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Episode 157: The Great Fire of London — Accident, Arson, and the Politics of Catastrophe
In the early hours of 2 September 1666, a fire broke out in a bakery on Pudding Lane in the City of London. Over the next four days it burned through approximately thirteen thousand houses, eighty-seven parish churches, and the medieval St Paul's Cathedral, leaving perhaps one hundred thousand people homeless and destroying the physical fabric of one of Europe's largest cities. The cause, the culpability, and the consequences of the fire have been disputed, embellished, and politically instrumentalised from the very day it began.
The immediate search for a culprit reflected the deep anxieties of Restoration England. England was at war with the Dutch Republic, and Catholic France was widely suspected of sympathy with England's enemies. Within hours of the fire's outbreak, rumours spread that it had been deliberately set by foreign agents — Catholic, Dutch, or French, depending upon one's existing prejudices. A French watchmaker named Robert Hubert confessed to starting the fire and was duly hanged, despite the fact that his confession contained numerous demonstrable inconsistencies and that he appeared to have been in France when the fire began. The confession was almost certainly false, obtained under coercion or perhaps given by a disturbed individual seeking notoriety. Parliament subsequently investigated and concluded that the fire had been started by the "hand of God, a great wind, and a very dry season."
The Monument to the Great Fire, designed by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke and completed in 1677, carried an inscription for over a century and a half explicitly blaming Catholics for the fire — an accusation that was finally removed in 1831. The political utility of the narrative of Catholic arson was plain: it served anti-Catholic sentiment that was central to English political culture throughout the late seventeenth century.
Modern historical consensus holds that the fire almost certainly began accidentally in the Pudding Lane bakery, most probably from an unextinguished oven. The conditions — an exceptionally dry summer, densely packed timber buildings, strong winds, and an inadequate fire-fighting capacity — ensured that what might have been a contained incident became an urban catastrophe. The conspiracy theories linking the fire to Catholic plots have no credible evidentiary basis, but they illuminate how disaster is routinely recruited to serve the political needs of the moment.
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