Here we can count the spires and the towers. I know them every one. Look
how Paul's rises above the houses. His walls are a hundred feet high.
His tower that you see is near three hundred feet high, and his spire,
which has been burned down these forty years, was two hundred feet more.
Alas, that goodly spire! It is only from this bank that you can see the
great houses along the river. There the ruins of White Friars--there
those of the Dominicans. Ruins were they not, but splendid buildings in
the days of my youth. Baynard's Castle, the Steel Yard, Cold Harbor, the
Bridge--there they stand. The famous city of Venice itself, I dare
swear, cannot show so fair a prospect. See, now the sun lights up the
windows of Nonesuch on the Bridge--see how the noble structure is
reflected in the water below. Good sir," he turned to me with glowing
face and eyes aflame with enthusiasm, "there is no other city in the
whole world, believe me, which may compare with this noble City of
London, of which--glory to God!--I have been permitted to become the
humble historian."
We took boat at Falcon stairs--Stow told me there were two thousand
boats and three thousand watermen on the river--and we returned to
Queenhithe, the watermen shouting jokes and throwing strong words at
each other, which seems to be their custom. By the time we landed the
sun had gone down. Work for the day was over, and the streets were
thronged with people. First, however, it was necessary to think of
supper. My guide took me to an old inn in Dowgate; you entered it as at
the Mitre by a long passage. This was the well-known Swan, where we
found a goodly company assembled. They seemed to be merchants all; grave
men, not given to idle mirth, so that the conversation was more dull (if
more seemly) than at the Falcon. For supper they served us roast pullet
with a salad of lettuce, very good, and a flask of right Canary. My
ancient guide swore--"Bones a' me"--that it contained the very spirit
and essence of the Canary grape. "Sir," he said, "can a man live in
London for eighty years and fail to discern good wine from bad? Why, the
city drinks up, I believe, all the good wine in the world. Amsterdam is
built on piles set in the ooze and mud. London floats on puncheons,
pipes, and hogsheads of the best and choicest. This is truly rare
Canary. Alas! I am past eighty. I shall drink but little more."
So he drank and warmed his old heart and discussed further, but it would
be idle to set down all he said, because most of it is in books, and my
desire has been to record only what cannot be found, by the curious,
already printed.
After supper we had more wine and tobacco. Some of the company fell to
card-playing, some to dice. Then the door opened, and a man came in
with two children, boys, who sang with him while he played the guitar.
They sang madrigals very sweetly, each his own part truly and with
justice. When they finished, the boys went around with a platter and
collected farthings. And having paid our reckoning we went away.
In the streets outside, the women sat at their doors or stood about
gossiping with each other. At every corner a bonfire was merrily
burning. This was partly because it was the Vigil of St. John the
Baptist, partly because in the city they always lit bonfires in the
summer months to purify and cleanse the air. But because of the day
every door was shadowed with green branches--birch, long fennel, St.
John's wort, orpin, white lilies, and such like--garnished with garlands
of beautiful flowers. They had also hung up lamps of colored glass, with
oil to burn all the night, so that the streets looked gay and bright
with the red light of the bonfires playing on the tall gabled fronts,
and the red and green light of the lamps. From all the taverns, as we
passed, came the sound of music, singing, and revelry, with the clink of
glasses and the uplifting of voices thick with wine. There was the sound
of music and singing from the private houses. Everywhere
singing--everywhere joy and happiness. In the streets the very prentices
and their sweethearts danced, to the pipe and tabor, those figures
called the Brawl and the Canary, and better dancing, with greater spirit
and more fidelity to the steps, had I never before seen.
At last we stopped once more before the door of John Stow's house.
"Sir," he said, taking my hand, "the time has come to bid you farewell.
It has been a great honor--believe me--to converse with one of a
generation yet to come, and a great satisfaction to learn that my name
will live so long beside those of the poets of this noble age. Many
things there are into which I would fain have inquired. The looking into
futurity is an idle thing, yet I would fain have asked if you have put a
new steeple on Paul's; if you still suffer the desecration of that
place; if London will spread still more beyond her walls; if her trade
will still more increase; if the Spaniard will be always permitted to
hold the Continent of America; if the Pope will still be reigning; with
many other things. But you came this day to learn, and I to teach. When
next you come, suffer me in turn to put questions. And now, good sir,
farewell. Behold!" He raised his hands in admiration. "I have spent a
day--a whole day--with a man of the nineteenth century!! Bones a' me!!!"
So he went within and shut the door.
VIII
CHARLES THE SECOND
It is not proposed here to swell with any new groans the general chorus
of lamentation over the deplorable morals of King Charles's court. Let
us acknowledge that we want all the available groans for the deplorable
morals of our own time. Let us leave severely on one side Whitehall,
with the indolent king: his mistresses, his singing boys, his gaming
tables, his tinkling guitars, his feasting and his dancing. We will have
nothing whatever to do with Chiffinch and his friends, nor with
Rochester, nor with Nell Gwynne, nor with Old Rowley himself. Therefore,
of course, we can have nothing to do with Messrs. Wycherley, Congreve,
and company. It is, I know, the accepted excuse for these dramatists
that their characters are not men and women, but puppets. To my humble
thinking they are not puppets at all, but living and actual human
creatures--portraits of real men and women who haunted Whitehall. Let us
keep to the east of Temple Bar: hither come whispers, murmurs, rumors,
of sad doings at court: sober and grim citizens, still touched with the
Puritan spirit, speak of these rumors with sorrow and disappointment;
they had hoped better things after the ten years' exile, yet they knew
so little and were always ready to believe so well of the King--and his
Majesty was always so friendly to the City--that the reports remained
mere reports. It is really no use to keep a king unless you are able to
persuade yourself that he is wiser, nobler, more virtuous, braver, and
greater than ordinary mortals. Indeed, as the head and leader of the
nation, he is officially the wisest, noblest, bravest, best, and
greatest among us, and is so recognized in the Prayer-book. Even those
who are about the court, and therefore are so unhappy as to be convinced
of the exact contrary, do their best to keep up the illusion. The great
mass of mankind still continue to believe that moral and intellectual
superiority goes with the crown and belongs to the reigning sovereign.
The only change that has come over nations living under the monarchic
form of government as regards their view of kings is that they no longer
believe all this of the reigning sovereign's predecessor; as regards the
present occupant of the throne, of course. Are the citizens of a
republic similarly convinced as regards their President?
[Illustration: PALACE OF WHITEHALL IN THE REIGN OF JAMES II]
The evil example of the court, therefore, produced very little effect
upon the morals of the City. At first, indeed, the whole nation, tired
to death of grave faces, sober clothes, Puritanic austerity, godly talk,
downcast eyes, and the intolerable nuisance of talking and thinking
perpetually about the very slender chance of getting into heaven, rushed
into a reckless extreme of brave and even gaudy attire and generous
feasting, the twang of the guitar no longer prohibited, nor the singing
of love ditties, nor the dancing of the youths and maids forbidden.
Even this natural reaction affected only the young. The heart of the
City was, and remained for a hundred and fifty years afterwards, deeply
affected with the Puritanic spirit. It has been of late years the
fashion of the day--led by those who wish to saddle us again with
sacerdotalism--to scoff and laugh at this spirit. It has nearly
disappeared now, even in America; but we may see in it far more than
what has been called the selfish desire of each man to save his own
soul. We may see in it, especially, the spirit of personal
responsibility, the loss of which--if we ever do lose it, should
authority be able to reassert her old power--will be fatal to
intellectual or moral advance. Personal responsibility brings with it
personal dignity, enterprise, courage, patience, all the virtues. Only
that man who stands face to face with his Maker, with no authority
intervening, can be called free. But when the young men of the City had
had their fling, in the first rush and whirlpool of the Restoration,
they settled down soberly to business again. The foundation of the
Hudson's Bay Company proves that the Elizabethan spirit of enterprise
was by no means dead. The Institution of the Royal Society, which had
its first home in Gresham College, proves that the City thought of other
useful things besides money-getting. The last forty years of the
seventeenth century, however, might have been passed over as presenting
no special points of change, except in the gradual introduction of tea
and coffee. As London was in the time of Elizabeth, so it was, with a
few changes, in the time of Charles the Second. A little variation in
the costumes; a little alteration in the hour of dinner; a greatly
extended trade over a much wider world; and, in all other respects, the
same city.
Two events--two disasters--give special importance to this period. I
mean the Plague and the Fire.
The Plague was the twelfth of its kind which visited the City during a
period of seven hundred years. The twelfth and the last. Yet not the
worst. That of the year 1407 is said to have killed half the population:
that of 1517, if historians are to be believed in the matter of numbers,
which is seldom the case, killed more than half. Of all these plagues we
hear no more than the bare, dreadful fact, "Plague--so many thousands
killed." That is all that the chronicles tell us. Since there was no
contemporary historian we know nothing more. How many plagues have
fallen upon poor humanity, with countless tragedies and appalling
miseries, but with no historian? We know all about the Plague of Athens,
the Plague of Florence, the Plague of London--the words require no
dates--but what of the many other plagues?
The plague was no new thing; it was always threatening; it broke out on
board ship; it was carried about in bales; it was brought from the
Levant with the figs and the spices; some sailor was stricken with it;
reports were constantly flying about concerning it; now it was at
Constantinople; now at Amsterdam; now at Marseilles; now at Algiers;
everybody knew that it might come again at any time. But it delayed; the
years went on; there was no plague; the younger people ceased to dread
it. Then, like the Deluge, which may stand as the type of disaster long
promised and foretold, and not to be avoided, yet long delayed, it came
at last. And when it went away it had destroyed near upon a hundred
thousand people.
We read the marvellous history of the Plague as it presented itself to
the imagination of Daniel Defoe, who wrote fifty years after the event.
Nothing ever written in the English language holds the reader with such
a grip as his account of the Plague. It seems as if no one at the time
could have been able to speak or think of anything but the Plague; we
see the horror of the empty streets; we hear the cries and lamentations
of those who are seized and those who are bereaved. The cart comes
slowly along the streets with the man ringing a bell and crying, "Bring
out your dead! Bring out your dead!" We think of the great _fosses
communes_, the holes into which the dead were thrown in heaps and
covered with a little earth; we think of the grass growing in the
streets; the churches deserted; the clergymen basely flying; their
places taken by the ejected nonconformists who preach of repentance and
forgiveness--no time, this, for the Calvinist to number the Elect on his
ten fingers--to as many as dare assemble together; the roads black with
fugitives hurrying from the abode of Death; we hear the frantic mirth of
revellers snatching to-night a doubtful rapture, for to-morrow they die.
The City is filled with despair. We look into the pale faces of those
who venture forth; we hear the sighs of those who meet; nobody--nobody,
we imagine--can think of aught else than the immediate prospect of death
for himself and all he loves.
Pepys, however, who remained in the City most of the time, not only
notes down calmly the progress of the pestilence, but also allows us to
see the effect it produced on his own mind. It is very curious. He
reads the Bills of Mortality as they are published: he, as well as
Defoe, records the silent and deserted appearance of the town: he
confesses, now and then, that he is fearful; but his mind is all the
time entirely occupied with his own advancement and his own pleasures.
He feasts and drinks with his friends; he notes that "we were very
merry." Occasionally he betrays a little anxiety, but he is never
panic-stricken.
In the entry of September, when the Plague was at its height, and the
terror and misery of London at their worst, he writes: "To the Tower,
and there sent for the weekly Bill, and find 8252 dead in all, and of
these 6978 of the Plague, which is a most dreadful number and shows
reason to fear that the Plague hath got that hold that it will yet
continue among us. Thence to Branford, reading 'The Villaine,' a pretty
good play, all the way. There a coach of Mr. Povy's stood ready for me,
and he at his house ready to come in, and so we together merrily to
Swakely to Sir R. Viner." And the same week, hearing that Lord Sandwich
with the fleet had taken some prizes--"the receipt of this news did put
us all into an extasy of joy that it inspired into Sir J. Minner and Mr.
Evelyn such a spirit of mirth, that in all my life I never met with so
merry a two hours as our company this night was." Perhaps, however, this
excess of mirth was not due to insensibility, but was a natural reaction
from the gloom and terror that stalked the streets.
The summer of 1665 was curiously hot and dry. Every day a blue sky, a
scorching sun, and no breath of wind. If bonfires were kindled to purify
the air, the smoke ascended and hung overhead in a motionless cloud.
From May till September, no wind, no rain, no cloud, only perpetual
sunshine to mock the misery of the prostrate city.
At the first outbreak of the disease the people began to run away; the
roads were black with carts carrying their necessaries into the country;
the City clergy for the most part deserted their churches; physicians
ran from the disease they could not cure, pretending that they had to go
away with their patients; the Court left Whitehall; the Courts of
Justice were removed to Oxford. The Archbishop of Canterbury, however,
remained at Lambeth Palace, and the Duke of Albemarle and Lord Craven
remained in their town houses. And the Lord Mayor, Sir John Laurence,
ordered that the aldermen, sheriffs, common councilmen, and all
constables and officers of the City should remain at their posts.
As the Plague increased, business of all kinds was suspended; works were
closed; ships that arrived laden, went down the river again and across
to Amsterdam; ships that waited for their cargoes lay idle in the Pool
by hundreds; shops were shut; manufactories and industries of all kinds
were stopped.
Consider what this means. London was not only a city of foreign trade
and a great port, but a city, also, of many industries. It made an
enormous quantity of things; the very livelihood of the City was derived
from its trade and its industries. These once stopped, the City
perished. We have seen how the Roman Augusta decayed and died. The
people had no longer any trade or any work, or any food. Therefore, the
City died. The same thing, from different causes, happened again. Trade
and work were suspended. Therefore, the people began to starve.
[Illustration: HUNGERFORD MARKET]
Defoe, in his cataloguing way, which is the surest way of bringing a
thing home to every one's understanding, enumerates all the different
trades thrown out of work. That is to say, he catalogues all the trades
of London. Let it be understood that the population of London was then
about 350,000. This means about 100,000 working men of sixteen and
upward. All these craftsmen, living from week to week upon their wages,
with nothing saved, were turned out of employment almost at the same
time--they and their families left to starve. Not only this, but clerks,
book-keepers, serving-men, footmen, maid-servants, and apprentices were
all turned into the streets together. Add to this the small shopkeepers
and retailers of every kind, who live by their daily or weekly takings,
and we shall have a population of a quarter of a million to keep.
The Lord Mayor, assisted by the Archbishop and the two lords, Albemarle
and Craven, began and maintained a service of relief for these starving
multitudes. The King sent a thousand pounds a week; the City gave six
hundred pounds a week; merchants and rich people sent thousands every
week; it is said that a hundred thousand pounds a week was contributed;
this seems too great a sum--yet a whole city out of work! Employment was
found for some of the men as constables, drivers of the carts that
carried the dead to the burial-places, and so forth--and for the women
as nurses. And, thanks to the Mayor's exertions, there was a plentiful
supply of provisions during the whole time.
[Illustration: CHEAPSIDE]
The disease continued to spread. It was thought that dogs and cats
carried about infection. All those in the City were slaughtered. They
even tried, for the same reason, to poison the rats and mice, but
apparently failed. The necessity of going to market was a great source
of danger; people were warned to lift their meat off the counter by iron
hooks. Many families isolated themselves. The journal of one such
household remains. The household, which lived in Wood Street, Cheapside,
consisted of the master, a wholesale grocer, his wife, five children,
two maid-servants, two apprentices, a porter, and a boy. He sent the boy
to his friends in the country; he gave the elder apprentice the rest of
his time; and he stationed his porter, Abraham, outside his door, there
to sit night and day. Every window was closed, and nothing suffered to
enter the house except at one upper window, which was opened to admit
necessaries, but only with fumigation of gunpowder. At first the Plague,
while it raged about Holborn, Fleet Street, and the Strand, came not
within the City. This careful man, however, fully expected it, and when
it did appear in July he locked himself up for good. Then they knew
nothing except what the porter told them, and what they read in the
Bills of Mortality. But all day long the knell never ceased to toll.
Very soon all the houses in the street were infected and visited except
their own. And when every day, and all day long, he heard nothing but
bad news, growing daily worse, and when every night he heard the dismal
bell and the rumbling of the dead cart, and the voice of the bellman
crying, "Bring out your dead!" he began to give up all for lost. First,
however, he made arrangements for the isolation of any one who should be
seized. Three times a day they held a service of prayer; twice a week
they observed a day of fasting; one would think that this maceration of
the flesh was enough in itself to invite the Plague. Every morning the
father rose early and went round to each chamber door asking how its
inmates fared. When they replied "Well," he answered "Give God thanks."
Outside, Abraham sat all day long, hearing from every passer-by the news
of the day, which grew more and more terrifying, and passing it on to
the upper window, where it was received with a fiery fumigation. One day
Abraham came not. But his wife came. "Abraham," she said, "died of the
Plague this morning, and as for me, I have it also, and I am going home
to die. But first I will send another man to take my husband's place."
So the poor faithful woman crept home and died, and that night with her
husband was thrown into a great pit with no funeral service except the
cursing and swearing of the rough fellows who drove the cart. The other
man came, but in a day or two he also sickened and died. Then they had
no porter and no way of communicating with the outer world. They
remained prisoners, the whole family, with the two maids, for five long
months. I suppose they must have devised some necessary communication
with the outer world, or they would have starved.
Presently the Plague began to decrease; its fury was spent. But it was
not until the first week of December that this citizen ventured forth.
Then he took all his family to Tottenham for a change of air. One would
think they needed it after this long confinement, and the monotony of
their prison fare.
By this time the people were coming back fast--too fast; because their
return caused a fresh outbreak. Then there was a grand conflagration of
everything which might harbor the plague--curtains, sheets, blankets,
hangings, stuffs, clothes--whatever there was in which the accursed
thing might linger. And every house in which a case had occurred was
scoured and whitewashed, while the church-yards were all covered with
fresh earth at least a foot thick.
All this is a twice-told tale. But some tales may be told again and
again. Consider, for instance, apart from the horror of this mighty
pestilence, the loss and injury inflicted upon the City. If it is true
that a hundred thousand perished, about half of them would be the
craftsmen, the skilled workmen who created most of the wealth of London.
How to replace these men? They could never be replaced.
Consider, again, that London was the great port for the reception and
transmission of all the goods in the whole country. The stoppage of
trade in London meant the stoppage of trade over the whole land. The
cloth-makers of the West, the iron-founders, the colliers, the tin
mines, the tanners, all were stopped, all were thrown out of work.
[Illustration: FLEET STREET]
Again, consider the ruin of families. How many children of flourishing
master-workmen, tradesmen, and merchants were reduced to poverty by the
death of the father, and suddenly lowered to the level of working-men,
happy if they were still young enough to learn a craft? How many lost
their credit in the general stoppage of business? How many fortunes were
cast away when no debts could be collected, and when the debtors
themselves were all destroyed? And in cases when children were too young
to protect themselves, how many were plundered of everything when their
parents were dead?
Defoe, writing what he had learned by conversation with those who could
remember this evil time, speaks of strange extravagances on the part of
those who were infected. Very likely there were such things. Not,
however, that they were common, as his story would have us believe. I
prefer the picture of the imprisoned citizen, which represents a city
sitting in sorrowful silence, the people crouching in their houses in
silence or in prayer, gazing helpless upon each other, while the blue
sky and the hot sun look down upon them, and the Plague grows busier
every day.
When it abated at last, and the runaways went back to town, Pepys among
them, he notes the amazing number of beggars. These poor creatures were
the widows or children of the craftsmen, or the craftsmen themselves
whose ruin we have just noted.
This was in January. The Plague, however, dragged on. In the week ending
March 1, 1666, there were forty-two deaths from it. In the month of July
it was still present in London, and reported to be raging at Colchester.
In August, Pepys finds the house of one of his friends in Fenchurch
Street shut up with the Plague, and it was said to be as bad as ever at
Greenwich. This was the last entry about it, because in a week or two
there was to happen an event of even greater importance than this great
Plague.