The Great Fire of London of 1666 is one of the best-known episodes in English history. Though generally thought (and taught) to have been an accident, it has recently been suggested in a television programme shown on the UK’s Channel 4 that the devastating fire, which burned for days, was in fact the result of a deliberate arson attack by enemies of the state.
Thomas Farriner’s Carelessness: the Schoolroom Version
Most British students know the story of the Great Fire of London. On the morning of 2nd September 1666, baker Thomas Farriner of Pudding Lane failed to extinguish his oven properly and his family woke to find the premises alight. They made their escape across the roof and, although the Lord Mayor was alerted, he famously asserted that the fire was so small that ‘a woman could piss it out’.
The unfortunate Lord Mayor had made one of history’s great misjudgements: in dry weather and fanned enthusiastically by a favourable wind, the flames spread rapidly westward and the fire burned until Wednesday 5th September – claiming few lives but destroying thousands of buildings, including St Paul’s Cathedral, and displacing most of the population of the city. Total disaster was averted by stopping the flames before they could reach the Tower of London – an ammunition store.
International Arson: the Alternative Version
The accidental version may be the better known, but there are dissenting voices. Author Neil Hanson quotes an SAS soldier who claimed that if the special forces had wanted to torch the capital, that’s exactly how they would have done it “at the time when the water engine that supplied the city was out of order, when an easterly gale was blowing to drive it right across London [and] in the most combustible district” (Museum of London).
The political situation (Britain was at war with the Netherlands) meant that London had no shortage of enemies. It was only a fortnight since the British fleet had set fire to the Dutch fleet and the burning of London would have been an appropriate act of revenge. And, failing that, there was continual religious unrest between Protestants and Catholics – particularly foreign, specifically French, Catholics.
There’s certainly no doubt from contemporary accounts and from the notes of the later inquiry into the Great Fire that Londoners believed the disaster to have been a crime – though even then there were many who thought differently. William Taswell, for example, noted that ‘the ignorant mob…vented their rage against the Roman Catholics and Frenchmen, imagining these incendiaries (as they thought) to have thrown red hot balls into their houses” (History Today).
There was even a culprit – a French Catholic, no less – one Robert Hubert, who boasted of starting the fire and was hanged on the strength of his claims, despite the lack of any evidence linking him with the scene of the crime. His confession may have been false: Hanson quotes one of the UK’s leading experts in the fiend of arson psychology as expressing surprise that any confession was made at all.
So, Who Really Started the Great Fire of London?
Although contemporary accounts indicate that many (though not all) Londoners believed it to be arson, such accounts must be treated with caution: Frances Dolan notes that “what one finds in whatever “archive” survives is rumor, disputation, missing documents, contested authority”. And it should also be remembered that there was still a popular association between Catholicism and fire – the burnings of Protestants in the reign of Mary Tudor were scarcely a century old.
And of course, people’s natural inclination after any disaster is to seek a scapegoat. Dolan again: “the easiest way to make sense of the chaos [was] to tell a familiar story… with a villain who acts as an agent, but who also gives meaning to the mayhem and who can be rooted out and punished”. In other words, people wanted to believe that the fire was a deliberate act and managed to persuade themselves accordingly.
Shortly after the fire the King, Charles II, set up an inquiry, but he was to prorogue Parliament before it reported and no official conclusion was ever reached. This may be interpreted as evidence of Catholic sympathies (the King’s brother, later James II and VII, was a Catholic and Charles himself was to have a deathbed conversion). Alternatively, Charles may genuinely have believed that the whole thing was an accident.
Though there was no shortage of suspects, and though the French Catholic Hubert (who, Dolan notes, was ‘possibly insane’) paid for his boasting, if not his crime, with his life, this by no means constitutes conclusive evidence that the fire was the result of arson. In the absence of any concrete information it’s probably easiest to ascribe the Great Fire of London to an accident – although the conspiracy theory is entertaining and was certainly persuasive at the time.
Sources
Frances Dolan “Ashes and “the Archive”: The London Fire of 1666, Partisanship, and Proof” in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 2001.
Museum of London “The Great Fire of London: myths and realities: Proceedings from a study day held on 6 October 2007”
Stephen Porter “The Great Fire of London” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
William Taswell “The Plague and the Fire: Reminiscences of Restoration Times” in History Today 2009
