On April 26, 1669, Pepys records: "A great fire happened in Durham Yard last night, burning the house of one Lady Hungerford, who was to come to town to it this night; and so the house is burned, new furnished, by carelessness of the girl sent to take off a candle from a bunch of candles, which she did by burning it off, and left the rest, as it is supposed, on fire. The King and Court were here, it seems, and stopped the fire by blowing up the next house." The Merry Monarch, having stopped the fire in Durham Yard, was up betimes next morning and off to Newmarket. Several other side-lights on the subject are furnished by Pepys. Thus, on February 1, 1663-1664, he notes that, "I hear how two men last night, justling for the wall about the New Exchange, did kill one another, each thrusting the other through; one of them of the King's Chapel, one Cave, and the other a retayner of my Lord Generall Middleton's." In the year of the Great Fire, 1666, he is "up by five o'clock" on September 7, "and, blessed be God! find all well; and by water to Pane's Wharfe. Walked thence, and saw all the towne burned, and a miserable sight of Paul's church, with all the roofs fallen, and the body of the quire fallen into St Fayth's; Paul's school also, Ludgate, and Fleet Street. My father's house, and the church, and a good part of the Temple the like. So to Creed's lodging, near the New Exchange, and there find him laid down upon a bed; the house all unfurnished, there being fears of the fire's coming to them. There borrowed a shirt of him, and washed. To Sir W. Coventry, at St James's, who lay without curtains, having removed all his goods; as the King at White Hall, and everybody had done, and was doing." Three months later, the "very good newes is just come of our four ships from Smyrna, come safe without convoy even into the Downes, without seeing any enemy; which is the best, and, indeed, only considerable good news to our Exchange since the burning of the City; and it is strange to see how it do cheer up men's hearts. Here I saw shops now come to be in this Exchange; and met little Batelier who sits here but at 3 L. per annum, whereas he sat at the other at 100 L.; which he says he believes will prove as good account to him now as the other did at that rent." Dean Crofts of Norwich and various others of some standing were living in Durham Yard in 1675, and in that year some waterworks, which are not to be confused with those of the York Buildings company, were established by Sir Robert Vyner and others. In 1677, Durham Yard had gone to ruin, and was notorious as a place of ill repute. In April of that year Le Tellier, Archbishop and Duke of Rheims, crossed the Channel in order to "treat about a marriage with the Lady Mary, daughter of the Duke of York, with the Dauphin." In some ribald verses by the libellous Anthony Wood (or, as he dubbed himself, Anthony à Wood, 1632-1695) we read that: