A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (39 page)

who rode from one place to another, and put themselves in great dangers among the burning and falling houses, to give advice and direction what was to be done, underwent as much fatigue as the meanest, and had as little sleep or rest; and the faces of all men appeared ghastly and in the highest confusion.

Where citizens had fled, Charles and James took charge themselves, exposing themselves to flames and smoke and the danger of falling buildings.

When the Great Fire roared down Ludgate Hill it swept into a printing house in King’s Head Court, off Shoe Lane. John Ogilby’s entire stock went up in flames, including the manuscript of his twelve-book epic
Carolies
– ‘the pride, divertisement, business and sole comfort of my age’.
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Many booksellers and publishers, whose shops clustered around St Paul’s churchyard, were ruined the same day. Some had placed their stock in Christ Church and Stationers’ Hall, where the loss amounted to over £150,000. Others had taken their books and the sheets ready for binding to St Faith’s Church, in the cathedral crypt. The great private library of Samuel Cromleholme, High Master of St Paul’s School, was also stored here. It was thought to be safe, but the burning roof timbers crashed through the floor into the vault and the tightly packed books burned for a week. Wren’s mentor John Wilkins, who had been rector of St Lawrence Jury since 1662, lost his house, his possessions and the manuscript of the
Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language
on which he had been working for years, and which he had to reconstruct from a proof.
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Richard Baxter reported that the libraries of most of the ministers in the City were burnt and from his home, six miles from London, he could see ‘the half burnt leaves of books’ whirling in the wind.
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Pepys’s favourite bookseller Kirton lost his house, shop and thousands of pounds’ worth of books. He died a year later, having never recovered from the shock.

One great monument remained. Around St Paul’s, all the houses were burning, but so far the cathedral itself was untouched. Crowds of people had taken their goods there and were sheltering inside, believing it could never fall.
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But now the fire began to lick the wooden scaffolding which had been put up in preparation for long-discussed repairs, like a pyre around a martyr’s stake. Above the cathedral the smoke-cloud was so dense that it caused a local thunderstorm, with jagged lightning forking down to the burning buildings around. At eight in the evening the roof caught fire. As the crowd inside rushed for the doors, the roof timbers blazed above their heads. The scorched stones cracked and whistled through the air like grenades and molten lead poured in streams from the roof, turning the pavements into glowing hearths.

Charles watched St Paul’s burn. Only now, when he returned to Whitehall, did he give orders for the court to leave for Hampton Court next morning. But that evening the wind changed, blowing more from the south. Gradually, too, the force of the gale lessened and the sparks no longer flew across the yawning gaps made by the demolished streets. Whitehall was saved.

In December 1666 the Lord Mayor and Common Council of the City appointed John Leake and his team of surveyors to make an ‘Exact Surveigh’ of the damage. This was engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar, as the
Map of the Destruction wrought by the Great Fire of London
, 1667. The numbers on the map refer to the many parish churches lost, and other important buildings such as the Baynard’s Castle (160), the Stocks Market (165) and the Royal Exchange (166).

The following day thousands of Londoners were out dousing the embers and quenching the fires that remained. In the eastern part of the city, the flames still roared around Cripplegate, north-west of the Guildhall, reducing the Barber Surgeons’ Hall to ashes. Charles and James were both here, directing the fight. Once again, the king was compared, approvingly, to a common labourer.

Although Pepys walked through Cheapside and Newgate market, in many places the glowing ruins were still too hot to approach. When Evelyn ventured through the burned-out areas, clambering over mountains of smoking rubbish, the ground under his feet was still so hot that it burnt the soles of his shoes. All the City’s finest buildings and churches had vanished: men were bemused and lost, lacking the familiar landmarks. Even the waters in the broken fountains seemed to boil, and evil-smelling smoke swirled up from wells and cellars like fumes from hell. The great chains that were used as barriers to close the City streets, the hinges and bars of the prisons, the bells from the churches, all lay on the ground, melted and twisted. In the narrow alleys the intense heat singed the hair on one’s head.

It was a scene of horror, but also one of wonder, a natural curiosity drawing the observant men of the Royal Society. In the broken tombs in St Paul’s, they observed the mummified bodies of bishops buried two centuries before, while in the tomb of Dean Colet, a more recent burial, his lead coffin was found to be full of a curious liquor that had conserved the body. ‘Mr Wyle and Ralph Greatorex tasted it and it was a kind of insipid taste, something of an ironish taste. The body felt, to the probe of a stick which they thrust into a chink, like brawn.’
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THE GREAT FIRE
destroyed five sixths of the city, cutting a swathe half a mile wide and a mile and a half long. Over 13,200 houses were burned, with eighty-seven churches and fifty company halls. No one knows how many people died. Thousands took refuge on the outskirts, on St George’s Common south of the river, in the fields of St Giles and Soho to the west, Moorfields, Islington and Highgate to the north and Goodman’s Field to the east. Some sheltered in tents, while others put up rough huts. Several of London’s wealthiest citizens were here, without a rag or a bowl to their name.

By the fourth morning, many of those who had fled had been without food since the fire began. Charles ordered the local Lords Lieutenant to send all bread and provisions that could be spared to London. He also set up temporary markets and decreed that churches, chapels and schools should be opened as communal storehouses. Army tents were provided and stocks of ship’s biscuits from naval stores were also distributed in Moorfields (although these hard, weevil-filled objects were widely declined as inedible). Outside London, Charles commanded all cities and towns to accept refugees and to allow them to operate their trades, regardless of the rules of local guilds, pledging that they would not be a burden on the parishes that took them in after the immediate crisis.
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Among these refugees, on Wednesday night a new rumour spread, that fifty thousand French had invaded, taking advantage of the devastation, and were coming to cut their throats and seize what goods remained. ‘Many citizens,’ wrote Revd Vincent, ‘having lost their houses, and almost all they had, are fired with rage and fury and they begin to stir themselves like lions, or like bears bereaved of their whelps; and now
Arm! Arm! Arm!
doth resound the fields and suburbs with a dreadful voice.’
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Grabbing whatever arms lay at hand, people poured back into the city, falling upon any foreigner they met. Troops were sent to quell the riots and drive the crowds back into the fields, where they were guarded until dawn broke.

Ever since fires caused by wind-blown sparks began to flare up simultaneously in different places, people had been convinced that the blaze was set deliberately. The first suspects were the Dutch and French. Even those who had lived in a neighbourhood for years were abused, beaten, kicked, dragged to the magistrates and thrown into gaol. William Taswell, a schoolboy from Westminster, who was sent into the City with his classmates to carry water-buckets, remembered how a blacksmith, ‘meeting an innocent Frenchman walking along the street, felled him instantly to the ground with an iron bar’.
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After the foreigners, suspicion fell on the local Catholics, who were forced to cower indoors, said Clarendon, despite the threat of the fire, ‘and yet some of them, and of quality, were taken by force out of their houses, and carried to prison’.
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Near Newgate, a crowd seized a servant of the Portuguese ambassador, accusing him of pulling a fireball out of his pocket and hurling it into a house across the street. When examined, he explained that he had picked up a piece of bread, put it in his pocket and then laid it on a shelf in the next house: ‘which is a custom or superstition so natural to the Portuguese, that if the king of Portugal were walking, and saw a piece of bread upon the ground, he would take it up with his own hand, and keep it till he saw a fit place to lay it down’.
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Luckily, Lords Hollis and Ashley, who were in charge of this area, returned to the scene and found the bread, but kept the man in prison for his own safety. Such strange, small incidents were rife. Some were comic, like the Frenchman in Moorfields who was set upon because he was thought to be carrying a box of bombs, that turned out to be tennis balls. Others were horrific, like the Frenchwoman carrying small chicks in her apron that were thought to be fireballs, set on by a mob who clubbed her and cut off her breasts.
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Charles’s most urgent fear now was of riot, escalating from the attacks on foreigners and Catholics.
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Seeking to calm things, on Thursday 6 September, he handed back control of the City to the Corporation, and ordered the troops and militia that had been called in from elsewhere to stand down. On the same day he rode out to Moorfields, accompanied by only a few courtiers. With St Paul’s still smoking in the background, he addressed the crowd gathered on the fields littered with their belongings. He spoke firmly:

The judgement that has fallen upon London is immediately from the hand of God and no plots by Frenchmen or Dutchmen or Papists have any part in bringing you so much misery. Many of those who have been detained upon suspicion I myself have examined. I have found no reason to suspect connivance in burning the City. I desire you all to take no more alarm. I have strength enough to defend you from any enemy and be assured that I, your King, will by the Grace of God live and die with you and take a particular care of you all.
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Four days after the fire subsided, the fields that had been so crowded with people were empty. Everyone went home as fast as they could, finding shelter in the suburbs or the unburned areas of the City. ‘And very many’, added Clarendon, ‘set up little sheds of brick and timber upon the ruins of their own houses.’
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But for weeks London still burned. When cellars were opened, the rush of air fanned smouldering ashes into flame. Fires flared sporadically until a downpour doused the City in October.

Everyone had stories, details that haunted their minds at the time and have been repeated down the centuries in all histories of the fire: John Locke seeing strange red sunbeams as far away as Oxford; Pepys watching the pigeons circling, unable to land on their lofts, until they fell, with charred wings, into the smoke; William Taswell hunting for souvenirs in St Paul’s churchyard and stumbling over the charred bones of an old woman who had sought shelter by the cathedral wall.
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For months, the sleep of many Londoners was troubled by dreams of fire and falling buildings. People also lived in dread of robbers. Many houses had been looted and in mid-September Charles issued an optimistic proclamation for ‘restoring goods embezzled during the late fire and since’.
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This noted that great quantities of plate, money, jewels, household goods and building materials were found daily in the rubble: all must be returned to the Armourer’s House within eight days or those hoarding them would face the full penalties of the law, including death. The looting, however, continued and the abandoned houses sheltered thieves and foot-pads. When men rode through the town at night or were driven in their carriages, they carried drawn swords.

Not everything was dark. A great sum was raised in the provinces and sent to the mayor and aldermen to help the homeless. The City officials moved into Gresham College, ousting the professors (except for Hooke) and filling the courtyard with tents. Here they opened a ledger where householders could record their title deeds, to estimate what was lost and what must be rebuilt. Gresham also became a temporary Exchange and observers marvelled at how quickly the guilds and livery companies who had lost their great halls began trading again. Not one merchant went bankrupt. A month later, a newsletter reported the Dutch to be dumbfounded that ‘after the late ruin of London all men continue amongst us so merry and hearty, no sign of any such mischief, when they expected we should have been wholly ruined and lost’.
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The corporation let tradesmen operate from tents and booths on public land, and commanded householders to clear the rubble from the foundations and surrounding streets. In a few weeks the theatres reopened, having agreed to give part of their profits to help those rendered destitute by the blaze.

The City was ready to start again.
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On 11 September, less than a week after the fire ended, Wren, as deputy surveyor, submitted his plan for a new city. Evelyn and Hooke were almost as fast. Other plans were later submitted by the topographer Richard Newcourt, who proposed a grid plan rather like Hooke’s, and by the army captain Valentine Knight, who suggested the building of a new canal from Billingsgate to the Fleet, for which the King could charge fees and finance the rebuilding. (Charles was horrified by the idea that the crown might benefit from the calamity, and Knight was arrested for his pains.) All proposed a modern city of avenues and squares, open markets, brick-built houses. With the loss of the old crooked, overcrowded, medieval London, it seemed that a new spirit would emerge, rational, individual, competitive, forged in fire. From the desert of ruin and death, Charles dreamed that a new London would arise, a phoenix from the ashes.

After the fire, Charles asked the Privy Council to sit morning and evening to examine all the allegations of conspiracy. Their conclusion was that ‘Nothing had been found to argue the Fire in London to have been caused by other than the hand of God, a great wind and a very dry season.’
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Sadly, their efforts to clear foreigners were largely overturned when a young Frenchman, a watchmaker’s son from Rouen named Robert Hubert, made a public confession, claiming that he had been hired in Paris to set the fire. His story was so disjointed and nonsensical that none of the justices believed him, while the captain of the ship that had brought him swore that he had not even landed until two days after the fire began.
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Yet Hubert was adamant, and because he could lead the justices to the exact place that the fire had started – which was hardly difficult as this had been widely reported – he was put on trial. The jury convicted him, and he was hanged on 27 October. Clarendon’s explanation, that Hubert’s fatal stance was effectively suicide, rings horribly true.

Hubert’s confession heightened suspicion that the Fire was a papist plot. On 25 September parliament set up a committee of inquiry. A month later, before the committee had even gathered all its evidence, the House of Commons asked Charles to issue a proclamation banning Catholic priests. Anxious to appease protestant anger, he agreed with alacrity. The following day Andrew Marvell reported to the Mayor of Hull that the king had decreed ‘that all Popish priests and Jesuites (except those attached to Queen Mother and Queen) be banisht in 30 days or else the law to be executed upon them’.
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The justices were also ordered to put the existing laws against Catholics into execution.

Plans for rebuilding the City by Christopher Wren (above) and John Evelyn. Wren’s plan has bold avenues, radiating out from circular piazzas, and a new quay along the Thames from Bridewell to the Tower. Evelyn, like Wren, has an octagonal piazza on Fleet Street, with avenues linking twelve squares and piazzas. He also planned to move the Royal Exchange to the riverside.

The parliamentary committee’s report, published on 22 January 1667, was very different from the Privy Council’s, finding clear ‘evidence’ that French Catholics and Jesuits were involved. As Marvell reported with his usual diligence, that day the House ‘heard the report of the Fire of London full of manifest testimonys that it was by a wicked design’.
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The fear of a conspiracy spread to the provinces, where local people hunted down all those labelled as potential incendiaries, sectaries in the north (where memories of the 1663 rebellion were still strong) but Catholics almost everywhere else. From this point on, the paranoia about Catholic designs would grow in strength, culminating in the hysteria of the Popish Plot a decade ahead.

Partly due to the finger pointed so fiercely at the French and the Catholics, Charles was also blamed. Pamphlets and lampoons cursed the sins of the nation, and particularly the Francophile court, with its Catholic queen, for rousing the wrath of God and bringing down sickness, fire and war as a judgement. William Sancroft, Dean of St Paul’s and later Archbishop of Canterbury, preached a solemn sermon on this theme. The portents of nature continued. In October people saw a bright comet fly low over the Midlands sky, while gales and strong winds blew down trees, tore off roofs and damaged church spires, and torrents of rain flooded the fields.
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On 10 October, when Charles instituted a general fast, Evelyn described it lugubriously as intended ‘to humble us, upon the late dreadfull conflagration, added to the Plage & Warr, the most dismall judgments could be inflicted, & indeede but what we highly deserved for our prodigious ingratitude, burning Lusts, dissolute Court, profane & abominable lives’.
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