The Great Fire of London began at about one in the morning on Sunday, 2 September 1666. By the time it was extinguished, some eighty hours later, about 13,700 houses had been destroyed, along with the Royal Exchange, the Custom House, fifty-two livery halls, eighty-seven churches, and St Paul’s Cathedral. Sixty to seventy thousand people were displaced, becoming refugees in their own city. Moorfields and the other open spaces in and around the City became vast camps for the homeless. Miraculously, the official death toll was fewer than a dozen, although it is possible that the number of unrecorded deaths was higher.
For centuries, it has been accepted that the Fire was an accident, caused by the carelessness of a baker in Pudding Lane. Many contemporaries, though, were convinced that the Fire was started deliberately. The year 1666 had seen several plots, real or imagined, and countless intimations of imminent disaster. There were many predictions that London would be consumed by fire, as punishment for England’s sins (specifically, for those of her king, the notoriously immoral Charles II); indeed, Mother Shipton and Nostradamus were supposed to have predicted the fiery destruction of the city in this, the year that contained the Number of the Beast in its date. Above all, though, at a time when the British Isles were engaged in a colossal naval war against both the Dutch and the French, many blamed enemy action — especially deliberate arson by foreign and/or native Roman Catholics. This opinion was reflected in a rabidly anti-Catholic inscription placed in 1681 on Sir Christopher Wren’s monument to the catastrophe; and although the inscription was removed in the nineteenth century, the monument itself still survives, giving its name to one of the busiest stations on the London Underground. Meanwhile, a French watchmaker, Robert Hubert, actually confessed to starting the fire, and was hanged as a result. But all modern books about the subject agree that he did not arrive in London until after the fire began, and the full reason for his pointless martyrdom remains a mystery.
The Great Fire of London is one of the most famous events in British history, one of the very few that still fulfils the age-old criterion of ‘what every schoolchild knows’, and its consequences still shape the cityscape of the United Kingdom’s capital to this day.
Rather less well known is the fire that destroyed the Dutch town of Westerschelling, known to contemporary Englishmen as Brandaris, just over three weeks before the Great Fire took place. Whereas the conflagration in London is generally regarded as the result of an accident, that on the Frisian island of Terschelling was a deliberate act of war, carried out by units of King Charles II’s Royal Navy. About one hundred and fifty Dutch merchant ships were torched in the adjacent Vlie anchorage, and the town was burned to the ground. The only known fatal casualties on the Dutch side were a watchman and two old women. The event is still remembered in the Netherlands as ‘the English Fury’, and its 350th anniversary is being commemorated on the Frisian Islands during 2016.
There is no known connection between ‘the English Fury’ and the Great Fire of London, although many at the time speculated that the latter was revenge for the former.