On 1 September 1666, London was the third largest city in the European world, after Paris and Constantinople. Estimates vary but its population probably amounted to around 300–400,000 people.
The city had three great centres of political power, strung along the north bank of the Thames – just as they are today. The wealth of the merchant classes was concentrated in the walled medieval City between the Tower in the east and St Paul’s Cathedral in the west. A mile further upstream, beyond Charing Cross, was the sprawling Tudor and Stuart palace of Whitehall; this was the King’s principal London residence and the heart of the government’s executive powers. Beyond that lay Westminster, where Parliament sat in a former royal palace.
The river linked these centres of power and offered the easiest way to travel from one to the other. Around them, the suburbs expanded steadily. London Bridge – at this time, the only bridge below Kingston, ten miles upstream – linked the City to Southwark, itself as large as many seventeenth-century cities, on the south bank of the Thames. The river was also the main artery for trade, both domestic and foreign.
Charles II regained his throne in 1660 amid scenes of almost universal jubilation. In the previous twenty years, hundreds of thousands had died in the Civil War between Crown and Parliament, including Charles’s own father, executed with a nice sense of symbolism in front of his own Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace. Afterwards, sustained by the army, Oliver Cromwell ruled the country with ruthless and bloody efficiency. When Cromwell died in 1658, however, the Commonwealth rapidly crumbled, and a restored monarchy seemed the only practicable way to heal the country’s divisions.
Six years later, the jubilation had subsided. The King’s profligate court horrified and angered his more sober subjects. Religion was a constant source of conflict – the Anglican establishment, restored with the King, nursed a deep distrust of the dissenting Protestants who had formed the core of Cromwell’s support. Both parties loathed the Catholics, who in popular imagination were associated with conspiracies at home and implacable, devious malignity abroad. The government was chronically short of money, which hampered its policies at every turn. To make matters worse, the plague struck repeatedly at the capital – in 1665, its most virulent outbreak, the mortality rate was an extraordinary one in five.
Still, somehow, London grew and prospered. Then, on 2 September 1666, the Great Fire began to burn in a baker’s shop in Pudding Lane, deep within the densely populated heart of the old City.
THE NOISE WAS the worst. Not the crackling of the flames, not the explosions and the clatter of falling buildings, not the shouting and the endless beating of drums and the groans and cries of the crowd: it was the howling of the fire. It roared its rage. It was the voice of the Great Beast itself.
Part of the nave roof fell in. The sound stunned the crowd into a brief silence.
Otherwise I shouldn’t have heard the whimpering at my elbow. It came from a boy in a ragged shirt who had just pushed his way through the mass of people. He was swaying, on the brink of collapse.
I poked his arm. ‘Hey. You.’
The lad’s head jerked up. His eyes were wide and unfocused. He made a movement as if to run away but we were hemmed in on every side. Half of London, from the King and the Duke of York downwards, had turned out to watch the death throes of St Paul’s.
‘Are you all right?’
The boy was still unsteady. I took his arm to support him. He snatched it away. He hunched his shoulders and tried to burrow between the people in front.
‘For God’s sake,’ I said. ‘Stand back. You’ll fry if you get closer.’
He wriggled to the other side of the woman next to him. The three of us were in a row, staring between the shoulders and elbows of the men in front.
The largest part of the crowd, including the royal party, was in the churchyard north-east of the cathedral. But the boy and I were in Ludgate Street, west of the portico. I was on my way to Whitehall – indeed, I should have been there an hour ago, for I had been summoned by Master Williamson, who was not a man to keep waiting.
But how could a man tear himself away from this spectacle? It was beyond imagination, beyond belief.
We were safe enough here at present, as long as we kept our distance. Some of the buildings between us and St Paul’s had been demolished in the hope of making a firebreak, which gave us a view up the hill to the cathedral. But I wasn’t sure how long we could stay. The heat and the smoke were already searing my lungs and making it hard to breathe.
Though the fire had now leapt the Fleet Ditch to the north and to the south, Fleet Street itself was still clear, at least for the moment, so there was no danger of it cutting off our retreat. The flames were travelling at about thirty yards an hour, much the same rate as they had since the fire started early on Sunday morning. But you could never tell. The wind might change again. Sparks might carry a hundred yards or more and find something else to act as kindling. The fire followed its own logic, not man’s.
Streams of molten metal were now oozing between the pillars of the portico and down the steps of the cathedral. It was a thick silver liquid, glinting with gold and orange and all the colours of hell: it was the overflow of the lead pouring from the burning roof to the floor of the nave.
Even the rats were running away. They streaked over the cobbles in waves of fiery fur, for some of them had already caught fire. Others were too old or too frail or too young even to flee, and they were baked alive in the heat. I watched three rats trapped in the silver rain, where they struggled and squealed and shrivelled and died.
Despite the lateness of the hour, despite the pall of smoke that blanketed the city, it was as bright as midday. By this stage – eight or nine o’clock on Tuesday evening – the cathedral glowed from within like an enormous lantern. It dominated its surroundings even in destruction.
I glanced to the left, beyond the woman beside me to the upturned face of the boy. The glare made him look less than human: it drained the life away and reduced him to a sharp but flattened representation, like a head stamped on a coin.
There was always a fascination about a fire, but this one elbowed aside all the others. I had been watching the city burn since Sunday morning. I had known London for as long as I had known anything. In a sense I was seeing my own history going up in smoke.
To my surprise, it was oddly exhilarating. Part of me was enjoying the spectacle. Another part thought: And now everything must change.
No one had really believed that the flames would reach the cathedral. St Paul’s