National Geographic Great Fire of London The Untold Story

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in a hot summer of 1666 the City of London was consumed by a great fire thirteen thousand houses were destroyed 89 churches were incinerated 80% of the building stock was erased no other city had burned like this since Roman times the story passed down to us says the fire was an accident started in a bakery in pudding Lane that Mister farriner the Royal Baker had left some embers still burning near his ovens that London's wooden buildings were a tinderbox fanned by on seasonably hot gas [Music] poor mr. phone it was all a terrible accident but that wasn't how it appeared to Londoners at the time from the very beginning Londoners were convinced that this was a deliberate attack and from the very beginning they wanted to know who done it prejudices rot like viruses in the human body they can appear to lie dormant for Pires and then suddenly flame up and spread but the great fire turns what is a kind of low-level flickering suspicion into a bonfire it's almost natural to try to blame somebody for it and who can you blame you know you pick a foreigner people become incredibly violent it is mob rule mob beat them they tried to lynch them they arrested them until it wasn't safe to be a foreigner in London [Music] [Music] less than three weeks after the fire being quenched the House of Commons appointed a committee to inquire into the causes of the disaster their collection of eyewitness accounts has survived to this day deep in London's Guildhall a true and faithful account is the report of a parliamentary committee of inquiry that was set up after the fire to find someone to blame to look for the truth to see what really happened on that fateful week or beginning of September 1666 the voices that emerge in this document are authentic they are the voices of ordinary people with all the fear and prejudice and shock they are the voice of London a constable took a Frenchman on fire in a house there were 300 Frenchmen were in a plot or conspiracy to fire the city search the fellow found a horn of powder about him he also had about him a book entitled the Jewish government the people cried out he is a Frenchman kill him i aprender de Willard with an instrument filled with gunpowder there were two more the same nation in his company the picture that emerges from this inquiry is of a people that are out for vengeance they want the truth they want to know who has destroyed their city and they want justice the original crime as Londoners saw it had been committed at fairness bakery in pudding Lane this is where the story starts between 1:00 and 2:00 in the morning on Sunday the 2nd of September 1666 the king's baker thomas farriner was woken up by a manservant there was smoke coming up from the ground floor in the bakery itself [Music] when they tried to get downstairs they couldn't Oh beaten back Thomas his daughter Hannah his son and a manservant were forced to clamber out onto a windowsill [Applause] the gales fanned the flames the flames spread and very soon it was obvious that this was more than just another house fire the parish constables called out the law bear sir Thomas blood was a representative of the vintners company and really the the man in charge of the City of London his first reaction the words that put him in the history books were a woman called piss this far out fairness maidservant was too frightened to clamber out on the windowsill she was scared of heights she was the first victim of the fire of London we don't even know her name to the frightened and confused people of London the start of this fire looked anything but accidental [Music] it's broken out at the wrong time in the wrong place it's broken out in the early hours the morning it's right next to huge stores and flammable materials and it takes out the great waterwheel from the Thames which pumps up water almost immediately this looks premeditated and because it's been lit just the wrong moment in terms of weather that also looks like a terrorist act foot in lane was a perfect location to set a deliberate fire the buildings were very close together they've been a drought or the building's we drive the timbers were dry it was up a hill so you'd have a natural draft coming up that hill to help fan the flames it would also be a good place to hide that from a nasties point of view on top of that it would be an ideal place to set deliver if I make it look like an accident because bikers in those days were a very dangerous place to work [Music] the way the fire behaved next further fueled the suspicions of ordinary Londoners Thomas Middleton was standing Danny three cranes walk I believe he was looking up towards a northeast of the city and he witnessed fire which appeared to be just erupting from inside buildings I repaired to the top of a church steeple where I observed the fire did break forth out of several houses when the houses that were then burning were at a good distance from them every way and more particularly I saw the fire break out from the inside of Lawrence Poultney steeple when there was no fire Derrick these and suchlike observations beget in me a persuasion that the fire was maintained by design the flames were spreading along Thames Street and into the city but they weren't just spreading in a line fires were breaking out all over London in separate incidents and as far as Londoners were concerned there was only one explanation for that RC it had to be a deliberate attack at the same time was it a coincidence that the waterwheels were destroyed was it a coincidence of the water house up at Islington at its doors locked and the water cocks have been turned off people said it couldn't be a coincidence all those things must have been happening for a reason and that reason was enemy action as the flames take hold Londoners spend a surprisingly little amount of time fighting the fire they spend rather more time looking for foreigners to blame [Music] day two of the great fire and a thousand houses in the square mile had burnt the ports were closed and word spread that a foreign army had landed to take advantage of the vulnerable city the subsequent parliamentary inquiry into the fire reveals that it started in pudding lane but nobody blamed the Baker for accidentally causing it it was as they saw it an attack by foreign enemies then one community was a prime suspect above all others the Dutch the Dutch for miles and miles ahead of any other nation Amsterdam was considered the capital of the world the Dutch language was considered a world language in English just as a second-rank language you know derived from the Dutch economically the country did extremely well the Dutch and the English were each other's necks as to Protestant countries because of the trade routes and increasingly because of the colonial trade routes because debts where all the money was made by the summer of 1666 commercial rivalry had erupted into open warfare in August 1666 a naval force under Sir Robert Holmes a flamboyant character with a used to wear a gold lace suit and carry a monkey on his shoulder a force sailed into the harbor to shelling on the Dutch coast they arrived completely unexpected there were about 100 to 50 Dutch ships there he attacked Dutch commercial Navy more or less destroyed most of the ships entered the islands emptied the warehouses and set fire to houses committed atrocities and killed many people even in the brutal 17th century this was a terrible thing to do but back in London it was seen as an enormous victory and people danced in the street Sir Robert Holmes his bonfire as it was called and people lit bonfires in London to celebrate our victory over the Dutch so when a couple of weeks later the fire broke out it was only natural everybody thought the Dutch had got its back it was a retaliatory strike the rumor that went around I went around quite quickly it fought that the Dutch had taken deliberate revenge on the English by setting fire to London suspicions about Dutch vengeance surfaced in the parliamentary inquiry a Wiltshire farmer testified about an ominous threat he'd heard in the days before the fire started he won't breathe bleach you made bonfires lately forbidding Dutch but since you delight in bonfires you shall have your bellies full of death she live one week longer you shall see London as said a London as Everett was since the world began lady Hobart to live in Chancery Lane wrote to her country cousin and said poor London is burnt down it began in pudding Lane at a bakery where a Dutch Road clay [Music] no Dutch rogue had been found in pudding Lane but by Monday lunchtime the Lord Chancellor reported that it was the universal conclusion the fire had been started and was being spread by the Dutch and there were plenty of suspects to choose from they were bakers there were Brewers they were haberdashers they were in the textile industry the whole silk industry is part of it it was a whole range of professional jobs and skills they brought twisting to treatment the fire was only a day old and so had not reached Westminster but it was traveling at 30 yards an hour in that direction here a Dutchman was raising suspicion [Music] flames and smoke were seen coming from a Dutchman's house [Music] this was the house of Cornelius wietfeldt and Cornelius Rietveld was a baker Cornelius rube felt that lived in London for more than a decade lying low fitting in raising a young family with five children under the age of eleven Reap felt was an upstanding member of the Dutch church but as the fire raged he no longer looked so innocent [Music] everybody was on such a high state of alert that they immediately suspected that he was setting alight two buildings and what he was doing was part of an enemy action the average Londoners a skewed towards aliens is mixed in Goodyear's aliens of funny and foreign entertaining they have slightly peculiar clothes and strange accents and they can be laughed at in the street or simply ignored when times get tense in terms of religion economy politics Society booting the foreigner is a great first resort when nerves start to break Cornelius Voss was saved by a possible he was taken for his own safety and put in a prison civil but nobody could reach him well you never know but his life might have been saved landowners were divided on the subject of immigration many welcomed a new industrious workforce there was a real movement to encourage immigration into England people thought that they were not enough people in the country so if you encourage immigration by using naturalization you would encourage a lot of people who would bring in their skills and money to this country on the other hand there was an anti immigration camp who felt that if aliens were going to come to this country and enjoyed the same kind of rights as Englishmen a lot for people be disadvantaged all would lose out keeping England for the English carried a lot of currency in the 1660s as this petition to Parliament shows what it says is that these people are only here for economic reasons they do not want to mix with us they do not want to go to check the same church as us and they do not want to intermarry with us the documents are summed up by saying that aliens should not be naturalized because of as they put it this gentleman will be only summer birds amongst us when they're filled their pockets all if trouble Wars arise they will not forget the native countries and may be instruments of much inconvenience onto his majesty and his dominance it means that they will not see England as their home but will return to their countries after they make their fortunes in this country and they couldn't they should not be trusted because if there's trouble they might be acting as instruments of their country so there could be potential spies for England's enemies as the growing fire engulfed thousands more homes one Dutch family was arousing exactly this kind of suspicion in Lime Street so close to the eastern front line they hastily removed their positions a Lime Street at a particular time we speaking was a very very rich area these were the successful immigrants to the financials the scientists some artists lived there and it was an area where many many of the leading minds in the immigrant community would come together yo I environed Amercian his wife a leader had lived in Lime Street for 12 years they'd made a fortune in the cloth and haberdashery trade a leaders brother Peter and his new wife Jane lived just a few doors down when the fire started he was able to procure carts and these were very hard to get as they cost a lot of money and they were very scarce and it was one of the only ways in which people could get their goods out of the burning city a Dutch merchant reported spending 60 pounds for three carts the equivalent of seven grand today other Londoners can get cards for Louisville money and emerge good his neighbors would have perhaps started asking questions when they saw him and his family loading carts up with their worldly goods it looked as if he perhaps had prior knowledge [Music] in two dark days the ties that normally bound one neighbor to another were broken tens of thousands were now homeless the fire was gathering pace and Londoners needed someone to blame they're deeply paranoid they're looking for the people that they're convinced were responsible for destroying their city the parliamentary inquiry for example heard evidence from Michel March and he said that he apprehended a Walloon in the time of the fire of the nags head in Leadenhall Street with an instrument like a dark Lantern made to lay a train of powder and it was filled with gunpowder there's your evidence but not a lot of foreigners haven't heard the rumors and so they are out on the street tried to fight the fire trying to get their goods away or simply trying to see what's going on and that immediately makes them vulnerable if there is somebody half crazed and a crowd nearby and then the mob turns on them there are no questions asked it comes out of a type of Terror within hours of the fire foreigners were going into hiding their fear was at London's people who had lived side by side with them until that Sunday morning people who call them friends and neighbors until that Sunday morning now they were the enemy it's apocalyptic mass hysteria broke out climbing over heaps of ashes nobody is going to be calm and level-headed in this type of environment there is total chaos where you get chaos anything can happen [Music] there was this one Swedish nobleman who was becoming particularly anxious about his mistress somewhere in the city and decided he would hazard an attempt to go and find her to make sure she was okay or perhaps he was just feeling a bit lonely but um he went out and because he looked different because he didn't look like an average Londoner because he obviously looked foreign the mob set upon him [Music] the lynchings give you an insight into the mindset that they were just panicking it was fanatical [Music] [Music] [Music] Oh sources tell us that the Swedish no woman was saved from the late shift gallows but could Londoners witnessing the destruction of their property and their fundamental way of life be saved from themselves fueled by hot gales London's firestorm had entered its third day violent mobs had taken to the streets flushing out the foreign agents they believed were responsible no dutch fire starter had been found so they turned to the next suspect England's traditional enemy the French the default prejudice of the medieval and early modern English are the French there are great traditional medieval enemies we'd fought them for longer than anybody else and they also happen to be that we hate to admit it a richer more populous more powerful more dangerous neighbor than anybody else the bulk of the parliamentary inquiry the bulk of the true and faithful accounts the report that comes out of the parliamentary inquiry targets France so for example a miss mrs. Elizabeth Stiles informs Parliament that in April last in an eager discourse she had with a French servant he replied you English maids will like the Frenchman better when there is not a house left between Temple Bar and London Bridge this will come to pass between June and October the most suspicious Frenchman of all at this time was man by the name of Monsieur bill and Monsieur bill and was a firework maker for the king of course he works with gunpowder and all sorts of incendiary things well naturally the eye of suspicion is going to fall on him only a few days before the fire he went to go get pasteboard to make fireworks and was told that there will be some delay in getting it and he complained that he really needed it for this weekend was very important and if he couldn't get his hands on it there was really no point he was asked by a citizen what did he want was all that pays board and he said that he made fireworks for the Kings pleasure which he did but he also said there was going to be a great firework display a fire display which would illuminate some poles and it was going to take place the next week and the next week some pause was illuminated but not in a way that anybody dreamt suspicion of the French went beyond politics and war it was about something that had tormented the English for the past century religious fundamentalism by definition the Protestant Reformation turns the Roman Catholic Church into the Bad Religion against which Protestants define themselves and the English are no exception after all in much of the reign of Elizabeth Catholics trying to murder the monarch and they send an armada against us in the reign of James the sixth and first they try and blow up the entire ruling class in the Gunpowder Plot and an awful lot of English Protestants blame the Catholics for the English Civil War which had raged through the 1640s so they are the obvious national enemy they are the Antichrist they are the definition not just of religion that's actually fashioned by the devil to take people to hell as fast as possible they're also the enemies of English liberties British democracy our basic ideals and rights going back to Magna Carta or so ordinary English people of the age believe the violence against the French exploded raid and roll onto the streets [Music] [Music] there was talk of arsonists all over the city William Caslon a 14 year old school boy mentioned a Frenchman that was caught in in more fields with an arm full of fire bombs [Music] [Music] the rocky tennis balls young William toss will talked of how he saw a blacksmith walk up to a Frenchman in the street and strike him across the head with an iron bar and he still remembered 60 years later he remembered how that poor man fell into the gutter and the blood streamed down around his ankles [Music] meeting a Frenchman walking along the street I could not help seeing the innocent blood of this exotic flowing in a plentiful stream there's a horrible kind of casualness about the way in which London rage against foreigners suddenly explodes with the fire burning probably the most atrocious single incident concerns a woman in more fields north of London who's walking in towards the city carrying some chicks in her apron some maniac gets the impression these of fireballs a mob runs towards her the chicks get away so she can't actually show them and explain what's really happening and they beat her savagely and cut off her breasts the casual violence against people in the streets on the fields outside indicate that some Londoners are simply losing their reason they're seeing their entire world literally going up in smoke and front their eyes they can't believe that this is natural that this is normal that this is something they can explain in any way other than evil human beings as they're looking for demons in human form walking their streets so naturally the mob went looking for their prime suspect mushiya Bell and the French firework maker they find his shop empty but they follow his servants they follow them across London for a smoking London until those servants reach the Palace of Whitehall [Music] they follow those servants into the palace of white salt down the corridors up the stairs and suddenly old monsieur bella himself pops his head out and says what are you doing here what are you doing it I'm not under arrest here I'm not the criminal nor is my son he says we're no common prisoners but lodged here to prevent us from the rage of the common people the land had found refuge at the Royal Court in Whitehall it turned out the king and his brother the Duke of York had been protecting foreigners and Catholics in particular from London's rage over and over again one hears the same phrase a Frenchman was taken firing a house and then one hears he was taken by the Duke of York's Life Guards a constable took a Frenchman firing a house he seized on him and going to a magistrate with him met His Royal Highness the Duke of York who asked the reason of this tumult the juvenille called for the man he spoke to him in French and the Duke said I'm taking this man into custody and the Frenchman wasn't seen again what they were doing is rescuing people but the mob didn't see it like that the culprits were being taken away from them from their justice were they being spirited away were they being whisked out of the country were they being protected perhaps the answer to that question lay at the front line of the fire we're small groups of brave firefighters fought vainly against overwhelming on and at the head was James Duke of York during the Great Fire of London the leaf of your haze like a hero his Lord High Admiral which means he commands the warships more than the Thames and so he brings up sailors from the fleet were used to running up rigging and putting up masts and gets them hard at work demolishing houses and pumping water and he's there himself [Music] increasing the Duke of York used his lifeguards as snatch squats to rescue these hapless Frenchmen to whisk them away of course what that did it increased the mob suspicions but before the mob could investigate his royal treason any further news arrived from the East End news that would vindicate the mobs base instinct just as the mob violence started to subside a little a young watchmaker called Robert Huber was caught in Essex trying to get out of the country he was brought before a magistrate and he said I did it it was me I started the fire of London this was exactly what Londoners had suspected and all their suspicions suddenly seem to be confirmed it was a plot it was a Catholic plot it was a French Catholic plot everybody said I told you sir robert huber of Rouen Normandy who acknowledged that he was one of those that fired the house of mr. farriner a baker in pudding Lane from whence the fire had its beginning confessed that he came out of France with one Stephen P glow about four months before the fire and then they came together into England in a Swedish ship called the skipper where he stayed on board with a said pedlow till that Saturday night to which the fire break out when peed low taking him out of the ship carried him into pudding Lane and then he told him that he had bought three balls and gave him one of them to throw into the house [Music] and then he did the fact which was that he put a fireball at the end of a long pole and lighting it with a piece of match he put it in at a window and stayed till he saw the house in a flame [Music] you he confessed that there were three and 20 accomplices we're off P Glo was the chief Huber's confession with just what Londoners had suspected it implied a serious well organized plot but his claims had to be investigated Hugh Bears jailer John Loman instructed the watchmaker to show him the scene of the crime here stood the house he said the jailer endeavored to draw him from that belief and put him upon seeking for some other place but he positively persisted in what you'd first said and affirmed that to have been the said house what the jailer did was good practice and it's practice now that he went out of his way to disprove the Huber had set the fire by trying to distract him from where Huber was saying the bakery was based on the jailers evidence it's pretty damning for Yuba and when I read there are I really believed that this could have been an arson fire Huber's evidence made sense to a battered City under due process he was convicted of starting the Great Fire of London and sentenced to death Londoners believed they'd got their man but the trouble wasn't over for London's foreigners over three days and nights the fire had grown so immense that it had lept across the city walls to the west with nearly 13,000 houses burnt London was now in the eye of a perfect firestorm that threatened everything within its reach because of the prevailing winds the fire moved westward but it crept to the east as well and creeping to the east men that had crept towards the Tower of London had the flames reached the tower that had been the racist explosion the entire early modern period because the tower is the magazine of the nation it's where the munitions to arm the Armed Forces are kept so that had those great piles of combustible material gone up it would have been like an atomic bomb a vast number of dispossessed people pitched up in places like Islington and Highgate where they could sit and watch the fire on horizon in kind of tent cities sitting there completely shocked by what had happened covered in ash miserable terrified [Music] the Dutch family sublime Street had joined this mass exodus fueling suspicions about where their true loyalties lay but they were seen in a very different light when they returned to help fight the raging inferno Vine Street was now on the front line of the fight to save the tower and with it the city [Music] when it became obvious to phonemic dots his house could not be saved or not completely saved he used one of the few tools available to him the fire hooks to bring down part of the house to try to stop the flames going further down the street what he did was sacrifice his own property in order to save other properties from the fire anybody that would do that has got to be in the highest public spirit a hero because those actions certain stopped the fire spreading so there's a very very selfless act after four days of complication and violence the Great Fire of London burnt itself out it never reached the tower because foreigners and their English neighbors make great personal sacrifices but the battle to live in peace in London wasn't over denied the right to rebuild their homes in their lives some foreign Londoners took their fight to the courts John Animesh an alien merchant had his house burned down by the fire and he was looking to renew his lease so he can rebuild a house but his land will refused on the ground that he was an alien enemy when fund emerge took the landlord to court it's quite hard warming in a way to see that there were so many local people who were prepared to come to court and support him tell the court about you know his heroism about his willingness to sacrifice to help and basically in Alberta but what a good citizen he had been the city I think was very clever in a way and Johan van emotion wants the lease and so they gave him the house he wanted but they also gave him another I suppose demolish house on the condition that he would rebuild a better house in its place London needed every single penny they could find and it's interesting that so many of the rich immigrants at the rich in general but the immigrants in particular were willing to to help in the actual rebuilding of London Johan van der mesh died three years after the great fire but the city gave his brother-in-law Peter van den anchor an even greater reward in recognition of his great contribution to the rebuilding of the city of London he was given the freedom of the city and the cost were paid for by the city as well so I think this is important because it's an ultimate sign of acceptance um into London society other victims of the mobs rage made their peace with London too Cornelius Reid felt once he was released and it was obvious that you know he was not devolved at all when you returned toys to his business to his home and found everything destroyed however he did stay in London there is a record that an order of his child was baptized in the church and he must have rebuilt his business nearby probably amidst the very people that had robbed and destroyed his previous business [Music] so that London will never forget the destruction of the Great Fire a monument was built near pudding Lane where the fire started the monument it's always called just the monument but it's not only a memorial to the Fire of London it's a memorial to the men and women who helped to save London are more importantly perhaps the men and women who helped to rebuild London but the monument also became a focus for London's righteous anger to remind Londoners of the foreign enemies in their midst it was a plaque here which read here by permission of heaven hell broke loose on this protestant city from the malice of barbarous Papists whose fires are not yet quenched the lame french watchmaker robert hugh bear's name was etched here as the bloody foreigner who london believes started the great fire he was hanged on the 29th of october 1666 just weeks after the fire was extinguished the mobs malice doesn't end with Huber's death according to the Venetian ambassador at least Londoners tour Huber's corpse limb from limb but not everyone believed that the Frenchman had actually done it Hugh bears innocence was confirmed by the captain of the ship which had brought into London Hugh bear hadn't even been in the city when the fire broke out there's absolutely no reason to believe that Hugh bear was anything other than a nutcase somebody who's effectively committing suicide while making himself world-famous even the cost of his own life but Hugh bear had insisted on his guilt and London had exact Adha revenge the rage to blame lasted long after the flames had gone out it lasted in fact foreclosed on 160 odd years it wasn't until 1829 but that plaque finally came down by which time London had decided to write the whole thing off the great fire was an unfortunate accident started in fairness bakery in pudding Lane and so London was able to develop into the cosmopolitan and commercially vibrant city we know today [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Music]

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Length: 44min 56sec (2696 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 30 2017

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