely by wood, fabrics, and thatch, Hanson points out, but also by the oil, pitch, coal, tallow, fats, sugar, alcohol, turpentine, and gunpowder stored in the riverside district. It melted the imported steel lying along the wharves and the great iron chains and locks on the City gates.
The material destruction has been computed at 13,500 houses, 87 parish churches, 44 Company Halls, the Royal Exchange, the Custom House, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Bridewell Palace and other City prisons, the General Letter Office, and the three western city gates—Ludgate, Newgate, and Aldersgate.
The monetary value of the loss, first estimated at £100,000,000 in the currency of the time, was later reduced to an uncertain £10,000,000 (equivalent to £1.55 billion in 2016). Evelyn believed that he saw as many as “200,000 people of all ranks and stations dispersed, and lying along their heaps of what they could save” in the fields towards Islington and Highgate.
Authorities brought the fire under control on September 5.
PHOTO: St Paul’s Cathedral, which was re-built after the Great Fire, was lit up to commemorate the anniversary. (AFP: Daniel Leal-Olivas)
Aftermath
An example of the urge to identify scapegoats for the fire is the acceptance of the confession of a simple-minded French watchmaker named Robert Hubert, who claimed that he was an agent of the Pope and had started the Great Fire in Westminster.
He later changed his story to say that he had started the fire at the bakery in Pudding Lane. Hubert was convicted, despite some misgivings about his fitness to plead, and hanged at Tyburn on 28 September 1666. After his death, it became apparent that he had been on board a ship in the North Sea, and had not arrived in London until two days after the fire started.
These allegations that Catholics had started the fire were exploited as powerful political propaganda by opponents of pro-Catholic Charles II‘s court, mostly during the Popish Plot and the exclusion crisis later in his reign.
Abroad in the Netherlands, the Great Fire of London was seen as a divine retribution for Holmes’s Bonfire, the burning by the English of a Dutch town during the Second Anglo-Dutch War.
On 5 October, Marc Antonio Giustinian, Venetian Ambassador in France, reported to the Doge of Venice and the Senate, that Louis XIV announced that he would not “have any rejoicings about it, being such a deplorable accident involving injury to so many unhappy people”. Louis had made an offer to his aunt, the British
Queen Henrietta Maria, to send food and whatever goods might be of aid in alleviating the plight of Londoners, yet he made no secret that he regarded “the fire of London as a stroke of good fortune for him ” as it reduced the risk of French ships crossing the Channel and the North Sea being taken or sunk by the English fleet.
Louis tried to take advantage but an attempt by a Franco-Dutch fleet to combine with a larger Dutch fleet ended in failure on 17 September when they encountered a larger English fleet led by Thomas Allin off Dungeness.
In the chaos and unrest after the fire, Charles II feared another London rebellion. He encouraged the homeless to move away from London and settle elsewhere, immediately issuing a proclamation that “all Cities and Towns whatsoever shall without any contradiction receive the said distressed persons and permit them the free exercise of their manual trades.” A special Fire Court was set up to deal with disputes between tenants and landlords and decide who should rebuild, based on ability to pay.
The Court was in session from February 1667 to September 1672. Cases were heard and a verdict usually given within a day; without the Fire Court, lengthy legal wrangles would have seriously delayed the rebuilding which was so necessary if London was to recover.
Radical rebuilding schemes poured in for the gutted City and were encouraged by Charles. If it had been rebuilt under some of these plans, London would have rivalled Paris in Baroque magnificence The Crown and the City authorities attempted to establish “to whom all the houses and ground did in truth belong” to negotiate with their owners about compensation for the large-scale remodelling that these plans entailed, but that unrealistic idea had to be abandoned.
Exhortations to bring workmen and measure the plots on which the houses had stood were mostly ignored by people worried about day-to-day survival, as well as by those who had left the capital; for one thing, with the shortage of labour following the fire, it was impossible to secure workmen for the purpose.
With the complexities of ownership unresolved, none of the grand Baroque schemes could be realised for a City of piazzas and avenues; there was nobody to negotiate with, and no means of calculating how much compensation should be paid.
Instead, much of the old street plan was recreated in the new City, with improvements in hygiene and fire safety: wider streets, open and accessible wharves along the length of the Thames, with no houses obstructing access to the river, and, most importantly, buildings constructed of brick and stone, not wood. New public buildings were created on their predecessors’ sites; perhaps the most famous is St Paul’s Cathedral .
The Monument for the Great Fire of London at Pudding Lane| “ | Here by permission of heaven, hell broke loose upon this Protestant city…..the most dreadful Burning of this City; begun and carried on by the treachery and malice of the Popish faction…Popish frenzy which wrought such horrors, is not yet quenched… | ” |
The inscription remained in place until 1830 after the passage of the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, aside from the four years of James II’s rule from 1685 to 1689.
Another monument marks the spot where the fire stopped: the Golden Boy of Pye Corner in Smithfield. According to the inscription, it was evidence of God’s wrath on the City of London for the sin of gluttony that the fire started at Pudding Lane and stopped at Pye Corner.
To prevent future fires, most new houses were built of brick or stone and separated by thicker walls. Narrow alleyways were forbidden and streets were made wider. Permanent fire departments, however, did not become a fixture in London until well into the 18th century.
The Great Plague epidemic of 1665 is believed to have killed a sixth of London’s inhabitants, or 80,000 people, and it is sometimes suggested that the fire saved more lives than that ,in the long run by burning down so much unsanitary housing with their rats and their fleas which transmitted the plague, as plague epidemics did not recur in London after the fire.