How French spies burnt London to the ground
. . .at least that’s what most Britons thought when the Great Fire started 350 years ago this week. And, as this mesmerising hour-by-hour account reveals, they took savage revenge on any foreigner they caught
THE summer of 1666 was hot and dry and the numbers of plague dead were rising. In the City of London, 80,000 people were crammed within a square mile. Narrow streets were jammed with carts and the upper storeys of houses jutted out so far they blocked the daylight. All this was to be destroyed by the Great Fire of London 350 years ago. Here, we tell the story of one of the most dramatic events in British history as it unfolded hour by hour.
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1666
8 PM: Thomas Farriner closed up his bakery on Pudding Lane, close to the Thames, just east of London Bridge.
‘Pudding’ was the medieval word for ‘offal’ and referred to the entrails and other animal waste which were taken away down the street to dung boats on the river.
Farriner would have baked in something similar to a pizza oven: a domed brick cavity, heated by burning wood laid directly on the oven floor and raked out once the space was hot enough for the baking to begin.
By evening the oven would be cold, and each night Farriner relaid the kindling ready for lighting early the next morning. On this evening, as usual, he raked over the coals in the grate of the fireplace and went to bed.
MIDNIGHT: Hanna Farriner, Thomas’s 23-yearold daughter, was the last person up. Before going upstairs to bed, she took a last look around the house and checked the bakehouse. She noticed nothing untoward.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 2
1 AM: Thomas Farriner’s manservant, who slept on the ground floor, woke up coughing and choking. The room was full of smoke.
He managed to make his way upstairs and wake Thomas, Hanna and their maid. Their only escape route was out of a window and along the guttering to their neighbour’s window. Thomas Farriner went first. Hanna, already badly burnt, managed to follow him, as did the manservant, but the maid didn’t make it.
The Farriners’ shouts roused local people to help put out the fire, filling buckets with water from the Thames. The immediate neighbours had time to clear their property as the blaze was confined to the bakery for about an hour.
When, despite their best efforts, the flames began to spread down Pudding Lane towards the warehouses that lined the Thames, the parish constables decided to call the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bludworth. They wanted permission to pull down nearby buildings in order to contain the fire.
Bludworth, apparently annoyed at being woken, declared he could not possibly order the destruction of houses without the agreement of the landlords, few of whom could be found in the middle of the night. In any case, Bludworth insisted, the fire was manageable: ‘A woman could p*** it out.’
Fire engines were summoned. These were heavy tanks with manual pumps that needed eight horses or 28 men to pull them through the streets.
They struggled to reach the fire as Pudding Lane was blocked by fleeing residents carrying what goods they could. By the time they arrived, the fire was so fierce their hoses couldn’t reach the heart of the blaze.
The flames were fanned by the persistent east wind and fuelled by the pitch commonly stored in basements for use in the maintenance of river vessels. We know that temperatures must have reached 1,700c, as melted pottery has been found on the site by archeologists.
The wooden waterwheels beneath London Bridge, which helped provide water for the fire engines, caught ablaze, so the engines had further problems with their water supply, and several fell into the river in the attempt to refill their tanks.
3 AM: A quarter of a mile away, in a house in Seething Lane beside the Tower of London, the household maids were up late preparing for a special Sunday dinner.
When they finally went to bed, they saw the glow of a great fire in the City from their attic window.
One of the maids, Jane Birch, rushed to wake the master and mistress of the house, Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys. Samuel slipped on his nightgown and went up to the maids’ room to look. He judged the blaze far enough away and went back to bed and to sleep.
7 AM: When Pepys got up, it looked to him as if the fire had died down. It was an illusion of daylight and Jane Birch soon had word from the street that 300 houses had been destroyed and that Fish Street, the main thoroughfare leading north from London Bridge, was alight.
BEFORE 8 AM: Pepys walked the short distance to the Tower of London, where he climbed the battlements to get a good view over the city. The sight shocked him. Not only was Fish Street alight, but so were the two churches that stood at the entrance to London Bridge. The warehouses of Thames Street were ablaze and all the houses that lined the bridge.
The fire stretched about a quarter of a mile west from Pudding Lane. As he looked out over the city, Pepys saw flames licking the steeple of St Laurence Pountney — one of the highest points on the skyline. Within minutes, the great spire came crashing to the ground.
ABOUT 8 AM: Pepys, who worked in the Admiralty, took a boat up river to Whitehall to inform the King. He was ushered straight into a meeting with Charles II and his brother James, the Duke of York.
They ordered him to instruct Mayor Bludworth to start the demolition of buildings to limit the spread of the fire. They also offered troops, should this measure fail.
LATER THAT MORNING: Pepys set off back to the city by coach in search of Lord Mayor Bludworth, whom he found in an office in Cannon Street, ‘like a man spent’. Bludworth had a handkerchief around his neck, and when Pepys gave him the King’s message, ‘ he cried like a fainting woman’. Bludworth insisted he was already doing everything that could be done and that . . . ‘he needed no more soldiers; and that he must go and refresh himself . . .’ which he promptly did.
Rumours were flying around London that the fire was not an accident, but an act of terrorism by foreign enemies — most likely, the Roman Catholic French.
Fourteen-year-old William Taswell, a pupil at Westminster School, was horrified to witness a brutal attack on ‘an innocent Frenchman walking along the street’.
A blacksmith ‘felled him to the ground with an iron bar. I could not help seeing the innocent blood of this exotic flowing in a plentiful stream down to his ancles (sic)’.
EARLY AFTERNOON: Charles II and the Duke of York set off downstream in a barge to see the fire for themselves. They were horrified by the enormity of the damage.
Charles summoned a former Lord Mayor, Sir Richard Browne, and instructed him to begin the demolition of buildings between the fire and the Tower of London.
It was essential to prevent the fire reaching the Tower as it held huge quantities of gun powder.
That evening, Samuel Pepys sat with his wife in an alehouse on the South Bank, not far from London Bridge, from where they watched the fire grow.
‘As far as we could see up the hill of the City, in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire . . . a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruine,’ he wrote.
Samuel wept. Eventually, he and his wife set off back across the river to their home, ‘with a sad heart’.
The fire had already destroyed 1,000 homes and businesses, nine churches, 22 alleys and wharves, and six Livery company halls.
ABOUT 11 PM: As the sound of the fire grew louder, Samuel Pepys started packing up the family goods for removal.
He moved his iron chests and money into the cellar, and his paintings and furniture into the garden
‘by mooneshine’. Pepys then began to panic that the garden would not be safe enough when he learnt that his neighbour was taking his goods to the country.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 3
4 AM: Still wearing his nightgown, Pepys left his house by cart, bearing all their belongings to the safety of a house in Bethnal Green.
Even at this hour, the roads out of London were packed with people fleeing the city.
LATER THAT MORNING: Charles II decided to intervene more forcefully, so he put his brother James, the Duke of York, in charge of the fire-fighting efforts.
James set up command posts along the perimeter of the fire, giving his courtiers instructions to press-gang firefighters and reward those who stayed in post with a shilling a night — a huge sum.
The exodus continued all day. Many people set up makeshift camps on Moorfields, the large public gardens just north of the city.
With almost all shops destroyed or closed, there was a shortage of food and drink.
As the conflagration spread, so did the attacks on foreigners. A member of the Portuguese ambassador’s household was beaten up by a mob.
A young man was thrown in Bridewell prison because he looked like a Frenchman.
The teenage William Taswell heard rumours that 4,000 French were about to set upon London and spread the fire. Many in the city and the suburbs were arming themselves in readiness for this attack. ABOUT 9 PM: Back home in Seething Lane, Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys ate cold leftovers. They’d had no sleep the previous night, and now had no furniture, so they lay down in Samuel’s office upon a quilt belonging to his manservant, William Hewer.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4
5 PM: The fire had reached the east side of medieval St Paul’s Cathedral — a vast symbolic landmark in the city, longer than today’s cathedral and 120 ft taller. It could be seen for miles.
The Duke of York moved on to the northern edge of the fire to oversee the destruction of houses in Holborn.
Charles II joined his brother at the pumps and both men stood for hours in ankle-deep water. Day was now as dark as night, under a vast cloud of smoke and dust, and the ground shook with explosions. One nobleman, Lord Berkeley, had begun using the gunpowder at the Tower of London to blow up the houses along Tower Street.
Just after sunset, young William Taswell went down to the Thames at Westminster, where he had a view downriver of the City. He could see how close the fire was to St Paul’s, and was transfixed.
ABOUT 8 PM: Samuel Pepys buried his wine and parmesan cheese in his garden. He ‘supped’ with neighbours ‘ on a shoulder of mutton . . . without any napkin or anything, in a sad manner, but were merry’.
From time to time they went out into the garden to look at the sky, which was all on fire and ‘enough to put us out of our wits; and indeed it was extremely dreadful — for it looks just as if . . . the whole heaven [was] on fire’.
9 PM: The fire had taken hold and St Paul’s Cathedral was burning so brightly that by its light Taswell was able to read a small edition of the Latin plays of Terence, which he carried in his pocket.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5
2 AM: Elizabeth Pepys, laying for a second night on their manservant William Hewer’s quilt on the floor of her husband’s office, was woken by cries of ‘Fire!’
Barking church at the bottom of Seething Lane was alight. The household leapt out of bed and Samuel ordered a boat to take his wife, his gold and his servants to Woolwich. ‘ But Lord, what a sad sight it was by moonlight to see the whole city almost on fire.’
7 AM: Samuel Pepys returned home, expecting to find his house burnt to the ground. But, it was not. Luckily, the fire in nearby Barking church had petered out. The wind had finally dropped.
ABOUT 4 PM: Samuel Pepys walked to Moorfields to see the encampment. He bought himself a drink and a penny loaf, which cost two pence. The people camping in the great park were wretched, huddled over their few possessions and miserable with hunger. Few of the displaced Londoners could afford the inflated prices.
EVENING: The Duke of York decided the worst was over. Having checked every post was manned for the night, he returned exhausted to his rooms in Whitehall. But 70,000 people had no rooms to return to.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6
6.30 AM: At dawn, William Taswell set off to see the ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral. The ground was so hot that the 14-year- old scorched his shoes, and the air was so hot he had to rest at Fleet Bridge, feeling faint and overcome.
When Taswell reached St Paul’s, he was in ‘violent emotion’. He was shocked by the sight of melted metal, which he assumed had come from the great bells, but may well have been lead from the roof.
The building was very unstable, and William was almost crushed by falling masonry as he climbed over the ruins.
He came upon the body of an old woman, ‘whole as to skin, meagre as to flesh, yellow as to colour’.
He loaded his pockets with pieces of metal, helped himself to a sword and a helmet, and returned to school.
LATER THAT DAY: Charles II rode out to the public encampment at Moorfields and made a speech to the crowds. He assured them the fire had been caused by an accident and not by a foreign plot.
As the King spoke, the clear-up operation was beginning. The teams of firefighters were joined by local residents in clearing rubble and smouldering timbers.
The people who were camping in the green fields of London began to move on to find places to stay in the outskirts of the city and in the villages beyond.
The tally of destruction was 13,500 houses, 87 churches, 44 Company Halls, three city gates, the city’s prisons, the Royal Exchange, the Custom House and St Paul’s Cathedral.
The human casualties recorded, though, are amazingly low, with fewer than ten people known to have died.
The figure is undoubtedly an underestimate, as some bodies would have been incinerated, and in the chaos of the dispersal of so many citizens, human loss was hard to count.
Nonetheless, death by smoke inhalation was much rarer before the invention of plastics.
The people of London were, of course, traumatised. Elizabeth Pepys’s hair fell out and Samuel suffered from recurrent nightmares, headaches and stomach aches. And these were people who lost almost nothing in the fire.