HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/people/samuel-pepys Thu, 02 Oct 2025 08:00:38 GMT en hourly 1 The sinister secrets of Samuel Pepys https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-sinister-secrets-of-samuel-pepys/ Fri, 12 Sep 2025 08:00:15 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-sinister-secrets-of-samuel-pepys/ His diaries are revered for their kaleidoscopic evocation of Restoration England. Yet a fresh analysis of Pepys’ world-famous journals – carried out by Guy de la Bédoyère – reveals a man with a proclivity for coercion and sexual violence Samuel Pepys is England’s most celebrated diarist. Between 1 January 1660 and 31 May 1669, he recorded his day-to-day life in fascinating and illuminating detail. He wrote about his relationship with his wife, Elizabeth, and the frustrations of managing his household and the servants. He left first-hand accounts of the plague epidemic that likely claimed around 100,000 lives in the capital in 1665–66, and of the Great Fire of London that followed. He has come down through the years as one of the key primary sources for anyone trying to understand the early Restoration era.

But there was a dark side to Pepys’ writings, which was never intended to be made public. He described a sordid litany of sexual encounters ranging from his relationships with long-term mistresses to his assaults on maids, including members of his own staff. In an era when corruption was commonplace, Pepys also wrote about using his position as a civilian naval official to coerce sexual services from women seeking promotion for their husbands or payment of unpaid wages.

Take the events of 18 February 1667, a day when Pepys met in his office with Elizabeth Burrows, who was around 30 years old and the widow of a naval lieutenant killed in action in 1665. Pepys had promised her financial assistance.

His diary entry – tellingly, one omitted from editions published in the 19th century, and which appeared without its meaning explained in the 1970s edition – describes what happened. “Yo had Mrs Burrows all sola a my closet and did there besar and tocar su mamelles as much as yo quisere hasta a hazer me hazer, but ella would not suffer that yo should poner mi mano abaxo ses jupes which yo endeavoured. [I had Mrs Burrows all alone in my closet and did there kiss and touch her breasts as much as I wanted until making myself do, but she would not suffer that I should put my hand below her skirts which I endeavoured.] Thence away, and with my wife by coach to the Duke of York’s playhouse.”

The description is typically offhand. That Pepys went to collect his wife, also Elizabeth, immediately afterwards is astonishing. The mix of English and foreign words was a deliberate tactic, as we will see. Pepys tended to avoid specifics in his writing, and often used indirect references to sexual details, but the meaning of “making myself do” is obvious.

Ignoring infidelities

Why isn’t this unpleasant side of Pepys’ character better known? It helps to understand that, in the past, diary transcribers and some biographers often depicted these activities as recreational capers – or simply ignored them altogether. The full extent and implications of Pepys’ self-confessed adulterous activities, including the coercion and sexual violence, were often glossed over and evaded. It’s a story further complicated by the history behind the publication of the diary text, sections of which first appeared in print in 1825.

Pepys wrote the diary in Tachygraphy, a commercial form of shorthand devised by Thomas Shelton in the early 17th century – a time when such abbreviated forms of writing were extremely popular. Shelton’s system uses symbols for consonants, prefixes and suffixes, and arbitrary symbols to represent specific words. Medial (middle) vowels were not normally written, but instead were indicated by the positioning of later consonants in a word. (I have been using Tachygraphy for more than 20 years in my everyday life.)

• Read more | 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Samuel Pepys

Pepys’ diary was not strictly ‘secret’ – but, when it came to his adulterous activities, he was worried that someone might realise what he had written about. In 1664, when his recorded infidelities become more frequent, Pepys resorted to writing parts of the key sentences in French. But he soon found that Shelton’s shorthand was unsuited to French – unlike Spanish, which has fewer vowel sounds. He therefore began to use a mixture of foreign languages: French and Spanish were preferred, but words from Italian, Portuguese, Latin and Greek also crop up in his entries.

Pepys’ graphic accounts of his sexual activities horrified previous transcribers and editors of the diary. The 19th-century editions generally omitted such material, although the editors alluded to the excised filth in their introductions, so readers were left titillated but none the wiser. “Have faith in the judgment of the editor,” pleaded Henry Wheatley, whose 1890s edition of the 1870s transcription by the Reverend Mynors Bright remained in print for decades.

By the late 1950s, plans were afoot to publish the whole, unexpurgated diary text in a transcription by Robert Latham and William Matthews, but legislation around obscene publications presented an obstacle. Then, in 1960, Penguin published the first unexpurgated UK edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence. In the landmark court case that followed, lawyers successfully argued that a provision in the Obscene Publications Act 1959 allowed publishers a defence for works of literary merit, and Penguin was acquitted.

That verdict opened the way for Pepys’ full diaries to be made public. Even then, lawyers urged restraint. In the event, Latham and Matthews decided to publish the whole text but not to analyse or translate any of Pepys’ polyglot. Nor would they flag up which passages were previously unpublished. Their edition, appearing throughout the 1970s and the early 1980s, has always been regarded as the definitive text – which, to a large extent, it is.

Out of kilter

When I embarked on a project to analyse and translate the controversial passages in 2024, I realised that avoiding doing so in the 1970s edition had resulted in some dubious readings of the polyglot being printed. Unlike my predecessors, I was able to magnify scans of the diary and scrutinise them in unprecedented detail. In doing so, I found that the correct readings were largely obvious and could be tracked easily to contemporary French or Spanish dictionaries that Pepys owned.

Using such methods, I made my own fresh transcriptions from the original shorthand and translated them. This was laborious but revelatory, and led me to discover other ways in which Pepys disguised his meanings.

In May 1667, while writing in the shorthand, he started adding what previous transcribers called “dummy letters” or “extraneous consonants” to certain English words, though very rarely applying this to the polyglot. One of the best examples is maladimen hered, which Pepys wrote (in shorthand) to represent ‘maidenhead’.

Not one of the earlier transcribers realised that this method had been devised by the polymath clergyman John Wilkins (1614–72) and explained in his Mercury, or The Secret and Swift Messenger (1641). A copy of this book that belonged to Pepys is shelved near the diary volumes in the Pepysian Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Pepys had several other books by Wilkins, and greatly admired him.

As I worked through Pepys’ diary, transcribing and translating these controversial passages, I realised that these were the private revelations of a man who had what seemed to be a neuro-psychological form of addiction. When he was in what he called his “hot humour”, by his own admission he sought out any woman he could find. And on at least two occasions he raped one of them.

Elizabeth Bagwell was the wife of William, a naval carpenter whose father, Owen, was yard foreman at Deptford royal dockyard. Conducting official business, Pepys frequently visited that site, where he spotted Elizabeth – and the Bagwells spotted Pepys, too. They wanted to secure positions for William, and used Elizabeth as a honeytrap. Was she willing to play the part? We can’t know – but father and son both pushed the young Mrs Bagwell on Pepys, who admired what he thought was her virtue while at the same time being determined to wear her down.

• Read more | Alternate history: what if the Great Fire of London never happened?

Pepys understood the transactional nature of this relationship. He found William jobs in Charles II’s navy – but, in return, he wanted Mrs Bagwell’s services. Whether she realised the risks of what she was being forced to do is impossible to know. But then came a day when Pepys could restrain himself no longer.

On 20 December 1664, he wrote, he “walked to Deptford where after doing something at the yard I walked, without being observed, with Bagwell home to his house and there was very kindly used, and the poor people did get a dinner for me in their fashion. Of which I also eat very well. After dinner I found occasion of sending him abroad, and then alone avec elle je tentoy à ferer ce que je vodre et contre sa force je le fesoy, bien que pas à mon contentement [alone with her, I tried to do what I would like and against her resistance I did it, although not to my full satisfaction].” Pepys had clearly raped Elizabeth Bagwell.

On the evening of 20 February 1665, he again headed to Deptford and “it being dark did privately entrer en la maison de la femme de Bagwell [enter the house of Bagwell’s wife], and there had sa company, though with a great deal of difficulty, néanmoins enfin j’avais ma volonté d’elle [nevertheless, in the end I had my will of her].”

The following day, Pepys nursed an injured finger: it seems he’d used force on Mrs Bagwell, who had clearly done everything possible to fight back.

Controlling behaviour

These horrifying episodes were conducted during the course of Pepys’ professional duties, and while he was married. He loved his wife, Elizabeth, passionately but also gaslit her, often denying her money and controlling her behaviour. She was so unhappy that she wrote down her concerns, only for Pepys to destroy her papers on 9 January 1663. On 19 December 1664, he became enraged by her challenges to his authority, and hit her so hard that she was left with a visible injury over one eye.

Elizabeth Pepys, who was half-French, died in November 1669, aged just 29, having contracted a fever – probably typhoid while on a trip to Paris and the Low Countries with Samuel. This followed a debacle the previous autumn when Elizabeth had caught him touching the genitals of her 18-year-old companion, Deb Willet, with whom Pepys had been obsessed ever since she came to work for them in 1667. It sent Elizabeth into a paroxysm of rage that lasted months. Pepys was contrite, but continued to seek out Deb, who had fled. Having found her, he forced himself upon her again.

He also returned to his other mistresses, among them Betty Martin and her younger sister, Doll, milliners who worked at Westminster. Betty, nearly 24 when Pepys first mentioned her at the beginning of the diary, had long been his most regular mistress, and seems to have been willing and pragmatic. By the early 1660s, though, he was encouraging her to marry. When she did wed one Samuel Martin, she worked on Pepys to give her husband a position as a naval purser. He obliged, and was even godfather to one of her children.

Despite the abuse and exploitation to which she had been subjected, Deb Willet married a client of Pepys called Jeremiah Wells, had two daughters, and lived near Pepys in London until her premature death in 1678. Pepys helped Jeremiah, who died in 1679, with his career in the church. Did Pepys’ pursuit continue during the marriage? Certainly, Deb had been confronted with a dilemma that so many women faced during this era: her security was tied up with her husband’s employment. We will never know if Pepys pursued the relationship, because he had ceased writing his diary on 31 May 1669.

By extracting all of these entries in sequence, the patterns of Pepys’ sex life have become easier to follow. He loved women, but also treated them as chattels. He revelled in the exuberant company of the actress Elizabeth Knepp: “I… got her upon my knee (the coach being full) and played with her breasts and sung, and at last set her at her house and so good night.” He routinely did the same to his maids and other people’s servants.

One mistake easily made is to assume that the diary is a comprehensive record of Pepys’ activities. He once referred to his antics with Betty Martin’s sister Doll, a decade her junior, and that he had been with her “100 times”. Though that was obviously metaphorical, it and other comments suggest that the diary records only a fraction of his philandering.

• Read more | Agony and adventure: the hidden histories inside women's diaries

Pepys was so over-sexed that he masturbated in public places. At the Queen’s Chapel on Christmas Eve 1667, “I did make myself to do la cosa [the thing] by mere imagination mirando a jolie móça [looking on a pretty wench] and with my eyes open which I never did before. And God forgive me for it, it being in the chapel.”

Read those two lines back out loud and you will spot another aspect of the diary that has escaped comment. Pepys used alliteration, metre and rhymes often in these controversial passages, suggesting that he took a perverse pleasure in composing them. Alliteration is so conspicuous in the polyglot sexual passages that it’s amazing it has gone unnoticed hitherto.

Lost voices

The tragedy is that nothing written down by any of the women in his life – even by his humiliated and angry wife – has survived. However, modern online genealogical resources (such as ancestry.co.uk and familysearch.org) unavailable to previous editors have made it possible to trace some new details.

These women were trapped in a society where their autonomy was limited. They were treated – and expected to be treated – as commodities. Mrs Bagwell was still visiting Pepys’ office when she was in her forties, two decades after their initial encounter, seeking positions for her husband. Pepys, then Secretary of the Admiralty, wrote her husband a letter telling him to stop his wife. Even so, Pepys helped William Bagwell throughout the rest of his career; the latter died as a master shipwright in 1697, and Mrs Bagwell passed away in 1702, a well-to-do widow. Was that really any consolation to her? We shall never know.

It’s clear that Pepys was a bully, a vain and philandering hypocrite, and a domineering and mean-minded husband. He was capable of sexual violence as well as being coercive, deceitful and manipulative. He groomed his female targets into submission, and disregarded their feelings. He was easily manipulated by others who spotted his inclinations. He also routinely beat his servants.

Yet he was equally capable of generosity, compassion and love. His enduring loyalty was one of his most edifying characteristics. He was meticulous, exceptionally well organised and a superb administrator. He had an overwhelming, if credulous, curiosity about life, and a well-developed appreciation of art and music. He was an invigorating individual and was manifestly held in great esteem by many of his contemporaries.

Pepys’ graphic honesty made him a man of disturbing contradictions. Yet the treatment of that diary in previous editions, all to a greater or lesser extent suppressing his least edifying characteristics, has created an image of Pepys that has falsified his own witnessing of his life. Now, with this side of his life laid bare as he wrote it himself, at last we have a fuller picture of the truth.

Pepys died in 1703, highly esteemed by many other luminaries of the period, none apparently aware of his controversial private life as a younger man. Had his secrets emerged, his reputation and career could have been destroyed. He had hidden in plain sight – but left a record of the truth without parallel. 

Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer. His latest book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations (Abacus, 2025)

This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> Alternate history: what if the Great Fire of London never happened? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/what-if-great-fire-london-never-happened-alternative-history/ Mon, 12 Dec 2022 10:16:24 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/what-if-great-fire-london-never-happened-alternative-history/ For a little under five days, London was ablaze in one of the city's worst-ever disasters. What was the impact of the Great Fire? Dr Clare Jackson talks to Nige Tassell about how it changed the English capital and why its legacy as a ‘plague killer’ should be extinguished When fire shot through the City of London over the course of three days in early September 1666, razing everything in its path, the future of England’s capital – its very existence – was in jeopardy. Although the estimated death toll remained remarkably low for a fire that wreaked such destruction, the City itself looked much different when the final smouldering was extinguished.

More than 13,000 houses had been destroyed, along with nearly 90 churches. Some significant buildings were lost to the flames, including the original St Paul’s Cathedral and the Royal Exchange, as well as the city gates at Aldersgate, Ludgate and Newgate. The subsequent history of England would have taken a different complexion had its entire capital been lost. As it was, the flames were largely limited to the City of London.

A few historians have even suggested that, in some regards, the Great Fire of London turned out to be a force for good. The principal tenet of this line of thinking revolves around the Great Plague. The belief is that, when fire broke out, the epidemic – which had ripped so easily through the cheek-by-jowl living quarters of the City the previous year – would have found it much harder be transmitted; in short, that the fire killed off the epidemic, certainly in London.

Did you know?

Thomas Farriner’s bakehouse (where the Great Fire of London began) was not located on Pudding Lane, as traditionally believed. Hearth tax records show it was actually sited on Fish Yard, a small enclave off Pudding Lane.

• Read more | Coffee, plague and the Great Fire: the pleasures and perils of living in Restoration London

Dr Clare Jackson – senior tutor at Trinity Hall, Cambridge and author of the award-winning Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588–1688 (Allen Lane, 2021) – dismisses this theory. “This is a myth. The Great Fire had not spread to areas that had experienced particularly high levels of plague infection, such as Southwark, Clerkenwell and Whitechapel.” That is, the flames failed to reach certain districts, so couldn’t have had an impact on plague numbers.

Plus, the timeline of the epidemic doesn’t neatly tally with the timeline of the Great Fire, as Dr Jackson explains: “Plague mortality had already started to decline from late 1665, while people also continued to die from plague after the Fire. Popular associations between the Great Plague of 1665 and the Fire of 1666 arise only from their close chronological proximity.”

On the podcast | Rebecca Rideal responds to listener questions about the devastating blaze that swept through the capital in 1666

Understandably, the Great Fire caused mass migration from the City of London to surrounding areas. But this alone didn’t reshape the city, especially as much of this migration was only short term as the homeless sought temporary shelter in the open land beyond the city limits, particularly to the north. By then, London was already swiftly expanding and swelling.

“Before the Fire, there had already been significant expansion westwards, with local populations moving beyond the City’s walls to escape overcrowding. Newly fashionable areas such as St James, Covent Garden and Westminster were attracting the gentry and upwardly mobile migrants, while poorer families were tending to move eastwards.”

A speedy recovery

Rather than licking its wounds, the City of London swiftly set about rebuilding itself. The economy obviously took an immediate knock, but it wasn’t as catastrophic a hit as might have been expected. “While there was inevitable short-term disruption to trade,” explains Dr Jackson, “the speed with which the authorities embarked on rapid rebuilding and recovery was remarkable. Two sets of plans for the City’s rebuilding had already been submitted to the government of Charles II by 13 September 1666, only a week after the Fire ended. By 1670, around 6,000 houses had been rebuilt.”

One legacy of the Great Fire was the use of less flammable materials in building; the Rebuilding Act of 1667 specified that “all the outsides of all buildings in and about the said City be henceforth made of brick or stone”.

However, as Dr Jackson clarifies, the events of 1666 can’t take complete credit, pointing out that, during the early 1600s, James VI and I had made similar restrictions on the use of materials in construction in London, “both to reduce fire risk and to reserve timber for England’s Navy ships. Such orders had, however, often been disregarded, but the Fire of 1666 provided an opportunity for widespread enforcement, as City authorities were given the right to demolish illegally built houses.”

In context: the Great Fire of London

From Sunday 2 to Wednesday 5 September 1666, the City of London was overwhelmed by the largest, fastest-moving fire it had ever experienced, one that razed most of the buildings within its walls to the ground. Having broken out in a bakery just after 12am, the fire spread swiftly through the night. There was a chance to contain its reach early on by demolishing buildings ahead of its path to create firebreaks, but the Lord Mayor dallied over authorising such measures and the fire took serious hold. Fanned by easterly winds, it roared largely unchallenged across the entire City. The flames only dissipated when the wind dropped nearly 72 hours after its outbreak. It was “the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw,” recorded the famed diarist Samuel Pepys.

One of the grandest rebuilds was, of course, the magnificent Sir Christopher Wren-designed St Paul’s Cathedral, which still dominates the London skyline as viewed looking northwards from the South Bank of the Thames. That’s an undisputed visual reminder of the Fire.

One last potential legacy of 1666 concerns how prepared London was for subsequent outbreaks of fires. Within a few years, the large-scale adoption of fire insurance became standard practice, but the idea that a new emergency service was immediately created is again debunked by Dr Jackson. “There were a few new fire pumps, but the first city-wide fire service was not created until January 1833.”

Perhaps it should have come into force earlier. In 1676, 600 houses in Southwark were lost to a blaze, and a further 1,000 in Wapping six years after that. In conclusion, although it accelerated certain developments that were already afoot, had the Great Fire not happened, the course of English history wouldn’t have been terribly affected. However, if the wind hadn’t dropped three days into the fire and the flames had continued to consume all before them, the events of September 1666 could have left the country without a capital city.

More from our alternate history series

What if... Britain and France went to war in 1898? What if... Queen Victoria had been assassinated? What if... the Ottomans had won at Lepanto? What if... George III hadn't 'lost' the colonies What if... the Spanish Armada had succeeded? What if...  the gunpowder plot had succeeded? What if... Alexander the Great had lived longer?

Clare Jackson is senior tutor of Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge. She has presented the BBC2 series The Stuarts and its sequel, The Stuarts in Exile, and is author of Devil-Land: England under Siege 1588-1688 (Allen Lane, 2021)

This article was first published in the October 2022 edition of BBC History Revealed

]]> Your guide to the Great Fire of London, plus 10 surprising facts https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/great-fire-london-facts-guide/ Wed, 27 Jul 2022 09:00:08 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/great-fire-london-facts-guide/ One of the most famous disasters in London's history, the Great Fire of London in 1666 devastated the heart of England's capital, destroying more than 13,000 houses and badly damaging landmarks including St Paul's Cathedral and the Royal Exchange. But how much do you really know about the blaze? We bring you the facts... Why did the Great Fire of London start? Who was to blame? And how many died? Discover the story of the 1666 blaze that destroyed the City of London – from diarist Samuel Pepys's first-hand accounts, to the aftermath of the devastating fire...

• When was the Great Fire of London?
• How did the Great Fire of London start?
• The Great Fire of London: eye-witness accounts
• What did people do when the fire broke out?
• The aftermath of the Great Fire of London
• How many people died in the Great Fire of London?
• How was London rebuilt after the Great Fire of London?
• 10 lesser-known facts about the Great Fire of London
• Great Fire of London: through the eyes of Samuel Pepys

The Great Fire of London: key facts

When was the Great Fire of London? 2 September 1666 to 5 September 1666 How much damage did it cause? It is thought that the Great Fire of London destroyed up to four-fifths of the City of London, including most of the civic buildings, old St Paul’s Cathedral, 87 churches, and around 13,000 houses How many people died in the Great Fire of London? "Though we do not know exactly how many people died as a result of the Great Fire of London, it was almost certainly more than commonly accepted figures," says historian Rebecca Rideal

When was the Great Fire of London?

The Great Fire of London began on Sunday 2 September 1666. The famous diarist Samuel Pepys – from whom we know a great deal about the event – was enjoying a good night’s rest at the time; the previous day he’d been to the theatre, avoided someone he didn’t like and repaired to Islington. He ate, drank and became “mighty merry”, before singing all the way home, writing some letters and falling into bed. Hardly surprising, then, that when his maid called him at three o’clock in the morning to look at a fire across town, he decided it was far enough away not to worry about and went straight back to sleep.

Pepys wasn’t the only one. The Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, took one look at the blaze, declared “a woman might piss it out,” and dived back under the covers. In the days that followed, his weak leadership added fuel to a fire that became one of the greatest catastrophes the city has seen. A spark from a baker’s oven grew into an all-consuming monster that lasted four days. The immediate aftermath was homelessness and ruin for thousands, but the effects can still be seen today.

How did the Great Fire of London start?

The Great Fire began when someone in Thomas Farynor’s Pudding Lane bakery failed to securely damp down the oven before going to bed. By Monday evening, 300 houses had burned – the final toll would top 13,000.

Divine retribution?

Mystics, fortune tellers and especially Puritans had predicted doom for the city’s modern, sinful ways even before the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. London, led by the decadent Charles II, enjoyed a lavish lifestyle and was, according to the deeply religious, ripe for a tumble. It was, they claimed, already happening. The Great Plague had taken 100,000 lives the previous year and invasion by the Dutch seemed to be only a matter of time. The ‘666’ number had not gone unnoticed either. In 1597, an anonymous pamphlet, Babylon is Fallen, had suggested 1666 would be the Year of the Beast, perhaps even the time of Christ’s second coming. Oddly, afterwards, it was commemorated by poet John Dryden as an annus mirabilis (‘year of wonders’). Restoration London was frivolous and worldly, bustling and cosmopolitan. On narrow, dirty and dark streets, rickety houses were built from wood and thatch. Their protruding upper storeys, ‘jetties’, almost met at the top. Filth rained onto unwary pedestrians from upstairs windows. Inside, people lit their houses with candles and cooked with open fires. There was hay in the stables, pitch on the roofs, tar in the shipyards and even gunpowder in many homes, as Cromwell’s soldiers retained their muskets from the civil wars. Given the city’s flammability, doom-mongers’ predictions of an apocalyptic inferno could hardly be deemed radical.

The Great Fire of London: eye-witness accounts

We have several eye-witness accounts of the fire.  The most famous is that of Pepys, whose access to famous figures such as the King, the Duke of York and the Lord Mayor make his version pivotal. Pepys’s friend John Evelyn, another diarist, lived in Deptford but came to town to see the kerfuffle. Letters and memoirs from ordinary people provide glimpses of what went on below the surface. Sir Edward Harley’s account mentions Farynor’s bakery maid, who, he says, was too scared to climb onto the roof next door with the rest of the household and became the fire’s first victim. Unless in the fire’s immediate path, people didn’t panic – at first. Strong winds from the east, however, fanned the flames, and disagreement and indecision allowed things to get out of hand. Postmaster James Hickes was forced to flee from the post office, but not before taking as many letters as he could carry. With no reliable information, rumour and hearsay took over.

• 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the history of London

Firefighting was the job of the Watch, ‘bell-men’ who patrolled the streets at night. Every church stored basic equipment – fire hooks (long poles to demolish precarious buildings), ladders, leather buckets, axes and ‘squirts’ (the 17th-century Super Soaker). The few ‘fire engines’ were clumsy and the river had no quays, so firefighters had to trundle them to the water as best they could. Several toppled into the Thames.

The Museum of London holds an incomplete fire engine from around 1678. As part of their ‘Fire! Fire!’ project, they commissioned Croford Coachbuilders to rebuild the missing parts. “It wasn’t until we put it together again that we could see how it would work,” explains Meriel Jeater, curator of the Museum of London’s ‘Fire! Fire!’ exhibition. “Now the wheels are back on we’ve realised it’s really difficult to turn corners.” The default fire-fighting technique was demolition, but faced with that prospect, the Lord Mayor demurred. He may have feared being personally held to account for the damage, but, whatever his reasons, Bloodworth became a hate figure.

Pepys described him as “a silly man”. In one of Pepys’s proudest moments, he was called to court to describe the fire to the Kingand the Duke of York. He advised a troubled Charles that buildings must be pulled down. “The King commanded me to go to my Lord Mayor from him, and command him to spare no houses, but to pull down before the fire every way. The Duke of York bid me tell him that if he would have any more soldiers he shall.” Pepys made his way back, noting “every creature coming away loaden with goods to save, and here and there sicke people carried away in beds”.

When he found Bloodworth, the mayor was “like a man spent, with a handkercher about his neck. To the King’s message he cried, like a fainting woman, ‘Lord! What can I do? I am spent: people will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses; but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it.’” Bloodworth refused the Duke of York’s soldiers and disappeared to “refresh himself, having been up all night”. Disgusted, Pepys reflected he appeared to be “a very weak man”.

People moved valuables to nearby ‘safety’, then again, and again as the flames licked closer. “I did remove my money and iron chests into my cellar, as thinking that the safest place,” recounts Pepys. “And got my bags of gold into my office, ready to carry away, and my chief papers of accounts.”

It wasn’t long before he would bury his wine and parmesan cheese, for safekeeping. The diarist was helped by the wife of a colleague, Sir William Batten, when, at 4am on Monday 3 September, she sent a cart to carry his things to the safety of a house in Bethnal Green. Pepys didn’t like the Battens – and is regularly rude about them in his diary – but for once he was grateful. Most Londoners weren’t so lucky.

What did people do when the fire broke out?

London streamed with people trying to get out, gridlocked by narrow streets and bottlenecked by the eight gates in the old Roman wall. The river jammed with boats. “Here we saw the Thames covered with goods floating, all the barges & boates laden with what some had time & courage to save, as on the other, the Carts &c. carrying out to the fields, which for many miles were strewed with moveables of all sorts, & Tents erecting to shelter both people & what goods they could get away,” writes John Evelyn who, on hearing the news, couldn’t resist taking his wife and son to Southwark to watch the carnage from the South Bank.

Pepys noted that one-in-three boats boasted a pair of virginals (a keyboard instrument) and most of the saved goods were, unsurprisingly, luxuries. One witness, Robert Flatman, writing to his lawyer brother, tells him his chambers are down – but his books are safe. The Museum of London holds a half-finished embroidery and set of bed-hangings said to have been saved from the flames.

Most burned. Excavations have fetched up crusty, rusted lumps which, under X-ray, reveal themselves as a padlock and several keys, fused together in London’s furnace.  A large iron lump turned out to be a heavy-duty waffle iron, just like ones used today. Archaeologists found, in a building two doors from Farynor’s bakery, melted hooks and eyes, as we might use on clothes, along with heat-twisted window glass and partly-melted ceramic floor tiles. “We understand it must have been at least 1,200 degrees to do that,” says Jeater.

However chaotic the flow out of town, it was almost as busy going towards the blaze. With carts and boats suddenly at a premium, it didn’t take long for country folk to realise they could charge extortionate rates to desperate refugees. The fire brought out the worst in some. Fourteen-year-old schoolboy William Taswell, who roamed the ruins, describes his father being robbed by people pretending to help, and mobs attacking foreigners, who were increasingly blamed for the disaster.

But while the Lord Mayor dragged his heels, first-hand reports describe King Charles up to his ankles in water helping to fight the flames. Londoners were impressed at the king’s “labouring in person” and if, to modern ears, his later declaration that no one had lost more than himself doesn’t sound too diplomatic, they knew what he meant.

Pepys, who had initially taken a boat to watch the fire – before “fire drops” raining from the sky made it too dangerous – had his family’s safety in mind. When his wife Elizabeth woke him at 2am with the flames at the bottom of their lane, it was time to get out. “Lord what sad sight it was by moone-light to see, the whole City almost on fire that you might see it plain at Woolwich,” he wrote, having taken a boat to the nearby port.

His family safe, Pepys dashed back expecting to find his home consumed, but it wasn’t. The wind had changed, causing the flames to switch course. Pepys climbed the church tower (brave, given its clock had burned) “and there saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw; everywhere great fires, oylecellars and brimstone and other things burning”. He picked his way through the streets, his “feet ready to burn, walking through the towne among the hot coles”, and picking up a piece of glass as a souvenir “melted and buckled with the heat of the fire like parchment”. He watched “a poor cat taken out of a hole in the chimney, joyning to the wall of the Exchange; with, the hair all burned off the body, and yet alive”.

It wasn’t the only time he noted the animals: “The poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were some of them burned their wings, and fell down.” Then at Moorfields he witnessed human suffering. Refugees, who had lost everything overnight, camped in the open air. He described the “wretches”, remarking how prices had taken a sharp hike during the fire: “twopence for a plain pennyloaf”.

A city in ruin: the aftermath of the Great Fire of London

Probably due to the demolition-policy, the fire stopped at Pye (Pie) Corner on the west of the city, on 5 September, but London was decimated. St Paul’s Cathedral lay in ruins, joined by scores of churches, thousands of homes and the city’s only bridge, itself once covered in shops and dwellings.

People wandered, dazed, through the rubble, looking for their old homes and haunts. Evelyn moved “with extraordinary difficulty, clambring over mountaines of yet smoking rubbish, & frequently mistaking where I was, the ground under my feete so hott, as made me not onely Sweate, but even burnt the soles of my shoes”.

How many people died in the Great Fire of London?

After the fire, the Parish Clerks’ bills of mortality, listing causes of death, were collated, with just six deaths appearing to have been fire-related. “It’s a mystery as to why more deaths aren’t recorded,” says Jeater. “There must have been more.” The true figure of deaths during the Great Fire of London may never be known.

The small number of deaths, however, meant mass misery. Gigantic encampments of around 100,000 homeless people appeared outside the city walls. “The fields are the only receptacle which they can find for themselves and their goods,” writes witness Thomas Vincent, “most of the late inhabitants of London lie all night in the open air, with no other canopy over them but that of the heavens.”

As for Evelyn, he went north to Islington and Highgate, where “two hundred thousand people of all ranks & degrees, dispersed & laying along by their heapes of what they could save from the Incendium, deploring their losse, & though ready to perish for hunger & destitution, yet not asking one penny for reliefe”.

Relief, asked for or not, was on its way, by order of the King. On 10 October, people across the country went to church, fasted for the day and donated money to destitute Londoners. The new lord mayor, Sir William Bolton, for whom everyone had high hopes after Bloodworth, was in charge of administrating the £12,000 raised. It all ended in scandal, however, when he couldn’t account for £1,800 and had to resign. Pepys, no fan of his predecessor, called Bolton’s actions “the greatest piece of roguery that they say was ever found in a Lord Mayor”.

London was never be the same again. “I could not sleep till almost two in the morning through thoughts of fire,” Pepys wrote months later, in February 1667. Rebuilding, with fire-resistant bricks and mortar, had begun, but the mental scars would be harder to erase.

Paying the price: fire judges

Nobody agreed about who should pay for rebuilding after the Great Fire of London. Many landlords required tenants to continue paying for homes that didn’t exist anymore – some even claimed tenants should rebuild their homes at their own expense. The Fire of London Disputes Act declared: “Every one concerned should beare a proportionable share of the losse according to their severall Interests,” but admitted that “wherein in respect of the multitude of cases varying in their circumstances, noe certaine generall rule can be prescribed.” To oversee disputes at the Fire Court, 22 men were recruited as firen judges. Speed was imperative, so they usually pronounced judgement within a day of hearing cases. They gave up their time free of charge and heard hundreds of cases. Between 1671-74, portraits of each judge were painted as a thank you.

How was London rebuilt after the Great Fire of London?

The ground may have been too hot to walk on, but that didn’t stop plans for rebuilding. First off the mark was Christopher Wren (not yet a ‘sir’) on 11 September, with a handsome peacock-tail grid of boulevards radiating from a central monument. He was followed by John Evelyn with a similar structure, containing an elegant kite-design at its centre. There were more radical suggestions, such as the severe, box-like grid of identical squares by Richard Newcourt, or retired army officer Valentine Knight’s terrifying ladderfest of tiny streets.

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The plans received varying levels of excitement by Charles II, but none found favour with Londoners. No landowner was prepared to see his few square feet consumed into a giant communal grid. So the medieval criss-cross of alleyways and courtyards was rebuilt, albeit with wider streets and one new road. Strict building regulations dictated construction. Sensible, straight-sided houses were to be built in brick and stone only, with no overhanging jetties. There should be guttering with pipes, not spouts, and the Thames was to have proper quays, accessible by fire engines. Smoke-producing and other dangerous industries were to be sited together, a plan that pleased Evelyn, who had written Fumifugium, one of the first treatise on air pollution in London, in 1661.

Royal surveyor Wren was put in charge of the complex rebuild, working closely with his friend Robert Hooke, the city surveyor (and another polymath, known as an inventor, physicist, astronomer, biologist and artist).

Some structures had survived. The church of St Katherine Cree acted as a canteen for the thousands of labourers building the new city. Its brand-new rose window had been based on one in the old St Paul’s and, today, provides an idea as to how the previous cathedral looked. The Guildhall needed a new roof, but was otherwise relatively unscathed. A merchant’s house, now the OldWine Shades in Martin Lane, and one of the city’s last half-timbered buildings, 41–42 Cloth Fair also survived both the Great Fire and the Second World War. Oddly, there are very few surviving private houses. Lack of good quality materials and poor workmanship ensured most fell down quickly. Wren was very fussy about his materials, ensuring the great public buildings of the time, including St Paul’s Cathedral, were built to last.

Man with the plan: Christopher Wren

Scientist, mathematician, architect, engineer, Christopher Wren was one of a growing group of 17th-century polymaths. The son of a rector, he had grown to prominence as a professor of astronomy, first at London’s Gresham College, then Oxford. He mingled with the great minds of the day and became a founding member of the Royal Society. When Wren visited Paris, he became inspired by continental baroque design, which, combined with his love of physics and engineering, created his own unique style. In charge of rebuilding London, Wren grew frustrated that his original plans were rejected, but he oversaw 51 new churches (23 still survive). His piéce de resistance was, of course, St Paul’s Cathedral. It was a building site before the fire, with piecemeal renovation ongoing instead of Wren’s requested wholesale demolition, which had been refused. But during the Great Fire, the wooden scaffolding surrounding the building created a mini-furnace – so Wren got his way after all. He was knighted in 1673 and went on to design many other famous London landmarks, including the royal hospitals at Greenwich and Chelsea.

• Coffee, plague and the Great Fire: the pleasures and perils of Restoration London

London demanded a monument to the great disasters, and Christopher Wren was happy to oblige. He – and his friend Robert Hooke – couldn’t bear the idea of a useless pillar at a time stone was so precious, so the pair of fanatical astronomers sneakily created a precision-instrument, disguised as a classical column. Opened in 1677, its spiral staircase has an open centre, with a secret door at the gilded urn at the top. This meant that Wren and Hooke could sit in an underground room, with their zenith telescope pointed through the stairs and the open trapdoor towards the heavens. Sadly, the only thing the two scientists couldn’t control was the rumble of traffic on the cobbled streets outside, which made their telescope practically unusable.

Who was to blame for the Great Fire of London?

Everyone looked to blame someone for the fire, with Roman Catholics under most suspicion, followed closely by foreigners. Things got ugly.

Then, out of the blue, French watchmaker Robert Hubert confessed. His story was shaky – he claimed he started the fire in Westminster, despite the flames never even reaching that far, then changed his tale to Pudding Lane, the fire’s base. Hubert’s mental condition was clearly unstable. The Earl of Clarendon watched his trail and described him as “a poor, distracted wretch”. Even the judge didn’t believe him, but he stuck to his story and all they could do was hang him. After his death, it was discovered Hubert hadn’t even been in London when the fire started.

Much of the blame culture was so Londoners could avoid looking at themselves. Thomas Vincent, a Puritan preacher, published God’s Terrible Voice in the City by Plague and Fire in 1667, voicing what many secretly suspected – that God punished them for their sinful ways, not least those of Charles II’s extravagant court. In 1681, a plaque blaming papists for the fire was erected in Pudding Lane. It had to be removed in the 18th century, not as it offended Catholics, but as it caused congestion as people stopped to read it. An inscription on the Monument itself, also blaming the Roman church, wouldn’t be removed until the 1830s.

This article was first published in the September 2016 issue of BBC History Revealed

Great Fire of London: 10 facts

Historian Rebecca Rideal shares 10 lesser-known facts about the Great Fire of London

On 5 September 1666, the 33-year-old Samuel Pepys climbed the steeple of the ancient church of All Hallows-by-the-Tower and was met with the “the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw; everywhere great fires, oyle-cellars, and brimstone, and other things burning”. Leaving the church, he wandered along Gracechurch Street, Fenchurch Street and Lombard Street towards the Royal Exchange, which he found to be “a sad sight” with all the pillars and statues (except one of Sir Thomas Gresham) destroyed. The ground scorched his feet and he found nothing but dust, ash and ruins. It was the fourth day of the Great Fire of London and, though some parts of the city would continue to burn for months, the worst of the destruction was finally over.

Thanks in part to Pepys’s vivid diary entries, the story of the Great Fire is well known. Alongside the fortunes of Henry VIII’s wives, the Battle of Britain and the fate of Guy Fawkes, it forms part of a scattering of familiar islands in the muddy quagmire of British history. We all know, roughly speaking, what happened: during the early hours of 2 September 1666, a fire broke out in Thomas Farriner’s bakehouse on Pudding Lane, which blazed and spread with such ferocity and speed that within a few days the old City of London was reduced to a charred ruin. More than 13,000 houses, 87 churches and 44 livery halls were destroyed, the historic city gates were wrecked, and the Guildhall, St Paul’s Cathedral, Baynard’s Castle and the Royal Exchange were severely damaged – in some cases, beyond repair.

Those with more than a passing knowledge of the crucial facts might be aware of accounts of King Charles II fighting the fire alongside his brother, the Duke of York; of Samuel Pepys taking pains to bury his prized parmesan cheese; or of the French watchmaker Robert Hubert meeting his death at Tyburn after (falsely) claiming to have started the blaze. Here are 10 more facts you may not know about the Great Fire of London…

The Great Fire of London did not start on Pudding Lane

Thomas Farriner’s bakehouse was not located on Pudding Lane proper. Hearth Tax records created just before the fire place Farriner’s bakehouse on Fish Yard, a small enclave off Pudding Lane. His immediate neighbours included a waterbearer named Henry More, a sexton [a person who looks after a church and churchyard] named Thomas Birt, the parish ‘clearke’, a plasterer named George Porter, one Alice Spencer, a widow named Mrs Mary Whittacre, and a turner named John Bibie.

The Great Fire of London was not Thomas Farriner’s first brush with trouble

In 1627, the then 10- or 11-year-old Thomas Farriner was discovered by a city constable wandering alone within the city walls, having run away from his master [it is not known why he had a master at this time]. He was detained at Bridewell Prison, where the incident was recorded in the book of minutes.

During the 17th century, Bridewell (a former Tudor palace) was a kind of proto-correctional facility where young waifs and strays would often be sent to receive a rudimentary education, many of them then cherry-picked to become apprentices to the prison’s patrons.

• The Globe theatre fire of 1613

During the boy’s hearing, it transpired that he had attempted to run away from his master three or four times previously. Farriner was released, only to be detained once more in 1628 for the same reason. A year later he was apprenticed as a baker under one Thomas Dodson.

Far from levelling the city, the Great Fire of London scorched the skin and flesh from the city’s buildings – but their skeletons remained

The ruins of many of London’s buildings had to be demolished before rebuilding work could begin. A sketch from 1673 by Thomas Wyck shows the extent of the ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral that remained. John Evelyn described the remaining stones as standing upright, fragile and “calcined”.

What’s more, the burning lasted months, not days: Pepys recorded that cellars were still burning in March of the following year. With plenty of nooks and crannies to commandeer, gangs operated among the ruins, pretending to offer travellers a ‘link’ (escorted passage) – only to rob them blind and leave them for dead. Many of those who lost their homes and livelihood to the fire built temporary shacks on the ruins of their former homes and shops until this was prohibited.

At the time of the Great Fire, England was engaged in a costly war with the Dutch Republic and was gearing up for one last battle

The conflict, known as the Second Anglo-Dutch War, was the second of three 17th-century maritime wars to be fought between the English and the Dutch over transatlantic trade supremacy. By September 1666 there had already been five major engagements: the battle of Lowestoft (1665); the battle of Vågen (1665); the Four Days’ Battle (1666); St James’s Day Battle (1666); and Holmes’s Bonfire (1666).

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In the confusion of the blaze, some believed that the Great Fire of London had been started by Dutch merchants in retaliation for the last of these engagements – a vicious raid on the Dutch islands of Vlieland and Terschelling – which had occurred barely a month earlier. That attack had been orchestrated by Sir Robert Holmes (renowned for his short fuse and unpredictable nature) and resulted in the destruction of an estimated 150 Dutch merchant ships and, crucially, the torching of the town of West-Terschelling.

While the attack was celebrated with bonfires and bells in London, it appalled the Dutch, and there was rioting in Amsterdam. Aphra Behn – at that time an English spy stationed in Antwerp – wrote how she had seen a letter from a merchant’s wife “that desires her husband to com [sic] to Amsterdam home for that theare [sic] never was so great a desolation & mourning”. Behn was supposed to travel to Dort to continue her espionage, but declared that she “dare as well be hang’d as go”.

• Listen | Alexander Larman and Nicholas Kenyon discuss the events and legacy of the 1666 blaze

Though we do not know exactly how many people died as a result of the Great Fire of London, it was almost certainly more than commonly accepted figures

In the traditional telling of the Great Fire story, the human cost is negligible. Indeed, only a few years after the blaze, Edward Chamberlayne claimed that “not above six or eight persons were burnt,” and an Essex vicar named Ralph Josselin noted that “few perished in the flames.” There was undoubtedly enough warning to ensure that a large proportion of London’s population vacated hazardous areas, but for every sick person helped out of their house, there must have been others with no one to aid them. What’s more, parish records hint at a far greater death toll than previously supposed.

At the parish of St Giles Cripplegate, for example, the number of burials increased by a third (presumably a result of citizens from destroyed parishes using this surviving church). Interestingly, there was a disproportionate rise (by two-thirds) in the number of deaths due to being “aged” and an increase in deaths attributed to “fright”. Likewise, the parish records of St Boltoph Bishopsgate show that the mean age at the time of death rose by an astonishing 12 years, from 18.3 to 31.3. This suggests either that older people were more likely to die in the month of September or that, in an age in which infanticide was rife, the deaths of young infants were not being recorded – perhaps even both.

The diarist John Evelyn certainly believed that the foul smell in the air at the time of the fire was caused by the bodies, beds and other combustible goods of “some poor creatures”, and the poet John Dryden – who, it must be said, was out of London at the time – wrote of “helpless infants left amidst the fire”. When reports reached France, a substantial loss of life was implied: “The letters from London speak of the terrible sights of persons burned to death and calcined limbs, making it easy to believe the terror though it cannot be exactly described. The old, tender children and many sick and helpless persons were all burned in their beds and served as fuel for the flames.”

Test your knowledge of the Great Fire of London with our history quiz

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Louis XIV of France offered to help

It took more than a week for news of the fire to reach the French royal court in Paris, but when it did there was talk of little else. The Venetian ambassador in the French capital declared that “this accident… will be memorable through all the centuries.”

Privately, Louis XIV must have been thrilled. It was wrongly believed that the fire had destroyed England’s magazine stores and that the English navy would be forced to retire. Because of a 1662 treaty with the Dutch Republic, France had been obliged to enter the Anglo-Dutch War on the side of the Dutch, but the French king had neither the appetite nor the navy to play an active role.

Louis XIV publicly ordered that he would not tolerate “any rejoicings about it [the Great Fire], being such a deplorable accident involving injury to so many unhappy people”, and offered to send aid in the shape of food provisions and anything else that might be required to relieve the suffering of those left destitute.

There had been a genuine plot to burn the City of London

In April 1666, a group of parliamentarians led by John Rathbone and William Saunders were tried at the Old Bailey and found guilty of conspiring to assassinate Charles II, overthrow government and fire the City of London, letting down the portcullis to keep out assistance. The trial was recorded in the London Gazette, which revealed that the plotters purportedly had the support of a conspirator in Holland and had planned to execute their “Hellish design” on the anniversary of Oliver Cromwell’s death, 3 September.

• Coffee, plague and the Great Fire: the pleasures and perils of Restoration London

People let their imaginations run away with them

By 6 September, news of the fire had travelled as far as Berwick, where local soldiers claimed that they had seen visions of “ships in the air”. Reporting the phenomenon back to Whitehall, one Mr Scott assured his contact that he believed it to have just been their imaginations. As he travelled across Wiltshire to gather more information about the fire, Bulstrode Whitelocke bumped into his friend Sir Seymour Pyle who had “had too much wine”. Pyle claimed that there had been a huge fight between 60,000 Presbyterians and the militia, which had resulted in the death and imprisonment of 30,000 rebels. Whitelocke soon discovered that Pyle had been “drunke & swearing & lying att almost every word”.

The Great Fire of London was predicted

A few weeks before the fire, one Mr Light claimed to have been asked by a “zealous Papist”: “You expect great things in ’66, and think that Rome will be destroyed, but what if it be London?”

Meanwhile, five months before the fire Elizabeth Styles claimed to have been told by a Frenchman that at some point between June and October there would not be “a house left between Temple Bar and London Bridge”.

• Samuel Pepys kept a lion as a pet + 6 other remarkable facts about the famous diarist

In 1651, an astrologer named William Lilly created a pamphlet entitled Monarchy or No Monarchy that contained illustrative predictions of the future state of England. The images depicted not only a city blazing with fire, but scenes of naval warfare, infestations of rodents, mass death and starvation. Unsurprisingly, Lilly was called in for questioning following the fire of 1666.

Watch: Dan Jones talks to HistoryExtra about walking the route of the fire street by street, following its four-day trail of devastation as it raged through the city

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The Great Fire wasn’t the only blaze in London in 1666

London was thrown into a panic during the evening of 9 November when a fire broke out in the Horse Guard House, next to Whitehall Palace. It was believed that the blaze had been caused by a candle falling into some straw. According to Samuel Pepys, the whole city was put on alarm by the “horrid great fire” and a lady even fell into fits of fear. With drums beating and guards running up and down the streets, by 10pm the fire was extinguished, with little damage caused.

Rebecca Rideal is a specialist factual television producer and writer whose credits include The Adventurers’ Guide to Britain, Bloody Tales of the Tower and David Attenborough’s First Life. She runs the online magazine The History Vault and is currently studying for her PhD on Restoration London during the Great Plague and the Great Fire at University College London.

This list of facts was first published on HistoryExtra in September 2016

Great Fire of London: through the eyes of Samuel Pepys

Dominic Sandbrook describes the events of 2 September 1666 – the date that the City of London was engulfed by "an infinite great fire" – from the perspective of Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys was fast asleep when, at three in the morning of Sunday 2 September 1666, one of his maids, Jane Birch, banged on the door with the news that there was a "great fire" in the City of London. "So I rose and slipped on my nightgowne," Pepys wrote later, "and went to her window." There he saw the telltale tinge of red in the distance. In fact, the fire had already been blazing for a couple of hours, having broken out in Thomas Farriner's bakery in Pudding Lane. The parish constables thought they should demolish the neighbouring houses to stop it spreading, but the lord mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, was not convinced. "Pish!" he famously remarked. "A woman could piss it out." To be fair, he was not alone in his view that the fire would soon be contained. From his window in Seething Lane, Pepys thought little of it, "and so went to bed again and to sleep".

By seven in the morning, when Pepys woke again, it seemed that the worst must be over; from his window, he “saw the fire not so much as it was and further off”. But then Jane reappeared with bad news. Almost 300 houses, she said, had burned down already; now the fire had reached Fish Street, near London Bridge. Alarmed, Pepys pulled on his clothes and walked to the Tower, where he went up to get a better view. “And there,” he recorded, “I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge.”

His heart overflowing with worry, he scurried down to the waterside and called for a boat, and now the full scale of the disaster became clear. The Thames presented a spectacle of calamity, “everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that layoff; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the waterside to another.” Even the pigeons, he noticed, seemed transfixed by the catastrophe: “loth to leave their houses,” they “hovered about the windows” until their wings caught fire and they fell to earth.

By now it was mid-morning. Whipped up by the eastern wind, the flames were leaping from house to house, consuming all in their path. Built from wood and straw, clustered together in tight alleys, London’s tenements were the perfect tinderbox, their overhanging jetties making it easier for the fire to move from street to street. At Whitehall, a frightened Pepys warned Charles II that “unless his majesty did command houses to be pulled down nothing could stop the fire”. Clearly much troubled, the king ordered him to find the lord mayor, and to tell him “to spare no houses, but to pull down before the fire every way”.

But when Pepys caught up with Sir Thomas Bloodworth in Canning Street, the mayor was like “a fainting woman”, with a handkerchief tied around his face to protect him from the smoke. “Lord! what can I do?” Bloodworth cried. “I am spent: people will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it.”

And so the fire burned on. In Thames Street, stores of pitch and tar were ablaze; in neighbouring streets, warehouses of oil, brandy and wine were up in flames. Pepys himself went off for dinner, which, he recorded, was “extraordinarily good”. But when he emerged, it was to scenes of utter chaos, the streets full of weeping families and soot-stained refugees. That night, he and his wife went for a drink on the South Bank, the City glowing red in the night. “It made me weep to see it,” Pepys wrote. “The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruins.”

The inferno blazed on, all Monday and all Tuesday, only dying down when the wind fell on Wednesday. In the long run, it was the making of modern London: without the fire, there would be no St Paul’s and far fewer Wren churches. But at the time, there seemed no consolation. The smouldering city seemed like a vision of the Apocalypse, wrote the diarist John Evelyn. “London was, but is no more.”

Dominic Sandbrook is the author of State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970–1974 (Allen Lane)

]]> 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Samuel Pepys https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/samuel-pepys-diary-fire-london-cheese-facts/ Fri, 01 Jan 2021 05:30:00 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/samuel-pepys-diary-fire-london-cheese-facts/ The diary of Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) gives us a fly-on-the-wall account of life during the 17th century – from the devastation of war and plague, to the triumphant return of Charles II. But did you know that Pepys ‘rescued’ a cheese during the Great Fire of London and once kept a lion as a pet? Historical novelist Deborah Swift reveals seven fascinating facts about the diarist… Samuel Pepys began his diary on 1 January 1660, adding entries until 1669, when the fear that writing in dim light was making him blind brought those entries to an end. His fears were unfounded, but mysteriously he never returned to writing his personal diary. A naval administrator who rose to become chief secretary of the Admiralty commission, Pepys helped to bring an important new professionalism to the Royal Navy. But you might not know…

Samuel Pepys kissed a dead queen

Pepys never once mentions his wife’s birthday in his diary, but often mentions his own. No cake or candles for Pepys though; on his birthday in 1669 he took his wife and servants to Westminster Abbey to show them the tombs. The open coffin of Catherine de Valois (queen to Henry V) was accessible to the public “by particular favour”, and Pepys was able to view the mummified remains.

Queen Catherine’s body had been languishing there since the time of Henry VII, when the Lady Chapel – where she was buried – was demolished. It has been suggested that Henry ordered her memorial to be destroyed in order to distance himself from his ancestry [Henry VII’s father, Edmund, was the eldest son of a possibly illegitimate union between Catherine de Valois and her keeper of the wardrobe, Owen Tudor].

• Coffee, plague and the Great Fire: the pleasures and perils of Restoration London

Pepys tells us: *“*I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queen, and that this was my birth-day, 36 years old, that I did first kiss a Queen.” This behaviour might seem odd to us today, but kissing a relic was in the 17th century usually a sign of reverence – though Pepys does seem to have done it with surprising enthusiasm.

Samuel Pepys loved the play Macbeth

Pepys was a great theatre-goer, but he was not overly impressed by the talents of renowned 16th- and 17th-century playwright William Shakespeare. Pepys was quick to dismiss one of Shakespeare’s most enduringly popular plays, writing in his diary: “Saw Midsummer Night's Dream [originally performed 1595–96] which I have never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life.”

Pepys also called Twelfth Night (1602) a “silly play and not relating at all to the name or day” and said of Henry VIII (1613): “Though I went with resolution to like it, is so simple a thing made up of a great many patches… there is nothing in the world good or well done.”

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• What was it like to watch one of Shakespeare’s plays?

The only one of Shakespeare’s plays Pepys seems to have enjoyed was Macbeth (1606), which he called “a most excellent play in all respects, especially divertissement”. Pepys loved it so much he saw it nine times and wrote: “It is one of the best plays for a stage, and variety of dancing and musique, that ever I saw.”

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Pepys rescued a cheese from the Great Fire

It is September 1666, and Pepys is in a panic. The disaster later known as the Great Fire is consuming London at an alarming rate. Terrified that he might have to abandon his most valuable possessions to the flames, he dashes outside and digs a hole. There he inters his precious hoard, which includes not only his gold and his papers, but also a large wheel of Parmesan cheese.

• Listen | Alexander Larman and Nicholas Kenyon discuss the events and legacy of the 1666 blaze

We might think this a strange thing to do, but to Pepys the cheese was an investment. Cheeses such as these, which could weigh up to 200lbs, were used as diplomatic gifts; for example, in 1556 Pope Paul IV made gifts of "eight great Parmesan cheeses" to Queen Mary.

A rare and expensive import from Italy, Parmesan was used sparingly and increased in value as it aged. Pepys’ cheese would have been too valuable to lose.

He was the victim of a vendetta

In 1679 Pepys was arrested and sent to the Tower of London. The charges included piracy and treason. It was alleged that, as an official in charge of navy stores, he plundered goods from ships captured from the Dutch. As bizarre a notion ‘Pepys the pirate’ might seem, his diary revealed the first charge to be true.

By law, captured enemy goods belonged to the Crown. However, Pepys’ private diary reveals that a few goods had indeed found their way into his own coffers, as ‘perks of the job’, but there was not enough evidence to convict him.

A more damaging rumour was that Pepys had sold state secrets to the French. In order to defend himself against the charge of treason, which was punishable by being “hanged, drawn and quartered”, Pepys sought to trace the source of the rumour. The search led him back to his time as a Justice of the Peace in 1678, when he had crossed one of the most cunning tricksters of the 17th century, Colonel John Scott.

• Bribes, gifts and scandal: 7 stories of corruption that shocked Britain

In 1678, Scott had been in exile trying to escape the law, having become a suspect in the murder of a London magistrate, Edmund Godfrey. Upon a search of Scott’s lodgings, secret papers were found, some written in Pepys’ own hand, detailing the strength of the English navy. Suspecting Scott to be a spy, Pepys ordered his arrest if he ever again set foot on English soil. Scott never forgave him and began a vendetta against Pepys which included false accusations of treason.

After he was arrested on the charge, Pepys set up a network of investigations into Scott’s background, in France, England and Holland. Two manuscript volumes survive among Pepys' papers which detail his enquiries. Pepys uncovered that Scott’s whole life was a lie, and that Scott was one of the most fraudulent rogues of the 17th century. With the chief accuser discredited, the prosecution case had no basis and petered out.

He is the first to record drinking an English cup of tea

Pepys’ diary contains the earliest known written reference to someone in England drinking a cup of tea. Although a 1664 bill recently discovered in the West Yorkshire Archives refers to “bottles of china drink”, the first written report of a cup of tea being offered socially, rather than medicinally, is in Pepys’ diary.

In 1660, Pepys was called to a high-level meeting with experts in naval affairs, including Sir William Batten, Colonel Slingsby and Sir Richard Ford. “Sir R. Ford talked like a man of great reason and experience,” wrote Pepys, “And afterwards did send for a Cupp of Tee (a China drink) of which I never had drank before.”

• A drink for the devil: 8 facts about the history of coffee
• A brief history of how we fell in love with caffeine and chocolate

Tea was imported via Holland in the 17th century, but it was prohibitively expensive. Ale was the national beverage in Pepys’ day, but that was soon to change. When Catherine of Braganza, the future wife of Charles II, arrived in Portsmouth on 14 May 1662, one of the first things she asked for was a cup of tea. A chest of tea was given as part of her dowry from her father King John IV of Portugal, and although Catherine soon adopted English ways, she kept the taste for tea because it had been easily obtainable and popular in her native country. The habit of drinking tea at the royal court soon spread to aristocratic circles and from there it filtered to the moneyed classes and beyond.

Unlike Catherine of Braganza, however, it seems Pepys did not take to tea – he made no further mention of it in his diary until seven years later in 1667, when his wife was prescribed it as a cure for a cold.

He had dozens of mistresses but no children

Pepys was famous for his roving eye and for his many affairs – with his servants and with the wives, daughters and even the mothers of his colleagues. His most enduring affair was with one Mrs Bess Bagwell, who was the wife of a ship’s carpenter, William Bagwell of Deptford dockyard. It appears Mr Bagwell was complicit in the affair and used Pepys’ interest in his wife to improve his career prospects by trading her favours for better positions in the navy. Bess Bagwell’s story is told in my novel A Plague on Mr Pepys.

Despite being married to Élisabeth de Saint Michel in 1655, Pepys listed in his diary dozens of mistresses including Mrs Lane, Mrs Tooker, Mrs Burrows, Mrs Martin, Mrs Pennington, Betty Mitchell and the actress Elizabeth Knepp. One of Pepys’ most passionate and poignant liaisons was with Deb Willet, a lady’s maid to his wife. Of course the romance couldn’t last and Deb was dismissed in disgrace.

Considering Pepys’ many affairs, it is surprising and perhaps sad that Pepys had no heir. A possible explanation is that during an operation in 1658 to remove a kidney stone (done at great risk and without anaesthetic), something went wrong which later prevented Pepys from ever fathering a child.

He kept a lion as a pet

In 1674, when he was lodging at Derby House, Westminster, Samuel Pepys kept a lion. It was presented to him as a diplomatic gift by Samuel Martin, the English consul in Algiers, who was married to one of Pepys’ former mistresses, Betty Lane. Pepys wrote to Martin to tell him that the lion was “as tame as you sent him, and as good company”.

• 10 famous people in history and their bizarre pets

Pepys also reports an incident in 1661 in which he was summoned to Sir William Batten’s house to view a “baboon” which he thought “so much like a man… I do believe it already understands much English; and I am of the mind that it might be tought (sic) to speak or make signs”.

Exotic pets were a status symbol in Pepys’ day and such animals were often on display to the public at the Tower of London, arguably England’s first city zoo. By 1622 the royal menagerie was home to eagles, pumas, a tiger and a jackal, as well as lions and leopards, which were considered symbols of kingship. Perhaps when it grew too large for his office, Pepys’ lion ended up there…

Deborah Swift is the author of Entertaining Mr Pepys (Accent Press, 2019). You can visit Deborah’s website here

This article was first published by HistoryExtra in February 2018

]]> 1666: when London burned with rage https://www.historyextra.com/membership/1666-when-london-burned-with-rage/ Sat, 10 Sep 2016 15:56:54 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/1666-when-london-burned-with-rage/ As the Great Fire ravaged their homes in 1666, Londoners were gripped by terror, despair and fury. And, writes Alexander Larman, barely had the last flames been put out before their ire was being directed at the city's foreigners... The decisive moment in the Great Fire of London came on Tuesday 4 September 1666. St Paul’s Cathedral had evaded destruction over the previous days, and provided sanctuary for scores of tradesmen, who hoped that divine providence would protect them and that their refuge would go undamaged. Unfortunately, highly flammable pieces of wood had been placed against the cathedral’s walls in preparation for planned building work. The scaffolding caught fire, and by nine o’clock, the flames had surrounded the building. After a couple of hours, the timbered roof beams caught fire and melted the lead roof; the enormous heat caused the walls and ceiling to explode. Vast chunks of masonry crashed to earth, destroying tombs and statues and shattering the cathedral’s stained glass.

Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York watched with horror as the great building burned. On a practical level, the cathedral’s destruction was a ruinously expensive disaster, which would take a huge amount of money to repair; the proposed renovation, itself a huge commitment for a depleted exchequer, would have been trifling in comparison. Yet more importantly, on a symbolic level, the burning of St Paul’s could hardly have been a more devastating blow for the city and country. It appeared entirely possible that the inferno would remain unchecked, and could spread to devour Whitehall itself, leaving London reduced to little more than a few disconnected streets and countless piles of rubble.

To many observers, it was obvious that the calamity had been sparked by divine retribution. Others, however, averred that the cause was something altogether more earthly…

Burning traitors

The Great Fire had begun on the night of 1 September at Thomas Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane in the City. After he went to bed, Farriner awoke to find his house full of smoke, and swiftly evacuated his family. Small fires were common in the area, but what worsened the blaze was Pudding Lane’s proximity to London Bridge, where many of the city’s most flammable materials were stored, ready to be placed on ships for export.

By eight the following morning, the bridge itself was fully ablaze. Those watching closely might have seen the grisly spectacle of some of the severed heads of traitors illuminated by the flames below. The lord mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, was summoned to view the blaze, but left without offering assistance, sneering: “A woman could piss it out.”

Bloodworth was quickly proved wrong. The fire spread with inexorable force, and had soon destroyed City landmarks such as Watermen’s Hall and the Post Office in Cloak Lane, Dowgate. Charles and James hurried by boat to see the damage; the distraught king had to be restrained from helping douse the fires by his attendants.

As streets were destroyed, the livelihoods of wealthy and poor alike went up in smoke in moments. Soon, the Custom House and St Paul’s fell victim to the flames. The noise and panic were indescribable.

That the fire didn’t rage west and consume the seat of government was down to a mixture of human agency and good luck. First, Londoners blew up buildings on the Strand with gunpowder in order to isolate the most important structures and prevent their destruction. Then, early on 5 September, the wind dropped, checking the flames’ advance further still.

By dawn on Thursday, the Great Fire had come to an end. Yet the time for recriminations and blame had just begun.

As ever with a disaster of this scale, the people sought a scapegoat, and the obvious culprits were the Catholics. Even during the fire, rumours spread that a papist plot to unseat Charles was under way. One Westminster School pupil, William Taswell, recorded that “the ignorant and deluded mob, who upon occasion were hurried [sic] away with a kind of frenzy, vented forth their rage against the Roman Catholics and Frenchmen”.

As fists flew and shops were looted, the mob claimed that their acts of violence were motivated by patriotic fervour. Those suspected of Catholicism, as well as the French and Dutch, found themselves accused of starting fires virtually at random and were thrown into prison on the slightest pretext; unless, that is, they had already been beaten senseless by the enraged mob. One unfortunate man was torn to pieces in Moorfields because he was said to be carrying “flaming spheres”; these spheres were, in fact, nothing more than tennis balls.

Despite Charles addressing the largest of the makeshift refugee camps at Moorfields on Thursday and explicitly telling them that the destruction had not been caused by any Catholic, French or Dutch conspiracy, suspicion lingered amid the panic. The need to apportion blame was affirmed judicially with the spurious arrest of Robert Hubert, a French watchmaker, who was said to have confessed to beginning the fire deliberately as an agent of the pope.

Hubert was found guilty at his trial, despite clear inconsistencies in the evidence against him, and swiftly executed at Tyburn. But it soon became embarrassingly clear that he had not even been in London at the time of the outbreak. What makes his fate even more tragic is that he was most likely to have been a Huguenot (French Protestant), and that his so-called ‘confession’ was extracted under duress. Charles’s mentor and counsellor the Earl of Clarendon wrote of him that he was “a poor distracted wretch, weary of his life, and chose to part with it in this way”.

Suspicion reached Whitehall, making it even more difficult for Charles to express his Catholic sympathies. Despite his gallant behaviour in helping quench the fire, rumours spread that the king’s brother James was a papist stooge, and his “gay countenance” during the blaze was held up as evidence that he was fanning the flames, rather than fighting them. (There was a nugget of truth at the heart of the allegations: the Duke of York was indeed a Catholic sympathiser, and would convert to the faith in 1668.)

Soon the rumours – and the virulently anti-Catholic sentiment that they were whipping up – were causing ructions in parliament. On 28 September, a motion was carried for the immediate deportation of Catholic priests and Jesuits. Meanwhile, all members of the Commons were forced to take Anglican communion and restate their belief in the English church on pain of immediate arrest.

But Catholics weren’t alone in taking the blame for starting the Great Fire of London. Soon the people had found another scapegoat – and that was God himself who, it was claimed, was wreaking his vengeance on Charles’s court for its decadence.

Ever since the Restoration, there had been murmurings that divine judgment was due. While some people had relished the free-spirited permissiveness of the early 1660s, others were less enamoured of what they saw as a combination of the restrictive and the hypocritical. Rumours of unrestrained libidinousness at Whitehall sat uneasily with the uncertain implementation of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and continued persecution of dissenters. The English defeat earlier that year in the Four Days’ battle, one of the central conflicts of the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1665–67, was also put down to God’s disfavour. Despite the fact that this reversal could most easily be blamed on inexperienced naval commanders (the Duke of Albemarle and Prince Rupert), it proved another means of attacking an unpopular monarch.

Pamphleteers and booksellers made a good profit out of sensationalistic works that prophesied fire and brimstone raining down on London in punishment for the city’s sins. Almanacs talked darkly of a year of fire and blood. The Quaker seer, the late Humphrey Smith, had had a vision, warning that “in the foundation of all her buildings and there was none could quench it… The burning thereof was exceeding great… All the tall buildings fell and it consumed all the lofty things therein… And the fire continued, for though all the lofty part was brought down yet there was much old stuff and parts of broken down, desolate walls, which the fire continued burning against.”

While few were foolish enough to state their convictions publicly, for fear of being accused of conspiracy against the king, there was a growing feeling in the sweltering heat that a reckoning was coming.

The lawyer Nathaniel Hobart, writing to his friend the politician Ralph Verney shortly after the blaze, talked of how “God was not pleased, & we must submit to his will”. The Puritan minister Thomas Vincent took a perverse joy in watching the main shopping area, the Royal Exchange, fall, writing: “The glory of the merchants is now invaded with much violence… by-and-down [sic] fall all the Kings upon their faces… with such a noise as was dreadful and astonishing.”

A glittering sword

The Quakers, who had been persecuted since the Restoration, were especially certain in their belief that the blaze was a sign from God. Their founder, George Fox, recently released from prison, described the fire in his journal, claiming that “I saw the angel of the Lord with a glittering drawn sword southward, as before expressed. The people of London were forewarned of this fire: yet few laid it to heart, or believed it; but rather grew more wicked, and higher in pride.” Satisfied that the destruction was a punishment for this wickedness, he wrote that: “The Lord has exercised his prophets and servants by his power, and showed them signs of his judgments.”

Fox was brave to have written down such sentiments; had they been made public, he would certainly have been arrested and probably executed for treason.

Others unsympathetic to England and London rejoiced in the destruction. An anonymous Spanish writer, probably an ambassador, wrote a pro-Catholic account of the fire, ‘The new and true account of the great fire that has engulfed the great city of London’, in which he stated: “At the sight of a Catholic temple the fire acknowledged itself to be conquered,” and wished that: “May God open their eyes to the truth, and enable them to take a lesson from the destruction of their own 140 churches and the safety of the one Roman Catholic temple.”

The real cause of the fire was less dramatic. The summer of 1666 had been an unusually hot and dry one, and London’s buildings, in the City at least, were badly maintained and filthy. They were covered in an omnipresent cloud of smoke, a byproduct of the innumerable small fires that were lit by tradesmen and hawkers in the course of their everyday work. These tightly packed and ramshackle structures, haphazardly extended over the years, were each made from timber, with the wood cloaked in pitch in an attempt to render it less susceptible to water, and therefore highly flammable. Brittle after the summer heat, both the public and private buildings were swiftly consumed by fire.

Had Sir Thomas Bloodworth acted with more alacrity and ordered the burning houses to be torn down to create firebreaks, the damage, while serious and costly to make good, would have been merely in the thousands of pounds. Yet, because he prevaricated, put off by the prospect of having to obtain the consent of the buildings’ owners, all was lost. It did not help that London had no firefighting service, unlike in Nuremberg, where a fire engine was invented in 1651. Instead, primitive fire-hooks were the principal means available of tearing down burning buildings. The brass hand pumps used to douse the flames held less than a gallon of water each.

London, of course, rose again. But the Great Fire represented the end of the excitement and joy of the Restoration. It was replaced by an attitude of cynicism and distrust, and widespread anti-Catholic sentiment. This cocktail would explode spectacularly in 1678 with the Popish Plot, when Titus Oates claimed – falsely, as it turned out – that a Roman conspiracy had taken root at the heart of the English establishment, with the aim of assassinating the king and placing a Catholic monarch on the throne. His allegations were wild and lacked proof, but a frightened and credulous court chose to believe them, leading to national panic. Had the fire never occurred, it is doubtful that Oates would ever have achieved his aims. Instead, its aftereffects lingered for years, in unpredictable and violent ways.

The Great Fire: six key moments

1–2 September 1666

The flames spread

The fire begins in Pudding Lane, and has reached London Bridge by early on the morning of the 2nd. The diarist Samuel Pepys, who lives on Seething Lane in the City, writes of how “I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge”, and says that the “lamentable fire” makes his “heart full of trouble”.

2 September

People flee in panic

The power of the blaze is such that any attempt to stop it fails, and, with the lord mayor an incompetent figure, there is no clearly co-ordinated attempt to check its progress. Pepys describes how the “most horrid malicious bloody flame” has lit up the sky, and, as he watches displaced and panicking people swarming the streets with what little they can salvage, how “it made me weep to see it”.

3 September

Landmarks burn

With many of the city’s most famous buildings destroyed – such as the famous Boar’s Head tavern in Eastcheap, referred to by Shakespeare in Henry IV – paranoia grips the populace. The aristocrat Lady Anne Hobart tells a friend that “tis thought Fleet Street will be burnt by tomorrow… there was never so sad a sight, nor so doleful a cry heard, my heart is not able to express the tenth, nay the thousandth part of it”.

4 September

The king steps in

Charles appoints a Privy Council to attempt to keep some form of order, but chaos reigns, with people trying to grab their possessions and escape from London on carts. Thomas Vincent, a Puritan minister, declares that the fire signifies God’s anger, and his intention to “destroy London with fire”. The diarist John Evelyn wishes: “God grant mine eyes may never behold the like, who now saw about 10,000 houses in one flame.”

4 September

St Paul’s succumbs

After the destruction of St Paul’s Cathedral and the Guildhall, the fire seems unstoppable. The only good fortune is that it does not destroy the gunpowder store in the Tower of London, which would, in Evelyn’s words, “not only have beaten down and destroyed all the bridge, but sunk and torn all the vessels in the river, and rendered the demolition beyond all expression for several miles about the country”.

5 September

The inferno wanes

At last, the wind dies and the blaze has begun to extinguish itself. The schoolboy William Taswell described how the ground around the wreck of St Paul’s was “so hot as almost to scorch my shoes”, and lingering small fires gave many the impression that it continued. Pepys, looking out at the ruined city, described it as “the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw; everywhere great fires, oil cellars and brimstone and other things burning”.

Alexander Larman is an author and journalist whose books include Restoration: 1666: A Year in Britain, published by Head of Zeus in April.

This article was first published in the September 2016 issue of BBC History Magazine 

]]> When was tobacco first thought to be dangerous? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/when-tobacco-first-thought-dangerous/ Thu, 14 May 2015 13:57:07 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/when-tobacco-first-thought-dangerous/ The story of tobacco in England has been chequered from the outset After it was introduced, it was deemed a medical cure for illnesses – in contrast with the views of several notable people.

In his 1604 treatise, A Counterblaste to Tobacco, King James VI and I described it as “harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs” and soon after, the great scientist Francis Bacon noted tobacco as highly addictive.

Samuel Pepys also wrote in 1665 about witnessing a cat being killed by a small dose of distilled tobacco oil. Still, it took another century for Dr John Hill to show that snuff tobacco could cause nose cancer, and yet another 80 years elapsed before doctors began debating the safety of smoking.

A proper body of scientific data was assembled in the sixties, but the tobacco companies successfully fought it. Intriguingly, we may see the whole pattern begin again with the growth of electronic cigarettes.

This article was taken from BBC History Revealed magazine

]]> My history hero: Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) https://www.historyextra.com/membership/my-history-hero-hugh-bonneville-chooses-samuel-pepys/ Tue, 23 Sep 2014 10:23:02 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/my-history-hero-hugh-bonneville-chooses-samuel-pepys/ Downton Abbey star Hugh Bonneville explains why he admires the 17th-century diarist... Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) was a naval administrator but is best known for his celebrated diary in which he recorded notable events of the day along with his own personal routines, health worries and infidelities. Born in London, he rose to become chief secretary of the Admiralty. His reforms helped bring an important new professionalism to the Royal Navy.

When did you first hear about Samuel Pepys?

My father was a great reader of historical biography and I found some of Pepys’s diaries on a shelf at home as a boy of about 10. I was rather intrigued by them, and read bits and pieces, without fully understanding them. A bit later on, in my teens, I read an unexpurgated version of his diaries and realised that my father’s version was actually a heavily edited, sanitised copy which left out a lot of the more titillating bits!

What kind of person was he?

He was dogged, determined and dutiful – and probably a bit corrupt, but you had to be at the time if you wanted to get on – and rose to be a great civil servant in his own right. But he always had a sense of duty to the crown, the church and his family, even though he sometimes mucked things up. Above all, what comes across in Pepys’s diaries is just his incredible appetite for life. He lived in an age when the man to be admired dabbled in science, knew a foreign tongue, and looked outwardly on life. Pepys was not only a man of enormous energy – socially and indeed sexually – but a man of wide and varied interests with an insatiable thirst for knowledge and ideas.

What made Pepys a hero?

I’m drawn to Pepys as a person because he was an unwitting cataloguer of an incredible period of history: everything from the Great Fire of London to the Plague to the Restoration. He was a sort of one-man webcam.

I also admire his bravery in writing down his innermost feelings in his diary, and recording his dalliances and the wonderful blazing rows he had with his wife, with her fiery French temperament. Yet he can see both sides of the argument, and privately acknowledges that, while he tries, he’s not always the best of husbands. Another thing I like is his loyalty to others – a quality of the man that shines through in his diaries.

What was Pepys’s finest hour?

He would probably have said that it was his role as a senior civil servant in turning around the governance of the Royal Navy, reducing corruption and in making it a modern fighting fleet. And there is no question that he left the senior service a lot more shipshape, so to speak, than he’d found it. Of course, his real legacy was his diaries which are so honest, and provide such a valuable insight into his life and times. They really give you a sense of a three-dimensional person.

Is there anything you don’t particularly admire about him?

Perhaps his snobbery and tendency to look down on people at times. But you have to remember that everything then was about appearance, and how to secure advancement. It’s all too easy to judge people through the long lens of history.

Can you see any parallels between his life and your own?

I like to think I face each day with the same sense of optimism and excitement, because we’re only here once. But sadly I don’t have half his energy. And while I too am curious about life, I don’t have his incredible sense of enquiry. I actually played Pepys once in a film [Stage Beauty] but I’d love to be in a project in which the man himself takes centre stage.

If you could meet Pepys, what would you ask him?

I would ask him how he found the time to do so much: that is, go to work but still find the time to have a pint in Deptford, see some wench, and then meet an ambassador – all in one day! In short, how did he pace himself?

Hugh Bonneville spoke to York Membery. Bonneville is an actor, best known recently for his roles in Downton Abbey and the BBC Two comedy series W1A.

This article was first published in the September 2014 issue of BBC History Magazine

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