London before the Great Fire.
(From an engraving by Hollar.)
Between the years 1660 and 1667, some necessary repairs were undertaken in the Tower, some five hundred pounds being expended thereon. In 1680 more extensive repairs were made, owing to reports made by members of the House of Lords who had been appointed by the King in Council, to inquire into “repairs and other works to be done, in and about the said Tower of London, for the safety and convenience of the garrison therein” (Harleian MSS.). An elaborate report was drawn up, the estimate for the necessary alterations amounting to £6097, 2s., but like most of the important undertakings at that time, little, if anything, was accomplished. The order for these repairs issued by the Treasury stated that the above sum would be provided “so soon as the state of His Majesty’s affairs would permit”: but knowing the state of Charles’s “affairs,” we may be sure nothing came of it.
During the Great Fire of 1666, the Tower ran the most perilous risk in all its history of utter destruction, and it was only by the timely blowing up of the buildings which abutted on the walls of the fortress and by the side of the moat, that the historical structure was saved. The conflagration began at midnight on the 1st September in a house in Pudding Lane, not far from where the monument erected in its commemoration now stands. Pepys, that most invaluable of chroniclers and domestic historians, then lived in Seething Lane, Crutched Friars. “Lord’s Day, 2nd September,” he writes: “I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower, and there got up upon one of the high places (perhaps Pepys mounted to the top of the White Tower), Sir J. Robinson’s little son going up with me. And there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire in this and the other side of this and of that bridge.” On the seventh of this September Pepys bears witness to the King’s energy in bringing assistance to the sufferers by the conflagration. “In the meantime,” he writes, “his Majesty got to the Tower by water, to demolish the houses about the Graffs (?), which being built entirely about it, had they taken fire, and attacked the White Tower where the magazine of powder lay, would undoubtedly not only have beaten down and destroyed all the bridge, but sunk and torn the vessels in the river, and rendered the demolition beyond expression, for several miles about the country.”
Charles certainly showed the Stuart courage as well as resourcefulness at a crisis, for there can be little doubt that he was chiefly instrumental in saving the Tower, by ordering the blowing up of the dangerous buildings attached to its walls.
In Hollar’s panoramic view of London before and after the Great Fire, here reproduced, it will be seen how very close was the approach of the conflagration to the walls of the ancient fortress. Another danger threatened the Tower in this same year, a Captain Rathbone, with some other officers, having formed a plan for scaling the outer walls, and killing Sir John Robinson,[5] after securing the gates. It was one of the Anti-Royalist plots with which the period was so rife, and, like the majority of them, ended in failure; Rathbone and his gang were taken prisoners and promptly hanged at Tyburn.
APPEARETH NOW AFTER THE SAD CALAMITIE AND DESTRVCTION BY FIRE In the Yeare M. DC. LXVI.
Wenceslaus Hollar delin: et sculp: 1666, Cum Privilegio.
London after the Great Fire.
(From an engraving by Hollar.)