PLAGUE, FEVER AND INFLUENZA FROM THE ACCESSION OF THE STUART DYNASTY TO
THE RESTORATION.
The last period of plague in England, from 1603 to its extinction in 1666,
was as fatal as any that the capital, and the provincial towns, had known
since the 14th century. The mortalities in London in 1603, 1625, and 1665
are the greatest in the whole history of the City’s epidemics, not,
perhaps, relatively to the population, but in absolute numbers. The
capital was growing rapidly, having now become the greatest trading
community in Europe. The dangers which were foreseen in the proclamation
of 1580, of an extension of the City’s borders beyond civic control, had
been realized. The old walled city, like Vienna down to a quite recent
date, remained both the residential quarter and the centre of trade and
commerce: the original suburbs, which were in the Liberties or Freedom of
the City, were the slums--the fringe of poverty covered by the poorest
class of tenements, unpaved and without regular streets, but penetrated by
alleys twisting and turning in an endless maze. The City was not, indeed,
without a good deal of building of the same class, especially in the
parish of St Stephen, Coleman Street, the most populous parish within the
walls. But what was an occasional thing in the City where gardens and
other open spaces had been built upon, was the rule in the parishes beyond
the walls. It was in the Liberties and outparishes that the plague of 1603
began; its origin in 1625 is less certain; but there can be no question
as to the gradual progress of the Great Plague of 1665 from the west end
of the town down Holborn and the Strand to the City, to the great parishes
on the north-east and east, and across the water to Southwark. From one
point of view we may represent the later plagues as incidents in the
transition from the medieval to the modern state of the capital--a
transition which proceeded slowly and is still unfinished so far as
concerns the forms of municipal government. The history of the public
health of London is, for nearly two centuries, the history of irregular
and uncontrolled expansion, of the failure of old municipal institutions
to overtake new duties. Perhaps if Wren’s grand conception of a New London
after the fire of 1666 had been taken up and given effect to by Charles
II., the Liberties and suburbs might have been joined more organically to
the centre and have benefited by the municipal traditions of the latter.
The history of the public health in London during the latter part of the
17th century and the whole of the 18th might in that case have been a less
melancholy record. That history falls within our next volume; but as it
began with the expansion of London under Elizabeth and the Stuarts, this
is the place to review the growth of the City from the time when it broke
through its medieval limits.
The Growth of London in the Tudor and Stuart Periods[919].
The accession of James I. to the English crown in 1603 corresponds in time
with the pretensions of London to be the first city in Europe. “London,”
says Dekker, in _The Wonderfull Yeare_, “was never in the highway to
preferment till now. For she saw herself in better state than Jerusalem,
she went more gallant than ever did Antwerp, was more courted by amorous
and lustie suitors than Venice (the minion of Italy); more lofty towers
stood about her temples than ever did about the beautiful forehead of
Rome; Tyre and Sydon to her were like two thatcht houses to Theobals, the
grand Cairo but a hogsty.” That is, of course, in Dekker’s manner; but it
can be shown by figures that London took a great start in the end of
Elizabeth’s reign and grew still faster under James.
From Richard I. to Henry VII., London was the medieval walled city, as
Drayton says, “built on a rising bank within a vale to stand,” with a
population between 40,000 and 50,000. Without the walls lay a few city
parishes or parts of parishes, including the three dedicated to St Botolph
outside Aldgate, Bishopsgate and Aldersgate, respectively, and St Giles’s
without Cripplegate, all of these being at the gates or close to the
walls. On the western side, however, lay an extensive but sparsely
populated suburb, which was erected in 1393 into the Ward of Farringdon
Without; it extended westward from the city wall as far as Temple Bar,
Holborn Bars and West Smithfield, and was divided into the four great
parishes of St Sepulchre’s without Newgate; St Andrew’s, on the other side
of Holborn valley, St Dunstan’s in the West (about Chancery Lane and
Fetter Lane), and St Bride’s, Fleet Street.
The earliest known bills of mortality, in 1532 and 1535, from which a
population of some 62,400 might be deduced, show that the St Botolph
parishes, St Giles’s without Cripplegate and the four great parishes in
the western Liberties (or, more correctly, in the ward of Farringdon
Without) had one-third of the whole deaths, and presumably about one-third
of the whole population. In the few memoranda left of the plague-bills of
1563, we find evidence that the population had increased to some 93,276,
of which about a sixth or seventh part, or some 12,000 to 15,000 was in
the “out-parishes,” or in the parishes not only beyond the walls, but
beyond the Bars of the Freedom. The most valuable series of statistics for
Elizabethan London are those which give the christenings and burials for
five years from 1578 to 1582; from those of the year 1580, which was
almost free from the disturbing element of plague, a population of some
123,034 may be deduced by taking the birth-rate at 29 per 1000 living and
the death-rate at 23 per 1000, or in each case at a favourable rate
corresponding to the large excess of births over deaths.
There is not enough left of the introduction to these old manuscript
abstracts of weekly births and deaths to show how many parishes they
relate to, or what is the proportion for each division of the capital.
But, as the earlier series of bills of mortality from 1563 to 1566
included the City, the Liberties and the out-parishes, it is probable that
the series from 1578 to 1582 had done the same. The crowding of the
Liberties with a poor class of tenements, and the extension of the
out-parishes, are otherwise known from the preamble to the proclamation of
1580, which prohibited all building on new sites within three miles of the
City wall. The next figures are for the years 1593, 1594, and 1595, which
show a population increased to about 152,000.
From the figures of the plague-year, 1593, it appears that the mortality
within the walls, both from plague and from ordinary causes, had now
become the smaller half, or somewhat less than that “without the walls and
in the Liberties,”--a phrase which is used loosely, even in some official
bills, for both Liberties and suburbs. In 1604 we have the exact
proportions of deaths in the City, in the Liberties and in the
out-parishes respectively:
|96 parishes |16 parishes |8 parishes out| Total
|within walls|in Liberties|of the Freedom|
--------------|------------|------------|--------------|------
All deaths | 1798 | 2465 | 956 | 5219
Plague deaths | 280 | 368 | 248 | 896
Christenings | -- | -- | -- | 5458
The sixteen parishes of the Liberties are now decidedly ahead of the
ninety-six old City parishes, while the eight out-parishes have some 18
per cent. of the whole mortality. The population is best reckoned from the
6504 baptisms of the year after, 1605, by which time the disturbance of
the enormous mortality in 1603 had ceased to be felt; at a birth-rate of
29 per 1000, the population would be some 224,275. The proportions in
1605, from the bills of mortality for the year, are 33·8 per cent. in the
City, 50 per cent. in the Liberties, and 16·2 per cent. in the
out-parishes; so that the City would have contained in that year about
76,000, the Liberties about 114,000, and the out-parishes about 37,000. To
those numbers we should have to add some 20,000 or 30,000 for
Westminster, Stepney, Lambeth, Newington, etc.
According to Graunt’s contemporary estimate for 1662, the population had
grown to 460,000, or to rather more than double that of 1605; and whereas
the proportion in 1605 was two-sixths in the City, three-sixths in the
Liberties and one-sixth in the out-parishes, he makes it in 1662 to have
been one-fifth in the City, three-fifths in the Liberties (including
Southwark) and the out-parishes nearest to the Bars, and one-fifth in the
out-parishes of Stepney, Redriff, Newington, Lambeth, Islington and
Hackney, with the city of Westminster. Thus, whereas in 1535 the City had
two-thirds of the whole estimated population, in 1662 it had one-fifth;
but with its one-fifth in 1662 it was twice as crowded as with its
two-thirds in 1535, the comparatively open appearance given to it by
gardens in various localities, as on Tower Hill, having entirely gone.
As early as the plague of 1563, the Liberties were observed to be first
infected, and to retain the infection longest; that is alleged of St
Sepulchre’s parish by Dr John Jones, from personal knowledge. The history
of the plague of 1593 is imperfectly known; but it is clear from Stow’s
summation of the deaths during the year, that more died of plague in the
Liberties and suburbs than in the City. Of the next plague, that of 1603,
we know that it did begin in the Liberties and was prevalent in those
skirts of the City for some time before it entered the gates. “Death,”
says _The Wonderfull Yeare_, “had pitcht his tents in the sinfully
polluted suburbs ... the skirts of London were pitifully pared off by
little and little; which they within the gates perceiving,” etc. Then the
plague, represented as an invading force, “entered within the walls and
marched through Cheapside,” the wealthier inhabitants having escaped
meanwhile.
The London Plague of 1603.
The most useful document for the London plague of 1603 is a printed Bill
of Mortality which is in the Guildhall Library. The bill, which is in the
form of a broadside, is for the week 13-20 October, and purports to be a
true copy, according to the report made to the king by the Company of
Parish Clerks, and printed by John Winder, printer to the honourable City
of London[920]. It is necessary to be thus particular, because the clerk
of the Company of Parish Clerks in the end of 1665 (between the Plague and
the Fire) published an account of all the statistics of former plagues
preserved in his office, and emphatically denied that the Parish Clerks
gave in an accompt for the year 1603; they did not resume their series
after 1595, he says, until 29th December, 1603. But the clerk was
mistaken, as even the most prim of officials will sometimes be. The
printed bill which has come down to us gives the usual weekly return of
deaths from all causes in one column and those from plague in another, for
each of the 96 parishes within their walls, each of the 16 parishes in the
Liberties and each of 8 out-parishes. On the right hand margin it gives
also a summary statement of the deaths in “the first great plague in our
memory” that of 1563, which is the same as in Stow’s _Annales_, and of the
deaths in the next great plague, that of 1593, which differs considerably
from Stow’s. It then goes on to give the sum of the figures of the year
1603 from 17th December, 1602, and carries the deaths per week from 21st
July down to date, the 20th of October, adding some information for the
parishes which kept separate bills, namely, Westminster, the Savoy,
Stepney, Newington Butts, Islington, Lambeth and Hackney. This extant
weekly bill was probably one of a series; for Graunt, in his book of 1662,
cites various figures of weekly baptisms throughout the year 1603 which
would appear to have been taken from the bills for the respective weeks.
But the returns had not been made regularly from all the parishes within
the Bills from the beginning of the year 1603. The reason why the weekly
figures are not recapitulated farther back than the week ending July 21,
is that the outparishes had not sent in their returns until that week.
From another source, we know the figures for the City and Liberties from
March 10 to July 14, and from the same source we obtain the totals for all
parishes within the Bills from October 19 to the end of the year. By
putting these figures into one table, we may represent the mortality of
1603, not indeed completely, as follows:
_Weekly Mortalities in London during the plague of 1603._
----------------------------------------------------------
| City and |
| Liberties. | Out parishes. | Totals.
Week |---------------|---------------|---------------
ending | All | | All | | All |
|causes.|Plague.|causes.|Plague.|causes.|Plague.
----------|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------
March 17 | 108 | 3 | | | |
24 | 60 | 2 | | | |
31 | 78 | 6 | | | |
April 7 | 66 | 4 | | | |
14 | 79 | 4 | | | |
21 | 98 | 8 | | | |
28 | 109 | 10 | | | |
May 5 | 90 | 11 | | | |
12 | 112 | 18 | | | |
19 | 122 | 22 | | | |
26 | 112 | 30 | | | |
June 2 | 114 | 30 | | | |
9 | 134 | 43 | | | |
15 | 144 | 59 | | | |
23 | 182 | 72 | | | |
30 | 267 | 158 | | | |
July 7 | 445 | 263 | | | |
14 | 612 | 424 | | | |
21 | 867 | 646 | 319 | 271 | 1186 | 917
28 | 1312 | 1025 | 398 | 354 | 1710 | 1379
Aug. 4 | 1700 | 1439 | 537 | 464 | 2237 | 1901
11 | 1655 | 1372 | 410 | 361 | 2065 | 1733
18 | 2486 | 2199 | 568 | 514 | 3054 | 2713
25 | 2343 | 2091 | 510 | 448 | 2853 | 2539
Sept. 1 | 2798 | 2495 | 587 | 542 | 3385 | 3037
8 | 2583 | 2283 | 495 | 441 | 3078 | 2724
15 | 2676 | 2411 | 433 | 407 | 3109 | 2818
22 | 2080 | 1851 | 376 | 344 | 2456 | 2195
29 | 1666 | 1478 | 295 | 254 | 1961 | 1732
Oct. 6 | 1528 | 1367 | 306 | 274 | 1834 | 1641
13 | 1109 | 962 | 203 | 184 | 1312 | 1146
20 | 647 | 546 | 119 | 96 | 766 | 642
27 | | | | | 625 | 508
Nov. 3 | | | | | 737 | 594
10 | | | | | 545 | 442
17 | | | | | 384 | 257
24 | | | | | 198 | 105
Dec. 1 | | | | | 223 | 102
8 | | | | | 163 | 55
15 | | | | | 200 | 96
22 | | | | | 168 | 74
----------------------------------------------------------
These figures may be accepted as real, so far as they go; and they give a
total (37,192 from all causes, whereof of the plague, 30,519) which is
nearly the same as that usually taken, e.g. by Graunt, for the mortality
of the whole year in all London (37,294 from all causes, whereof of the
plague, 30,561). But it is clear that important additions have to be made.
In the first place, no deaths are included for the weeks previous to March
10. In the second place, no deaths are included from the out-parishes
(within the Bills), previous to July 14. In the third place, no deaths at
all are included from Westminster, Stepney, Newington, Lambeth, etc. These
omissions have to be kept in mind when the plague of 1603 is compared with
those of 1625 and 1665, for which the figures are fully ascertained; and
we possess various data from which to supply them approximately. One great
addition, with nothing conjectural in it, is for the seven parishes
outside the general bill of mortality, Stepney being the largest: they
kept their own bills, and the figures from them, for the principal part of
the year, are given on the margin of the broadside, as quoted below[921].
Another unconjectural addition is the mortality from all causes in the
City and Liberties from December 17, 1602, to March 10, 1603, which was
1375, having been mostly non-plague deaths. All these deaths, actually
known, bring the total for the year up to 42,945 whereof of the plague
about 33,347. The farther additions, which can only be guessed, are the
mortality from all causes in the eight out-parishes (within the Bills)
previous to July 14, and the mortality in the seven other suburban
localities (Westminster, Stepney, etc.) before and after the dates stated
in the note for each. Only the former of these additions would have been a
considerable figure, the plague being already at 271 deaths a week when
the reckoning begins. Thus the totals, 42,945 burials from all causes, and
from plague alone, 33,347, are well within the reality.
Some details are extant of the incidence of the disease in particular
parishes at certain dates. Thus, in the great parish of Stepney, which
extended from Shoreditch to Blackwall, 650 plague-deaths, and 24 from
other causes, took place in the single month of September; so that, if the
plague began in Stepney about the 25th of March, it had not come to a head
until autumn. In St Giles’s Cripplegate, the burials entered in the parish
register for the whole year are 2879, the highest mortality having been in
the beginning of September, when the burials on three successive days were
36, 26 and 26[922]. In the week 13 to 20 October, for which the printed
bill is extant, the proportions of the City, Liberties and 8 out-parishes
respectively were, for the week, 351, 296, and 119. Of the parishes
without the walls, the most infected were, in their order at that date, St
Sepulchre’s, St Saviour’s, Southwark, St Andrew’s, Holborn, St Giles’s,
Cripplegate, St Clement’s Danes, St Giles’s in the Fields, St Olave’s,
Southwark, St Martin’s in the Fields, St Mary’s, Whitechapel and St
Leonard’s, Shoreditch. For St Olave’s, Southwark, we have some particulars
of the plague from the minister of the parish.
In a dialogue conveying various instructions on the plague[923], to his
parishioners of St Olave’s, James Bamford states that 2640 had died in
that parish from May 7 to the date of writing (October 13), and that the
burials had fallen from 305 in a week to 51, and from 57 in a day to 4. St
Olave’s was a typical parish of the new London. It extended eastwards
along the Surrey bank of the river from London Bridge, and had been
almost all built within the half-century since the purchase of the Borough
of Southwark by the City from the Crown in 1550. In Stow’s _Survey_ of
1598 the parish is thus described: “Then from the bridge along by the
Thames eastward is St Olave’s Street, having continual building on both
the sides, with lanes and alleys, up to Battle Bridge, to Horsedown and
towards Rotherhithe some good half mile in length from London Bridge”--the
Bermondsey High Street running south from the Horsleydown end of it. St
Olave’s Church, he continues, stood on the bank of the river, “a fair and
meet large church, but a far larger parish, especially of aliens or
strangers, and poor people.” A mansion of former times, St Leger House,
was now “divided into sundry tenements.” Over against the church, the
great house that was once the residence of the prior of Lewes, was now the
Walnut Tree inn, a common hostelry.
London was now so extensive in area that it becomes of interest to know in
what part of it the plague broke out, and in what course the infection
proceeded. These things are known for the plague of 1665; but for that of
1603 they cannot be ascertained precisely. Dekker is emphatic that it
began in the suburbs. The earliest reference to it in the State papers is
under the date of April 18, when the Lord Mayor wrote to the Lord
Treasurer to inform him of the steps taken to prevent the spread of the
plague in the counties of Middlesex and Surrey. “The parishes in Middlesex
and Surrey” was an expression which afterwards came to mean a group of
twelve out-parishes beyond the Bars of the Freedom, including St Giles’s
in the Fields, Lambeth, Newington and Bermondsey, Stepney, Whitechapel,
Shoreditch and Clerkenwell, Islington, Hackney and two others. The phrase
used by the mayor may not have had so definite a meaning in 1603, but he
can hardly have intended it to apply to the City and Liberties of London,
although those were the only divisions of the capital directly under his
own jurisdiction. The parish which is associated with the earliest date,
in the summary of the epidemic in the broadside of 1603, is Stepney, where
the record of deaths from plague and other causes begins from 25th March.
It would perhaps be safe to conclude that the plague of 1603 began at the
extreme east in Stepney, as that of 1665 certainly did at the extreme west
in St Giles’s in the Fields.
An examination of the Table shows that the eight out-parishes had reached
a higher plague mortality relative to their population on July 21, than
the parishes within the bars of the Freedom: but the maximum of deaths
falls in both divisions about the same week. We may take it that the
plague broke out in one of the suburbs; and as Dekker speaks of the flight
having been westwards, the evidence points on the whole to an eastern
suburb, perhaps Whitechapel or Stepney. March is clearly indicated by
various things as a time when plague-deaths began to attract notice; and
that date of commencement is corroborated by the following passage from
the essay of Graunt, based, it would seem, upon a series of weekly
bills:--
“We observe as followeth, viz. First, that (when from December 1602 to
March following there was little or no plague) then the christenings at a
medium were between 110 and 130 per week, few weeks being above the one or
below the other; but when the plague increased from thence to July, that
then the christenings decreased to under 90.... (3) Moreover we observe
that from the 21st July to the 12th October, the plague increasing reduced
the christenings to 70 at a medium. Now the cause of this must be flying,
and death of teeming women” &c.--the total christenings of the year 1603
having been only 4789, as against some 6000 in the year before the plague,
and 5458 in the year after it.
This prevalence of plague in the suburbs and liberties of the City in the
spring of 1603 coincides with great political events. Queen Elizabeth died
at Richmond on the 24th of March, and was buried at Westminster on the
28th of April; according to Dekker, “never did the English nation behold
so much black worn as there was at her funeral.” The approach of king
James from Scotland appears to have caused an outburst of gaiety, his
accession to the crown, according to the same writer, having led to a
marked revival of trade: “Trades that lay dead and rotten started out of
their trance.... There was mirth in everyone’s face, the streets were
filled with gallants, tabacconists filled up whole taverns, vintners hung
out spick and span new ivy-bushes (because they wanted good wine), and
their old rain-beaten lattices marched under other colours, having lost
both company and colour before.” James made a slow progress from Scotland,
paying visits on the way. He arrived at Theobalds, near Cheshunt, on the
3rd of May, and was at Greenwich before the end of the month. On May 29, a
proclamation was issued commanding gentlemen to depart the court and city
on account of the plague. On June 23, the remainder of Trinity law term
was adjourned. On July 10, a letter (one of the series between J.
Chamberlain and Dudley Carleton) says: “Paul’s grows very thin [the church
aisles where people were wont to meet to exchange news], for every man
shrinks away. Our pageants are pretty forward, but most of them are such
small-timbered gentlemen that they cannot last long, and I doubt, if the
plague cease not sooner, they will riot and sink where they stand.” The
Coronation was shorn of its full splendour. On July 18, it was announced
that, as the king could not pass through the City--the traditional route
being from the Tower to Westminster--all the customary services by the way
are to be performed between Westminster Bridge and the Abbey. The
ceremony, thus shortened, took place on July 25. On August 8, it was
ordered that all fairs within fifty miles of London should be suspended,
the more important being Bartholomew fair at Smithfield, and Stourbridge
fair near Cambridge. The new Spanish ambassador was unable to approach the
king, who moved from place to place,--Hampton Court, Woodstock and
Southampton.
These are the traces left by this great epidemic in the state papers of
the time. As in the case of the sweating sickness of 1485, which was in
London while the preparations were going on for Henry VII.’s coronation,
we should hardly have known from public documents that the City was in a
state of panic. But in 1603 we are come to a period when other sources of
information are available. It remains to put together what descriptions
have come down to us of the City of the Plague.
The most graphic touches are those left by Thomas Dekker, the dramatist,
of whom it has been said that “he knew London as well as Dickens[924].”
To describe first the condition of the “sinfully polluted suburbs,” he
takes a walk through the still and melancholy streets in the dead hours of
the night. He hears from every house the loud groans of raving sick men,
the struggling pangs of souls departing, grief striking an alarum,
servants crying out for masters, wives for husbands, parents for children,
children for their mothers. Here, he meets some frantically running to
knock up sextons; there, others fearfully sweating with coffins, to steal
forth dead bodies lest the fatal handwriting of death should seal up their
houses. This would have been an evasion of the order, dating from 1547,
that no bodies were to be buried between six in the evening and six in the
morning--an order which was exactly reversed in the plague of 1665.
When morning comes, a hundred hungry graves stand gaping, and everyone of
them, as at a breakfast, hath swallowed down ten or eleven lifeless
carcases; before dinner, in the same gulf are twice so many more devoured,
and before the sun takes his rest these numbers are doubled,--threescore
bodies lying slovenly tumbled together in a muck-pit[925]! One gruesome
story he tells of a poor wretch in the Southwark parish of St Mary Overy,
who was thrown for dead upon a heap of bodies in the morning, and in the
afternoon was found gasping and gaping for life. Others were thrust out of
doors by cruel masters, to die in the fields and ditches, or in the common
cages or under stalls. A boy sick of the plague was put on the water in a
wherry to come ashore wherever he could, but landing was denied him by an
army of brown-bill men that kept the shore, so that he had to be taken
whence he came to die in a cellar. The sextons made their fortunes,
especially those of St Giles’s, Cripplegate, of St Sepulchre’s, outside
Newgate, of St Olave’s in Southwark, of St Clement’s at Temple Bar, and
of Stepney. Herb-wives and gardeners also prospered; the price of flowers,
herbs, and garlands rose wonderfully, insomuch that rosemary, which had
wont to be sold for twelve pence an armful, went now for six shillings a
handful.
While plague was thus raging in the poor skirts of the City, “paring them
off by little and little,” the well-to-do within the walls took alarm and
fled, “some riding, some on foot, some without boots, some in slippers, by
water, by land, swarm they westwards. Hackneys, watermen and waggons were
not so terribly employed many a year; so that within a short time there
was not a good horse in Smithfield, nor a coach to be set eyes on.” But
they might just as well have remained as trust themselves to the
“unmerciful hands of the country hard-hearted hobbinolls.” The sight of a
Londoner’s flat-cap was dreadful to a lob: a treble ruff threw a whole
village into a sweat. A crow that had been seen on a sunshiny day standing
on the top of Powles would have been better than a beacon on fire, to have
raised all the towns within ten miles of London for the keeping her out.
One Londoner set out for Bristol, thinking not to see his home again this
side Christmas. But forty miles from town the plague came upon him, and he
sought entrance to an inn. When his case was known, the doors of the inn
“had their wooden ribs crushed to pieces by being beaten together; the
casements were shut more close than an usurer’s greasy velvet pouch; the
drawing windows were hanged, drawn, and quartered; not a crevice but was
stopt, not a mouse-hole left open.” The host and hostess tumbled over each
other in their flight, the maids ran out into the orchard, the tapster
into the cellar. The unhappy Londoner was helped by a fellow-citizen who
appeared on the scene, and was carried to die on a truss of straw in the
corner of a field; but the parson and the clerk refused him burial, and he
was laid in a hole where he had died. According to Stow, Bamford, and
Davies of Hereford, such experiences of fugitive Londoners were repeated
everywhere in the country, and Dekker gives several other tales of the
same sort “to shorten long winter nights.”
Meanwhile, Dekker goes on, the plague had entered the gates of the City
and marched through Cheapside; men, women, and children dropped down
before him, houses were rifled, streets ransacked, rich men’s coffers
broken open and shared amongst prodigal heirs and unworthy servants. Every
house looked like St Bartholomew’s Hospital and every street like
Bucklersbury: (“the whole street called Bucklersbury,” says Stow, “on both
sides throughout is possessed of grocers, and apothecaries towards the
west end thereof”), for poor Mithridaticum and Dragon-water were bought in
every corner, and yet were both drunk every hour at other men’s cost. “I
could make your cheeks look pale and your hearts shake with telling how
some have had eighteen sores at one time running upon them, others ten or
twelve, many four and five; and how those that have been four times
wounded by this year’s infection have died of the last wound, while
others, hurt as often, are now going about whole.” Funerals followed so
close that three thousand mourners went as if trooping together, with rue
and wormwood stuffed into their ears and nostrils, looking like so many
boars’ heads stuck with branches of rosemary. A dying man was visited by a
friendly neighbour, who promised to order the coffin; but he died himself
an hour before his infected friend. A churchwarden in Thames Street, on
being asked for space in the churchyard, answered mockingly that he wanted
it for himself, and he did occupy it in three days.
One more extract from Dekker will bring us back to the strictly medical
history:
“Never let any man ask me what became of our Phisitions in this
massacre. They hid their synodical heads as well as the proudest, and
I cannot blame them, for their phlebotomies, losinges and electuaries,
with their diacatholicons, diacodions, amulets and antidotes, had not
so much strength to hold life and soul together as a pot of Pinder’s
ale and a nutmeg. Their drugs turned to durt, their simples were
simple things. Galen could do no more good than Sir Giles Goosecap.
Hippocrate, Avicen, Paracelsus, Rasis, Fernelius, with all their
succeeding rabble of doctors and water-casters, were at their wits’
end; for not one of them durst peep abroad.”
Only a band of desperadoes, he goes on, some few empirical madcaps--for
they could never be worth velvet caps--clapped their bills upon every
door. But besides the empirical desperadoes, who dared the infection for
the sake of the golden harvest, some few physicians and surgeons remained
at their post, or at least put out essays with prescriptions and rules of
regimen. Three such books on the plague were published in London in 1603,
of which the most notable was one by Dr Thomas Lodge[926], a poet like
Dekker himself, but of the academical school to which Dekker did not
belong. The passage quoted about the impotence of the faculty is perhaps
aimed at these books, which all abound with the sayings and maxims of
Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and the like, Lodge also quoting the more
obscure name of Fernelius, which Dekker has not failed to seize upon.
Lodge confirms the statement about the empirical desperadoes clapping
their bills upon every post. One of them, “who underwrit not his bills,”
posted them close to Lodge’s house in Warwick Lane, so that the physician
was taken by the populace to be himself the advertiser. He was besieged
with applicants for his cordial waters, and wrote his book to make his own
position clear, being “aggrieved because of that loathsome imposition
which was laid upon me to make myself vendible (which is unworthy a
liberal and gentle mind, much more ill-beseeming a physician and
philosopher), who ought not to prostitute so sacred a profession so
abjectly.” Farther confirming Dekker about the greed of the quacks as well
as about the strictly business-like attitude of the regular profession, he
speaks of “my poor countrymen left without guide or counsel how to succour
themselves in extremity; for where the infection most rageth, there
poverty reigneth among the commons, which, having no supplies to satisfy
the greedy desires of those that should attend them, are for the most part
left desolate to die without relief.” The reader must wonder, he says,
“why, amongst so many excellent and learned physicians of this city, I
alone have undertaken to answer the expectation of the multitude, and to
bear the heavy burthen of contentious critiques and depravers.” The
explanation was that the regular faculty had for the most part gone out of
town, along with magistrates, ministers and rich men. Bamford, the
minister of St Olave’s, Southwark, who remained at his post, has no excuse
to offer for magistrates or for his clerical brethren, but he is extremely
fair to the doctors: “As for physicians, I only propound this question:
Whether they be bound in conscience to be resident, in regard of their
profession and ability to do good, or they may use their liberty for
themselves and (as they think) for their lives, in regard they are no
public persons and live (not by a common stipend but) by what they can
get.”
Dr Lodge, who dated his book from Warwick Lane on August 19, or when the
epidemic would have been at its height, had already won laurels in the
field of poetry and romance. He was an Oxonian (Trinity College, 1573) and
one of a set with Marlowe and Greene. “At length his mind growing
serious,” says Anthony Wood, “he studied physic,” travelling abroad for
the purpose and graduating M.D. at Avignon. He had great success in
practice, especially among Catholics, to whom he was suspected of
belonging. He died of the plague, during the next great epidemic of 1625,
at Low Leyton in Essex. His book on the plague would be entitled to a
place in medical literature if only that its style is above the average of
medical compositions. I cannot forbear quoting the following collect for
its structure and euphony:
“But before I prosecute this my intended purpose, let us invocate and
call upon that divine bounty, from whose fountain head of mercy every
good and gracious benefit is derived, that it will please him to
assist this my labor and charitable intent, and so to order the scope
of my indevour, that it may redound to his eternal glory, our
neighbours’ comfort, and the special benefit of our whole country;
which, being now under the fatherly correction of Almighty God, and
punished for our misdeeds by his heavy hand, may through the admirable
effects and fruits of the sacred art of physic, receive prevention of
their danger, and comfort in this desperate time of visitation. To him
therefore, King of kings, invisible and only wise, be all honor,
majesty and dominion, now and for ever. Amen.”
It is only in dealing with the more public aspects of the plague that
Lodge shows any individuality. So far as concerns causes,
prognostications, symptoms, remedies, preventives, and precautions, there
is little in his essay which is not to be found in the older plague-books,
such as the 14th century one of the bishop of Aarhus, his anatomical
directions for blood-letting being word for word the same as the bishop’s.
Some of his points are the same as in Skene’s Edinburgh essay of 1568,
such as the indication of plague about to begin which is got from rats,
moles and other underground creatures forsaking their holes. To keep off
the infection he advises the wearing of small cakes of arsenic in the
armpits, where the buboes usually came. That Paracelsist practice is known
to have been tried at Zurich in 1564; it was one of the matters of dispute
between the Galenists and the chemical physicians. During the plague of
1603, Dr Peter Turner published a curious tract in defence of it[927].
From a Venetian gentleman Lodge obtained also the formula of a
preservative from infection, which contained, among other things,
tormentilla root, white dittany, bole Armeniac and oriental pearl: “The
gentleman that gave me this assured me that he had given it to many in the
time of the great plague in Venice, who, though continually conversant in
the houses of those that were infected, received no infection or prejudice
by them.”
In his chapter on “The Order and Police that ought to be held in a City
during the Plague-time,” he advises the removal of the shambles from
within the walls to some remote and convenient place near the river of
Thames, to the end that the blood and garbage of beasts that are killed
may be washed away with the tide. Lodge lived just on the other side of
Newgate Street from the shambles, and could speak feelingly about them, as
many more had done since Edward III.’s time. The nobles of Aries, he says,
had acted so on the advice of Valenolaes, having built their
slaughter-houses to the westward of the city upon the river of Rhone. The
chief interest of the book is in the sections on preventing the spread of
infection. He quotes an instance from Alexander Benedetti of Venice, of a
feather-bed, slept on by one in the plague, having been laid aside for
seven years, “and the first that slept upon the same at the end of the
same term was suddenly surprised with the plague.” His directions for the
cleansing of houses, bedding, clothes, &c. are minute and thorough
(Chapter XVII.)[928]. Modern readers will find his views on isolation and
compulsory removal to hospital worth noting. The Pest House, which had
been lately built in the fields towards Finsbury, was then the only
special hospital to which patients in the plague could be removed, and its
accommodation was not great; the burials at it in the nine weeks from July
21 to September 22, 1603, were respectively 18, 18, 12, 21, 12, 6, 5, 10
and 10. The Bridewell near Fleet Street appears also to have admitted a
small number of plague-cases, the burials from it in the five weeks from
August 18 to September 22, having been respectively 8, 5, 17, 7 and 19.
There was also a pest-house in Tothill fields, for the Westminster end of
the town. Servants appear to have been mostly sent to these refuges. Lodge
saw that the principle of compulsory removal of the sick had no chance
without more hospital accommodation (as Defoe also insisted in reviewing
the plague of 1665), and he proposes a plan for a pest-house with
“twenty-eight to thirty separate chambers on the upper floor, and as many
beneath.” He is humanely alive to the hardships of compulsory isolation:
“For in truth it is a great amazement, and no less horror, to separate
the child from the father and mother, the husband from his wife, the
wife from her husband, and the confederate and friend from his
adherent and friend; and to speak my conscience in this matter, this
course ought not to be kept before that, by the judgment of a learned
physician, the sickness be resolved on. And when it shall be found it
is infectious, yet it is very needful to use humanity towards such as
are seized. And if their parents or friends have the means to succour
them, and that freely, and with a good heart they are willing to do
the same, those that have the charge to carry them to the pest-house
ought to suffer them to use that office of charity towards their sick,
yet with this condition that they keep them apart and suffer them not
to frequent and converse with such as are in health. For, to speak the
truth, one of the chiefest occasions of the death of such sick folks
(besides the danger of their disease) is the fright and fear they
conceive when they see themselves devoid of all succour, and, as it
were, ravished out of the hands of their parents and friends, and
committed to the trust of strangers.... And therefore in this cause
men ought to proceed very discreetly and modestly.”
Another London essay of the same year, by “S. H. Studious in Phisicke” is
a much slighter production. The author writes in a superior strain and
offers advice “unto such Chirurgeons as shall be called or shall adventure
themselves to the care of this so dangerous sickness,” one piece of advice
being not to let blood except at the beginning of the seizure, and to take
then five ounces of blood in the morning, and three ounces more at three
in the afternoon, repeating the depletion next day at discretion. He
states also the theory of the plague-bubo: it was a way made by nature to
expel the venomous and corrupt matter which is noisome unto it. He advises
the practice of incising the bubo and of helping it to suppurate, which
was the treatment in the Black Death of 1348-49: if nature be “weak and
not able to expel the venom fast enough, by insensible transpiration the
venom returneth back to the heart and so presently destroyeth
nature[929].”
It is significant of the state of medical practice and literature in
England at the end of the Elizabethan period that the only other treatise
which the plague of 1603 is known to have called forth was a
mystification[930] under the name of one Thomas Thayre, chirurgian, “for
the benefite of his countrie, but chiefly for the honorable city of
London,” elaborately dedicated to the Lord Mayor of the year (by name),
the Sheriffs and the Aldermen, to whom “Thomas Thayre wisheth all
spirituall and temporal blessings.” It proves on examination to be a very
close reproduction, with some omissions at the end and a few additions,
of the old Treatise of the Pestilence by Thomas Phayre or Phaer, first
published in 1547, and was probably the venture of some bookseller or
literary hack. The original treatise of Phayre had been reprinted last in
1596, “latelye corrected and enlarged by Thomas Phayre,” although that
writer must have been dead many years. A reprint of some of “Dr Phaer’s”
remedies and preservatives, without date, is conjecturally assigned to the
year 1601. The original work of Henry VIII.’s time was also a literary
compilation, in some parts copied verbatim from the 14th century book by
the Danish bishop of Arusia, and bears not a trace of first-hand
observation. Yet it had the fortune to be reprinted once more, in 1722, by
a physician W. T., who remarked that, as the writers on plague in his own
time “usually transcribe from others,” he wished to set before them a
specimen “of such as have written on a disease of which they were
eye-witnesses.”
Two printed addresses on the plague by London ministers are extant: one by
Henoch Clapham, “to his ordinary hearers,” which is merely a sermon, in
the form of an epistle, to improve the occasion[931]; and the other by
James Bamford, rector of St Olave’s, Southwark, in the form of a dialogue,
and full of practical and sensible advice[932]. Bamford’s tract is
especially directed against “that bloody error which denieth the
pestilence to be contagious; maintained not only by the rude multitude but
by too many of the better sort;” and its chief medical interest lies in
the reasons with which he confutes that deadly heresy:--
“Do not the botches, blains and spots (called God’s tokens)
accompanied with raving and death, argue a stranger [sic] infection
than that of the leprosy, to be judged by botches and spots? [the
infectiousness of leprosy being proved by revelation, Lev. xiii.].
Doth not the ordinary experience of laying live pigeons to
plague-sores and taking them presently dead away, and that one after
another, demonstrate mortal infection? In that the plague rageth and
reigneth especially amongst the younger sort, and such as do not
greatly regard clean and sweet keeping, and where many are pestered
together in alleys and houses--is not this an argument of infection?
Thousands can directly tell where, when, and of whom they took the
infection.... Persons of a tender constitution or corrupt humours
sooner take the plague than those of a strong constitution and sound
bodies. The infirmities of many women in travail, and other diseases,
turn into the plague. We see few auncient people die in comparison of
children and the younger sort.
“Lastly, of those that keep a good diet, have clean and sweet keeping,
live in a good air, use reasonable and seasonable preservatives, and
be not pestered many in one house, or have convenient house-room for
their household--we see few infected in comparison of those that fail
in all these means of preservation and yet will thrust themselves into
danger.”
The plague of London in 1603 called forth also a poem by John Davies, a
schoolmaster of Hereford. It is called “The Triumph of Death; or the
Picture of the Plague, according to the Life, as it was in A.D.
1603[933].” The description is by no means so concrete as the title would
have us believe, and might, indeed, have been taken, most of it, at
second-hand from Dekker:--
“Cast out your dead, the carcass-carrier cries,
Which he by heaps in groundless graves inters ...
The London lanes, themselves thereby to save,
Did vomit out their undigested dead,
Who by cart-loads are carried to the grave,
For all those lanes with folk were overfed.”
He mentions that the prisoners in the gaols were comparatively exempt from
plague[934]. One line suggests the great size that the plague-buboes
sometimes reached:
“Here swells a botch as high as hide can hold.”
Perhaps his particulars of the plague in the provinces, in 1603 and
following years, are from his own knowledge. Both the Universities, he
says, were forsaken.
“Each village free now stands upon her guard ...
The haycocks in the meads were oft opprest
With plaguy bodies, both alive and dead,
Which being used confounded man and beast.”
One incident he vouches for (in a marginal note) as having occurred at
Leominster: A person with the plague was drowned to prevent infection, by
the order of Sir Herbert Croft, one of the Council of the Marches of
Wales.
The Plague of 1603 in the country near London.
Most of the country parishes nearest to London had plague-burials in 1603,
doubtless from the escape of infected Londoners to them and from the
spreading of the infection. In several of these parish registers[935] the
plague-deaths in 1603 are more than in the time of the Great Plague of
1665: there is a note in the Croydon register that “many died in the
highways near the city.” The following table shows the mortalities, great
and small.
Burials
Burials from from
all causes. plague.
Barking 381 --
Battersea 23 --
Beckenham 24 --
Bromley 26 --
Cheam 13 9
Chigwell 28 --
Chiselhurst 62 --
Clapham 20 mostly plague
Croydon -- 158
Deptford 235 --
Ealing 136 --
Edmonton 145 85
Eltham 52 17
Enfield 253 129
Finchley 51 38
Hackney 321 269
Hampstead 7 --
Isleworth 75 --
Islington 322 --
Kensington 32 --
Lambeth 566 --
Lewisham 117 --
Romford 122 --
Stratford 130 89
Streatham 36 --
Tottenham 79 44
Twickenham -- 67
Wandsworth -- 100
Wimbledon 21 --
A comparison of these figures with those of 1665 will show that the
northern parishes, Islington and Hackney, as well as parishes farther out
in the country, such as Enfield, had more plague-deaths in 1603 than in
the time of the Great Plague. Also Barking, Stratford and Romford on the
one side, and Lewisham, Eltham and Croydon on the other, had heavier
mortalities in the earlier year. It would appear, indeed, that the
infection in the country near London had been attracting notice before the
plague in the capital caused any alarm. On April 18, 1603, the lord mayor
wrote to the Privy Council concerning the steps that had been taken “to
prevent the spread of the plague in the counties of Middlesex and Surrey.”
On July 20, 1603, the king issued a warrant to the constables and others
of the hundred of Twyford in Kent, to levy a special rate on certain
parishes to relieve the sufferers by a grievous plague in the villages of
West Malling, East Malling, Offham, and seven others[936]. Such rates were
usually levied when an epidemic was nearly over; so that the outbreak in
Kent must have been at least as early as that in London.
The towns and villages of Hertfordshire, which were favourite resorts of
Londoners in plague-time, had their share of the visitation in 1603. At
Great Amwell, there were 41 burials in the year, of which 19 were of the
plague between August 19 and November 28, 6 of them in one day. Doubtless
the registers of other parishes in the home counties would show a similar
history if they were searched[937].
Annual Plague in London after 1603.
Before following the plague of 1603 into the provinces, it will be
convenient to give the history of the infection in London for the next few
years. There was little plague in 1604 and not much in 1605; but in 1606
the infection again became active, and continued at its endemic level for
some five or six years. The following table, from the weekly bills of
mortality, shows how regularly the infection came to a height in the
autumn year after year, as if it had been a product of the soil[938]:
_Table, from the Weekly Bills of Mortality (London), showing the increase
of Plague in Autumn, for five successive years._
1606 1607 1608 1609 1610
Total deaths from}
plague in the } 2124 2352 2262 4240 1803
year }
Weekly deaths in
{ 25 27 16 60 38
{ 33 33 26 57 45
July { 50 37 24 58 45
{ 46 51 50 91 40
{ 66 43
{ 67 77 45 100 47
{ 75 69 70 126 50
August { 85 76 79 101 73
{ 85 71 73 150 60
{ 177 99
{ 116 105 123 141 96
{ 105 121 136 158 89
Sept. { 92 114 107 210 86
{ 87 177 143 144 72
{ 147
{ 141 150 103 154 63
{ 106 113 131 177 79
Oct. { 117 110 124 131 59
{ 109 82 102 55 49
{ 101 68
{ 68 66 109 84 58
{ 41 55 72 69 40
Nov. { 78 46 69 67 22
{ 72 21 70 59 42
{ 51 39
In Dekker’s _Seven Deadly Sins of London_, published in 1606, he returns
to the subject of the plague. He says that it still slays hundreds in a
week, a statement which will be seen to be an exaggeration by reference to
the Table. But, on another point, Dekker would have been correctly
informed. The playhouses, he says, stand empty, with the doors locked and
the flag taken down. The policy of forbidding plays during plague-time, or
when the infection threatened to be active, was advocated by the Puritan
clergy as early as 1577, and had been in force in the plague of 1563.
“Plaies are banished for a time out of London,” says Harrison in 1572,
“lest the resort unto them should ingender a plague, or rather disperse it
being already begonne[939].” In a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross on
Sunday, November 3, 1577, in the time of the plague, by T. W., on the text
“Woe to that abominable, filthy and cruel city,” the preacher exclaims,
“Behold the sumptuous theatre-houses, a continual monument of London’s
prodigal folly! But I understand they are now forbidden because of the
plague[940].” By the year 1581 the lord mayor had become a zealous
supporter of the Puritan demands for the stopping of plays in the City and
in the Liberties[941]. In July (?), 1603, James I. granted a licence to
players for performances in the Curtain and Boar’s Head theatres, “as soon
as the plague decreases to 30 deaths per week in London[942].” In the
beginning of winter, 1607, on the subsidence of plague, the theatres were
permitted to be opened, so that the “poor players,” might make a living;
but as the plague revived in 1608, and became still more serious in 1609,
it is tolerably certain that the theatres were shut during the whole
summer and autumn of those years.
Those years, from 1606 to 1610, when the actor’s and dramatist’s
profession was seriously hindered by the fear of plague, correspond to a
blank period in the personal history of Shakespeare. It has been
conjectured that he retired from London for a time, before his final
retirement to Stratford-on-Avon. At all events his occupation, if not
gone, was greatly interfered with in every one of the years from 1603 to
1610, excepting perhaps the years 1604 and 1605, which would hardly have
come within the limit of 30 plague-deaths in a week. In 1604 his name is
joined in a patent with that of Laurence Fletcher for the Globe theatre.
Plays continued to be acted in the plague-years, before the court or in
the houses of the nobility; but the applause of the pit and gallery would
have been wanting. _Macbeth_, which is supposed, from its subject, to have
been written to celebrate the accession of the king of Scots to the
English crown was not put on the stage until 1610 or 1611. _King Lear_
was given before the court at Christmas 1606. One of the quartos of
_Troilus and Cressida_, published in 1609, with the author’s name, has a
note to say that “this new piece had never been staled with the stage,
never clapper-clawed by the palms of the vulgar;” but another edition of
the same year (1609) omitting the preface, bears on the title that the
piece had been played at the Globe theatre by the king’s servants, from
which it is inferred that it had been acted in the interval between the
two editions of 1609. After 1610, and continuously so until 1625, there
was no plague in London to interfere with the business of actors and
play-writers, just as the period from 1594 to 1603 was a clear interval.
The earlier time of freedom was the great period of the drama in London.
The disastrous plague of 1603 and the successive unhealthy summers and
autumns until 1610 seriously interfered with it, and seriously interfered,
also, with Shakespeare’s active share in the production of plays on the
stage. Whatever writing he did after that would have been with a less
certain prospect of representation, or, one may say, was not done under
the same direct influence of playhouse atmosphere which inspired his
earlier comedies and historical plays.
Plague in the Provinces in 1603 and following years.
Returning now to 1603, to follow the infection into towns and villages in
the provinces, we find first that the plague had been active in some
provincial parts of England for several months before it broke out
severely in London in 1603. At Chester the great epidemic, referred to in
the sequel, began in September, 1602. At Stamford, an epidemic which
eventually carried off nearly 600 is heard of first on December 2, 1602,
when the corporation resolved to build a “cabbin” for the plague-stricken,
and again in January, 1603, when a fourth part of a fifteenth was levied
for their relief and maintenance[943].
At Oxford, which was one of the towns earliest and most severely smitten,
after London, the disease was first seen in July, 1603, and was supposed
to have been spread abroad by the “lewd and dissolute behaviour of some
base and unruly inhabitants.” In September the colleges broke up, having
made a collection for the relief of the plague-stricken town’s people
before leaving. The Michaelmas term was prorogued until December 5, but
very few came to the congregation, the plague not ceasing until February.
Anthony Wood says:
“The truth is, the times were very sad, and nothing but lamentation
and bemoanings heard in the streets. Those that had wealth retired
into the country, but those that were needy were, if not taken away by
death, almost starved, and so consequently ready to mutiny against
their superiors for relief.” All the gates of colleges and halls were
constantly kept shut day and night, a few persons being left in them
to keep possession. The shops of the town were closed, none but the
attendants on the sick or the collectors for them were to be seen
stirring abroad, the churches were seldom or never open for divine
service.
The plague having ceased in February most of the scholars came back, and
in April the infection broke out again, but was prevented from spreading.
The court was at Oxford in 1604, and plague broke out after it left, the
infected being sent, as before, to the house in Portmead and to the
cabins. Among the deaths was that of the Principal of Hart Hall,
apparently in August. It broke out once more in March, 1605, but did not
spread, whether owing to the measures that were taken or to natural causes
may remain doubtful[944]. From that date Oxford had a twenty years’
immunity, until 1625. The Cambridge annals are less full, partly, perhaps,
because none of the colleges kept a register on the plan of that of Merton
College; but it appears from a letter assigned to 1608 that the Visitor of
King’s College had been unable to come to the college to exercise his
much-needed authority, “in regard of the infection[945].”
The severity of plague in 1603 among the provincial towns and country
parishes is known accurately for only a few of them. From a considerable
number more there is evidence of outbreaks of one degree or another. Thus
at Canterbury, the accounts of the corporation contain entries of sums
paid for watching shut-up houses, for carrying out the dead, and the like,
during twenty-four weeks in 1603-4[946]. At Exeter, a pest-house had to be
provided, and the fairs were not kept[947]. Similar indications of plague
come from Winchester[948], Colchester[949], Ipswich[950], Norwich[951],
Boston[952], and Newcastle[953]. The register of a parish in Derbyshire
(Brimington) contains plague-deaths in the end of 1602[954].
For Chester there are full particulars of a great plague. It began in
September, 1602, in a glover’s house in St John’s Lane, where 7 died, and
kept increasing until the weekly deaths reached 60. In 1603 there died of
the plague 650, and of other diseases 61. In 1604 the plague-deaths were
986, of which 55 were in one week. From October 14, 1604, to March 20,
1605, 812 died, and about 100 more until the 9th January, 1606, when the
infection ceased for a time. Cabins outside the city were erected for the
plague-stricken. In some houses, especially of sailors, five or six of the
same family died in the course of two or three weeks[955].
It appears to have been in Nantwich and Northwych in one or more of the
years 1603-1605, a rate for relief of the poor in them having been ordered
on June 22, 1605. Plague-deaths occur in the registers of Macclesfield and
Congleton in 1603. At Stockport 51 were buried of plague from October 9,
1605, to August 14, 1606, most of them in the latter year[956]. Straggling
epidemics are also reported from Northamptonshire--31 burials from plague
at Merston Trussell in 1604, and 16 at Eydon in 1605[957].
One of the severest epidemics of the period occurred at York in 1604. The
markets were closed, the courts adjourned to Ripon and Durham, and the
Minster and Minster-yard closely shut up. The infected were housed in
booths on Hobmoor and Horsefair. The number of those who died is put down
at 3512[958]. Durham also had a visitation in St Giles’s parish, but a
minor one[959].
At Shrewsbury, however, the plague of 1604 was on the same disastrous
scale as at Chester and York, the deaths in the five parishes from June 2,
1604, to April 6, 1605, having been 667. On October 11, 1604, a
proclamation was issued against buying or receiving apparel, bedding,
etc., as it was suspected that plague spread greatly in the town by such
means[960]. A weekly tax was levied upon the inhabitants of Manchester,
sometime previous to 1606, for the relief of the poor infected, or
suspected of being infected, with the plague[961]. It was in Nottingham in
1604, and in at least one of the parishes in the county (Holme
Pierrepont)[962].
There are few parts of England from which evidence of plague does not come
in the years immediately following the great plague in London in 1603. To
those already mentioned we have to add Cranborne, in Dorset, where 71 died
of plague (in a total of 91) from June to December, 1604, six deaths
having occurred in the family first infected and eight in another[963].
The parish register of Monkleigh in North Devon has the words “cessat
pestis” opposite the entry of a burial on March 30, 1605[964]. In 1606
Peterborough was visited, the infection lasting “until the September
following[965].” In 1606 Eton also was “visited,” as appears from payments
made[966].
* * * * *
In the years 1606-1610, as we have seen, the plague in London occurred as
a regular product of the summer and autumn seasons. The outbreak in 1608
has left several traces in the state letters[967]. On September 12, Lord
Chancellor Ellesmere writes from Ashridge (Berkhamstead) to the Secretary
of State that he will remain away until he is fully sure of his London
house being clear of the infection. On September 20 the City ditch was
being cleaned out, and Parliament was put off until February. On November
26 a letter from the court at Newmarket states that the king is angry that
my Lord Chamberlain has not sent him the bill of sickness. In 1609 there
were 13 plague-deaths in Enfield parish, and in 1610 some suspicious cases
near Theobalds.
In the provinces there is no record of plague again until 1608: at
Chester, in that year, 14 died of it “at the Talbot[968].” In 1609 the
infection was at work in a number of provincial centres. On June 1 a
letter from Rochester reports it prevalent in Kent, impeding the work of
the Commissioners for the Aid. On June 15 the Commissioners at Hereford
request farther time on account of the plague. On August 22 the king’s
tenants of Long Bennington, near Grantham, are brought to great poverty by
the plague[969]. These accounts relate to the counties of Hereford,
Lincoln and Kent, and with the last may be taken the brief reference to
plague at Sandwich[970]. Other counties affected in 1609, perhaps only at
a few spots, are Derbyshire, Norfolk, Northumberland, and Leicestershire.
In the first, there died at Chesterfield a few persons of the plague from
March 18 until May; at Belper, 51 between May 1 and September 30; and at
Holmesfield, the curate on March 12[971]. At Norwich the outbreak of 1609
was slight compared with other experiences of that city[972]. Its
existence at Newcastle the same year is known only from the register of St
Nicholas parish[973].
The plague in Loughborough was one of the severer kind. The first case of
it appears to have been on the 24th August, 1609, in a woman who had given
birth to a child on the 19th. The last plague entry in the parish register
is on February 19, 1611; so that the epidemic went on for about eighteen
months. During that time the whole mortality was 452, of which by far the
most were plague-burials. Within a mile of Loughborough is a spot of
ground, long after known as the Cabbin Lees, whereon many of the
inhabitants “prudently built themselves huts and encamped to avoid the
infection[974].”
In Leicester there was a slight amount of plague in 1607, and it
reappeared in 1608 (payments on account of it in the former year, and an
item of “30 hurdells used at the visited houses” in the accounts of 1608).
A more severe outbreak occurred in 1610 and 1611, during and after the
great plague at Loughborough. The streets lying towards the Castle were
exempt; a pest-house was built in Belgrave Gate; the burials for 1610 were
82 in St Martin’s parish alone (more than half being from plague), and in
1611 the same parish had 128 burials[975].
In 1610 the infection was at work in one or more villages of the county of
Durham; 78 deaths “of the pestilence” occur in the register of Lamesley
parish, and the same year was probably one of the numerous plague seasons
down to 1647 in Whickham parish, where it is said that the people, perhaps
the plague-stricken, lived in huts upon Whickham Fell[976]. At Chester in
1610 “many died of the plague[977]”; and at Evesham there was a visitation
which caused the wealthier inhabitants to leave the town and the
authorities to effect a much-needed improvement in the cleanliness of the
streets (swine found at large to be impounded, stones, timber, dunghills
and carrion to be removed from the streets, and the paving in front of
each house to be repaired and cleansed once a week)[978].
Between 1610 and 1625, which was an almost absolutely clear interval for
London, there are few accounts of plague from the provinces. In 1611,
moneys were levied for “the visited” at Sherborne[979], and there was a
local rate for the same class at Canterbury in 1614-15[980]. Accounts of
the same kind for Coventry probably belong to the year 1613[981]. Then, as
we come near the next great plague-period, which began with the new reign
in 1625, we find an entry of 26 plague-deaths at Banbury in 1623,
“recorded in a part of the original register which has not been
transcribed into the parchment copy[982]:” if the date be correct, Banbury
was the first town to break the somewhat prolonged truce with the plague,
which became broken all over the country in 1625. There appears also to
have been distress in Grantham from sickness of some kind in 1623; in
September of that year the corporation of Stamford made a collection “in
this dangerous time of visitation,” and sent £10 of it to Grantham, the
rest to go “to London or some other town as occasion offered.” But the
years 1623 and 1624 were so much afflicted with fevers that the “dangerous
time of visitation” may not have meant plague.
Ireland.
The accounts for Ireland are so casual that one suspects there may have
been more plague in that country than the records show. Thus, on January
25, 1604, there is a municipal order at Kilkenny, for men to stand at
every gate to keep out all strangers or suspected persons that might come
from any infected place within the kingdom; and on October 24 there is
another order, from which it appears that the plague was then in the town,
that it was needful to have the sick persons removed to remote places,
that no dung should be in the open streets before the doors, and that no
hogs should go or lie in the streets[983]. Towards the end of 1607 and
beginning of 1608 there was a “most dreadful pestilence” in the city of
Cork, which “by degrees ceased of itself[984].”
Plague in Scotland, 1603-24.
The history of the plague in Scotland, which we left in a former chapter
at the year 1603, begins again in that year and goes on at one place or
another continuously until 1609. From June, 1603, until February, 1604, it
continued in the south of Scotland. At Edinburgh, in April, 1604, the
house of Mr John Hall was “clengit,” because a servant woman’s death was
suspected of the plague: which infection certainly spread in May and
became so severe in July that people fled the city[985]. A letter of July
18 from Codrus Cottage, relating to gold-mining, and making mention of
Closeburn, says that the plague is amongst the men[986].
In 1605, towards the end of July, the infection reappeared at Edinburgh,
Leith, and St Andrews[987]. On October 7, the chancellor of Scotland, Lord
Dunfermline, wrote to the earl of Salisbury that the plague was rife in
the small towns about Edinburgh, probably its old favourite seats along
the Firth and on the Fife coast[988]. The chancellor himself, as we know
from another source, had had a sad experience of it in his own house; his
son and niece had died of the plague, and his daughter “had the boils” but
recovered[989]. The next year, 1606, was the worst of this plague-period
in Scotland: “It raged so extremely in all the corners of the kingdoms
that neither burgh nor land in any part was free. The burghs of Ayr and
Stirling were almost desolate, and all the judicatures of the land were
deserted[990].” It is to this epidemic that a curious transaction,
discovered by Chambers, seems to belong. Two houses, on the line of the
great road from the south towards Aberdeen, situated on opposite sides of
the Dee, the one being the house of a proprietor and the other of a
minister, were suspected of having received the infection. The gentlemen
of the county met and resolved to send to Dundee for two professional
“clengers” or disinfectors, giving a bond to the borough of Dundee for 500
merks for the services of its “clengers[991].”
In April of the year following, 1607, we hear of the plague in Dundee
itself, despite the experts, as well as in Perth and other places[992]. In
July, 1608, many houses in Dundee were infected, and so many magistrates
dead that new appointments were made by the Privy Council[993]. It broke
out again at Perth on August 29, and continued till May, 1609, “wherein
deit young and auld 500 persons[994].”
Until 1624 there is no other Scottish reference to plague except an entry,
November 7, 1609, touching the arrival at Leith of a vessel from the
Thames, with some of her crew dead of the plague, and the quarantining of
her at Inchkeith[995]. Edinburgh had a small outbreak the year before the
next great English plague that we come to. On November 23, 1624, the
infection was discovered to be in several houses, and the session of the
law courts was adjourned to January 8[996]; but Scotland appears to have
had no part in the great infection of English soil which immediately
followed.
Malignant Fever preceding the Plague of 1625.
The period of immunity from plague both in London and in the provinces,
which began about 1611, was at length broken in 1625. The health of
London, and of country districts as well, had not been good for two years
before, but plague was not the reigning type of disease. Thus, in London,
the burials rose from 8959 in 1622, to 11,102 in 1623 and to 12,210 in
1624. The letters of the time enable us to see what it was that disturbed
the public health. On August 21, 1624, Chamberlain writes from London to
Dudley Carleton[997]:
“We had 328 died this week, a greater number than hath been these
fifteen or sixteen years, and yet no mention of plague. God keep it
from among us, for we are in danger. But this spotted fever is
cousin-german to it at least, and makes as quick riddance almost. The
Lady Hatton hath two or three of her children sick of it at her
brother Fanshaw’s, in Essex, and hath lost her younger daughter, that
was buried at Westminster on Wednesday night by her father; a pretty
gentlewoman, much lamented.” Again, on September 4: “We have here but
a sickly season, which is easily seen by the weekly mounting of our
bill, which is come this last week to 407, and yet we will acknowledge
no infection [i.e., of plague]. Indeed, by the particulars we find
about 250 of them to be children, most of the rest carried away by
this spotted fever, which reigns almost everywhere, in the country as
ill as here.... The mortality is spread far and near, and takes hold
of whole households in many places.” On October 9: “The town continues
sickly still, for this week there died 347.” On October 23 we hear of
the Lord Keeper being “troubled with the fluent disease of the
time”--the flux, or flix. On December 18 (as well as previously on
August 21) a cure of smallpox is mentioned in a person of quality.
These, then, were the prevalent types of epidemic sickness, in the houses
of the great as well as among the poor--spotted fever or typhus, dysentery
or flux, and smallpox. Two of these continued into the plague-year, 1625,
as Taylor, the Water-poet, says of that occasion:
“Thou see’st the fearful plague, the flix and fever,
Which many a soul doth from the body sever.”
An eminent victim of the “pestilent fever” was the marquis of Hamilton,
who died of it while at Moor Park, Rickmansworth, on Ash-Wednesday,
1625[998]. His residence in London was the house called Fisher’s Folly
(mentioned by Stow) outside Bishopsgate in a parish which was now
“pestered” with tenements of the poor.
The fever was not always called the spotted fever. It may have been the
same disease that is often spoken of under the name of ague--“the ague
with a hundred names,” as Abraham Holland says (1625). Thus, Mead, of
Christ’s College, Cambridge, writes on September 4, 1625: “Agues grow
wonderfully rife both here and everywhere; so that one told me yesterday
that about Royston and Barkway they wanted help to gather their harvest
out of the fields”--perhaps the same sort of “burning fever” which we
shall have to trace a few pages later, both in town and country, in time
of peace as well as in the Civil Wars, the type of sickness which became
the common one in England when the plague had ceased, reaching its highest
point in the 18th century. But here again we meet the old difficulty of
“influenza.”
These historical glimpses of spotted fevers, or pestilent fevers, in the
houses of the great, as well as among the common people, are in
accordance not only with the London bills of mortality for the respective
years, but also with the registers of country parishes and market towns as
abstracted by the laborious Dr Short. Repeating the form of table used in
a former chapter, which dealt with the epidemic years 1557-8 and 1580-82,
we find the years 1623-25 distinguished as follows:
_Country Parishes._
Year. No. of No. of Baptised Buried
registers unhealthy in same in same
examined parishes
1622 85 11 177 223
1623 84 30 601 836
1624 87 19 362 511
1625 88 13 246 327
_Market Towns._
Year. No. of No. of Baptised Buried
registers unhealthy in same in same
examined towns
1622 25 4 345 442
1623 25 16 439 2254
1624 25 9 714 978
1625 25 9 563 666
The incidence upon the year 1623 is the more noteworthy as there appears
to be no record of plague in England that year in its more usual seats,
except an entry in a parish register at Banbury. Fever, we may take it,
was the prevalent epidemic types both in London and provincial places,
urban and rural. In his other treatise Short calls it “malignant spotted
fever,” and refers specially to the parish registers of Keswick, Penrith,
and Wigton for its prevalence in 1623[999].
Chamberlain, in the letter of August 21, 1624, says the spotted fever was
cousin-german at least to the plague; and therein he expressed as a layman
an opinion which was afterwards formally expounded by Willis Sydenham and
Morton. Along with the flux and the smallpox it stood for the
unhealthiness of London in 1623 and 1624 and the first months of 1625,
just as the trio were the chief causes of epidemic mortality in the
capital in the latter part of the seventeenth century and throughout the
whole of the eighteenth. But in 1625 London was not yet done with plague.
As the year passed from spring into summer, the spotted fever did not,
indeed, cease (as we may infer from casual references and from the known
facts of the analogous plague-years, 1636 and 1665); but it was soon
overtaken, surpassed, and eclipsed by the greater infection, the old
“common infection” of the sixteenth century, the bubo-plague itself. To
explain the existence of typhus in the Liberties and out-parishes of
London in 1623 and 1624, we find ready to hand the evidence of
overcrowding while the plague was quiet from 1611; the births in 1624 were
about half as many again as immediately before the last great plague of
1603, and the deaths were twice as many. The fringe of poverty had grown
once more, despite the epidemic checks of flux, fever and smallpox: the
harvest was ready for the sickle, and the reaping took place in the summer
and autumn of 1625. The infection of plague was lurking in London, as it
had been for nearly three centuries; but it depended for its activity upon
the times and seasons, and the season of 1625 was a favourable one.
The London Plague of 1625.
The previous summer of 1624 had been unusually hot and dry. The weather in
October was exceptionally fine, and the fruit crop was abundant. In
January the weather was warm and mild. On February 25 there occurred one
of those very high tides that come perhaps once in a generation. Thames
Street was wrecked, Westminster Hall was “full three feet in water all
over. But the greater loss we hear of in the drowning of marshes, and
overthrowing the walls in Kent, Essex, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, and other
places near the sea[1000].” For the first three months of 1625 the deaths
from plague were two or three in a week, some weeks being clear. In the
last week of March they were 11, and in the week after, 10. In the last
week of May they were 69, reported from twenty parishes. The spring is
described by the Water-poet as “wholesome;” but the early summer was
unusually cold. On June 12 Chamberlain writes: “We have had for a month
together the extremest cold weather ever I knew in this season.” The whole
month of June was a time of “ceaseless rain in London[1001].” In the
country, the hay-harvest was spoilt, and the corn-harvest was only a half
crop[1002]. Another says (in verse), that the summer sun wore sallow hair
and a languishing complexion; the air was full of black mists and damp,
with no dewdrops at night, but a vaporous smoke[1003]. The following table
of the weekly burials (with christenings) in London will show how the
plague increased after the rains of June. The mortality of May and June
had been a good deal higher for the season than in the moderate endemic
years of plague, such as the last series from 1606 to 1611; but it was not
until July that a plague of the first degree declared itself.
_A Table of the Christenings and Mortality in London for the year
1625._[1004]
Of Parishes
Week ending Christened Buried Plague Infected
Dec. 23 165 183 0 0
30 176 211 0 0
Jan. 6 199 220 1 1
13 194 196 1 1
20 160 240 0 0
27 178 226 0 0
Feb. 3 178 174 3 1
10 161 204 5 2
17 181 211 3 1
24 190 252 1 1
Mar. 3 185 207 0 0
10 196 210 0 0
17 175 262 4 3
24 187 226 8 2
31 133 243 11 4
Apr. 7 184 239 10 4
14 154 256 24 10
21 160 230 25 11
28 134 305 26 9
May 5 158 292 30 10
12 140 332 45 13
19 182 379 71 17
26 145 401 78 16
June 2 123 395 69 20
9 125 434 91 25
16 110 510 165 31
23 110 640 239 32
30 125 942 390 50
July 7 114 1222 593 57
14 115 1741 1004 82
21 137 2850 1819 96
28 155 3583 2471 103
Aug. 4 128 4517 3659 114
11 125 4855 4115 112
18 134 5205 4463 114
25 135 4841 4218 114
Sept. 1 117 3897 3344 117
8 112 3157 2550 116
15 100 2148 1674 107
22 75 1994 1551 111
29 78 1236 852 103
Oct. 6 77 838 538 99
13 85 815 511 91
20 91 651 331 76
27 77 375 134 47
Nov. 3 82 357 89 41
10 85 319 92 35
17 88 274 48 22
24 88 231 27 16
Dec. 1 93 190 15 12
8 90 181 15 7
15 94 168 6 5
---- ----- -----
6983 54265 35417
The deaths from all causes in May and June were so many more than the
reported plague-deaths could account for that those who watched the bills
of mortality (Mead at Cambridge, Salvetti in London) suspected that plague
was being concealed. “It is a strange reckoning,” says Mead of the bill
for the week ending June 30: “Are there some other diseases as bad and
spreading as the plague, or is there untrue dealing in the account[1005]?”
Probably there were both; at the end of the year the deaths from all
causes were some 20,000 more than the plague accounted for; and at least
half of that excess was extra to the ordinary mortality. The spotted fever
and the flux doubtless continued side by side with the plague, having
been its forerunners. The parishes most affected were, as in 1603, St
Giles’s, Cripplegate, St Olave’s, Southwark, St Sepulchre’s, without
Newgate, and St Mary’s, Whitechapel, corresponding to the mazes of lanes
and twisting passages, “pestered” with the tenements of the poorer class,
of which only a few examples now remain from 18th century London. The
following are the parishes with greatest mortality, in their order (Bell):
Total Plague
deaths deaths
St Giles’s, Cripplegate 3988 2338
St Olave’s, Southwark 3689 2609
St Sepulchre’s, Newgate 3425 2420
St Mary’s, Whitechapel 3305 2272
St Saviour’s, Southwark 2746 1671
St Botolph’s, Aldgate 2573 1653
St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate 2334 714
St Andrew’s, Holborn 2190 1636
St Leonard’s, Shoreditch 1995 1407
St George’s, Southwark 1608 912
St Bride’s, Fleet St. 1481 1031
St Martin’s in the Fields 1470 973
St Giles’s in the Fields 1333 947
St Clement’s Danes 1284 755
St James’s, Clerkenwell 1191 903
St Magdalen’s, Bermondsey 1127 889
St Katharine’s, Tower 998 744
St Dunstan’s in the West 860 642
97 parishes within the walls 14342 9197
The original printed bill of the Parish Clerks is extant for the worst
week but one, August 4th to 11th[1006]. Its mortalities for the week in
each of the 122 parishes are almost exactly in the order of the final
summation for the year, so that the details throw no light upon the
question, in what direction the infection spread, or what parishes felt
its incidence most as the season advanced. The total mortalities for the
week within the walls, in the Liberties, and in the nine out-parishes
(within the Bills) are respectively 1144, 2717 and 994. The infection is
said[1007] to have begun in Whitechapel, as we conclude that it did also
in 1603; but the City had its due share at length, the parishes of St
Stephen, Coleman Street (full of tortuous passages), of Allhallows the
Great, and of Christ Church having the largest mortalities.
In the 97 parishes of the City, the 16 parishes of the Liberties, and 9
out-parishes, the deaths at the end of the year were 54,265 from all
causes, whereof of the plague 35,417. But that was by no means the whole
mortality. A separate account was kept for the parishes of Stepney,
Newington, Lambeth, Islington, and Hackney, and for the Westminster
parishes, in all of which the deaths from December 30, 1624, to December
22, 1625, were from all causes 8,736, whereof of the plague 5,896[1008].
The grand total of deaths in 1625 was, accordingly, 63,001, whereof of the
plague 41,313.
The large parish of Stepney, extending from Shoreditch to Blackwall, was
one of the worst plague-districts in London. It is mentioned as such by
Dekker in 1603; and in the plague of 1665 it headed the list, with 8,598
deaths, whereof of the plague 6,583. We have some particulars of it for
1625: in the week July 18 to 24, there died in it 184, whereof of the
plague, 144; and from July 25 to 31, 259, of which 241 were
plague-deaths[1009]; and those figures would have been nearly doubled in
the weeks of August. Stepney alone would have had about half the deaths in
the additional bill for the year; the parish register of Lambeth gives 623
burials, of Islington 213, and of Hackney 170[1010], while Westminster
with St Mary Newington (or Newington Butts, between Lambeth and Southwark)
and Rotherhithe would account for most of the remainder. The parishes
farthest out, and on higher ground, such as Hackney, Islington and Stoke
Newington had fewer burials than in 1603.
The plague of 1625 was a great national event, although historians, as
usual, do no more than mention it. Coinciding exactly with the accession
of Charles I., it stopped all trade in the City for a season and left
great confusion and impoverishment behind it; in many provincial towns and
in whole counties the plague of that or the following years made the
people unable, supposing that they had been willing, to take up the
forced loan, and to furnish ships or the money for them. The history might
have proceeded just the same without the plague; but historians would
doubtless admit that all causes, moral and physical, should be taken into
the account; and it will not be thought beyond the scope of this history
to enter as fully as possible into these events of sickness. First as to
the sources, other than statistical. Four or more poems were written on
the plague of 1625--an interminable one by George Wither (with other
topics brought in) in eight cantos and about thirty thousand lines[1011],
a piece by John Taylor, the water-poet and Queen’s bargeman, not wanting
in graphic touches[1012], a short piece by Abraham Holland[1013], the son
of Philemon Holland, doctor of physic, and another short poem by one
Brewer[1014]. Besides the poems, there were sermons, mostly when the
epidemic was over, and various other moral pieces to improve the occasion.
A broadside called _The Red Crosse_ gives a few details of former plagues.
The letters of Chamberlain to Carleton, those of Mead, at Christ’s
College, Cambridge (whose relation Dr Meddus, rector of St Gabriel’s,
Fenchurch Street, was in the City during the epidemic), and the diary of
Salvetti, the envoy of the Grand Duke of Tuscany[1015], supply many
particulars; while the _Calendar of State Papers_ brings together other
information both for London and the provinces. I know of no account of the
plague of 1625 from the medical side[1016].
James I., prematurely worn out at fifty-seven, died at Theobalds on March
27, from the effects of a tertian ague, for which he preferred to be
treated by the plasters and possets of an obscure ague-curer from Dunmow,
setting aside his physicians, who would have succeeded no better. A great
funeral, for which 14,000 “blacks” were given out, followed on May 7.
Meanwhile the marriage of Charles I. to the princess Henrietta of France
was being arranged. The king met his bride at Dover on June 13, and
entered London with her on the 18th, passing up the river in a state barge
to Denmark House, amidst an immense concourse of people on the houses and
shipping, and in wherries on the water, with salvoes of artillery and
demonstrations of welcome to the Catholic princess. On the 13th the Lord
Keeper had written to Conway, Secretary of State, that cases of plague had
occurred in Westminster, and that he could have wished that his majesty
had determined to come no nearer than Greenwich. The nobility were kept in
town to await the coming of the new queen, and some of them by the summons
to Parliament. The Houses met on June 18, and were advised in the king’s
speech to expedite their business on account of the plague. However, those
who were disposed to refuse supplies until grievances were redressed could
make use of the plague as well as the king, and it was proposed by Mallory
and Wentworth to adjourn on that plea until Michaelmas. The Houses sat for
three weeks, until July 11, when they were adjourned to meet at Oxford on
August 1. On a day in June Francis, Lord Russell (afterwards earl of
Bedford), “being to go to Parliament, had his shoemaker to pull on his
boots, who fell down dead of the plague in his presence,” so that his
lordship avoided the House. In the first week of July, the court removed
to Hampton Court, and thence to Woodstock and to Beaulieu in the New
Forest. The Coronation was put off until October, for reasons connected
with the queen’s religion as well as for the infection, and eventually
until February 2, 1626.
Before Parliament rose, it obtained the king’s sanction to a solemn fast.
“This,” says the Tuscan, Salvetti, “is a ceremony which is performed in
all the parishes, and consists in staying in church all day singing
psalms, hearing sermons, the one shortly after the other, and making I
know not how many prayers, imploring God for stoppage of the plague, and
of the ceaseless rain which for a month past has fallen to the detriment
of all kinds of crops.” At that date, July 1, he says that plague is now
spread through all the streets and has reached other parts of the kingdom.
A general exodus took place to the country, of all who had the means to
remove. As in 1603, the magistrates, the ministers, the doctors, and the
rich men seem to have left the city to take care of itself. On August 9,
Salvetti, who had himself escaped to Richmond, writes: “The magistrates in
desperation have abandoned every care; everyone does what he pleases, and
the houses of merchants who have left London are broken into and robbed.”
On September 1, Dr Meddus, rector of St Gabriel’s, Fenchurch Street,
wrote: “The want and misery is the greatest here that ever any man living
knew; no trading at all; the rich all gone; housekeepers and apprentices
of manual trades begging in the streets, and that in such a lamentable
manner as will make the strongest heart to yearn.” The city an hour after
noon was the same as at three in the morning in the month of June, no more
people stirring, no more shops open[1017]. This is re-echoed in verse by
Abraham Holland:
“A noon in Fleet Street now can hardly show
That press which midnight could, not long ago.
Walk through the woeful streets (whoever dare
Still venture on the sad infected air)
So many marked houses you shall meet
As if the city were one Red-Cross Street.”
And by the Water-poet:
“In some whole street, perhaps, a shop or twain
Stands open for small takings and less gain.
And every closed window, door and stall
Makes every day seem a solemn festival.
All trades are dead, or almost out of breath,
But such as live by sickness and by death.”
The circumstances are so exactly the same as in 1603 that it is needless
to repeat much: the sextons, coffin-makers, bearers, searchers,
apothecaries and quacks are all profitably employed;
“And last to dog-killers great gain abounds,
For braining brawling curs and foisting hounds.”
The clocks striking the hours are not heard for the constant tolling of
bells. “Strange,” says Holland,
“Strange that the hours should fail to tell the day
When Time to thousands ran so fast away.”
Of the sick, Taylor says there were
“Some franticke raving, some with anguish crying.”
--delirious ravings and cries of pain (from the buboes) which we know from
the accounts for 1665 to have been no rhetorical exaggeration. There were
the same crowded common graves as in 1603, probably in the same
graveyards:
“My multitude of graves that gaping wide
Are hourly fed with carcases of men.
Those hardly swallowed, they be fed again.”
Or as Taylor says,
“Dead coarses carried and recarried still
Whilst fifty corpses scarce one grave doth fill.”
The treatment seems to have been mostly in the hands of quacks. Taylor
says:
“On many a post I see Quacksalvers’ bills
Like fencers’ challenges to show their skill.”
The Water-poet, being Queen’s bargeman, appears to have had a proper
feeling for all constituted authorities. After denouncing the quacks, as
men who “pick their living out of others’ dying,” he proceeds to eulogise
the regular practitioners, forgetting to add that they were now
conspicuous by their absence:
“This sharp invective no way seems to touch
The learned physicians whom I honour much.
The Paracelsists and the Galenists,
The philosophical grave Herbalists,--
These I admire and reverence, for in those
God doth dame nature’s secrets fast inclose,
Which they distribute as occasions serve.”
--the prevalence of plague not being one of the occasions for revealing
the secrets entrusted to them.
The medical faculty is hardly at all in evidence the whole time. Thayre’s
surgical treatise of 1603 was reprinted; while a semi-empiric, one Stephen
Bradwell, the grandson of Banister, a well-known Elizabethan practitioner,
published a poor essay on plague, patched up from the usual stale sources
and plagiarised even from the lay dialogue of the rector of St Olave’s in
1603[1018]. Bradwell addressed the reader, on July 15 “from my study in
Mugwell-street, ready to my power to do thee any pleasure.”
“I have two powders. I have also an excellent electuary. I have
likewise lozenges, and rich pomanders to smell of. These are all of my
grandfather’s invention, and have been proved to be admirably
effectual both by his and my father’s experience. I confess they are
costly; but slight means and cheap medicines (however they promise)
prove as dear as death. The first powder is 12 pence a dram. The
second is 3 pence a grain (the quantity is 10 or 12 grains). The
electuary is 2 shillings and 6 pence an ounce, the quantity is one or
two drams. There is a fellow in Distaff-lane that disperseth his bills
abroad, bragging of a medicine that was my grandfather Bannister’s. My
grandfather was very scrupulous of giving any special receipts to
others. But if any man can say he hath any receipt of his, I am sure,
if it were of any value, I have the copy of it. Because many men know
that I have a whole volume of excellent receipts left me both by my
grandfather and my father, and lest they should conceive me as too
strict and covetous in keeping all secret to myself, I have thought
fit for the common good to divulge this excellent antidote
following:”--the ingredients occupying a whole page.
This enterprising tradesman had been at Oxford, where he failed to take a
degree in medicine, but he was a licentiate of the College of Physicians.
He is the single literary representative of the faculty, so far as
appears, in 1625; and there is nothing in his essay that concerns us,
except the following corroboration of a well-known character of the
epidemic:
“Poor people, by reason of their great want, living sluttishly,
feeding nastily on offals, or the worst and unwholesomest meats, and
many times, too, lacking food altogether, have both their bodies much
corrupted, and their spirits exceedingly weakened; whereby they
become (of all others) most subject to this sickness. And therefore we
see the plague sweeps up such people in greatest heaps.”
It is impossible to know whether any considerable proportion recovered. It
appears that, as in 1603, the buboes and boils might come out in the same
person more than once, and that the best chance was from their
suppuration:
“Some with their carbuncles and sores new burst
Are fed with hope they have escaped the worst.”
But the best hope was in flight, as Bradwell was candid enough to say,
although he remained behind with his shilling powders and half-crown
electuaries. _Cito cede, longé recede, tardé redi_--is the proverbial
advice which he quotes.
However, the people in their flight, unless they were nobles or squires
with country houses, fared but ill in the provinces. The story of their
reception in country towns and villages is so like that of 1603 that one
might suppose in this, as in other things, that the writers of 1625 were
copying from Dekker. One of the versifiers, Brewer, has a section
specially devoted to a “Relation of the many miseries that many of those
that fly the City do fall into in the country.” They are driven back by
men with bills and halberds, passing through village after village in
disgrace until they end their journey; they sleep in stables, barns and
outhouses, or even by the roadside in ditches and in the open fields. And
that was the lot of comparatively wealthy men. Taylor says that when he
was with the queen’s barge at Hampton Court and up the river almost to
Oxford, he had much grief and remorse to see and hear of the miserable and
cold entertainment of many Londoners:
“The name of London now both far and near
Strikes all the towns and villages with fear.
And to be thought a Londoner is worse
Than one that breaks a house, or takes a purse ...
Whilst hay-cock lodging with hard slender fare,
Welcome, like dogs into a church, they are.
For why the hob-nailed boors, inhuman blocks,
Uncharitable hounds, hearts hard as rocks,
Did suffer people in the field to sink
Rather than give or sell a draught of drink.
Milkmaids and farmers’ wives are grown so nice
They think a Citizen a cockatrice,
And country dames are waxed so coy and brisk
They shun him as they shun a basilisk.”
Taylor gives various instances in prose:
“A man sick of an ague lying on the ground at Maidenhead in Berkshire,
with his fit violently on him, had stones cast at him by two men of
the towne (whom I could name), and when they could not cause him to
rise, one of them tooke a hitcher, or long boat-hook, and hitched in
the sick man’s breeches, drawing him backward with his face grovelling
on the ground, drawing him so under the bridge in a dry place, where
he lay till his fit was gone, and having lost a new hat, went his
way.”
One at Richmond was drawn naked in the night by his own wife and boy, and
cast into the Thames, where the next day the corpse was found. The village
of Hendon distinguished itself by relieving the sick, burying the dead,
and collecting eight pounds, at the least (being but a small village) for
the poor of St Andrew’s, Holborn, besides allowing good weekly wages to
two men to attend and bury such as died. The village of Tottenham appears
to have been equally hospitable; but as it was on the road to Theobalds,
and some of his majesty’s servants dwelt there, the Privy Council on July
19, wrote to the justices of Middlesex to order the inhabitants of
Tottenham, who had received into their houses “multitudes of inmates,” to
remove the new-comers and not to receive any in future[1019]. Although the
king was not at Richmond, yet as there was a royal residence there, the
inhabitants sought to drive away citizens on the ground of the warrant
forbidding them to approach any of his majesty’s houses[1020]. At
Woodstock, where the Court was in August, no one was allowed to go from
thence to London, nor any to come thither, and for contraveners a gibbet
was set up at the Court gate[1021]. It was hardly possible to get a letter
smuggled into London[1022]; in the provinces “no one comes into a town
without a ticket, yet there are few free places.” At Southampton on August
27, a stranger died in the fields: “He came from London. He had good store
of money about him, which was taken before he was cold[1023].” Dr Donne,
the dean of St Paul’s, confirms these experiences in a letter of November
25, from Chelsea[1024]:
“The citizens fled away as out of a house on fire, and stuffed their
pockets with their best ware, and threw themselves into the highways,
and were not received so much as into barns, and perished so: some of
them with more money about them than would have bought the village
where they died. A justice of the peace told me of one that died so
with £1400 about him.”
Meddus, rector of St Gabriel’s, heard of one sad case of a citizen in
Leadenhall-street who removed to the country with his seven children, “but
having buried all there is come again hither,” in July[1025]. In October,
the people began to come back, although the infection was by no means
over; Salvetti, who was himself near Huntingdon, says that many of the
returning artisans caught the infection in the city, which is probable
enough, as it happened also in 1665. On October 15, a correspondent of
Mead’s wrote that in his passing through London he found the streets full
of people, and the highways full of passengers, horse and foot. On October
24, we hear of great distress among tradesmen, artificers and farmers
round London, and of discontent at the forced loan[1026]; although the
Court itself was in as great extremity during the plague for want of money
as any private house could have been. On November 22, the lord mayor and
aldermen wrote to the Privy Council that the great mortality, although it
had taken many poor people away, yet had made more poverty by decay of
tradesmen, the want and misery being still very great[1027]. Still, the
effect of this great plague on London, cutting off some fifty thousand in
a year, or more than a fifth part of the population, must have been, like
that of all other great plagues in London, to cut off the fringe of
poverty and broken fortunes, and to raise the general average of
well-being of those that remained. Trade would come back; but the
submerged tenth, or sixth, or fourth, or whatever fraction they made, were
drowned for good.
London soon filled up the gaps made by the plague, doubtless by fresh
blood from the country. In 1627, the christenings were again at 8,408,
having been at a maximum of 8,299 the year before the plague. In 1629 they
actually exceeded the burials by more than a thousand (9,901 to 8,771),
and continued to be slightly in excess until the next plague of 1636.
The Plague of 1625 near London.
In the immediate neighbourhood of the capital the parishes on the Kentish
chalk below London, such as Deptford, Greenwich, Lewisham, Eltham and
Bromley had more plague in 1625 than in 1603. Kensington, for some unknown
reason, has 80 deaths from all causes in the register, as against 32 in
1603 and 62 (of plague 25) in 1665. The group of parishes in Middlesex,
such as Enfield, Edmonton and Finchley, had each a large number of deaths,
but somewhat less than in 1603 and 1665, and the same holds for Hackney
and Stoke Newington, Islington and Hampstead. Places up the Thames all the
way from Battersea to Windsor were infected, including Wandsworth, Putney,
Isleworth, Richmond, Kingston and Hampton Court. Eton was “visited;” even
the sequestered village of Stoke Pogis had houses shut up “by reason of
the contagion” and a collection made for their impoverished inmates. Among
the Hertfordshire towns to which Londoners resorted in plague-times,
Watford is known to have had plague-deaths in 1625. In Essex,--Stratford,
Tottenham, Romford and Barking had each a large number of plague-deaths,
and, in Surrey, Croydon and Streatham. At Carshalton, oddly enough, the
heavy mortality was the year after (1626) “not from plague, but from a
disease somewhat akin to it[1028].”
Plague in the Provinces in 1625 and following years.
It is stated by Salvetti and other gossips of the time that the infection
of plague in 1625 was carried all over the country from London by the
fleeing citizens, and that few places remained free from it, just as it
was said afterwards for the plague of 1665. So far as records show, one
would not be warranted in inferring a great provincial prevalence of
plague either in 1625 or in 1665. There was plague at Plymouth, and in the
south-western counties, under very special circumstances, as we shall see.
There was plague also at Norwich, said to have been brought from Yarmouth,
and at Colchester the year after. Newcastle, also, which hardly ever
escaped the infection when it was afoot, had one of its minor visitations.
But, on the whole, it is impossible to show by local evidences that the
plague of 1625 was diffused universally over England, either in that or in
the following year, or that it grew to a great epidemic in but a few
provincial centres[1029]. Probably all the plague-deaths in the provinces
together, in 1625 and 1626, would not have made a fifth part of the
mortality in London.
The interest centres in the plague at Plymouth, with which the outbreaks
at Ashburton, Exeter, Dartmouth, Bridport, and perhaps Portsmouth, Rye and
other places, may be connected, if not causally, yet in neighbourhood. The
first that we hear of sickness at Plymouth is under date July 26, 1625;
some of the ships arrived there had been visited with sickness, and the
sick had been landed and lodged under sails[1030]. It is not called “the
sickness,” and it is not clear that it was bubo-plague. There may, indeed,
have been real plague on board ships of war: Stow says that it was in the
fleet in 1603, and there is evidence of its existence now and again in the
Venetian galleys of an earlier day. But we are now come to the period of
the beginnings of ship-fever, as we shall see in the next chapter; and,
for the present, we must not assume that the sickness on board ship in
1625 was all plague, or chiefly plague.
The ships at Plymouth in July were doubtless a part of the squadron of
ninety sail, which sailed thence in autumn, carrying ten thousand men to
make war on Spain, in accordance with the anti-Catholic policy which had
been forced upon James I. in the last years of his reign, and was now
being carried out by Charles I. and Buckingham. This was not the first
fruit of that policy. The immediate result of it was Mansfeld’s English
troops for the recovery of the Palatinate to Protestant rule. That
expedition failing to effect a landing was speedily broken with disease,
and before it had been many days on shore in Holland was burying 40 or 50
men a day. The fleet eight months later had a similar experience. The
ships were victualled with rotten food, and the men were supplied with
worthless clothing. As the facts were never investigated, the king having
interfered to shield the duke of Buckingham from the attack on him by Sir
John Eliot, peculation and jobbery were never proved, although it was
known to everyone that honesty was the last quality to be looked for in
those about the king and the favourite. The fleet reached the Bay of Cadiz
and made a futile demonstration there. It is in the month of November that
we begin to hear of sickness. On the 9th Viscount Wimbledon writes from on
board the ‘Anne Royal’ to Secretary Conway that there are not men enough
to keep the watches owing to sickness. On December 22, the Commissioners
at Plymouth write to the Council that about thirty sail had arrived there
with 4,000 soldiers “in such miserable condition as for the most part to
be incapable of such comforts as the country would afford them.” Captain
Bolles, who died since their coming in, declared the occasion of his
sickness to be scarcity and corruption of the provisions. Great numbers of
the soldiers are continually thrown overboard. Yesterday seven fell down
in the streets. The rest are weak, and want clothes, for the supply of
which some thousands of pounds were needed. The despatch of December 29,
says, “They stink as they go, and the poor rags they have are rotten and
ready to fall off if they be touched”[1031].
So far there is no word of plague; on the other hand there is a strong
probability that the sickness was ship-fever, or typhus. It is not until
the spring of 1626 that the plague is mentioned at Plymouth. On March 18,
sickness increases at Plymouth and the plague is wondrous rife. On March
28, the plague is dispersed about the town. On April 5, the sickness
increases very much. On the 11th, 40 died last week and twenty houses are
shut up; some of the sick died and were buried in less than twenty-four
hours. On 8th June, the plague is very bad in Plymouth, and the town is
destitute of its best inhabitants. The town-council records bear witness
to a rate having been levied for the relief of the plague-stricken, and to
attempts as late as 1628 to collect their share of it from those who had
fled the town in 1626. The deaths at Plymouth are stated in a manuscript
book of the municipal annals to have been 2,000[1032].