by Simon Schama
So the appearance of a comet in the summer of 1664 struck observers, not with astronomical wonder (though those in possession of Richard Reeve’s telescope could observe its blazing tail with unparalleled clarity), but with the same dismay that this phenomenon had always inspired as a presage of disaster. Those like Clarendon who had bitterly opposed the war against the Dutch, into which the king had entered with such bellicose optimism, felt even queasier when they saw the dusty pallor trembling in the night sky, notwithstanding an early naval victory at Lowestoft. By the following summer, when the Dutch showed no sign of surrender and plague carts were carrying thousands to the burial pits every week, the Jeremiahs seemed vindicated in their prophecies that God’s hand would be laid across the back of the sin-steeped kingdom. And there was not much that science could do about it, other than count London’s dead with modern devotion to the seriousness of statistics and the mapping of the epidemic (8252 deaths in the first week of September, 6978 from the plague).
Understanding of the generation and transmission of the sickness was scarcely any more advanced than when it had first struck in 1348. Because it was thought that cats and dogs spread the plague, the Lord Mayor of London ordered a general slaughter: 40,000 dogs and perhaps (by Pepys’s reckoning) 200,000 cats were duly massacred. That they were so swiftly rounded up and dispatched testified to the fact that what had modernized since the medieval epidemics was the policing of mortality. Daniel Defoe’s heart-rending account of the harvest of bodies in 1665, A Journal of the Plague Year, was written more than half a century after the event, but was based on reliable memories of contemporaries, including one of Samuel Pepys’s amanuenses, Paul Lorrain. What Defoe describes is a culture divided into the mad and the methodical. Unhinged prophets walked naked in the streets roaring for repentance before the race was consumed altogether, while platoons of watchmen patrolled the streets enforcing the requirement that households become hermetically sealed at the first sign of infection. While the court, the aristocracy and the professions (including, of course, physicians) fled London just as fast as they could, common citizens were locked up by the watch in their own houses, prisoners of the contagion, left to succumb, starve or survive. The regulations may have been designed to seal off the country from the plague, but inevitably the infection always outran the ability to contain it, and in the meantime they condemned Londoners to be deprived of any hope of work or sustenance except what came their way by charity. The desperate who attempted to escape the net risked arrest and prosecution. From Alderman Hooker, Pepys heard of a saddler ‘who had buried all the rest of his children of the plague; and himself and wife now being shut up, and in despair of escaping, did desire only to save the life of this [their surviving] little child; and so prevailed to have it received stark-naked into the arms of a friend, who brought it (having put it into new fresh clothes) to Greenwich’. And for once Pepys and his colleagues were moved enough to allow the child to stay there in safety.
One-sixth of London’s population died in the plague of 1665. The misery ebbed with the onset of cool weather, but the trepidation hung around. Pepys was inhibited from wearing his fine new periwig for fear that it was made of hair cut from infected bodies. Following astrology, as the almanacs reminded their preternaturally anxious readers, was numerology; the tail of the comet heralded the sign of the Beast, his number being, as everyone knew: 666. Sure enough, in the first week of September 1666, up from the bituminous regions of hell came the diabolical fire. Prophets like Walter Gostelo and Daniel Baker had long been warning that the new Sodom, steeped in lechery and luxury, would be consumed by the fiery wrath of an indignant Jehovah. But the more sober John Evelyn, watching thousands upon thousands arrive each day from the country, blocking the alleys with their carts, cramming the stinking, congested, drought-stricken city, also believed that, should a dry wind catch a casually released flame, a general ignition would occur.
Still, the violence of the conflagration caught almost everyone else unawares. The warm southeasterly, which blew in with the last dog days of August and the first of September, was feared as the carrier of contagion, rather than as a fire-lighter. So when, in the early hours of Sunday morning, 2 September, Sir Thomas Bludworth, the Lord Mayor of London, was woken from his sleep and told that the fire that had begun in the bakery of Thomas Farinor in Pudding Lane had already consumed much of Fish Street Hill and was advancing towards Thames Street, his response was: ‘Pish! A woman might piss it out’, before going back to sleep, irritated by the disturbance. As he snored on, the flames found their way into the warehouses flanking the Thames between London Bridge and the Tower, brim full of tallow, pitch, tar and brandy wines. A rolling fireball came roaring and sucking out of the narrow streets, feeding on the overhanging timbered bays and gables. In an hour or two another 300 houses had been swallowed up by the fire. Panic took hold. People came flying out of their homes, pushing carts full of their possessions, making for the river where they dumped their wooden boxes in the grimy water to float and bob along in the spark-flecked darkness. The lanes became choked with traffic; faces were choked with scorching smoke. The elderly were carried through the streets in their beds or in improvised wheelbarrows. Told how serious the situation had become, Pepys got up before dawn, walked to the Tower and climbed to one of the high storeys from where he saw the fire working its way along London Bridge, devouring the piled-up houses and shops as it ate its way hungrily across the span. Only the pigeons stayed put in their windows and eaves until their feathers caught fire, leaving them to flutter pathetically, their wings alight.
Pepys made his way up-river, his boat navigating between the crates of household possessions as he kept his face away from the ‘showers of firedrops’ that flew with the wind. At Whitehall he told the king that only the immediate demolition of houses in the path of the fire, depriving it of kindling and creating fire-breaks, could contain the conflagration. For once Charles was not about to make light of the situation and gave orders that this should be done right away. A system of couriers between the City and the palace was established to keep the king informed of the progress of the fire. When Pepys got to the Lord Mayor, very much awake now ‘like a man spent, with a hankercher about his neck’, he found that Bludworth had gone from complacency to distraction: ‘Lord what can I do? People will not obey me.’ The Lord Mayor protested that he was pulling down houses as fast as he could but – not surprisingly – he was encountering resistance from those whose property (but not their persons) happened to be in the demolition zone. The truth was that Bludworth himself was still deeply reluctant to take action, worrying about the cost to house- and store-owners.
By the end of Sunday the fire, stoked by the wind, had destroyed the most densely populated core of the old city between the Tower and the Bridge. The thick pall of smoke, still lit here and there by bursts of flame, hung over London so thickly that it turned the September sun blood-red. John Evelyn, for whom the city’s health and welfare had become a personal passion, was distraught.
O the miserable & calamitous speectacle, such as happly the whole world had not seene the like since the foundation of it, nor to be out don, ‘til the universal Conflagration of it, all the skie were of a fiery aspect, like the top of a burning Oven, & the light seene above 40 miles round about for many nights. God grant mine eyes may never behold the like, who now saw above ten thousand houses all in one flame, the noise & crackling & thunder of the impetuous flames, the shreeking of Women & children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses & churches was like an hideous storme . . . Thus I left it this afternoone burning, a resemblance of Sodome, or the last day . . . It call’d to mind that passage of 4 Heb: non enim hic habemus stabilem Civitatem: the ruines resembling the picture of Troy. London was, but is no more!
On Monday, 3 September, the fire travelled beyond the huddle of houses, shops, taverns and warehouses, jumping the narrow Fleet river that bisected the old city, to reach the Royal Exchange and Lombard Street. ‘Rattle, ra
ttle, rattle was the noise which the fire struck upon the ear as if there had been a thousand iron chariots beating down upon the stones,’ wrote Thomas Vincent of the experience of being trapped in the burning near the Exchange, ‘whole streets at once in flames that issued forth as if they had been so many great forges.’ Pepys now began to fear for his own property and possessions. While there was still time he sent his valuables off to a friend at Bethnal Green and, together with Sir William Penn, buried their official papers in a pit dug in Tower Street by the Navy Office. Then the two men, their shirts filthy with soot and smoke stains, dug their own deep hole. Into it went precious things: bottles of wine and Pepys’s Parmesan cheese. At the end of the day he wanted to let his father know the terrible news that St Paul’s and all Cheapside were on fire, ‘but the post-house being burned, the letter could not go’. The next day, Tuesday, 4 September, was even worse, with the gusty breeze blowing the flames still further, north and west. On that terrifying Tuesday, the fire showed itself no respecter of the great public institutions of the city. Over forty of the livery company halls went up in flames, and the Guildhall itself burned for twenty-four hours. By some miracle the city archives, which had been hastily stored in the crypt, survived. Not so the enormous stock of books kept by the sellers in the churchyard precincts of St Paul’s. Seeing the fire coming straight towards the cathedral, they had made a panicky rush to store them in the booksellers’ favoured chapel of St Faith’s in the great church. Some managed to get their barrow-loads there; others, caught in the mass of human traffic and desperate not to be trapped, ended up dumping the books in the open yard. When the fire caught up with them it ignited the paper and parchment in a huge bonfire, the blackened pages flaking and flapping around amid the roaring air. But the books in St Faith’s ended up no better off. For at the critical moment of the blaze most of the superstructure of the choir crashed into the chapel below, completing the incineration of the books. Then the lead on the roof liquefied: ‘The stones of Pauless, flew like granados,’ wrote Evelyn, who had been on a tour of inspection of the cathedral just a week before on 27 August; ‘the Lead mealting downe the streetes in a streame, & the very pavements glowing with fiery rednesse, so as nor horse nor man was able to tread on them.’
The immensity of the disaster seemed to mock the pretensions of king and government to be a protector to the people. But unlike during the plague epidemic, when they had got themselves out of the capital as quickly as possible, Charles and his brother were very much in the thick of the efforts to contain and fight the fire. James was put in charge of containment and demolition. There was not much that could be done with water. The summer’s drought had reduced the levels of the city cisterns, and in any case most of the wooden pipes carrying water to the pumps and squirts had themselves been destroyed by the heat. But it was possible to fight fire with fire, and once the opposition to the demolition programme was finally overruled, and whole streets of houses blown up using military mines and tunnels, it began to have some noticeable effect. On Wednesday, 5 September, the wind started to drop. The conflagration began, at last, to be held in check.
The king himself was seen in the streets attended by just a few guards, doing what he did best – giving away gold (for once, to the deserving). But even his genuinely kindly presence could do little to abate the trauma experienced by the multitudes – now at least 100,000 – who had been made homeless by the fire and who wandered about the smouldering ruins of the city. Tents had been set up at St George’s Fields and Moorfields where the refugees camped in a state of shock. Evelyn saw many ‘without a rag, or any necessary utinsils, bed or board, who from delicatnesse, riches & easy accomodations . . . were now reduc’d to extreamest misery & poverty’. By the end of the week, the tent cities of the homeless stretched all the way north through Islington and Primrose Hill to Highgate. If many were disconsolate at the catastrophe, just as many were in the grip of anger, looking for someone to blame for their predicament. So Charles went to the camp at Moorfields to quell the ugly rumours that the fire had been set by either the Papists or the Dutch – or, in some improbably unholy alliance, by both. James intervened to stop a Dutch baker being lynched, but the French were still conspicuous targets. A Westminster School boy, William Taswell, saw one of them floored by a blacksmith with an iron bar. It had not been foreigners who had caused the disaster, Charles told the destitute and the homeless; it was, rather, the hand of God. And for whose transgressions, exactly, they might have asked, looking the king in the eye, had London been turned into a second Sodom?
When the rain started on 9 September, a week after the outbreak of the fire, allowing some early stocktaking, the scale of the devastation appalled even the pessimists. London, blackened and shattered, looked as though it had been broken by a cruel siege. Some 13,200 houses had been destroyed in 400 streets and courts. Eighty-seven churches, six chapels, much of St Paul’s Cathedral and forty-four halls of the livery companies, as well as the Guildhall, the Exchange, the Custom House, Bridewell Prison, the great law courts, four bridges and three city gates, were gone. The damage was estimated at almost £10 million.
Of course, when Evelyn lamented ‘London is no more’, he was technically rather than demographically accurate. Three-quarters of the old City of London, the most densely populated core of shops, warehouses and small dwellings, had indeed been burned, but the metropolis now consisted of two cities (London and the rapidly expanding Westminster), or perhaps even three, with Southwark, Rotherhithe and Lambeth making another conurbation on the south bank. The fire had been contained before it could get through to the newer sprawling areas to the west and north, which housed both the very rich and the very poor. But it was precisely because the palace at Whitehall and the fashionable new streets, like Piccadilly where Clarendon had had his outrageously palatial town house built by Sir Roger Pratt, had been unscathed by the destruction that it was especially incumbent on the rich and powerful to show themselves solicitous about rebuilding the dwellings and public meeting-places of the less well-to-do. ‘Restoration’ might finally mean something other than so much poetic rhetoric. Now there was something solid, something serious to restore.
On 11 September, just two days after the rain had started, dousing any more fears of minor reignitions, the Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford asked for an urgent audience with the king. Christopher Wren was then in his early thirties, a little younger than Charles. He could expect a cordial reception because his father, also Christopher, had been Dean of Windsor and had put his own life on the line during the civil war to preserve some of the treasures of the chapel, not least the archives of the Order of the Garter that Charles I had so passionately and so hopelessly cherished. Dean Wren had died before the Restoration, but his more famous and much more intransigent brother Matthew, the Bishop of Ely, had emerged from captivity determined to perpetuate Laud’s programme for authority and beauteous decorum in the Church. The erstwhile Bishop of London, Gilbert Sheldon, now Archbishop of Canterbury, was one of young Christopher’s patrons and had commended him to the king not just as someone capable of abstruse mathematical demonstrations, but as a prodigy who could turn his nimbly versatile intellect to practical and architectural matters. Although Wren chose not to go, he had been asked, as early as 1661, if he could advise the king on the fortifications of Tangier, which were about to be passed to the Crown as a result of Charles’s marriage to the Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza.
The flames had barely died away when Wren drafted for the king’s inspection a plan for the rebuilding of the City of London. He must have worked on the project at startling speed, day and night, since he managed to anticipate by some days the more considered plans of two of his close friends among the Royal Society circle of scientists, John Evelyn and Robert Hooke. Wren’s determination to get his ideas before the king’s eyes in advance of any rival plans stemmed not so much from egotistical ambition (though Wren was no shrinking violet) as from his certainty that the breatht
aking radicalism of the plan would shock conventional expectations of how the destroyed city should be rebuilt. Most of those expectations – including the king’s – assumed that the buildings and streets of London would be reconstructed as and where they had stood before the fire. The immensely important exceptions to this assumption, embodied in the Rebuilding Act of February 1667, were the requirement to build in brick and stone, the ban on overhanging storeys and the broadening of selected streets so that an accidental fire on one side would not automatically catch on the other. Noxious industries that used combustible materials, like dyeing, tanning and brewing, were also to be moved out from the centre of town, preferably across the river.
Most of these prophylactic measures had been proposed by Evelyn’s Fumifugium five years before. But Wren had his eye on something far more daring than fire precautions. He wanted an utter transformation of the old city: nothing short of the creation of a new Rome on the banks of the Thames, with a great domed basilica replacing the burnt-out Gothic hulk of old St Paul’s. The vision, laid out so audaciously before Charles, was something Wren believed most perfectly expressed the spirit of a new Londinium: a marriage of antiquity and modernity, the colossal and the commercial, the sacred and the entrepreneurial. At its heart was a great oval piazza, but it was to be dominated by a Pantheon of business – a new, colonnaded Royal Exchange. Radiating out from its hub would be broad streets, optically calculated to afford sweeping, geometrically satisfying vistas of the public edifices and monuments (not least one to the fire itself). Studded throughout the new metropolis would be fifty-odd rebuilt churches, situated without any regard to the old boundaries of parishes, which Wren believed had been made redundant by the fire. New parishes could surely be redesigned about these architectural imperatives, not the other way round. Surely, as a man of science and high taste, the king could see the logic of this argument? Did he not want a capital worthy of all those odes eulogizing him as the new Augustus?
