Fire, page 25
‘The King could still have pardoned him,’ I say.
‘The hanging took place very shortly after the trial. The following day, in fact. Parliament was due to meet and discuss the causes of the fire, and having Hubert condemned but not yet executed might have been a … distraction, shall we say? It was felt that it was better things were tidied up.’
‘Hubert was thus unable to give evidence to Parliament? Evidence in which he might have mentioned Lord Ashley?’
‘I thought I’d made that clear: he was dead. He couldn’t give evidence at all.’
‘That was Ashley’s price for his support against Lord Clarendon?’
‘Rarely has a thing been done so economically.’
‘And that’s all Ashley wanted?’
‘No. He’d also like a plaque put up.’ Arlington consults a paper on his desk. ‘ “Here by the permission of heaven, hell broke loose upon this Protestant City from the malicious hearts of barbarous Papists by the hand of their agent Hubert …” and so on and so on. It’s brief enough. It won’t be too expensive to have cut. And it stops short of claiming that there was a plot as such. The King is content with the compromise.’
‘Hubert was a Huguenot, not a Catholic,’ I say.
‘Yes, of course. But it only says he was their agent—not that he was Catholic himself.’
‘And you really have no compassion for the poor man?’ I say.
Arlington, who has started to read a document on his desk, looks up. ‘Sorry—who are you talking about?’ he asks.
‘Nobody important,’ I say.
When I arrive back at Lincoln’s Inn, Will thrusts a letter into my hands. ‘Arrived an hour ago, sir. From Essex.’
I look at the writing. It is Aminta’s.
‘Won’t you open it, sir?’
I think of Abigail Farley, not wanting the answers to her questions about her husband.
‘As long as it’s still sealed, she hasn’t yet turned me down,’ I say.
‘I know Lady Pole,’ says Will. ‘If it was “no”, she’d tell you to your face. She wouldn’t entrust it to a letter.’
‘You never know what you’ll do until the moment comes,’ I say.
‘Well, I’d open it now,’ says Will. ‘You’ll have to do it sooner or later.’
I look at the paper and at Aminta’s writing, and at the bright red blob of wax, applied in far-away Essex. Then, very carefully, I break the seal …
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As ever, this book is a mixture of real events, guesswork and pure invention. The broad account of the burning of London, and of the chaos and confusion of the early stages of the fire, is as true as I can make it. It is also true that the Clerkenwell fire engine was taken down into the City, only to fall into the river, though the surrounding detail falls into the invention category. Likewise, the turning off of the water supply at New River Head on the first night of the fire was described in Bishop Burnet’s History of My Own Time. John Graunt, the Director whom Burnet accused of cutting off the supply, is perhaps better known as a pioneer of the science of demography. He died in 1674 ‘lamented by all good men that had the happinesse to knowe him.’ If he was responsible, as Burnet claimed, then it should be noted that Graunt also lost his own house in the fire. He was never formally charged and biographies of him refer to his purported role only in passing, if at all. The New River Company records make no reference to any interruption of supply on the night in question. But corporate cover-ups are not unknown.
Londoners did, as I describe, spend more time blaming and attacking the French (or anyone who looked a bit French) than fighting the conflagration. Some foreign residents, such as the King’s French firework maker, barely escaped with their lives. When troops were sent in to help fight the fire, they spent a great deal of their time rescuing foreigners from the mob. London had a surprising number of French residents at the time, bearing in mind that we were (as Arlington points out in the book) nominally at war with France in 1666. Robert Hubert’s confession was a godsend to those who wanted to blame the French or the Catholics or both. It is difficult to decide whether, in reality, he had anything to do with starting the fire or not. He confessed to it, but changed his story more than once. The chronology that he set out—his trip to Sweden in particular—made (and makes) little sense. But he did succeed, when taken on a walk round the City by Lowman, in identifying the bakery as the scene of his crime—or that’s what Lowman later told the court. Almost nobody believed Hubert, but nobody could persuade him to withdraw his confession. That, and Lowman’s evidence, pretty much did for him. He was convicted and then hanged with great haste—‘The Commons resolving to examine Hubert … next day he was hanged before the House sate, and so he could tell no further tales.’ Nobody now really doubts that it was Thomas Farynor’s carelessness that started the blaze. So it is worth noting that the jury that convicted Hubert included three members of Farynor’s family. It is also related that, after Hubert’s death, a Swedish sea captain appeared and claimed that Hubert was still on board his ship when the fire broke out, which also may or may not have been true. At all events, it was much too late to make any difference to anything. My only real invention (and it is admittedly quite a large one in terms of the plot) is the murder of Peidloe. Stephen Peidloe was a shadowy figure at best, though one witness at Hubert’s trial claimed to know him and said he was ‘a very debauched person and apt to any wicked designs’. Nobody else, apart from Hubert, seems to have ever heard of him. Hubert was adamant that Peidloe had recruited him to set fire to London. In spite of this, the authorities apparently made little effort to find Peidloe. He simply vanishes from records, to the extent that he features in them at all.
The description of London after the fire is based on contemporary accounts, such as that of Samuel Pepys, and illustrations made just after the fire showing the extent of the damage. Most of the City within the old walls was destroyed and the population decamped, as I have said, to the fields around London, before being absorbed, quite quickly, into the suburbs and surrounding countryside. Contemporary accounts describe a strange resignation to their plight. The resettlement of the burnt area seems to have begun almost at once, but it would be twenty years or more until the rebuilding was complete. Citizens, including Pepys, crossed the ruins with great caution.
Other events are based more loosely on fact. Sir Felix’s improbable escape from the Tower is modelled (as some will have spotted) on that of the Fifth Earl of Nithsdale, whose wife masterminded the scheme. John Grey’s escape through the cesspit was inspired by a problem that Pepys had with his neighbour’s privy, built too close to his own cellar.
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Ashley (later Earl of Shaftesbury), was, with Lord Arlington, one of the two As in the celebrated CABAL government of Charles II (the remaining letters denoted Sir Thomas Clifford, the Duke of Buckingham and the Duke of Lauderdale). In a court that leaned towards Catholicism, Ashley represented the Protestant cause. Though vehemently anti-Catholic in public, in private he seems a far more reasonable man. One of the better-known anecdotes about him is his remark that ‘all wise men are of the same religion’. When asked by a lady what religion that was, he replied: ‘Madam, wise men never tell.’ But at the same time he was a professional rabble-rouser, with a large power base amongst the citizens of London. He was later involved in the infamous Popish Plot, where he ‘drove on Oates’s original revelations, interrogated informants, schooled witnesses, manipulated the fears of doomed men in the cells of Newgate and ferreted out further plots within plots’. Charles II, a good judge of character, described him as the ‘Plott Hunter’. His downfall came with his involvement in the Rye House Plot in 1682, when he encouraged the Duke of Monmouth to stake his claim to the throne and threatened to seize London himself with an army of ‘brisk Protestant boys’. He badly overplayed his hand and died in exile. I have no evidence that he did any of the things I claim he did in 1666, but he was quite capable of most of them. His contemporaries did not like him much. When he had to have an operation to insert a permanent drain for a liver cyst, his rivals cruelly nicknamed him ‘Tapski’. John Caryll wrote of him:
The silver pipe is no sufficient drain
For the corruption of this little man
Who though he ulcers has in ev’ry part
Is nowhere so corrupt as in his heart
But I have a sneaking regard for him, for all that. He was a man of principle, at least by the fairly low standard of the times.
Arlington, as noted above, was a real minister of Charles II, as was Sir Thomas (later Lord) Clifford. Joseph Williamson became in due course a senior statesman in his own right, was knighted, and later founded a mathematical school in Rochester that still bears his name.
The other characters in the book are my own invention and I am wholly to blame for any imperfections they possess and their success or failure in marrying each other.
I consulted a number of sources when researching this book, the most useful of which are as follows. Pepys’s Diaries, as already noted, are invaluable, and the best contemporary description of the fire. It is interesting to compare this with the account of William Taswell, who was then a fourteen-year-old schoolboy at Westminster School and was involved in fighting the blaze. Other contemporary sources included John Evelyn’s diaries, Bishop Burnet’s History of My Own Time and Cobbett’s State Trials (volume 6, 1661-78), which contains much of the verbatim evidence presented at Hubert’s trial and at the Parliamentary enquiry. Of the books relating to the fire itself, Walter George Bell’s The Great Fire of London in 1666 is one of the earliest. I also consulted Stephen Porter’s The Great Fire of London, James Leasor’s The Plague and the Fire and Adrian Tinniswood’s By Permission of Heaven. I am grateful to Adrian Tinniswood for his prompt and helpful answers to my questions about The Precious Man. John Spurr’s Anthony Ashley Cooper is a comprehensive account of the life and times of the slippery Lord Ashley. On espionage during the period, an important source (as with earlier books) was Alan Marshall’s Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II. On conditions more generally, Lisa Picard’s Restoration London and Alexander Larman’s Restoration: 1666: A Year in Britain are recommended reading. The Museum of London’s exhibition on the Great Fire coincided with the early stages of writing this book and allowed me to see many actual artefacts from the fire.
I must also thank David Headley and everyone at DHH for their continuing support and encouragement, Krystyna Green, Amanda Keats, Ellie Russell and everyone at Constable for continuing to publish me, Penny Isaac for making copy-editing so efficient and painless, Jan McCann for her careful proofreading, and fellow writer of Restoration fiction, Deborah Swift, for her insightful comments on a late draft of the manuscript. And of course my family, without whose love, patience and forbearance none of these books would get written at all.
Finally, and coincidentally, I completed this book just as another London fire—that at Grenfell Tower—was making headlines. Not for the first time, the present seemed tragically to be imitating the very same past that I was writing about. By the time you read this, you will know much more than I do now about the causes of the more recent fire. Already, however, there are echoes of the accusations of incompetence on the part of the civic authorities in 1666, shock that it could happen at all and a desire to find somebody to blame. Sadly, the loss of life in 2017 was much greater than in the earlier fire that destroyed almost all of the City of London. But it would have been greater still had it not been for the bravery and skill of the London firefighters. Fire is therefore dedicated to them.
London, July 2017
L.C. Tyler, Fire
