ten o'clock
At nine o'clock the King and Queen attended service in St. Paul 's , and when they left the Cathedral half an hour later the besiegers on the heights were astounded to hear the bells of all the steeples left standing in London ring out in a triumphant series of peals which rippled away eastward and westward from St. Paul 's and Westminster Abbey , caught up and carried on by steeple after steeple , until from Highgate to Dulwich , and from Hammersmith to Canning Town , the beleaguered and starving city might have been celebrating some great triumph or deliverance . The astonished besiegers could only put the extraordinary manifestation down to joy on the part of the citizens at the near approaching end of the siege ; but before the bells of London had been ringing for half an hour this fallacious idea was dispelled from their minds in a very stern and summary fashion . Since nightfall there had been no communication with the secret agents of the League in the various towns of England and Scotland . At ten o'clock a small company of Cossacks spurred and flogged their jaded horses up the northern slope of Muswell Hill , on which the Tsar had fixed his headquarters . Nearly every man was wounded , and the horses were in the last stages of exhaustion . Their captain was at once admitted to the presence of the Tsar , and , flinging himself on the ground before the enraged Autocrat , gasped out the dreadful tidings that his little company were the sole survivors of the army of occupation that had been left at Harwich , and which , twelve hours before , had been thirty thousand strong . A huge fleet of strange-looking vessels , flying a plain blood-red flag , had just before four A.M. forced the approaches to the harbour , sunk every transport and warship with guns that were fired without flame , or smoke , or report , and whose projectiles shattered everything that they struck .