1666 by Rebecca Rideal

Author:Rebecca Rideal
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250097071
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

7

Fire! Fire! Fire!

War, fire and plague against us all conspire;

We the war, God the plague, who raised the fire?

Andrew Marvell, ‘The Third

Advice to a Painter’ (1667)1

London, a few days earlier …

AS THE SUN set on another hot day, an easterly wind danced through the capital, weaving its way westward. From Islington, Samuel Pepys and his wife journeyed home after watching a new puppet show on Moorfields before sharing food and wine with their friends, Mary Mercer and Sir William Penn. The Pepyses could have travelled any number of ways home, but the quickest route was to head south in their coach towards the scaffolding-heavy St Paul’s Cathedral, before turning east along the historic throughway and marketplace of Cheapside, following the road through to Lombard Street and then Eastcheap, before finally reaching their home in Seething Lane.

If they had taken this particular route, Thomas Farriner might just have heard the ‘mighty merry’ pair singing cheerfully as their coach skimmed past Pudding Lane. Farriner’s working day was drawing to a close and at 10 p.m. he raked through the coals in the oven of his bake-house to subdue the tired fire. Tomorrow was the Sabbath, so several pots of meat were dotted around the room, ready for dinner the next day. As one of the navy’s suppliers, the end of the working week was doubtless a welcome respite and would probably be spent worshipping at the local parish church of St Magnus the Martyr, where Farriner had held the position of churchwarden just before the outbreak of plague. This evening Farriner kept company with his daughter Hanna, his apprentice son Thomas, and their maid. At around midnight, his daughter went downstairs to the bake-house to get a light for a candle. There may or may not have been timber for the following week drying close to, or perhaps inside, the oven. In any case, it was later claimed that there hadn’t been enough fire in the oven to light the candle so a flame was found elsewhere. Soon afterwards, the family, like the rest of London, was asleep.

Between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m., at roughly the same time the fleet had sighted the Dungeness Lighthouse, the Farriner family awoke choking; smoke was filling their living quarters. It seemed that a fire had started in their bake-house and the blaze had become so well established that thick fumes and orange heat roared up the stairs of their ramshackle house. With their main exit blocked, the only means of escape was through a window and over the roof. Thomas and his adult son and teenage daughter climbed out to save themselves; his daughter scorched her skin a little during their escape. Too fearful to follow, their maid remained behind and perished in the flames. As they scrambled to safety, the bundles of faggots stored in Farriner’s yard quickly caught alight and the blaze began to spread to the adjacent houses.2

‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’ was shouted out in the surrounding streets as neighbouring citizens woke from their sleep, looked out of their windows, dressed and ran to see what the commotion was all about.

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