King Charles II (48 page)

Soon Arlington’s words would have an ironic ring.

The long hot summer of 1666 got off to a bad start. Charles wrote irritably to Madame in May, ‘I can only now wish for peace and leave the rest to God.’
¹⁶
His subjects were beginning to feel the same way. The King’s birthday had been since the Restoration an occasion of special rejoicing, directed towards the person of the monarch. On 29 May this year Pepys was moved to comment on the decline which six years’ reign had shown in his popularity. Worse was to follow.

On 1 June commenced that prolonged naval engagement known as the Four Days’ Battle, which resulted in a heavy defeat for the English at the hands of the Dutch and French. The vast casualties of the battle compel horror: the English lost six thousand men (many of them burnt to death when their ships caught fire) and suffered an incredible amount of wounded. According to the official account, eight English ships were sunk and nine captured. Against this, the Dutch lost two thousand men and seven ships. It was a bitter pill for the English to swallow: the superior Dutch guns, under their Admiral de Ruyter, were mainly responsible for this mayhem.

The natural English reaction was towards revenge. The King’s new servant, Thomas Clifford, who shared his love of the sea, spoke defiantly of ‘the Hollanders’ brags’, which, though set forth to the world in high measure, would soon ‘vanish and turn to their disadvantage’. Described by Evelyn as ‘a bold young man from Devon’ (in fact, he was exactly the same age as Charles), Clifford had been appointed in 1664 Commissioner for the care of sick and wounded seamen, and later a sub-commissioner
of naval prizes; he had gone on a mission to Copenhagen after the fatal Bergen raid, and in November 1666 would become Comptroller of the King’s Household. Industry and loyalty were his two strong points, a useful combination at any court. Now he wrote feelingly of the magnificent spectacle of the fleet in July and the men’s high morale, ‘Even the common men cry out: If we do not beat them now, we shall never do it.’ Clifford wished the King could have witnessed it. Arlington confirmed it to Carlingford: ‘Our fleet is almost ready and the Dutch are expecting us.’
¹⁷

By the end of July some kind of revenge was secured by these spirited men off the French coast, although the skilful Dutch seamanship enabled the enemy to withdraw in good order. Thus the episode did not amount to quite the crushing defeat which had been anticipated. It seemed that Hollanders and English were heading for a stalemate. As a result, Charles
II
, Louis
XIV
and Johann de Witt were now to be found arguing, proposing and counter-proposing over terms for peace. After eighteen months’ war, all three of them had reason to desire it.

Charles’ principal motive was lack of money. But if he believed in the fates, he had an additional reason to suspect that they had now turned against him after the smiling years. In September the Great Fire raged through the City, following the Great Plague – another cataclysmic blow, as it seemed at the time, although, unlike the plague, it was to have wondrous consequences. It was at least an episode from which King Charles emerged with the greatest personal credit, able to employ those qualities of courage and decision in action which had been too long dormant in civil (royal) life.

The fire began before dawn on Sunday 2 September, in Pudding Lane, not far from London Bridge.
¹⁸
A persistent east wind then drove the fire along the Thames and across the city. By Monday the flames had gained a front of half a mile. At the Palace of Whitehall, the bend in the river concealed the burning buildings, although later the glow of the fire at night, and the shooting flames, would be visible from the Palace windows. At any rate, the first the King knew of the crisis was the noise of
Londoners crying out on Sunday night, ‘Fire, fire! God and the King save us.’

The fact was that fire in itself, and even a pall of smoke, was not unusual in the wooden-built capital. Because fire was unfortunately part of London’s way of life, it was a favourite suspicion that conspirators would fire the city – which does something to explain the outrageous charges of incendiarism made after 1666. King Charles had always shown himself extremely concerned on the subject. In April, like Cassandra, he had written to the Lord Mayor, Recorder and Aldermen, warning them of the dangers of fire inherent in such narrow streets, overhung by wooden houses. They had his royal authority to pull such perilous excrescences down, and imprison those who contravened the Building Acts. Like Cassandra, he was not heeded.

The prevalence of the fire hazard may also explain the dilatoriness of the authorities in grappling with this particular outbreak. It was not until Monday that the extent of the emergency was grasped, by which time it was very difficult to establish a clear zone, to confine the flames. A special committee was set up by the Privy Council under the respected Yorkshire soldier and landowner Lord Belasyse, who years later would be denounced and even imprisoned by the wagging tongue of Titus Oates, simply because he was a Catholic. Now his efforts were Trojan, from the informal headquarters of Ely House in Holborn, where he was joined by Ashley Cooper (Lord Ashley since the Restoration), the Earl of Manchester and others, under the overall control of the Duke of York. Fire posts were established, with an official allowance of £5 per post for beer, cheese and bread. The rickety and inflammable wooden wharves of the Fleet River bank had to be cleared immediately, and the soldiers went to their work, aided by those passers-by who could be bribed to assist.

The King himself was also intimately concerned. When he first learned the news, he sent in his own Guards. In the afternoon, with the Duke of York, he was rowed down from Whitehall in the royal barge, and, from the roof of a tall building, watched the Waterman’s Hall burning. He went as far as
Queenshithe, where he repeatedly urged the people to pull down the houses and strip the highly combustible market: he was afterwards said to have imperilled his life in his eagerness to give orders. On Tuesday the blaze spread hideously to engulf Blackfriars and the entire parish of St Bride’s. Soon the fire ‘rushed like a torrent down Ludgate Hill’, as an onlooker described it. Worried for Whitehall, Charles had the buildings only recently erected by Denham at Scotland Yard unroofed and defaced so that the fire should not get a hold.

Very early on the Tuesday the King and the Duke of York arrived in the City on horseback and stayed there all day, riding from place to place, at times directing their Guards to fight the fire, and at times, accompanied by only a small escort, going to the very limits of the blaze, distributing water. From the first, the fire had been leaping great distances ‘after a prodigious manner’, as Evelyn put it.
¹⁹
Aware throughout of the vital need to demolish, if it was in any way to be held in check, the King moved about the City with a pouch containing one hundred golden guineas slung over his shoulder. These were to be handed out to the workmen at their destructive task
pour encourager
.

By the end of the day the King’s clothes were soaking, his face black, his whole person muddy and dirty. But there were many testimonials to his bravery and resolution as he stood up to his ankles in the water, joining in the work with a will, wielding a bucket and spade with the rest, and encouraging the courtiers to do likewise. At Cripplegate, for example, he was known to have taken part in the extinction of the fire, as if he had been ‘a poor labourer’; a foreigner living in London heard that the King had spent over thirty hours on horseback. He had shown ‘singular care and pains’ for the welfare of his people, and much real popularity was gained, or rather regained, as a result.

Nor did King Charles confine his activities to the showier pursuits of fire-fighting and water-dowsing. Throughout, he showed enormous concern for the plight of the many homeless, ordering the Victualler of the Navy to send bread to the poor at Moorfields (in the end biscuit from sea-stores was sent, but declined as inedible). The King also appointed a day of fasting
and humiliation, to be accompanied by collections in aid of the suffering. He was experiencing that Lear-like identification with the wretched and needy which he had learnt after Worcester, not merely striking the public attitudes of a royal figure.

The Duke of York, a man whose courage in those days was never questioned (and rightly so – he was a brave soldier, a valiant admiral), showed himself equally to advantage. A younger scion of the royal family, the Duke of Monmouth, was also present: he formed part of the King’s guard, which kept the people back from St Michael’s church, whose mediaeval tower continued to stand, although its great bells fell clattering to the ground. It is a striking demonstration of the indifference to the truth which ambition breeds, that many years later Monmouth should dare to accuse James of starting the fire.

It was time for evacuation once more. The peregrinating Exchequer set off again for Nonsuch. Henrietta Maria was enjoying a serene old age improving her Somerset House residence, or, as a contemporary verse put it,

Now she hastily took herself up river to Hampton Court. A Spanish Catholic in London gleefully reported the preservation of her chapel from the fire, while the Anglican St Paul’s was destroyed. It was, he wrote, at the site of a holy house that ‘the flaming tempest, which involved so many in disaster (and burnt 140 heretic churches) allowed itself to be subdued’.

But still the course of the fire was not stopped. Unlike the plague, it fell on rich and poor alike. Dorset House went up with the parish of St Bride’s. The empty prison of Bridewell was made of sterner stuff and survived. But the royal apartments of this ancient palace burned, as did the City grain stored there. In Bridewell cemetery, overflowing from the plague, there was no peace for the dead: in their graves they burned again. During the four days’ course of the fire
^fn3
a light debris scattered a
mantle of soot as far away as rural Kensington. Pieces of burnt paper and scorched silk sailed softly to the ground as far away as Windsor Great Park, Henley and Beaconsfield. The whole sky was of a fiery aspect for forty miles around, ‘like the top of a burning oven’, in Evelyn’s phrase.

As for the experiences of those closer to the fire, a correspondent told Lord Conway that you would have thought it was Doomsday: ‘and the fearful cries and howlings of undone people did much increase the resemblance’. While Dryden wrote movingly of the plight of the homeless,

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…

In all, the flames destroyed an oblong-shaped area about one-and-a-half miles long and a half a mile deep; or, as a preacher put it in terms of books, the City was reduced by fire from a large folio volume to a decimotertio. Most vivid of all was the comparison of a native of Westmorland, who wrote that the once great City had become ‘just like our fells, for there is nothing to be seen but heaps of stones’. After four days of holocaust, dead calm came. On Sunday the first rains fell. But there were periodic alarms for weeks after that, and the smouldering amidst the ruins continued, with occasional outbreaks of minor fires, until a vast downpour of rain in October put an end to it altogether.

A pamphlet published in Holland (by the Dutch) put the whole fire down to the will of God, who was visiting his vengeance on the English for burning the Dutch ships: ‘Therefore not for long did they triumph and glory in this proud and self-satisfied City…. And now comes the Almighty and just God … and sends this wind, His strong wind. And He with His wind threw down all the remaining buildings, beautiful palaces and shops of the rich merchants which were swallowed up and destroyed by an unquenchable fire.’
²¹
Oddly enough, the official report of the Privy Council, asked to investigate the
causes of the blaze, agreed in principle with the Dutch, and differed only in interpretation. They wrote that ‘Nothing had been found to argue the Fire in London to have been caused by other than the hand of God, a great wind and a very dry season.’
²²

It may seem strange to our ears that any other explanation was sought than the three (or even latter two) suggested by the Privy Council, in a rickety wooden city where fire was generally acknowledged to be a common hazard. On 6 September the King addressed all the homeless Londoners assembled at Moor-fields. It was a macabre scene. The grass was littered with rescued belongings, interspersed with ashes. The ruins of St Paul’s provided a sombre background. Wisps of smoke were rising from the stones of the once ‘proud and self-satisfied City’. The King came on horseback, attended by only a few gentlemen. As he addressed the people before him, his first care was to state with all the firmness at his command:
there had been no plot
. The Fire was due to the hand of God.

He spoke in vain, except to the rational. From the first, the Catholics were prime suspects for firing the City, with the Anabaptists second in line. The Catholics themselves were inclined to believe, like the Dutch, in the theory of God’s vengeance; the Quakers too worked it out that God was punishing the City of London for persecuting
them
. But in the minds of the populace, and of many who should have known better, purulent suspicious against the Catholics formed. The fact that the Post Office had burnt down early on meant that reliable news was hard to come by – and gave a field day to the rumour-mongers. As fear of revolution was to some (like King Charles), fear of the Catholics was to others: irrational, but a fact of the age. Hidden from outward eyes, the infection festered and waited for the next outbreak of strident anti-Popery.

In his Moorfields speech of 6 September the King had vowed, by the grace of God, to take particular care of all Londoners. The manner in which he intended to implement this promise was an exciting one. He intended to build on the ruins of London. Only ten days after the start of the fire he was
prophesying a thrilling development for ‘this our native city’ – a judicious reminder that London was his birthplace. But it was to be a Phoenix of brick and stone, not inflammable wood, which was to rise from the ashes.