The Pageant of British History

by Edward Parrott

As we follow Pepys’s pages we see alarm spreading, the clergy taking flight to the country, the stoppage of all work and trading, grass growing in the deserted streets, the bells tolling all day long, searchers going about to discover infected houses, dreaded death-carts rumbling over the stones to the mournful cry of “Bring out your dead;” then the last scene of all—the carts shooting their contents into huge pits dug at St. Martin’s in the Fields and at Mile-End. It is a terrible picture, and we shudder as we realize it.

All infected houses become prisons, with watchers at the doors so that none might come out or go in. Pepys tells us that a complaint was brought against a man for taking a child from an infected house, and the case was inquired into by the magistrates. They discovered that the child was the little daughter of a saddler. All his other children had died of the plague, and the saddler and his wife were shut up in their house, never expecting to leave it alive. They had one only wish in their despair, and that was to save the life of their little girl. At last they managed to communicate with a friend, who promised to take her away from London. The child was handed down from the window stark naked, and the friend, having dressed it in fresh clothes, took it to Greenwich, where, when the story was known, it was permitted to remain.

In all, the death-roll of that terrible year reached nearly 100,000, or about one-fifth of the total population. The worst time of all was in the first fortnight of September, when the deaths were over a thousand a day. As the summer passed, and the cold, high winds of winter blew, the plague gradually passed away.

Scarcely, however, had the dead-cart ceased to go its rounds when fire laid well-nigh the whole city in ruins. It broke out at one o’clock on Sunday morning, September 2, 1666, at the house of a baker in Pudding Lane, not far from the Monument which now commemorates the visitation. Most of the city was then built of wood, and as a high wind was blowing at the time the flames spread rapidly. The citizens could do nothing to stop the fire, and before long the city from the Tower to the Temple, and from the river to Smithfield, was one sheet of flame. A great terror seized the people, but as soon as they recovered from their fright they endeavoured to save what they could from the flames. Five, ten, and even fifty pounds were given for a cart, and the barges and boats on the river were laden to the gunwale with fugitives and their belongings. The fields round London were full of furniture and of people camping out amidst the pitiful remnants of property which they had saved. On Monday night the streets were as light as noonday, and the flames had reached St. Paul’s.

John Evelyn tells us in his diary that the stones flew like bombs, melting lead ran down the streets in streams, and the very pavements were red hot. “God grant,” says he, “my eyes may never behold the like. I now saw about ten thousand houses all in one flame. The noise and cracking and thunder of the flames, the shrieking of women and children, the hurry of the people, the fall of towers, houses, and churches, was like an awful storm. The air was so hot that at last men were not able to approach the fire, and were forced to stand still and let the flames burn on, which they did for nearly two miles in length and one in breadth. The clouds of smoke were dismal, and reached nearly fifty-six miles in length. London was, but is no more!”

At last the fire was checked by blowing up a number of houses with gunpowder. The wind fell, and on Wednesday morning the fire ceased, “as it were by a command from Heaven.” It began at Pudding Lane, and it ended at Pie Corner in Giltspur Street. Actually 13,000 houses and 89 churches were burnt down, but only fourteen persons were killed. Every dwelling and building over an area of 436 acres was destroyed. The fire, however, was a blessing in disguise, for it swept away the foul courts and alleys and destroyed the plague germs lingering in the soil. Wider and more open streets were built, and new and stately churches arose. The genius of Sir Christopher Wren was afforded a unique opportunity. He re-created St. Paul’s, his chief monument, and erected fifty-four churches, each with its own special features, yet all in harmony with the great mother-church of the city.

The restoration of Charles was a triumph for the Church of England, and marked the downfall of that religious toleration which Cromwell had established. At the instigation of Clarendon, the only man of real zeal and probity about the king, the Cavalier Parliament passed a series of spiteful Acts against the Puritans, or Nonconformists, as they may now be called. Henceforth all mayors, aldermen, councillors, and other borough officers must renounce the Solemn League and Covenant, deny the lawfulness of taking up arms against the king, and receive the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. This harsh and unfair Act was a great blow to the Nonconformists, and it practically drove them out of local government. They were next excluded from the Church by the Act of Uniformity; and then the expelled ministers began to form congregations outside the pale. But a new Act of Parliament forbidding the holding of all religious services except those of the Church of England, under pain of fine and imprisonment, was speedily passed to keep them forcibly within the fold. This shocking law actually made family worship a crime if more than five persons not belonging to the family were present. Then came another Act which forbade ministers expelled under the Act of Uniformity from teaching in a school or living within five miles of a city or corporate town. Thus the Church system which Laud had lost his head in trying to establish in the reign of Charles the First became the law of the land by the will of the people in the reign of his indifferent and cynical son.

The author of these cruel Acts was not long to sit high in the king’s favour. He was a grave, ponderous man, with the utmost scorn for the idle triflers and wicked spendthrifts amongst whom the king wasted his days. Frequently he took Charles to task for his misdemeanours, and by his importunity goaded him into keeping his promises. “He often said it was the making those promises which had brought the king home, and the keeping of them must keep him at home.” The king’s friends hated the solemn, long-winded Polonius, and one of them used to whisper in Charles’s ear, “There goes your schoolmaster.”

After the second Dutch War, in which England was covered with disgrace, Clarendon was a convenient scapegoat, and Charles dismissed him without a shade of regret and no single mark of gratitude for the long and faithful service which the deposed chancellor had rendered him both in exile and after the Restoration. Clarendon’s fall was the signal for great rejoicing amongst the shameless crew which surrounded the king. As he left Whitehall, disgraced and abandoned, a courtier assured Charles “that this was the first time he could ever call him King of England, being freed from this great man.”

And now, “freed from this great man,” Charles began to descend deeper and deeper into the mire. He formed a ministry of his friends, and laid deep plans for ruling as an absolute king, but without running any undue risks. Hitherto he had laughed at religion; now, when sick and serious, he turned to the Church of Rome, and desired to re-establish it in his land, but again without running undue risks. On one principle and one principle alone Charles was absolutely fixed—he would never go on his travels again. Then he perpetrated his last and foullest piece of infamy—he sold himself to Lewis of France for a miserable £200,000 a year. Henceforth he was the pensioner of the French king and a secret traitor to his own subjects.