Every six houses on each side of the way are to joyn together to provide one great
fire before the dore of the middlemost inhabitant; and one or two more persons to
be appointed to keep the fires constantly burning.
—Proclamation of Sir John Lawrence, Lord Mayor of London, September 5 , 1665London Fires
At the peak of this terrible season, London’s suffering citizens could scarcely
imagine how their great capital avoided plunging into utter disorder. For
weeks on end the mayor and aldermen held no meetings at the Guildhall.
The merchant guilds stopped meeting for the duration. The College of Phy-
sicians was abandoned, and thieves absconded with its treasure. The heads of
church and state were far distant—Dean Sancroft long since gone, King
Charles far away in body and spirit. In the parishes, center of most basic re-
lief work, there were barely enough persons to carry on. Only top officials,
like Captain General Albemarle and Mayor Lawrence, and a handful of stra-
tegically placed persons, like Turner and Pepys, could see an overall structure
of containment behind the loose patchwork of visible civic relief efforts.
The most ambitious public act of the epidemic was the lighting of street
fires throughout the capital for three days and nights in September. Samuel
Pepys had just returned from the temporary navy office in Greenwich to fin-
ish packing at Seething Lane. The extreme heat of the day and the blazing
fires made the scene apocalyptic as Pepys’ waterman rowed upstream to
Westminster on September 6. Samuel disembarked and went to Albemarle’s
residence to discuss navy supplies, his mind still on the blazes. They had
been lit the previous day and were going continually. “A gloomy time,” a
The Web of Authority
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