On this day in 1666, the Great Fire of London broke out.
It started in Pudding Lane, at the bakery of Thomas Farriner, spreading quickly and burning until the 5th of September. Huge areas of the city were destroyed, but the number of deaths recorded is surprisingly small- although in recent years it’s been suggested that the deaths of the poor may not have been recorded properly, and the intensity of the fire meant that bodies would have been completely destroyed.
When news of the fire first got out, Samuel Pepys was one of the first to reach Whitehall and inform the king. The Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, was dismissive about the fire, saying that “A woman could piss it out”. However, his lack of awareness about the situation is partly responsible for the extent of the damage caused by the fire.
As the city authorities like Bloodworth didn’t take control, Charles II and his brother James, then Duke of York, took on the job of directing the efforts to control and extinguish the fire. Contemporary sources are particularly positive about them at this point in time, stating that both brothers worked alongside the ordinary people to throw buckets of water and demolish houses.
The entry in Samuel Pepys’s diary for the 2nd of September reads:
So down [I went], with my heart full of trouble, to the Lieutenant of the Tower, who tells me that it began this morning in the King’s baker’s house in Pudding Lane, and that it hath burned St. Magnus’s Church and most part of Fish Street already. So I rode down to the waterside, … and there saw a lamentable fire… . Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the waterside to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies, till they some of them burned their wings and fell down.
Having stayed, and in an hour’s time seen the fire rage every way, and nobody to my sight endeavouring to quench it, … I [went next] to Whitehall (with a gentleman with me, who desired to go off from the Tower to see the fire in my boat); and there up to the King’s closet in the Chapel, where people came about me, and I did give them an account [that]dismayed them all, and the word was carried into the King. so I was called for, and did tell the King and Duke of York what I saw; and that unless His Majesty did command houses to be pulled down, nothing could stop the fire. They seemed much troubled, and the King commanded me to go to my Lord Mayor from him, and command him to spare no houses.
John Evelyn also mentioned the fire in his diary, but it wasn’t until later that he realised the true extent of what was happening:
The fire having continued all this night (if I may call that night which was light as day for 10 miles round about, after a dreadful manner) when conspiring with a fierce eastern wind in a very dry season; I went on foot to the same place, and saw the whole south part of the city burning from Cheapside to the Thames, and all along Cornhill, (for it likewise kindled back against the wind as well as forward), Tower street, Fen-church street, Gracious street, and so along to Bainard’s Castle, and was now taking hold of St. Paul’s church, to which the scaffolds contributed exceedingly. The conflagration was so universal, and the people so astonished, that from the beginning, I know not by what despondency or fate, but crying out and lamentation, running about like distracted creatures without at all attempting to save even their goods; such a strange consternation there was among them, so as it burned both in breadth and length, the churches, public halls, Exchange, hospitals, monuments, and ornaments, leaping after a prodigious manner, from house to house and street to street, at great distances from one the other; for the heat with a long set of fair and warm weather had even ignited the air and prepared the materials to conceive the fire, which devoured after an incredible manner houses, furniture, and everything. Here we saw the Thames covered with goods floating, all the barges and boats laden with what some had time and courage to save, as, on the other, the carts, &c. carrying out to the fields, which for many miles were strewed with moveables of all sorts, and tents erecting to shelter both people and what goods they could get away.
