Chapter X (2)

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.