The Fall of St Paul’s Cathedral, September 4, 1666

Within the City the fire had formed into three burning arcs: the flames that had run along the river front of the Thames now charred the City walls and attacked the redoubtable fortress, Baynard’s Castle, under the cover of darkness. The castle, built by William the Conqueror in the eleventh century, had stood as a resolute defence against attack from the west but was overcome by the easterly flames in ten hours of relentless assault; by dawn, only two broken-toothed turrets remained. One arc of flames then leapt westwards towards the Fleet river. The second arc was funnelled by the City walls and made it ways northwards encircling the base of Ludgate Hill and working its way along the east side of the Fleet Ditch towards ‘the shambles’ of Ludgate and Aldergate, slowly rising up to the summit where St Paul’s cathedral stood untouched above the smoke. The third arc moved through the City from the east.

The Fleet Ditch curled along the western reaches of the walled city from the north through Clerkenwell, entering the Thames at Blackfriars. A single bridge spanned the stream leading to the suburbs that grew from the western approaches of Fleet Street. The fire leapt over the water and made a new home in the fetid slum housings on its west bank, breaking into the two prisons that clung to the banks. Once on the western shore the fire seemed to regain its force and began its ascent of Fleet Street devouring the buildings on either side of the thoroughfare, gaining ever closer to the hurriedly prepared Fire stations set by James, Duke of York.

In the centre of the City, the wind was now driving the third arc of fire from the Royal Exchange to the grand market thoroughfare, Cheapside, that ran westwards towards St Paul’s cathedral. Along the route an exhausted team of ten fire fighters had attempted to bring down houses in the pathway of the flames but the fire had moved so fast that as soon as the houses had been razed the fearful citizens had to flee, leaving the debris as kindling in the conflagration’s path.

The stone church of Mary le Bow, half way along Cheapside, failed to act as a break to the flames, the famous Bow bell which called the curfew every night before the City gates were closed came crashing down from its tower. Next the flames took hold of the ancient gothic Guildhall, the powerhouse of the civic authorities. The stained windows of the medieval hall began to melt and once the flames had entered the building, the ancient oak beams of the building glowed in the heat ‘in a bright shining coal, as if it had been a palace of gold, or a great building of burnished brass’. The fire continued westwards, making small meat of Goldsmith’s Row, the splendid collection of Tudor houses, described by John Stow as ‘the most beautiful frame of fair houses and shops that be within the walls of London, or elsewhere in England.’ before moving up the slight incline towards the summit of Ludgate Hill. Elsewhere the flames were encircling the promontory and slowly making progress towards the huge building on its peak, St Paul’s Cathedral.

The previous day, William Taswell, travelling across the city had noted that ‘the people who lived contiguous to St Paul’s church raised their expectations greatly concerning the absolute security of that place upon account of the immense thickness of its walls and situation; built in a large piece of ground, on every side remote from houses. Upon this account they filled it with all sorts of goods’. The local merchants had rushed to store their goods under the walls or inside the building itself. The printers whose shops clustered the Churchyard had packed the crypt church, St Faiths, under the main cathedral with their papers, scripts and works — including the complete print run of John Wilkins’s magnus opus on the universal language of New Philosophy — and sealing the door to prevent air feeding the flames.

As the fire approached, first from the east where it consumed St Paul’s school then from the west. A single brand rose from the cluster of houses to the south and landed on the roof of the Cathedral where the lead had been removed during the Interregnum to expose the wooden beams below. As Martin, a local bookseller, later reported to Pepys, ‘it took fire first upon the end of a board that, among others, was laid upon the roof instead of lead, the lead being broken off ’.

Fire began to creep along the roof. The bare wood beneath had been dried to tinder in the summer’s drought and so the fire moved unchecked along the roof supports, smouldering on under the areas which were still covered with lead and gave off an unearthly hissing. As the jackdaws circled the cathedral’s gothic spire, the nave below began to fill with smoke whilst the remaining roof, a solid area of almost six acres of hard metal, liquified and began to drip into the body of the church, running down the walls, and flowing out of the rain spouts onto the stones of the yard and down Ludgate Hill.

The crowd gathered inside the cathedral succumbed to panic and were forced to dart out through the flames to safety as the heat burned through the wooden scaffolding above. Soon the melted lead of the roof dripped into the cracks of the cathedral’s fabric and the very stones began to explode in the heat, ‘like grenadoes’. The walls sliced, sheered and plummeted onto the ground below. Gaping holes opened up in the structure which allowed air to rush in and stoke the flames further. The east window, a rose of stained glass, turned to liquid and, finally, the crumbling masonry of the vaulted roof crashed down and broke through the marble flooring, exposing the crypt beneath like a disinterred tomb.

The flames did not take long to follow, and the precious works of the printers, neatly stacked and protected, caught fire. They would burn for a full week. The falling masonry broke open the long forgotten tombs within the nave. The cadaver of Robert Braybrooke, lain to rest two hundred and fifty years before, was exposed intact, his skin hard and brittle but his hair still red.

On Thursday, September 6, John Evelyn took a boat from Sayes Court to Whitehall and after visiting the court walked within the city. Stumbling up from his boat by London Bridge, he could feel the heat of the ground rise through his shoes as he clambered over ‘heaps of yet smoking rubbish’. It had become impossible to recognise a street or where a house once stood, let alone which parish he was in. He mourned the passing of the many great buildings that had once glorified London: ‘the exquisitely wrought Mercer’s Chapel, the sumptuous Exchange, the august fabric of Christ Church, all the rest of the Companies’ Halls, splendid buildings, arches, entries, all in dust; the fountains dried up and ruined, whilst the very waters remained boiling; the voragoes of subterranean cellars, wells, and dungeons.’ Evelyn watched as fellow citizens went in search of their homes, ‘like men in some dismal desert’

In particular Evelyn was struck by the damaged St Paul’s cathedral that still stood high above the city like some torn and discarded shroud. ‘Now a sad ruin,’ he recorded, ‘and that beautiful portico (for structure comparable to any in Europe, as not long before repaired by the late King) now rent in pieces, flakes of large stones split asunder . . . It was astonishing to see what immense stones the heat had in a manner calcined, so that all the ornaments, columns, friezes, capitals and projectures of massy Portland stone, flew off, even to the very roof where a sheet of lead covering a great space (no less than six acres by measure) was totally melted. . . Thus lay in ashes that most venerable church, one of the most ancient pieces of early piety in the Christian world’.

William Taswell also wandered towards the cathedral, the ‘ground so hot as almost to scorch my shoes; and the air so intensely warm that unless I had stopped some time upon Fleet Bridge to rest myself, I must have fainted’. Around the churchyard he found melted globs of bell metal, the carcasses of dogs ‘stiff as a plank, the skin being tough like leather’. He also shocked to uncover a burned woman who had hidden by the walls but failed to escape the flames, ‘every limb reduced to a coal’.