The Great Fire of London

Stephen Porter

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780752450254
• eBook ISBN: 9780752475707
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Great Fire of London was the greatest catastrophe of its kind in Western Europe. Although detailed fire precautions and fire-fighting arrangements were in place, the fire raged for four days and destroyed 13, 200 houses, 87 churches and 44 of the City of London's great livery halls. The 'great fire' of 1666 closely followed by the 'great plague' of 1665; as the antiquary Anthony Wood wrote left London 'much impoverished, discontented, afflicted, cast downe'. In this comprehensive account, Stephen Porter examines the background to 1666, events leading up to and during the fire, the proposals to rebuild the city and the progress of the five-year programme which followed. He places the fire firmly in context, revealing not only its destructive impact on London but also its implications for town planning, building styles and fire precautions both in the capital and provincial towns.

THREE

TAKING STOCK

In three days the most flourishing city in the world is a ruinous heap, the streets only to be known by the maimed remainder of the churches.

Letter to Philip Pedder, 13 September 1666, Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1666–7, p. 122

A disaster on the scale of the Great Fire created immediate and massive problems. Some of them were practical matters similar to those which followed any large-scale urban fire. Provision had to be made for the homeless before the winter, for example, both in terms of accommodation and cash assistance for those left destitute. Yet the citizens who were best able to provide poor relief were themselves among the victims. This was one reason that it was necessary to establish the scale of the losses, by individuals taking stock of their own position and by the City authorities assessing the overall extent of the damage. But because of London’s unique role there were further, political, considerations, which did not apply after such catastrophes elsewhere. It was advisable that the causes of the conflagration be investigated, if only to ensure that the citizens’ initial xenophobic reaction would not lead them to prolong their search for scapegoats, perhaps even turn their anger against the government itself. This was not the only problem facing the government, however, for the fire inevitably had some effect upon its own operations and the conduct of the war against the United Provinces and France.

Even more immediate than these concerns was the possibility that the fire could begin again if the wind sprang up. Both Pepys and Taswell remarked how hot the ground was when they walked through the ruined area on Wednesday and Thursday, and on Friday Evelyn found himself climbing over ‘mountaines of yet smoking rubbish’, with his hair almost singed and his feet made sore by the heat.¹ The initial priority, therefore, was to make things safe by moving stocks of fuel out of the burnt area, clearing the streets and damping down the smouldering ruins. The task was eased by the rain that fell on the Sunday following the fire. A longer spell of rain, lasting for ten days, came in October, finally dousing the embers.

Those who ventured among the ruins soon after the fire had ended were struck by the completeness of the destruction. Most of the buildings had collapsed, so that it was almost possible to see from one side of the City to the other, and the river was visible from Cheapside.² The masonry of many of the churches and some of the company halls still stood, although a number of churches, such as St Mary-le-Bow, were completely ruined. Those which were recognisable were invaluable as landmarks in the confusion of wreckage and rubbish. Some of the buildings had fallen into the streets and Evelyn found that the lanes and narrower streets were ‘quite fill’d up with rubbish’. The heat had been so intense that the church bells had melted, as had the chains along the streets and the hinges, bars and gates of the prisons. Scavengers searching through the ruins found lumps of metal ‘mixed together and out of shape’. As Evelyn looked over the ruins of St Paul’s he was shocked to see that not only had the bells melted, but so too had the large area of lead from the roof, the ironwork and the plate.³

Letters sent from London describing this calamity reached a readership anxious for accurate news. Word of the fire had spread rapidly. It had reached the neighbourhood of Hungerford by Tuesday and by Friday a rumour was circulating that 60,000 Presbyterians, with French and Dutch, had been up in arms during the fire and the king’s forces had defeated them, killing 30,000 and taking many others prisoner. This nonsense was contradicted by a more reliable source of intelligence.⁴ Yet many who heard of the fire assumed at once that it had been started deliberately, by ‘implacable enemies’ or ‘Anabaptists and other disaffected persons’. At Newcastle it was observed that the meetings of Quakers and other sectaries had been well attended recently ‘and little care is taken to hinder them’. In many places the militia were called out in case the fire was part of a wider plan, perhaps a ‘hellish contrivance’ of the French, Dutch and fanatics. This fear was so widespread that ‘all townes stood upon their owne defence day and night’. The militia were still keeping a watch at Barnstaple on 11 September, because of a report that the plot was aimed not only at London, but at the destruction of the principal towns and cities in England. The governor of Hull set a strong guard and in Norwich the innkeepers were instructed not to lodge strangers until they had been questioned by the mayor, nor to allow them to leave the city without his order.

These anxieties were strengthened by rumours that began to circulate of fires elsewhere. Minor outbreaks now received considerable notice, such as a blaze in two houses in Bridgwater and one in a tanner’s kiln in Chester, both of which were quenched with little damage. Fear of arsonists was rife, with suspects thrown into prison in Leicester and reports that suspicious persons seized near Lutterworth were carrying fire-balls as big as tennis balls. A rumour that a man had been seen handling a fire-ball near Warwick caused ‘the whole town’ to take to the streets, and the crowd had to be dispersed by the militia. Anthony Wood noted that two fires near Oxford on successive days soon after the Great Fire had been started deliberately.⁵

Such sharp reactions to the news of the fire were exacerbated by the lack of reliable information. The post office in Cloak Lane, off Dowgate Hill, was in the area burnt out on Monday morning and the consequent breakdown of the postal service with London raised suspicions that something was awry. Those who had received the 3 September issue of The London Gazette would have seen a short, but alarming, note to the effect that a major fire had broken out which had already blazed for two nights and a day and was continuing to burn ‘with great violence’. This was enough to set its readers’ imaginations racing, especially as no further issue appeared for a week. That number, for 3–10 September, began by explaining that publication had been interrupted ‘by a Sad and Lamentable Accident of Fire lately hapned in the City of London’. In fact, the premises of its printer, Thomas Newcombe, were close to Baynard’s Castle and had been destroyed.⁶

The Gazette was managed by Joseph Williamson, Lord Arlington’s secretary, and the account of the fire printed in the issue of 10 September was effectively an official statement. Readers certainly seem to have regarded it as authoritative and welcomed it as providing hard news ‘after such a diversity of reports’. It gave an account of the early stages of the fire and its subsequent progress, describing the efforts made to check the flames and stressing the role of the royal brothers. The measures that the king had taken for supplying the homeless with provisions were also noted, together with the extent of the citizens’ gratitude for his efforts. While admitting the arrest of ‘Divers Strangers’ during the fire and announcing an enquiry into its causes, the report was at pains to stress that the fire was an accident. The way in which the flames had behaved in the strong wind led to the conclusion that the disaster was the result of ‘an unhappy chance, or to speak better, the heavy hand of God upon us for our Sins, shewing us the terrour of his Judgment’ not only in raising the fire, but also in stopping it ‘when we were in the last despair’.

This point that the fire was a divine judgement was one which was widely accepted. Classical and biblical parallels with Troy and Jerusalem immediately sprang to mind, but so did the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the need to repent was obvious.⁷ Thomas Holden wrote to Williamson from Falmouth expressing the hope that the fire would be regarded by all as a judgement for sin, and Williamson also received a letter from Hugh Acland at Truro, who prayed that God would avert His judgements and ‘give grace to all so to live as to divert the fierceness of His anger’. Another writer believed that everyone accepted that the fire was caused by the anger of the Lord for the sins of the people, pointing out that pestilence and fire had both come, and that unless the nation’s conduct improved the Lord would ‘empty his quiver of wrath’. Evelyn saw it as a punishment not only for sins, including those committed within the dissolute court, but also ingratitude for the deliverance from the ‘late intestine calamities’ and the restoration of the church and monarchy.⁸

Pepys’s description of two services which he attended on the Sunday after the fire provides an indication of the mood in London in the aftermath of the disaster. The church was ‘mighty full’ in the morning and the ‘melancholy but good’ sermon was so moving that many in the congregation wept. Pepys was less impressed by the Dean of Rochester’s preaching at the later service, however, and was particularly displeased by the description of the city as being ‘reduced from a large Folio to a Decimo tertio’. Yet although some of the congregation at St Olave’s, Hart Street, were deeply moved by the disaster, other citizens apparently showed no sign of contrition. On the previous day Sir Edward Atkyns had written to his brother giving an account of the fire, but concluding that ‘you would wonder at the profaness of people, & how little some are concerned in this sad calamity’.⁹

A national fast day was observed on 10 October. This was an important occasion, with William Sancroft, Dean of St Paul’s, preaching to the king and court, Seth Ward, Bishop of Exeter, to the Lords and Edward Stillingfleet, later Bishop of Worcester, delivering a sermon to the House of Commons, in St Margaret’s, Westminster. The clergy generally presented the fire as a reprimand, a heavy judgement indeed, but also a mercy, for the destruction could have been much worse. A greater disaster could be visited on the country if repentance and reform did not follow this most explicit of warnings.¹⁰ The message was evidently driven home with some fervour. Isaac Archer, the incumbent of Chippenham in Cambridgeshire, noted that the news of the fire ‘struck mee with amazement’. His text on the fast day was from the book of Amos, chapter four, verse eleven, with its reference to Sodom and Gomorrah and ‘a firebrand plucked out of the burning’, and he endeavoured to develop his theme ‘to worke my own soule, and the hearts of others to a submission to God, and a seeking his face, and imploring his helpe that we might, in this day of our distresse, prepare to meet our God by true repentance’.¹¹

Pepys was in London and went to hear Stillingfleet, but could not stay for the sermon because the church was so full, as it was again later in the day when the preacher was Robert Frampton, later Bishop of Gloucester. While clergymen around the country were able to use the opportunity to drive home the moral lessons of the disaster, the services ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• One Dangers and Precautions
• Two The Great Fire
• Three Taking Stock
• Four Preparations for Rebuilding
• Five The Rebuilding
• Six The Aftermath
• List of Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Copyright