Houses crumbled into cinders by the hundred and the thousand.The summer had been intensely hot and dry,the streets were very narrow,and the houses mostly built of wood and plaster.Nothing could stop the tremendous fire,but the want of more houses to burn;nor did it stop until the whole way from the Tower to Temple Bar was a desert,composed of the ashes of thirteen thousand houses and eighty-nine churches.
This was a terrible visitation at the time,and occasioned great loss and suffering to the two hundred thousand burnt-out people,who were obliged to lie in the fields under the open night sky,or in hastily-made huts of mud and straw,while the lanes and roads were rendered impassable by carts which had broken down as they tried to save their goods.But the Fire was a great blessing to the City afterwards,for it arose from its ruins very much improved-built more regularly,more widely,more cleanly and carefully,and therefore much more healthily.It might be far more healthy than it is,but there are some people in it still-even now,at this time,nearly two hundred years later-so selfish,so pig-headed,and so ignorant,that I doubt if even another Great Fire would warm them up to do their duty.
The Catholics were accused of having wilfully set London in flames;
one poor Frenchman,who had been mad for years,even accused himself of having with his own hand fired the first house.There is no reasonable doubt,however,that the fire was accidental.An inion on the Monument long attributed it to the Catholics;
But it is removed now,and was always a malicious and stupid untruth.
SECOND PART
THAT the Merry Monarch might be very merry indeed,in the merry times when his people were suffering under pestilence and fire,he drank and gambled and flung away among his favourites the money which the Parliament had voted for the war.The consequence of this was that the stout-hearted English sailors were merrily starving of want,and dying in the streets;while the Dutch,under their admirals DE WITT and DE RUYTER,came into the River Thames,and up the River Medway as far as Upnor,burned the guard-ships,silenced the weak batteries,and did what they would to the English coast for six whole weeks.Most of the English ships that could have prevented them had neither powder nor shot on board;in this merry reign,public officers made themselves as merry as the King did with the public money;and when it was entrusted to them to spend in national defences or preparations,they put it into their own pockets with the merriest grace in the world.
Lord Clarendon had,by this time,run as long a course as is usually allotted to the unscrupulous ministers of bad kings.He was impeached by his political opponents,but unsuccessfully.The King then commanded him to withdraw from England and retire to France,which he did,after defending himself in writing.He was no great loss at home,and died abroad some seven years afterwards.
There then came into power a ministry called the Cabal Ministry,because it was composed of LORD CLIFFORD,the EARL OF ARLINGTON,the DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM (a great rascal,and the King's most powerful favourite),LORD ASHLEY,and the DUKE OF LAUDERDALE,C.A.
B.A.L.As the French were making conquests in Flanders,the first Cabal proceeding was to make a treaty with the Dutch,for uniting with Spain to oppose the French.It was no sooner made than the Merry Monarch,who always wanted to get money without being accountable to a Parliament for his expenditure,apologised to the King of France for having had anything to do with it,and concluded a secret treaty with him,making himself his infamous pensioner to the amount of two millions of livres down,and three millions more a year;and engaging to desert that very Spain,to make war against those very Dutch,and to declare himself a Catholic when a convenient time should arrive.This religious king had lately been crying to his Catholic brother on the subject of his strong desire to be a Catholic;and now he merrily concluded this treasonable conspiracy against the country he governed,by undertaking to become one as soon as he safely could.For all of which,though he had had ten merry heads instead of one,he richly deserved to lose them by the headsman's axe.
