1576--1665--1721
When our Litany entreats that we may be delivered from 'plague,
pestilence, and famine', the first of these words bears a special
meaning, which came home with strong and painful force to European minds
at the time the Prayer Book was translated, and for the whole following
century.
It refers to the deadly sickness emphatically called 'the plague', a
typhoid fever exceedingly violent and rapid, and accompanied with a
frightful swelling either under the arm or on the corresponding part of
the thigh. The East is the usual haunt of this fatal complaint, which
some suppose to be bred by the marshy, unwholesome state of Egypt after
the subsidence of the waters of the Nile, and which generally prevails
in Egypt and Syria until its course is checked either by the cold of
winter or the heat in summer. At times this disease has become unusually
malignant and infectious, and then has come beyond its usual boundaries
and made its way over all the West. These dreadful visitations were
rendered more frequent by total disregard of all precautions, and
ignorance of laws for preserving health. People crowded together in
towns without means of obtaining sufficient air or cleanliness, and thus
were sure to be unhealthy; and whenever war or famine had occasioned
more than usual poverty, some frightful epidemic was sure to follow in
its train, and sweep away the poor creatures whose frames were already
weakened by previous privation. And often this 'sore judgment' was that
emphatically called the plague; and especially during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, a time when war had become far more cruel and
mischievous in the hands of hired regiments than ever it had been with a
feudal army, and when at the same time increasing trade was filling the
cities with more closely packed inhabitants, within fortifications that
would not allow the city to expand in proportion to its needs. It
has been only the establishment of the system of quarantine which has
succeeded in cutting off the course of infection by which the plague was
wont to set out on its frightful travels from land to land, from city to
city.
The desolation of a plague-stricken city was a sort of horrible dream.
Every infected house was marked with a red cross, and carefully closed
against all persons, except those who were charged to drive carts
through the streets to collect the corpses, ringing a bell as they went.
These men were generally wretched beings, the lowest and most reckless
of the people, who undertook their frightful task for the sake of the
plunder of the desolate houses, and wound themselves up by intoxicating
drinks to endure the horrors. The bodies were thrown into large
trenches, without prayer or funeral rites, and these were hastily closed
up. Whole families died together, untended save by one another, with no
aid of a friendly hand to give drink or food; and, in the Roman Catholic
cities, the perishing without a priest to administer the last rites of
the Church was viewed as more dreadful than death itself.
Such visitations as these did indeed prove whether the pastors of the
afflicted flock were shepherds or hirelings. So felt, in 1576, Cardinal
Carlo Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, the worthiest of all the successors
of St. Ambrose, when he learnt at Lodi that the plague had made its
appearance in his city, where, remarkably enough, there had lately been
such licentious revelry that he had solemnly warned the people that,
unless they repented, they would certainly bring on themselves the wrath
of heaven. His council of clergy advised him to remain in some healthy
part of his diocese till the sickness should have spent itself, but he
replied that a Bishop, whose duty it is to give his life for his sheep,
could not rightly abandon them in time of peril. They owned that to
stand by them was the higher course. 'Well,' he said, 'is it not a
Bishop's duty to choose the higher course?'
So back into the town of deadly sickness he went, leading the people
to repent, and watching over them in their sufferings, visiting the
hospitals, and, by his own example, encouraging his clergy in carrying
spiritual consolation to the dying. All the time the plague lasted,
which was four months, his exertions were fearless and unwearied, and
what was remarkable was, that of his whole household only two died, and
they were persons who had not been called to go about among the sick.
Indeed, some of the rich who had repaired to a villa, where they spent
their time in feasting and amusement in the luxurious Italian fashion,
were there followed by the pestilence, and all perished; their dainty
fare and the excess in which they indulged having no doubt been as bad a
preparation as the poverty of the starving people in the city.
The strict and regular life of the Cardinal and his clergy, and their
home in the spacious palace, were, no doubt, under Providence, a
preservative; but, in the opinions of the time, there was little
short of a miracle in the safety of one who daily preached in the
cathedral,--bent over the beds of the sick, giving them food and
medicine, hearing their confessions, and administering the last rites of
the Church,--and then braving the contagion after death, rather than let
the corpses go forth unblest to their common grave. Nay, so far was he
from seeking to save his own life, that, kneeling before the altar in
the cathedral, he solemnly offered himself, like Moses, as a sacrifice
for his people. But, like Moses, the sacrifice was passed by--'it cost
more to redeem their souls'--and Borromeo remained untouched, as did the
twenty-eight priests who voluntarily offered themselves to join in his
labors.
No wonder that the chief memories that haunt the glorious white marble
cathedral of Milan are those of St. Ambrose, who taught mercy to an
emperor, and of St. Carlo Borromeo, who practiced mercy on a people.
It was a hundred years later that the greatest and last visitation of
the plague took place in London. Doubtless the scourge called forth--as
in Christian lands such judgments always do--many an act of true and
blessed self-devotion; but these are not recorded, save where they
have their reward: and the tale now to be told is of one of the small
villages to which the infection spread--namely, Eyam, in Derbyshire.
This is a lovely place between Buxton and Chatsworth, perched high on a
hillside, and shut in by another higher mountain--extremely beautiful,
but exactly one of those that, for want of free air, always become the
especial prey of infection. At that time lead works were in operation
in the mountains, and the village was thickly inhabited. Great was the
dismay of the villagers when the family of a tailor, who had received
some patterns of cloth from London, showed symptoms of the plague in its
most virulent form, sickening and dying in one day.
The rector of the parish, the Rev. William Mompesson, was still a young
man, and had been married only a few years. His wife, a beautiful young
woman, only twenty-seven years old, was exceedingly terrified at the
tidings from the village, and wept bitterly as she implored her husband
to take her, and her little George and Elizabeth, who were three and
fours years old, away to some place of safety. But Mr. Mompesson gravely
showed her that it was his duty not to forsake his flock in their hour
of need, and began at once to make arrangements for sending her and the
children away. She saw he was right in remaining, and ceased to urge him
to forsake his charge; but she insisted that if he ought not to desert
his flock, his wife ought not to leave him; and she wept and entreated
so earnestly, that he at length consented that she should be with him,
and that only the two little ones should be removed while yet there was
time.
Their father and mother parted with the little ones as treasures that
they might never see again. At the same time Mr. Mompesson wrote
to London for the most approved medicines and prescriptions; and he
likewise sent a letter to the Earl of Devonshire, at Chatsworth, to
engage that his parishioners should exclude themselves from the
whole neighborhood, and thus confine the contagion within their own
boundaries, provided the Earl would undertake that food, medicines,
and other necessaries, should be placed at certain appointed spots, at
regular times, upon the hills around, where the Eyamites might
come, leave payment for them, and take them up, without holding any
communication with the bringers, except by letters, which could be
placed on a stone, and then fumigated, or passed through vinegar, before
they were touched with the hand. To this the Earl consented, and for
seven whole months the engagement was kept.
Mr. Mompesson represented to his people that, with the plague once among
them, it would be so unlikely that they should not carry infection about
with them, that it would be selfish cruelty to other places to try to
escape amongst them, and thus spread the danger. So rocky and wild was
the ground around them, that, had they striven to escape, a regiment of
soldiers could not have prevented them. But of their own free will they
attended to their rector's remonstrance, and it was not known that one
parishoner of Eyam passed the boundary all that time, nor was there a
single case of plague in any of the villages around.
The assembling of large congregations in churches had been thought to
increase the infection in London, and Mr. Mompesson, therefore, thought
it best to hold his services out-of-doors. In the middle of the village
is a dell, suddenly making a cleft in the mountain-side, only five yards
wide at the bottom, which is the pebble bed of a wintry torrent, but is
dry in the summer. On the side towards the village, the slope upwards
was of soft green turf, scattered with hazel, rowan, and alder bushes,
and full of singing birds. On the other side, the ascent was nearly
perpendicular, and composed of sharp rocks, partly adorned with bushes
and ivy, and here and there rising up in fantastic peaks and archways,
through which the sky could be seen from below. One of these rocks was
hollow, and could be entered from above--a natural gallery, leading to
an archway opening over the precipice; and this Mr. Mompesson chose
for his reading-desk and pulpit. The dell was so narrow, that his
voice could clearly be heard across it, and his congregation arranged
themselves upon the green slop opposite, seated or kneeling upon the
grass.
On Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays arose the earnest voice of prayer
from that rocky glen, the people's response meeting the pastor's voice;
and twice on Sundays he preached to them the words of life and hope.
It was a dry, hot summer; fain would they have seen thunder and rain
to drive away their enemy; and seldom did weather break in on the
regularity of these service. But there was another service that the
rector had daily to perform; not in his churchyard--that would have
perpetuated the infection--but on a healthy hill above the village.
There he daily read of 'the Resurrection and the Life', and week by
week the company on the grassy slope grew fewer and scantier. His
congregation were passing from the dell to the healthy mound.
Day and night the rector and his wife were among the sick, nursing,
feeding, and tending them with all that care and skill could do; but,
in spite of all their endeavors, only a fifth part of the whole of their
inhabitants lived to spend the last Sunday in Cucklet Church, as the
dell is still called. Mrs. Mompesson had persuaded her husband to have
a wound made in his leg, fancying that this would lessen the danger of
infection, and he yielded in order to satisfy her. His health endured
perfectly, but she began to waste under her constant exertions, and her
husband feared that he saw symptoms of consumption; but she was full of
delight at some appearances in his wound that made her imagine that it
had carried off the disease, and that his danger was over.
A few days after, she sickened with symptoms of the plague, and
her frame was so weakened that she sank very quickly. She was often
delirious; but when she was too much exhausted to endure the exertion of
taking cordials, her husband entreated her to try for their children's
sake, she lifted herself up and made the endeavor. She lay peacefully,
saying, 'she was but looking for the good hour to come', and calmly
died, making the responses to her husband's prayers even to the last.
Her he buried in the churchyard, and fenced the grave in afterwards
with iron rails. There are two beautiful letters from him written on her
death--one to his little children, to be kept and read when they would
be old enough to understand it; the other to his patron, Sir George
Saville, afterwards Lord Halifax. 'My drooping spirits', he says, 'are
much refreshed with her joys, which I assure myself are unutterable.' He
wrote both these letters in the belief that he should soon follow her,
speaking of himself to Sir George as 'his dying chaplain', commending
to him his 'distressed orphans', and begging that a 'humble pious man'
might be chosen to succeed him in his parsonage. 'Sire, I thank God
that I am willing to shake hands in peace with all the world; and I have
comfortable assurance that He will accept me for the sake of His
Son, and I find God more good than ever I imagined, and wish that his
goodness were not so much abused and contemned', writes the widowed
pastor, left alone among his dying flock. And he concludes, 'and with
tears I entreat that when you are praying for fatherless and motherless
infants, you would then remember my two pretty babes'.
These two letters were written on the last day of August and first of
September, 1666; but on the 20th of November, Mr. Mompesson was writing
to his uncle, in the lull after the storm. 'The condition of this place
hath been so dreadful, that I persuade myself it exceedeth all history
and example. I may truly say our town has become a Golgotha, a place of
skulls; and had there not been a small remnant of us left, we had been
as Sodom, and like unto Gomorrah. My ears never heard such doleful
lamentations, my nose never smelt such noisome smells, and my eyes never
beheld such ghastly spectacles. Here have been seventy-six families
visited within my parish, out of which died 259 persons.'
However, since the 11th of October there had been no fresh cases, and he
was now burning all woolen cloths, lest the infection should linger in
them. He himself had never been touched by the complaint, nor had his
maid-servant; his man had had it but slightly. Mr. Mompesson lived many
more years, was offered the Deanery of Lincoln, but did not accept it,
and died in 1708. So virulent was the contagion that, ninety-one years
after, in 1757, when five laboring men, who were digging up land near
the plague-graves for a potato-garden, came upon what appeared to be
some linen, though they buried it again directly, they all sickened with
typhus fever, three of them died, and it was so infectious that no less
than seventy persons in the parish were carried off.
The last of these remarkable visitations of the plague, properly so
called, was at Marseilles, in 1721. It was supposed to have been brought
by a vessel which sailed from Seyde, in the bay of Tunis, on the 31st of
January, 1720, which had a clean bill of health when it anchored off
the Chateau d'If, at Marseilles, on the 25th of May; but six of the crew
were found to have died on the voyage, and the persons who handled the
freight also died, though, it was said, without any symptoms of the
plague, and the first cases were supposed to be of the fevers caused
by excessive poverty and crowding. The unmistakable Oriental plague,
however, soon began to spread in the city among the poorer population,
and in truth the wars and heavy expenses of Louis XIV. had made poverty
in France more wretched than ever before, and the whole country was like
one deadly sore, festering, and by and by to come to a fearful crisis.
Precautions were taken, the infected families were removed to the
infirmaries and their houses walled up, but all this was done at night
in order not to excite alarm. The mystery, however, made things more
terrible to the imagination, and this was a period of the utmost
selfishness. All the richer inhabitants who had means of quitting the
city, and who were the very people who could have been useful
there, fled with one accord. Suddenly the lazaretto was left without
superintendents, the hospitals without stewards; the judges, public
officers, notaries, and most of the superior workmen in the most
necessary trades were all gone. Only the Provost and four municipal
officers remained, with 1,100 livres in their treasury, in the midst of
an entirely disorganized city, and an enormous population without
work, without restraint, without food, and a prey to the deadliest of
diseases.
The Parliament which still survived in the ancient kingdom of Provence
signalized itself by retreating to a distance, and on the 31st of May
putting out a decree that nobody should pass a boundary line round
Marseilles on pain of death; but considering what people were trying to
escape from, and the utter overthrow of all rule and order, this penalty
was not likely to have much effect, and the plague was carried by
the fugitives to Arles, Aix, Toulon, and sixty-three lesser towns and
villages. What a contrast to Mr. Mompesson's moral influence!
Horrible crimes were committed. Malefactors were released from the
prisons and convicts from the galleys, and employed for large payment
to collect the corpses and carry the sick to the infirmaries. Of course
they could only be wrought up to such work by intoxication and unlimited
opportunities of plunder, and their rude treatment both of the dead and
of the living sufferers added unspeakably to the general wretchedness.
To be carried to the infirmary was certain death,--no one lived in that
heap of contagion; and even this shelter was not always to be had,--some
of the streets were full of dying creatures who had been turned out of
their houses and could crawl no farther.
What was done to alleviate all these horrors? It was in the minority of
Louis XV., and the Regent Duke of Orleans, easy, good-natured man that
he was, sent 22,000 marks to the relief of the city, all in silver, for
paper money was found to spread the infection more than anything else.
He also sent a great quantity of corn, and likewise doctors for the
sick, and troops to shut in the infected district. The Pope, Clement
XI., sent spiritual blessings to the sufferers, and, moreover, three
shiploads of wheat. The Regent's Prime Minister, the Abbe Dubois, the
shame of his Church and country, fancied that to send these supplies
cast a slight upon his administration, and desired his representative at
Rome to prevent the sailing of the ships, but his orders were not, for
very shame, carried out, and the vessels set out. On their way they were
seized by a Moorish corsair, who was more merciful than Dubois, for he
no sooner learnt their destination than he let them go unplundered.
And in the midst of the misery there were bright lights 'running to and
fro among the stubble'. The Provost and his five remaining officers, and
a gentleman call Le Chevalier Rose, did their utmost in the bravest
and most unselfish way to help the sufferers, distribute food, provide
shelter, restrain the horrors perpetrated by the sick in their ravings,
and provide for the burial of the dead. And the clergy were all devoted
to the task of mercy. There was only one convent, that of St. Victor,
where the gates were closed against all comers in the hope of shutting
out infection. Every other monastic establishment freely devoted itself.
It was a time when party spirit ran high. The bishop, Henri Francois
Xavier de Belzunce, a nephew of the Duke de Lauzun, was a strong
and rigid Jesuit, and had joined so hotly in the persecution of the
Jansenists that he had forbidden the brotherhood called Oratorian
fathers to hear confessions, because he suspected them of a leaning to
Jansenist opinions; but he and they both alike worked earnestly in the
one cause of mercy. They were content to obey his prejudiced edict,
since he was in lawful authority, and threw themselves heartily into the
lower and more disdained services to the sick, as nurses and tenders of
the body alone, not of the soul, and in this work their whole community,
Superior and all, perished, almost without exception. Perhaps these men,
thus laying aside hurt feeling and sense of injustice, were the greatest
conquerors of all whose golden deeds we have described.
Bishop Belzunce himself, however, stands as the prominent figure in
the memory of those dreadful five months. He was a man of commanding
stature, towering above all around him, and his fervent sermons, aided
by his example of severe and strict piety, and his great charities,
had greatly impressed the people. He now went about among the plague-
stricken, attending to their wants, both spiritual and temporal, and
sold or mortgaged all his property to obtain relief for them, and he
actually went himself in the tumbrils of corpses to give them the rites
of Christian burial. His doings closely resembled those of Cardinal
Borromeo, and like him he had recourse to constant preaching of
repentance, processions and assemblies for litanies in the church. It is
curiously characteristic that it was the English clergyman, who, equally
pious, and sensible that only the Almighty could remove the scourge, yet
deemed it right to take precautions against the effects of bringing
a large number of persons into one building. How Belzunce's clergy
seconded him may be gathered from the numbers who died of the disease.
Besides the Oratorians, there died eighteen Jesuits, twenty-six of
the order called Recollets, and forty-three Capuchins, all of whom
had freely given their lives in the endeavor to alleviate the general
suffering. In the four chief towns of Provence 80,000 died, and about
8,000 in the lesser places. The winter finally checked the destroyer,
and then, sad to say, it appeared how little effect the warning had had
on the survivors. Inheritances had fallen together into the hands of
persons who found themselves rich beyond their expectations, and in
the glee of having escaped the danger, forgot to be thankful, and spent
their wealth in revelry. Never had the cities of Provence been so full
of wild, questionable mirth as during the ensuing winter, and it was
remarked that the places which had suffered most severely were the most
given up to thoughtless gaiety, and even licentiousness.
Good Bishop Belzunce did his best to protest against the wickedness
around him, and refused to leave his flock at Marseilles, when, four
years after, a far more distinguished see was offered to him. He died
in 1755, in time to escape the sight of the retribution that was soon
worked out on the folly and vice of the unhappy country.