Meantime, Boyle’s treatise, Hydrostatical Paradoxes, that had been slowly printing for several months, appeared early in that year. This was shortly followed by his Origin of Forms; and a good many of his philosophical transactions also belong to this year. Later in the summer, when the London season was over, he was living in his Chelsea lodging; but he had been ill again; and Lady Ranelagh was back in her house in Pall Mall.

Was Boyle in London from the second of September to the fifth? Did he watch, as it grew dark on the eve of Cromwell’s “lucky day”, from Chelsea, or from Pall Mall, that arc of fire over the poor blazing City—so lately pestilence-stricken that its burial-grounds were choked with lime, its bells still tolling, and almost every house was in mourning? Did he see the Fire of London? Probably Boyle was in London, for on September 10, Oldenburg was writing as if Boyle had just left town, and he says nothing in his letter to Boyle of the Fire itself, but begins, as it were, when the Fire left off. Boyle had called at Oldenburg’s house to say good-bye, and Oldenburg was much disappointed that he had been out, but was glad that Boyle had been well enough to make the journey: “I cannot omit acquainting you,” he goes on, “that never a calamity—and such a one—was borne so well as this is. It is incredible how little the sufferers, though great ones, do complain of their losses. I was yesterday in many meetings of the principal citizens whose houses are laid in ashes, who, instead of complaining, discoursed almost of nothing but of a Survey of London, and a design for rebuilding....”[308]

Two days later, Lady Ranelagh also wrote to Boyle; and again it is noticeable that she gives him no account of the Fire itself. She reports her own household to be as safe as it was when he left them—

“I have since taken to myself the mortification of seeing the desolations that God, in his just and dreadful judgment, has made in the poor City, which is thereby now turned indeed into a ruinous heap, and gave me the most amazing spectacle that ever I beheld in my progress about and into this ruin. I dispensed your Charity amongst some poor families and persons that I found yet in the fields unhoused....”

And the end of her letter is equally characteristic: “Gresham College is now Guildhall, and the Exchange, and all. If the philosophers and the citizens become one corporation henceforward, it may be hoped our affairs may be better managed than they have been, unless the citizens should prove the prevailing party, which, as the worst, it is most like to do in this world, according to the small observation of your K. R.”[309]

CHAPTER XVI
A NEW LONDON

“In the meane time the King and Parliament are infinitely zealous for the rebuilding of our ruines; and I believe it will universally be the employment of the next spring. They are now busied with adjusting the claims of each proprietor, that so they may dispose things for the building after the noblest model: Everybody brings in his idea, amongst the rest I presented his Majestie my own Conceptions, with a Discourse annex’d. It was the second that was seene within 2 Dayes after the Conflagration: but Dr. Wren had got the start of me.”—John Evelyn to Sir Samuel Tuke, September 27, 1666.

Christopher Wren had not let the ashes cool under his feet. Evelyn was picking his way among the debris—“the ground ... so hot that it even burnt the soles of my shoes”—and mourning over the ninety burnt City Churches, and the ruins of St. Paul’s, “one of the most antient pieces of piety in the Christian World.” He was thinking of the “poore Bookesellers,” who, having trusted all their “noble impressions” to the insides of the Churches, had “ben indeede ill-treated by Vulcan.” Two hundred thousand pounds’ worth of books had been burnt: “an extraordinary detriment,” says Evelyn, “to the whole Republiq of Learning.”[310] Pepys, after the grimy fatigues of the past few days, had been “trimmed,” and had gone to Church, in his Sunday best, and listened to a bad, poor sermon by the Dean of Rochester: “nor eloquent, in saying at this time that the City is reduced from a large folio to a decimo-tertio”:—the Dean, too, must have been among the booksellers. Lady Ranelagh was dispensing Robert Boyle’s charity among the houseless Londoners huddled in the fields; and Henry Oldenburg was writing to Robert Boyle in Oxford. “The Stationers of Paul’s,” he wrote, “had suffered greatly.” All their books, carried by them into St. Faith’s Church, under St. Paul’s, had been burnt; and amongst them were the “hitherto printed Transactions.”

“Dr. Wren,” he continued, “has, since my last, drawn a model for a New City, and presented it to the King, who produced it himself before the Council, and manifested much approbation of it. I was yesterday morning with the Doctor, and saw the model, which methinks does so well provide for security, conveniency, and beauty, that I can see nothing wanting as to those three main articles; but whether it has consulted with the populousness of a great City, and whether reason of state would have that consulted with, is a query to me. I then told the Doctor that, if I had had an opportunity to speak with him sooner, I should have suggested to him that such a model, contrived by him and received and approved by the Royal Society or a Committee thereof, before it had come to the view of his Majesty, would have given Our Society a name, and made it popular, and availed not a little to silence those who ask continually, what have they done?”