It was at this moment of national disappointment, with the fruit of great efforts snatched away and the sea lost, that a fresh calamity at home was added to the sufferings of the war. In the night of the second of September a fire broke out in the heart of London which raged for four days and reduced the city to ashes from the Tower to the Temple. Thirteen hundred houses and ninety churches were destroyed. The loss of merchandise and property was beyond count. Again the Parliament with stubborn pride voted a subsidy of nearly two millions to refit the fleet. But the money came in slowly. The treasury was so utterly drained that it was agreed to fit out no large ships for the coming year. The ministers indeed were already seeking to conclude a peace through the mediation of France. It was not the public distress alone which drove Clarendon to peace negotiations: his own fears and those of the king had been alike fulfilled as the war went on. The country squires were disgusted at the obstinacy and cost of the struggle, and they visited their disgust on Clarendon as its supposed author. He had lost the support of the Houses, and the admission of fresh opponents into the royal council spoke of the secret enmity of the king. But Charles too had his reasons for desiring peace. He had a sleepless distrust of Parliaments, and his distrust was already justified. The "Cavalier" Parliament had met in a passion of loyalty. It had pressed for the death of the regicides. It had hardly been hindered from throwing all England into confusion by refusing its assent to the Amnesty Bill. It had ordered the League and Covenant, as well as the act deposing Charles Stuart, to be burned by the common hangman. It had declared the taking up arms against the king on any pretext to be treason, and had turned its declaration into a test to be exacted from every parson and every alderman. And yet this loyal Parliament had faced and checked the Crown as boldly and pertinaciously as the Long Parliament itself. It had carried out its own ecclesiastical policy in the teeth of the known wishes of the king. It had humiliated him by forcing him to cancel his public declaration in favour of the Nonconformists. It gave counsel in foreign affairs, and met the king's leanings towards Lewis by expressions of its will for a contest with France. It voted large subsidies indeed, but at this juncture it inserted into the Subsidy Bill a clause which appointed a Parliamentary commission with powers to examine into the royal expenditure, and to question royal officers upon oath. [Sidenote: The Dutch in the Medway.]