The Penguin History of Britain: A Monarchy Transformed, Britain 1630-1714: A Monarchy Transformed, Britain 1630-1714 v. 6 by Kishlansky Mark

Author:Kishlansky, Mark [Kishlansky, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780140148275
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 1997-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

9

The Restoration Settlements 1659–1667

No one will ever know how it started. At 2 a.m. on Sunday 2 September 1666 Thomas Farrinor awoke to the smell of smoke in the rooms above his bakery in Pudding Lane. His investigation discovered a fire consuming the shop, and in shock he led his family to safety and raised the alarm. It was heard in the inn whose stable was behind his garden, and guests in nightdress peered through their windows to see flames licking away at the wooden structure. It had been a hot summer, London was bone dry, and for the past week warm breezes had blown from the east. They now caught the flames, and embers landed among the inn’s haystacks. As the onlookers rubbed sleep from their eyes, three more buildings were struck by shards of burning wood and a serious fire had begun. Within an hour City authorities were on the scene and water-pumping machines were being wheeled into action. The Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, had seen many fires that seemed more threatening than this and he was peeved to have been roused from sleep to view it. Before returning to bed he judged dismissively, ‘A woman might piss it out.’ It would become his epitaph.

The east wind first carried the blaze on to London Bridge, where it rapidly destroyed a third of the buildings on the main thoroughfare between the City and Southwark on the other side of the Thames. The bridge acted as a fire-break to the south, but the flames destroyed the largest of the City’s pumping mechanisms and made battling it with water more difficult. The conventional means of fire-fighting was to clear a path too wide for the flames to jump and then to extinguish the sparks that blew across. But in London it was law that anyone who pulled down another man’s dwelling must pay for it to be erected again, and, with the fire only a few hours old, the Mayor was reluctant to act without authority. By the time it came – delivered by Samuel Pepys from the mouth of King Charles II – the sun was up and the whipping winds were carrying ‘whirlwinds of tempestuous fire’. Panic had set in as churches and warehouses along the river erupted. Pepys saw an arch of flame a mile long that night, and the diarist John Evelyn witnessed it consuming ‘churches, public halls, exchange, hospitals, monuments and ornaments, leaping after a prodigious manner from house to house and street to street’. The good news that day was that the conflagration had been halted in the north at the great Leadenhall, which simply resisted the flames. The bad news was that there was now only one direction in which it could move: west towards the Guildhall, Cheapside and St Paul’s Cathedral.

Tuesday 4 September was a day every Londoner would always remember. Finally the effort to halt the fire’s spread was coordinated. Trained bands from the surrounding counties arrived to maintain order. They established

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