Rideal - 1666: plague, war, and hellfire

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To my daughter, Edie

I N LATE-SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY E NGLAND , the new year officially began on 25 March, however 1 January was also recognised by contemporaries as the beginning of the year. To overcome this discrepancy, dates between 1 January and 24 March would often be chronicled by contemporaneous record-keepers in a split year format (e.g. what we would recognise as 1 February 1666, would be recorded as 1 February 1665/6). For clarity, this book takes 1 January as the beginning of the year. For the most part, this book uses dates according to the Julian calendar; by the seventeenth century this was ten days behind the Gregorian calendar used on the Continent. The reader should also note that, where appropriate, obscure spellings within quotations have been modernised.

I am much deceivd if any have so dearly purchased their Reputation than [through] an expensive, though necessary, War, a consuming Pestilence, and a more consuming Fire.

John Dryden, Preface to Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, 1666

O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people int!

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Moorfields: Saturday, 1 September 1666

H E WAS USUALLY dressed in white with a black mask. The opposing colours were a nod to life and death. Carrying a wooden baton, he shuffled awkwardly to and fro as an eclectic crowd of spectators eyed his every move; they had travelled from all over London just to see him. He was an uneasy mix of stupidity and cunning; his voice was shrill, his temper was short; and taut strings of silk tugged at his tiny arms and legs, manipulated by an operator hidden from view. For now, his name was Polichinello, but within a couple of decades Londoners would come to know him as Punch.

On this late summer afternoon, Samuel Pepys was part of the audience watching this puppet play in Moorfields. It was a place of trees and open fields to the north of the city and was lined with shops, taverns and brothels, and filled with an assortment of characters from booksellers and ballad singers to laundresses, pickpockets and gentlemen. The horrors of the previous summer the carts, the bodies and the smell had all but gone. They were now nine months into the year that some had warned, and many had feared, would herald the biblical End of Days. Centuries of religious conditioning had led the Christian world to see disasters and major events as signs of Gods providence, and the year 1666, with its link to the biblical Number of the Beast, had been earmarked by religious factions from as early as 1597 as the beginning of the apocalypse. The kings own grandfather, James VI and I had written a tract rooted in the Book of Revelation arguing that he and his contemporaries were living in this our last age and, over the course of the previous two decades, religious fervour had escalated. Yet despite the prophecies and the undeniable bad fortune of the previous year, the world appeared to be intact and London at least was almost wholly returned to normal.

While the exact nature of Polichinellos performance is unknown, puppet shows thrived on satire and farce, subverting the narrative of well-known events, fables and histories. It was the third time in just over a week that Pepys had seen this particular show and he thought it to be The best that ever I saw. Joined by his wife, Elizabeth, her friend Mary, and their acquaintance Sir William Penn, this cheery, albeit windy, Saturday afternoon would continue with food and wine at a nearby alehouse. It was a typical afternoon in the historic metropolis of London.

Only it wasnt typical. Within hours a fire would begin in the heart of the city. It was to be a fire that would transform the London they knew for ever.

for it is observed that in most Families of England, if there be any Son or Daughter that excels the rest in Beauty or Wit, or perhaps Courage or Industry, or any other rare quality, London is their North-star, and they are never at rest till they point directly thither .

Edward Chamberlayne, The present state of england

Tuesday, 7 March 1665

T HE DAY STARTED like any other. A pale winter sun brought the dawn. Casting a mottled-grey glow on glazed windows and icy puddles, it offered light but little warmth. London was a month into a deep frost. Across the capital, people woke to clanging church bells and the hubbub of the streets: barking dogs, clattering carts, calling pigeons and chattering early risers. Candles and fires were lit, chamber pots were emptied, food and drink were taken, and the people of the metropolis prepared for the day ahead. The butchers, bakers and tallow-chandlers; the booksellers, grocers and coffee-house keepers; the apothecaries, goldsmiths and city drapers made the short journey from their living quarters upstairs to their shops and businesses below. The rest of the citys inhabitants stepped into the big wide world; their misty breath swirling and rising above the medieval streets.

On this day, if someone had viewed the capital from above, they would have found a city that had long given up the fight to contain itself. A vast canopy of tiled roofs, Gothic church spires, and stone chimneys emitting thick black smoke, covered a warren of passageways and streets below some unevenly paved, others hard mud and stone. These streets, so narrow and incommodious in the centre of the city, according to John Evelyn, cleaved through a discord of overhanging timber-framed buildings, replete with heavy wooden trade posts suspended overhead. To John Milton, who resided at Artillery Walk to the north-east of the city, it was a place Where houses [were] thick and sewers annoy[ed] the air Thanks to its meandering streets, it was, as French philosopher Samuel de Sorbire declared, the type of city that required a Years time to live in it before you can have a very exact Idea of the Place and while brick buildings could be found in the wealthier areas, the medieval dominated.