Restoration, p.10
Restoration, page 10
Initially, the well-to-do remained remote from the situation. The ‘pestered places’ in which the poor congregated were notoriously crowded and unhealthy, and full of fever and disease at any time. Those in charge of the city had no dedicated hospitals for those suffering from infectious diseases; instead, the poor were ordered to keep the exteriors of their houses and shops clean, on pain of fines. Yet the steady spread of the illness led to action. Infected houses were closed for forty days from the date of confirmed plague with a ‘watcher’ outside to ensure that nobody entered or left, and a nurse to care for the inhabitants. What little sustenance the occupants could afford would be passed through the window. Many died of starvation, as well as of illness and maltreatment by the nurses; Hodges wrote, ‘what greatly contributed to the loss of people thus shut up was the wicked practices of the nurses, for they are not to be mentioned but in the most bitter terms…these wretches, out of greediness to plunder the dead, would strangle their patients, and charge it to the distemper in their throats’.
If they were not murdered by their supposed carers, other problems awaited those shut up indoors. The disadvantage with this plague order – which had existed since the time of James I – was that it all but guaranteed the inhabitants of the house would die, and failed to protect their neighbours; the plague was carried by fleas and passed through the air, and no quarantine could combat its movement. A widespread belief that the poor were the targets of a harsh system – Hodges even noted that ‘it came by some to be referred to as “the poor’s plague”’ – led to rioting, with one closed tavern, the Ship, having its front door forcibly removed and the inhabitants allowed to ‘go abroad into the streets promiscuously with others’. Even as Charles promised ‘the severest punishment’ for ‘offenders in the said riot’, it was beginning to dawn on those in charge that they faced a perfect storm of civil disobedience and a steadily increasing infection that they were powerless to combat.
The plague soon spread across town, reaching Bearbinder Lane in the City in early May. Even as doctors argued over the causes of the illness, and how best to treat it, a general order was given out on 4 May that all infected houses should be shut up. Yet the mild and pleasant spring weather, which encouraged people to spend time outdoors, was a far greater enemy than any individual victim, since it caused the plague to spread with terrifying speed. By the middle of June, it had made further inroads into the City, claiming another four lives in Cripplegate. One, ironically, was the servant of a physician, Alexander Burnet, who had sent his man away to the City ‘pesthouse’ in St Giles Cripplegate before voluntarily quarantining himself and his household. By the middle of June, there had been nearly 200 deaths from plague, of which more than half were in St Giles parish. The death toll was rising inexorably: thirty-one people had died in the week of 30 May to 6 June in St Giles, and sixty-eight perished the week after.
One apothecary, William Boghurst, undertook a study of the tell-tale symptoms of the epidemic. Like Hodges, he noted the round, raised marks on the body, either purple or scarlet in colour, and eventual swellings (or ‘buboes’, leading to the name ‘bubonic plague’) that normally arose in the armpits or groin, as well as shivering, vomiting and headaches. Boghurst recorded an eclectic range of symptoms including hysterical laughter, cold sweats, ‘griping’ or cramping of the guts and diarrhoea. A combination of these symptoms meant ‘infallible signs of death now at hand, and they seldom came single’, as Boghurst noted. It was easy to tell who was fatally affected: ‘I most commonly gave judgement whether people would live or die at the first visit.’ It soon became common knowledge that buboes meant the presence of infection; Pepys wrote in his diary of 22 July that Burnet’s servant had died ‘of a bubo on his right groin, and two spots on his right thigh, which is the plague’. Some even referred to them as ‘God’s marks’, perhaps ironically, as their effects were anything but godly.
Death from the plague was a hideous, drawn-out process. Those afflicted took about five days to die, vomiting blood and suffering agonizing pain and seizures. Occasionally, the buboes burst and the patient did not die of plague, but in their weakened state, in the squalor and filth around them, they seldom had long to live. There was a stigma attached to anyone of ‘the better sort’ who died this way, and there were instances of well-meaning individuals concealing the true causes of a person’s death. Simon Patrick, the rector of St Paul’s Covent Garden, claimed that the daughter of his parishioner Dr Ponteus had died of natural causes, rather than of plague. This allowed her to be buried in Christian fashion: a kindness, certainly, but a misguided one. The contagion was a more than effective leveller, claiming victims from every stratum of society from beggars to the wealthiest.
While money itself could not save anyone’s skin, it could buy the means to escape from London. Pepys had noted on 21 June, ‘I find all the town almost going, the coaches and wagons being all full of people going into the country’, and he dispatched his wife Elizabeth and her mother to Woolwich on 5 July. The next day, Charles himself left the city for Hampton Court, although not before issuing a command for the mayor and aldermen to remain. His court would later relocate to Salisbury before arriving at Oxford on 27 September, around the peak of the contagion.
In the king’s absence, Sir John Lawrence, the Lord Mayor, was in charge, aided by Albemarle, who remained in London throughout 1665. They were faced with an increasingly desperate situation; the week of 27 June to 4 July saw 438 victims buried. As citizens perished in their hundreds, and with the monarch absent from the scene, all hope seemed lost. The only people who profited from the situation were coach drivers and boatmen, who charged exorbitant prices to transport Londoners away from their stricken city. It cost at least five shillings to leave town, a sum beyond the reach of any artisan or skilled labourer.
It is impossible to know how many people fled the capital at the height of the plague, but the doctor William Sydenham estimated that ‘at least two-thirds of the inhabitants had retired to the country to avoid infection’. Even allowing for exaggeration, that still represents an exodus of tens of thousands of people from the city, leaving behind only the poor and the sick. Patrick noted that the centre of town was ‘very empty’, and that, while ‘the ordinary sort of people continued there’, a ghostly atmosphere hung over the plague-ravaged streets, ‘all the gentry and better sort of tradesmen being gone’. And the countryside to which so many Londoners fled was itself far from safe. Many were attacked en route, either by opportunistic robbers who knew that the travellers were likely to be carrying their portable property with them, or by frightened locals who associated the urban influx with disease and death.
Not everyone left London, however. Pepys remained in the City, unable or unwilling to abandon his position in the Naval Office, and many high-end tradesmen, including goldsmiths and scriveners, knew that abandoning their businesses would spell economic ruin. As they lurked fearfully around the City, hoping that pestilence would not visit their homes, the usual quacks and mountebanks crawled out from under their rocks, offering ever more fanciful remedies. As panic rose, so did the scale and outlandishness of the deceptions that they practised on the terrified and gullible. Bills were distributed advertising themselves as selling ‘the royal antidote’ and ‘never-failing preservatives against the infection’. The remedies proposed included such unlikely things as powdered unicorn horn and liquid gold. Even those who were not out for profit were still credulous; John Allin, the Sussex vicar, claimed to have discovered a plant called ‘nostock’,* which was said to be permeated ‘by a magic substance derived from fallen stars’.
While many so-called ‘medical authorities’ knew little more about healing the afflicted than their patients, others were of more assistance. When the pestilence was at its height in the summer and autumn of 1665, Hodges remained in London to aid his patients, assisted by the surgeon Thomas Harman. Many he correctly diagnosed as suffering from terror, rather than illness, but there was still the ever-present danger of infection from the genuinely sick. Fortifying himself with ‘the quantity of a nutmeg of the anti-pestilential electuary’,* he spent several hours each day examining the sick, before taking breakfast. His precautions were basic; he drank a glass of Spanish white wine, or sack, ‘to warm the stomach, refresh the spirits and dissipate any beginning lodgement of the infection’, and ensured that his mind was ‘as composed as possible’ in the presence of the unwell; he threw quicklime on to the coals in his home in an attempt to ‘destroy the efficacy of the pestilential miasmata’. Hodges himself fell temporarily sick on two occasions, but claimed to cure himself by the methodical application of sack; he commented, ‘I have never yet met anything so agreeable to the nerves and spirits in all my experience.’ He later wrote of his experiences in an invaluable work that appeared in 1666, An Account Of The First Rise, Progress, Symptoms And Cure Of The Plague, being the substance of a letter from Dr Hodges to a person of quality.†
Of the 1,500 doctors, physicians and apothecaries in London before the plague, only around 300 remained at its height. Hodges was one of the only two doctors who were chosen by the College of Physicians to continue to practise, and he was offered £100 in September ‘for the prevention and cure of the plague’. If, of course, he could survive that long. He took notes from the College of Physicians, who counselled against bleeding weakened plague victims, and instead recommended a drug called theriac, a combination of viper’s flesh, onion, garlic and opium, which was said to have healing properties. The use of the snake was believed to neutralize the effects of the poison in the plague. Those who were not sick, such as Pepys, still took ‘plague waters’, a drink containing various herbs and spices. It was also believed that smoking tobacco could ward off the illness; Eton schoolboys were caned if they missed their daily smoke before prayers. O tempora! O mores!
By mid-July, the humid and oppressively warm summer weather (described by Pepys as ‘most extraordinary hot that I ever knew’) was exacerbating an already chaotic situation. Thousands of people were dying each week, even as food shortages threatened to lead to mass starvation. There was no longer such a thing as a ‘safe place’ in London, as contagion had spread to virtually every part of the city. Those who had to remain there, whether from financial necessity or choice, spent little time outside. The streets were almost silent, the only sounds to be heard were coughing, choking and weeping, interspersed with the occasional cry of ‘Bring out your dead!’ In the early days of the plague, a bell had tolled at St Giles for every death, but now they were so frequent and so numerous that it remained silent. In neighbouring parishes, however, church bells continued to sound their grim tocsin. Nearly all public places, including schools, theatres and law courts, were closed, the only gatherings being the occasional church services that were designed to pray for victims of the infection. Prisoners were doubly unfortunate: not only were the inhabitants of Newgate and Ludgate denied habeas corpus and confined indefinitely, in some cases without trial, but the filthy and cramped conditions within the jails were a breeding ground for plague, leading to many a de facto death sentence – for hardened criminal and petty thief alike.
The continued lockdown on London meant that traders were unable to sell their wares, either in the City or elsewhere. The alderman Sir William Turner, who specialized in the sale of fine cloth, lamented, in a letter to his Paris trading partners, ‘I have little to say at present, there being nothing to do by reason of the sickness… everyone hastes out of town which causes that there is no sale for goods and merchants pay ill.’ As the chaos stretched on into the autumn of 1665, he would complain that ‘it makes a miserable trade’. Nonetheless, Turner and his peers at least had the means to leave London if they needed to, unlike the city’s poor, who were forced to turn to the parish for basic subsistence. Even as the death toll continued to rise (reaching 7,000 a week by the end of August), the impoverished still needed the basic necessities of existence, and parishes were obliged to appeal to the wealthy and generous for financial assistance. Some of the more compassionate gave gifts; St Margaret’s in the west of the City recorded an income of £1,117 in aid. Others were either absent or uninterested in helping their fellow man, even in these times of extraordinary need.
Pepys remained in his post at the Navy Board for the duration of the plague. He saw it as his duty to face his potential fate, writing to the naval commissioner Sir William Coventry to say, ‘You, sir, take your turn at the sword… I must not therefore grudge to take mine at the pestilence.’ England was engaged in a naval war with the Dutch, and Pepys continued to benefit from the lucrative contracts, gratuities and bribes that came with his job. Even a serious epidemic could not halt the business of warmongering. It was with some satisfaction that Pepys wrote in his diary on 31 July: ‘thus I end this month with the greatest joy that ever I did in all my life, because I have spent the greater part of it with abundance of joy and honour, and pleasant journeys and brave entertainment, and without cost of money.’ The ‘brave entertainment’ included a visit to his occasional mistress Elizabeth Bagwell, whose husband was away at sea; the risk of infection that Pepys ran in travelling to Deptford where she lived was worth it for the carnal dalliance, even as he returned home ‘in a most violent sweat’.
As the endless round of deaths continued, a curfew was introduced. Householders were warned to remain indoors after 9 p.m. Burials took place in mass pits both day and night. Those who loaded the dead onto carts to be taken away were paid fifteen shillings a week by the parish, a large sum of money, but a necessary expense, given how few would take the risk otherwise. The burial pits were located outside the City walls, in Finsbury Fields and Stepney among other places, and the cart drivers dumped the bodies in them as quickly as they could with neither ceremony nor respect, in the hope that they themselves would avoid contagion. These pits held enormous numbers of corpses; the Finsbury Fields pit alone contained 2,200 bodies. The constant threat of sudden, hideous death led to a general feeling of depression and fear in the city. Pepys wrote on 14 September that he had ‘great apprehensions of melancholy’, despite trying to ‘put off the thoughts of sadness as much as I can’. The arrival of cooler weather in the autumn of 1665 made no difference to the toll exacted by the plague; in the week of 12–19 September, it was believed that up to 15,000 people died. Even recording the names of all those who perished had become a major task for the parish clerks, straining their abilities and facilities to the limit. In some cases, as at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, the clerks themselves expired, leading to further administrative chaos. The only group who kept entirely accurate records of their members were the Quakers, who continued to visit the sick, despite the risks to their own health.
Those who remained in the city through choice, rather than necessity, began to consider themselves beleaguered soldiers in a seemingly never-ending siege. Since it was believed the plague was transmitted by ‘bad air’, street fires were lit in an attempt to purify the atmosphere. But the smoke and smog they produced polluted the city yet further, and lent the streets of London an apocalyptic appearance. Hodges later claimed that 4,000 people died as a result of these fires and their harmful emissions. In the midst of death, the grimmest form of gallows humour developed. One possibly apocryphal story, which Daniel Defoe later recycled in A Journal of the Plague Year,* concerned a Scottish piper who drunkenly collapsed one night, was assumed dead and was loaded on to a cart with other corpses. Regaining consciousness, he attempted to attract the driver’s attention by frantically playing his bagpipes. The noise that ensued made the driver believe that the Scotsman was in fact the devil, and he fled in mortal terror. Whether the piper continued to evade death is unknown.
Even some of those who were infected managed to summon up a final spirit of reckless – even malicious – defiance. Hodges recorded some of those in the city throwing infected bandages through the windows of their neighbours, and literally laughing in the faces of passers-by. He also saw some victims breaking out of their houses and running madly down the street, summoning up their remaining energy in a doomed attempt at some kind of escape. All this he ascribed to a form of madness: ‘the plague seemed to have complicated in its production everything of a poisonous and destroying nature’.
While London was the part of England worst affected by the plague, the rest of the country did not escape infection. Although the ‘Great Plague of London’, as it was called in the early summer, began as an urban pestilence, it soon carried into the Midlands and East Anglia, and reached as far north as Newcastle and as far southwest as Dorset and Devon. Up to 100,000 people died of plague outside of London in 1665 and 1666, giving the lie to the idea that it was restricted to the capital. Colchester was especially badly affected, with 161 people dying of plague in the week from 29 September to 6 October; this was more than seven times the number who died of other causes. The East Anglian naval commissioner William Doyly saw chaos break out as a result of captured Dutch prisoners, themselves already infected, spreading further sickness in cramped and unhygienic prison conditions. He wrote to his fellow commissioner John Evelyn to say ‘the sickness is broken out most fiercely. The present mayor hath no authority to rule this numerous people.’ Panic and lawlessness broke out, and the army had to be called in. It had little effect, as the dispirited and frightened population were summarily reduced by lingering plague, which remained in the town until early December 1666. The town, which had been a medium-sized one of around 5,000 inhabitants at the beginning of 1665, was reduced to barely half of that the following year.
