Charles Dickens (1812-70) who was then a newspaper reporter watched, as did several thousand others of whom many cheered. Dickens' description in a lecture some years later at the Drury Lane Theatre contained the following.
'Ages ago a savage mode of keeping accounts on notched sticks was introduced into the Court of Exchequer and the accounts were kept much as Robinson Crusoe kept his calendar on the desert island...Official routine inclined to these notched sticks, as if they were pillars of the constitution...In the reign of George III an enquiry was made by some revolutionary spirit whether - pens, ink and paper, slates and pencils, being in existence - this obstinate adherence to an obsolete custom ought to be continued and whether a change ought not to be effected. All the red tape of the country grew redder at this bold and original conception and it took until 1826 to get the sticks abolished. In 1834 it was found that there was a considerable accumulation of them; and the question then arose - what was to be done with such worn out, worm-eaten rotten old bits of wood? The sticks were housed at Westminster and it would naturally occur to any intelligent person that nothing could be easier than to allow them to be carried away as firewood by the miserable people who lived in the neighbourhood. However, they never had been useful and official routine required that they never should be, and so the order went through that they should privately and confidentially burn. It came to pass that they were burnt in a stove in the House of Lords. The stove, over-gorged with these preposterous sticks, set fire to the panelling; the panelling set fire to the House of Lords; the House of Lords set fire to the House of Commons; and two Houses were reduced to ashes...'
As well as the buildings, a considerable number of documents, paintings and other artefacts were destroyed but no life was lost although several were seriously injured. The effectiveness of the efforts of the considerable number of soldiers, police and fire-fighters who were there was not helped by the politicians who joined in (including the Prim Minister, Lord Melbourne). A witness is recorded as saying that 'The firemen shouted their directions from above, to the numerous, busy, meddling people, whose rank embarrassed but whose wisdom afforded little guide from below.' This event ended about a hundred years of procrastination over how to replace the random accretion of structures which housed the legislature by a building designed for that purpose. The possibility of moving to some other building, erected for whatever purpose (Buckingham Palace was offered by the king), was not acceptable to the parliamentarians. They were determined to remain on that site alongside the Thames, the main and open sewer for the metropolis.

O/S Co-ords:3024.7942
Source(s):

Parliament House - The Chambers of the House of Commons

Here is the site of the Parliament Building, within the Palace of Westminster, of this time. It was a two storey structure of which the upper storey was the meeting place for the Lords, i.e., 'The House of Lords', and also the meeting place for Parliament, i.e., where the monarch met with the lords, temporal and spiritual, and representatives of communities from across the kingdom. The lower storey had no specific use. It had been the kitchens of the palace when that was the London residence of the monarch between the 11th and the early 16th centuries. The 'Journal' of the Commons has the somewhat laconic entry for this date that 'This last night the Upper House of Parliament was searched by Sir Thos. Knevett; and one Johnson, a servant of Mr Thomas Percy was there apprehended; who had placed thirty-six barrels of gun powder in the vault under the House with a purpose to blow up the King, and the whole Company, when they should there assemble. Afterwards divers other gentlemen were discovered to be of the plot.' Guy Fawkes (1570-1606) with whom the event is generally associated was a Yorkshireman, a convert to Catholicism and a religious fanatic. He served with the Spanish forces in the Netherlands from 1593-1604. He was invited back to England by a Robert Catesby (1573-1605) to take part in the plot conceived by Catesby to 'blow the Scots back to Scotland'. No 'Johnson', as per the Journal's report, is identified in the group of eight men in a contemporary sketch of the conspirators.. A feature of that sketch is that seven, who are hatted, are identified by forename and surname (including Guido Fawkes) whilst one, Bates, has no hat and no forename. The caption to the sketch commences with 'Concilium septem nobilium...' A feature of this action was that it was being taken by these Catholics because they viewed the King and Parliament as heretical Protestants whilst for the general populace, in the words of Stephen Inwood's 'History of London', 'There was a general belief that Catholicism was an idolatrous, superstitious, priest-ridden perversion of true Christianity, that it still had a strong and secret hold on the clergy, the nobility and the Court, and that it would use sedition, conspiracy and foreign or Irish troops to regain control of England.' This polarity of views is occasionally reported to exist in the British Isles today.

O/S Co-ords:3024.7942
Source(s):

A History of London

Chambers Biographical Dictionary

Parliament House - The Chambers of the House of Commons

Westminster Palace and Parliament