CHAPTER XVIII.
The Fire of London broke out on the 1st of September, in a baker's shop in Pudding Lane. It rushed down Fish Street Hill, and soon enveloped the dwellings by London Bridge and on the banks of the Thames. Fanned by the winds, the conflagration swept westward and northward. It passed in leaps from house to house, and flowed in streams from street to street. Torrents of flame coming over Cornhill met others dashing up from Walbrook and Bucklersbury. Along Cheapside, Ludgate, the Strand, the furious element advanced, curling round the edge of Smithfield, before its frightful circuit was complete. Thatched roofs, timber walls, cellars of oil, warehouses filled with inflammable material fed the tremendous pyre. Lead, iron, glass, were melted; water in cisterns was boiled, adding vapour to smoke; stones were calcined, and the ground became so hot that people walking over it burnt their shoes. The libraries of St. Paul's, and Sion College, with large collections of books and papers, were consumed; half-burnt leaves fell by Baxter's house at Acton, and were blown even as far as Windsor.[506] Public buildings shone like palaces of fine gold or burnished brass, and glowed like coals in a furnace, heated seven times hotter than usual. Blazing fragments were swept, like flakes in a snow storm, over the City; whilst the dense conflagration underneath resembled a bow—"a bow which had God's arrow in it with a flaming point." The cloud of smoke was so great that travellers at noon-day rode six miles under its shadow. At night the moon shone from a crimson sky. Young Taswell, a Westminster boy, stood on Westminster Bridge, with his little pocket edition of Terence in his hand, which he could see to read plainly by the light of the burning City.[507]
1666.
FIRE OF LONDON.
People were distracted. Everybody endeavoured to remove what he could—all sorts of things being conveyed away in carts and waggons, barges and wherries. Poor people near the bridges stayed in their houses so long that the fire touched them; and then they ran into boats, or clambered from one pair of stairs, by the waterside, to another. The pigeons were loath to leave their cots, and hovered about windows and balconies, until they scorched their wings, and fell. Churches were filled with furniture and articles of all kinds. Holes were dug in gardens to receive casks and bottles of wine, boxes of documents, and other treasures. The sick were carried in litters to places of safety, and multitudes encamped in the fields beyond Finsbury, in the village of Islington, and on the slopes of Highgate. Such was the eagerness to obtain the means of removing goods, that £4 a load for a carter, or 10s. a day for a porter, was counted poor pay. At the Temple, neither boat, barge, coach, nor cart, could be had for love or money; all the streets were crowded with appropriated vehicles of various kinds.
The constables of the respective parishes were required to attend at Temple Bar, Clifford's Inn Gardens, Fetter Lane, Shoe Lane, and Bow Lane, with 100 men each; at every post were stationed 130 foot soldiers, with a good officer; and three gentlemen, empowered to reward the diligent, by giving them one shilling apiece, whilst five pounds—in bread, cheese, and beer—were allowed to every party. The King and the Duke of York were bold and persevering in their endeavours to extinguish the conflagration, ordering the use of great hooks, kept in churches and chapels, for pulling down houses—the only means of stopping the fire being to cut off the fuel. The militia were called to aid these efforts and to prevent disturbance. They marched out of Hertfordshire, and other counties, with food for forty-eight hours, and with carts full of pickaxes, ropes, and buckets. These troops encamped at Kingsland, near Bishopsgate. Markets were held in Bishopsgate Street, upon Tower Hill, in Leadenhall Street, and in Smithfield. Bread and cheese were supplied to the famishing, and means were adopted to stimulate charity towards the homeless poor. Multitudes having taken refuge in the houses and fields about Islington, the King requested that strict watch might be kept in all the ways within the limits of the town and parish, and charitable and Christian reception, with lodging and entertainment, given to strangers. He further ordered, that bread should be brought both to the new and old markets; that all churches, chapels, schools, and public buildings, should be open to receive the property of such as were burnt out of house and home; and that other towns should receive sufferers who fled to them for refuge, and permit them to exercise their callings—promise being given that they should afterwards be no burthen.
1666.
Three hundred and seventy-three acres within the walls, and seventy-three acres three roods without the walls, were left covered with ruins from the Tower to the Temple, from the North-east gate of the City wall to Holborn Bridge. Besides Guildhall, and other public edifices, eighty-nine parish churches, and thirteen thousand two hundred dwellings were destroyed. The loss of property was estimated at eleven millions sterling.[508]
The miseries of the fire did not end with its extinction. In addition to the losses which arose from the destruction of property—manufacturers at Coventry, for example, being greatly injured by the burning of goods which they had sent to London for sale—and to other evils of various kinds incident after such a visitation, there were certain lamentable consequences of a peculiar nature.
This visitation, as might be expected, was construed as a Divine judgment for the sins of the City; different parties of course pointing at the iniquities of their opponents as the cause of the fiery overthrow. Fanatics believed that it was the vengeance of Heaven against English barbarity in burning the Islands of Vlie and Schelling, and against national sins in general. A Quaker, near Windsor, was reported to have heard a miraculous voice saying, that "they have had the pestilence, and fire, and other calamities, and yet are not amended; but a worse plague has yet to come on them and the nation." "They clearly intimate in their letters," it was said of the same sect, "no sorrow for the late burning down so many steeple-houses (as they call them) in all the City."[509]
FIRE OF LONDON.