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His diaries are revered for their kaleidoscopic evocation of Restoration England. Yet a fresh analysis of Pepys’ world-famous journals – carried out by Guy de la Bédoyère – reveals a man with a proclivity for coercion and sexual violence
Samuel Pepys is England’s most celebrated diarist. Between 1 January 1660 and 31 May 1669, he recorded his day-to-day life in fascinating and illuminating detail. He wrote about his relationship with his wife, Elizabeth, and the frustrations of managing his household and the servants. He left first-hand accounts of the plague epidemic that likely claimed around 100,000 lives in the capital in 1665–66, and of the Great Fire of London that followed. He has come down through the years as one of the key primary sources for anyone trying to understand the early Restoration era. But there was a dark side to Pepys’ writings, which was never intended to be made public. He described a sordid litany of sexual encounters ranging from his relationships with long-term mistresses to his assaults on maids, including members of his own staff. In an era when corruption was commonplace, Pepys also wrote about using his position as a civilian naval official to coerce sexual services from women seeking promotion for their husbands or payment of unpaid wages. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-660416773webready-b8ec9d0.jpg" width="3680" height="2453" alt="London blazes in a colourised woodcut depicting the Great Fire of 1666, published the following year. Pepys’ diaries include valuable first-hand accounts of such events – but also explicit details of his often troubling personal activities (Image by Getty Images)" title="London blazes in a colourised woodcut depicting the Great Fire of 1666, published the following year. Pepys’ diaries include valuable first-hand accounts of such events – but also explicit details of his often troubling personal activities (Image by Getty Images)" /> Take the events of 18 February 1667, a day when Pepys met in his office with Elizabeth Burrows, who was around 30 years old and the widow of a naval lieutenant killed in action in 1665. Pepys had promised her financial assistance. His diary entry – tellingly, one omitted from editions published in the 19th century, and which appeared without its meaning explained in the 1970s edition – describes what happened. “Yo had Mrs Burrows all sola a my closet and did there besar and tocar su mamelles as much as yo quisere hasta a hazer me hazer, but ella would not suffer that yo should poner mi mano abaxo ses jupes which yo endeavoured. [I had Mrs Burrows all alone in my closet and did there kiss and touch her breasts as much as I wanted until making myself do, but she would not suffer that I should put my hand below her skirts which I endeavoured.] Thence away, and with my wife by coach to the Duke of York’s playhouse.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-526930024webready-ba9bbfe.jpg" width="1500" height="1977" alt="A black and white image of a young woman with curly hair tied back. She is wearing a low cut dress and has her arm across her lap, holding a plant stalk" title="Elizabeth Pepys, depicted in an engraving of a contemporary portrait. She died aged just 29, after nearly 14 years of marriage (Image by Getty Images)" /> The description is typically offhand. That Pepys went to collect his wife, also Elizabeth, immediately afterwards is astonishing. The mix of English and foreign words was a deliberate tactic, as we will see. Pepys tended to avoid specifics in his writing, and often used indirect references to sexual details, but the meaning of “making myself do” is obvious. Ignoring infidelities Why isn’t this unpleasant side of Pepys’ character better known? It helps to understand that, in the past, diary transcribers and some biographers often depicted these activities as recreational capers – or simply ignored them altogether. The full extent and implications of Pepys’ self-confessed adulterous activities, including the coercion and sexual violence, were often glossed over and evaded. It’s a story further complicated by the history behind the publication of the diary text, sections of which first appeared in print in 1825. Pepys wrote the diary in Tachygraphy, a commercial form of shorthand devised by Thomas Shelton in the early 17th century – a time when such abbreviated forms of writing were extremely popular. Shelton’s system uses symbols for consonants, prefixes and suffixes, and arbitrary symbols to represent specific words. Medial (middle) vowels were not normally written, but instead were indicated by the positioning of later consonants in a word. (I have been using Tachygraphy for more than 20 years in my everyday life.) Read more | 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Samuel Pepys Pepys’ diary was not strictly ‘secret’ – but, when it came to his adulterous activities, he was worried that someone might realise what he had written about. In 1664, when his recorded infidelities become more frequent, Pepys resorted to writing parts of the key sentences in French. But he soon found that Shelton’s shorthand was unsuited to French – unlike Spanish, which has fewer vowel sounds. He therefore began to use a mixture of foreign languages: French and Spanish were preferred, but words from Italian, Portuguese, Latin and Greek also crop up in his entries. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/6-volumes-of-diarywebready-07b7f70.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Five dark brown books with gold insignia on the front, with one open book, covered in writing" title="Pepys wrote his diaries (above) in a form of shorthand called Tachygraphy, incorporating words from other languages to further obscure his meaning (Image by Pepys Library, Magdalene College)" /> Pepys’ graphic accounts of his sexual activities horrified previous transcribers and editors of the diary. The 19th-century editions generally omitted such material, although the editors alluded to the excised filth in their introductions, so readers were left titillated but none the wiser. “Have faith in the judgment of the editor,” pleaded Henry Wheatley, whose 1890s edition of the 1870s transcription by the Reverend Mynors Bright remained in print for decades. By the late 1950s, plans were afoot to publish the whole, unexpurgated diary text in a transcription by Robert Latham and William Matthews, but legislation around obscene publications presented an obstacle. Then, in 1960, Penguin published the first unexpurgated UK edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence. In the landmark court case that followed, lawyers successfully argued that a provision in the Obscene Publications Act 1959 allowed publishers a defence for works of literary merit, and Penguin was acquitted. That verdict opened the way for Pepys’ full diaries to be made public. Even then, lawyers urged restraint. In the event, Latham and Matthews decided to publish the whole text but not to analyse or translate any of Pepys’ polyglot. Nor would they flag up which passages were previously unpublished. Their edition, appearing throughout the 1970s and the early 1980s, has always been regarded as the definitive text – which, to a large extent, it is. Out of kilter When I embarked on a project to analyse and translate the controversial passages in 2024, I realised that avoiding doing so in the 1970s edition had resulted in some dubious readings of the polyglot being printed. Unlike my predecessors, I was able to magnify scans of the diary and scrutinise them in unprecedented detail. In doing so, I found that the correct readings were largely obvious and could be tracked easily to contemporary French or Spanish dictionaries that Pepys owned. Using such methods, I made my own fresh transcriptions from the original shorthand and translated them. This was laborious but revelatory, and led me to discover other ways in which Pepys disguised his meanings. In May 1667, while writing in the shorthand, he started adding what previous transcribers called “dummy letters” or “extraneous consonants” to certain English words, though very rarely applying this to the polyglot. One of the best examples is maladimen hered, which Pepys wrote (in shorthand) to represent ‘maidenhead’. Not one of the earlier transcribers realised that this method had been devised by the polymath clergyman John Wilkins (1614–72) and explained in his Mercury, or The Secret and Swift Messenger (1641). A copy of this book that belonged to Pepys is shelved near the diary volumes in the Pepysian Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Pepys had several other books by Wilkins, and greatly admired him. As I worked through Pepys’ diary, transcribing and translating these controversial passages, I realised that these were the private revelations of a man who had what seemed to be a neuro-psychological form of addiction. When he was in what he called his “hot humour”, by his own admission he sought out any woman he could find. And on at least two occasions he raped one of them. Elizabeth Bagwell was the wife of William, a naval carpenter whose father, Owen, was yard foreman at Deptford royal dockyard. Conducting official business, Pepys frequently visited that site, where he spotted Elizabeth – and the Bagwells spotted Pepys, too. They wanted to secure positions for William, and used Elizabeth as a honeytrap. Was she willing to play the part? We can’t know – but father and son both pushed the young Mrs Bagwell on Pepys, who admired what he thought was her virtue while at the same time being determined to wear her down. Read more | Alternate history: what if the Great Fire of London never happened? Pepys understood the transactional nature of this relationship. He found William jobs in Charles II’s navy – but, in return, he wanted Mrs Bagwell’s services. Whether she realised the risks of what she was being forced to do is impossible to know. But then came a day when Pepys could restrain himself no longer. On 20 December 1664, he wrote, he “walked to Deptford where after doing something at the yard I walked, without being observed, with Bagwell home to his house and there was very kindly used, and the poor people did get a dinner for me in their fashion. Of which I also eat very well. After dinner I found occasion of sending him abroad, and then alone avec elle je tentoy à ferer ce que je vodre et contre sa force je le fesoy, bien que pas à mon contentement [alone with her, I tried to do what I would like and against her resistance I did it, although not to my full satisfaction].” Pepys had clearly raped Elizabeth Bagwell. On the evening of 20 February 1665, he again headed to Deptford and “it being dark did privately entrer en la maison de la femme de Bagwell [enter the house of Bagwell’s wife], and there had sa company, though with a great deal of difficulty, néanmoins enfin j’avais ma volonté d’elle [nevertheless, in the end I had my will of her].” The following day, Pepys nursed an injured finger: it seems he’d used force on Mrs Bagwell, who had clearly done everything possible to fight back. Controlling behaviour These horrifying episodes were conducted during the course of Pepys’ professional duties, and while he was married. He loved his wife, Elizabeth, passionately but also gaslit her, often denying her money and controlling her behaviour. She was so unhappy that she wrote down her concerns, only for Pepys to destroy her papers on 9 January 1663. On 19 December 1664, he became enraged by her challenges to his authority, and hit her so hard that she was left with a visible injury over one eye. Elizabeth Pepys, who was half-French, died in November 1669, aged just 29, having contracted a fever – probably typhoid while on a trip to Paris and the Low Countries with Samuel. This followed a debacle the previous autumn when Elizabeth had caught him touching the genitals of her 18-year-old companion, Deb Willet, with whom Pepys had been obsessed ever since she came to work for them in 1667. It sent Elizabeth into a paroxysm of rage that lasted months. Pepys was contrite, but continued to seek out Deb, who had fled. Having found her, he forced himself upon her again. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/gr0099194webreadyH-2-1ea86dd.jpg" width="3109" height="2073" alt="Pepys with his wife, Elizabeth, depicted at home in a 19th-century coloured engraving. Their relationship was often fraught: Pepys reacted violently to what he saw as her challenges to his authority, on one occasion leaving her with a visible injury above her eye (Image by TopFoto)" title="Pepys with his wife, Elizabeth, depicted at home in a 19th-century coloured engraving. Their relationship was often fraught: Pepys reacted violently to what he saw as her challenges to his authority, on one occasion leaving her with a visible injury above her eye (Image by TopFoto)" /> He also returned to his other mistresses, among them Betty Martin and her younger sister, Doll, milliners who worked at Westminster. Betty, nearly 24 when Pepys first mentioned her at the beginning of the diary, had long been his most regular mistress, and seems to have been willing and pragmatic. By the early 1660s, though, he was encouraging her to marry. When she did wed one Samuel Martin, she worked on Pepys to give her husband a position as a naval purser. He obliged, and was even godfather to one of her children. Despite the abuse and exploitation to which she had been subjected, Deb Willet married a client of Pepys called Jeremiah Wells, had two daughters, and lived near Pepys in London until her premature death in 1678. Pepys helped Jeremiah, who died in 1679, with his career in the church. Did Pepys’ pursuit continue during the marriage? Certainly, Deb had been confronted with a dilemma that so many women faced during this era: her security was tied up with her husband’s employment. We will never know if Pepys pursued the relationship, because he had ceased writing his diary on 31 May 1669. By extracting all of these entries in sequence, the patterns of Pepys’ sex life have become easier to follow. He loved women, but also treated them as chattels. He revelled in the exuberant company of the actress Elizabeth Knepp: “I… got her upon my knee (the coach being full) and played with her breasts and sung, and at last set her at her house and so good night.” He routinely did the same to his maids and other people’s servants. One mistake easily made is to assume that the diary is a comprehensive record of Pepys’ activities. He once referred to his antics with Betty Martin’s sister Doll, a decade her junior, and that he had been with her “100 times”. Though that was obviously metaphorical, it and other comments suggest that the diary records only a fraction of his philandering. Read more | Agony and adventure: the hidden histories inside women's diaries Pepys was so over-sexed that he masturbated in public places. At the Queen’s Chapel on Christmas Eve 1667, “I did make myself to do la cosa [the thing] by mere imagination mirando a jolie móça [looking on a pretty wench] and with my eyes open which I never did before. And God forgive me for it, it being in the chapel.” Read those two lines back out loud and you will spot another aspect of the diary that has escaped comment. Pepys used alliteration, metre and rhymes often in these controversial passages, suggesting that he took a perverse pleasure in composing them. Alliteration is so conspicuous in the polyglot sexual passages that it’s amazing it has gone unnoticed hitherto. Lost voices The tragedy is that nothing written down by any of the women in his life – even by his humiliated and angry wife – has survived. However, modern online genealogical resources (such as ancestry.co.uk and familysearch.org) unavailable to previous editors have made it possible to trace some new details. These women were trapped in a society where their autonomy was limited. They were treated – and expected to be treated – as commodities. Mrs Bagwell was still visiting Pepys’ office when she was in her forties, two decades after their initial encounter, seeking positions for her husband. Pepys, then Secretary of the Admiralty, wrote her husband a letter telling him to stop his wife. Even so, Pepys helped William Bagwell throughout the rest of his career; the latter died as a master shipwright in 1697, and Mrs Bagwell passed away in 1702, a well-to-do widow. Was that really any consolation to her? We shall never know. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/AKG7770684webready-e35e02b.jpg" width="1500" height="1837" alt="A painting of a man in a brown shirt with white scarf and cuffs. He is looking directly at the viewer and is holding a piece of music in his left hand" title="John Hayls’ 1666 portrait of Pepys. The diarist’s “graphic honesty made him a man of disturbing contradictions”, writes Guy de la Bédoyère (Image by AKG)" /> It’s clear that Pepys was a bully, a vain and philandering hypocrite, and a domineering and mean-minded husband. He was capable of sexual violence as well as being coercive, deceitful and manipulative. He groomed his female targets into submission, and disregarded their feelings. He was easily manipulated by others who spotted his inclinations. He also routinely beat his servants. Yet he was equally capable of generosity, compassion and love. His enduring loyalty was one of his most edifying characteristics. He was meticulous, exceptionally well organised and a superb administrator. He had an overwhelming, if credulous, curiosity about life, and a well-developed appreciation of art and music. He was an invigorating individual and was manifestly held in great esteem by many of his contemporaries. Pepys’ graphic honesty made him a man of disturbing contradictions. Yet the treatment of that diary in previous editions, all to a greater or lesser extent suppressing his least edifying characteristics, has created an image of Pepys that has falsified his own witnessing of his life. Now, with this side of his life laid bare as he wrote it himself, at last we have a fuller picture of the truth. Pepys died in 1703, highly esteemed by many other luminaries of the period, none apparently aware of his controversial private life as a younger man. Had his secrets emerged, his reputation and career could have been destroyed. He had hidden in plain sight – but left a record of the truth without parallel. Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer. His latest book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations (Abacus, 2025) This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Long road to paradise: the life of John Milton and how he created his masterpiece, Paradise Lost
John Milton was an English radical polemicist and poet, whose magnum opus, Paradise Lost, has influenced artistic endeavours since its publication. On the 350th anniversary of his death, Islam Issa explores the story of the man who lived in revolutionary times, and who lost two wives, his liberty and his sight – but never his hope
John Milton was an early riser. He woke each morning with poetry in his head, itching for it to be recorded. The verses came to him during the night, he said – a special delivery from his very own lyrical muse. By 1652, he had completely lost his sight, so the disgruntled Milton had to wait patiently for a scribe to arrive. In the popular imagination, one of them was his daughter, Deborah, who has been depicted putting pen to paper as her father dictates his intricate poetry. Milton’s biographer wrote that on some days, when it took longer than usual for someone to begin transcribing, the poet “would complain, saying he wanted to be milked”. That was in the mid-1660s, when Milton – in an effort to evade the Great Plague of London – had relocated to a cottage in Chalfont St Giles, rural Buckinghamshire. The move to the country had worked wonders for his writing, and he set to putting the final touches on a magnum opus that had occupied his thoughts for decades and taken years to complete. It hadn’t always been his intention to compose an epic poem. In the early 1640s he’d had in mind a drama, scribbling the outline for a tragedy titled Adam Unparadised. But the political and social turmoil of the couple of decades before his country sojourn had changed his mind about writing a play. Instead, he decided to compose a lengthy poem of more than 10,000 unrhymed lines. Its title was Paradise Lost. Tumultuous times John Milton was born in 1608 in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, the son of a scrivener and composer, also named John. In early adulthood he had developed a habit of opposing the status quo, especially when it came to religion and politics. The Church of England was too hierarchical, he said, proposing that regular people should be able to read the scriptures without being influenced by religious leaders. As for the Roman Catholic church, its obsession with popery and rituals was a form of heresy. In 1642, Milton went to Oxfordshire to collect an interest payment from a landowner to whom his father had lent money years earlier. By the time he returned to London, he had tied the knot with the debtor’s daughter. This marriage to Mary Powell – at 17, half his age – lasted just a few weeks. It’s long been assumed that Milton must have been difficult to live with. A more obvious cause of the rift was politics: the first rumblings of the Civil War were growing, and the Powell family’s strong royalist views were incompatible with Milton’s staunch republicanism. In any case, when Mary abandoned him and returned to her family, Milton redirected his intellectual energies to addressing the topic of divorce. The law of the time offered a separation agreement “from bed and board” that didn’t go as far as terminating the marriage. Dissolution “from the bond of marriage” was valid only on grounds of adultery. Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, published as an anonymous and unlicensed pamphlet, made the radical argument that a breakdown due to “indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind” should be sufficient grounds. Milton was well ahead of his time. It was another three centuries before parliament passed the Divorce Reform Act 1969, legalising no-fault divorce on the grounds of an “irretrievable breakdown”. To his contemporaries, however, Milton’s justifications for divorce were likely the most controversial of all his opinions. They led to open attacks that reached parliament (by now his name was associated publicly with the book), where he was condemned and where members pushed for state control over unregistered books, including Milton’s contentious tract. Under the Licensing Order of 1643, every book produced had to be read and approved by a censor before publication. Milton penned a strong and impassioned case opposing the policy. In Areopagitica, which became his most famous polemic, he defended freedom of expression and compared suppressing books to killing humans – in fact, he wrote, it might be even more deplorable, because it “slays an immortality rather than a life”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/BAL348130-5dfa773-e1731929244146.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The Milton memorial window in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, made by Clayton & Bell in 1888. Here, Satan spies on Adam and Eve (Photo by Neil Holmes/Bridgeman Images)" title="The Milton memorial window in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, made by Clayton & Bell in 1888. Here, Satan spies on Adam and Eve (Photo by Neil Holmes/Bridgeman Images)" /> Republican ideals Milton was most prolific when expounding his diehard republican beliefs. During the 1640s, he spent much of his time writing poetry and prose that supported the militant anti-monarchical movement. When the republican army’s commander-in-chief, Thomas Fairfax, besieged Colchester in 1648, Milton wrote a sonnet in praise of “Fairfax, whose name in arms through Europe rings”. That poem also suggested that the job of opposing the tyranny of inherited power remained unfinished: “O yet a nobler task awaits thy hand; / For what can war, but endless war still breed, / Till truth, and right from violence be freed.” Early the next year, parliament indicted Charles I. Fairfax, meanwhile, was overshadowed by a subordinate commander, Oliver Cromwell, who became the island’s most influential statesman – and in whom Milton placed high hopes. Listen | Browse the HistoryExtra archive of podcasts on the Civil War, from female spies to Charles I's killers Charles I’s trial lasted eight days in January 1649. During that time, Milton quickly put together the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, its title page boasting “that it is lawful, and hath been held so through all ages, for any, who have the power, to call to account a tyrant, or wicked KING, and after due conviction, to depose, and put him to death”. On 30 January, the king was decapitated by a single axe blow and his head held up, blood dripping from the neck, to the cheering crowd. The monarchy and the House of Lords were swiftly abolished. Some years later, Cromwell became head of state, taking the (unmistakably regal) title of lord protector. Speaking in tongues Within six weeks of Charles I’s execution, Milton was called upon to serve the republican government in the role of secretary for foreign tongues. Tasked with translating official communications, largely from the period’s international language of Latin, Milton received a handsome annual salary of £288, 13 shillings and 6½d (around £45,000 today). Foreign governments were still wary of the new regime in Britain, so Milton’s talents were mainly channelled into writings in defence of the revolution. His Eikonoklastes (The Image Breaker), published in October 1649, attempted to justify the regicide. It was written in response to Eikon Basilike (The Royal Image), subtitled The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings, published shortly after the execution and purportedly written by the king himself before he died. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-1288501833-86a56ff-e1731928903323.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The frontispiece of Eikon Basilike, purportedly written by Charles I, depicting the deposed monarch as a saintly martyr; Milton wrote in justification of the king’s execution (Photo by Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" title="The frontispiece of Eikon Basilike, purportedly written by Charles I, depicting the deposed monarch as a saintly martyr; Milton wrote in justification of the king’s execution (Photo by Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> Held in high regard by royalists, the title page of Eikon Basilike featured an allegorical image depicting Charles as a saintly martyr, engraved by William Marshall. That artist had earlier drawn Milton for his 1645 poetry collection – a depiction that the author hated. In retribution, Milton instructed Marshall to engrave a caption in Greek, describing the latter as “a rank beginner” and “a good-for-nothing artist” – barbs which, not speaking that language, he would have been unable to understand. Milton and Mary Powell had reconciled in 1645, but different problems soon arose. For one thing, the writer’s eyesight was weakening: by 1648, he’d lost all vision in one eye, and in 1652 he became permanently blind. In that same devastating year, Mary died from complications during the birth of their third daughter, Deborah. Milton’s second marriage, to Katherine Woodcock in 1656, appears to have been more amicable. Like his first wife, though, Katherine died in 1658 following childbirth. In one of his most emotive pieces, Milton writes about encountering his late beloved, whom he met only after losing his sight, during his vivid sleep: “But O as to embrace me she inclined, / I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.” Perhaps tellingly, it was around this time that Milton – a blind man left to raise his three daughters alone – began to work on Paradise Lost. Despite the overthrow of the monarchy, on Oliver’s death in September 1658 the Cromwellian government reverted to dynastic succession. Richard Cromwell succeeded his father as lord protector, but lacked the qualities that had prompted Milton to describe his father as “chief of men… Guided by faith and matchless fortitude”. Parliament soon retook control, much to Milton’s delight. Within a few months, however, the army had dissolved parliament – something that Milton condemned in no uncertain terms. As the royalists regained power, and with the restoration of the monarchy looking inevitable, Milton remained outspoken in opposition. The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth proposed the formation of a permanent republican federation, or at the very least an elected sovereign. Yet such a scheme was, by 1660, hopelessly utopian. Writer on the run The monarchy was restored that May, when Charles II returned from exile and succeeded his father. Like his fellow republicans, Milton had to either run or hide. With an arrest warrant issued, and in real danger of assassination, he went into hiding. A proclamation was issued ordering that all of his books should be collected for burning, and Milton’s writings were consigned to the flames at the Old Bailey. Read more | Art, culture and science in the Restoration period Execution loomed, and many of his friends were put to death. A general pardon issued later in the summer of 1660 exempted Milton from suffering the same fate, but it didn’t mean that he was safe. By autumn, Milton had been arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. It’s not known why he was pardoned, around three months later; it may have been because of his visual impairment, or thanks to support from his friend Andrew Marvell, a poet who was also an influential MP. Still, Milton emerged from prison having lost many of his acquaintances, and in financial difficulty; he’d paid £150 – a large sum – to be released, and £2,000 of his savings had been seized. More detrimentally still, his dream of a republic – one in which he had believed, that he’d promoted and that had, for a short while, lived – had all but vanished. The Restoration complete, plague arrived to ravage England, driving Milton to take refuge in Buckinghamshire in July 1665. When that epidemic abated, he made his way back to London early the following year – only to be met by another disaster: the Great Fire of London. Though his house survived, the majority of his city was razed. Milton had spent the first half of the 1660s focusing on Paradise Lost, with an inevitably different outlook on life. “I now must change / Those notes to tragic,” laments the poem’s narrator. Milton was by then blind, lonely and essentially under house arrest, the powers he had challenged now restored: “fallen on evil days, / On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues; / In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, / And solitude.” Read more | Coffee, plague and the Great Fire: the pleasures and perils of living in Restoration London The well-read Milton alluded to the scriptures, poetry and tragedy from across the continent to tell his epic tale of humanity’s fall from grace. The result is a dramatic, imaginative take on Satan’s rebellion against God, and the subsequent fall of Adam and Eve. Set at the beginning of human history, it boasts an expansive setting, with Heaven at the top and Earth dangling from it, Hell at the bottom and a dark Chaos in between. Its story is one of ambition and rebellion, questioning the extent of free will and divine justice. Its characters – even God the Father and Son – are complicated and imperfect. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-463907993-5e42463-e1731929089161.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels, by William Blake, 1808. The English artist created the illustration for John Milton's Paradise Lost (Photo by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels, by William Blake, 1808. The English artist created the illustration for John Milton's Paradise Lost (Photo by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> And no Miltonic character is more famous than the deeply intense Satan, who rallies the fallen angels with populist rhetoric but also contemplates his condition with psychological rigour: “Me miserable! Which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? / Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.” It’s difficult not to read Milton’s politics into his great epic. In the preface, entitled ‘The Verse’, he explains why the poem doesn’t rhyme – a fact that appears to have disconcerted his publisher. Milton decries “the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming”. Not only had royalist poets used rhyming couplets, but rhyme served as a symbol for the shackles of the ruling powers, he thought. By opposing rhyme and writing freely, Milton’s style was inherently nonconformist. Even more surprising is Satan’s often justified, if overambitious, opposition to the omnipotent but stubborn and out-of-touch God. It’s no surprise that this has long been interpreted as a metaphor for brave opposition against the seemingly immovable monarchy. In 1667, publisher Samuel Simmons paid Milton £5 for the rights to Paradise Lost; according to his contract, he received a further £5 once sales reached an agreed figure. In 1674, he republished the most authoritative version of Paradise Lost, in 12 books – like the classic epics with which he may have felt it was on a par. A few weeks later, Milton prepared his will, in which he mentioned the money still owed by his first wife’s father. He died in November that year. All is not lost It’s both intriguing and telling that Milton didn’t venture to North America. As well as Puritans and Quakers, many anti-monarchists crossed the Atlantic to set up republican structures in the colonies. Indeed, the founding fathers of the US drew on Milton’s work as they shaped the fundamental republican ideals of their new nation. In an alternative universe, he might have been America’s greatest poet. Yet though Milton was a radical, he was also an idealist who stayed put, believing that he could change the system. Read more | "They decided that God must be leading them to North America": the Puritan journey to the Mayflower He had seen some of the world beyond England, travelling to Italy, Geneva and France in 1638. He appears to have had no trouble mastering Italian, claiming that it’s “easily learned at any odd hour”. It’s even said that Milton rolled his letter R when he spoke in Europe, in an effort to differentiate himself from other embarrassing compatriots on the continent. That trip had a formative effect on Milton, evident in Paradise Lost. When Satan ventures from Hell to Eden with the intention of taking down Adam and Eve, his shield, “massy, large and round… Hung on his shoulders like the moon”. Satan is essentially carrying his shield like a big backpack: it looks like the moon only if “through optic glass the Tuscan artist views” it. That artist was the astronomer Galileo Galilei, who’d championed the idea that the Earth moves around the sun. This view was officially deemed “foolish and absurd… formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of holy scripture”. By the time Milton met him, the Italian was elderly and blind. He had challenged authority but been forced to retract his beliefs, and was under house arrest – just as Milton was when writing Paradise Lost. No wonder Milton also challenged authority. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-600041375-c1a0392-e1731928957762.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A 19th-century painting of John Milton visiting Galileo Galilei in Florence in 1638, when the astronomer was blind and under house arrest – echoed in the poet’s later life (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" title="A 19th-century painting of John Milton visiting Galileo Galilei in Florence in 1638, when the astronomer was blind and under house arrest – echoed in the poet’s later life (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" /> Never to yield Yet there is much to suggest that a spark of idealism lived on. Adam, Eve and Satan seemingly all lose in Paradise Lost. But its ending sees the human couple locking hands as they step into a new world, free from Eden’s baggage – a world in which they can explore themselves and engage their free will. Even Satan, “in dubious battle… shook his (God’s) throne”. Here, Milton holds on to the thought that, for a short while, he played a part in shaking the establishment. “What though the field be lost?” Satan asks himself, before continuing to declare that “All is not lost; the unconquerable will… And courage never to submit or yield.” Milton’s influence on the English language is as profound as his views on politics and religion were radical. It’s claimed that he invented almost three times as many words as William Shakespeare did. Throughout his career, too, he conceived phrases, many of which speak to the enduring necessity of optimism. In his masque Comus, the character of the Lady spots a “cloud / Turn forth her silver lining”. And in the elegy Lycidas, Milton ends by confirming the temporary nature of grieving – that life must go on: “At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue: / Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.” John Milton’s artistic legacy In the 350 years since its creator’s death, Paradise Lost has inspired generations of painters, musicians and writers Painting and poetry Poet and painter William Blake quipped that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”. The protagonist of Blake’s illustrated Milton: A Poem is that author, whose soul is re-embodied from Heaven. Describing blindness, the narrator of Paradise Lost mentions that a “cloud” of “ever-during dark Surrounds me”; in the first picture of his illustrated epic, Blake drew a naked Milton surrounded by darkness and clouds. In the 1800s, Blake also created a series of striking watercolour plates illustrating Paradise Lost. Sculpture Milton’s Satan is a complicated character with altered perceptions over the centuries. Jacob Epstein’s Lucifer is a towering and unsettling bronze statue completed during the Second World War. The figure’s asymmetry, suggestive stance and possible androgyny reflect Satan’s sexual tensions in Paradise Lost and the poem’s description of how “spirits when they please / Can either sex assume, or both”. Several decades earlier, Spanish sculptor Ricardo Bellver’s Fallen Angel portrayed Satan’s agonising fall from heaven – a move away from the stern and hypermasculine pre-Miltonic devil. Literature In Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, Frankenstein, the creature discovers a book inside an abandoned bag: Paradise Lost. He assumes that it’s a true story, and compares himself to lonely Adam and mistreated Satan. “Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence,” he reflects, “I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.” More recently, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy drew heavily on the plot and themes of Paradise Lost. Its very title borrows the epic’s description of the mysterious elements that God employs during the act of creation. Landscape art A footpath in San Diego, California, takes the form of a beguiling serpent that turns Paradise Lost into a physical journey. Since 1992, artist Alexis Smith’s 170-metre-long Snake Path has invited individuals to walk through temptation, passing a small Edenic garden of fruit trees and a granite statue of an oversized book. It is carved with words from the finale of Paradise Lost, in which the angel Michael reminds Adam – and, in turn, readers – about the path to true bliss: “Then wilt thou not be loath / To leave this paradise, but shalt possess / A paradise within thee, happier far.” Stained glass During the 19th-century Gothic revival, Paradise Lost appeared in stained glass – a form that Milton described as “storied windows richly dight [ie adorned]”. The Milton memorial window in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, made by Clayton & Bell in 1888, includes portraits of Milton at various stages of his life: at school, visiting Galileo, dictating to his daughters. Its Paradise Lost scenes show Satan rousing the fallen angels in one panel and spying on Adam and Eve in another. Music Themes and images from Paradise Lost have influenced countless musicians over the decades, from a metal band of the same name to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Eminem. Lana Del Rey reimagined the epic story in her short film Tropico, with songs Body Electric, Gods and Monsters and Bel Air exploring the states of bliss, fall and redemption. It takes cues from Milton’s epic poem: there’s a “muttering thunder” when Adam and Eve eat the fruit, while at the end the first couple depart “hand in hand”. “It’s innocence lost,” sings Del Rey, “like Paradise, Paradise Lost.” This article was first published in the December 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Discover the most important moments in the story of the Restoration period with our handy timeline...
Chart the most pivotal moments in the Restoration period with our timeline, from Charles II's homecoming to the highs and lows that came to define his quarter-century reign: 30 January 1649 King Charles I is beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall. 1 January 1651 Charles II is crowned king of Scotland at Scone Abbey having already, in June 1650, reluctantly promised to establish Presbyterianism (a branch of Protestantism originating in Scotland) across all three kingdoms. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/04/GettyImages173339552-57d2957-e1680780186912.jpg" width="620" height="411" alt="King Charles I on his way to be executed, 30 January 1649, in a 19th-century painting by Ernest Crofts (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)" title="King Charles I on his way to be executed, 30 January 1649, in a 19th-century painting by Ernest Crofts (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)" /> 3 September 1651 Hoping to take back the English crown, Charles II and his mainly Scottish army take on Oliver Cromwell’s superior forces at Worcester and lose. The young king narrowly evades capture and is forced to flee to France, disguised as a servant. Read more | Your ultimate guide to the Restoration era 3 September 1658 Oliver Cromwell dies, aged 59. His eldest son, Richard, succeeds him as lord protector. May 1659 With little political or military experience, Richard Cromwell is unable to command the respect or confidence of the army and parliament. Nine months after his father’s death, he resigns, ending the Protectorate. 4 April 1660 The exiled king issues the Declaration of Breda, outlining his terms for a restoration of the monarchy, including freedom of religious conscience and a “general pardon” for those who swear loyalty to him. It is made public on 1 May. 29 May 1660 Charles II triumphantly enters London on his 30th birthday. His huge procession makes its way to Whitehall, where the king meets with peers and MPs, who queue to kiss his hand. Read more | How Charles II put Britain back together after the Civil War November 1660 The Royal Society is founded at Gresham College, London. 30 January 1661 The bodies of Oliver Cromwell, Robert Blake, John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton – all instrumental in the trial and execution of Charles I – are exhumed and posthumously hanged, drawn and quartered, after which their heads are placed on spikes above Westminster Hall. 23 April 1661 Charles II is crowned king of England at Westminster Abbey. The loss or destruction of the Crown Jewels during the Commonwealth era has seen new pieces of royal regalia specially made for the occasion. 19 May 1662 The Act of Uniformity enforces the use of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. More than 2,000 clergymen refuse to comply and are expelled from the Church of England. 21 May 1662 Charles II marries the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza. October 1662 In need of money, Charles agrees to sell Dunkirk, which has been in English hands since 1658, to Louis XIV of France for 5 million livres (around £320,000). The price is later brought down by a 12 per cent discount. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/04/GettyImages599965549-2fcbee7-e1680779780202.jpg" width="620" height="410" alt="The Raid on the Medway, 1667, painting by Dutch artist Pieter Cornelisz van Soest (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" title="The Raid on the Medway, 1667, painting by Dutch artist Pieter Cornelisz van Soest (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" /> March 1665 – July 1667 The Second Anglo-Dutch War, stemming from commercial rivalry between England and the Dutch Republic, ends in victory for the Dutch. 1665–66 The Great Plague of London kills as many as 100,000 people, roughly 20 per cent of the city’s population. It is the worst outbreak of plague in England since the Black Death of 1348. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/04/GettyImages802465290-5218254-e1680779636889.jpg" width="620" height="404" alt="An illustration showing a group of men filling a mass grave during the Great Plague of London, 1665-66 (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="An illustration showing a group of men filling a mass grave during the Great Plague of London, 1665-66 (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> February 1666 Catherine of Braganza suffers a miscarriage. She will lose two more pregnancies before 1669 and will never bear a living heir for the king. Read more | Coffee, plague and the Great Fire: the pleasures and perils of living in Restoration London 2 September 1666 The Great Fire of London begins in a baker’s shop off Pudding Lane. Some 13,200 houses, as well as St Paul’s Cathedral, are destroyed. The financial costs are estimated at £10 million. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/04/GettyImages464477641-8f8f540-e1680780109394.jpg" width="625" height="413" alt="A 17th-century depiction of the Great Fire of London, 1666, looking towards the west facade of old St Paul's Cathedral (Photo by Museum of London/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" title="A 17th-century depiction of the Great Fire of London, 1666, looking towards the west facade of old St Paul's Cathedral (Photo by Museum of London/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" /> Summer 1667 Charles forms the Cabal ministry, a private group of high councillors who help him extend his power. The first letters of the names or titles of the five most prominent men – Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale – give the Cabal its name. April 1668 Charles begins a relationship with orange seller-turned actor Nell Gwyn. June 1670 Charles signs a secret treaty with Louis XIV. In it he promises to convert to Catholicism at a future date and provide warships and soldiers to help the French war against the Dutch, in return for French subsidies. March 1672 Charles bypasses parliament and issues the Declaration of Indulgence, which states that penal laws against Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters will be removed. Parliamentary protests see the proclamation revoked. 1672–74 According to the terms of his secret treaty with the French king, Charles sends the English navy to support France in its war with the Dutch Republic. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/04/GettyImages544166568-56d87b0-e1680779927531.jpg" width="629" height="402" alt="The battle of Solebay in 1672, the first naval engagement of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, painting by Willem van de Velde (Photo by VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images)" title="The battle of Solebay in 1672, the first naval engagement of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, painting by Willem van de Velde (Photo by VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images)" /> March 1675 John Flamsteed is appointed the first astronomer royal. He is charged with drawing up an accurate map of the night sky, which can be used for navigation. September 1678 A renegade Anglican clergyman named Titus Oates informs parliament of a fictitious plot (known as the Popish Plot) alleging that members of the Jesuit religious order are planning to assassinate Charles II and bring his brother James, Duke of York to the throne. On the podcast | Dr Clare Jackson tackles listener questions on the reestablishment of the monarchy 1679–81 A parliamentary bill is introduced in May 1679, intended to exclude Charles II’s Catholic brother and heir from the succession. The so-called Exclusion Crisis continues until 1681, when Charles dissolves parliament for the last time before his death. May 1679 The Habeas Corpus act is passed, ensuring that no one can be imprisoned unlawfully. The term – Latin for “you may have the body” – has ancient beginnings in the common law of England, dating back before the creation of Magna Carta in 1215. Early 1683 A group of Protestants, including James, Duke of Monmouth (an illegitimate son of Charles II), plan to murder the king and his heir in the Rye House Plot. 6 February 1685 Charles II dies at the Palace of Whitehall, having apparently suffered a stroke a few days earlier. In his final moments he converts to Roman Catholicism, taking Communion, and is anointed with holy oil. His younger brother succeeds him as James VII and II. This article was first published in the Christmas 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed
Alternate history: what if the Great Fire of London never happened?
For a little under five days, London was ablaze in one of the city's worst-ever disasters. What was the impact of the Great Fire? Dr Clare Jackson talks to Nige Tassell about how it changed the English capital and why its legacy as a ‘plague killer’ should be extinguished
When fire shot through the City of London over the course of three days in early September 1666, razing everything in its path, the future of England’s capital – its very existence – was in jeopardy. Although the estimated death toll remained remarkably low for a fire that wreaked such destruction, the City itself looked much different when the final smouldering was extinguished. More than 13,000 houses had been destroyed, along with nearly 90 churches. Some significant buildings were lost to the flames, including the original St Paul’s Cathedral and the Royal Exchange, as well as the city gates at Aldersgate, Ludgate and Newgate. The subsequent history of England would have taken a different complexion had its entire capital been lost. As it was, the flames were largely limited to the City of London. A few historians have even suggested that, in some regards, the Great Fire of London turned out to be a force for good. The principal tenet of this line of thinking revolves around the Great Plague. The belief is that, when fire broke out, the epidemic – which had ripped so easily through the cheek-by-jowl living quarters of the City the previous year – would have found it much harder be transmitted; in short, that the fire killed off the epidemic, certainly in London. Did you know? Thomas Farriner’s bakehouse (where the Great Fire of London began) was not located on Pudding Lane, as traditionally believed. Hearth tax records show it was actually sited on Fish Yard, a small enclave off Pudding Lane. Read more | Coffee, plague and the Great Fire: the pleasures and perils of living in Restoration London Dr Clare Jackson – senior tutor at Trinity Hall, Cambridge and author of the award-winning Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588–1688 (Allen Lane, 2021) – dismisses this theory. “This is a myth. The Great Fire had not spread to areas that had experienced particularly high levels of plague infection, such as Southwark, Clerkenwell and Whitechapel.” That is, the flames failed to reach certain districts, so couldn’t have had an impact on plague numbers. Plus, the timeline of the epidemic doesn’t neatly tally with the timeline of the Great Fire, as Dr Jackson explains: “Plague mortality had already started to decline from late 1665, while people also continued to die from plague after the Fire. Popular associations between the Great Plague of 1665 and the Fire of 1666 arise only from their close chronological proximity.” On the podcast | Rebecca Rideal responds to listener questions about the devastating blaze that swept through the capital in 1666 Understandably, the Great Fire caused mass migration from the City of London to surrounding areas. But this alone didn’t reshape the city, especially as much of this migration was only short term as the homeless sought temporary shelter in the open land beyond the city limits, particularly to the north. By then, London was already swiftly expanding and swelling. “Before the Fire, there had already been significant expansion westwards, with local populations moving beyond the City’s walls to escape overcrowding. Newly fashionable areas such as St James, Covent Garden and Westminster were attracting the gentry and upwardly mobile migrants, while poorer families were tending to move eastwards.” A speedy recovery Rather than licking its wounds, the City of London swiftly set about rebuilding itself. The economy obviously took an immediate knock, but it wasn’t as catastrophic a hit as might have been expected. “While there was inevitable short-term disruption to trade,” explains Dr Jackson, “the speed with which the authorities embarked on rapid rebuilding and recovery was remarkable. Two sets of plans for the City’s rebuilding had already been submitted to the government of Charles II by 13 September 1666, only a week after the Fire ended. By 1670, around 6,000 houses had been rebuilt.” One legacy of the Great Fire was the use of less flammable materials in building; the Rebuilding Act of 1667 specified that “all the outsides of all buildings in and about the said City be henceforth made of brick or stone”. However, as Dr Jackson clarifies, the events of 1666 can’t take complete credit, pointing out that, during the early 1600s, James VI and I had made similar restrictions on the use of materials in construction in London, “both to reduce fire risk and to reserve timber for England’s Navy ships. Such orders had, however, often been disregarded, but the Fire of 1666 provided an opportunity for widespread enforcement, as City authorities were given the right to demolish illegally built houses.” In context: the Great Fire of London From Sunday 2 to Wednesday 5 September 1666, the City of London was overwhelmed by the largest, fastest-moving fire it had ever experienced, one that razed most of the buildings within its walls to the ground. Having broken out in a bakery just after 12am, the fire spread swiftly through the night. There was a chance to contain its reach early on by demolishing buildings ahead of its path to create firebreaks, but the Lord Mayor dallied over authorising such measures and the fire took serious hold. Fanned by easterly winds, it roared largely unchallenged across the entire City. The flames only dissipated when the wind dropped nearly 72 hours after its outbreak. It was “the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw,” recorded the famed diarist Samuel Pepys. One of the grandest rebuilds was, of course, the magnificent Sir Christopher Wren-designed St Paul’s Cathedral, which still dominates the London skyline as viewed looking northwards from the South Bank of the Thames. That’s an undisputed visual reminder of the Fire. One last potential legacy of 1666 concerns how prepared London was for subsequent outbreaks of fires. Within a few years, the large-scale adoption of fire insurance became standard practice, but the idea that a new emergency service was immediately created is again debunked by Dr Jackson. “There were a few new fire pumps, but the first city-wide fire service was not created until January 1833.” Perhaps it should have come into force earlier. In 1676, 600 houses in Southwark were lost to a blaze, and a further 1,000 in Wapping six years after that. In conclusion, although it accelerated certain developments that were already afoot, had the Great Fire not happened, the course of English history wouldn’t have been terribly affected. However, if the wind hadn’t dropped three days into the fire and the flames had continued to consume all before them, the events of September 1666 could have left the country without a capital city. More from our alternate history series What if... Britain and France went to war in 1898? What if... Queen Victoria had been assassinated? What if... the Ottomans had won at Lepanto? What if... George III hadn't 'lost' the colonies What if... the Spanish Armada had succeeded? What if... the gunpowder plot had succeeded? What if... Alexander the Great had lived longer? Clare Jackson is senior tutor of Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge. She has presented the BBC2 series The Stuarts and its sequel, The Stuarts in Exile, and is author of Devil-Land: England under Siege 1588-1688 (Allen Lane, 2021) This article was first published in the October 2022 edition of BBC History Revealed
Your guide to the Great Fire of London, plus 10 surprising facts
One of the most famous disasters in London's history, the Great Fire of London in 1666 devastated the heart of England's capital, destroying more than 13,000 houses and badly damaging landmarks including St Paul's Cathedral and the Royal Exchange. But how much do you really know about the blaze? We bring you the facts...
Why did the Great Fire of London start? Who was to blame? And how many died? Discover the story of the 1666 blaze that destroyed the City of London – from diarist Samuel Pepys's first-hand accounts, to the aftermath of the devastating fire... When was the Great Fire of London? How did the Great Fire of London start? The Great Fire of London: eye-witness accounts What did people do when the fire broke out? The aftermath of the Great Fire of London How many people died in the Great Fire of London? How was London rebuilt after the Great Fire of London? 10 lesser-known facts about the Great Fire of London Great Fire of London: through the eyes of Samuel Pepys The Great Fire of London: key facts When was the Great Fire of London? 2 September 1666 to 5 September 1666 How much damage did it cause? It is thought that the Great Fire of London destroyed up to four-fifths of the City of London, including most of the civic buildings, old St Paul’s Cathedral, 87 churches, and around 13,000 houses How many people died in the Great Fire of London? "Though we do not know exactly how many people died as a result of the Great Fire of London, it was almost certainly more than commonly accepted figures," says historian Rebecca Rideal When was the Great Fire of London? The Great Fire of London began on Sunday 2 September 1666. The famous diarist Samuel Pepys – from whom we know a great deal about the event – was enjoying a good night’s rest at the time; the previous day he’d been to the theatre, avoided someone he didn’t like and repaired to Islington. He ate, drank and became “mighty merry”, before singing all the way home, writing some letters and falling into bed. Hardly surprising, then, that when his maid called him at three o’clock in the morning to look at a fire across town, he decided it was far enough away not to worry about and went straight back to sleep. Pepys wasn’t the only one. The Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, took one look at the blaze, declared “a woman might piss it out,” and dived back under the covers. In the days that followed, his weak leadership added fuel to a fire that became one of the greatest catastrophes the city has seen. A spark from a baker’s oven grew into an all-consuming monster that lasted four days. The immediate aftermath was homelessness and ruin for thousands, but the effects can still be seen today. How did the Great Fire of London start? The Great Fire began when someone in Thomas Farynor’s Pudding Lane bakery failed to securely damp down the oven before going to bed. By Monday evening, 300 houses had burned – the final toll would top 13,000. Divine retribution? Mystics, fortune tellers and especially Puritans had predicted doom for the city’s modern, sinful ways even before the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. London, led by the decadent Charles II, enjoyed a lavish lifestyle and was, according to the deeply religious, ripe for a tumble. It was, they claimed, already happening. The Great Plague had taken 100,000 lives the previous year and invasion by the Dutch seemed to be only a matter of time. The ‘666’ number had not gone unnoticed either. In 1597, an anonymous pamphlet, Babylon is Fallen, had suggested 1666 would be the Year of the Beast, perhaps even the time of Christ’s second coming. Oddly, afterwards, it was commemorated by poet John Dryden as an annus mirabilis (‘year of wonders’). Restoration London was frivolous and worldly, bustling and cosmopolitan. On narrow, dirty and dark streets, rickety houses were built from wood and thatch. Their protruding upper storeys, ‘jetties’, almost met at the top. Filth rained onto unwary pedestrians from upstairs windows. Inside, people lit their houses with candles and cooked with open fires. There was hay in the stables, pitch on the roofs, tar in the shipyards and even gunpowder in many homes, as Cromwell’s soldiers retained their muskets from the civil wars. Given the city’s flammability, doom-mongers’ predictions of an apocalyptic inferno could hardly be deemed radical. The Great Fire of London: eye-witness accounts We have several eye-witness accounts of the fire. The most famous is that of Pepys, whose access to famous figures such as the King, the Duke of York and the Lord Mayor make his version pivotal. Pepys’s friend John Evelyn, another diarist, lived in Deptford but came to town to see the kerfuffle. Letters and memoirs from ordinary people provide glimpses of what went on below the surface. Sir Edward Harley’s account mentions Farynor’s bakery maid, who, he says, was too scared to climb onto the roof next door with the rest of the household and became the fire’s first victim. Unless in the fire’s immediate path, people didn’t panic – at first. Strong winds from the east, however, fanned the flames, and disagreement and indecision allowed things to get out of hand. Postmaster James Hickes was forced to flee from the post office, but not before taking as many letters as he could carry. With no reliable information, rumour and hearsay took over. 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the history of London Firefighting was the job of the Watch, ‘bell-men’ who patrolled the streets at night. Every church stored basic equipment – fire hooks (long poles to demolish precarious buildings), ladders, leather buckets, axes and ‘squirts’ (the 17th-century Super Soaker). The few ‘fire engines’ were clumsy and the river had no quays, so firefighters had to trundle them to the water as best they could. Several toppled into the Thames. The Museum of London holds an incomplete fire engine from around 1678. As part of their ‘Fire! Fire!’ project, they commissioned Croford Coachbuilders to rebuild the missing parts. “It wasn’t until we put it together again that we could see how it would work,” explains Meriel Jeater, curator of the Museum of London’s ‘Fire! Fire!’ exhibition. “Now the wheels are back on we’ve realised it’s really difficult to turn corners.” The default fire-fighting technique was demolition, but faced with that prospect, the Lord Mayor demurred. He may have feared being personally held to account for the damage, but, whatever his reasons, Bloodworth became a hate figure. Pepys described him as “a silly man”. In one of Pepys’s proudest moments, he was called to court to describe the fire to the Kingand the Duke of York. He advised a troubled Charles that buildings must be pulled down. “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. The Duke of York bid me tell him that if he would have any more soldiers he shall.” Pepys made his way back, noting “every creature coming away loaden with goods to save, and here and there sicke people carried away in beds”. When he found Bloodworth, the mayor was “like a man spent, with a handkercher about his neck. To 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.’” Bloodworth refused the Duke of York’s soldiers and disappeared to “refresh himself, having been up all night”. Disgusted, Pepys reflected he appeared to be “a very weak man”. People moved valuables to nearby ‘safety’, then again, and again as the flames licked closer. “I did remove my money and iron chests into my cellar, as thinking that the safest place,” recounts Pepys. “And got my bags of gold into my office, ready to carry away, and my chief papers of accounts.” It wasn’t long before he would bury his wine and parmesan cheese, for safekeeping. The diarist was helped by the wife of a colleague, Sir William Batten, when, at 4am on Monday 3 September, she sent a cart to carry his things to the safety of a house in Bethnal Green. Pepys didn’t like the Battens – and is regularly rude about them in his diary – but for once he was grateful. Most Londoners weren’t so lucky. What did people do when the fire broke out? London streamed with people trying to get out, gridlocked by narrow streets and bottlenecked by the eight gates in the old Roman wall. The river jammed with boats. “Here we saw the Thames covered with goods floating, all the barges & boates laden with what some had time & courage to save, as on the other, the Carts &c. carrying out to the fields, which for many miles were strewed with moveables of all sorts, & Tents erecting to shelter both people & what goods they could get away,” writes John Evelyn who, on hearing the news, couldn’t resist taking his wife and son to Southwark to watch the carnage from the South Bank. Pepys noted that one-in-three boats boasted a pair of virginals (a keyboard instrument) and most of the saved goods were, unsurprisingly, luxuries. One witness, Robert Flatman, writing to his lawyer brother, tells him his chambers are down – but his books are safe. The Museum of London holds a half-finished embroidery and set of bed-hangings said to have been saved from the flames. Most burned. Excavations have fetched up crusty, rusted lumps which, under X-ray, reveal themselves as a padlock and several keys, fused together in London’s furnace. A large iron lump turned out to be a heavy-duty waffle iron, just like ones used today. Archaeologists found, in a building two doors from Farynor’s bakery, melted hooks and eyes, as we might use on clothes, along with heat-twisted window glass and partly-melted ceramic floor tiles. “We understand it must have been at least 1,200 degrees to do that,” says Jeater. However chaotic the flow out of town, it was almost as busy going towards the blaze. With carts and boats suddenly at a premium, it didn’t take long for country folk to realise they could charge extortionate rates to desperate refugees. The fire brought out the worst in some. Fourteen-year-old schoolboy William Taswell, who roamed the ruins, describes his father being robbed by people pretending to help, and mobs attacking foreigners, who were increasingly blamed for the disaster. But while the Lord Mayor dragged his heels, first-hand reports describe King Charles up to his ankles in water helping to fight the flames. Londoners were impressed at the king’s “labouring in person” and if, to modern ears, his later declaration that no one had lost more than himself doesn’t sound too diplomatic, they knew what he meant. Pepys, who had initially taken a boat to watch the fire – before “fire drops” raining from the sky made it too dangerous – had his family’s safety in mind. When his wife Elizabeth woke him at 2am with the flames at the bottom of their lane, it was time to get out. “Lord what sad sight it was by moone-light to see, the whole City almost on fire that you might see it plain at Woolwich,” he wrote, having taken a boat to the nearby port. His family safe, Pepys dashed back expecting to find his home consumed, but it wasn’t. The wind had changed, causing the flames to switch course. Pepys climbed the church tower (brave, given its clock had burned) “and there saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw; everywhere great fires, oylecellars and brimstone and other things burning”. He picked his way through the streets, his “feet ready to burn, walking through the towne among the hot coles”, and picking up a piece of glass as a souvenir “melted and buckled with the heat of the fire like parchment”. He watched “a poor cat taken out of a hole in the chimney, joyning to the wall of the Exchange; with, the hair all burned off the body, and yet alive”. It wasn’t the only time he noted the animals: “The poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were some of them burned their wings, and fell down.” Then at Moorfields he witnessed human suffering. Refugees, who had lost everything overnight, camped in the open air. He described the “wretches”, remarking how prices had taken a sharp hike during the fire: “twopence for a plain pennyloaf”. A city in ruin: the aftermath of the Great Fire of London Probably due to the demolition-policy, the fire stopped at Pye (Pie) Corner on the west of the city, on 5 September, but London was decimated. St Paul’s Cathedral lay in ruins, joined by scores of churches, thousands of homes and the city’s only bridge, itself once covered in shops and dwellings. People wandered, dazed, through the rubble, looking for their old homes and haunts. Evelyn moved “with extraordinary difficulty, clambring over mountaines of yet smoking rubbish, & frequently mistaking where I was, the ground under my feete so hott, as made me not onely Sweate, but even burnt the soles of my shoes”. How many people died in the Great Fire of London? After the fire, the Parish Clerks’ bills of mortality, listing causes of death, were collated, with just six deaths appearing to have been fire-related. “It’s a mystery as to why more deaths aren’t recorded,” says Jeater. “There must have been more.” The true figure of deaths during the Great Fire of London may never be known. The small number of deaths, however, meant mass misery. Gigantic encampments of around 100,000 homeless people appeared outside the city walls. “The fields are the only receptacle which they can find for themselves and their goods,” writes witness Thomas Vincent, “most of the late inhabitants of London lie all night in the open air, with no other canopy over them but that of the heavens.” As for Evelyn, he went north to Islington and Highgate, where “two hundred thousand people of all ranks & degrees, dispersed & laying along by their heapes of what they could save from the Incendium, deploring their losse, & though ready to perish for hunger & destitution, yet not asking one penny for reliefe”. Relief, asked for or not, was on its way, by order of the King. On 10 October, people across the country went to church, fasted for the day and donated money to destitute Londoners. The new lord mayor, Sir William Bolton, for whom everyone had high hopes after Bloodworth, was in charge of administrating the £12,000 raised. It all ended in scandal, however, when he couldn’t account for £1,800 and had to resign. Pepys, no fan of his predecessor, called Bolton’s actions “the greatest piece of roguery that they say was ever found in a Lord Mayor”. London was never be the same again. “I could not sleep till almost two in the morning through thoughts of fire,” Pepys wrote months later, in February 1667. Rebuilding, with fire-resistant bricks and mortar, had begun, but the mental scars would be harder to erase. Paying the price: fire judges Nobody agreed about who should pay for rebuilding after the Great Fire of London. Many landlords required tenants to continue paying for homes that didn’t exist anymore – some even claimed tenants should rebuild their homes at their own expense. The Fire of London Disputes Act declared: “Every one concerned should beare a proportionable share of the losse according to their severall Interests,” but admitted that “wherein in respect of the multitude of cases varying in their circumstances, noe certaine generall rule can be prescribed.” To oversee disputes at the Fire Court, 22 men were recruited as firen judges. Speed was imperative, so they usually pronounced judgement within a day of hearing cases. They gave up their time free of charge and heard hundreds of cases. Between 1671-74, portraits of each judge were painted as a thank you. How was London rebuilt after the Great Fire of London? The ground may have been too hot to walk on, but that didn’t stop plans for rebuilding. First off the mark was Christopher Wren (not yet a ‘sir’) on 11 September, with a handsome peacock-tail grid of boulevards radiating from a central monument. He was followed by John Evelyn with a similar structure, containing an elegant kite-design at its centre. There were more radical suggestions, such as the severe, box-like grid of identical squares by Richard Newcourt, or retired army officer Valentine Knight’s terrifying ladderfest of tiny streets. From magnificent ruins to imposing forts: 10 must-visit British castles The plans received varying levels of excitement by Charles II, but none found favour with Londoners. No landowner was prepared to see his few square feet consumed into a giant communal grid. So the medieval criss-cross of alleyways and courtyards was rebuilt, albeit with wider streets and one new road. Strict building regulations dictated construction. Sensible, straight-sided houses were to be built in brick and stone only, with no overhanging jetties. There should be guttering with pipes, not spouts, and the Thames was to have proper quays, accessible by fire engines. Smoke-producing and other dangerous industries were to be sited together, a plan that pleased Evelyn, who had written Fumifugium, one of the first treatise on air pollution in London, in 1661. Royal surveyor Wren was put in charge of the complex rebuild, working closely with his friend Robert Hooke, the city surveyor (and another polymath, known as an inventor, physicist, astronomer, biologist and artist). Some structures had survived. The church of St Katherine Cree acted as a canteen for the thousands of labourers building the new city. Its brand-new rose window had been based on one in the old St Paul’s and, today, provides an idea as to how the previous cathedral looked. The Guildhall needed a new roof, but was otherwise relatively unscathed. A merchant’s house, now the OldWine Shades in Martin Lane, and one of the city’s last half-timbered buildings, 41–42 Cloth Fair also survived both the Great Fire and the Second World War. Oddly, there are very few surviving private houses. Lack of good quality materials and poor workmanship ensured most fell down quickly. Wren was very fussy about his materials, ensuring the great public buildings of the time, including St Paul’s Cathedral, were built to last. Man with the plan: Christopher Wren Scientist, mathematician, architect, engineer, Christopher Wren was one of a growing group of 17th-century polymaths. The son of a rector, he had grown to prominence as a professor of astronomy, first at London’s Gresham College, then Oxford. He mingled with the great minds of the day and became a founding member of the Royal Society. When Wren visited Paris, he became inspired by continental baroque design, which, combined with his love of physics and engineering, created his own unique style. In charge of rebuilding London, Wren grew frustrated that his original plans were rejected, but he oversaw 51 new churches (23 still survive). His piéce de resistance was, of course, St Paul’s Cathedral. It was a building site before the fire, with piecemeal renovation ongoing instead of Wren’s requested wholesale demolition, which had been refused. But during the Great Fire, the wooden scaffolding surrounding the building created a mini-furnace – so Wren got his way after all. He was knighted in 1673 and went on to design many other famous London landmarks, including the royal hospitals at Greenwich and Chelsea. Coffee, plague and the Great Fire: the pleasures and perils of Restoration London London demanded a monument to the great disasters, and Christopher Wren was happy to oblige. He – and his friend Robert Hooke – couldn’t bear the idea of a useless pillar at a time stone was so precious, so the pair of fanatical astronomers sneakily created a precision-instrument, disguised as a classical column. Opened in 1677, its spiral staircase has an open centre, with a secret door at the gilded urn at the top. This meant that Wren and Hooke could sit in an underground room, with their zenith telescope pointed through the stairs and the open trapdoor towards the heavens. Sadly, the only thing the two scientists couldn’t control was the rumble of traffic on the cobbled streets outside, which made their telescope practically unusable. Who was to blame for the Great Fire of London? Everyone looked to blame someone for the fire, with Roman Catholics under most suspicion, followed closely by foreigners. Things got ugly. Then, out of the blue, French watchmaker Robert Hubert confessed. His story was shaky – he claimed he started the fire in Westminster, despite the flames never even reaching that far, then changed his tale to Pudding Lane, the fire’s base. Hubert’s mental condition was clearly unstable. The Earl of Clarendon watched his trail and described him as “a poor, distracted wretch”. Even the judge didn’t believe him, but he stuck to his story and all they could do was hang him. After his death, it was discovered Hubert hadn’t even been in London when the fire started. Much of the blame culture was so Londoners could avoid looking at themselves. Thomas Vincent, a Puritan preacher, published God’s Terrible Voice in the City by Plague and Fire in 1667, voicing what many secretly suspected – that God punished them for their sinful ways, not least those of Charles II’s extravagant court. In 1681, a plaque blaming papists for the fire was erected in Pudding Lane. It had to be removed in the 18th century, not as it offended Catholics, but as it caused congestion as people stopped to read it. An inscription on the Monument itself, also blaming the Roman church, wouldn’t be removed until the 1830s. This article was first published in the September 2016 issue of BBC History Revealed Great Fire of London: 10 facts Historian Rebecca Rideal shares 10 lesser-known facts about the Great Fire of London On 5 September 1666, the 33-year-old Samuel Pepys climbed the steeple of the ancient church of All Hallows-by-the-Tower and was met with the “the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw; everywhere great fires, oyle-cellars, and brimstone, and other things burning”. Leaving the church, he wandered along Gracechurch Street, Fenchurch Street and Lombard Street towards the Royal Exchange, which he found to be “a sad sight” with all the pillars and statues (except one of Sir Thomas Gresham) destroyed. The ground scorched his feet and he found nothing but dust, ash and ruins. It was the fourth day of the Great Fire of London and, though some parts of the city would continue to burn for months, the worst of the destruction was finally over. Thanks in part to Pepys’s vivid diary entries, the story of the Great Fire is well known. Alongside the fortunes of Henry VIII’s wives, the Battle of Britain and the fate of Guy Fawkes, it forms part of a scattering of familiar islands in the muddy quagmire of British history. We all know, roughly speaking, what happened: during the early hours of 2 September 1666, a fire broke out in Thomas Farriner’s bakehouse on Pudding Lane, which blazed and spread with such ferocity and speed that within a few days the old City of London was reduced to a charred ruin. More than 13,000 houses, 87 churches and 44 livery halls were destroyed, the historic city gates were wrecked, and the Guildhall, St Paul’s Cathedral, Baynard’s Castle and the Royal Exchange were severely damaged – in some cases, beyond repair. Those with more than a passing knowledge of the crucial facts might be aware of accounts of King Charles II fighting the fire alongside his brother, the Duke of York; of Samuel Pepys taking pains to bury his prized parmesan cheese; or of the French watchmaker Robert Hubert meeting his death at Tyburn after (falsely) claiming to have started the blaze. Here are 10 more facts you may not know about the Great Fire of London… The Great Fire of London did not start on Pudding Lane Thomas Farriner’s bakehouse was not located on Pudding Lane proper. Hearth Tax records created just before the fire place Farriner’s bakehouse on Fish Yard, a small enclave off Pudding Lane. His immediate neighbours included a waterbearer named Henry More, a sexton [a person who looks after a church and churchyard] named Thomas Birt, the parish ‘clearke’, a plasterer named George Porter, one Alice Spencer, a widow named Mrs Mary Whittacre, and a turner named John Bibie. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/Billingsgate2C20London2C20pictured20in201598-5d952c0.jpg" width="1100" height="600" alt="Billingsgate, London, pictured in 1598. Billngsgate is a ward in London on the north side of the River Thames, between Tower and London Bridge. In 1666 the Great Fire of London began here in Pudding Lane. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)" title="Billingsgate" /> The Great Fire of London was not Thomas Farriner’s first brush with trouble In 1627, the then 10- or 11-year-old Thomas Farriner was discovered by a city constable wandering alone within the city walls, having run away from his master [it is not known why he had a master at this time]. He was detained at Bridewell Prison, where the incident was recorded in the book of minutes. During the 17th century, Bridewell (a former Tudor palace) was a kind of proto-correctional facility where young waifs and strays would often be sent to receive a rudimentary education, many of them then cherry-picked to become apprentices to the prison’s patrons. The Globe theatre fire of 1613 During the boy’s hearing, it transpired that he had attempted to run away from his master three or four times previously. Farriner was released, only to be detained once more in 1628 for the same reason. A year later he was apprenticed as a baker under one Thomas Dodson. Far from levelling the city, the Great Fire of London scorched the skin and flesh from the city’s buildings – but their skeletons remained The ruins of many of London’s buildings had to be demolished before rebuilding work could begin. A sketch from 1673 by Thomas Wyck shows the extent of the ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral that remained. John Evelyn described the remaining stones as standing upright, fragile and “calcined”. What’s more, the burning lasted months, not days: Pepys recorded that cellars were still burning in March of the following year. With plenty of nooks and crannies to commandeer, gangs operated among the ruins, pretending to offer travellers a ‘link’ (escorted passage) – only to rob them blind and leave them for dead. Many of those who lost their homes and livelihood to the fire built temporary shacks on the ruins of their former homes and shops until this was prohibited. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/Old20St20Paul27s20Cathedral20burning20in20the20Great20Fire20of20London2C201666-9089390.jpg" width="900" height="550" alt="Old St Paul's Cathedral burning in the Great Fire of London, 1666. (Photo by Guildhall Library & Art Gallery/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" title="Old St Paul's Cathedral burning in the Great Fire of London, 1666. Artist: Wenceslaus Hollar" /> At the time of the Great Fire, England was engaged in a costly war with the Dutch Republic and was gearing up for one last battle The conflict, known as the Second Anglo-Dutch War, was the second of three 17th-century maritime wars to be fought between the English and the Dutch over transatlantic trade supremacy. By September 1666 there had already been five major engagements: the battle of Lowestoft (1665); the battle of Vågen (1665); the Four Days’ Battle (1666); St James’s Day Battle (1666); and Holmes’s Bonfire (1666). How the Great Fire of London revealed the city’s Roman past In the confusion of the blaze, some believed that the Great Fire of London had been started by Dutch merchants in retaliation for the last of these engagements – a vicious raid on the Dutch islands of Vlieland and Terschelling – which had occurred barely a month earlier. That attack had been orchestrated by Sir Robert Holmes (renowned for his short fuse and unpredictable nature) and resulted in the destruction of an estimated 150 Dutch merchant ships and, crucially, the torching of the town of West-Terschelling. While the attack was celebrated with bonfires and bells in London, it appalled the Dutch, and there was rioting in Amsterdam. Aphra Behn – at that time an English spy stationed in Antwerp – wrote how she had seen a letter from a merchant’s wife “that desires her husband to com [sic] to Amsterdam home for that theare [sic] never was so great a desolation & mourning”. Behn was supposed to travel to Dort to continue her espionage, but declared that she “dare as well be hang’d as go”. Listen | Alexander Larman and Nicholas Kenyon discuss the events and legacy of the 1666 blaze Though we do not know exactly how many people died as a result of the Great Fire of London, it was almost certainly more than commonly accepted figures In the traditional telling of the Great Fire story, the human cost is negligible. Indeed, only a few years after the blaze, Edward Chamberlayne claimed that “not above six or eight persons were burnt,” and an Essex vicar named Ralph Josselin noted that “few perished in the flames.” There was undoubtedly enough warning to ensure that a large proportion of London’s population vacated hazardous areas, but for every sick person helped out of their house, there must have been others with no one to aid them. What’s more, parish records hint at a far greater death toll than previously supposed. At the parish of St Giles Cripplegate, for example, the number of burials increased by a third (presumably a result of citizens from destroyed parishes using this surviving church). Interestingly, there was a disproportionate rise (by two-thirds) in the number of deaths due to being “aged” and an increase in deaths attributed to “fright”. Likewise, the parish records of St Boltoph Bishopsgate show that the mean age at the time of death rose by an astonishing 12 years, from 18.3 to 31.3. This suggests either that older people were more likely to die in the month of September or that, in an age in which infanticide was rife, the deaths of young infants were not being recorded – perhaps even both. The diarist John Evelyn certainly believed that the foul smell in the air at the time of the fire was caused by the bodies, beds and other combustible goods of “some poor creatures”, and the poet John Dryden – who, it must be said, was out of London at the time – wrote of “helpless infants left amidst the fire”. When reports reached France, a substantial loss of life was implied: “The letters from London speak of the terrible sights of persons burned to death and calcined limbs, making it easy to believe the terror though it cannot be exactly described. The old, tender children and many sick and helpless persons were all burned in their beds and served as fuel for the flames.” Test your knowledge of the Great Fire of London with our history quiz View Riddle on the source website Louis XIV of France offered to help It took more than a week for news of the fire to reach the French royal court in Paris, but when it did there was talk of little else. The Venetian ambassador in the French capital declared that “this accident… will be memorable through all the centuries.” Privately, Louis XIV must have been thrilled. It was wrongly believed that the fire had destroyed England’s magazine stores and that the English navy would be forced to retire. Because of a 1662 treaty with the Dutch Republic, France had been obliged to enter the Anglo-Dutch War on the side of the Dutch, but the French king had neither the appetite nor the navy to play an active role. Louis XIV publicly ordered that he would not tolerate “any rejoicings about it [the Great Fire], being such a deplorable accident involving injury to so many unhappy people”, and offered to send aid in the shape of food provisions and anything else that might be required to relieve the suffering of those left destitute. There had been a genuine plot to burn the City of London In April 1666, a group of parliamentarians led by John Rathbone and William Saunders were tried at the Old Bailey and found guilty of conspiring to assassinate Charles II, overthrow government and fire the City of London, letting down the portcullis to keep out assistance. The trial was recorded in the London Gazette, which revealed that the plotters purportedly had the support of a conspirator in Holland and had planned to execute their “Hellish design” on the anniversary of Oliver Cromwell’s death, 3 September. Coffee, plague and the Great Fire: the pleasures and perils of Restoration London People let their imaginations run away with them By 6 September, news of the fire had travelled as far as Berwick, where local soldiers claimed that they had seen visions of “ships in the air”. Reporting the phenomenon back to Whitehall, one Mr Scott assured his contact that he believed it to have just been their imaginations. As he travelled across Wiltshire to gather more information about the fire, Bulstrode Whitelocke bumped into his friend Sir Seymour Pyle who had “had too much wine”. Pyle claimed that there had been a huge fight between 60,000 Presbyterians and the militia, which had resulted in the death and imprisonment of 30,000 rebels. Whitelocke soon discovered that Pyle had been “drunke & swearing & lying att almost every word”. The Great Fire of London was predicted A few weeks before the fire, one Mr Light claimed to have been asked by a “zealous Papist”: “You expect great things in ’66, and think that Rome will be destroyed, but what if it be London?” Meanwhile, five months before the fire Elizabeth Styles claimed to have been told by a Frenchman that at some point between June and October there would not be “a house left between Temple Bar and London Bridge”. Samuel Pepys kept a lion as a pet + 6 other remarkable facts about the famous diarist In 1651, an astrologer named William Lilly created a pamphlet entitled Monarchy or No Monarchy that contained illustrative predictions of the future state of England. The images depicted not only a city blazing with fire, but scenes of naval warfare, infestations of rodents, mass death and starvation. Unsurprisingly, Lilly was called in for questioning following the fire of 1666. Watch: Dan Jones talks to HistoryExtra about walking the route of the fire street by street, following its four-day trail of devastation as it raged through the city View oEmbed on the source website The Great Fire wasn’t the only blaze in London in 1666 London was thrown into a panic during the evening of 9 November when a fire broke out in the Horse Guard House, next to Whitehall Palace. It was believed that the blaze had been caused by a candle falling into some straw. According to Samuel Pepys, the whole city was put on alarm by the “horrid great fire” and a lady even fell into fits of fear. With drums beating and guards running up and down the streets, by 10pm the fire was extinguished, with little damage caused. Rebecca Rideal is a specialist factual television producer and writer whose credits include The Adventurers’ Guide to Britain, Bloody Tales of the Tower and David Attenborough’s First Life. She runs the online magazine The History Vault and is currently studying for her PhD on Restoration London during the Great Plague and the Great Fire at University College London. This list of facts was first published on HistoryExtra in September 2016 Great Fire of London: through the eyes of Samuel Pepys Dominic Sandbrook describes the events of 2 September 1666 – the date that the City of London was engulfed by "an infinite great fire" – from the perspective of Samuel Pepys Samuel Pepys was fast asleep when, at three in the morning of Sunday 2 September 1666, one of his maids, Jane Birch, banged on the door with the news that there was a "great fire" in the City of London. "So I rose and slipped on my nightgowne," Pepys wrote later, "and went to her window." There he saw the telltale tinge of red in the distance. In fact, the fire had already been blazing for a couple of hours, having broken out in Thomas Farriner's bakery in Pudding Lane. The parish constables thought they should demolish the neighbouring houses to stop it spreading, but the lord mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, was not convinced. "Pish!" he famously remarked. "A woman could piss it out." To be fair, he was not alone in his view that the fire would soon be contained. From his window in Seething Lane, Pepys thought little of it, "and so went to bed again and to sleep". By seven in the morning, when Pepys woke again, it seemed that the worst must be over; from his window, he “saw the fire not so much as it was and further off”. But then Jane reappeared with bad news. Almost 300 houses, she said, had burned down already; now the fire had reached Fish Street, near London Bridge. Alarmed, Pepys pulled on his clothes and walked to the Tower, where he went up to get a better view. “And there,” he recorded, “I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge.” His heart overflowing with worry, he scurried down to the waterside and called for a boat, and now the full scale of the disaster became clear. The Thames presented a spectacle of calamity, “everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that layoff; 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 waterside to another.” Even the pigeons, he noticed, seemed transfixed by the catastrophe: “loth to leave their houses,” they “hovered about the windows” until their wings caught fire and they fell to earth. By now it was mid-morning. Whipped up by the eastern wind, the flames were leaping from house to house, consuming all in their path. Built from wood and straw, clustered together in tight alleys, London’s tenements were the perfect tinderbox, their overhanging jetties making it easier for the fire to move from street to street. At Whitehall, a frightened Pepys warned Charles II that “unless his majesty did command houses to be pulled down nothing could stop the fire”. Clearly much troubled, the king ordered him to find the lord mayor, and to tell him “to spare no houses, but to pull down before the fire every way”. But when Pepys caught up with Sir Thomas Bloodworth in Canning Street, the mayor was like “a fainting woman”, with a handkerchief tied around his face to protect him from the smoke. “Lord! what can I do?” Bloodworth cried. “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.” And so the fire burned on. In Thames Street, stores of pitch and tar were ablaze; in neighbouring streets, warehouses of oil, brandy and wine were up in flames. Pepys himself went off for dinner, which, he recorded, was “extraordinarily good”. But when he emerged, it was to scenes of utter chaos, the streets full of weeping families and soot-stained refugees. That night, he and his wife went for a drink on the South Bank, the City glowing red in the night. “It made me weep to see it,” Pepys wrote. “The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruins.” The inferno blazed on, all Monday and all Tuesday, only dying down when the wind fell on Wednesday. In the long run, it was the making of modern London: without the fire, there would be no St Paul’s and far fewer Wren churches. But at the time, there seemed no consolation. The smouldering city seemed like a vision of the Apocalypse, wrote the diarist John Evelyn. “London was, but is no more.” Dominic Sandbrook is the author of State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970–1974 (Allen Lane)
How the Great Fire of London revealed the city’s Roman past
The Great Fire of London obliterated an estimated four-fifths of the City of London, engulfing more than 13,000 houses and almost 90 parish churches. But, as historian Alison Cooley explains, the fire also unearthed a fascinating relic from London's Roman past – the tombstone of a Roman soldier named Vivius Marcianus
The name of one man stands out in accounts of the aftermath of the Great Fire of London: Christopher Wren. The renowned architect masterminded the rebuilding of some 50 churches including the new St Paul’s Cathedral, which also became his memorial, as his epitaph proclaims: Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice – “Reader, if you seek a memorial, look around you.” Less well known, though, is another aspect of the fire: that it revealed elements of London’s Roman past. In 1669, on the site where St Martin’s Church was to be rebuilt on Ludgate Hill, Christopher Wren uncovered a large slab of limestone depicting a full-length male figure below a Latin text. Despite the fact that the stone was over two metres high, it had remained hidden for hundreds of years, having been used as building material during the construction of the earlier medieval church. The sockets cut into the surface of the stone when it was reused are still clearly visible. Read more | The story of the Great Fire of London The slab was a tombstone for a Roman soldier named Vivius Marcianus. The epitaph reads: “To the spirits of the dead. Ianuaria Martina, most dutiful wife, set up the monument for Vivius Marcianus, centurion of the 2nd Legion Augusta”. The 2nd Legion Augusta came to Britain during the Claudian invasion of AD 43 and remained until the Romans withdrew from the province. By the middle of the second century AD the legion was based at Caerleon in south Wales, but it was quite usual for individual soldiers to be posted to the provincial capital. It seems likely, therefore, that Vivius Marcianus was in London on secondment to the staff of the provincial governor. On its rediscovery, the stone was immediately appreciated for its historical value. It was transported to Oxford at the expense of the archbishop of Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon, who had longstanding ties to the university, having been fellow and warden of All Souls College, as well as university pro-vice chancellor and chancellor. He was also the benefactor of the Sheldonian Theatre, built between 1664 and 1669 to the design of Christopher Wren while he sat as Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. The tombstone was displayed in the Garden of Antiquities next to the Sheldonian Theatre. As a relic of Roman London, it was an appropriate addition to the classically inspired design of the theatre and its environs, joining a display of other classical inscriptions from the collection of John Selden, presented in alcoves built into the theatre’s enclosure wall and, on John Evelyn’s suggestion, protected from over-curious visitors by a hedge of prickly holly. In this way the tombstone of Vivius Marcianus came to contribute to the grand Roman atmosphere evoked by the theatre, with its painted ceiling recalling the open-air ambience of the theatre of Marcellus at Rome, and the bearded stone heads surmounting the area’s iron railings outside. Read more | Who were the gladiators of ancient Rome? Thereafter, the tombstone regularly featured in historical works on the development of London. Rather bizarrely, interpretations of the physical appearance of Vivius Marcianus himself – the actual relief having become badly worn, leaving viewers free to reconstruct it as they saw fit – went through various transformations, reflecting both contemporary fashions and changing perceptions of Roman Britain. The figure carved in the niche is roughly three-quarters life size – about 1.3 metres (four feet) tall. He stands facing the viewer, and is represented wearing a short tunic, belt and cloak, carrying a staff in his right hand and what appears to be a scroll in his left. The wooden staff appears to mark him out as a centurion in the Roman army. In Thomas Gale’s Antonini Iter Britanniarum of 1709 the Roman is illustrated as a figure with short hair, wielding a sword and staff as he stands ready for action, whereas John Horsley in his Britannia Romana: or the Roman Antiquities of Britain of 1732 depicted him with ringlets. George Alexander Cooke in 1813 described him as a prototype Highlander: “a plaid flung over his breast”, holding “a sword of vast length, like the claymore of the later Highlander”. Nor was it his personal appearance alone that could be reinterpreted. Humphrey Prideaux’s Marmora Oxoniensia of 1676 showed him holding a long, pointed sword rather than the vine-staff distinctive of the Roman centurion. Listen on the podcast | Alexander Larman and Nicholas Kenyon discuss the events and legacy of the 1666 blaze There was a tendency for historians to look only at illustrations of the figure rather than the monument itself. In 1790 Thomas Pennant argued that the figure’s long hair (as depicted in Prideaux’ reconstruction, but not the actual relief) was proof that Marcianus was a soldier of the cohors Britanorum and that he was “dressed and armed in the manner of the country”. In 1841, however, Charles Knight criticised this tendency of antiquarians to interpret Marcianus as a “British-born” soldier precisely because they relied heavily on inaccurate drawings. He cannily observed that “in truth nearly all the points of his attire and accoutrements are so uncertainly delineated on the mutilated stone that anything like a complete or consistent picture of the whole can only be made out by an exercise of fancy.” If you want to decide for yourself what Vivius Marcianus may have looked like, visit the Museum of London, where this tombstone is now on display. Professor Alison Cooley is head of the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick This article was first published on HistoryExtra in 2016
The Great Fire of London: everything you wanted to know
Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
Rebecca Rideal responds to listener questions about the devastating blaze that swept through the capital in 1666
How much damage did the Great Fire of London cause? How long did it take to put out? And did it really start in Pudding Lane? Rebecca Rideal responds to listener questions and popular internet search queries about the devastating blaze that swept through the capital in 1666. Rebecca Rideal is the author of 1666: Plague, War, and Hellfire (Thomas Dunne Books, 2016) Buy now on Amazon
17th-century London: a city shaped by catastrophe
Margarette Lincoln reveals how a century that saw plague, fire, revolution and civil war transformed England’s capital
Author Margarette Lincoln talks about her latest book, London and the 17th Century, which describes how a period blighted by plague, fire, revolution and civil war helped transform London into one of the world’s great cities. Margarette Lincoln is the author of London and the 17th Century: The Making of the World’s Greatest City (Yale, 2021) Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones
7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Samuel Pepys
The diary of Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) gives us a fly-on-the-wall account of life during the 17th century – from the devastation of war and plague, to the triumphant return of Charles II. But did you know that Pepys ‘rescued’ a cheese during the Great Fire of London and once kept a lion as a pet? Historical novelist Deborah Swift reveals seven fascinating facts about the diarist…
Samuel Pepys began his diary on 1 January 1660, adding entries until 1669, when the fear that writing in dim light was making him blind brought those entries to an end. His fears were unfounded, but mysteriously he never returned to writing his personal diary. A naval administrator who rose to become chief secretary of the Admiralty commission, Pepys helped to bring an important new professionalism to the Royal Navy. But you might not know… Samuel Pepys kissed a dead queen Pepys never once mentions his wife’s birthday in his diary, but often mentions his own. No cake or candles for Pepys though; on his birthday in 1669 he took his wife and servants to Westminster Abbey to show them the tombs. The open coffin of Catherine de Valois (queen to Henry V) was accessible to the public “by particular favour”, and Pepys was able to view the mummified remains. Queen Catherine’s body had been languishing there since the time of Henry VII, when the Lady Chapel – where she was buried – was demolished. It has been suggested that Henry ordered her memorial to be destroyed in order to distance himself from his ancestry [Henry VII’s father, Edmund, was the eldest son of a possibly illegitimate union between Catherine de Valois and her keeper of the wardrobe, Owen Tudor]. Coffee, plague and the Great Fire: the pleasures and perils of Restoration London Pepys tells us: “I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queen, and that this was my birth-day, 36 years old, that I did first kiss a Queen.” This behaviour might seem odd to us today, but kissing a relic was in the 17th century usually a sign of reverence – though Pepys does seem to have done it with surprising enthusiasm. Samuel Pepys loved the play Macbeth Pepys was a great theatre-goer, but he was not overly impressed by the talents of renowned 16th- and 17th-century playwright William Shakespeare. Pepys was quick to dismiss one of Shakespeare’s most enduringly popular plays, writing in his diary: “Saw Midsummer Night's Dream [originally performed 1595–96] which I have never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life.” Pepys also called Twelfth Night (1602) a “silly play and not relating at all to the name or day” and said of Henry VIII (1613): “Though I went with resolution to like it, is so simple a thing made up of a great many patches… there is nothing in the world good or well done.” How did an ‘upstart crow’ become England’s greatest playwright? What was it like to watch one of Shakespeare’s plays? The only one of Shakespeare’s plays Pepys seems to have enjoyed was Macbeth (1606), which he called “a most excellent play in all respects, especially divertissement”. Pepys loved it so much he saw it nine times and wrote: “It is one of the best plays for a stage, and variety of dancing and musique, that ever I saw.” View Riddle on the source website Pepys rescued a cheese from the Great Fire It is September 1666, and Pepys is in a panic. The disaster later known as the Great Fire is consuming London at an alarming rate. Terrified that he might have to abandon his most valuable possessions to the flames, he dashes outside and digs a hole. There he inters his precious hoard, which includes not only his gold and his papers, but also a large wheel of Parmesan cheese. Listen | Alexander Larman and Nicholas Kenyon discuss the events and legacy of the 1666 blaze We might think this a strange thing to do, but to Pepys the cheese was an investment. Cheeses such as these, which could weigh up to 200lbs, were used as diplomatic gifts; for example, in 1556 Pope Paul IV made gifts of "eight great Parmesan cheeses" to Queen Mary. A rare and expensive import from Italy, Parmesan was used sparingly and increased in value as it aged. Pepys’ cheese would have been too valuable to lose. He was the victim of a vendetta In 1679 Pepys was arrested and sent to the Tower of London. The charges included piracy and treason. It was alleged that, as an official in charge of navy stores, he plundered goods from ships captured from the Dutch. As bizarre a notion ‘Pepys the pirate’ might seem, his diary revealed the first charge to be true. By law, captured enemy goods belonged to the Crown. However, Pepys’ private diary reveals that a few goods had indeed found their way into his own coffers, as ‘perks of the job’, but there was not enough evidence to convict him. A more damaging rumour was that Pepys had sold state secrets to the French. In order to defend himself against the charge of treason, which was punishable by being “hanged, drawn and quartered”, Pepys sought to trace the source of the rumour. The search led him back to his time as a Justice of the Peace in 1678, when he had crossed one of the most cunning tricksters of the 17th century, Colonel John Scott. Bribes, gifts and scandal: 7 stories of corruption that shocked Britain In 1678, Scott had been in exile trying to escape the law, having become a suspect in the murder of a London magistrate, Edmund Godfrey. Upon a search of Scott’s lodgings, secret papers were found, some written in Pepys’ own hand, detailing the strength of the English navy. Suspecting Scott to be a spy, Pepys ordered his arrest if he ever again set foot on English soil. Scott never forgave him and began a vendetta against Pepys which included false accusations of treason. After he was arrested on the charge, Pepys set up a network of investigations into Scott’s background, in France, England and Holland. Two manuscript volumes survive among Pepys' papers which detail his enquiries. Pepys uncovered that Scott’s whole life was a lie, and that Scott was one of the most fraudulent rogues of the 17th century. With the chief accuser discredited, the prosecution case had no basis and petered out. He is the first to record drinking an English cup of tea Pepys’ diary contains the earliest known written reference to someone in England drinking a cup of tea. Although a 1664 bill recently discovered in the West Yorkshire Archives refers to “bottles of china drink”, the first written report of a cup of tea being offered socially, rather than medicinally, is in Pepys’ diary. In 1660, Pepys was called to a high-level meeting with experts in naval affairs, including Sir William Batten, Colonel Slingsby and Sir Richard Ford. “Sir R. Ford talked like a man of great reason and experience,” wrote Pepys, “And afterwards did send for a Cupp of Tee (a China drink) of which I never had drank before.” A drink for the devil: 8 facts about the history of coffee A brief history of how we fell in love with caffeine and chocolate Tea was imported via Holland in the 17th century, but it was prohibitively expensive. Ale was the national beverage in Pepys’ day, but that was soon to change. When Catherine of Braganza, the future wife of Charles II, arrived in Portsmouth on 14 May 1662, one of the first things she asked for was a cup of tea. A chest of tea was given as part of her dowry from her father King John IV of Portugal, and although Catherine soon adopted English ways, she kept the taste for tea because it had been easily obtainable and popular in her native country. The habit of drinking tea at the royal court soon spread to aristocratic circles and from there it filtered to the moneyed classes and beyond. Unlike Catherine of Braganza, however, it seems Pepys did not take to tea – he made no further mention of it in his diary until seven years later in 1667, when his wife was prescribed it as a cure for a cold. He had dozens of mistresses but no children Pepys was famous for his roving eye and for his many affairs – with his servants and with the wives, daughters and even the mothers of his colleagues. His most enduring affair was with one Mrs Bess Bagwell, who was the wife of a ship’s carpenter, William Bagwell of Deptford dockyard. It appears Mr Bagwell was complicit in the affair and used Pepys’ interest in his wife to improve his career prospects by trading her favours for better positions in the navy. Bess Bagwell’s story is told in my novel A Plague on Mr Pepys. Despite being married to Élisabeth de Saint Michel in 1655, Pepys listed in his diary dozens of mistresses including Mrs Lane, Mrs Tooker, Mrs Burrows, Mrs Martin, Mrs Pennington, Betty Mitchell and the actress Elizabeth Knepp. One of Pepys’ most passionate and poignant liaisons was with Deb Willet, a lady’s maid to his wife. Of course the romance couldn’t last and Deb was dismissed in disgrace. Considering Pepys’ many affairs, it is surprising and perhaps sad that Pepys had no heir. A possible explanation is that during an operation in 1658 to remove a kidney stone (done at great risk and without anaesthetic), something went wrong which later prevented Pepys from ever fathering a child. He kept a lion as a pet In 1674, when he was lodging at Derby House, Westminster, Samuel Pepys kept a lion. It was presented to him as a diplomatic gift by Samuel Martin, the English consul in Algiers, who was married to one of Pepys’ former mistresses, Betty Lane. Pepys wrote to Martin to tell him that the lion was “as tame as you sent him, and as good company”. 10 famous people in history and their bizarre pets Pepys also reports an incident in 1661 in which he was summoned to Sir William Batten’s house to view a “baboon” which he thought “so much like a man… I do believe it already understands much English; and I am of the mind that it might be tought (sic) to speak or make signs”. Exotic pets were a status symbol in Pepys’ day and such animals were often on display to the public at the Tower of London, arguably England’s first city zoo. By 1622 the royal menagerie was home to eagles, pumas, a tiger and a jackal, as well as lions and leopards, which were considered symbols of kingship. Perhaps when it grew too large for his office, Pepys’ lion ended up there… Deborah Swift is the author of Entertaining Mr Pepys (Accent Press, 2019). You can visit Deborah’s website here This article was first published by HistoryExtra in February 2018
Coffee, plague and the Great Fire: the pleasures and perils of living in Restoration London
What was life like for a 17th-century Londoner? From avoiding the plague to coping with the Great Fire, Londoners in the Stuart period had a lot to deal with. Here, author Nick Rennison investigates the perils and the pleasures of living in the nation's capital...
Two of the greatest disasters in London’s history both occurred in the 1660s: plague and fire struck the city in successive years. Neither was a novelty. The bubonic plague was endemic – there were outbreaks in 1603 and 1625 that killed tens of thousands – but neither was as bad as the Great Plague of 1665. By some estimates it caused the deaths of a quarter of London’s population. Fire, meanwhile, was a permanent danger in a 17th-century city but it is difficult to exaggerate the damage caused by the Great Fire. “In three days the most flourishing city in the world is a ruinous heap,” one official wrote, and he was right. More than 13,000 houses were gone and so too were 87 parish churches, St Paul’s Cathedral, 44 Livery Company halls and three of the city gates. Almost miraculously there was only a handful of deaths recorded – less than 10 according to most authorities. If you were a Londoner in the 17th century, however, death was an ever-present possibility. All sorts of things could carry you off. Examination of just one of the weekly ‘bills of mortality’, the official death statistics of the day, for 1665 is revealing. Given the year it is no surprise that by far the greatest number of fatalities – more than 7,000 – were caused by the plague. Other diseases, however, also took their toll. Just over 100 deaths were ascribed to ‘spotted fever’; 134 to ‘consumption’; 64 to ‘convulsion’ and 51 to ‘griping in the guts’. Three unfortunates were so troubled by ‘wind’ that it proved fatal to them. Some 43 women died in childbirth. In addition there were the one-off accidents: one man was “burnt in his bed by a candle at St Giles Cripplegate”; another was “killed by a fall from the belfry at All-Hallows-the-Great”. Read more | Your ultimate guide to the Restoration period Disease in 17th-century London Plague was only the scariest of an assortment of diseases that might befall you. Smallpox was prevalent, killing thousands and disfiguring many more. The unmistakable ‘pockmarks’, signs that a person had survived the disease, would have been visible on the faces of a remarkably high proportion of London’s citizens, perhaps as many as half. Tuberculosis was another prolific killer, its symptoms exacerbated by the smoke and poor air of the city. It is easy to forget just how many of the medical advances we take for granted today were made in the past 150 years. Three-and-a-half centuries ago physicians were largely helpless in the face of most illnesses. It is little wonder, then, that people resorted to remedies and ‘cures’ that now seem bizarre. The London Pharmacopoeia, or list of drugs, issued by the College of Physicians in 1618 and reprinted several times later in the century, suggested such dubious ingredients for its prescriptions as dog excrement, moss from a recently buried skull and the saliva of a fasting man. Smog in 17th-century London The city itself was not a healthy place. Pollution of all kinds was ever present. Smog was not just a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. The burning of sea-coal in domestic fires meant that 17th-century London was as foul-smelling and filled with sulphurous smoke as the Victorian city. John Evelyn claimed that nearly half the deaths in the city were caused by it and that “the inhabitants are never free from coughs and importunate rheumatisms, spitting of impostumated and corrupt matter”. Read more | The Great Smog of London: what caused the 1952 crisis? The city streets were mostly narrow, packed and filthy. A 1662 Act of Parliament admitted that “the common highways leading unto and from the cities of London and Westminster” were “miry and foul” and were thus “noisome, dangerous and inconvenient to the inhabitants”. Drainage was poor – in some areas non-existent – and faeces, both human and animal, befouled the roads. The dangers of being deluged by filth and rubbish thrown from windows were such that the wise pedestrian strove to walk under the projecting upper storeys of the houses. Jostling for the best positions next to the walls could lead to fights and even, on occasions, deaths. Crime in 17th-century London The streets were also ill-lit and dark, perfect for footpads and robbers. Although their heyday was in the following century, highwaymen (muggers) had begun to demand that travellers on the edges of the city should stand and deliver. One of the most famous was Claude Duval, who began his career as a ‘gentleman of the road’ in 1666. Many of the stories told of Duval are later inventions by writers with a romantic imagination, but it may well be true that he once invited the wife of one of his victims to dance a coranto with him on the roadside and then charged her husband £100 for the entertainment the dancing had provided. He was captured in January 1670, drunk, in a pub called the Hole-in-the-Wall in Chandos Street, found guilty of robbery and, despite attempts to persuade the king to pardon him, was hanged at Tyburn. Duval was an aristocrat of crime. More typical were the petty pickpockets who stole purses and handkerchiefs or the housebreakers who ran off with bed linen, clothes and anything else they could carry. Punishment for such crimes was draconian. In theory at least, if the value of stolen goods exceeded 12 pence, theft was punishable by death. In practice, many judges and magistrates found reasons to avoid the letter of the law but plenty of people – men, women and even children – were condemned to “dancing on air” at Tyburn largely because their poverty and desperation had driven them to theft. Read more | Crime and punishment through history Unexpected pleasures in 17th-century London And yet, despite all the perils of 17th-century London, life in the great city was not all gloom and doom. Its citizens found much to amuse and delight them. Pleasures that had been banned under Cromwell’s Commonwealth returned with Charles II’s restoration. John Aubrey reported that “Maypoles which in the late hypocritical times ‘twas forbidden to set up now were set up in every cross-way” and “the tallest maypole ever seen” was erected in the Strand. Read more | Your guide to Charles II, the 'merry monarch' The late hypocritical times had, of course, not been kind to the theatre but the stage enjoyed a renaissance under Charles. The king loved plays in general and, in particular, some of the actresses who appeared in them. (Nell Gwyn famously began her career selling oranges to theatregoers, progressed to roles in comedies and ended up in the royal bed. And she was not the only actress to catch the king’s eye.) A new theatre was built in Drury Lane and another was created in Lincoln’s Inn Fields by converting an old tennis court. Music was another source of entertainment, from street musicians and strolling ballad-singers to makeshift concerts at gatherings of friends. The diarist Samuel Pepys was passionately fond of music, which he called “the thing of the world I love most”. He played the flageolet, a kind of early flute, and was possessed of a fine singing voice. Even he, however, drew the line at the bagpipes which, he reckoned, produced “mighty barbarous music”. He paid for his wife to take dancing lessons, although he grew very jealous of Mr Pembleton, the dancing master, who was, he decided, becoming far too friendly with his pupil. Eventually, he himself also took lessons from Pembleton and was soon reporting merry evenings when the three of them “danced three or four country dances”. Cruel entertainment in 17th-century London Cruder and crueller entertainments than country dancing could be found in Southwark, the centre of the theatrical world in Shakespeare’s time and also home to less attractive pursuits. Bear-baiting, in which a hobbled and occasionally blind bear was set upon by a pack of dogs, was enjoyed by many. So too was bull-baiting. In his diary entry for 14 August 1666, Pepys records his visit to the Bear Garden with his wife and a friend where they saw “some good sport of the bull’s tossing of the dogs”. The diarist did have the grace to admit that it was “a very rude and nasty pleasure”. Four years later another great diarist of the period, John Evelyn, “went with some friends to the Bear Garden where was cock-fighting, dog-fighting, bear and bull-baiting, it being a famous day for all these butcherly sports”. While he was there, “one of the bulls tossed a dog full into a lady’s lap as she sat in one of the boxes”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/Bear20Garden2C20London-6bbf96d-e1681725402265.jpg" width="620" height="411" alt="Bear Garden, Southwark, London, after its third rebuilding, 1648. By this time plays and prize-fighting had been added to the original entertainment of bear baiting. Woodcut based on a detail in the Bohemian etcher and engraver Wenceslas Hollar's (1607-1677) view of London. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="Bear Garden, Southwark, London, after its third rebuilding, 1648." /> Perhaps the lady was not too bothered. After all, this was an age in which the average Londoner necessarily had a strong stomach. Executions provided a form of public theatre, as they were to do for nearly 200 years to come. In the years after Charles II’s restoration, those who had condemned his father to death were pursued relentlessly by the regime. Many were executed and the heads of some of these regicides were stuck on top of the city gates, often remaining there for years. Oliver Cromwell was posthumously disinterred from his supposedly final resting place in Westminster Abbey and his skull placed on a spike above Westminster Hall, where it stayed for more than 20 years. Many citizens and visitors to the city flocked to see it. Read more | A timeline of the Restoration period More edifying excursions could be made to outlying villages like Islington and Highgate, to New Spring Gardens (later Vauxhall Gardens) south of the river and to the royal parks. For those with an inquisitive mind, cabinets of curiosities were the museums of the day. One, advertised as open for business in the Strand in June 1661, offered the sight of “an entire Egyptian mummy with all the hieroglyphics”. The collection of the botanist John Tradescant included a deerskin cloak that had once supposedly belonged to the Native American chieftain Powhatan, father of Pocahontas, and which is now in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. Another magnet for visitors was the royal menagerie, housed in the Tower of London, which was home to the city’s more exotic animals. Pepys took a party of women and children there in May 1662 and “showed them the lions”. Want to learn more about the Great Fire of London? Your guide to the Great Fire of London (+ 10 surprising facts) How the Great Fire of London revealed the city’s Roman past Alternate history: what if the Great Fire of London never happened? Great Fire of London quiz – how much do you know? Food and drink in 17th-century London For those who could afford it, food was rich and plentiful. One meal for 12 persons from 1663 consisted of “a fricassee of rabbits and chicken, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three tarts, a most rare lamprey pie, and a dish of anchovies”. Vegetables are not mentioned, either because they were not on the table at all or because they were considered too ordinary to describe. The poor, of course, could only dream of dining so lavishly. They would have rarely eaten meat at all, although oysters, today considered rather upmarket, were then so plentiful that they were a staple food for Londoners of all classes. In pre-refrigeration days, it was difficult to keep food fresh. Pepys was mortified when he invited a colleague to dinner, and a sturgeon was brought to the table, “upon which I saw very many little worms creeping”. Read more | A drink for the devil: 8 facts about the history of coffee New drinks had recently arrived in town. Hot chocolate came from the New World via Spain, but the most successful novelty was coffee. The first coffeehouse in London was opened in an alley off Cornhill in 1652 by a Greek man named Pasqua Rosee (who was originally from Sicily and had lived in Smyrna). Ten years later there were nearly 100 of them. They were used almost exclusively by men. One of the unfortunate consequences of the fashion for this “newfangled, abominable, heathenish liquor”, according to The Women’s Petition Against Coffee, a pamphlet published in 1674, was the sapping of the nation’s virility. “Our gallants,” the pamphlet’s writer claimed, “are become mere cock-sparrows” who “are not able to stand to it, and in the very first charge fall down flat before us.” Better, perhaps, to stick to more traditional drinks like beer and ale, which were consumed at home and in the hundreds of taverns that catered to the city’s thirsty population. The Londoners of the 1660s had to face crises unmatched in the city’s history until the Second World War. They struggled to survive in a dangerous world, one in which life was cheap and death could be just around the corner, but they did so with the energy and capacity for enjoyment for which the inhabitants of this great city have always been known.