264 • The Great PlagueThe passage of time had also dimmed the memories of London’s citizens,
blurring the twin calamities of plague and fire in 1665 and 1666 into a night-
marish sequence best forgotten. Or, better still, one could reflect on the city’s
quick recovery. The image to remember was that of the phoenix rising from
the ashes, as the poet-playwright John Dryden had written so eloquently in
hisAnnus Mirabilis.It was an apt metaphor, for London’s citizens had rallied
the capital against both the plague’s terrible blows and the conflagration that
destroyed the old city center.
After fire broke out at a bakery in Pudding Lane during the early hours of
Sunday, September 2 , 1666 , Samuel Pepys brushed aside Mayor Bludworth’s
excuses for inaction. The risk-taking plague survivor dashed to Whitehall to
alert his king, and Charles II was braver than he had been the year before. By
the third day he was supervising the firefighting and relief for a hundred
thousand displaced citizens. Carters from the countryside transported the
homeless and their goods to tents north of the city pesthouse, where twelve
months before thousands had been taken to nearby plague pits.
At the eastern wall Pepys buried valuable papers, coin, wine, and Parme-
san cheese in a neighboring garden and huddled in his office wrapped in his
assistant Will’s quilt. Fearing the worst, he later moved his wife, servants,
and £ 2 , 350 in gold to their plaguetime quarters at Woolwich. When he re-
turned he found the nearby streets “all in dust,” but to his joy their home was
intact. Dynamiting operations had stopped the inferno short of the navy of-
fice, Tower, and bridge. John Evelyn led a similar operation to protect royal
Whitehall and the hospitals housing his sick and wounded sailors.
Rev. Symon Patrick remained with his frightened parishioners, the poor
not knowing what would happen to their livelihood, the richer sort wonder-
ing whether their mansions would be among those blown up by the king’s
orders to save the west end. Inside the wall Sir William Turner stood ready
to serve as he had the year before, but it was beyond his powers to save the
Guildhall. The crumbling medieval cathedral of Saint Paul’s, which Evelyn
and others had been planning to repair, also went up in flames, the molten
lead of its roof flowing across the glowing stones of the churchyard past
Turner’s shop. A decade later, an unlettered workman fetched a flat stone
from the churchyard rubble to mark the center of the dome on the floor of
the new Saint Paul’s. By pure chance he had unearthed a gravestone bearing
a single decipherable word,“resurgam.”As the new edifice arose over the
ruins of the old, this same magical word, symbolizing London’s rebirth, ap-
peared on the south transept over a phoenix rising from the ashes.^2
John Evelyn submitted a design for a new London featuring broad ave-