The Duke of Monmouth gave a ball to the queen and her ladies, where, after the queen’s retirement, “Mrs. Stewart was extraordinary merry,” and sang “French songs with great skill."[116:2]

Ten Acts of Parliament received the royal assent at Oxford, of which but one is still remembered in certain quarters—­the Five Mile Act, which Marvell briefly describes as an Act “for debarring ejected Nonconformists from living in or near Corporations (where they had formerly pursued their callings), unless taking the new Oath and Declaration.”  Parliament was prorogued at the end of October.

Another visitation of Providence was soon to befall the capital.  On Sunday morning, the 2nd of September, Pepys was aroused by one of his maid-servants at 3 A.M. to look at a fire.  He could not make out much about it and went to bed again, but when he rose at seven o’clock it was still burning, so he left his house and made his way to the Tower, from whence he saw London Bridge aflame, and describes how the poor pigeons, loth to leave their homes, fluttered about the balconies, until with singed wings they fell into the flames.  After gazing his fill he went to Whitehall and had an interview with the king, who at once ordered his barge and proceeded downstream to his burning City, and to the assistance of a distracted Lord Mayor.

The fire raged four days, and made an end of old London, a picturesque and even beautiful City.  St. Paul’s, both the church and the school, the Royal Exchange, Ludgate, Fleet Street as far as the Inner Temple, were by the 7th of the month smoking ruins.  Four hundred streets, eighty-nine churches (just a church an hour, so the curious noted), warehouses unnumbered with all their varied contents, whole editions of books, valuable and the reverse of valuable, were wiped out of existence.  Rents to an enormous amount ceased to be represented any longer by the houses that paid them.  How was the king to get his chimney-money?  How were merchants to meet their obligations?  The parsons on Sunday, the 9th of September, ought to have had no difficulty in finding texts for their sermons.  Pepys went to church twice, but without edification, and certainly Dean Harding, whom he heard complaining in the evening “that the City had been reduced from a folio to a duo decimo,” hardly rose to the dignity of the occasion.

Strange to say, not a life was actually lost in the fire,[118:1] though some old Londoners (among them Edmund Calamy’s grandfather) died of grief, and others (and among them Shirley the dramatist and his wife) from exposure and exhaustion.  One hysterical foreigner, who insisted that he lit the flame, was executed, though no sensible man believed what he said.  It was long the boast of the merchants of London that no one of their number “broke” in consequence of the great fire.

Unhappily the belief was widespread, as that “tall bully,” the monument, long testified, that the fire was the work of the Roman Catholics, and aliens, suspected of belonging to our old religion, found it dangerous to walk the streets whilst the embers still smoked, which they continued to do for six months.