Evelyn, in describing the conflagration, says: “All the skie was of a fiery aspect like that of a burning oven, and the light seen above forty miles round about for many nights. God grant mine eyes may never behold the sight—who now saw ten thousand houses all in one flame; the noise and crackling and thunder of the impetuous flames; the shrieking of women and children; the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses, and churches was like an hideous storme and the aire all about so hot and inflamed that at last one was not able to approach it. The clouds also and smoke were dismall and reached upon computation neere 56 miles in length. The poore inhabitants were dispers’d about St. George’s Fields and Moorefields, as far as Highgate, and several miles in circle, some under tents, some under miserable hutts and hovells, many without a rag or any necessary utensils, bed or board, who from delicatenesse, riches, and easy accommodations in stately and well-furnished houses, were now reduc’d to extremest misery and poverty.”
Pepys tells us that the entire lead roof of St. Paul’s Cathedral, no less than six acres by measure, “fell in, the melted lead running down into the streets and into the crypt where books had been carried for safety.” He notes that the fire burned just as many parish churches as there were hours from the beginning to the end of the fire.
Dryden, in the long section of his “Annus Mirabilis” which describes the “Great Fire,” has a few lines among his prosaic stanzas which bear quotation:
“The ghosts of traitors from the bridge descend,
With bold fanatic spectres to rejoice:
About the fire into a dance they bend,
And sing their sabbath notes with feeble voice.
······
“A key of fire ran all along the shore,
And lightened all the river with a blaze:
The wakened tides began again to roar,
And wondering fish in shining waters gaze.
······
“The rich grow suppliant, and the poor grow proud:
Those offer mighty gain, and these ask more:
So void of pity is the ignoble crowd,
When others’ ruin may increase their store.
······
“The most in fields like herded beasts lie down,
To dews obnoxious on the grassy floor;
And while their babes in sleep their sorrows drown,
Sad parents watch the remnants of their store.”
The king, who for the time being had behaved in manly fashion, went back to his dalliance with courtesans and “the burning lusts, dissolute court, profane and abominable lives” of which Evelyn writes on the day of fast and humiliation ordered for the occasion.
Though there was not a particle of proof that the Catholics had anything whatever to do with the origin of the fire, the frenzy and prejudice of the populace attributed it to them, and an inscription to that effect, which later was erased, was placed upon the monument.
The fire destroyed eighty-eight churches besides St. Paul’s, together with the city gates, the Exchange, the Custom House, 13,200 dwelling-houses, and four hundred streets. A space of 436 acres, two-thirds of the entire city, was consumed; and property then valued at £7,335,000 was destroyed. For six months London remained a chaos of rubbish heaps. Pepys writes that in March he still saw smoke rising from the ruins. The eight churches in the city proper that still remain practically as Milton saw them have been described in detail. They are All Hallows Barking, St. Ethelburga’s, St. Andrew Undershaft, of Saxon foundation; St. Olave’s, of Danish; and St. Helen’s, of Norman foundation; St. Catherine Cree, Austin Friars, which was the Dutch church, and St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, just beside the city wall. Of the six others that were not destroyed, All Hallows by the wall (Broad Street Ward) and St. Katherine Coleman (Aldgate) were rebuilt later. The four that then remained but have since disappeared were St. Christopher le Stocks, and St. Martin Outwich (Broad Street Ward), All-Hallows, Staining (Tower Ward), and St. Alphage, Aldermanbury.
Forty churches were rebuilt after the fire, and these were all designed by Sir Christopher Wren, who when he began his gigantic task was a young man of thirty-five. Wren, who was a nephew of the Bishop of Ely, was trained under Doctor Busby in Westminster School, and then at Wadham College, Oxford, and was there noted by John Evelyn as a “miracle of a youth,” “a prodigious young scholar,” who showed him “a thermometer, a monstrous magnet, and some dials.”
Wren was a little later one of the chief founders of the Royal Society, and its first meetings were held in his rooms. As versatile and original as Da Vinci, he excelled in Latin, mathematics, and astronomy, and was a close student of anatomy, and other sciences as well. Ten years before the Great Fire he was professor of astronomy in Gresham College, London, and at the age of twenty-eight, he was elected to the professorship of astronomy in Oxford. Before he was thirty and had done any work in architecture, Isaac Barrow declared him to be “something superhuman.” About this time he invented an agricultural implement for planting, and a method of making fresh water at sea. A year before the Fire he solved a knotty problem in geometry which Pascal had sent to English mathematicians. Says Hooke, “I must affirm that since the time of Archimedes there scarce ever met in one man in so great a perfection such a mechanical hand and so philosophic a mind.” Had Wren never designed a building he would have been famous for his achievements in the study of the cycloid, in rendering practical the use of the barometer, in inventing a method for the transference of one animal’s blood to another, in methods for noting longitude at sea, and for other studies and inventions too numerous to mention.
Wren was a self-taught architect. Before the Fire he erected Pembroke College Chapel at Cambridge, and the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford. He then visited Paris, where he saw Bernini, and made the most of observations of the Louvre and such Renaissance work as Paris then afforded. His bent of mind was wholly divergent from the Gothic, and as it proved, in the few instances in which he introduced its features into his Renaissance churches, the result was as incongruous as Chaucer’s cap and gown upon a Roman emperor.