Great Fire of London Prophecies
Multiple prophets allegedly predicted the Great Fire of London. Mother Shipton's prophecy and Nostradamus's verses are cited, though their authenticity and interpretation remain disputed.
On the night of September 2, 1666, a fire broke out in a bakery on Pudding Lane in the heart of London, and over the course of four terrible days it consumed the medieval city with a ferocity that seemed, to those who witnessed it, less like an accident and more like the wrath of God. By the time the flames were finally subdued, 13,200 houses had been reduced to ash, 87 parish churches lay in ruins, the great Cathedral of St. Paul’s had collapsed into a molten heap of stone and lead, and the commercial heart of the richest city in Europe had been erased from the map. In the stunned aftermath, as Londoners picked through the smoldering wreckage of their lives, a question arose that would haunt the collective imagination for centuries: had anyone seen this coming? The answer, according to a tradition that began almost before the embers had cooled, was yes. Multiple prophets, seers, and astrologers had allegedly foretold the Great Fire, some with a specificity that seemed to transcend coincidence and enter the realm of the genuinely supernatural. Whether these prophecies were authentic foreknowledge of a future catastrophe or the products of after-the-fact fabrication, selective interpretation, and confirmation bias remains one of the most enduring questions in the long history of claimed prophetic vision.
The Fire That Devoured London
To understand why the prophecies surrounding the Great Fire achieved such lasting power, one must first appreciate the magnitude of the disaster itself. London in 1666 was a city of approximately 400,000 inhabitants, the largest in England and one of the largest in Europe. It was also, by modern standards, an extraordinarily dangerous place. The city within the old Roman walls was a dense warren of timber-framed buildings, many of them centuries old, their upper stories jutting out over narrow lanes in a manner that created virtual tunnels of combustible material. The streets were lined with workshops, warehouses, and shops that stored everything from tallow and pitch to gunpowder and spirits. Water supply was limited, firefighting equipment was primitive, and the concept of fire prevention was essentially nonexistent.
The summer of 1666 had been unusually hot and dry, and the timber-and-thatch buildings of the city were parched to the consistency of kindling. When the fire began in Thomas Farriner’s bakery on Pudding Lane in the early hours of September 2, conditions were perfect for catastrophe. A strong east wind drove the flames westward through the city with terrifying speed, leaping from building to building, consuming entire streets in minutes. Firefighting efforts were hampered by the narrow lanes, which prevented the passage of water wagons, and by the reluctance of property owners to permit the demolition of buildings that might serve as firebreaks.
The fire burned for four days and nights, and at its height the conflagration was visible from forty miles away. The heat was so intense that the lead roof of St. Paul’s Cathedral melted and ran in rivers down Ludgate Hill. The stones of the cathedral itself cracked and exploded in the heat, sending fragments flying like artillery shells. The crypt of St. Faith’s, beneath St. Paul’s, which booksellers had used as a warehouse, disgorged a river of burning paper and molten binding that flowed through the streets. Samuel Pepys, whose diary provides the most vivid first-person account of the disaster, described seeing the Thames lit by reflected flames so bright that he could read by their light from the south bank.
The destruction was almost incomprehensible. Within the walls, approximately 80 percent of the city was destroyed. 13,200 houses, 87 churches, the Royal Exchange, the Custom House, the Guildhall, and countless other public buildings were reduced to rubble. An estimated 70,000 of the city’s 80,000 inhabitants within the walls were made homeless. The official death toll was remarkably low, only six confirmed fatalities, but this figure is almost certainly a dramatic undercount, as the intense heat would have incinerated many victims beyond recognition, and the poor, the homeless, and the transient populations of the city were not systematically accounted for.
The Number of the Beast
Even before the fire broke out, the year 1666 had been viewed with apocalyptic apprehension throughout the Christian world. The reason was simple: the final three digits of the year corresponded to 666, the Number of the Beast described in the Book of Revelation. “Here is wisdom,” the apostle John had written. “Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”
The identification of 666 with the Antichrist and the end times had been a fixed point of Christian eschatology since the earliest centuries of the church, and the approach of the year 1666 generated widespread anxiety across Europe. Preachers and pamphleteers warned their audiences that the year would bring divine judgment, cosmic upheaval, or the literal end of the world. The fact that 1665 had already brought catastrophe in the form of the Great Plague, which killed approximately 100,000 Londoners, seemed to confirm that the nation was under divine punishment and that worse was yet to come.
When the Great Fire struck in September 1666, the numerological significance of the year was immediately invoked. For many Londoners, the fire was not merely a disaster but a sign, a divine communication whose meaning was written in the very digits of the calendar. The combination of plague in 1665 and fire in 1666 seemed to echo the biblical plagues visited upon Egypt, and the destruction of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the principal church of the English nation, appeared to confirm that God’s wrath was directed specifically at London and its people.
This interpretation was not confined to the uneducated or the superstitious. Educated clergymen, members of Parliament, and even natural philosophers who would later help found the Royal Society entertained the possibility that the fire was a supernatural event with prophetic significance. The line between religious faith and what we would now call superstition was far less clearly drawn in the seventeenth century than it is today, and the conviction that God communicated through events in the natural world was a mainstream theological position, not a fringe belief.
Mother Shipton’s Prophecy
The most famous prophecy associated with the Great Fire is attributed to Mother Shipton, a legendary figure from Yorkshire whose life and predictions occupy a contested territory between history and folklore. According to tradition, Ursula Southeil, later known as Mother Shipton, was born in a cave near Knaresborough in 1488 and lived as a prophetess and seer until her death in 1561. Her predictions, which allegedly foretold events centuries in the future, have been circulated in various forms since the sixteenth century.
The prophecy most commonly linked to the Great Fire reads, in its most often quoted form: “Triumphant death rides London through, and men on tops of houses go.” Some versions add more specific references, including a prediction that London would be “destroyed by fire” and a reference to the year 1666. The apparent specificity of these lines has made them among the most frequently cited examples of prophetic accuracy in English folklore.
However, the authenticity of Mother Shipton’s prophecies is deeply problematic. The earliest published collection of her predictions, compiled by Richard Head in 1667, appeared suspiciously soon after the Great Fire, raising the obvious question of whether the prophecies were written or modified after the event they purportedly foretold. Later collections, published throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, added progressively more detailed and specific predictions, a pattern strongly suggestive of retrospective fabrication.
The most famous version of the Mother Shipton prophecy, the one that includes references to iron ships, horseless carriages, and other technological marvels, was definitively exposed as a forgery in 1873 when Charles Hindley, a bookseller from Brighton, confessed to having fabricated the verses and attributed them to the legendary prophetess. This confession did not prevent the forged prophecies from continuing to circulate, and they are still widely quoted today, often without any acknowledgment of their fraudulent origin.
Whether the real Mother Shipton, if she existed at all, made any prediction about the Great Fire is impossible to determine. The earliest references to her prophecies predate the fire, establishing that she was a known figure in English folklore, but the specific predictions linked to 1666 cannot be reliably traced to any source earlier than the fire itself. The most parsimonious explanation is that the prophecies were either invented or substantially modified after the event, a practice that was extremely common in the early modern period and that accounts for a large proportion of all claimed prophetic successes.
Nostradamus and Century 2, Quatrain 51
The second most famous prophecy associated with the Great Fire comes from the pen of Michel de Nostredame, the sixteenth-century French physician and astrologer whose enigmatic quatrains have been applied to virtually every major historical event since their publication in 1555. The relevant verse, Century 2, Quatrain 51, reads in one common translation:
“The blood of the just will be demanded of London, burnt by fire in the year ‘66. The ancient lady will fall from her high place, and many of the same sect will be killed.”
The apparent reference to London, fire, and the year ‘66 has led many commentators to conclude that Nostradamus predicted the Great Fire with remarkable precision. The “ancient lady” who falls from her high place has been interpreted as St. Paul’s Cathedral, a reading that gains support from the cathedral’s dramatic collapse during the fire. The reference to “the blood of the just” has been connected to the persecution of Protestants or to the general suffering of London’s innocent population.
However, the interpretation of Nostradamus is an exercise fraught with difficulty and subjectivity. The original French text of the quatrain is ambiguous, and different translators have produced significantly different readings. The word translated as “London” in some versions is rendered differently in others, and the phrase “in the year ‘66” could refer to any year ending in 66, not specifically 1666. The “ancient lady” could refer to any number of structures, institutions, or even abstract concepts, and the vague reference to a “sect” could be applied to countless religious or political groups.
Nostradamus wrote 942 quatrains, each consisting of four lines of deliberately obscure verse. Given this volume of material and the inherent ambiguity of the language, it would be remarkable if none of the quatrains could be plausibly connected to a major historical event after the fact. The process by which Nostradamus’s verses are “decoded” typically involves selecting a historical event, searching through the quatrains for any that contain potentially relevant imagery, and then adjusting the translation and interpretation until a match is achieved. This process is fundamentally different from genuine prediction, in which specific events are foretold before they occur in terms clear enough to be recognized in advance.
William Lilly and the Hieroglyphics
Perhaps the most intriguing of the alleged fire prophecies involves William Lilly, the most famous astrologer in seventeenth-century England and a figure of considerable political influence during the Civil War and Interregnum periods. In 1651, Lilly published a pamphlet entitled Monarchy or No Monarchy in England, which contained a series of enigmatic woodcut illustrations, or hieroglyphics, depicting future events.
One of these illustrations showed a city engulfed in flames, with figures fleeing the conflagration and buildings toppling into ruin. Another showed coffins and bodies, an image that has been interpreted as a prediction of the Great Plague. The illustrations were accompanied by minimal text, and Lilly never explicitly stated that they depicted London or that they predicted specific events. Nevertheless, the correspondence between the images and the actual disasters that struck London in 1665 and 1666 was close enough to attract official attention.
In October 1666, in the immediate aftermath of the Great Fire, Lilly was summoned before a committee of the House of Commons to explain his hieroglyphics. The committee was investigating the cause of the fire, and suspicions of arson were widespread. Some members apparently suspected that Lilly might have had foreknowledge of the fire because he had planned or assisted in starting it, rather than because he had genuinely predicted it through astrological means.
Lilly defended himself with characteristic skill, arguing that his hieroglyphics were general symbolic representations of the types of calamities that might befall a great city, not specific predictions of the 1666 fire. He pointed out that cities had burned throughout history and that depicting a city in flames was hardly a remarkable prophetic feat. The committee apparently accepted his explanation and cleared him of any involvement in the fire.
The Lilly case illustrates a crucial dynamic in the interpretation of prophecies. When a disaster occurs, people naturally search for prior warnings, and anything that can be plausibly connected to the event, no matter how general or ambiguous, is retrospectively elevated to the status of prophecy. Lilly’s hieroglyphics were sufficiently vague to permit multiple interpretations, and it was only after the fire that the fiery cityscape image was specifically identified as a prediction of the London conflagration. Had the fire never occurred, the same image might have been applied to any number of other events, or simply forgotten.
Contemporary Prophets and Portents
Beyond the famous names of Shipton, Nostradamus, and Lilly, the Great Fire generated a profusion of lesser-known prophetic claims. In the days and weeks following the disaster, numerous individuals came forward claiming to have foreseen the fire through dreams, visions, or divine revelation. Pamphlets and broadsheets recounting these alleged prophecies circulated widely, feeding the public’s appetite for supernatural explanations of the catastrophe.
Some of these claims were clearly opportunistic, the work of charlatans seeking attention or profit in the wake of disaster. Others may have been genuine reports of dreams or premonitions that, in the heightened emotional atmosphere following the fire, were retrospectively interpreted as prophetic. The human mind is remarkably adept at selective memory, recalling instances that seem to confirm a pattern while forgetting the vastly more numerous instances that do not. A person who dreamed of fire at any point in the weeks or months before September 1666, an unremarkable dream in a city where fire was a constant danger, might sincerely come to believe that the dream had been a supernatural warning.
The phenomenon of post-disaster prophecy claims is well documented throughout history and across cultures. After every major catastrophe, from earthquakes to wars to pandemics, individuals emerge claiming to have predicted the event. The vast majority of these claims cannot be verified, and those that can be examined tend to dissolve under scrutiny, revealing themselves as products of hindsight bias, selective interpretation, or outright fabrication. The Great Fire prophecies are consistent with this pattern, offering a case study in how the human need to find meaning in suffering generates narratives of foreknowledge that provide comfort even when they cannot withstand critical analysis.
The Parliamentary Investigation
The official investigation into the cause of the Great Fire, conducted by a committee of the House of Commons, provides a fascinating window into the intersection of rational inquiry and supernatural belief in seventeenth-century England. The committee considered multiple hypotheses, including accidental origin, deliberate arson by foreign agents (the French and Dutch were the primary suspects, given that England was at war with both nations), and divine punishment for the nation’s sins.
The investigation heard testimony from Thomas Farriner, the baker in whose premises the fire started, who insisted that he had properly extinguished his ovens before retiring for the night. A French watchmaker named Robert Hubert confessed to having started the fire on behalf of the French government, and he was executed on the basis of this confession despite considerable evidence that his account was unreliable and possibly coerced. Modern historians generally regard Hubert as a convenient scapegoat and his confession as false.
The committee’s final report attributed the fire to “the hand of God upon us, a great wind, and the season so very dry.” This conclusion, which combined supernatural and natural explanations without apparent contradiction, reflects the intellectual framework of the period. Divine causation and natural causation were not seen as mutually exclusive; God could express his will through natural phenomena, and a fire that was technically accidental could simultaneously be a divine punishment. The prophecies of Shipton, Nostradamus, and Lilly fit neatly into this framework, serving as evidence that God had warned his people before striking them.
The Skeptical Perspective
Modern analysis of the Great Fire prophecies offers little support for their authenticity as genuine examples of foreknowledge. The evidence, when examined critically, points consistently toward the standard mechanisms by which apparent prophecies are generated: retrospective fabrication, selective interpretation, and the exploitation of ambiguity.
Mother Shipton’s prophecies cannot be reliably traced to any source predating the fire. Nostradamus’s quatrain is sufficiently vague to permit application to numerous events, and its connection to the Great Fire depends on translation choices that are far from settled. Lilly’s hieroglyphics depict generic catastrophe, not a specific event, and Lilly himself denied that they were intended as predictions of the 1666 fire. The various contemporary prophets who emerged after the disaster cannot be verified and exhibit the classic characteristics of post-hoc attribution.
This does not mean that the prophecies are without interest or significance. On the contrary, they provide invaluable evidence for the study of how societies process and interpret catastrophic events. The need to find meaning in suffering, to believe that disasters are not random but serve some higher purpose, is a deeply human impulse that manifests across all cultures and historical periods. The Great Fire prophecies are expressions of this impulse, attempts to impose order on chaos by demonstrating that the catastrophe was foreseen and therefore, in some sense, intended.
Enduring Fascination
The prophecies associated with the Great Fire of London continue to fascinate and inspire debate more than three and a half centuries after the flames died. They are regularly cited in popular books about prophecy and the supernatural, typically without the caveats and qualifications that scholarly analysis demands. Mother Shipton and Nostradamus, in particular, have achieved a cultural immortality that seems entirely unrelated to the actual reliability of their predictions, sustained by a public appetite for the mysterious that shows no sign of diminishing.
The Great Fire prophecies endure because they address a question that is ultimately unanswerable with certainty: is the future fixed, and can certain individuals perceive it before it unfolds? Science offers no mechanism by which such perception could occur, and the historical evidence for prophetic accuracy, when examined rigorously, consistently dissolves into ambiguity and wish-fulfillment. Yet the possibility continues to captivate, because it speaks to a hope that runs deeper than evidence, the hope that the universe is not indifferent, that catastrophe is not random, and that somewhere, somehow, someone is watching and warning.
Whether Mother Shipton truly saw London burning from her cave in Yorkshire, whether Nostradamus glimpsed the flames of 1666 in his scrying bowl in Salon-de-Provence, or whether William Lilly read the conflagration in the stars, no living person can say with certainty. What can be said is that the fire was real, the suffering was immense, and the human need to believe that it was foreseen tells us something profound about the species that endured it. The prophecies of the Great Fire of London may reveal less about the future than they do about the eternal human longing to make sense of the incomprehensible past.