TuesdayTuesday, 4 September, was the day of greatest destruction. The Duke of York's command post at Temple Bar, where Strand meets Fleet Street, was supposed to stop the fire's westward advance towards the Palace of Whitehall. Making a stand with his firemen from the Fleet Bridge and down to the Thames, James hoped that the River Fleet would form a natural firebreak. However, early on Tuesday morning, the flames jumped over the Fleet, driven by the unabated easterly gale, and outflanked them, forcing them to run for it. There was consternation at the palace as the fire continued implacably westward: "Oh, the confusion there was then at that court!" wrote Evelyn. Working to a plan at last, James's firefighters had also created a large firebreak to the north of the conflagration. It contained the fire until late afternoon, when the flames leapt across and began to destroy the wide, affluent luxury shopping street of Cheapside. Everybody had thought St. Paul's Cathedral a safe refuge, with its thick stone walls and natural firebreak in the form of a wide, empty surrounding plaza. It had been crammed full of rescued goods and its crypt filled with the tightly packed stocks of the printers and booksellers in adjoining Paternoster Row. However an enormous stroke of bad luck meant that the building was covered in wooden scaffolding, undergoing piecemeal restoration by a then relatively unknown Christopher Wren. The scaffolding caught fire on Tuesday night. Leaving school, young William Taswell stood on Westminster Stairs a mile away and watched as the flames crept round the cathedral and the burning scaffolding ignited the timbered roof beams. Within half an hour, the lead roof was melting, and the books and papers in the crypt caught with a roar. "The stones of Paul's flew like grenados, the melting lead 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", reported Evelyn in his diary. The cathedral was quickly a ruin. During the day, the flames began to move eastward from the neighbourhood of Pudding Lane, straight against the prevailing east wind towards Pepys's home on Seething Lane and the Tower of London with its gunpowder stores. After waiting all day for requested help from James's official firemen, who were busy in the west, the garrison at the Tower took matters into their own hands and created firebreaks by blowing up houses in the vicinity on a large scale, halting the advance of the fire.
|
