Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
THE GREAT FIRE
In the early hours of September 2, 1666, the
Great Fire
broke out at Farriner's, the king's bakery
in Pudding Lane. The Lord Mayor refused to lose any sleep over it, dismissing it with the line
“Pish! A woman might piss it out.” Pepys was also roused from his bed, but saw no cause for
alarm. Four days and four nights later, the Lord Mayor was found crying “like a fainting woman”,
and Pepys had fled, having famously buried his Parmesan cheese in the garden: the Fire had
destroyed some four-fifths of the City of London, including 87 churches, 44 livery halls and
13,200 houses. The medieval city was no more.
Miraculously, there were only eight recorded fatalities, but one hundred thousand people
were made homeless. “The hand of God upon us, a great wind and the season so very dry”,
was the verdict of the parliamentary report on the Fire, but Londoners preferred to blame
Catholics and foreigners. The poor baker eventually “confessed” to being an agent of the pope
and was executed, after which the following words, “but Popish frenzy, which wrought such
horrors, is not yet quenched”, were added to the Latin inscription on the Monument
(see p.178), and only erased in 1830.
rebuilt all the City churches and completed the world's first purpose-built Protestant
cathedral,
St Paul's
. Medieval London was no more, though the grandiose masterplans
of Wren and other architects had to be rejected due to the legal intricacies of property
rights within the City. The
Great Rebuilding
, as it was known, was one of London's
most remarkable achievements - and all achieved in spite of a chronic lack of funds,
a series of very severe winters and continuing wars against the Dutch.
Religious differences once again came to the fore with the accession of Charles's
Catholic brother,
James II
(1685-88), who successfully put down the Monmouth
Rebellion of 1685, but failed to halt the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which brought
the Dutch king William of Orange to the throne, much to most people's relief.
William
(1689-1702) and his wife
Mary
(1689-95), daughter of James II, were made joint
sovereigns, having agreed to a Bill of Rights defining the limitations of the monarch's
power and the rights of his or her subjects. his, together with the Act of Settlement of
1701 - which among other things barred Catholics, or anyone married to one, from
succession to the throne - made Britain the first country in the world to be governed
by a
constitutional monarchy
, in which the roles of legislature and executive were
separate and interdependent. A further development during the reign of
Anne
(1702-14), second daughter of James II, was the Act of Union of 1707, which united
the English and Scottish parliaments.
Georgian London
When Queen Anne died childless in 1714 (despite having given birth seventeen times),
the Stuart line ended, though pro-Stuart or Jacobite rebellions continued on and off
until 1745. In accordance with the Act of Settlement, the succession passed to a
non-English-speaking German, the Duke of Hanover, who became
George I
(1714-27)
of England. As power leaked from the monarchy, the king ceased to attend cabinet
meetings (which he couldn't understand anyway), his place being taken by his chief
minister. Most prominent among these chief ministers or “prime ministers”, as they
1645
1649
1649-60
1652
Archbishop of Canterbury,
William Laud, executed
on Tower Hill
King Charles I executed
in Whitehall
The Commonwealth of
England
Pasqua Rosée opens
the first coffee house in
London
