Great fire of London - Plague and Fire devastate London

Fire and Plague
In 1665, Charles II was faced with a great health crisis: an outbreak of Bubonic Plague in London commonly referred to as the Great Plague.
Believed to have been introduced by Dutch shipping vessels carrying cotton from Amsterdam, the plague was carried by rats and fleas and the death toll at one point reached up to 7000 per week.
Charles, his family and court fled London in July 1665 to Oxford. Various attempts at containing the disease by London public health officials all fell in vain and the disease continued to spread rapidly.

On 2 September 1666, adding to London's woes was what later became famously known as the Great Fire of London.

Although effectively ending the spreading of the Great Plague due to the burning of all plague-carrying rats and fleas, the fire, which started in the early hours of Sunday, 2nd. of September in Thomas Farynor's bakery, Pudding Lane, consumed about 13,200 houses (396 acres of houses were destroyed, comprising 400 streets) and 87 churches, including St. Paul's Cathedral.

Four of the city gates were destroyed in the flames and almost all the buildings and landmarks of the medieval city of London, vanished.

At the time, a comet was visible in the night sky.
The supposition of the day claimed it was God's message, and that the above crises were as a result of God's anger.
Blame was placed upon Charles and his Court, but later the people shifted their blame to the hated Roman Catholics.
The situation was not helped by Charles's brother, James II's conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1667

2nd September, 1666 - Diary of Samuel Pepys

"So near the fire as we could for smoke; and all over the Thames, with one's face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops. This is very true; so as houses were burned by these drops and flakes of fire, three or four, nay, five or six houses, one from another. When we could endure no more upon the water; we to a little ale-house on the Bankside, over against the 'Three Cranes, and there staid till it was dark almost, and saw the fire grow; and, as it grew darker, appeared more and more, and in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire."

4th. September, 1666
"I up to the top of Barking steeple,and there saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw; every where great fires, oyle-cellars, and brimstone, and other things burning. I became afeard to stay there long, and therefore down again as fast as I could, the fire being spread as far as I could see it; and to Sir W.Pen's, and there eat a piece of cold meat, having eaten nothing since Sunday, but the remains of Sunday's dinner."

The Earl of Clarendon wrote.

"Above two parts of three of that great city were burned to ashes, and those the most rich and wealthy parts of the city, where the greatest warehouses and the best shops stood. The Royal Exchange, with all the streets about it, Lombard Street, Cheapside, Paternoster-Row, St. Paul's church, and almost all the other churches in the city, with the Old Bailey, Ludgate, all Paul's churchyard even to the Thames, and the greatest part of Fleet Street, all which were places the best inhabited, were all burned down without one house remaining."

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.

Extract from "Old Saint Paul's A Tale of the Plague and the Fire" by William Harrison Ainsworth

SEPTEMBER, 1665.

Plague
As he proceeded along Holborn, the ravages of the scourge were yet more apparent.
Every house, on either side of the way, had a red cross, with the fatal inscription above it, upon the door.
Here and there, a watchman might be seen, looking more like a phantom than a living thing.
Formerly, the dead were conveyed away at night, but now the carts went about in the daytime.

On reaching Saint Andrew's, Holborn, several persons were seen wheeling hand-barrows filled with corpses, scarcely covered with clothing, and revealing the blue and white stripes of the pestilence, towards a cart which was standing near the church gates.