=The Fire.=--The house and Navy office of Samuel Pepys were in Seething Lane, Crutched Friars, near where Fenchurch Street Station now is. About three in the morning of Sunday, September 2, 1666, Samuel and his wife were called by their servant Jane, who told them of a fire visible in the south-west towards London Bridge. After looking out, not thinking it a great matter, the couple returned to bed; but getting up at seven Pepys heard a far worse account, and instead of attending morning service went to the Tower, and called on his neighbour Sir John Robinson, the Lieutenant. Robinson told him that the house of Faryner, baker to the king, in Pudding Lane had just caught fire, that Fish Street was in flames, and the church of St. Magnus destroyed. These were near the north end of London Bridge, as the Monument and St. Magnus both remind us.
The origin of the Fire Pepys learnt later (February 24, 1667). Faryner's people had occasion to light a candle at midnight; they went as usual into their bakehouse to light it, but as the fire had gone out, had to seek elsewhere. This striking a light in an unusual place by Faryner, his son and daughter, is asserted to have been, somehow and all unknown to them, the origin of the Fire. "Which is," says Pepys, "a strange thing, that so horrid an effect should have so mean and uncertain a beginning." About two in the morning, when the family were upstairs and asleep again, the choking sensation of smoke woke them up, just in time to escape and tell the tale.
[Illustration: ST. PAUL'S IN FLAMES. _Originally engraved by Hollar for the title of Dean (afterwards Archbishop) Sancroft's sermon on the Great Fire._]
There was a drought, and the flames spread on their mission of devastation, assisted by a breeze. St. Paul's and most of the hundred City churches were not likely to be used for worship that morning. "To see the churches all filling with goods by people who themselves should have been quietly there at the time." But service was held as usual at the Abbey; and just about sermon time, a newly elected king's scholar, Taswell, noticing a stir and commotion--he was standing by the pulpit steps--ascertained the cause. The news had spread that the City was in flames. Like most boys the prospect of something exciting coincided with his desire to escape a long sermon, so he hastened outside in time to see four boats on the river, the occupants of which had escaped in blankets. Let us hope that as he was not fully admitted, he escaped Busby's birch. All through the Sunday St. Paul's was safe--the distance from Pudding Lane was a little over half a mile--and even the east end of Lombard Street was intact. The parishioners of St. Gregory and St. Faith, lulled into a false sense of security, remained confident that even though the conflagration spread westward, and the surrounding houses caught fire, the flames would not leap across the vacant space of churchyard; and the booksellers accordingly began to store their goods in St. Faith's as though the crypt were a fireproof safe.[36] So it might possibly have been, and in spite of sparks, had the distracted Lord Mayor been firm enough to prevent the storing of books in the churchyard, and had the cathedral roof been in good repair. The flames gradually encircled the churchyard; the goods there took fire, and the flames caught the end of a board placed on the roof to keep out the wet. The Nemesis of neglect!