Chapter XVII
The Plague.—The Fire.—Wren.—London Rebuilt
In the summer of 1665, the Great Plague appeared in the midst of the alarm over the Dutch invasion. The three earlier visitations of the terrible disease during Milton’s youth were to be eclipsed in horror by this, the last great one that England was to know. Little connection between dirt and disease existed in the minds of even scientific men. Dirt was condemned as unæsthetic; but that earth floors covered with rushes, mixed with greasy bones and decaying cabbage leaves, had any connection with the griping pain of the groaning child upon the cot, its father did not dream. Some water was brought in pipes from Tyburn, but much of it was taken from the polluted Thames near London Bridge and carried about the streets in water-carts. How much was taken for bathing purposes may be imagined. When a luxurious monarch like Louis XIV. found a bath no necessity, we need not wonder that the English cartman, and blacksmith, and craftsman, housed in his narrow tenements near Smithfield or in Southwark, considered it a superfluity.
The summer of 1665 was hot and oppressive. All through the pitiless heat the wretched inmates of the town, whence two hundred thousand of the fortunate ones like Milton had fled, walked around the gloomy and deserted streets gathering their dead. By September fifteen hundred were dying every day. The heat was aggravated by the bonfires which were kept burning in vain hope of purifying the atmosphere. Physicians, ignorant, but heroic, remained at their posts, cupping and blistering, and uselessly tormenting the helpless folk who with pathetic confidence looked to them for salvation. Some men became insane, and some died of sheer fright. The suddenness of the death was one of the most ghastly features of the scourge. The mother who nursed her child at morning handed its little corpse at night to the man with the bell and dreadful cart, and knew not where its tender limbs were rudely thrust with the haste of a great terror which possessed the wretched gravediggers.
Out of a population of less than seven hundred thousand, probably one hundred thousand perished, and starvation and poverty stared many others in the face.
The South Prospect of The Royall Exchange
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Erected in 1564-70 by Sir Thomas Gresham, and burned in the Great Fire in 1666.
From an old engraving.
Something must have been learned of the need of purer water, for we find London, after the fire next year, bestirring itself to get a general supply of water from a canal forty miles long, called “New River,” which conducted a supply from Chadswell Springs in Hertfordshire to a reservoir at Islington.
The summer of 1666 was likewise hot and dry, and a furious gale blew for weeks together. Conditions were the same as in Chicago before the conflagration that in November, 1871, swept over 1,687 acres, which covered a territory four miles long and nearly three miles wide, and entailed a loss of $300,000,000, though half of the buildings were of wood. The moment was as propitious for the fire fiend as when Mother O’Leary’s cow kicked over the lamp in the Windy City of the West. A baker’s oven took fire in Pudding Lane, two hundred and two feet from the site of the present Fire Monument, which Wren erected in memory of it that number of feet in height. The fire began on Sunday night. It was twenty-four hours before the dazed citizens attempted organised relief, but then it was too late. By Tuesday evening the flames had licked up everything as far west as the Temple. The resolute king came to the help of the inefficient mayor, and ordered gunpowder to be used to blow up buildings and thus create open spaces where the fire would lack food. By Thursday evening the fire had practically ceased, and the citizens who had looked on at the destruction of their homes and churches and shops and the inestimable treasures of the past, sought shelter for their weary limbs. No telegraphic messages of sympathy, no carloads of provisions from neighbouring cities poured in to their relief, and homeless children cried for bread.
Evelyn, in describing the conflagration, says: “All the skie was of a fiery aspect like that of a burning oven, and the light seen above forty miles round about for many nights. God grant mine eyes may never behold the sight—who now saw ten thousand houses all in one flame; the noise and crackling and thunder of the impetuous flames; the shrieking of women and children; the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses, and churches was like an hideous storme and the aire all about so hot and inflamed that at last one was not able to approach it. The clouds also and smoke were dismall and reached upon computation neere 56 miles in length. The poore inhabitants were dispers’d about St. George’s Fields and Moorefields, as far as Highgate, and several miles in circle, some under tents, some under miserable hutts and hovells, many without a rag or any necessary utensils, bed or board, who from delicatenesse, riches, and easy accommodations in stately and well-furnished houses, were now reduc’d to extremest misery and poverty.”
Pepys tells us that the entire lead roof of St. Paul’s Cathedral, no less than six acres by measure, “fell in, the melted lead running down into the streets and into the crypt where books had been carried for safety.” He notes that the fire burned just as many parish churches as there were hours from the beginning to the end of the fire.
Dryden, in the long section of his “Annus Mirabilis” which describes the “Great Fire,” has a few lines among his prosaic stanzas which bear quotation:
“The ghosts of traitors from the bridge descend,
With bold fanatic spectres to rejoice:
About the fire into a dance they bend,
And sing their sabbath notes with feeble voice.
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“A key of fire ran all along the shore,
And lightened all the river with a blaze:
The wakened tides began again to roar,
And wondering fish in shining waters gaze.
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“The rich grow suppliant, and the poor grow proud:
Those offer mighty gain, and these ask more:
So void of pity is the ignoble crowd,
When others’ ruin may increase their store.
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“The most in fields like herded beasts lie down,
To dews obnoxious on the grassy floor;
And while their babes in sleep their sorrows drown,
Sad parents watch the remnants of their store.”
The king, who for the time being had behaved in manly fashion, went back to his dalliance with courtesans and “the burning lusts, dissolute court, profane and abominable lives” of which Evelyn writes on the day of fast and humiliation ordered for the occasion.
Though there was not a particle of proof that the Catholics had anything whatever to do with the origin of the fire, the frenzy and prejudice of the populace attributed it to them, and an inscription to that effect, which later was erased, was placed upon the monument.
The fire destroyed eighty-eight churches besides St. Paul’s, together with the city gates, the Exchange, the Custom House, 13,200 dwelling-houses, and four hundred streets. A space of 436 acres, two-thirds of the entire city, was consumed; and property then valued at £7,335,000 was destroyed. For six months London remained a chaos of rubbish heaps. Pepys writes that in March he still saw smoke rising from the ruins. The eight churches in the city proper that still remain practically as Milton saw them have been described in detail. They are All Hallows Barking, St. Ethelburga’s, St. Andrew Undershaft, of Saxon foundation; St. Olave’s, of Danish; and St. Helen’s, of Norman foundation; St. Catherine Cree, Austin Friars, which was the Dutch church, and St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, just beside the city wall. Of the six others that were not destroyed, All Hallows by the wall (Broad Street Ward) and St. Katherine Coleman (Aldgate) were rebuilt later. The four that then remained but have since disappeared were St. Christopher le Stocks, and St. Martin Outwich (Broad Street Ward), All-Hallows, Staining (Tower Ward), and St. Alphage, Aldermanbury.
Forty churches were rebuilt after the fire, and these were all designed by Sir Christopher Wren, who when he began his gigantic task was a young man of thirty-five. Wren, who was a nephew of the Bishop of Ely, was trained under Doctor Busby in Westminster School, and then at Wadham College, Oxford, and was there noted by John Evelyn as a “miracle of a youth,” “a prodigious young scholar,” who showed him “a thermometer, a monstrous magnet, and some dials.”
Wren was a little later one of the chief founders of the Royal Society, and its first meetings were held in his rooms. As versatile and original as Da Vinci, he excelled in Latin, mathematics, and astronomy, and was a close student of anatomy, and other sciences as well. Ten years before the Great Fire he was professor of astronomy in Gresham College, London, and at the age of twenty-eight, he was elected to the professorship of astronomy in Oxford. Before he was thirty and had done any work in architecture, Isaac Barrow declared him to be “something superhuman.” About this time he invented an agricultural implement for planting, and a method of making fresh water at sea. A year before the Fire he solved a knotty problem in geometry which Pascal had sent to English mathematicians. Says Hooke, “I must affirm that since the time of Archimedes there scarce ever met in one man in so great a perfection such a mechanical hand and so philosophic a mind.” Had Wren never designed a building he would have been famous for his achievements in the study of the cycloid, in rendering practical the use of the barometer, in inventing a method for the transference of one animal’s blood to another, in methods for noting longitude at sea, and for other studies and inventions too numerous to mention.
Wren was a self-taught architect. Before the Fire he erected Pembroke College Chapel at Cambridge, and the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford. He then visited Paris, where he saw Bernini, and made the most of observations of the Louvre and such Renaissance work as Paris then afforded. His bent of mind was wholly divergent from the Gothic, and as it proved, in the few instances in which he introduced its features into his Renaissance churches, the result was as incongruous as Chaucer’s cap and gown upon a Roman emperor.
London’s calamity was the opportunity for this little man of mighty intellect. Four days after the fire ceased he laid before the king the sketch of his plan for the restoration of the city. He looked far into the future, and in vision saw a splendid town built on a well-conceived, harmonious plan. He proposed to have Ludgate Hill widen as it approached St. Paul’s, where it would divide into two broad streets around the cathedral and leave ample space for its huge mass to be plainly viewed. One of these streets should lead to the Tower and the other to the Royal Exchange, which was to be the centre of the city. Around it should be a great piazza, from which ten streets were to lead, and on the outer edge of this piazza would be situated the Post-Office, the Mint, and other important buildings. “All churchyards, gardens, and trades that use great fires and noisome smells” were to be relegated to the country, and the churches with their spires were to be placed in prominent positions on the main thoroughfares.
All this meant present sacrifice for future good; but the short-sighted and impatient Londoners thought of the crying needs of the present year alone. The architect might implore and weep bitter tears, but all in vain. London must rise again on its old, congested plan, with its crooked alleyways and narrow courts. But, though the ground-plan was discarded, Wren was to make the new city his monument. Besides St. Paul’s he built within and without the walls fifty parish churches, thirty-six of the companies’ halls, the Custom House, and much besides.
During the last eight years of Milton’s life, the destruction of the walls of St. Paul’s went on and the new edifice was assuming shape in the mind of its creator. The old walls were blown down by gunpowder explosions and by battering-rams. This took about two years, and the clearing away of rubbish and building the massive foundations, longer still. Several schemes were considered and rejected, and the plan which finally took its present form was not begun until the funeral wreaths were withered upon Milton’s grave. Into the history of this mighty structure we may not enter. In 1710 the last stone of the lantern above the dome was laid by Wren’s son in the presence of the now aged architect and of all London, which assembled for the proud spectacle. The fair walls, ungrimed by soot and smoke, rose fresh and perfect, a monument to one of the greatest geniuses of all time.
One building erected the year after Milton’s death is worth mentioning as an illustration of the consideration shown for the insane at that period. Bethlehem Hospital, which has been referred to, was in Milton’s time situated on Bishopsgate Street Without. “This hospital stood in an obscure and close place near unto many common sewers; and also was too little to receive and entertain the great number of distracted Persons both men and women,” writes an old author. But the city with admirable public spirit gave ground for a better site against London wall near Moorfields. A handsome brick and stone structure 540 feet long was erected in 1675, and large gardens were provided for the less insane. Over the gate were placed two figures representing a distracted man and woman. This building had a cupola surmounted by a gilded ball; there was a clock within and “three fair dials without.” Men occupied one end of the building, and women the other. Hot and cold baths were provided, and there was a “stove room,” where in the winter the patients might assemble for warmth. Considering the ignorance of the time, astonishingly good sense was displayed in all the arrangements, insomuch that two out of every three persons were reported cured.
As if this were not enough for one man’s work, Wren of course was busy all these years with the care of all the churches. Before Milton died he had been knighted, and lived in a spacious mansion in Great Russell Square. He had by then rebuilt St. Dunstan’s in the East in Tower Ward; St. Mildred’s, Bread Street Ward; St. Mary’s, Aldermanbury; St. Edmund the King’s; St. Lawrence’s, Jewry; St. Michael’s, Cornhill, where he attempted Gothic work; the beautiful St. Stephen’s, Wallbrook; St. Olave’s, Jewry; St. Martin’s, Ludgate; St. Michael’s, Wood Street; St. Dionis’s, Langbourne Ward; St. George’s, Botolph Lane; and the Custom House.
No interior, either of these or those that followed these, is so perfect as St. Stephen’s, Wallbrook. Architecturally speaking, it has been questioned whether St. Paul’s itself shows greater genius.
In most of his labours Wren was embarrassed by lack of adequate funds and the caprice of his employers. Most of his churches were ingenious compromises between his ideals and their necessities or whims. His spires were in the Renaissance forms, but of endless variations. The most beautiful are so placed as rarely to be seen to advantage. Probably the most admired of all of them are St. Bride’s and St. Mary le Bow. The former, which overshadows the spot where Milton conceived the plan of “Paradise Lost,” is situated on a little narrow street called after St. Bride or Bridget, the Irish maiden, who died in 525. She had a holy well, which is commemorated by an iron pump within a niche upon its site.
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BOW STEEPLE, CHEAPSIDE
From a print published in 1798.
The lofty spire of the church rises to an altitude of 226 feet, a trifle higher than Bunker Hill Monument, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, which is a measuring-rod for many Americans.
St. Mary le Bow is on the site of a Norman church of the Conqueror’s time, and so named because it was built on arches or “bows” of stone. This crypt still remains. The steeple of the later church, which rang its bells above the head of little John Milton on Bread Street, close by, was built a hundred and fifty years before his birth; the church was said to have been a rather low, poor building. Bow bells were nightly rung at nine o’clock, but an old couplet shows that they were not always punctual:
“Clark of the Bow Bell, with the yellow lockes,
For thy late ringing, thy head shall have knockes.”
To which the clerk responded:
“Children of Cheape, hold you all still,
For you shall have the Bow Bell rung at your will.”
From the days when little Dick Whittington, a forlorn runaway, heard from far Bow bells summon him back to London, the bells have played a notable part in the life of Londoners. A true cockney is supposed to be one born within hearing of these bells. Certainly the boy in Spread Eagle Court deserved the title.
The spire of St. Mary le Bow rises a little higher than St. Bride’s, and bears a golden dragon nine feet long.
Upon the side of Bow Church, half hidden behind the tower, is an inscription which the pilgrim to Milton’s London will step aside to read. It is on the tablet which was transferred from All Hallows Church, in which Milton was baptised, when it was torn down. It closes with the familiar lines of Dryden, the poet whom England most admired when this new spire of Wren’s was rising upon the ruins of the old, and close beside the birthplace of the greatest soul ever born to London in all her two millenniums of history.
“Three poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed,
The next in majesty, in both the last;
The force of nature could no farther go,
To make a third she joined the other two.”
THE END.