The pestilence swept off over a hundred thousand victims within six months.  Among the few brave men who voluntarily remained in the stricken city were the Puritan ministers, who stayed to comfort and console the sick and dying.  After the plague was over, they received their reward through the enforcement of those acts of persecution which drove them homeless and helpless from their parishes and friends (S472).

The dead cart had hardly ceased to go its rounds, when a fire broke out, 1666, of which Evelyn, a courtier who witnessed it, wrote that it “was not to be outdone until the final conflagration of the world."[1] By it the city of London proper was reduced to ruins, little more being left than a fringe of houses on the northeast.

[1] Evelyn’s “Diary,” 1641-1705; also compare Dryden’s poem “Annus Mirabilis.”

Great as the calamity was, yet from a sanitary point of view it did immense good.  Nothing short of fire could have effectually cleansed the London of that day, and so put a stop to the periodical ravages of the plague.  By sweeping away miles of narrow streets crowded with miserable buildings black with the encrusted filth of ages, the conflagration in the end proved friendly to health and life.

A monument near London Bridge still marks the spot where the flames first burst out.  For many years it bore an inscription affirming that the Catholics kindled them in order to be revenged on their persecutors.  The poet Pope, at a later period, exposed the falsehood in the lines: 

“Where London’s column pointing toward the skies
Like a tall bully lifts its head and lies."[2]

[2] “Moral Essays,” Epistle III.

Sir Christopher Wren, the most famous architect of the period, rebuilt the city.  The greater part of it had been of wood, but it rose from the ashes brick and stone.  One irreparable loss was the old Gothic church of St. Paul.  Wren erected the present cathedral on the foundations of the ancient structure.  On a tablet near the tomb of the great master builder one reads the inscription in Latin, “Reader, if you seek his monument, look around."[1]

[1] “Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice.”

475.  Invasion by the Dutch (1667).

The new city had not risen from the ruins of the old, when a third calamity overtook it.  Charles was at war with France and Holland.  The contest with the latter nation grew out of the rivalry of the English and the Dutch to get the exclusive possession of foreign trade (S459).  Parliament granted the King large sums of money to build and equip a navy, but the pleasure-loving monarch wasted it in dissipation.  The few ships he had were rotten old hulks, but half provisioned, with crews ready to mutiny because they could not get their pay.

A Dutch fleet sailed up the Thames.  It was manned in part by English sailors who had deserted in disgust because when they asked for cash to support their families they got only worthless government tickets.  There was no force to oppose them.  They burned some half-built men-of-war, blockaded London for several weeks, and then made their own terms of peace.