A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (38 page)

When the final ambivalent news arrived, in the middle of the monthly fast day for the plague, Charles decided to celebrate the Four Days Battle, as it became known, as a victory. An order was given for bonfires and bells. People played music in the streets in the fine moonlit night, firing muskets in exhilaration. But the following day, like a hangover following a feast, a different story arrived, suggesting that the British had lost many ships and taken none. The expressions of merchants at the Exchange turned from delight to apprehension. ‘The court gave out that it was a victory,’ wrote Burnet years later, and public thanksgivings were ordered, ‘which was a horrid mocking of God and a lying to the world.’
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For a few days the outcome was uncertain. Everyone rushed to find news: in the
Gazette
and the newsletters, in letters, in talk at the coffee-houses and taverns, at the Exchange or at the street corner. Newsletters, each with a different slant, were sold in markets and fairs. At court the gamblers judged the odds and laid bets on the
Swiftsure
and other ships being lost or saved. To outsiders, it seemed that the courtiers regarded the war as another game. And in fact, court life had continued much the same, if slightly subdued by plague, war and the death, in April, of Catherine’s mother in Portugal, which plunged Whitehall into mourning. The famous beauties wore their hair plain, and applied no beauty spots or patches. The whole colour scheme of the court had turned to black and white, and Charles quipped that it looked as if it were inhabited by magpies. But in early summer the women of the court went again to Tunbridge, sending for players to entertain them.

Amid the tensions of the war, Charles’s spats with Barbara were increasing, in number and ferocity, sparking from minor incidents into full-scale rows. A week after the Four Days Battle, Catherine provoked Barbara by saying slyly that she feared the King would catch cold by staying so late at her house. Oh no, Barbara replied before the whole court, he always left early, and if he did not appear before the small hours, he must be staying somewhere else. Charles, overhearing this public hint that he had other mistresses, took her aside, whispering furiously, and dismissed her from court. After three days with friends in Pall Mall, she asked if she should collect her things. She must first come and see them, said Charles, ‘and so she came, and the King went to her and all friends again’.
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Charles was in no mood for such rows, or for his courtiers’ bets on the battle. In the end the bleak figures spoke for themselves. In the Four Days Battle eight English ships had been sunk, compared to four Dutch, and nine had been captured. Five thousand English sailors and two thousand Dutch were dead or wounded. Three thousand more English sailors were prisoners. The loss of life was terrifying, the wounds appalling. The dead included admirals and officers, seamen, cooks and carpenters and cabin boys as young as twelve. Thousands of families the length and breadth of England lost men and boys they loved.

In the shipyards of both sides, another round of repairing and refitting began. The hospitals were full, and a hunt to find and impress new seamen was underway, rousing furious resentment. The sailors who had fought were still unpaid, and the families of prisoners were not compensated. On 10 July Pepys left for his office:

the yard being very full of women (I believe above three hundred) coming to get money for their husbands and friends that are prisoners in Holland; and they lay clamouring and swearing, and cursing us, that my wife and I were afeared to send a venison pasty that we have for supper tonight to the cook’s to be baked, for fear of their offering violence to it – but it went, and no hurt done.
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The women got into the garden and crowded round his window, crying for money, lamenting the state of their families, shouting that their husbands had done so much for the king and were so badly treated, while the Dutch prisoners received allowances, and were also offering to take on the English seamen with good pay. ‘I do most heartily pity them,’ wrote the harassed Pepys, ‘and was ready to cry to hear them – but cannot help them.’ All he could do was give some of his own money to one woman, ‘who blessed me and went away’.

The distress in the streets of London was matched by similar scenes in all the ports. The Privy Council discussed further censorship of the press and even closing down the coffee-houses. Meanwhile the ships of the Levant and East India Companies were stuck in port for fear of attacks: early in July the Dutch again sailed up boldly to the mouth of the Thames, to mount a blockade. Bad news also came from the colonies. On 18 July the West Indies Governor Willoughby sent a report to Clarendon saying that he was sailing to Barbados with his best ships, having heard that the Dutch had taken Surinam, and that the French were heading for Nevis. He set out with five ships and a thousand men but his fleet was caught in a hurricane off Guadeloupe: nothing was heard of his fate. It was rumoured, too, that twelve Dutch ships were on their way from Amsterdam to retake New York.
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Then came a sudden leap in fortune. On 25 July, St James’s Day, Rupert and Albemarle led their great line of ships, almost ten miles long, out to sea. The fleets met almost where they had last crashed together, off the Galloper shoals. This time the English line was better disciplined, with more ships and guns, and the victory was clearly theirs. A week later, Henry Savile, now a Groom of the Bedchamber to the Duke of York, told his brother George, ‘the noise of our victory does daily encrease and the Dutch are said to have lost such quantity’s of men as they will hardly recover, unless they recruit with landsmen’.
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Winning a battle, however, did not mean winning the war. As the Venetian envoy reported to the Doge and Senate, ‘The two maritime and warlike nations’ were still contesting to whom ‘the empire of the seas shall belong’.
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Charles was equally concerned as to who should rule the United Provinces, the States General or his nephew the Prince of Orange. But in August, while people were still rejoicing over the St James’s Day victory, a bizarre error by a passionate Orange supporter, the Sieur de Buat, set back the Orange cause irrevocably. By mistake, thinking it was another letter altogether, Buat had handed de Witt a long message from Arlington laying out English plans for levering the Prince of Orange into power. Buat was speedily tried and executed, but not before he had given the names of sixty powerful allies in Holland, many of whom fled the country. The English intelligence system was shattered, de Witt’s own position was immeasurably strengthened, and the people rallied behind him.
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There was a final act to the sea war of 1666. Hoping to exploit their July triumph, the English admirals seized on the comment of a Dutch informer that merchant ships unloaded their stores on the islands of Vlie and Terschelling at the mouth of the Zuyder Zee, and also waited there, fully laden, on their outward voyages. Captain Holmes was given a squadron and sent to find them. On 8 August, with the help of a Dutch pilot, he found more than 160 richly laden merchantmen riding at anchor in the Vlie channel, guarded by only two men-of-war. The next day he sent fireships in, and burned all the ships except two. ‘They burned likewise the whole town of Schelling,’ wrote Clarendon soberly, ‘which conflagration, with that of the ships, appearing at the break of day so near Amsterdam, put that place into that consternation that they thought the day of judgement was come.’
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The Amsterdam merchants had thought their ships safe, and now their losses amounted to over a million pounds. The Dutch public were enraged at the callous attack on the village, and de Witt himself boarded the Dutch flagship and sailed for England, vowing revenge.

‘Holmes’s Bonfire’. The English fleet under Sir Robert Holmes enter the Vlie Roads in August 1666, using fireships to attack Dutch ships and also burning the undefended town on the island of Terschelling.

But although the fleets caught sight of each other on 1 September they were kept apart by easterly gales, blowing relentlessly across the sea and land. The east wind had blown all summer, and all over Britain, the country people were waiting for it to turn, longing for the rain-carrying westerlies. For ten months the rainfall had been unusually low and there was widespread drought, even in Scotland. In Oxford in late July, Anthony Wood wrote, ‘This year 1666 a dry year or summer: rivers almost dry, rivulets quite drye, notwithstanding divers violent flashes of rain and haile. The like hath not bin knowne in the memory of man, or at least for 60 years. Plentiful year of corne. To the great impoverishment of the boatmen.’
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The Thames was so low that no boats could pass the locks. There were sudden freak thunderstorms, with hailstones the size of eggs. Those among the sects who believed in the power of the number 666, or who shivered over the prophecies in the almanacs, were waiting for the judgement to fall.

LONDONERS WERE USED TO FIRES
. When Sir Thomas Bludworth, the Lord Mayor of London, was called to one in Pudding Lane at the house of Mr Farryner, the king’s baker, at three o’clock in the morning on Sunday 2 September 1666, he was not impressed. ‘Pish!’ he said, ‘a woman might piss it out.’
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The Fire of London had started an hour earlier. Before he went to bed, Farryner had gone through the house checking every hearth. There was a fire in only one room, and here he carefully raked up the embers. Yet somehow, perhaps from a spark smouldering beneath the floorboards on the edge of the stone hearth, the flames caught hold. They reached the faggots piled up for the day’s baking, and soon the building was ablaze. All around stood wooden-frame pitched houses, densely packed together, dry as kindling after the drought. Within an hour, the easterly gale that prevented the British fleet engaging the Dutch was sweeping the fire through the streets.

One river of flame rushed northward towards the city, another south to the Thames. At London Bridge the great waterwheel under the most northerly arch was set alight, slipping off its axle into the mud, ending hopes of pumping water from the river. As day broke, those citizens who had not already been roused from their beds awoke to see clouds of smoke above the City. Pepys, who lived in Seething Lane, east of the Tower, was woken in the small hours by their servant Jane, telling him she saw flames. Like Bludworth, he decided this was nothing to worry about and went back to sleep – it was too far away and fires were common. But when he woke again at seven, and heard that three hundred houses had been burned near London Bridge, he dressed hurriedly and walked over to the Tower to get a clear view. What he saw over the next hour prompted him to take a boat upriver to Whitehall. He reached the river stairs about eleven o’clock and when the dismayed courtiers heard his news, they took him to the king. Immediately, Charles sent him back with orders to the Lord Mayor ordering him to pull down houses to create firebreaks, and offering to provide soldiers to help, an offer that went against all City traditions to accept no troops other than its own Trained Bands.

The conflagration was so sudden and fierce that it seemed to many onlookers as though the authorities hardly stirred to quench it, and men and women and children ran crying through the streets as if distracted. The chaos blinded them to the desperate efforts that were indeed being made. The magistrates organised rosters of hosepipes and buckets – as effective as throwing teaspoons of water on a bonfire. More practically, from early Sunday morning until midday, Bludworth sent the Trained Bands out to demolish houses to create firebreaks. But the gaps were too small, the wind too strong and the fire too fierce. Sailors from the Tower offered to blow up more houses with gunpowder, but the mayor was held back by fears that angry owners would demand compensation, and ‘who will pay the charge?’
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By mid-morning he had reached the limits of his strength and patience. When Pepys reached him with the king’s message, ‘he cried like a fainting woman, “Lord, what can I do? I am spent! People will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses. But the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it.”’
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A fire on this scale was something that Charles had long dreaded. Eighteen months before, in April 1665, he had written to the mayor and aldermen of London warning them that the narrowness of the streets made a large-scale fire a real danger, and authorising the imprisonment of those who broke the new building regulations. But the advice had been ignored, and the cheap buildings now so vulnerable to the flames had continued to rise. By noon on this first day, having ordered companies of the King’s Guard to stand by outside the City, Charles and the Duke of York were on their way downriver. They landed at the Three Cranes in Vintry, climbing to the roof to see the extent of the blaze. Urgently, Charles ordered yet more demolition, and went on by water to the Tower to see that the surrounding houses were torn down, and to remove the gunpowder stored in the White Tower.
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As the fire rushed down the streets it sucked in air, so that a burning wind heralded its path. After laying low the houses at the north end of London Bridge, it reached Thames Street, separated from the river by webs of narrow alleys full of stores and cellars and by huge warehouses packed with goods from the Baltic, the Mediterranean and the East: ‘oils, pitch, tar, turpentine, brimstone, saltpetre, gunpowder, cordage, resin, wax, butter, cheese, brandy, sugar, honey, hops, tobacco, tallow, rope, hemp, flax, cotton, silk, wool, furs, skins and hides’.
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Beyond these stores lay the wharves where coal and timber and wood were piled high. All were fodder for the flames.

Fire swept through the timber houses and shacks of the fish market, devouring the Fishmongers’ Hall, the Watermen’s Hall and the Steelyard, the old hall of the German merchants of the Hanseatic League. More slowly, the flames crept up the alleys heading north from Thames Street into the City. In the evening, Pepys looked across from a little alehouse on the south bank and saw the fire leap from corner to corner, between churches and houses, ‘in a most horrid malicious bloody flame’.
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As he watched, a great arc of flame, a mile wide, curved like a bow over the whole of the city. Overnight, people got ready to flee, hiding their valuables in cellars, placing them for safety in churches, staggering through the streets in their nightclothes, their arms laden with precious goods.

Next day, Monday, Charles rose at dawn. Setting aside the vaunted independence of London, he took personal control. The Duke of York was given supreme authority over the City, above the Lord Mayor. Charles summoned the Privy Council and set up a special committee, headed by the Yorkshire soldier Lord Belasyse, with headquarters at Ely House, Holborn. A semicircle of five fire posts, each with a hundred men and thirty soldiers, with an allowance of £5 for bread and beer, was established outside the ring of flame, curving from Smithfield to Temple Bar. Three courtiers were attached to each post, with the power to override the aldermen if they thought that more houses should be destroyed, and to hand out a shilling ‘to anyone who are diligent all night’.
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Within this, a nearer ring was organised by parish constables. The Lords Lieutenant of neighbouring counties were asked to send their militia to replace the exhausted London bands, and sailors were brought in from Woolwich and Deptford to help the demolitions.

James began his work at Fetter Lane, organising defences and dousing houses against the expected flames. Meanwhile Charles went by barge to Queenhithe to work with the men pulling down the market stalls and houses, and then rode around the inner ring of fireposts, encouraging and exhorting, carrying a bag of silver – some said golden – sovereigns to persuade townsfolk not to flee but to stay and fight the fire. The two brothers worked all day, as one Londoner, Henry Griffith, reported to his relative Seth Biggs, a Shrewsbury draper. He described

his Majesty’s and the Duke of York’s singular care and pains, handling the water in buckets while they stood up to the ankles deep in water, and playing the engines for many hours together, as they did at the Temple and Cripplegate, which people seeing, fell to work with effect, having so good fellow labourers.
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The flames roared on. At one point they built suddenly to a single wall of flame, fifty feet high, consuming everything it met. All along the riverside, as far as the medieval bulk of Baynard’s Castle, the oil and resin of the chandlers’ shops and the piles of ropes and timber went up like straw. To the north the fire licked along Cannon Street and Eastcheap, and then up Gracechurch Street towards Lombard Street. In Cornhill, Monmouth led a troop of the King’s Guard, clearing anxious owners from the street. As the flames reached the Royal Exchange, the heart of London’s mercantile power, they swept the balconies, cracked the columns and filled the courtyard with a lake of fire. The burning spices of the East India Company, packed in the crypt, filled the air with incense and rainbow-coloured flames. The statues of England’s kings, from William the Conqueror on, all tumbled from their niches: only Gresham’s statue stayed intact.

When the Exchange finally fell, with a deafening, roaring crash, said the Revd Thomas Vincent:

Then, then
the city did shake indeed, and the inhabitants did tremble, and flew away in great amazement from the houses, lest the flames should devour them.
Rattle, rattle, rattle
, was the noise which the fire struck upon the ear round about, as if there had been a thousand iron chariots beating upon the stones: And if you opened your eye to the opening of the street, where the fire was come, you might see in some places whole streets at once in flames, that issued forth, as if they had been so many great forges from the opposite windows…and then you may see the houses
tumble, tumble, tumble
, from one end of the street to the other with a great crash, leaving the foundations open to the view of the heavens.
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The people fled. Some ran west and north, to the open fields. Others took their families to Westminster and beyond. The roads were jammed with coaches, carts, drays and packhorses, laden with boxes, blankets, vats of wine, babies’ cradles, bedcurtains and even the beds themselves. A cart that cost a few shillings to hire could now command any price: ten, twenty, thirty, forty pounds. Carts were also pouring into the city from the countryside, driven by people anxious to make a profit or simply to help. There were jams at all the gates and on Monday the magistrates ordered them to be shut to any incoming traffic, a well-intentioned but disastrous move that led to desperate fights for the few remaining coaches. Many people also took to the river, piling their household goods into skiffs and wherries. The better off tried to save prize possessions. Some carried their new pictures, in gilded frames. Some buried their money, and Pepys buried his Parmesan cheese. (He never tells us why, or what it was like when he dug it up.)

The scene was lit by the lowering red of the fire shining on the underside of the cloud of smoke. ‘All the skie were of a fiery aspect, like the top of a burning Oven,’ wrote Evelyn. It seemed to him as if he saw ten thousand houses,

all in one flame, the noise & crakling & thunder of the impetuous flames, the shrieking of Women & children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses & churches was like an hideous storme, & the aire all about so hot and inflamed that at the last one was not able to approach it.
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As he left the city in the evening he was reminded of the burning of Sodom, the Day of Judgement, the sack of Troy. ‘London was,’ he wrote, ‘but is no more.’

By next morning clouds of smoke were streaming far over the countryside, like the plume from a volcano. Ash and charred embers and half-burnt scraps of paper drifted down on lanes and fields and parks miles from the city. In London, the fire surged along the Thames through the slums of Blackfriars, consuming the grain stored in the empty Bridewell prison. Further north it reached Cheapside, the home of the goldsmiths. Up in smoke went the great halls of the Merchant Taylors and the Drapers. Next came the medieval Guildhall, with the offices of the mayor and aldermen. Its structure of old oak timbers was so strong that even after the fire engulfed it the skeleton stood whole for several hours, outlined ‘in a bright shining coal, as if it had been a palace of gold, or a great building of burnished brass’.
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Luckily the floor was equally strong: beneath it lay all London’s ancient records, untouched by smoke or flame.

To the west, the fire raged past Newgate and the Old Bailey and down Ludgate Hill towards the Fleet River. The wind was blowing it inexorably towards Whitehall and Westminster. The alarm was raised at court. The Exchequer was despatched to Nonsuch where it had taken refuge from the plague, and Charles ordered the roofs stripped from the new houses that Denham had built in Scotland Yard, to create a break before Whitehall itself. Throughout the night and most of the day James directed workmen at the Fleet river, pulling down sheds and wharves, ‘handling buckets of water with as much diligence as the poorest man that did assist’, and summoning all the nearby counties to send workmen with their tools.
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The aim was to create a long firebreak stretching from the Thames to Holborn, where the Earl of Craven had his team, to stop the flames jumping across the Fleet from Ludgate Hill to Fleet Street.

Meanwhile, filthy, smoke-blackened and tired, Charles toured the fireposts, wielding buckets and shovels with the men. Many contemporary accounts mention his bravery and energy, ‘even labouring in person, & being present’, as Evelyn put it, ‘to command, order, reward, and encourage Workemen; by which he shewed his affection to his people, & gained theirs’.
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The king and duke, wrote Clarendon,