The Historical Content

The flight of the lawyers had created something unprecedented in the governance of London: a zone where property existed without title, where ownership could not be proved, where the usual machinery of compensation and consent had simply evaporated. This vacuum of legal authority and proof made the brutal, physical coercion of the firebreak not merely a tactical choice but a structural necessity. Without deeds to consult, without counsel to adjudicate, the question of who might pay for a demolished house became academic when the alternative was the burning of Westminster. The Duke of York understood this at approximately six o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, 4 September 1666, when he established his command post at Temple Bar and began to wage war upon the city’s architecture with gunpowder and iron hooks.

Three days earlier, such methods would have been unthinkable. The Lord Mayor, Thomas Bloodworth, had possessed the formal authority to order demolitions under the common law’s ancient provision for pulling down houses to stop a fire, provided the act was done in the presence of the fire itself and with witnesses to testify that necessity compelled it. Yet Bloodworth had hesitated. The liability remained unclear: if the fire missed a pulled-down house, who compensated the owner? The question paralyzed him. His successors in the field—aldermen, constables, the scattering of militia officers—operated under the same constraint. They pulled down this house or that, piecemeal, often too late, often in the wrong place, always with one eye on the flames and one on the future lawsuits.

Tuesday, 4 September was the day of greatest destruction. The Duke of York’s command post at Temple Bar was supposed to stop the fire’s westward advance towards the Palace of Whitehall. He had hoped the River Fleet would form a natural firebreak, making a stand with his firemen from the Fleet Bridge down to the Thames. However, early on Tuesday morning, the flames jumped over the Fleet and outflanked them, driven by the unabated easterly gale, forcing a retreat. The Duke, James Stuart, twenty-nine years old, brother to the King, recently returned from naval command against the Dutch, brought to this street corner the habits of naval warfare. Fire, like water, found its level through the path of least resistance. To stop it, one did not reason with it. One removed its fuel systematically, ruthlessly, accepting that the cure might appear as terrible as the disease.

The answer lay not in better buckets, but in a ruthless calculus of demolition.

The Duke’s position at Temple Bar commanded the approach to Westminster. Behind him lay the Strand, already burning in places, and beyond that the open spaces of Whitehall where the King had spent Monday night watching the glow. Before him lay Fleet Street, the thoroughfare that carried the fire’s appetite westward from the legal quarter. The Fleet Ditch itself, that open sewer running north-south, offered a potential barrier if the flames could be prevented from leaping it. But the houses on either bank stood packed together, their upper stories jettied outward until neighbors could shake hands across the gap. The fire had already proven its ability to jump such spaces. It would not be stopped by a ditch alone.

The Duke’s solution was to create a desert.

He had sailors from the naval dockyards at Woolwich and Deptford, men accustomed to handling heavy tackle and working under officers’ commands. He had soldiers from the trained bands, though these were fewer and less reliable. Most critically, he had gunpowder. The King himself had authorized its use, overruling the objections of those who feared that explosions would spread rather than contain the flames. The method was simple in description and terrifying in execution: bore holes in the walls of a house, pack them with powder, touch it off, and let the structure collapse into its own cellar before the fire could consume it. Done correctly, the house became a pile of rubble too dense to burn easily. Done incorrectly, the explosion scattered burning debris across neighboring roofs and accelerated the very catastrophe it was meant to prevent.

The Duke worked through the morning and into the afternoon, moving his teams methodically along the south side of Fleet Street. The London Gazette, official mouthpiece of the royal government, would later record this operation with the flat precision of military dispatch. His Royal Highness, it reported, had been indefatigable in his personal care and pains, in directing and helping to pull down houses, and in giving orders for the blowing up of others.

The passive construction elided what the orders meant. Men with hand drills bored into plaster and lath, into the timber frames that had stood for generations. They packed black powder into cavities never designed to contain it. They ran slow match or touched off quick powder trains, then retreated to what they hoped was a safe distance while the charges detonated and the walls came down. Sometimes buildings were levelled quickly and effectively by means of controlled gunpowder explosions; modern historians believe this method, combined with the wind dying down, was what finally won the struggle.

Samuel Pepys, moving through the city on his own errands of observation and survival, encountered this operation at its height. He had spent the night at Woolwich, having escorted his wife and valuables to safety, and returned by water to find the fire had now got further, both below and above. His route took him past the destruction at the Temple, the legal precinct where he had spent so many hours in his professional life as Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board. The contrast between the Inns of Court he remembered and the scene before him struck him into a rare silence of description. He noted the Duke’s presence, the organized demolition, the gunpowder. Then he moved on, his diary entries for this day shorter than usual, as if the scale of destruction had exceeded his habit of precise notation.

John Evelyn, traveling by water from Sayes Court at Deptford, approached from the east and saw the fire’s advance before he saw the attempt to stop it. He recorded the horrible conflagration consuming the heart of the city, the stones of churches exploding from the heat, the lead melting in the streets and running in streams that glowed like lava. Coming to land near London Bridge, he made his way through streets where the air itself seemed to burn, where the smoke turned day to twilight and the falling embers raised blisters on exposed skin. He reached the western edge of the fire in time to witness the Duke’s operations, though his account compresses the timeline in ways that suggest the difficulty of maintaining precise chronology amid chaos.

What impressed him was the coordination. The Duke of York, with many of the nobility and gentry, were at hand, laboring with their own hands, and giving orders for the pulling down of houses.

The gentry laboring with their own hands: this was the visual emblem of the new regime. Bloodworth had ridden away. The aldermen had scattered. The lawyers had fled with their deeds. In their place stood the King’s brother, his clothes smeared with soot, directing explosions.

The property owners of Fleet Street watched their inheritance demolished by royal command. Some resisted. The Duke’s authority, derived directly from the King, overrode their objections. Soldiers and sailors applied physical force where persuasion failed. The legal immunity that Bloodworth had sought, the witnesses, the formal presence of the fire, the documented necessity, was replaced by a simpler principle: the King’s officer ordered it, and the King’s men enforced it. The barrier of uncertain responsibility which had delayed effective action for three days crumbled before the pressing need to save Westminster.

The operation extended through the afternoon and into the evening. The Duke’s teams worked south from Fleet Street into the precincts of the Temple, clearing a swath of destruction that would later be measured in acres. They used the Fleet Ditch as a secondary line, blowing houses into its stagnant waters to create a firebreak that combined the barrier of stone and water with the barrier of collapsed masonry. The method was costly. The Temple itself, that warren of chambers where England’s law had been practiced and preserved, suffered extensive damage not from the fire but from the prevention of fire. Its halls, its libraries, its ancient records, many of these were pulled down or blown apart to save them from a worse fate.

The gunpowder was not always controlled. Contemporary accounts note explosions that scattered debris dangerously, fires started by premature detonation, the occasional injury or death among the demolition crews. The risk was accepted. The alternative, letting the fire run unchecked toward Whitehall, was judged worse. This was the calculus that Bloodworth had been unable to make: not because he lacked intelligence or courage, but because he lacked the authority to make others bear the cost of his decision. The Duke bore that authority as the King’s proxy. The cost would be sorted out later, or not at all.

By nightfall on Tuesday, the firebreak at Fleet Street held. The flames had been denied their westward path. They turned north instead, toward Smithfield and the open ground of Moorfields, where the wind and the lack of dense building would eventually slow them. The destruction of Tuesday exceeded that of Sunday and Monday combined. Pepys would estimate that more houses burned on this single day than in the entire Great Fire of 1661. But the shape of the disaster had changed. It had a boundary now. It had been forced into channels.

The Duke retired to Whitehall past midnight, filthy and exhausted. The King, who had spent his own day in the streets, reportedly met him with relief and something like wonder. They had stopped a fire by blowing up a city. The method would be remembered. The next time London burned, in 1676, in 1683, in the centuries of smaller fires that punctuated urban life, the authorities would reach for gunpowder sooner, with less hesitation, with better technique. The precedent of September 4, 1666, established that the Crown could destroy private property without immediate compensation when the public safety required it. The legal settlement of that principle, its confirmation, limitation, or rejection, would occupy the Fire Court and Parliament for years to come.

Wednesday dawned on a changed city. The fire still burned in pockets, still threatened where the wind shifted, but its character had altered from an advancing wall to a scattering of outbreaks. The Duke’s firebreak had not extinguished the flames; it had redefined their possible extent. This was containment, not victory. The cost of containment was visible in the miles of rubble, the standing walls without roofs, the cellars filled with debris and the occasional corpse of those who had not fled in time.

The property owners began to return, picking through the ruins of what had been their security. They found, in many cases, that their houses had been destroyed by order rather than by accident. The distinction mattered enormously for their prospects of compensation. A house burned by the fire was a casualty of God’s judgment or natural misfortune; the charitable subscriptions and eventual parliamentary relief would acknowledge such losses. A house pulled down by the Duke’s men, or blown apart by royal gunpowder, was a casualty of state action. The legal theory of necessity might protect the Crown from liability, but it offered cold comfort to those who had watched their inheritance demolished before their eyes.

The Inns of Court, partially spared by the firebreak, became temporary headquarters for the remaining authorities. The judges who had fled with the lawyers began to drift back, finding their chambers damaged but their jurisdiction intact. They would soon be asked to adjudicate the very questions that their flight had left unresolved: who owned what, who owed whom, whether the destruction had been lawful and who should pay for it. The fire had created a new jurisdiction, a new category of cases, a new test for the common law’s capacity to absorb catastrophe.

The Duke of York’s operation at Fleet Street became the model for subsequent firefighting in London and other English cities. It demonstrated that effective response required centralized command, military discipline, and the willingness to sacrifice property for safety. It also demonstrated that such effectiveness came at a price measured not merely in pounds and shillings but in the erosion of customary protections. The property owner who watched soldiers enter his house with powder and drills learned something about the limits of his rights in moments of collective emergency. The lesson would be reinforced in future crises, softened by the passage of time, contested in courts and pamphlets, but never entirely forgotten.

Pepys, returning to his own house on Wednesday morning, found it standing but threatened by the continuing fires to the north. He moved his remaining goods to Woolwich again, then returned to observe the final stages of the disaster. His diary for these days shows a mind struggling to process information that exceeded his categories of description: the melted bells of St. Dunstan’s, the burned ships in the Pool, the poor people everywhere with bundles of salvaged goods. He noted the Duke’s efforts without the skepticism he had applied to Bloodworth’s failures. The difference was visible in the result. Where Bloodworth had hesitated and the fire had advanced, the Duke had acted and the fire had stopped. The moral seemed clear enough, though Pepys would later have occasion to reconsider it when the bills came due.

Evelyn, in his more meditative account, drew the theological conclusion that his temperament required. The fire was a judgment upon a sinful city, and the destruction of its buildings, whether by flame or by gunpowder, was equally part of that judgment. The Duke’s agency did not exempt him from this interpretation; it merely placed him in the role of instrument rather than author of the catastrophe. Evelyn’s perspective, shaped by decades of civil war and restoration, saw in the firebreak at Fleet Street another example of human effort operating within divine permission. The containment was real, the effort admirable, the cost enormous. Whether it represented wisdom or merely successful improvisation remained to be seen.

The gunpowder itself became a subject of controversy in the immediate aftermath. Some claimed that the explosions had spread the fire, that the Duke’s methods had worsened what they purported to cure. These accusations found their way into pamphlets and private letters, though they rarely named the Duke directly. The official account, propagated through the London Gazette and royal proclamation, emphasized the success of the operation and the personal courage of those who had carried it out. The truth lay somewhere in the interstices: gunpowder had been dangerous, sometimes counterproductive, occasionally lethal to those who used it. It had also been effective in a way that buckets and fire hooks had not. The city that emerged from the fire would retain a memory of both aspects, a double knowledge that would shape its preparations for future disasters.

The Fleet Ditch, choked with rubble from the demolitions, required years of cleansing and enclosure. The houses that had been pulled down or blown up left gaps in the urban fabric that Christopher Wren and his competitors would later fill with new construction, wider streets, the stone architecture of a rebuilt London. The firebreak had been temporary, tactical, desperate. Its permanent legacy was negative space: the absence of what had been, the cleared ground on which something else might rise.

In the immediate aftermath, the property owners of the Fleet Street district faced a particular predicament. Their houses had been destroyed by command rather than by accident, and this distinction carried legal weight that would soon be tested. The Fire Court would eventually hear their claims, attempting to distinguish between losses caused by the fire itself and losses caused by the measures taken to stop it. The judges would find no clear precedent for such cases. They would improvise, as judges do when the categories of law fail to match the facts of experience. The successful, costly firebreak at Fleet Street provided the first containment, but left a landscape of deliberate ruin and a pressing question of liability, pointing toward the post-fire inquiries and legal reckoning.