Every body whose reason remained to them avoided all possible contact or communication with others. Even in the country, in the exchange of commodities, a thousand contrivances were resorted to, to avoid all personal connection. In one place there was a stone, where those who had any thing to sell placed their goods and then retreated, while he who wished to buy came up, and, depositing his money on the stone in the place of the merchandise, took what he had thus bought away.
The great fire took place in 1666, about a year after the plague, and burned a very large part of London. It commenced accidentally in a baker's shop, where a great store of fagots had been collected, and spread so rapidly among the buildings which surrounded the spot that it was soon entirely beyond control. The city of London was then composed of an immense mass of mean buildings, crowded densely together, with very narrow streets intervening, and the wind carried the flames, with inconceivable rapidity, far and wide. The people seemed struck universally with a sense of terror and despair, and nothing was to be heard but shrieks, outcries, and wild lamentations. The sky was one vast lurid canopy, like molten brass, day and night, for four days, while the whole city presented a scene of indescribable and awful din; the cracking and thundering of the flames, the frenzied screams of the women and children, the terrific falling of spires, towers, walls, and lofty battlements, the frightful explosions of the houses, blown up by gunpowder in the vain hope of stopping the progress of the flames, all formed a scene of grandeur so terrific and dreadful, that they who witnessed the spectacle were haunted by the recollection of it long afterward, as by a frightful dream. A tall monument was built upon the spot where the baker's shop stood, to commemorate the calamity. The fire held, in fact, in the estimation of mankind, the rank of the greatest and most terrible of all conflagrations, until the burning of Moscow, in the time of Napoleon, in some degree eclipsed its fame.
The Dutch invasion was the third great calamity which signalized King Charles's unfortunate reign. The ships of the enemy came up the Thames and the Medway, which is a branch of the Thames; they took possession of a fort at Sheerness, near the mouth of the river, and, after seizing all the military stores, which had been collected there to an enormous amount, they set fire to the powder magazine, and blew up the whole fortress with a terrific explosion. The way was now open to them to London, unless the English could contrive some way to arrest their progress. They attempted to do this by sinking some ships in the river, and drawing a strong chain across from one sunken vessel to the other, and fastening the ends to the shores. The Dutch, however, broke through this obstruction. They seized an opportunity when the tide was setting strongly up the river, and a fresh wind was blowing; their ships, impelled thus by a double force, broke through the chains, passed safely between the sunken ships, and came on in triumph up the river, throwing the city of London into universal consternation. There were several English ships of war, and several Dutch ships, which had been captured and brought up the Thames as prizes, lying in the river; these vessels were all seized by the Dutch, and burned; one of the English ships which they thus destroyed was called the Royal Oak.
Of course, there was now a universal scene of confusion and terror in London. Every body laid the blame of the calamity upon the king; the money which he had received for building ships, and other national defenses, he had squandered, they said, upon his guilty pleasures; then the war, which had resulted in this invasion, was caused by the political mismanagement of his reign. While the people, however, thus loudly condemned the conduct of their monarch, they went energetically at work to arrest the progress of their invaders; they sunk other ships in greater numbers, and built platforms, on which they raised batteries of cannon. At length the further progress of the enemy was stopped, and the ships were finally compelled to retire.
Among the other events which occurred during the reign of King Charles the Second, and which tended to connect unfavorable associations with the recollection of it in the minds of men, was a very extraordinary affair, which is known in history by the name of Titus Oates's Popish Plot. It was the story of a plot, said to have been formed by the Catholics, to put King Charles to death, and place his brother James, who, it will be recollected, was a Catholic, upon the throne in his stead. The story of this plot was told by a man named Titus Oates, and as it was at first generally believed, it occasioned infinite trouble and difficulty. In after times, however, the whole story came to be regarded as the fabrication of Oates, without there being any foundation for it whatever; hence the name of Titus Oates's Popish Plot, by which the affair has always since been designated in history. The circumstances were these:
Among his other various accomplishments, King Charles was quite a chemist and philosopher. He had a laboratory where he amused himself with experiments, having, of course, several persons associated with him, and attendant upon him in these researches. Among these was a man named Kirby. Mr. Kirby was an intelligent man, of agreeable manners, and of considerable scientific attainments. Charles devoted, at some periods of his life, a considerable portion of his time to these researches in experimental philosophy, and he took, likewise, an interest in facilitating the progress of others in the same pursuits. There was a small society of philosophers that was accustomed to meet sometimes in Oxford and sometimes in London. The object of this society was to provide apparatus and other facilities for making experiments, and to communicate to each other at their meetings the result of their investigations. The king took this society under his patronage, and made it, as it were, his own. He gave it the name of THE ROYAL SOCIETY, and granted it a charter, by which it was incorporated as a permanent organization, with the most ample powers. This association has since become one of the most celebrated learned societies in the world, and its establishment is one of the very few transactions of King Charles's reign which have been since remembered with pleasure.
But to return to Mr. Kirby. One day, when the king was walking in the park with a party of companions and attendants, who were separated more or less from him, as was usual on such occasions, Mr. Kirby came up to him, and, with a mysterious and earnest air, begged the king not to allow himself to be separated from the company, for his life, he said, was in danger. "Keep with your company, sir," said he, "your enemies have a design upon your life. You may be suddenly shot on this very walk." Charles was not easily frightened, and he received this announcement with great composure. He asked an explanation, however, and Mr. Kirby informed him that a plot had been formed by the Catholics to destroy him; that two men had been engaged to shoot him; and, to make the result doubly sure, another arrangement had been made to poison him. The queen's physician was the person, he said, who was charged with this latter design. Mr. Kirby said, moreover, that there was a clergyman, Dr. Tong, who was fully acquainted with all the particulars of the plot, and that, if the king would grant him an interview that evening, he would make them all known.
The king agreed to this, and in the evening Dr. Tong was introduced. He had a budget of papers which he began to open and read, but Charles had not patience to hear them; his mind was full of a plan which he was contemplating of going to Windsor the next day, to look at some new decorations which he had ordered for several of the apartments of the palace. He did not believe in the existence of any plot. It is true that plots and conspiracies were very common in those days, but false rumors and unfounded tales of plots were more common still. There was so much excitement in the minds of the community on the subject of the Catholic and Protestant faith, and such vastly extended interests depended on whether the sovereign belonged to one side or the other on this question, that every thing relating to the subject was invested with a mysterious awe, and the most wonderful stories were readily circulated and believed. The public mind was always particularly sensitive and excitable in such a case as that of Charles and his brother James at the time of which we are writing, where the reigning monarch, Charles, was of one religious faith, and his brother James, the next heir, was of the other. The death of Charles, which might at any time take place, would naturally lead to a religious revolution, and this kept the whole community in an exceedingly excitable and feverish state. There was a great temptation to form plots on the one hand, and a great eagerness to discover them on the other; and any man who could tell a story of treasonable schemes, whether his tale was true or fabricated, became immediately a personage of great importance.