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miles of any city, town, or village, doomed them to starvation and
death.
The fleet had been at sea, and healthy. The King of France was now
in alliance with the Dutch, though his navy was chiefly employed in
looking on while the English and Dutch fought. The Dutch gained
one victory; and the English gained another and a greater; and
Prince Rupert, one of the English admirals, was out in the Channel
one windy night, looking for the French Admiral, with the intention
of giving him something more to do than he had had yet, when the
gale increased to a storm, and blew him into Saint Helen’s. That
night was the third of September, one thousand six hundred and
sixty-six, and that wind fanned the Great Fire of London.
It broke out at a baker’s shop near London Bridge, on the spot on
which the Monument now stands as a remembrance of those raging
flames. It spread and spread, and burned and burned, for three
days. The nights were lighter than the days; in the daytime there
was an immense cloud of smoke, and in the night-time there was a
great tower of fire mounting up into the sky, which lighted the
whole country landscape for ten miles round. Showers of hot ashes
rose into the air and fell on distant places; flying sparks carried
the conflagration to great distances, and kindled it in twenty new
spots at a time; church steeples fell down with tremendous crashes;
houses crumbled into cinders by the hundred and the thousand. The
summer had been intensely hot and dry, the streets were very
narrow, and the houses mostly built of wood and plaster. Nothing
could stop the tremendous fire, but the want of more houses to
burn; nor did it stop until the whole way from the Tower to Temple
Bar was a desert, composed of the ashes of thirteen thousand houses
and eighty-nine churches.
This was a terrible visitation at the time, and occasioned great
loss and suffering to the two hundred thousand burnt-out people,
who were obliged to lie in the fields under the open night sky, or
in hastily-made huts of mud and straw, while the lanes and roads
were rendered impassable by carts which had broken down as they
tried to save their goods. But the Fire was a great blessing to
the City afterwards, for it arose from its ruins very much improved
– built more regularly, more widely, more cleanly and carefully,
and therefore much more healthily. It might be far more healthy
than it is, but there are some people in it still – even now, at
this time, nearly two hundred years later – so selfish, so pigheaded,
and so ignorant, that I doubt if even another Great Fire
would warm them up to do their duty.
The Catholics were accused of having wilfully set London in flames;
one poor Frenchman, who had been mad for years, even accused
himself of having with his own hand fired the first house. There
is no reasonable doubt, however, that the fire was accidental. An
inscription on the Monument long attributed it to the Catholics;
but it is removed now, and was always a malicious and stupid
untruth.
SECOND PART
THAT the Merry Monarch might be very merry indeed, in the merry
times when his people were suffering under pestilence and fire, he
drank and gambled and flung away among his favourites the money
which the Parliament had voted for the war. The consequence of
this was that the stout-hearted English sailors were merrily
starving of want, and dying in the streets; while the Dutch, under
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their admirals DE WITT and DE RUYTER, came into the River Thames,
and up the River Medway as far as Upnor, burned the guard-ships,
silenced the weak batteries, and did what they would to the English
coast for six whole weeks. Most of the English ships that could
have prevented them had neither powder nor shot on board; in this
merry reign, public officers made themselves as merry as the King
did with the public money; and when it was entrusted to them to