Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  Coventry performed one more service for Pepys, by telling a government adviser that it would cost the king £10,000 to get anyone as good as the present clerk of the acts; and Pepys kept his job.42 But Coventry’s official career was finished, although he continued to sit in parliament.43 Pepys was now in effect an orphan professionally, with Sandwich in Spain and Coventry out of power. Each had helped him into the sunshine of royal favour, and from each he had learnt about its unreliability; from now on he would have to stand on his own feet and deal directly with the royal brothers. Sadly for us, his indiscretions about the king ceased with the end of his Diary.

  15 The Fire

  At three on a Sunday morning, 2 September, Pepys was woken by Jane, who had got up early to cook for a dinner party. From her window she noticed a fire to the south-west, in the region of Billingsgate. It was enough to make her rouse Pepys. He put on his dressing gown and went to her window to see for himself, and, having done so, he decided the fire was not near enough to cause concern and returned to his bed. Jane went downstairs to start her cooking on their own kitchen fire. The great fire had started in Pudding Lane, in the house of a baker who had failed to extinguish the fire under his oven, and from his house the flames spread.

  Pepys woke again at seven. This time he looked out of his bedroom window and decided the fire seemed smaller and even further away than he had at first thought – no doubt because it was moving west, away from Seething Lane, blown by a powerful east wind. He went into his closet, the small side room where he kept some of his treasures, pictures and books, intending to rearrange it after the efforts of the cleaners the day before, because he was expecting to show off its contents to one of his dinner guests. Then Jane reappeared and said she had heard that 300 houses had been burnt down and that the fire was now close to London Bridge. At this he decided to dress himself and walk over to the Tower, intending to use one of its high windows as an observation point. The lieutenant of the Tower’s small son went up with him. What they saw was enough to start him worrying. His first fears, as he set them down, were for two of the girls he was fond of, Betty Michell, who lived close to the bridge, and his former maid Sarah, who now lived on the bridge.

  He realized that there was more at stake than the girls, and without returning home he went down to the river, got himself a boat and had himself taken westwards, passing under the bridge. The Michells’ house, he saw, was already burnt, and people along the river bank were bringing out their goods and throwing them into lighters or even into the water. He noticed that some of them were so reluctant to leave their houses that they put off going until the last possible moment, and that the pigeons behaved in exactly the same way, hovering about their familiar roosting spots until some had their wings burnt – one of his most vivid and telling observations. Looking about him in this way, and thinking over what he saw, he stayed on the water for an hour. He saw that the fire was being driven by the strong easterly wind, and that the dry summer weather had made everything combustible; and he decided to take action. This is when he instructed his boatman to take him to Whitehall, where Sunday service was in progress in the chapel. He went straight up to the king’s closet and started telling people about the fire. It seems that no one had yet heard of it, and word was quickly taken to the king, who sent for him. Pepys told him what he had seen and advised him and the duke to order the blowing up of houses to stop it spreading further, telling them that the destruction of houses in the path of the fire was the only way to stop it.

  This was his key role in the great fire of London, as the first to inform the king and the giver of sound advice. The king told Pepys to go to the lord mayor with the command to have houses pulled down and the promise of soldiers to help. Pepys set off back towards the fire in a borrowed coach, joined by Creed. They drove as far as St Paul’s, then walked on eastwards along Watling Street, meeting crowds of refugees, among them sick people being carried on their beds, and into Canning (i.e., Cannon) Street, where they found the mayor, Sir Thomas Bludworth, in a state of exhaustion: ‘he cried, like a fainting woman, “Lord, what can I do? I am spent! People will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses. But the fire overtakes us faster then we can do it.”’ He had been up all night and now intended to take a rest. Instead of returning to Whitehall for more instructions, Pepys simply walked on, fascinated by the strangeness of everything, seeing what he could see. This became his other great service, as a reporter to posterity. His description of the fire is one of the most famous set pieces in the Diary, and deservedly so. Most of it was written on loose sheets of paper, quite literally in the heat of the moment, and only copied into the journal proper later, and it follows his experience hour by hour.

  People were putting their goods into the churches for safety, and the great merchant family, the Houblons, were removing their goods from their houses; all but one of the brothers lost their homes. By now it was noon, and he remembered he was expecting dinner guests. It did not occur to him to do anything but hurry home to greet them. A newly married couple had been invited, the Woods, Barbara Wood being a friend of Elizabeth and niece of the family in whose house she had lodged at Woolwich during the plague; he was the son of a rich mast-maker. There was also Moone, secretary to Lord Belasyse, whom Pepys knew through his Tangier business; Pepys had been hoping to show him his closet. Now that was put off, and the dinner party was not prolonged; all the same, ‘we had an extraordinary good dinner, and as merry as at this time we could be’. Then Pepys walked through the City again with Moone, as far as St Paul’s, before taking to the water once more. The king and duke were now on the river in their barge, and Pepys went with them to summon a colonel in the City militia to command him to pull down more houses below the bridge. It was too late. The wind was carrying the fire into the heart of the City.

  Elizabeth meanwhile had gone to St James’s Park with the Woods and Creed. Pepys went to meet them there and took them on to the river again. The air was hot and full of smoke and ‘showers of Firedrops’, the wind blowing as hard as ever. When they could endure no more of the heat, they steered for an ale house on Bankside and sat there till it was dark, watching the whole City burning, as far as they could see up the hill, ‘a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire’, and an arch of flame across the bridge. There was a terrible noise too, from the cracking of doomed houses and the sound the flames roaring before the wind. Pepys felt the horror of it – ‘It made me weep to see it’ – but he was also intent on recording the spectacle.

  Back at home, Pepys found Tom Hayter arrived from his burnt-out house, and he invited him to stay at Seething Lane. They soon realized that they too must start salvaging what they could, because although the main movement of the fire was westwards, it was now such a huge conflagration that it was spreading slowly east as well. Hayter helped him drag his iron chests into the cellar and other goods into the garden, and Pepys got his bags of gold and his accounts into the office, ready to carry away. Batten had already most efficiently sent for carts from the country, expected to arrive during the night. Pepys went briefly to bed. He was up again at four on Monday morning, riding in one of Batten’s carts in his dressing gown, with a pile of his valuables, to Bethnal Green, where a merchant friend of the Navy Office had agreed to take their possessions into his large house. This is where Pepys took his Diary for safety.

  He got a navy lighter to take away more of his goods from Tower Dock. The duke of York called at the office. He had been put in command of the City and was riding about to maintain order. At home there were unfortunate scenes. Elizabeth, angry that Mary Mercer had gone to her mother’s without asking permission, scolded her; her mother told Elizabeth that Mary was not a prentice girl to be so treated, and Elizabeth sacked her on the spot, to Pepys’s considerable chagrin. But there was nothing he could do. Mercer left, and in the evening they ate leftovers from their Sunday dinner. The two junior maids seem to have gone to see how their own families were doing at th
is point, because no more is heard of them for the moment; and Will Hewer went to check how his mother was, found her burnt out and moved her to lodgings in Islington. There were now no beds to sleep on, because they had been dismantled and removed, and that night Pepys and Elizabeth lay on a little quilt of Hewer’s on the floor of the office.

  Pepys was up at break of day again on Tuesday, carrying more of his goods to another lighter. Then he and Penn went into Tower Street, took one look at the advancing fire and hurried home to dig a pit in the garden in which they laid their wine; Pepys famously buried his Parmesan cheese there as well. Both he and Penn now believed Seething Lane was lost, although Pepys proposed sending for workmen from Deptford and Woolwich to pull down more houses to save the Navy Office, and wrote off to Coventry for permission. And although no official answer came, Penn got hold of some men and they began blowing up houses. That night the Pepyses bought a roast shoulder of mutton from a cookshop for a picnic with some of their neighbours; after which he went out, first into the garden, then into Tower Street, to see how close the fire was. As well as threatening them, it was also advancing west along Fleet Street; Cheapside and St Paul’s were now in flames. Pepys wrote a letter to his father and found he could not post it because the post office had burnt down.

  On Wednesday, 5 September, after another few hours trying to sleep on the office floor, Pepys was woken at two in the morning by Elizabeth. She told him the fire was at the bottom of Seething Lane, by All Hallows Church, and he immediately decided to take her to Woolwich, where she had lived during the plague. They set off by boat with Jane, Will and another bag of gold, leaving Tom Edwards and Hayter. Pepys and Hewer hardly expected to find the Seething Lane buildings standing on their return, but they were. Penn had given good orders to the men blowing up houses, and the wind had dropped at last. All Hallows Church was also saved. Pepys climbed its familiar steeple ‘and there saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw’. There were fires burning all around, fuelled by oil and brimstone stored in cellars. He found the sight so frightening that he got down again fast.

  Penn gave him some cold meat, and then he walked into the City, risking scorched feet from the hot coals underfoot everywhere, finding the main streets and the Exchange all destroyed, and Moorfields crowded with people camping out. He bought himself a drink and a plain penny loaf (observing that the price had gone up), picked up a piece of glass from a chapel window, melted and buckled by the heat, and saw a cat taken out of a hole in a chimney, still alive, with its fur singed off. Back at Seething Lane, fire watchers were installed in the office. It seemed so long since Sunday that he had almost forgotten the day of the week. There was, he noted, talk of the fire being started by either the Dutch or the French, rumours that grew and persisted. He snatched a little more sleep.

  On Thursday morning he saw some looting, nothing serious, just people helping themselves to sugar from bags and mixing it with beer. He took himself to Westminster by boat, intending to buy himself a new shirt, but there were no stalls set up in Westminster Hall, which was being used as a deposit for the goods of the homeless. There was no one about in Whitehall either. He managed to get a shave, and went home again, to find his neighbour Sir Richard Ford giving an impromptu dinner of fried mutton served on earthenware platters. After this Pepys went off to Deptford to supervise his goods, which were being delivered at Carteret’s house there, and returned to more male camaraderie. The fire was now burning itself out. He tried to sleep in the office again, but was disturbed by the labourers, who talked and walked about all night.

  In the morning he made a melancholy survey of the landmarks of his life that had disappeared. St Paul’s was gone, and his school with it. Ludgate and a good part of Fleet Street were destroyed, with St Bride’s, the church in which he had been christened and had worshipped as a child, and ‘my father’s house’ in Salisbury Court – also, although he did not say so, his cousin Jane’s house in which he had been operated on for the stone. These were his immediate and most personal losses; around them more than 400 acres and 400 streets were reduced to smoking ruins. The medieval City no longer existed. He walked on to Creed’s lodgings to borrow a shirt and to wash, then called on Coventry at St James’s. He found him with a curtainless bed and all his goods removed; everyone at court had done as much. Coventry told him that he too had heard talk of the French being suspected of having had a hand in the fire.

  Pepys ordered the cleaning of his house – the junior maids must have been back by now – and visited Elizabeth at Woolwich. Then he spent the evening with his neighbours, discussing house prices and rebuilding plans, and Penn good-naturedly offered him a curtainless bed in his house. After four nights on the floor he lay down comfortably in his drawers, worrying about the possibility of more outbreaks of fire as long as he was awake and dreaming of fire when he slept. The next day he got back to some work with Coventry – the country was in the middle of a war – and saw Albemarle, summoned back to London from his ship by the king to act as a reassuring and authoritative presence.

  Pepys’s brother John turned up from Huntingdon to see how things were. Pepys was touched but didn’t know what to do with him. He took him to Bethnal Green when he went to collect his Diary and shared his bed at Penn’s with him that night; but he did not really want him around, and the next day he sent him to dine with Elizabeth at Woolwich and then back to the country, with forty shillings ‘for his pocket’. This was Sunday again, a week after the outbreak of the fire. Pepys went to church twice and wrote up his Diary in the office; he noted that it was raining at last – bad for John’s journey but ‘good for the Fyre’. Tom read him to sleep at Penn’s.

  On Monday he cleared out the cellar, belatedly thinking the old lumber he kept in it might constitute a fire risk. Everything was returning slowly to its usual order. Jane arrived back, and he set off for Deptford, wanting to see Mrs Bagwell. Failing in that, he went on to Woolwich, where Elizabeth was annoyingly ‘out of humour and indifferent’. But he stayed overnight with her, and the next day set to office work again with his colleagues, at Brouncker’s house. The pattern of work resumed as his own house was slowly restored to normal. Sexual forays were also resumed: on 12 September he had a morning encounter with Betty Martin and an afternoon in bed with Mrs Bagwell, suffering from remorse and disgust afterwards. The next night Elizabeth was home, and they slept on the floor, with Baity and his wife Esther in another room. Only on the 15th were the beds reinstalled with their hangings. Sleeping in his own bed again, Pepys had terrifying dreams of fire and houses falling down. These dreams continued for many months; the following February he observed that he could not ‘sleep a-night without great terrors of fire; and this very night could not sleep till almost 2 in the morning through thoughts of fire’.1 The huge area of ruins continued to smoulder and smoke for months, and was believed to harbour robbers; Pepys unsheathed his sword as he was driven through the City in a coach at night.

  The fire was a terrifying ordeal for all involved, and it left a legacy of fear; but it was very different from the Blitz of 1941, to which it is sometimes compared. There were the same flames, falling buildings and noise, but fewer than ten people were known to have died – if there were more, their deaths were unnoticed and unrecorded – and the worst lasted for only a few days. Naturally it left a long train of difficulties and huge financial losses. The greatest sufferers were the booksellers, who kept their shops and also lived around St Paul’s. Pepys laments their fate in the Diary. His own bookseller Kirton lost his dwelling, his shop and many thousands of pounds’ worth of books, and was ruined beyond recovery. When he died a year later, Pepys believed it was ‘of grief for his losses by the fire’.2 Some of his fellows had hoped to save stock by putting books into churches or their hall, the Stationers’, only to see hall and churches burnt with all the books inside feeding the blaze. Pepys’s one-time schoolmaster, Samuel Cromleholme, who had helped to nurture his love of books, also lost his private library, said to have been
the best in London.3 Pepys’s losses from moving his goods were negligible, just two small pictures of ships and the sea, one gold frame and some chipping to another gilt frame; the few books he thought he had lost turned up again. Once again Fortune had favoured him. The Pearses profited from the fire by letting out Mrs Pearse’s closet with a little windowless chamber and a garret for an inflated amount, £50 down and £30 a year, to a dispossessed silk merchant. Pepys and Elizabeth talked of taking in Hayter and Hewer permanently, but they did not pursue the idea, and Hayter had to look for a new place, his wife still away in the country at the end of October. Pepys’s cousin Jane Turner came down from Yorkshire in November to survey the empty space where her house in Salisbury Court had stood. Old Mr Pepys also came to London in October to see the ruins, which had become a tourist attraction.

  Plans to set up a modern city on the site of the ancient streets were immediately considered. Three different proposals were prepared at great speed by three members of the Royal Society: John Evelyn, Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren. All had visions of broad and beautiful avenues replacing the old narrow muddled streets. The House of Commons discussed the matter before the end of the month, but any major changes to the street pattern were given up because every householder understandably wanted to rebuild on his own site. A few streets were widened, the riverside was opened up, and an attempt was made to improve the Fleet River into a something like a canal, with wharves. It was decreed that buildings had to be brick-built and flat-fronted; and in due course Wren’s churches arose on the sites of the many lost medieval ones. The new St Bride’s was built during the 1670s, although its enchanting steeple, the tallest of Wren’s, did not appear until the beginning of the next century. St Olave’s still stood, modest and reassuringly the same, but the backcloth and scenery against which Pepys had played out his life so far was gone for good. Hardly surprising that he had nightmares; and fire continued to cause havoc in his life, because seven years later it broke out in Seething Lane itself and destroyed another part of his life.