Georgian London: Into the Streets (2 page)

Much of this book is concerned with the minutiae of daily life in Georgian London, during the years between 1714 and 1830. It was an extraordinary period in the city’s history, but its foundations lay in the latter half of the seventeenth century, when four defining events shaped the psyche of Londoners. The first was a question of government, followed by a terrifying epidemic and a devastating fire. The last was a matter of religious identity.

Our story begins in the winter of 1659. The country was poor, and disheartened by civil war. It was the time of the Commonwealth, when England was a republic under Oliver Cromwell’s Rump Parliament, the ‘hind’ or leftovers of government from the war. But now Cromwell was dead. In December, gangs of youths took to the streets of London, pelting soldiers with rocks. These were not street children but the city’s teenage apprentices, feared since medieval times for their propensity to riot when aggrieved. Their protest was put down at sword- and gunpoint, but it was the start of a series of public displays of unrest, where the watermen wore the badges of the old King and urchins made bonfires and burned mock ‘rumps’ in the streets. The republic’s days were numbered.

Charles Stuart, son of the executed King, had been exiled in The Hague, and was waiting to return to power. He was proclaimed King in his absence on 8 May 1660, and ‘
Bow Bells
could not be heard for the noise of the people’. The Quaker Daniel Baker reprimanded citizens for their enthusiastic celebrations, calling the city an ‘
Impudent Harlot
, thou whorish Blood-thirsty Mistress of abomination’. But London’s royalist pamphleteers styled Charles as a phoenix rising from the ashes of the republic. He arrived in London on 29 May, his thirtieth birthday. He was welcomed to the City of London by the Lord Mayor before processing along the Strand to Westminster. Such were the crowds that it took him seven hours to cover the distance, a little under two miles. Accompanying him were
‘
above 20000 horse and foot, brandishing their swords, and shouting with inexpressible joy; the ways strewed with flowers, the bells ringing, the streets hung with tapestry, fountains running with wine’. John Evelyn the diarist recalled how he had ‘stood in the Strand and beheld it, and blessed God
’.

The Restoration returned colour and fun to London. The theatres, closed by the Puritans, reopened and were soon full every night. Before the Restoration of Charles II London had lacked the money to grow, or else had been held back by cautious monarchs who prohibited building, fretting that the city might become unmanageable. It remained a medieval city of narrow streets and courts, a jumble of gables crowded too close together to be either comfortable or sanitary. However, Charles did not fear expansion and London soon began to grow. Then came the twin horrors of the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666. In little over a year, a fifth of London’s population lay below the earth. Above it, four-fifths of the City was ashes.

The Plague killed approximately 100,000 Londoners over the summer of 1665. Amsterdam had been devastated the year before, and London knew it was only a matter of time before the disease arrived. It began in April, when the first fatality was recorded. The initial outbreak was in St Giles-in-the-Fields, a poor area near Tottenham Court Road. Many who died there went undiagnosed and unrecorded, for no one in London understood that the rod-shaped plague bacterium,
Yersinia pestis
, was carried by London’s black rats. Rats were, after all, part of city life. Plague rapidly made ‘
a great impression of fear
on the hearts of men’ because of its unpredictability and the devastation it wreaked on the body. There were no set signs, and some died suddenly with no symptoms at all. Others suffered terribly with fever, or large black buboes growing in the lymph nodes of their groin or throat, followed by organ failure and seizures. It was hot and airless in the cramped streets; the numbers of dead rose and no one knew where the sickness would strike next. London was gripped by terror.

By the summer, anyone who could leave London had gone. Shops and taverns were closed, the streets empty. Priests, doctors and some officials, including Samuel Pepys, remained – as did a few hardy
residents. Many of those who stayed behind were servants abandoned by their fleeing employers. The superstitious carried ‘
charms, philtres, exorcisms, amulets’ to protect themselves. On 1 July, the Mayor and Aldermen of the City published a more practical set of emergency procedures for each parish to follow. Plagued households were shut up by the watchmen with all the occupants inside. Daniel Defoe recorded that some died simply of fear, watching the sufferings of their family. In the event of a death, a searcher – usually a poor old woman – was sent in to investigate. The watchmen granted them access to the house and they had to diagnose the dead, ‘as near as they can
’. Any surviving members of the household had to stay in the house for twenty-eight days, relying on food passed through windows by friends. The friendless starved.

By September, the death toll had hit 7,000 a week. The Lord Mayor ordered London’s cats and dogs to be exterminated as a misguided precaution against the spread of the disease: ‘
they talked of
forty thousand dogs, and five times as many cats; few houses being without a cat’. Free from predators, the toxic rat population boomed. Londoners ventured out only when necessary, often returning sick. A clergyman named John Allin and his brother had decided to stay in London. Early in that deadly September, John’s brother went out one morning. When he returned he found a ‘
stiffnesse under his eare, where he had a swelling that could not be brought to rise and breake, but choacked him; he dyed Thursday night last’. That week, with the deaths at their peak, Allin wrote of the ‘dolefull and almost universall and continuall ringing and tolling of bells
’.

The ‘dead carts’ rumbled through the empty streets, piled high with bodies. As they approached the drivers tolled a handbell and called, ‘Bring out your dead!’ Few were prepared neatly for the grave. Plague pits were dug, several around Aldgate and Cripplegate, where the dead were to be buried at least six feet deep. Those expectant holes in the ground had a great effect upon the living. John Allin was distressed by the one he could see from his bedroom window, and at the height of the deaths Defoe remembered how ‘
people that were infected
and near their end, and delirious also, would run to those pits, wrapt in blankets or rugs, and throw themselves in’. The drivers
and the ‘buriers’ became hardened to the sufferings around them. One driver, named Buckinham, was whipped and imprisoned for driving through the streets shouting, ‘
Faggots, faggots
, five for sixpence’ then holding up the corpse of a child by the leg.

Then, just as Londoners feared extinction, the spread of the disease slowed as autumn cooled the city. It seemed that more victims were surviving. They ‘
sweated kindly
’, their buboes burst and could be drained. Families still fell sick, but then they recovered, sometimes without the loss of even one life. The worst had passed. By spring 1666, most of those who had left the city returned to their homes, and the King and his court were back in St James’s. The disease would linger on in some slums through another blazing summer, but life returned to normal with remarkable speed. London had survived. Or so it seemed.

In the early hours of 2 September 1666, in Seething Lane, Samuel Pepys and his wife, Elizabeth, were woken by their maid, Jane, to tell them of a fire she and the other maids had seen in the City. He got up, put on his nightgown and went with Jane to look but, as he recorded in his diary, ‘thought it far enough off; and so went to bed again and to sleep’. He rose again around seven and after getting dressed, ‘Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down to-night by the fire we saw, and that it is now burning down all Fish-street by London Bridge’. Perturbed, Pepys walked to the Tower of London and watched the progress of the fire. He went down to the river and took a boat to get a perspective from the water. The Steelyard, a four-acre area of light industry, warehouses and housing now covered by Cannon Street Station, was already burning fiercely and people had begun to evacuate their homes on a large scale. Public order broke down as people looked for someone to blame. London’s foreign population, particularly the French element, were targeted that day. A fourteen-year-old Westminster schoolboy, William Taswell, remembered seeing a blacksmith who met ‘
an innocent Frenchman walking along the street, [and] felled him instantly to the ground with an iron bar’. His brother told him he too had seen a Frenchman ‘almost dismembered
’ in Moorfields because the mob thought he was carrying firebombs. It was a box of tennis balls.

Samuel Pepys continued to traverse the city, watching the progress of the flames. The cramped, high buildings were ‘so very thick thereabouts’ that their gables leaned towards each other and allowed the fire to spread across the roofs unchecked. The wind had got up ‘mighty high and [was] driving [the fire] into the City; and every thing, after so long a drought, [was] proving combustible, even the very stones of churches’. Pepys was called to see the King, who told him to go and order the Lord Mayor to pull down the houses in the path of the fire ‘every which way’. The Mayor was found in Canning Street, ‘like a man spent, with a handkercher about his neck’. He had responded too late to stop the fire. Pepys took to the water again. Everywhere people were loading the contents of their homes on to the small Thames cargo boats, known as ‘lighters’. He watched the fire from the river, nearly overwhelmed by smoke, and his face ‘almost burned with a shower of firedrops’. That night, sitting in an alehouse at Three Cranes Wharf, Samuel and his wife saw the flames above the city, ‘an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it’.

In the morning, Monday, they began to pack up their own house. While Samuel’s household laboured to save their belongings, London’s other famous diarist, John Evelyn, had come up from Deptford to see the ‘Great Fire’. By the time he saw the city, from Southwark, the alehouse Samuel and Elizabeth had sat in the night before was gone. Nor was the Lord Mayor, Thomas Bloodworth, anywhere to be seen. Instead King Charles’s brother, James, the Duke of York, arrived in the City, marshalled groups of firefighters and ordered the demolition of whole streets. The fire continued to spread. The Royal Exchange, the glory of Elizabethan London, burned through the late afternoon.

On Tuesday, the garrison stationed at the Tower took decisive action and blew up all the houses on the eastern limit of the City, halting the spread of the fire in that direction. High on Ludgate Hill, St Paul’s began to burn. Evelyn reported ‘the melting lead [from the roof] running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness, so as no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them’. He recalled how, throughout the City, ‘the fall of towers, houses and churches was like a hideous storm’. To the west, James
and his men had hoped the Fleet Ditch would provide a natural firebreak. Yet the wind still blew hard and dry from the east and, as they watched, the fire leapt the ditch and arrived on Fleet Street. Then they ran.

That evening the wind died abruptly. The firebreaks held. On Wednesday morning, Pepys roamed the city, seeing widespread devastation in Moorfields where he walked, his ‘feet ready to burn’, and watched people huddled amongst their possessions on the scrubland. On a much smaller scale, he observed the destruction of medieval London. He picked up, as a souvenir, ‘a piece of glasse of [the sixteenth century] Mercer’s Chappell in the streete … so melted and buckled with the heat of the fire like parchment’, and was upset to see ‘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’. That night, there were whispers that the French and Dutch were rising, to take over the enfeebled City, but nothing happened. For the first time since Sunday, Samuel lay down and ‘slept a good night’.

On Thursday morning, the fire burned only in localized patches. Young William Taswell, equipped with his sword and helmet, walked into the City along the Strand and then Fleet Street. Number 55 now marks the westernmost limit of the fire. The ground almost scorched his shoes, the heat coming up from the pavements so fiercely. He stopped on the Fleet Bridge for a rest, so hot he was worried he might faint. He explored the ruins of St Paul’s, dodging falling masonry and putting twisted pieces of metal from the molten bells in his pockets. Against the east wall he found the corpse of a woman who had taken shelter there, ‘
whole as to skin
, meagre as to flesh, yellow as to colour’. The number of deaths recorded in the Great Fire was low, but there is no accurate figure which would take in people such as this woman, shackled prisoners, invalids and the elderly living alone.

As the fire died, the need to find someone to blame became urgent. Frenchman Robert Hubert, ‘
a poor distracted wretch
’, was executed for starting it, but the culprit turned out to be baker Thomas Farynor of Pudding Lane who had failed to extinguish his oven properly. The fire had destroyed over 13,000 homes, 87 churches, a cathedral, and
most of the City’s public buildings. Charles II invited plans for rebuilding. John Evelyn and Christopher Wren sent in designs featuring orderly streets and broad piazzas within a clearly delineated border. But it was too late for that; the citizens of London were already in a frenzy of rebuilding, sifting the charred remains of their homes, marking out boundaries and sourcing building materials.