In January of 1649/50, the city of London was still reeling from almost a decade of civil war that had led to the beheading of King Charles I less than a year earlier. Tensions between the Royalist supporters of the new King Charles II and supporters of the Commonwealth government were still high and war still raged in Ireland and Scotland. The old king was dead, but the War of the Three Kingdoms was not yet over.

It was in this context that a ship-chandler by the name of Robert Porter sold 27 barrels of gunpowder to the master of a ship. The barrels were scheduled to be delivered to the ship on Saturday, January 5, so the night before he brought 20 of the barrels from his warehouse down into his shop in Tower Street—presumably to reduce the effort needed to move them the following morning. What happened next is unknown: "none in the house was left alive to report" whatever accident led to the gunpowder being set alight, only the consequences thereof.¹

The bill of mortality for the week of January 1–8, 1649/50 was probably the first printed record of the incident. In its usual laconic terms, it reported that there were “Kild by the blast of Gunpowder 28. Twenty five at Alhallowes Barking, and three at Alhallower Steyning."² The reference to the blast, rather than a blast, implies that everyone who read the bill was expected to already know what blast was meant. Indeed, there was nothing subtle about the massive gunpowder explosion that took out 15 houses, made 26 more uninhabitable, and left "at least an hundred more much shattered shaken and defaced," including blowing out the windows of the parish church.³ Everyone in the vicinity would have immediately known it had happened and rumors would have flown throughout the city from there.

The initial report was followed up a week later with more burials recorded January 8—15: "one by the fall of a peece of timber in Tower-streete, and 27 by the blast of gunpowder, whereof 8 found at Alhallowes Barking, and 18 more inhabitting within Preists Alley in Towerstreete (besides strangers) lost in the fire taken up in peeces."⁴ Although efforts to clear the rubble continued until Wednesday the 17th, no more burials were reported on the bills.⁵ Together, the bills put the confirmed death toll at 55, of whom 54 were killed in the blast and the last taken out by a structural hazard (falling timber) in its wake. But the second of the bills also makes clear the contemporary uncertainty about the number of actual deaths: there were 8 bodies found and buried in the parish of All Hallows Barking, but there were also at least 18 inhabitants of Priest's Alley in Tower Street who were "lost" and "taken up in peeces."

Given the drama of the explosion—a fire coming from nowhere and instantly killing a large number of people—it is perhaps unsurprising that a subsequent pamphlet was published to provide more details on the accident to a curious and anxious public audience. The pamphlet, Death's Master-Peece, was printed for Francis Grove sometime between late January and mid-March and provided "A true Relation of that great and sudden Fire in Towerstreet, London; which came by the fiering of Gunpowder, on Friday the 4th of January, 1649."⁶ It provided details on the accident; a list of the houses destroyed by the head of each household that lived in those houses; a list of the dead by household; a brief account of the firefighting efforts; and a financial accounting of losses from the fire, estimated at a £60,000 which would come to over £6 million pounds today.⁷

The greater detail provided by the pamphlet allows us to gain more insight on how the deaths were counted and recorded in the bills of mortality. The initial damage from the blast took out “five fair houses” belonging to a presumably high-status vintner named Mr. Wormewell who is always listed first; the unfortunate ship-chandler Porter; Mrs. Shaw, “a midwife of good esteem and quality;” the shoemaker Mr. Bradley; and a pair of merchants, Mr. Charles Compton and Mr. Woods.⁸ It also took out 10 houses “backwards from the street in an Alley called Priests Alley” where the subsequent fire appears to have raged longer and done significantly more damage. An additional 26 houses “were scattered and part beaten downe” but are not recorded as having produced further casualties.⁹

Of the people killed by the blast, 28 were killed in those “five fair houses” and appear to account for the 28 bodies initially recovered and reported on the first of the bills. Of these, 16 died in what was probably a dinner party at the vintner Wormewell’s house, including “Gentlemen, Merchants, Tradesmen and diverse of very good quality, of whom diverse were slaine, and many wounded.” Three members of the household also died, including “his wife, an apprentice, found dead together, also a maid servant.”¹⁰ All five people in the ship-chandler Porter’s house at the epicenter of the explosion died—Porter, his wife, an apprentice, a maid, and “a kinswoman.”¹¹ The widowed Shaw lost a maid, three grandchildren, and her son-in-law, who was dramatically blown out of the house into the church yard and died of his wounds. The shoemaker Bradley died along with his wife and a servant, while the merchants’ house was luckily spared any casualties.¹²

While the 28 victims in the “five fair houses” were accounted for within a few days of the blast, it took another week to sift through the rubble of Priest’s Alley and indeed the recovery efforts continued for almost two full weeks. It is in the pamphlet’s recounting of the deaths in Priest’s Alley that it becomes clear how terrible the disaster was and how difficult it was to account for the dead. The names of the heads of households for those 10 houses were listed earlier, but there is no separate account of the deaths in each house. Instead, the pamphlet estimates the dead not by counting the bodies but by explicitly counting the missing:

there is missing 24. of the Inhabitants, which is conceived to be all destroyed and burnt, of whom there is only found some parts of their bodies, and of others bare bones, and other quite consumed, so that no other account can be given of them, but that they buried what parts of the bodies and bones they found among the rubbish.¹³

At the end of recovery efforts, “the number buried that were not so much disfigured by the fire, but they were known, some buried at Barkin Church, and others carried home to their own places of abode, were 43. and 24. which were so missing and found out be peece meal.” But the anonymous author of the pamphlet admits these 67 burials “is the number that is yet known certainly to be kild” but not necessarily the total death toll.¹⁴

The destruction of Priest’s Alley demonstrates at once both the strength and the limitations of the mortality data published in the London bills. Within days of the disaster, an accurate death count had been produced from the “five fair houses” and published to let members of the public get an initial glimpse into the magnitude of the disaster. As recovery efforts went on, they meticulously tallied not only the identifiable bodies in the bills but also explicitly flagged the impossibility of recovering enough pieces to fully reassemble and count or identify the dead, who could only be estimated as inhabitants versus “strangers” who did not reside in Priest’s Alley and could not easily be known. At the same time, there are discrepancies between the bills and the later pamphlet—54 blast deaths in the former, 67 in the latter—with some bodies so destroyed that they could not be identified as a body, and others carried away to other parishes—or even outside the bills entirely—for burial. Despite a fortnight of Herculean recovery efforts that cost another person their life from falling timber, the true number of dead was fundamentally unknowable.

That this was no ordinary London fire can be seen by the discussions documented in the House of Commons on January 9th–11th. On the 9th, Parliament ordered the Committee of the Army to confer with city officials and determine how to avoid “all Mischiefs and Inconveniences that may happen by Powder, and other combustible Matter, in private Houses, and other Magazines, within the City of London.”¹⁵ It is probably only a coincidence that much of Parliament’s business on the following day focused on removing delinquents—that is, Royalists—as well as “Papists and Malignants” from London, but deliberate enemy action as well as accidents would have certainly been an underlying concern when attempting to prevent future gunpowder incidents.¹⁶ The explosion appears one last time in the records on January 11th, when the Haberdashers were ordered to divert the first £200 out of an outstanding fine of £2000 to aid “the most Necessitous of the poor Persons, whose Houses were, by the late sad Accident, destroyed and spoiled, in Tower-street.”¹⁷

Unsurprisingly, Parliament and the city officials did not take immediate action to remove all gunpowder from London, and the dangers remained of concern. A month later, on February 9th, the inhabitants of the Tower Hamlets petitioned Parliament over the continuing danger of gunpowder explosions. Parliament referred the issue to to the several militia committees for the areas around London, demanding each” that they take special Care, within their Precincts, of the Removing of Powder out of private Houses and other Places, for Preventing of any Mischiefs, that may be occasioned thereby" and report back in a fortnight.¹⁸

Whatever response may have been received from those committees is not recorded.