Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (24 page)

The old rector of Eyam, Thomas Stanley, had recently been ousted. A dissenter, he was one of the thousand or so Puritans who
had refused to conform to the Church of England when, along with the monarchy, it had been restored six years earlier. So
Stanley was deprived of his living, but he stayed on in Eyam, and seems to have collaborated with his young successor, the
Revd William Mompesson, in face of the terrifying threat to their flock.

It was Mompesson, a married man with two children, who took the step that made Eyam famous — he urged his congregation to
follow Jesus’s words in the Gospel of St John:‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’
Rather than fleeing the village and spreading the infection around the Peak District, argued the young rector, the community
should stick together and help their fellow-men. This, clearly, was to risk their own lives in an act of extraordinary self-sacrifice.
The congregation agreed, and for more than a year Eyam became effectively a huge plague house, shut off from the world. Their
neighbours, meanwhile, who included the Earl of Devonshire at nearby Chatsworth, responded to their gesture by
leaving food and other provisions at the outskirts of the village. Derbyshire was spared further plague, and Eyam paid the
price, losing more than 260 inhabitants, some three-quarters of the population. Among the last to die was Mompesson’s wife
Catherine, who had gone from house to house during the outbreak, ministering to the sick.

The final burial took place on II October 1666, and Mompesson started assessing the damage.’Our town has become a Golgotha,
the place of a skull…’ he wrote in November.’I intend, God willing, to spend this week in seeing all woollen clothes fumed
and purified…’ Modern quarantine procedure suggests that this is the very first thing Eyam should have done. Had the fleas
that were lurking in Edward Cooper’s box of clothing been destroyed on day one, the villagers would have posed no threat to
their neighbours. And even if the fleas had not been destroyed, those who left the village flealess could not have infected
anyone they met.

In scientific terms, we can now say that the sacrifice of Eyam’s villagers was probably unnecessary, and quite certainly counterproductive.
By staying together they actually brought more humans, fleas and rats into close proximity, hugely increasing the mortality
from a single source of infection. But if their lack of knowledge now seems a tragedy, does that invalidate the brave and
selfless decision they took?

A
T TWO O’CLOCK ON THE MORNING OF
Sunday 2 September 1666, Thomas Farynor awoke to the smell of burning. Farynor bore the title of King’s Baker — meaning that
he baked ships’ biscuits for the navy rather than bread for the King — and he lived above his bakery in Pudding Lane, not
far from London Bridge. Dashing downstairs, he met with a blaze of such intensity that he snatched up his family and fled.
Modern excavations have unearthed the carbonised remains of twenty tar barrels in the cellar below Pudding Lane, and it was
probably their explosion that catapulted burning debris into the stables of the inn next door, setting fire to the hay piled
up in the yard.

It had been a long hot summer. London’s wood and wattle houses, roofed with straw, were tinderbox-dry, and a warm wind was
blowing from the east. By three a.m. the city’s fire-fighters were on hand, accompanied by the Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth,
tetchy at having had his sleep disturbed. He gave the conflagration a cursory glance, then returned to his bed.‘Pish!’ he
sniffed,‘a woman might piss it out!’

But while the Lord Mayor slept, the flames licked their way to the riverside, enveloping the wooden wharves and warehouses
that were stacked to the rafters with merchandise waiting to burn. Tallow, oil, timber, coal — in no time an inferno was raging
up the shoreline and had consumed a third of the houses on London Bridge.‘Rattle, rattle, rattle…’ wrote one eyewitness,‘as
if there had been a thousand iron chariots, beating together on the stones.’ The fire was roaring along so fast that it caught
any pigeons too slow to get out of its path, setting their feathers alight.

By Sunday lunchtime, Mayor Bloodworth’s coarse complacency had turned to panic. Samuel Pepys found him sweating helplessly
at the front line, a handkerchief tied round his neck.‘Lord, what can I do?’ he cried.‘People will not obey me!’

Bloodworth’s only recourse was the one reliable defence that the seventeenth century could offer against fire — to pull down
blocks of houses to create firebreaks. But he found himself up against the fiercely protective instincts of some of the city’s
most powerful property owners, and it took royal intervention to get the firebreak policy under way. In fact, King Charles
and his brother James were the
fire-fighting heroes of that day, and of the three further days it took to bring the blaze under control. The King sent his
Life Guards along to help, and the two brothers were soon out on the streets themselves, setting to with shovels and buckets
of water. Working from five in the morning until nearly midnight, James came in for particular praise.‘If the Lord Mayor had
done as much,’ said one citizen,‘his example might have gone far towards saving the
city!

Thirteen thousand two hundred houses, 87 churches, and 44 merchant guild halls, along with the City’s own Guildhall, Exchange,
Custom House and the Bridewell Prison, were destroyed in the fire that started at Pudding Lane. For several nights the flames
burned so brightly that they lit the horizon at Oxford, fifty miles away. One hundred thousand were made homeless — tent cities
sprang up in the fields around the capital. And with no compensation available for rebuilding — at this date insurance existed
only for ships — many were left destitute.

It was hardly surprising that a catastrophe of such magnitude should prompt a witch-hunt. When MPs gathered at the end of
September they agreed to a man that papist saboteurs were to blame, and they set up a commission to prove it, solemnly gathering
gossip about sinister French firework-makers and Catholic housewives from Ilford overheard predicting hot weather.

In fact, there is not the slightest evidence that the fire which started in Thomas Farynor’s biscuit bakery in Pudding Lane
in September 1666 was anything but an accident. And there was a certain half-heartedness in the Protestant
attempts to pin the blame on the papists. Coupled with the‘blow’ of the plague the previous year, people felt a depressing
anxiety that the punishment might be the work of God himself — His judgement on a king and a monarchy that, in just a few
years, had fallen sadly short of all that its restoration had promised.

K
ING CHARLES II WAS PROUD TO HAVE
fathered no less than fourteen illegitimate children. His pursuit of pleasure summed up the spirit with which Restoration
England threw off the drab constraints of the Puritan years. Strolling in the park with his knock-kneed, floppy-eared spaniels,
the‘Merry Monarch’ privately believed in his divine right to rule as totally as his father had, but unlike his father, Charles
II masked his mission with the common touch. Orange-seller turned actress Nell Gwynne was the most popular of his many mistresses,
famously turning jeers to cheers when anti-Catholic demonstrators
jostled her carriage. Red-haired Nelly leaned out of the window.’I am the
Protestant
whore!’ she cried.

’King Charles 11,’ wrote John Evelyn,‘would doubtless have been an excellent prince had he been less addicted to women.’ The
King, explained Evelyn, was‘always in want to supply their immeasurable profusion’.

Women and wars drained the royal coffers. Under Charles, England’s taxes rose to even higher levels than under the Commonwealth
and Protectorate, but without the military triumphs that had made Cromwell’s wars palatable. In June 1667 a marauding Dutch
fleet entered the Thames estuary and sailed up the River Medway, where its fire ships destroyed half the English fleet. The
Dutch cannon were clearly heard many miles away in fire-devastated London, while the newly renamed
Royal Charles
was captured and towed ignominiously back to Holland.

The humiliation in the Medway ended the Restoration honeymoon. Charles had been careful to avoid dissolving the‘Cavalier’
Parliament that had been elected in the first joyously royalist flush of his return — at the end of every session he used
the mechanism of prorogation (the temporary suspension of the Lords and Commons) to keep the Cavaliers returning. But these
loyal merchants and country gentlemen distrusted the Roman Catholicism that permeated the royal court, and they disliked wasted
taxes as much as the next man.

In 1670 Charles embarked on a disastrous course. Seeking extra funds that would diminish his reliance on Parliament, he made
a secret pact with his cousin, the French
King Louis XIV. In return for a French pension that, in the event, would be paid intermittently for the rest of his reign,
he agreed not only to restore the rights of English Catholics but also, when the moment was right, personally to acknowledge
the Catholic faith in which he had been brought up by his devout French mother, Henrietta Maria.

The secret clauses were negotiated at Dover as part of a deal creating an Anglo-French alliance against the Dutch, and to
camouflage his betrayal Charles appointed two of his ministers to negotiate a cover’ Treaty of Dover — without the sell-out
over Catholicism. But it was not long before suspicions of under-the-table dealings emerged, and when Charles went before
Parliament in 1674 to swear there had been no secret clauses, it was observed that his hand shook.

The King’s problems were intensified by the fact that, despite his profusion of bastard children, he had produced no legitimate
heirs. His marriage to the Portuguese Catherine of Braganza remained obstinately childless, and though faithless to his spouse
in so many ways, Charles refused to discard her. This handed the succession squarely to his brother James, Duke of York, who,
unlike Charles, was not prepared to disguise his faith. In 1673 James had resigned his post as Lord High Admiral rather than
denounce the doctrine of transubstantiation (
see p. 102
) as required by the Test Act, Parliament’s attempt to exclude non-Anglicans
from public office. Thus the heir to England’s ultimate public office openly declared himself a Roman Catholic.

With the present King living a lie and his successor conjuring up the prospect of a re-enactment of the fires of Smith field,
it was small wonder that Protestant England felt under
threat — and on 17 October 1678 came the event that seemed to justify their wildest fears. The body of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey,
a prominent London magistrate, was found face down in a ditch on Primrose Hill, run through with a sword. Godfrey had been
a rare London hero of the plague year. He had stayed in the capital overseeing mass burials and prosecuting grave robbers,
and shortly before his death, it now turned out, he had embarked on a still more heroic mission: he was investigating allegations
of a sinister‘Popish Plot’ to murder the King and place James on the throne.

The allegations had been laid before the magistrate by one Titus Oates, an oily and pompous con man of the cloth, who had
been expelled from his school, two Cambridge colleges, his Church of England ministry, the navy, and two Catholic colleges
in Europe for offences that ranged from drunkenness to sodomy — with an ongoing strand of perjury. Oates’s tabloid tales of
dagger-wielding Jesuit assassins might normally have commanded little credence, but the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey
— which was never solved — gave his‘Popish Plot’ a horrid plausibility. The magistrate’s body was put on public display, and
enterprising tradesfolk hawked‘Edmund Berry Godfrey’ daggers to citizens newly concerned with self-defence. In the panic that
followed, further informers came crawling out of the woodwork, leading to the prosecution of more than twelve hundred Catholics
in London alone and the execution of twenty-four innocent men and women on charges of treason.