London in Flames: Apocalypse 1666

London in Flames Apocalypse 1666 James D. Rietveld

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Also, there are actual accounts of the citizens of the time in the book, which adds to the facts and makes the reading more relatable in that it is easier to understand the people and how they are feeling. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. I enjoyed the story for the most partl; however, too much of the outcome seemed to depend upon happenstance and coincidence. The characters were well developed and the scenes presented were easily visualized.

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AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. Even under normal circumstances, the mix of carts, wagons, and pedestrians in the undersized alleys was subject to frequent traffic jams and gridlock. During the fire, the passages were additionally blocked by refugees camping in them amongst their rescued belongings, or escaping outwards, away from the centre of destruction, as demolition teams and fire engine crews struggled in vain to move in towards it. Demolishing the houses downwind of a dangerous fire was often an effective way of containing the destruction by means of firehooks or explosives.

This time, however, demolition was fatally delayed for hours by the Lord Mayor's lack of leadership and failure to give the necessary orders. The use of water to extinguish the fire was also frustrated. In principle, water was available from a system of elm pipes which supplied 30, houses via a high water tower at Cornhill , filled from the river at high tide, and also via a reservoir of Hertfordshire spring water in Islington.

Further, Pudding Lane was close to the river. Theoretically, all the lanes from the river up to the bakery and adjoining buildings should have been manned with double rows of firefighters passing full buckets up to the fire and empty buckets back down to the river. This did not happen, or at least was no longer happening by the time that Pepys viewed the fire from the river at mid-morning on the Sunday. Pepys comments in his diary that nobody was trying to put it out, but instead they fled from it in fear, hurrying "to remove their goods, and leave all to the fire.

The resulting conflagration cut off the firefighters from the immediate water supply from the river and set alight the water wheels under London Bridge which pumped water to the Cornhill water tower; the direct access to the river and the supply of piped water failed together. London possessed advanced fire-fighting technology in the form of fire engines , which had been used in earlier large-scale fires.

However, unlike the useful firehooks, these large pumps had rarely proved flexible or functional enough to make much difference. Only some of them had wheels; others were mounted on wheelless sleds. On this occasion, an unknown number of fire engines were either wheeled or dragged through the streets, some from across the City. The piped water had already failed which they were designed to use, but parts of the river bank could still be reached. Gangs of men tried desperately to manoeuvre the engines right up to the river to fill their reservoirs, and several of the engines toppled into the Thames.

The heat from the flames by then was too great for the remaining engines to get within a useful distance; they could not even get into Pudding Lane. The personal experiences of many Londoners during the fire are glimpsed in letters and memoirs. The two best-known diarists of the Restoration are Samuel Pepys — [27] and John Evelyn — , [28] and both recorded the events and their own reactions day by day, and made great efforts to keep themselves informed of what was happening all over the City and beyond. After two rainy summers in and , London had lain under an exceptional drought since November , and the wooden buildings were tinder-dry after the long hot summer of The family was trapped upstairs but managed to climb from an upstairs window to the house next door, except for a maidservant who was too frightened to try, who became the first victim.

The householders protested, and Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth was summoned, who alone had the authority to override their wishes. When Bloodworth arrived, the flames were consuming the adjoining houses and creeping towards the paper warehouses and flammable stores on the riverfront. The more experienced firemen were clamouring for demolition, but Bloodworth refused on the grounds that most premises were rented and the owners could not be found. Bloodworth is generally thought to have been appointed to the office of Lord Mayor as a yes man , rather than by possessing requisite capabilities for the job.

He panicked when faced with a sudden emergency [31] and, when pressed, made the oft-quoted remark, "Pish! A woman could piss it out", and left. After the City had been destroyed, Samuel Pepys looked back on the events and wrote in his diary on 7 September Pepys was a senior official in the Navy Office by then, and he ascended the Tower of London on Sunday morning to view the fire from a turret. He recorded in his diary that the eastern gale had turned it into a conflagration. It had burned down several churches and, he estimated, houses and reached the riverfront.

The houses on London Bridge were burning. He took a boat to inspect the destruction around Pudding Lane at close range and describes 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 water-side to another.

So I was called for, and did tell the King and Duke of Yorke 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, but to pull down before the fire every way. Young schoolboy William Taswell had bolted from the early morning service in Westminster Abbey. He saw some refugees arrive in hired lighter boats near Westminster Stairs, a mile west of Pudding Lane, unclothed and covered only with blankets.

The fire spread quickly in the high wind and, by mid-morning on Sunday, people abandoned attempts at extinguishing it and fled. The moving human mass and their bundles and carts made the lanes impassable for firemen and carriages. Pepys took a coach back into the city from Whitehall, but reached only St Paul's Cathedral before he had to get out and walk. Pedestrians with handcarts and goods were still on the move away from the fire, heavily weighed down. The parish churches not directly threatened were filling up with furniture and valuables, which soon had to be moved further afield.

Pepys found Bloodworth trying to co-ordinate the fire-fighting efforts and near to collapse, "like a fainting woman", crying out plaintively in response to the King's message that he was pulling down houses. He found that houses were still not being pulled down, in spite of Bloodworth's assurances to Pepys, and daringly overrode the authority of Bloodworth to order wholesale demolitions west of the fire zone.

A tremendous uprush of hot air above the flames was driven by the chimney effect wherever constrictions narrowed the air current, such as the constricted space between jettied buildings, and this left a vacuum at ground level. The resulting strong inward winds did not tend to put the fire out, as might be thought; [36] instead, they supplied fresh oxygen to the flames, and the turbulence created by the uprush made the wind veer erratically both north and south of the main easterly direction of the gale which was still blowing.

Pepys went again on the river in the early evening with his wife and some friends, "and to the fire up and down, it still encreasing". They ordered the boatman to go "so near the fire as we could for smoke; and all over the Thames, with one's face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops". When the "firedrops" became unbearable, the party went on to an alehouse on the South Bank and stayed there till darkness came and they could see the fire on London Bridge and across the river, "as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side of the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: Pepys described this arch of fire as "a bow with God's arrow in it with a shining point".

The fire was principally expanding north and west by dawn on Monday, 3 September, the turbulence of the fire storm pushing the flames both farther south and farther north than the day before. Southwark was preserved by a pre-existent firebreak on the bridge, a long gap between the buildings which had saved the south side of the Thames in the fire of and now did so again. The fire's spread to the north reached the financial heart of the City.

The houses of the bankers in Lombard Street began to burn on Monday afternoon, prompting a rush to get their stacks of gold coins to safety before they melted away, so crucial to the wealth of the city and the nation. Several observers emphasise the despair and helplessness which seemed to seize Londoners on this second day, and the lack of efforts to save the wealthy, fashionable districts which were now menaced by the flames, such as the Royal Exchange —combined bourse and shopping centre — and the opulent consumer goods shops in Cheapside.

The Royal Exchange caught fire in the late afternoon, and was a smoking shell within a few hours. John Evelyn, courtier and diarist, wrote:. He went by coach to Southwark on Monday, joining many other upper-class people, to see the view which Pepys had seen the day before of the burning City across the river. The conflagration was much larger now: In the evening, Evelyn reported that the river was covered with barges and boats making their escape piled with goods.

He observed a great exodus of carts and pedestrians through the bottleneck City gates, making for the open fields to the north and east, "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. Oh, the miserable and calamitous spectacle! Suspicion soon arose in the threatened city that the fire was no accident.

The swirling winds carried sparks and burning flakes long distances to lodge on thatched roofs and in wooden gutters , causing seemingly unrelated house fires to break out far from their source and giving rise to rumours that fresh fires were being set on purpose. Foreigners were immediately suspects because of the current Second Anglo-Dutch War. Fear and suspicion hardened into certainty on Monday, as reports circulated of imminent invasion and of foreign undercover agents seen casting "fireballs" into houses, or caught with hand grenades or matches. The fears of terrorism received an extra boost from the disruption of communications and news as facilities were devoured by the fire.

The General Letter Office in Threadneedle Street burned down early on Monday morning, through which post passed for the entire country. The London Gazette just managed to put out its Monday issue before the printer's premises went up in flames. The whole nation depended on these communications, and the void which they left filled up with rumours. There were also religious alarms of renewed Gunpowder Plots. Suspicions rose to panic and collective paranoia on Monday, and both the Trained Bands and the Coldstream Guards focused less on fire fighting and more on rounding up foreigners, Catholics, and any odd-looking people, arresting them or rescuing them from mobs, or both together.

The inhabitants were growing desperate to remove their belongings from the City, especially the upper class. This provided a source of income for the able-bodied poor, who hired out as porters sometimes simply making off with the goods , and it was especially profitable for the owners of carts and boats. Seemingly every cart and boat owner within reach of London made their way towards the City to share in these opportunities, the carts jostling at the narrow gates with the panicked inhabitants trying to get out. The chaos at the gates was such that the magistrates ordered the gates shut on Monday afternoon, in the hope of turning the inhabitants' attention from safeguarding their own possessions to fighting the fire: Monday marked the beginning of organised action, even as order broke down in the streets, especially at the gates, and the fire raged unchecked.

Bloodworth was responsible as Lord Mayor for co-ordinating the fire-fighting, but he had apparently left the City; his name is not mentioned in any contemporaneous accounts of the Monday's events. James set up command posts round the perimeter of the fire, press-ganging into teams of well-paid and well-fed firemen any men of the lower classes found in the streets. Three courtiers were put in charge of each post, with authority from Charles himself to order demolitions. This visible gesture of solidarity from the Crown was intended to cut through the citizens' misgivings about being held financially responsible for pulling down houses.

James and his life guards rode up and down the streets all Monday, rescuing foreigners from the mob and attempting to keep order. A fat drop of rain, then another and another, splattered in the dust. Lightning again forked down. There was another peal of thunder, and then a curtain of rain swept over the street, hissing against the cobbles. Within seconds water was teeming from the roofs, pouring from jetties and spouts, and cascading in waterfalls from the gables.

The kennel in the center of the street filled with a surge of brown, foaming water. The fires burning before every sixth house hissed and spat. The flames shriveled and sank to twists of smoke and steam in the rain, then guttered out, one by one, like snuffed candles.

Water swirled around the piles of filth and rubbish in the streets and lapped at the heaps of black, charred embers, then swept them away. Tar barrels still ablaze outside St. There was now no sound but the rush of water in the streets. Choked by clouds of swirling smoke, the light over the city dimmed and went out, leaving it as black and cold as the grave. The brooding mass and squat, truncated tower of St.

Although two men had been set to tend and watch over every fire, so closely built and combustible were the older parts of the city that the attempt to burn off the plague might easily have reduced the entire city to rubble. The riverside wharves were stacked with wood and coal, domestic fuel for the coming winter.

Behind them, running parallel to the river from one 41 The Great Fire of London end of the city to the other, lay Thames Street. He heard the whistle of the wind around the eaves, the rattle of the casements, the creak of timbers, and the squeak of the great iron signs as they swung in the gale, and at first he thought that these were the sounds that had awoken him. Then the noise came again. His servant, Teagh, was pounding at his door, his hoarse shouts ending in a hacking cough.

As his senses cleared, Thomas felt a choking sensation. He struggled for breath, his eyes streaming with tears. The room was filled with smoke. He leaped from the bed, shouting to his daughter. He groped his way to the window, threw the casement wide open, and took a deep draft of the night air. Then he recrossed the room, fumbled for the handle, and opened the door. Thomas dropped to his knees and crawled toward the head of the stairs. The darkness was lit by an orange glow.

He heard the crackle of fire and saw flames already licking around the stairs, barring the way. The treads were thin and fibrous from generations of wear, and the flames seized on them hungrily, climbing fast toward the upper floors. Hannah was out of bed and standing huddled by the window, her eyes wide with fear. He thrust his head and shoulders out of the window. There was a sheer drop of twenty feet to the street, and the jetty of the floor above projected out by a yard, preventing them from climbing to the roof.

He looked to right and left, but there was not sufficient foothold on the timber studding for them to escape that way.

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The stairs were now well ablaze. He led the way back to his own room and peered down into the yard. In the light from the fire, he could see that the stacks of brushwood in the yard were not yet ablaze and the bakehouse was still in darkness. The wall fell away sheer to the cobbles with no trace of a handhold or foothold.

He ran back into the corridor, followed by Hannah and Teagh. If they could climb out onto the great iron sign hanging from the wall below his window and lower themselves from it, there would be a drop of only a few feet to the ground. Thomas turned the handle, but the door was stuck fast. Fighting down a growing wave of panic, he laid a hand on the door. It was hot to the touch. It resisted as he pushed, then gave with a crack as he put his shoulder to it. He caught a momentary glimpse of the smoldering hangings around the walls, then there was a blinding flash.

He threw himself flat as a sheet of flame spread in an instant from one side of the room to the other. It burst through the door, searing over his head, but enveloping Hannah, standing behind him. Her clothes and hair were ablaze at once, and he and Teagh had to beat out the flames as she clung to them. Her face and arms were left badly burned.

His hair was singed from his head, his ears burned, and his brow blackened and blistered. He croaked to Hannah to 44 The Lodge ofAll Combustibles follow him and led her and Teagh up the crooked winding stairs to the garret.

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Every breath he took felt like fire in his lungs. He closed the door behind them, but the smoke was now so dense and choking that they had to lie full length as they wormed their way across the floor. The maidservant, Rose, lay on her sleeping mat on the bare boards, shaking with fright, the covers still drawn up about her chin. Thomas hauled himself upright and pushed open the casement. The wind whistled in his ears as he wrenched and tore at the window, forcing it backward and forward against the frame until the rotten wood gave and fell crashing to the cobbles below. He struggled to force his bulky frame through the opening, then perched swaying on the sill as he felt around for the roof tiles, his fingers scrabbling for grip.

He found purchase on the edge of a tile. It shifted a fraction under his hand, but held as he straddled the casement and the roof edge for a moment, then hauled himself out onto the roof. He braced his foot against the ridge gutter and reached a hand around, calling to Hannah to follow him. She hesitated on the brink, backlit by the flames already licking at the door of the garret, then, clutching his hand, she half climbed and was half dragged through the broken casement and onto the roof.

Teagh clambered out next. Only Rose now remained behind. She stood in the window, rooted to the spot. Although Thomas cajoled and entreated, ordered and threatened, she remained motionless, mute with terror. When he grasped her arm to pull her out, she jerked it away. He teetered on the point of falling for a moment, then hauled himself back to the safety of the roof. He tried once more, telling Rose that she would die if she stayed there.

She shook her head, mute, more frightened of falling to the cobbles than of the fire within. Wreathed with flame and smoke, her face was still framed at the window as Thomas turned away and began to crawl along the gutter, clinging to the uneven, soot-encrusted roof. The wind whipped his nightgown around him, and the coarse roof tiles scraped his knees.

As he crawled on, his groping hand dislodged one of the tiles. It slid down the roof and disappeared over the edge, shattering on the cobbles forty feet below. Thomas felt cold sweat on his blistered brow as he continued to inch his way forward. He reached around, his fingers scrabbling at the glass, and kept banging on the small panes until at last the casement was thrown open and a face appeared. There was a narrow ledge in front of the casement just wide enough to stand on.

Thomas stood there, gripping the frame with his left hand and reaching out with his right to help first Hannah and then Teagh to safety. Just before he crawled after them, Thomas looked back along the roof to the garret of his own house. It was only then that Thomas thought of the gold locked in his own cabinet.

He ran outside and up the street to his house. The door was barred and bolted from the inside, and the windows were smoke-blackened and cracked with the heat. He could hear the roar of flames and the crash of falling timber. His gold and everything else he possessed were already beyond his reach. He retreated and stood helpless with Hannah as their home and workplace burned before their eyes. The bakehouse, filled with combustibles, its walls and ceiling steeped in decades of smoke and grease, was now an inferno, and smoke was also seeping in thickening streams from between the roof slates.

Tongues of fire were scorching the broken casement through which they had escaped. Hidden behind the burning walls, Rose already lay dead, asphyxiated by the smoke and fumes long before the creeping flames devoured her body.

There was a thunder of drums, beating to call the citizens to arms against the blaze, and moments later the bells of St. There were cries and shouts, and the sound of running feet. A few ran to the church for the 46 The Lodge ofAll Combustibles equipment stored there against the outbreak of a fire, but such was the speed at which the blaze was spreading that most hurried to secure their goods, already certain that their houses were doomed.

The men returned from St. There had been no great fire these thirty years, and the equipment stored there was either damaged or missing altogether. The ladders, axes, and many of the leather buckets had been taken and not returned, and most of the remainder were cracked, split, and useless. The firehooks—grapnels on long lengths of chain and rope, used for pulling down houses—were dragged out of the church entry but then dumped in the middle of the lane for want of the manpower to use them and a leader to take charge.

Thomas stood stunned and helpless, his mouth agape, still staring as the flames burst through the roof of his house. Sparks, smoldering embers, and flecks of flame caught by the wind were whirled away across the street, some lodging among the gutters and gables of the facing houses, some disappearing over the roofline into the darkness beyond. The brass fire squirts stored in the hall were solid as cannon barrels, and the weight made them stagger as they hurried back down the lane. There was another delay as an ax and spades were found, the cobbles of the street torn up, and the quill—the elm water pipe—broached.

The flow was weak, for the engine in the Water House at the bridge was out of order and the cisterns were almost empty, but water filled the hole in the cobbles and began to run away in a thin stream down the kennel. Thomas, Hannah, and Teagh joined a ragged chain of people, using such leather buckets as could be found, augmented by wooden tubs, earthenware bowls, and even chamber pots to move water to the squirts. But each one took three men to operate, two holding the handles at either side while a third forced in the plunger that sent the feeble jet of water through the broken windows of the house, and there were too few hands for the work.

Men, women, and children ran in an unending stream to and from St. If any structure could withstand the blaze, it would be the church, almost the only stone building amid the forest of timber houses. With nothing left to save, Thomas and a handful of others continued to battle the fire. During that time the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bludworth, arrived at the scene, roused from his slumbers in his house in Gracechurch Street. He was rich, a successful Turkey merchant with interests in the timber trade, and a leading member of the Levant Company who also had influence in the East India Company.

Arrested on suspicion of Royalist sympathies during the Commonwealth, he was among those who attended the exiled Charles at The Hague and provided a letter of credit to ease the financial worries of the impoverished Court in exile. His reward was a knighthood at The Hague and substantial royal patronage in the years that followed the Restoration. His gaze returned to the blazing building.

Great Fire of London

A few moments later his coach rumbled off into the night. They began to jump from garret to garret, as if following the route Thomas had taken to escape the blaze. The fires burning fiercely in the roofs ignited the lower stories, and fanned by the wind, the flames began to move down the lane with gathering speed. Like the throat of a chimney, the stepped jetties almost meeting overhead further increased the already ferocious updraft.

Sparks and burning embers carried aloft on the wind lodged among the stables and outbuildings at the rear of the Star Inn. Its stores of hay and its midden of dung and straw were soon ignited. Flames encircled the courtyard of the inn, running through the timber galleries with a gathering roar, and within minutes the whole building was ablaze. The terrified neighing of the horses trapped in the stables could be heard above the thunder of the flames.

A few were led to safety, a few more broke free and bolted through the blazing archway, galloping away through the darkened streets trailing smoke from their singed coats. Still others, choked by smoke, collapsed and burned to death in their stalls. The gale, still increasing, drove the flames on. Still the little group kept up their work with buckets and squirts amid the roar of the flames, the crash of falling timbers, and the small detonations of flints exploding within the rubble walls. They fled for their lives, leaving the squirts buried under the smoldering rubble.

The buildings on both sides of the lane were now well ablaze, and flames could be seen shooting skyward above the rooftops to the west. Blazing roof timbers crashing down through the stories of the house had broken 49 The Great Fire of London through the floor into the cellar and set the staves of the tar barrels smoldering. Before long they were ablaze. Their contents began to volatilize as the heat increased, but the barrels as yet remained sealed.

The cellar extended some way under the street, and the first signs of the new danger were the cracks appearing in the ground. There was no further warning, just a massive detonation that shook the ground with the force of an earthquake. Clods of earth, cobbles, masonry, and fragments of blazing tar barrel were blasted outward and upward as a pillar of fire rose as high as the rooftops. Within seconds another dozen houses were ablaze.

Thomas and Hannah had been thrown to the ground by the force of the blast.

Deafened, their faces scorched and their clothing smoldering, they dragged themselves to their feet and ran blindly to escape the advancing wall of flames. They fled through the church entry and into Fish Street Hill, where once more they were confronted by another line of fire spreading down toward the waterfront from the inferno raging in the Star. They ran before it down the hill and away along Thames Street to seek sanctuary where they could.

Behind them the fires burned on in two parallel lines down Pudding Lane and Fish Street, the wings of an army advancing toward the bridge. The flames slipped from house to house, furtively creeping behind paneling and hangings, then bursting forth with sudden, shocking violence. Beech laths became flaming brands, cracking and spitting as they burned, and plaster turned to dust and ashes.

Great timbers tumbled and fell blazing, bridging courts and alleys, creating flare paths for the consuming fires to follow.

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Each house, each hovel, made its contribution to the fires, which rose ever higher into the sky and advanced ever faster. A hot, searing wind now traveled before them, and buildings already charred and smoldering erupted as the wall of flame reached them. The flames roared through the desiccated grass of the churchyard and lapped around the walls.

The funeral garlands shriveled and crumbled into ashes, the burning parchment cut into the shape of a pair of gloves took flight, trailing smoke as it spiraled up into the sky, borne aloft on a pillar of fire. For a time the stonework and the stout oak doors of the church held the blaze at bay, but the east window began to bulge and buckle in the heat, 50 The Lodge ofAll Combustibles and then cracked and shattered. As the flakes of glass fell to the ground, the flames poured through the breach, seizing upon the goods stored inside.

The pews and the aisles in the nave and the vault belowground were stacked with a jumbled mass of furniture, tapestries, paintings, documents, books, clothes, and casks of wine and brandy. Anything that could be moved from the fire-threatened houses had been deposited there. Now it was all more fuel for the fire. Confined within the body of the church, the flames burst out with a roar like cannon fire, wreathing the bell tower in fire and running the length of the roof of the nave in seconds.

Flames leaped into the sky, chasing the billowing swirls of smoke, and for the first time was heard a sound that struck terror into every heart: It bore within it the thunder of flames, the crash of stone and timber, the pounding of running feet, and the cries and screams of human beings.

London in Flames : Apocalypse 1666 by James D. Rietveld (2012, Paperback)

A lead cistern stood in the churchyard against the rear wall of the church. It was one of two—the other was in the Green Yard at Leadenhall—fed by the engine of the Water House at the bridge. As the cistern emptied, its last water trickling out through the broken pipe in Pudding Lane, the heat began to melt the lead. When the flames moved on, the cistern was a wreck, a pool of molten lead solidifying as it mingled with the dust of the blackened churchyard. Clinging to every inch of space, stacked and cantilevered upon each other, stood ruinous 51 The Great Fire of London tenements, shacks and hovels, cramped garrets, and damp, dark cellars.

There, those who gained their living on the river—porters and carriers, stevedores and dock laborers, boatmen and wherrymen—found lodging. They had fed the plague in the previous year, now they were fuel for the consuming fire. Even if any carters had been disposed to linger in the shadow of the flames, there was no time to load carts with possessions.

Those with a boat piled it with whatever they could carry and fled before the advancing fires. Roaring through the warehouses on Thames Street, the twin walls of flame came together to beat against the stones of the church of St. Scrambling to escape, the parish clerk left behind the church plate and all the burial money received since Lady Day. All of it melted and was consumed as the fire ravaged the church.

The stones shattered in the heat; and fed by the wooden stairs and staging in the belfry, flames engulfed the bell tower, forming a huge burning torch that lit up the night sky. It sent out a warning across London that few in that hour before dawn had eyes to see. For those within its compass, the fire already had a dreadful aspect, but from a distance this blaze among the low and mean housing clustered around Pudding Lane and Fish Street Hill still seemed a thing of small consequence.

In Seething Lane, a quarter of a mile distant toward the Tower, the Clerk of the Acts, Samuel Pepys, roused from his sleep by his maid, climbed to the garret to look out on the fire, then returned to bed. The rest of the city slept on, untroubled, as the first traces of dawn began to redden the eastern sky.

Around Bridgefoot it was already bright as day. The flames marched on, laying waste the Parsonage House in Churchyard Alley and devouring the Bear Inn as they spilled onto the approach to one of the wonders of England: One, Nonsuch House, claimed to have been built without a single nail, was capped by four great copper-clad onion domes from which gilded weathervanes projected.

The ground floors of the buildings were occupied by a double row of shops. The greatest buildings filled the bridge from side to side, and the roadway burrowed beneath them, forming dark tunnels filled in the daylight hours with a tide of jostling humanity. Toward the northern end of the bridge, where most of the houses burned in the fire of still had not been rebuilt, there was a gap spanning six arches. The iron rail was lined with wooden palisades against which sprawling rows of stalls and shops had been built, further encroaching on the roadway.

The only other breaks in the double row of buildings were The Square by the old chapel of St. Thomas between the ninth and tenth arches, where pilgrims once paused to pray on their way to Canterbury, and the drawbridge over the fourteenth arch. Once raised at almost every tide to allow great vessels to pass upstream, it had lain unused for well over a century, for want of the money to repair the mechanism.

Giant waterwheels set in the two northernmost arches used the force of the tides to raise river water into conduits that supplied the lower parts of the city. At the other end of the bridge another pair of waterwheels drove corn mills fed from the Southwark granary. Unresisted, the fires swept through the gate tower and at once engulfed the houses built since the fire of Three stories high and projecting fifteen feet over the river on great wooden beams, they tumbled one by one in the wake of the fire.

Rubble completely blocked the roadway, barring all entry to the city from the south. The jettied stories and blazing timbers collapsed into the river, the water erupting in cauldrons of smoke and steam as the fire debris, black and silent, drifted downstream with the retreating tide. The flames raced on among the weatherboarded shops and stalls, devouring the palings lining the gap left by the fire thirty years before. In their path were the great turreted houses surrounding the drawbridge and lining the southern end of the bridge. Hundreds scrambled from their beds and fled for the safety of the Southwark bank, the air above them already thick with sparks and burning brands.

Others clambered down from the timbers projecting over the river and huddled together on the stone starlings beneath the bridge to await rescue by watermen. Above their heads, a few people on the bridge had the prudence and courage to face the fires, casting down some of the stalls and wooden palisades into the river even as the flames roared toward them, driven by the keening wind.

Burning all before them, the fires met their first check above the eighth arch of the bridge. The remaining stalls and palings offered insufficient fuel to ignite the first of the buildings beyond the gap, the stone-walled tenement that had once been St. The flames scorched the walls, then guttered and went out, leaving the northern half of the bridge a mass of smoking, twisted ruins. The great houses to the south were untouched, but those who had reached the Southwark shore now faced a fresh alarm.

A blazing ember blown by the wind a full two hundred yards from the bridge had set light to a stable in Horseshoe Alley, near Winchester Stairs. It spread quickly to two neighboring houses, but hooks, chains, and ladders were brought at once from the church of St. Mary Overy and a neighboring house was pulled down before the flames could reach it. Thus isolated, the fire south of the river was extinguished, foiled by the decisive action so wanting on the other side of the bridge. Dark-eyed, black-haired, handsome, and powerfully built, the thirtyyear-old Italian had come to London as an emissary of the deposed Queen Christina of Sweden and a traveling companion to several Swedish nobles, ambassadors to the Court at Whitehall.

On Saturday night, he and his friend Baumann had ventured over the river to Southwark to sample the delights of its theaters, bear-baiting arenas, and pleasure gardens: I had not crossed the bridge over the Thames before. I thought no more about it and we went on with our walk until evening. I was very alarmed and said that it must signify something. I went aside to the iron rail of the bridge and bled for the space of a good two Paternosters. We had hardly been in bed for an hour when. We jumped out of bed and from the window could see nothing but a great fire beside the Thames, near that same bridge.

One burning wheel fell from its mountings and rolled across the mud, toppling into the water and floating away, the upper part still burning as it drifted downstream.

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Just west of the bridge was Gully Hole, the narrow passage leading to the Water House. The conduits were already low and breached in a number of places as the people sought water to fight the fires. Now they began to run dry. The flames burning west along the shore were beginning to cut off access to the only other source of water in the lower part of the city, the Thames itself. Even for those still within reach of it, the tide was ebbing and the flow so low after such a drought that water could be fetched from the river only after a long trek across the mud.

To the fleeing inhabitants of the waterside districts, it already seemed that an act of God rather than the hand of man might perhaps be the only hope of stemming the progress of the fires. Soon after dawn the Lord Mayor returned to the scene. Only the express authority of the King in Council would absolve Bludworth of responsibility, and by the time His Majesty had been persuaded to give his assent, the whole city lay in peril. Hundreds of people lived in these crowded tenements built of lath and plaster bound with horsehair, rotting timber, and rough deal boards, crudely weatherproofed with pitch.

The area was honeycombed with filthy, narrow passages—Rood Alley, Fleur de Lys Alley, Black Raven Alley, Stockfishmonger Row, and a score of others—scarce wide enough for two men to pass, but giving ample entry to the fire. The flames raked them from end to end in minutes. They burned with what seemed a malign purpose, racing to block alleys and passageways, denying escape to the terrified inhabitants. The fleeing residents twisted and turned, ducking into courts and scuttling through passages like rats in the wainscoting, only to find once more their escape route blocked by a curtain of fire.

Some made it to the quays, where boats were already burning at their moorings. Barges stranded on the mud by the retreating tide were also ablaze. Driven before the searing heat, many people jumped from the wharves and floundered away upstream through the mud and swirling water, as the wind drove the flames in pursuit. Others, their eyes staring white from smoke-blackened faces, clambered from boat-stairs to boat-stairs along the waterfront, or clung to the rotting timbers below the wharves.

Coughing and retching from the smoke, they negotiated with the boatmen who stood ready, at an ever escalating price, to take them and their goods up- or downriver, or across to the Southwark bank. Still others straggled away on foot east along the mudbanks beneath the smoking ruins lining the shore. A few found shelter with friends or relatives in nearby streets, only to move again as the fire burned on.

A hot, searing wind came before the flames, full of smoke, dust, and ashes, and the rumble of distant thunder. The heat increased until pitch melted from weatherboarding, and wisps of smoke began to curl from doors and casements, eaves and gables. The noise grew louder, and a blizzard of sparks, burning embers, and ashes fell from the sky, cloaking the roofs like snow.

The eastern face of every building now streamed with smoke, and the air was so dense with it that people groped their way blindly through the streets. The rumbling and thundering grew so loud and the heat so fierce that it seemed a volcano was erupting. Those fleeing pressed their hands to their ears to blot out the terrible sound, snatching them away only to beat out the smoldering embers lodging in their clothes.

Then out of the heart of this maelstrom of heat and noise and wind burst a wall of flame fifty feet high, moving as fast as a running man. Each smoking, smoldering building in its path erupted at its touch. Devoured and picked clean, only the skeletons remained as the fires moved on. Not a wall remained standing. The dark and festering courts and alleys were gone forever, laid bare to the light of the rising sun. A high arched gateway in the stone facade led from there to a narrow riverside terrace with a watergate. The walls gave barely a check to the flames, which were soon bursting through the roof lantern of the hall.

They advanced with such speed and purpose that the fleeing inhabitants could save only themselves. Only the imposing stone frontage to the river remained. All the records of the salt-fishmongers and stock-fishmongers and all their gold and silver plate were consumed. The pillar of smoke rising from the fires was visible throughout the city, but the sunlight seemed to diminish the flames, and at first the blazes causing such terror on the shore west of the bridgefoot caused barely a tremor elsewhere. Fire was too frequent a phenomenon in the old city to cause much comment or alarm. A blaze would erupt, a few houses would be burned and pulled down, a small note in the London Gazette of that week would record the losses and the dead.

For the rest of London, life went on as normal that Sunday morning. Men and women slept late, attended church, and went about their feast day preparations, with little sense of foreboding. It was scarcely suitable garb for viewing a fire, but if the blaze was as serious as Jane had said, Pepys intended to be the first to bring a report to Whitehall. Men such as he owed their position and future advancement to the services they were able to render to those persons of quality with whom they came into contact.

An opportunity to appear before His Majesty himself was not to be missed. He walked to the Tower, and gazing westward from one of the turrets, saw for the first time the extent and the intensity of the blaze.

He hired a boat and was rowed through one of the arches of the bridge and upstream across water thick with boats, floating goods, and furniture. They passed the smoking ruins on the bank and the raging firefront, and Pepys then bade his boatman make for Whitehall. As he was rowed upstream, carried on the rising tide, the fire rumbled on behind him, its noise growing like a gathering storm as the force of the gale and the contours of the land conspired to keep it roaring westward along the river frontage. Approached from the river, the great palace built around the house confiscated from Cardinal Wolsey by Henry VIII had more of the air of a jumble of small houses in a dozen different architectural styles, with the great Banqueting Hall rising behind them.

After describing the fire to the courtiers assembled there, he was escorted up the Privy Stairs to the first floor and through the long gallery hung with paintings and rich tapestries. French furniture and velvet-lined musical instruments ornamented with silver gilt added to an air of opulence designed both to impress and to intimidate visitors with the power and splendor of the Crown. Above the splashing of a fountain, the song of caged birds, and the soft ticking of endless clocks came the murmur of low voices as courtiers strolled through the long gallery or stepped aside to mutter together in bays overlooking the river.

The Great Fire of London which they moved. For all the superficial elegance of their apparel, most were dirty and smelly, and their clothes, close to, were often patched and worn. He stated his business and was admitted at once to the Presence Chamber. Although the canopied Chair of State was empty, passing servants still bowed to it as if the King were actually seated there. Pepys gave an account of the fire to a group of courtiers gathered in the chamber, and when word was taken to the King he at once summoned Pepys to appear before him.

It was a signal honor. Pepys wrinkled his nose as he entered, then recomposed his features. King Charles delighted in his spaniels, which followed him everywhere and slept in his bedchamber. A bitch had recently whelped, and Pepys could hear the mewling cries of her puppies from their refuge beneath the bed. He was tall with a dark, almost olive skin, and such prominent features that he could have passed for a Greek or a Levantine.

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