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goods: tallow, oil, spirits, pitch, and coal. When the fire reached these stores, it was no longer a simple house fire. It became an uncontrollable, roaring beast, fueled by an angry easterly wind that began to blow the sparks from roof to roof. The Mayor Who Wanted to Sleep In the seventeenth century, London did not possess a professional, centralized fire brigade. Instead, firefighting was a community effort, relying on local volunteers armed with leather buckets, hand-operated brass squirts, and large iron hooks used to pull down burning buildings to create firebreaks. The system was primitive, but it could work, provided someone in authority made quick, decisive decisions. Enter Sir Thomas Bloodworth, the Lord Mayor of London. Summoned from his comfortable bed in the early hours of Sunday morning, Bloodworth arrived at Pudding Lane to inspect the situation. The local constables were already anxious, advising that they should immediately begin pulling down neighboring houses to stop the fire from spreading. But Bloodworth was a man of business, a politician who understood the sacred nature of property rights and the agonizing complexity of municipal red tape. Under the city's ancient laws, the cost of rebuilding any home demolished to prevent a fire was the personal financial responsibility of the person who ordered the demolition. If Bloodworth authorized the destruction of these houses, he might find himself personally bankrupted by angry property owners. Furthermore, he was tired, grumpy, and thoroughly unimpressed by what he saw. Peering at the flames, Bloodworth famously declared that the fire was so insignificant that "a woman might piss it out!" With this legendary piece of administrative dismissiveness, the Lord Mayor turned on his heel and went back to bed. It was a decision that would go down in history as one of the greatest bureaucratic blunders of all time. By the time Bloodworth woke up several hours later, the fire had consumed several streets, cut off access to the Thames, and was marching steadily toward the heart of the city. The time for easy containment had passed, and the Lord Mayor's reluctance to bypass the rules had doomed London to ash. The Great Conflagration By Sunday afternoon, the fire had gained a terrifying momentum. Samuel Pepys, a high-ranking naval administrator and one of history's most famous diarists, walked down to the Tower of London to get a better view. Horrified by what he saw, Pepys took a boat onto the Thames, where he observed the panic of the citizens. People were throwing their most valuable possessions into the river, scrambling into boats, or simply running for their lives. Pepys noted with his characteristic eye for detail that the city's domestic pigeons were particularly reluctant to leave their homes. They hovered over the burning chimneys until their wings were singed, tumbling down into the flames below. It was a melancholy echo of the "Battle of the Pigeons" from the Wars of the Roses, showing once again how nature's creatures were often caught in the crossfire of human misfortune. Realizing that the Lord Mayor was utterly paralyzed by indecision, Pepys traveled to Whitehall Palace to inform King Charles II of the true scale of the disaster. The King, recognizing that the very survival of his capital was at stake, immediately bypassed the local authorities. He commanded Pepys to find Bloodworth and order him to spare no houses, but to pull down everything in the fire's path, regardless of who owned it. When Pepys finally located the Lord Mayor, he found Bloodworth wandering the streets, exhausted, sweating, and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. "Lord! What can I do?"