Great fire of London

Wikipedia

"Great Fire" redirects here. This article is about the 1666 fire of London. For other "Great Fires", see List of historic fires; for other notable fires in London, see Early fires of London and Second Great Fire of London.

Detail of painting from 1666 of the Great Fire of London by an unknown painter, depicting the fire as it would have appeared on the evening of Tuesday, 4 September from a boat in the vicinity of Tower Wharf. The Tower of London is on the right and London Bridge on the left, with St. Paul's Cathedral in the distance, surrounded by the tallest flames.

The Great Fire of London was a major conflagration that swept through the central parts of the English city of London, from Sunday, 2 September to Wednesday, 5 September 1666.[1] The fire gutted the medieval City of London inside the old Roman City Wall. It threatened, but did not reach, the aristocratic district of Westminster, Charles II's Palace of Whitehall, and most of the suburban slums.[2] It consumed 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, St. Paul's Cathedral, and most of the buildings of the City authorities. It is estimated that it destroyed the homes of 70,000 of the City's ca. 80,000 inhabitants.[3] The death toll from the fire is unknown and is traditionally thought to have been small, as only six verified deaths were recorded. This reasoning has recently been challenged on the grounds that the deaths of poor and middle-class people were not recorded anywhere, and that the heat of the fire may have cremated many victims, leaving no recognizable remains.

The great fire started at the bakery of Thomas Farriner (or Farynor) on Pudding Lane, shortly after midnight on Sunday, 2 September, and it spread rapidly west across the City of London. The use of the major firefighting technique of the time, the creation of firebreaks by means of demolition, was critically delayed due to the indecisiveness of the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth. By the time large-scale demolitions were ordered on Sunday night, the wind had already fanned the bakery fire into a firestorm which defeated such measures. The fire pushed north on Monday into the heart of the City. Order in the streets broke down as rumours arose of suspicious foreigners setting fires. The fears of the homeless focused on the French and Dutch, England's enemies in the ongoing Second Anglo-Dutch War; these substantial immigrant groups became victims of lynchings and street violence. On Tuesday, the fire spread over most of the City, destroying St. Paul's Cathedral and leaping the River Fleet to threaten Charles II's court at Whitehall, while coordinated firefighting efforts were simultaneously mobilizing. The battle to quench the fire is considered to have been won by two factors: the strong east winds died down, and the Tower of London garrison used gunpowder to create effective firebreaks to halt further spread eastward.

The social and economic problems created by the disaster were overwhelming; significant scapegoating occurred for some time after the fire. Evacuation from London and resettlement elsewhere were strongly encouraged by Charles II, who feared a London rebellion amongst the dispossessed refugees. Despite numerous radical proposals, London was reconstructed on essentially the same street plan used before the fire.[4]

Evelyn lived four miles (6 km) outside the City, in Deptford, and so did not see the early stages of the disaster. On Monday, joining many other upper-class people, he went by coach to Southwark to see the view that Pepys had seen the day before, of the burning City across the river. The conflagration was much larger now: "the whole City in dreadful flames near the water-side; all the houses from the Bridge, all Thames-street, and upwards towards Cheapside, down to the Three Cranes, were now consumed".[35] In the evening, Evelyn reported that the river was covered with barges and boats making their escape piled with goods. He observed a great exodus of carts and pedestrians through the bottleneck City gates, making for the open fields to the north and east, "which for many miles were strewed with moveables of all sorts, and tents erecting to shelter both people and what goods they could get away. Oh, the miserable and calamitous spectacle!"[35]

Approximate damage by the evening of Monday, 3 September.

John Evelyn (1620–1706) in 1651.

Suspicion soon arose in the threatened city that the fire was no accident. The swirling winds carried sparks and burning flakes long distances to lodge on thatched roofs and in wooden gutters, causing seemingly unrelated house fires to break out far from their source and giving rise to rumours that fresh fires were being set on purpose. Foreigners were immediately suspect due to the ongoing Second Anglo-Dutch War. As fear and suspicion hardened into certainty on the Monday, reports circulated of imminent invasion, and of foreign undercover agents seen casting "fireballs" into houses, or caught with hand grenades or matches.[36] There was a wave of street violence.[37] William Taswell saw a mob loot the shop of a French painter and level it to the ground, and watched in horror as a blacksmith walked up to a Frenchman in the street and hit him over the head with an iron bar. The fears of terrorism received an extra boost from the disruption of communications and news as facilities were devoured by the fire. The General Letter Office in Threadneedle Street, through which post for the entire country passed, burned down early on Monday morning. The London Gazette just managed to put out its Monday issue before the printer's premises went up in flames (this issue contained mainly society gossip, with a small note about a fire that had broken out on Sunday morning and "which continues still with great violence"). The whole nation depended on these communications, and the void they left filled up with rumours. There were also religious alarms of renewed Gunpowder Plots. As suspicions rose to panic and collective paranoia on the Monday, both the Trained Bands and the Coldstream Guards focused less on firefighting and more on rounding up foreigners, Catholics, and any odd-looking people, and arresting them or rescuing them from mobs, or both together.

The inhabitants, especially the upper class, were growing desperate to remove their belongings from the City. This provided a source of income for the able-bodied poor, who hired out as porters (sometimes simply making off with the goods), and especially for the owners of carts and boats. Hiring a cart had cost a couple of shillings on the Saturday before the fire; on the Monday it rose to as much as £40, a small fortune (equivalent to over £4000 in 2005).[38] Seemingly every cart and boat owner within reach of London made their way towards the City to share in these opportunities, the carts jostling at the narrow gates with the panicked inhabitants trying to get out. The chaos at the gates was such that the magistrates ordered the gates shut on Monday afternoon, in the hope of turning the inhabitants' attention from safeguarding their own possessions to the fighting of the fire: "that, no hopes of saving any things left, they might have more desperately endeavoured the quenching of the fire."[39] This headlong and unsuccessful measure was rescinded the next day.

Even as order in the streets broke down, especially at the gates, and the fire raged unchecked, Monday marked the beginning of organised action. Bloodworth, who as Lord Mayor was responsible for coordinating the fire-fighting, had apparently left the City; his name is not mentioned in any contemporary accounts of the Monday's events.[40] In this state of emergency, Charles again overrode the City authorities and put his brother James, Duke of York, in charge of operations. James set up command posts round the perimeter of the fire, press-ganging any men of the lower classes found in the streets into teams of well-paid and well-fed firefighters. Three courtiers were put in charge of each post, with authority from Charles himself to order demolitions. This visible gesture of solidarity from the Crown was intended to cut through the citizens' misgivings about being held financially responsible for pulling down houses. James and his life guards rode up and down the streets all Monday, rescuing foreigners from the mob and attempting to keep order. "The Duke of York hath won the hearts of the people with his continual and indefatigable pains day and night in helping to quench the Fire", wrote a witness in a letter on 8 September.[41]

On the Monday evening, hopes were dashed that the massive stone walls of Baynard's Castle, Blackfriars, the western counterpart of the Tower of London, would stay the course of the flames. This historic royal palace was completely consumed, burning all night.[42]

A contemporary account said that, that day or later, King Charles II in person worked manually to help to throw water on flames and to help to demolish buildings to make a firebreak.

Tuesday

Tuesday, 4 September, was the day of greatest destruction.[43] The Duke of York's command post at Temple Bar, where The Strand met Fleet Street, was supposed to stop the fire's westward advance towards the Palace of Whitehall. Making a stand with his firefighters from the Fleet Bridge and down to the Thames, James hoped that the River Fleet would form a natural firebreak. However early on Tuesday morning the flames jumped over the Fleet, driven by the unabated easterly gale, and outflanked them, forcing them to run for it. There was consternation at the palace as the fire continued implacably westward: "Oh, the confusion there was then at that court!" wrote Evelyn.

Working to a plan at last, James' firefighters had also created a large firebreak to the north of the conflagration. It contained the fire until late afternoon, when the flames leaped across and began to destroy the wide, affluent luxury shopping street of Cheapside.

Everybody had thought St. Paul's Cathedral a safe refuge, with its thick stone walls and natural firebreak in the form of a wide, empty surrounding plaza. It had been crammed full of rescued goods and its crypt filled with the tightly packed stocks of the printers and booksellers in adjoining Paternoster Row. However an enormous stroke of bad luck meant that the building was covered in wooden scaffolding, undergoing piecemeal restoration by a then relatively unknown Christopher Wren. The scaffolding caught fire on Tuesday night. Leaving school, young William Taswell stood on Westminster Stairs a mile away and watched as the flames crept round the cathedral and the burning scaffolding ignited the timbered roof beams. Within half an hour, the lead roof was melting, and the books and papers in the crypt caught with a roar. "The stones of Paul's flew like grenados, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness, so as no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them", reported Evelyn in his diary. The cathedral was quickly a ruin.

During the day, the flames began to move due east from the neighbourhood of Pudding Lane, straight against the prevailing east wind towards Pepys' home on Seething Lane and the Tower of London with its gunpowder stores. After waiting all day for requested help from James' official firefighters, who were busy in the west, the garrison at the Tower took matters into their own hands and created firebreaks by blowing up houses in the vicinity on a large scale, halting the advance of the fire.

Wednesday

James, Duke of York, later James II.

The wind dropped on Tuesday evening, and the firebreaks created by the garrison finally began to take effect on Wednesday, 5 September.[44] Pepys walked all over the smouldering city, getting his feet hot, and climbed the steeple of Barking Church, from which he viewed the destroyed City, "the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw." There were many separate fires still burning themselves out, but the Great Fire was over. Pepys visited Moorfields, a large public park immediately north of the City, and saw a great encampment of homeless refugees, "poor wretches carrying their good there, and every body keeping his goods together by themselves", and noted that the price of bread in the environs of the park had doubled. Evelyn also went out to Moorfields, which was turning into the main point of assembly for the homeless, and was horrified at the numbers of distressed people filling it, some under tents, others in makeshift shacks: "Many [were] without a rag or any necessary utensils, bed or board... reduced to extremest misery and poverty."[45] Evelyn was impressed by the pride of these distressed Londoners, "tho' ready to perish for hunger and destitution, yet not asking one pennie for relief."

Fears of foreign terrorists and of a French and Dutch invasion were as high as ever among the traumatised fire victims, and on Wednesday night there was an outbreak of general panic in the encampments at Parliament Hill, Moorfields and Islington. A light in the sky over Fleet Street started a story that 50,000 French and Dutch immigrants, widely rumoured to have started the fire, had risen and were marching towards Moorfields to finish what the fire had begun: to cut the men's throats, rape the women, and steal their few possessions. Surging into the streets, the frightened mob fell on any foreigners they happened to encounter, and were, according to Evelyn, only "with infinite pains and great difficulty"[46] appeased and pushed back into the fields by the Trained Bands, troops of Life Guards, and members of the court. The mood was now so volatile that Charles feared a full-scale London rebellion against the monarchy. Food production and distribution had been disrupted to the point of non-existence; Charles announced that supplies of bread would be brought into the City every day, and safe markets set up round the perimeter. These markets were for buying and selling;[47] there was no question of distributing emergency aid.

Deaths and destruction

James Shirley

The LONDONERS Lamentation, a broadside ballad published in 1666 giving an account of the fire, and of the limits of its destruction. Click on the image to enlarge and read.

Only a few deaths from the fire are officially recorded, and deaths are traditionally believed to have been few. Porter gives the figure as eight[48] and Tinniswood as "in single figures", although he adds that some deaths must have gone unrecorded and that, besides direct deaths from burning and smoke inhalation, refugees also perished in the impromptu camps.[49] Hanson takes issue with the idea that there were only a few deaths, enumerating known deaths from hunger and exposure among survivors of the holocaust, "huddled in shacks or living among the ruins that had once been their homes" in the cold winter that followed, including, for instance, the dramatist James Shirley and his wife. Hanson also maintains that "it stretches credulity to believe that the only papists or foreigners being beaten to death or lynched were the ones rescued by the Duke of York", that official figures say very little about the fate of the undocumented poor, and that the heat at the heart of the firestorms, far hotter than an ordinary house fire, was enough to consume bodies fully, or leave only a few skull fragments. The fire, fed not merely by wood, fabrics, and thatch, but also by the oil, pitch, coal, tallow, fats, sugar, alcohol, turpentine, and gunpowder stored in the riverside district, melted the imported steel lying along the wharves (melting point between 1,250 °C (2,300 F) and 1,480 °C (2,700 F)) and the great iron chains and locks on the City gates (melting point between 1,100 °C (2,000 F) and 1,650 °C (3000 F)). Nor would anonymous bone fragments have been of much interest to the hungry people sifting through the tens of thousands of tons of rubble and debris after the fire, looking for valuables, or to the workmen clearing away the rubble later during the rebuilding. Appealing to common sense and "the experience of every other major urban fire down the centuries", Hanson emphasises that the fire attacked the rotting tenements of the poor with furious speed, surely trapping at the very least "the old, the very young, the halt and the lame" and burying the dust and ashes of their bones under the rubble of cellars; making for a death toll not of four or eight, but of "several hundred and quite possibly several thousand."[50]

The material destruction has been computed at 13,500 houses, 87 parish churches, 44 Company Halls, the Royal Exchange, the Custom House, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Bridewell Palace and other City prisons, the General Letter Office, and the three western city gates, Ludgate, Newgate, and Aldersgate.[51] The monetary value of the loss, first estimated at £100,000,000 in the currency of the time, was later reduced to an uncertain £10,000,000[52] (over £1 billion in 2005 pounds).[53] Evelyn believed that he saw as many as "200,000 people of all ranks and stations dispersed, and lying along their heaps of what they could save" in the fields towards Islington and Highgate.[52]

Aftermath

Approximate damage by the evening of Tuesday, 4 September. The fire did not spread significantly on Wednesday, 5 September.

Ludgate in flames, with St. Paul's Cathedral in the distance (square tower without the spire) now catching flames. Oil painting by anonymous artist, ca. 1670.

John Evelyn's plan never carried out, for rebuilding a radically different City of London.

Sir Christopher Wren.

The Monument to the Great Fire of London to commemorate the Great Fire of London, designed by Sir Christopher Wren

An example of the urge to identify scapegoats for the fire is the acceptance of the confession of a simple-minded French watchmaker, Robert Hubert, who claimed he was an agent of the Pope and had started the Great Fire in Westminster.[54] He later changed his story to say that he had started the fire at the bakery in Pudding Lane. Hubert was convicted, despite some misgivings about his fitness to plead, and hanged at Tyburn on 28 September 1666. After his death, it became apparent that he had not arrived in London until two days after the fire started.[55] These allegations that Catholics had started the fire were exploited as powerful political propaganda by opponents of pro-Catholic Charles II's court, mostly during the Popish Plot and the exclusion crisis later in his reign.[56]

Abroad the Great Fire of London was seen as a Divine retribution, the Lord punishing the English for Holmes's Bonfire, the burning of a Dutch town three weeks earlier during the Second Anglo-Dutch War.

In the chaos and unrest after the fire, Charles II feared another London rebellion. He encouraged the homeless to move away from London and settle elsewhere, immediately issuing a proclamation that "all Cities and Towns whatsoever shall without any contradiction receive the said distressed persons and permit them the free exercise of their manual trades." A special Fire Court was set up to deal with disputes between tenants and landlords and decide who should rebuild, based on ability to pay. The Court was in session from February 1667 to September 1672. Cases were heard and a verdict usually given within a day, and without the Fire Court, lengthy legal wrangles would have seriously delayed the rebuilding which was so necessary if London was to recover. Encouraged by Charles, radical rebuilding schemes for the gutted City poured in. If it had been rebuilt under some of these plans, London would have rivalled Paris in Baroque magnificence (see Evelyn's plan on the right). The Crown and the City authorities attempted to establish "to whom all the houses and ground did in truth belong" in order to negotiate with their owners about compensation for the large-scale remodelling that these plans entailed, but that unrealistic idea had to be abandoned. Exhortations to bring workmen and measure the plots on which the houses had stood were mostly ignored by people worried about day-to-day survival, as well as by those who had left the capital; for one thing, with the shortage of labour following the fire, it was impossible to secure workmen for the purpose. Apart from Wren and Evelyn, it is known that Robert Hooke, Valentine Knight and Richard Newcourt proposed rebuilding plans.

With the complexities of ownership unresolved, none of the grand Baroque schemes for a City of piazzas and avenues could be realised; there was nobody to negotiate with, and no means of calculating how much compensation should be paid. Instead, much of the old street plan was recreated in the new City, with improvements in hygiene and fire safety: wider streets, open and accessible wharves along the length of the Thames, with no houses obstructing access to the river, and, most importantly, buildings constructed of brick and stone, not wood. New public buildings were created on their predecessors' sites; perhaps the most famous is St. Paul's Cathedral and its smaller cousins, Christopher Wren's 50 new churches.

On Charles' initiative, a Monument to the Great Fire of London, designed by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke, was erected near Pudding Lane. Standing 61 metres tall and known simply as "The Monument", it is a familiar London landmark which has given its name to a tube station. In 1668 accusations against the Catholics were added to the inscription on the Monument which read, in part:

Aside from the four years of James II's rule from 1685 to 1689, the inscription remained in place until 1830 and the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act.[57]

Another monument, the Golden Boy of Pye Corner in Smithfield, marks the spot where the fire stopped. According to the inscription, the fact that the fire started at Pudding Lane and stopped at Pye Corner was an indication that the Fire was evidence of God's wrath on the City of London for the sin of gluttony.

The Great Plague epidemic of 1665 is believed to have killed a sixth of London's inhabitants, or 80,000 people,[58] and it is sometimes suggested, as plague epidemics did not recur in London after the fire,[59] that the fire saved lives in the long run by burning down so much unsanitary housing with their rats and their fleas which transmitted the plague. Historians disagree as to whether the fire played a part in preventing subsequent major outbreaks. The Museum of London website claims that there was a connection,[60] while historian Roy Porter points out that the fire left the most insalubrious parts of London, the slum suburbs, untouched.[61] Alternative epidemiological explanations have been put forward, along with the observation that the disease disappeared from almost every other European city around the same time.[59]

See also

• Great Chicago Fire
• Great Toronto Fire
• Great fire of Newcastle and Gateshead, 1854
• Great Plague of London
• Second Great Fire of London
• Thomas Vincent - a Puritan minister's eyewitness account

Notes

References

• Evelyn, John (1854). Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, F.R.S.. London: Hurst and Blackett. http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC20137959&id=JiH6MSVCzmsC&pg=PA10&vq=fire&dq=%22John+evelyn%22+diary&as_brr=1. Retrieved 2006-11-05. 
• Hanson, Neil (2001). The Dreadful Judgement: The True Story of the Great Fire of London. New York: Doubleday.  For a review of Hanson's work, see Lauzanne, Alain. "Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone". Cercles. http://www.cercles.com/review/r1/hanson.html. Retrieved 2006-10-12. 
• Hanson, Neil (2002). The Great Fire of London: In That Apocalyptic Year, 1666. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons.  A "substantially different" version of Hanson's The Dreadful Judgement (front matter).
• Morgan (2000). Oxford Illustrated History of Britain. Oxford: Oxford. 
• Pepys, Samuel (1995). Robert Latham and William Matthews (eds.). ed. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 7. London: Harper Collins. ISBN 0-00-499027-7.  First published between 1970 and 1983, by Bell & Hyman, London. Quotations from and details involving Pepys are taken from this standard, and copyright, edition. All web versions of the diaries are based on public domain 19th century editions and unfortunately contain many errors, as the shorthand in which Pepys' diaries were originally written was not accurately transcribed until the pioneering work of Latham and Matthews.
• Porter, Roy (1994). London: A Social History. Cambridge: Harvard. 
• Reddaway, T. F. (1940). The Rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. London: Jonathan Cape. 
• Robinson, Bruce. London: Brighter Lights, Bigger City. BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/civil_war_revolution/brighter_lights_01.shtml. Retrieved 2006-08-12. 
• Sheppard, Francis (1998). London: A History. Oxford: Oxford. 
• Tinniswood, Adrian (2003). By Permission of Heaven: The Story of the Great Fire of London. London: Jonathan Cape. 

External links

• BBC history site
• Museum of London answers questions
• Channel 4 animation of the spread of the fire
• Child-friendly Great Fire of London site
• Fire of London website produced by the Museum of London, The National Archives, the National Portrait Gallery, London Fire Brigade Museum and London Metropolitan Archives for Key Stage 1 pupils (ages 5–7) and teachers

Coordinates: 51°30′57″N 0°05′32″W / 51.5157°N 0.0921°W / 51.5157; -0.0921

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References in the diary

1666

Sep: 2, 3, 4, 17, 22, 29, 30
Oct: 9, 10, 12, 15, 20, 23, 24, 26, 31
Nov: 5, 11, 12, 19, 23
Dec: 1, 9, 13, 14

1667

Jan: 6, 16, 18