Chapter XII (1)

THE GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON, AND THE LAST OF PLAGUE IN ENGLAND.

Literature of the Great Plague.

The writings called forth directly by the London Plague of 1665 were hardly more numerous or of better quality than those of 1603 and 1625. At its beginning in June, or in August, there appeared a number of tracts by enterprising practitioners, containing a few commonplace remarks on causes and the like, and advertisements of nostrums--by G. Harvey, Kemp, Garrencieres (“Plague is one of the easiest diseases in the world to cure, if” etc.), and Gadbury, an astrologer. The directions drawn up by the College of Physicians in 1636, for the preservation of the sound and recovery of the sick were re-issued, and an excellent set of “cautionary rules” by H. Brooke was published by order of the mayor. The writings which contain accounts of the Great Plague fall under two periods--the years immediately following 1665, and the years 1720 to 1723 when there was a sudden revival of interest in the subject in London owing to the great plague of Marseilles in 1720. To the latter period belongs the most famous work on the plague of 1665, Defoe’s _Journal of the Plague Year_, which embodied in a picturesque form the substance of various writings that preceded it, together with traditions known to Defoe. A brief account of those writings that preceded Defoe’s in both periods will serve at the same time to show the sources of a great part of his information.

The weekly bills of mortality issued by Parish Clerks’ Hall, which showed the number of deaths week by week in each of the one hundred and forty parishes of London, with a rough classification of the causes of death, were reprinted at the end of the year 1665 in a volume with the title _London’s Dreadful Visitation_[1194]. The bills thus collected in convenient form were made great use of by Defoe, and became, indeed, the backbone of his work. Next to them in importance, although it is not certain that Defoe used it, is a treatise on the medical aspects of the Great Plague, which has never had the fortune to be published. The author of it was William Boghurst, a young apothecary practising at the White Hart in St Giles’s-in-the-Fields, who advertised in the _Intelligencer_ on July 31, 1665, at the height of the plague in his parish, that he had treated forty, fifty or sixty patients in a day, that he was prepared to undertake the treatment of cases in the City, the suburbs, or the country, and that he had a water, a lozenge, and an electuary, as well as an antidote at eightpence an ounce[1195].

After the epidemic was over he employed his spare half-hours in writing a book upon his experiences, “considering that none hath printed anything either since this plague, or that forty years since--which I something wonder at.” He professes to have taken nothing from hearsay, or from books, or from the testimonies of others; he writes in English “for general readers and sale,” and he had omitted many things “so as not to make the book too tedious and too dear to bie.” The manuscript was completed for the press, with a title-page, at the foot of which is what appears to be a publisher’s name (the surname now torn off); but it was never published, although the author lived until 1685. It is conceivable that the printed sheets, or the composed type, may have been destroyed in the fire of September, 1666, and the enterprise abandoned. The manuscript came into the possession of Sir Hans Sloane, and is now in the British Museum[1196]. It gives much fuller clinical details of the plague than any other English work, although in somewhat aphoristic form; and it may be allowed the character of originality which the author claims for it, except in some of the more systematic chapters showing the influence of Diemerbroek.

Another medical essay following the plague was that of Dr Hodges, of Watling Street, first written in English in 1666 (May 8) under the title _A Letter to a Person of Quality_[1197], and expanded in 1671 into a Latin treatise[1198]. Besides a few pages at the beginning, giving some general facts of the London outbreak (which Defoe used), it is mostly a systematic disquisition, although a few cases are interspersed. One other medical piece of 1666 (June 16) is known, by Dr George Thomson, of Duke’s Place near Aldgate, a Paracelsist or chemical physician; it contains the account of a dissection of a plague-body, but is mostly occupied with a polemic against the Galenists, which the author carried on for a number of years in numerous other writings[1199].

Descriptive pieces, in prose or verse, such as the plagues of 1603 and 1625 elicited, are entirely wanting for that of 1665. But there was the usual crop of religious and moral exercises to improve the occasion. These appear to have come mostly, if not exclusively, from Dissenters. “Many useful and pious treatises,” says a Dissenter in 1721, “were published upon the occasion of the last visitation, as by Mr Zach. Crofton, Mr Shaw, Mr Doolittle, and others.” But the only one that attained popularity, having gone through five editions at once, and been often reprinted, even as late as 1851, was _God’s Terrible Voice in the City_[1200], by the Rev. Thomas Vincent, of Christ Church, Oxford, who had been ejected from his living of St Mary Magdalen, Milk Street, and was then a leader of Dissent. Vincent preached in several parish churches (deserted by their parsons) all through the plague, and ministered constantly among the sick. His book, which moralizes also upon the great fire of 1666, will be drawn upon in the sequel.

We come next to the revival of interest in the Great Plague of London, which was occasioned by the Marseilles epidemic in the summer of 1720, an event that alarmed Western Europe as if the old recurrences of plague were about to begin afresh after a long interval. In London, in 1721, several books were published upon the Marseilles plague itself; and the years from 1720 to 1722 saw a whole crop of writings,--new essays and reprints of old ones,--upon the last London plague of 1665. Among the books reprinted were Hodges’ _Loimologia_, in an English translation by Quincy, his _Letter to a Person of Quality_, the _Necessary Directions_ of the College of Physicians, the _Orders drawn up by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City_ (these three in 1721 in a _Collection of very Valuable and Scarce Pieces relating to the last Plague in 1665_), and Vincent’s _God’s Terrible Voice in the City_. The new medical books on the Great Plague were by Scarborough, Hancock and Browne.

When Defoe in 1722 wrote his _Journal of the Plague Year_, he had these recent reprints and original books convenient to his hand. He had to go back to 1665 for the collection of the weekly bills of mortality in the plague-year (in a volume called _London’s Dreadful Visitation_), and he may have consulted Boghurst’s manuscript, which was probably then in the possession of Sir Hans Sloane. But it is impossible to trace all his copious narrative of the Great Plague to these sources, even if we make due allowance for his legitimate construction of incidents out of the generalities of contemporary writers. It is possible that he may have had some unknown manuscript, less technical than Boghurst’s, to draw from. At all events, he was a likely person to have had many stories of the plague in his memory. He was a child of four when the plague was in London, the son of a butcher named Foe in St Giles’s, Cripplegate, which was one of the most severely visited parishes. The most graphic parts of his _Journal_ are those which contain such tales as he might have been told in boyhood concerning the plague in Cripplegate, the scene of them being carried round to Aldgate, opposite to the Butchers’ Row (still there) in Whitechapel High Street. He must have had some testimony from which to construct the visit to Blackwall, the view of the shipping moored all up and down the Thames, and the other particulars of the river-side population in the plague-time. The rough experiences of the three Stepney men in the country near London are in the manner of _Robinson Crusoe_, and needed only a few hints from Dekker’s stories, or from the writers of 1625. His account of the burials by the cart-load in plague-pits is also suggestive of Dekker. The somewhat meagre references by Hodges might have sufficed him for his frequent theme of the hardships and horrors of shut-up houses, even if he had not seen two other tracts, of 1665, on the same. The accounts of the Marseilles plague, one of the worst in history, would have kept him right in picturing that of London.

Whatever materials Defoe took from Hodges, Vincent, or the writers on other plagues, he enlarged them by his power of circumstantial construction into a narrative which must be accounted on the whole veracious. He based upon figures, whenever he could get them; he seems even to have sought among the archives of the City for accounts of monies distributed to the poor. He prints in full the orders of the Mayor and Aldermen, and professes to give the text of a formal resolution which they passed to remain at their posts throughout the crisis. His table of the number of plague-deaths in each of twenty-six towns or villages near London does not, indeed, agree with the figures in the parish registers, as the table on a later page will show; but it can hardly have been drawn up at a guess.

The best instance of Defoe’s skilful use of authentic documents is his description of how the infection invaded one part of London after another from the western suburbs to the eastern, so that its intensity was nearly over in one place before it had begun in another. That is the most interesting epidemiological fact in the whole outbreak; and Defoe has done ample justice to it. Boghurst had stated it with equal clearness and emphasis in his manuscript of 1666, which Defoe may or may not have seen[1201]; however the latter deduced it afresh, and illustrated it by numerous tables from the bills of mortality, which showed the incidence of plague upon each of the one hundred and forty parishes from week to week.

Antecedents, Beginnings and Progress of the Plague of 1665.

When the London plague of 1665 had given indications that it would grow to be one of the great outbreaks of that infection, much was made, in the retrospect, of a single death from plague which had occurred towards the end of December, 1664, in a house in or near Long Acre. Connected with that case was one of those trivial chains of evidence which are so often produced as the easy solution of a difficult problem. A bale of silks had come to the house from Holland, and that bale of silks could be traced to the Levant; therefore the seeds of the great plague of London were imported Levantine seeds. This was pretty well for a city which had a continuous record of plague-infection in its soil ever since the Black Death of 1348. But credulity could ignore facts more recent than the history for three centuries. The death in Long Acre in December was a solitary one, and was of no more import for what followed than any of the five other sporadic plague-deaths in 1664[1202]. Only one more death from plague occurred in the bills (in the middle of February), until the last week of April, 1665; even then the progress of the infection was slower for the next two months than it had been in many former seasons of moderate plague, such as the five years 1606-1610 and the eight years 1640-1647, or than it had been in the great plague-years of 1603, 1625 and 1636. An importation from abroad had been alleged as early as the great plague of 1563, namely from Havre, which was then held by an English garrison. But on that occasion the epidemic in London was gaining ground before the sickness at Havre had declared itself plague, and was of the bubonic type while the latter was still a malignant fever. The return of the whole English garrison from Havre, with the seeds of sickness among them, might well have introduced infection; but that return was not until the end of July, by which time the mortality in London had been progressing for two months. There is equally little reason for Stow’s statement that the plague of 1603 was brought to London from Ostend, or for the corresponding theory of origin for the plague of 1625. A foreign source was not thought of unless the plague became one of the greater degree. Year after year in London there were a few cases of plague, and sometimes for a succession of years the plague-deaths kept steadily at a level of from one thousand to three thousand. There are, indeed, few years from 1348 to 1666 in which the infection did not declare its presence in London. Whether the few threatening cases in the spring were to rise to a plague of the greater degree depended upon a concurrence of circumstances--upon the interval since the last great plague, upon the number of strangers crowding to the capital, and upon the kind of weather preceding. In 1665 the various determining things did chance to come together, and a plague of the first degree ensued. The one singular thing in the history is that such a concurrence never happened again, or that the conditions had so far changed (certainly not for the better), that the type of epidemic disease was no longer the bubo-plague.

According to precedent, a great plague was somewhat overdue in the year 1665. Its two great predecessors (not reckoning the smaller plague of 1636) had happened each at the beginning of a new reign--in 1603 on the accession of James I., and in 1625 on the accession of Charles I. The Restoration of 1660 was the time for the next great outburst; but that was delayed for five years. Those five years were occupied with a good deal of fever and other infective disease in London, and the fever in the beginning of 1665 was, according to Sydenham, of a marked pestilential type. It may be said to have led up to the plague; but the bubonic disease itself needed something in addition to the determining causes of spotted fever. It is generally admitted that London was unusually crowded with the poorer classes whose work is required by the luxury of the rich (Defoe says that an enumeration for the Lord Mayor had made out 100,000 ribbon-weavers in the eastern suburbs, although the number is incredible). There was also a general relaxation of morals, which may have predisposed many constitutions to receive the seeds of infection. Another element in the case was the weather.

The summer before had been remarkable for the immense number of house-flies, and of other insects and frogs. From November to the end of March the earth was held in almost continual black frost. Boghurst says the wind was westerly for seven months. No rain fell all the time except a slight sprinkling in the end of April. The dry cold continued after the frost broke, and produced, says Sydenham, an unusual number of cases of pleurisy, pneumonia and angina. Richard Baxter says of the seasons preceding the great plague, that they were “the driest winter, spring and summer that ever man alive knew, or our forefathers ever heard of; so that the grounds were burnt like the highways, the meadow ground where I lived [Acton] having but four loads of hay which before bare forty[1203].” The hay crop was “pitiful,” says Boghurst, in consequence of the long cold and drought. But the summer was made pleasant by refreshing breezes, and there was abundance of all kinds of grain, vegetables and fruit.

It was not until the beginning of June that the deaths from plague in all London, according to the bills of mortality, reached the sum of 43 in the week. But the mortality had been excessive from the beginning of the year, and it was suspected, as in the like circumstances in 1625, that the searchers had been concealing the existence of plague, or calling cases of it by other names, so as to save the infected houses from being shut up. The motive for bribery and concealment doubtless existed; it had been kept in view by the authorities from the first institution of searchers, who were solemnly sworn before the Dean of the Arches to make a true return of the cause of death. In all the great plagues, less so in 1563 and 1603 than in other years, there was reason to suppose that a large proportion of deaths put down to other causes than plague were really cases of plague. However there is no doubt that, in the early months of 1665, just as in the beginning of 1625, there was a great deal of spotted fever in London, not to mention smallpox and dysentery. The season was a sickly one, such a sickly season as often occurred in the latter part of the seventeenth century and throughout the whole of the eighteenth, when there could be no longer any question of plague. The weekly bills contain numerous deaths in the several parishes from “fever” and from “spotted fever” for months before they contain more than an occasional plague-death. There was no reason why these and other maladies should not have swelled the bills to three or four hundred in a week; in the year 1739, when London was probably not a third larger than in 1665, Strother says that fever brought the weekly bill up to near a thousand. It is remarkable, however, that Boghurst claims to have been treating cases of plague from the month of November, 1664; Hodges also says that he was called in the middle of the Christmas holidays to a young man in a fever who acquired, two days after, a plague-botch in each groin as large as a nutmeg, and recovered. Boghurst admits that “tokens,” by which he means the marks of plague other than the botch or bubo, “appeared not much till about the middle of June, and carbuncles not till the latter end of July.” He suspects that the bills of mortality did not tell the whole truth; and, as an instance of evasion, he says that there had been plague in St Giles’s, St Martin’s, St Clement’s, and St Paul’s, Covent Garden, for three or four years before (the bills of mortality give only 12, 9, and 5 deaths respectively for all London in the years 1662, 1663 and 1664), “as I have been certainly informed by the people themselves that had it in their houses in those parishes.”

But, in claiming an earlier beginning for the plague than the bills recognize, and in setting aside the diagnosis of fever as insufficient, Boghurst takes what is known, in the controversies upon the nature and affinities of plague, as the “ontological” view: that is to say, he sees in plague a fixed and uniform entity, and he sees the same in fever. The other view is the developmental, which recognizes transitions from the one type of pestilential disease into the other. The great writers of the time, Willis, Sydenham, and Morton, were none of them “ontologists.” They all taught the scale of malignity, which had simple continued fever at one end, then a severer fever with spots and “parotids,” then a fever with buboes, and at the farthest end of the scale the true plague, with its buboes, carbuncles, and tokens. Nor is it denied by competent observers, such as Boghurst himself, that an epidemic of plague declined as a whole in malignity towards the end, so that the buboes suppurated, and three out of four, or three out of five, patients recovered. If that were the case in the descent of the curve, why should there not have been something corresponding in the ascent? If certain cases of the prevailing fever in the beginning of the year developed buboes which suppurated (as in the case treated by Hodges at Christmas, 1664), should they be called plague or fever? Willis would have answered in favour of fever, until such time, at least, as the “epidemic constitution” of the season changed definitely to plague[1204]; he does in effect answer so in the particular instance of the Oxford fever of 1643, which in some cases was bubonic, whereas, in 1645, he makes no doubt that the disease prevailing in Oxford and Wallingford was true plague.

The more general discussion of this theme will be found in the concluding section of the chapter on the Black Death, where illustrations are given of typhus fever turning to bubonic fever and to plague, from recent and anomalous outbreaks of plague in Arab villages or encampments, in some Indian villages, and elsewhere. The conclusion there come to was that the type of plague, or the bubonic type, prevailed when the infection of the filthy habitations began with change of season to rise from the soil, whereas the form of sickness was typhus fever so long as the infection was primarily in the atmosphere of the dwellings.

We may admit, then, that there was some ambiguity in the naming and classifying of pestilential cases in the early months of 1665. If we follow the bills--and there is nothing else to follow--the plague-deaths in all the parishes of London for the seven weeks from April 18 to June 6 were respectively no more than 2, 0, 9, 3, 14, 17 and 43, the deaths from “fever” and “spotted fever” being much more numerous.

Having thus far determined the date of beginning, we come next to the line of advance of the plague of 1665. It was from the western and northern suburbs towards the City, the eastern suburbs, and Southwark. Boghurst, who practised in St Giles’s-in-the-Fields, says:

“The plague fell first upon the highest ground, for our parish is the
highest ground about London, and the best air, and was first infected.
Highgate, Hampstead and Acton also all shared in it.” From the west
end of the town, Boghurst continues, “it gradually insinuated and
crept down Holborn and the Strand, and then into the City, and at last
to the east end of the suburbs, so that it was half a year at the west
end of the city [in his experience] before the east end and Stepney
was infected, which was about the middle of July. Southwark, being the
south suburb, was infected almost as soon as the west end.” But the
same writer farther explains that “it fell upon several places of the
city and suburbs like rain--at the first at St Giles’, St Martin’s,
Chancery-lane, Southwark, Houndsditch, and some places within the
City, as at Proctor’s-houses.”

The slow progress from west to east has been made much of by Defoe, who used the bills of mortality to ascertain the rise of the infection in the several districts. His conclusion is the same in the main as Boghurst’s contemporary observation; only that he makes the infection of Southwark later, and with reason so far as the bills show:--

“It was now mid-July, and the plague which had chiefly raged at the
other end of the town, and as I said before, in the parishes of St
Giles’s, St Andrew’s, Holbourn, and towards Westminster, began now to
come eastward towards the part where I lived. It was to be observed,
indeed, that it did not come straight on toward us; for the City, that
is to say within the walls, was indifferent healthy still; nor was it
got then very much over the water into Southwark; for though there
died that week 1268 of all distempers, whereof it might be supposed
above 900 died of the plague [only 725 in the bill], yet there was but
28 in the whole City within the walls, and but 19 in Southwark,
Lambeth included; whereas in the parishes of St Giles’ and St Martin’s
in the Fields alone, there died 421.... We perceived, I say, the
distemper to draw our way; viz. by the parishes of Clerkenwell,
Cripplegate, Shoreditch, and Bishopsgate; which last two parishes
joining to Aldgate, Whitechapel and Stepney, the infection came at
length to spread its utmost rage and violence in those parts, even
when it abated at the western parishes where it began. It was very
strange to observe that in this particular week, from the 4th to the
13th July, when, as I have observed, there died near 400 of the plague
in the two parishes of St Martin’s and St Giles’ in the Fields only,
there died in the parish of Aldgate but four, in the parish of
Whitechapel three, and in the parish of Stepney but one.” In the
following week of July, with a total of 1761 deaths, whereof of the
plague 1089, only 16 occurred on the Southwark side. Soon, however,
Cripplegate had the infection at its hottest, and at the same time
Clerkenwell, St Sepulchre’s parish, St Bride’s and Aldersgate. “While
it was in all these parishes, the City and the parishes of the
Southwark side of the water, and all Stepney, Whitechapel, Aldgate,
Wapping and Ratcliff were very little touched; so that people went
about their business unconcerned, carried on their trades, kept open
their shops, and conversed freely with one another in all the City,
the east and north-east suburbs, and in Southwark, almost as if the
plague had not been among us.”

In another passage Defoe brings out the moral of its gradual advance. He had shown

“how it began at one end of the town, and proceeded gradually and
slowly from one part to another; and like a dark cloud that passes
over our heads, which as it thickens and overcasts the air at one
end, clears up at the other end: so while the plague went on raging
from west to east, as it went forwards east it abated in the west, by
which means those parts of the town which were not seized, or who were
left, and where it had spent its fury were, as it were, spared to help
and assist the other; whereas had the distemper spread itself all over
the City and suburbs at once, raging in all places alike, as it has
done since in some places abroad, the whole body of the people must
have been overwhelmed” etc.

That is how Defoe constructs a concrete picture from the dry statistics of the weekly bills. He has defined the stages, and pointed the moral, with a firmer hand than the reality would most likely have warranted. But no scientific writer could have apprehended more correctly the general fact of a gradual invasion from the west end of the town.

These striking facts of the gradual advance of the Great Plague of London from west to east will be found to suit that theory of the plague-virus which has been illustrated in various parts of this volume. The virus of plague is a soil-poison, or the ground is its habitat; its quiescence or activity depends upon whether or not the state of the soil favours the fermentation of the special organic matters therein, which special organic matters we here take to be the products of cadaveric decomposition. The conclusion that the poison of plague lay in the soil, and that it rose into the air in emanations or effluvia, was forced upon all those who thought much about the matter from the medieval period onwards. Thus, the apothecary Boghurst, says in his first chapter: “And therefore my opinion falls in wholly with those who make the earth the seminary and seed-plot of these venomous vapours and pestiferous effluvia, which vitiate and corrupt the air, and consequently induce the pestilence.” And again: “The plague is a most subtle, insinuating, venomous, deleterious exhalation, arising from the maturation of the ferment of the forces (?) of the earth, extracted into the air by the heat of the sun.” It is true that Boghurst, like the sixteenth-century writers abroad, such as Ambroise Parè, locates the venom in mysterious cavities and bowels of the earth, and dwells upon the agency of earthquakes in setting it free. But he comes to more ordinary causes in his enumeration of favouring things--“dunghills, excrements, dead bodies lying unburied, putrefying churchyards too full,” and again “breaking up tombs and graves where dead bodies have been long buried.” As telling against the last, however, he adds: “When the charnel-house at St Paul’s was demolished, there was a thousand cart-loads of dead men’s bones carried away to Finsbury, yet no plague followed it.”

The activity of this soil-poison depends upon processes in the soil which go on so slowly that the link of cause and effect is easily overlooked. In the last resort, they are dependent on the rise and fall of the ground-water. It was observed beyond all doubt as the law in Lower Egypt, that the plague came forth annually after the Nile had begun to fall, and that it reached its height in the months of March, April and May, when the soil was driest, or the pores of the ground occupied solely by air after having been full of water. It was observed, also, that the plague-area and the inundation-area were co-extensive. Lower Egypt is, of course, somewhat peculiar (Lower Bengal coming near to it) in these regular alternations of air alone and water alone in the pores of the ground. But other countries have the same sharp contrast occasionally, and London had the contrast very decidedly in the years 1664 and 1665. The months from November 1664 to June 1665, some of which ought to have brought snow or rain to raise the wells and springs to their highest periodic water-mark early in the year, were quite remarkable for drought: Richard Baxter says that no one remembered the like. The ground-water, instead of rising all through the winter, must have fallen lower and lower as the spring and summer advanced. The pores of the ground had been occupied with air to an unusual depth of the subsoil, and the presence of air in these circumstances had given occasion to that ferment-activity in the special organic matters of an old-inhabited soil which produced the virus of plague. The stratum of subsoil would become dry first in the more elevated parts; and as the ground-water continued to fall, the air would reach in due course an unwonted stratum in the lower situations. Defoe says that they came to water at eighteen feet in digging the Whitechapel plague-pits. The same seasonal march of a soil-infection from the higher ground to the lower has been observed in modern times in other cities, and in other diseases than plague. The drought for seven months from November to June would not, of itself, have caused a great plague. But it was an essential member of the co-operating group of things; and it probably determined of itself the season when the great plague was once more to come and take away the enormous increase of poor people.

Mortality and Incidents of the Great Plague.

The plague of 1665 was justly called the Great Plague, and is sometimes spoken of as “the plague of London,” as if it were unique. But it was not much more severe than those of 1603 and 1625 had been for the London of their generation; and there had been many plagues when London was a small capital, such as those of 1407, 1479, 1500, 1513 and 1563, which had cut off as large a proportion (one-fifth to one-sixth) of the population. The inhabitants in 1665 were not far short of half a million, nearly twice as many as in 1603, and about a third more than in 1625. The increased mortality in 1665 was somewhat more than proportionate to the increase of inhabitants, as the following table shows:--

Highest
Year Estimated Total Plague mortality Worst
population deaths deaths in a week week

1603 250,000 42,940 33,347 3385 25 Aug.-1 Sept.
1625 320,000 63,001 41,313 5205 11-18 Aug.
1665 460,000 97,306 68,596 8297 12-19 Sept.

Reckoned from the christenings and burials in the bills of Parish Clerks’ Hall, the population in 1605 would have been 224,275, and in 1622, 272,207. But in those years (and until after 1636) certain of the newer parishes (known as the Seven Parishes), including Stepney and Westminster, kept separate bills, of which some figures for 1603 and 1625 are given at p. 477 and p. 511. The population of the Seven Parishes appears to have been about one-ninth of the whole metropolis in 1603, and about one-seventh in 1625, while Graunt, a contemporary, makes it one-fifth in 1662. These fractions have been added in the table, so as to make 1603 and 1625 comparable with 1665. In 1603 and 1625, the highest mortality in a week does not show the deaths in those parishes (Westminster, Stepney &c.) which did not send their returns to the general bill until 1636, but their figures have been included in the totals for those years. It will be seen that the plague of 1665 fully kept pace with the increase of population. The old City within the walls had 15,207 deaths in the year from all causes. It had become crowded since the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign by its gardens and churchyards being built upon, and its mansions turned into tenement-houses for a poorer class; and yet in 1563 the mortality from plague and other causes in the City and its Liberties, with a population hardly exceeding that of the City alone in 1665, was 20,372. The enormous total of 1665 was largely made up from the populous suburbs of Cripplegate, Whitechapel, Stepney, St Martin’s in the Fields, St Giles’s in the Fields, Southwark and Westminster, which would have contributed but little to the total down to the middle third of the sixteenth century.

The following tables will show the progress of the epidemic from week to week, the weekly deaths from all causes and from plague, and the incidence upon the several parts of London. The so-called ordinary deaths are much in excess of the average, and must have included many that were really cases of plague. Part of the excess, however, was due to the great prevalence of fever and spotted fever, which made a heavy mortality in the early months before the plague began. Bowel complaint also is credited with a good many deaths. The other more important items in the bills are consumption and infantile troubles. Boghurst, however, says: “Almost all other diseases turned into the plague. For five or six months together there was hardly any other disease seen but the plague and a few casualties, whatever the Bills say; and Thucydides says the same of the plague at Athens.” As to the total of deaths in the year from all causes (97,306), Hodges thinks that it does not show the whole mortality. The largest number of burials in one week is 8297; but he thinks that 12,000 were buried in that week, and that 4000 were buried in one day and night. But there seems to be no reason to set aside the tally of the sextons to that extent; the returns were made weekly from one hundred and forty parishes, and might easily have been exact to within a few in each.

_Bill of Mortality of the Plague-year 1665 in London._

Week
ending Christened Buried Plague

Dec. 27 229 291 1
Jan. 3 239 349 0
10 235 394 0
17 223 415 0
24 237 474 0
31 216 409 0
Feb. 7 221 393 0
14 224 462 1
21 232 393 0
28 233 396 0
Mar. 7 236 441 0
14 236 433 0
21 221 363 0
28 238 353 0
Apr. 4 242 344 0
11 245 382 0
18 287 344 0
25 229 398 2
May 2 237 388 0
9 211 347 9
16 227 353 3
23 231 385 14
30 229 400 17
June 6 234 405 43
13 206 558 112
20 204 615 168
27 199 684 267
July 4 207 1006 470
11 197 1268 725
18 194 1761 1089
25 193 2785 1843
Aug. 1 215 3014 2010
8 178 4030 2817
15 166 5319 3880
22 171 5568 4237
29 169 7496 6102
Sept. 5 167 8252 6988
12 168 7690 6544
19 176 8297 7165
26 146 6460 5533
Oct. 3 142 5720 4929
10 141 5068 4327
17 147 3219 2665
24 104 1806 1421
31 104 1388 1031
Nov. 7 95 1787 1414
14 113 1359 1050
21 108 905 652
28 112 544 333
Dec. 5 123 428 210
12 133 442 243
19 147 525 281
----- ------ ------
9,967 97,306 68,596

_Incidence on Parishes of the Plague in 1665._

_Ninety-seven Parishes within the Walls._

All deaths Plague deaths
97 City parishes 15,207 9,877

(The parishes with heaviest mortalities were St Anne’s, Blackfriars; Christ Church, Newgate; St Stephen’s, Coleman St; St Martin’s, Vintry; Allhallows Barking, the Great, and in-the-Wall; St Andrew’s, Wardrobe).

_Sixteen Parishes without the Walls and in the Liberties._

St Giles’s, Cripplegate 8069 4838
St Botolph’s, Aldgate 4926 4051
St Olave’s, Southwark 4793 2785
St Sepulchre’s 4509 2746
St Saviour’s, Southwark 4235 3446
St Andrew’s, Holborn 3958 3103
St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate 3464 2500
St Bride’s, Fleet Street 2111 1427
St George’s, Southwark 1613 1260
St Botolph’s, Aldersgate 997 755
St Dunstan’s in the West 958 665
St Bartholomew the Great 493 344
St Thomas’s, Southwark 475 371
Bridewell Precinct 230 179
St Bartholomew the Less 193 139
Trinity, Minories 168 123

Pesthouse 159

_Twelve Out-parishes in Middlesex and Surrey._

Stepney 8598 6583
Whitechapel 4766 3855
St Giles’s in the Fields 4457 3216
St Leonard’s, Shoreditch 2669 949
St Magdalen’s, Bermondsey 1943 1362
St James’s, Clerkenwell 1863 1377
St Mary’s, Newington 1272 1004
St Katharine’s, Tower 956 601
Lambeth 798 537
Islington 696 593
Rotherhithe 304 210
Hackney 232 132

_Five Parishes in the City and Liberties of Westminster._

St Martin’s in the Fields 4804 2883
St Margaret’s 4710 3742
St Clement’s Danes 1969 1319
St Paul’s, Covent Garden 408 281
St Mary’s, Savoy 303 198

Pesthouse 156

The Great Plague brought back all the familiar incidents of 1603 and 1625, and revealed no new feature. As before, all that could afford to do so made their escape at the outset. Sydenham, who fled with the rest, says that two-thirds of the population left; which may be true of the City proper, but certainly not of the populous Liberties and suburbs on both sides of the water, as Defoe points out. The poorer classes were left stranded, and bore the brunt of the calamity, as they had always done. Flight was, doubtless, the best step to take, the motive being to get “into clean air,” as cardinal Wolsey expressed it in 1515. Those that were left behind knew that they were in bad air, and knew that it mattered little whether they came into contact with the sick or not[1205]. Their employments and wages mostly ceased as the plague extended from suburb to suburb and to the City, so that with starvation on the one side and plague on the other, they held their lives cheaply and bore themselves with an unconcern which was strange to the rich. Their desperate case explains, as Defoe correctly saw, the ease with which the mayor could always get men to undertake for pay the disagreeable and risky work of day and night watchmen to the multitude of shut-up houses, of bearers of the dead, of buriers, of nurses, and distributors of the public charity. As soon as any fell in these humble ranks, others were willing to take their place; so that at no period of the epidemic was there any break-down in the work of expeditious burial or any failure in good order and decency. To carry the poor through the great crisis much money was needed; Defoe says that it was forthcoming from all parts of England and he estimates the distribution of relief at thousands of pounds weekly, although he failed to find the exact accounts, which, he thinks, had been destroyed in the fire of 1666. A thousand pounds a week, he says, was given from the king’s purse. The whole of this great system of relief was under the direction of the Lord Mayor, Sir John Lawrence, who proved himself worthy of the best traditions of his office. In the out-parishes there were Justices of the Peace who discharged the like duties.

The regular clergy for the most part left the town, but two are honourably mentioned as having stayed with the plague-stricken people, Dr Anthony Walker, of St Mary Aldermanbury, and Mr Meriton[1206].

Sometime in August Lord Arlington wrote to the bishop of London that the king was informed of many ministers and lecturers being absent from their posts during this time of contagion, and that nonconformists had thrust themselves into their pulpits to preach seditions and doctrines contrary to the Church. His majesty wishes the bishop to prevent such mischiefs to Church and State[1207]. The bishop replied, from Fulham, 19 August, that the sober clergy remain, that he had refused some that offered to supply vacancies, suspecting them to be of the factious party, though they promised to conform, that most of his officers had deserted him and gone into the country, but he could not learn that any nonconformists had invaded the pulpit[1208]. The bishop, however, was not likely to hear much within his garden walls at Fulham of what was passing at Aldgate. There can be no question that Church pulpits were occupied during the plague by ministers who had been ejected in 1662. Chief among them was Thomas Vincent, formerly minister of St Magdalen’s, Milk Street, who preached in St Botolph’s, Aldgate, Great St Helen’s, and Allhallows Staining[1209]. Vincent says that it was the opportunity of irregular practitioners both in the Church and in medicine, and he is disposed to say a good word for the latter from a fellow feeling with them. Besides Vincent, says Richard Baxter[1210], there were “some strangers that came thither since they were silenced, as Mr Chester, Mr Janeway, Mr Turner, Mr Grimes, Mr Franklin, and some others.” These all became prominent in London Nonconformity; and Baxter clearly traces their subsequent power to the opportunity that the plague gave them:

“But one great benefit the plague brought to the city, that is, it
occasioned the silenced ministers more openly and laboriously to
preach the Gospel to the exceeding comfort and profit of the people;
in so much that to this day [1670] the freedom of preaching which this
occasioned, cannot, by the daily guards of soldiers, nor by the
imprisonments of multitudes be restrained. The ministers that were
silenced for Nonconformity had ever since 1662 done their work
privately.”

Baxter knew of none among the Nonconformist ministers remaining in London who fell victims to the plague, except “Mr Grunman, a German, a very humble, holy, able minister, but being a silenced Nonconformist, was so poor that he was not able to remove his family.” Two others of the sect, who fled, lost their lives--“Mr Cross, flying from the plague into the country died with his wife and some children as soon as he came thither, in the house of that learned worthy man, Mr Shaw, another silenced minister,” and Mr Roberts, “a godly Welsh minister, who also flying from the plague, fell sick as far off as between Shrewsbury and Oswestry and died in a little straw, but none durst entertain him.” Baxter himself found refuge in the house of the Hampdens, in Bucks[1211], leaving his family, as he says, in the midst of plague at Acton. Defoe draws from the incident of the Nonconformists in Church pulpits a somewhat sentimental moral; he sees nothing aggressive in it, but merely the levelling of differences by affliction, and a short-lived prospect of reconciliation.

The irregular practitioners of physic would appear to have been in great force, just as in former plagues, when their bills were on every post. Defoe professes to give specimens of their advertisements, which he might have adapted from actual advertisements in the news-sheets, the ‘Intelligencer’ and the ‘Newes.’ The empirics were of both sexes, and of foreign extraction as well as native.

Among the regular physicians who practised for a time, at least, in the plague were the famous Professor Glisson, Dr Nathan Paget (an intimate friend of Milton and cousin of Elizabeth Minshull whom the poet, in 1664, had married for his third wife), Dr Wharton, of St Thomas’s Hospital, a distinguished anatomist, Dr Berwick or Barwick, Dr Brooke, Dr Hodges, and Dr Conyers. The last was one of two of his order who died of the plague. Two Paracelsist or chemical physicians, Dr Dey and Dr Starkey, died of it: and Dr George Thomson says that he survived three several attacks of the buboes, the first sore lasting for four months. A considerable number of chirurgeons and apothecaries are said (by Defoe) to have fallen victims. Pepys says that at the first meeting of Gresham College (the Royal Society) since the plague, held on January 22, 1666, Dr Goddard “did fill us with talk in defence of his and his fellow physicians’ going out of town in the plague-time,” his plea being that their particular patients were out of town, and they left at liberty. But that excuse ignores the fact that the time was a great emergency, and puts the defence upon the wrong ground.

Goddard had attended Cromwell in the Irish and Scottish campaigns as physician to the army. For a short time he had been a member of the Council of State, and for several years was master of a College at Oxford. He was Gresham professor of physic, and one of the original council of the Royal Society. This eminent man of science was the inventor and proprietor of “Goddard’s drop,” the secret of which he sold to Charles II. for a large sum, said to have been £6000. Dr Martin Lister says that the king showed him the receipt, and that the drops were nothing more than the volatile spirit of raw silk rectified with oil of cinnamon, and no better than ordinary spirit of hartshorn. Another writer says that the drops contained also skull of a person hanged and dried viper. According to Sydenham, Goddard’s drops were preferable to other volatile spirits for the particular purpose, namely, the recovery of people from faintings of various kinds. Even if Dr Goddard had remained in town, he would have been a trafficker in nostrums as much as the empirics; nor is it probable, from all that we know, that he could have brought epidemiological principles to bear upon the management of the epidemic among the poor. The best teaching of the time counselled that which he himself practised, namely, flight.

Defoe says that the Lord Mayor (Sir John Lawrence), the Sheriffs (Sir George Waterman and Sir Charles Doe), the Court of Aldermen and certain of the Common Council, or their deputies, came to a resolution and published it, viz.:

“That they would not quit the City themselves, but that they would be
always at hand for the preserving of good order in every place, and
for the doing justice on all occasions; as also for the distributing
the public charity to the poor; and, in a word, for the doing the duty
and discharging the trust reposed in them by the citizens to the
utmost of their power.”

The minutes are extant of numerous meetings of the Mayor and Council, with the orders made (on May 11, June 17, 19, and 27, July 12, and at short intervals thereafter)[1212]. Two of the Aldermen died of plague.

It appears to be admitted by all, that good order was kept, the dead buried expeditiously, day and night watchmen provided for an immense number of infected houses (until, as Vincent says, the infected houses became so many that there was no use shutting them up), bearers of the dead and grave-diggers engaged to fill the places of those who died, and applications heard for relief. One of the things that justly excited the admiration of Defoe was the abundant supply of all the markets, and the almost unvarying weight of the penny wheaten loaf, which is given every week at the foot of the bill of mortality. The Parish Clerks brought out their bill regularly, although Hodges says that the sextons failed at length to keep an accurate account of the number of corpses. All the dead were buried at first in coffins and with full ceremony; but when the infection became hottest in August and September, especially in the crowded East-end and in Southwark, the bodies are said to have been brought to the pits in cartloads and thrown in, sometimes without even a covering[1213]. That is alleged by the writers on the plagues of 1603 and 1625, and the same must have happened to some extent in 1665, but whether to the extent that Defoe’s graphic account implies may be doubted.

The burials took place over night until, as Vincent says, “now the nights are too short to bury the dead.” This was a reversal of the order, first issued in 1547 and probably carried out in the plague of 1603, that no burial was to take place between six in the evening and six in the morning. Even at the worst time, coffins would seem to have been got for most. Vincent says, “Now we could hardly go forth but we should meet many coffins,” and he mentions one woman whom he met with a little coffin under her arm. Evelyn enters in his diary on September 7, the worst week of the epidemic: “I went all along the City and suburbs from Kent Street to St James’s, a dismal passage and dangerous, to see so many coffins exposed in the streets now thin of people.” Defoe’s weird description of the Aldgate plague-pit at midnight, with seven or eight lanterns set on the heaps of earth round the edge, and of the constant journeys to and fro of the dead-carts, has probably made the most of the realities of the case.

A letter of Pepys to Lady Carteret, written from Woolwich on September 4, gives us a glimpse of the state of the City:

“I having stayed in the city till about 7400 died in one week, and of
them above 6000 of the plague, and little noise heard day nor night
but tolling of bells; till I could walk Lumber-Street and not meet
twenty persons from one end to the other, and not fifty upon the
Exchange; till whole families, 10 and 12 together, have been swept
away; till my very physician, Dr Burnet, who undertook to secure me
against any infection, having survived the month of his own being shut
up, died himself of the plague; till the nights, though much
lengthened, are grown too short to conceal the burials of those that
died the day before, people being thereby constrained to borrow
daylight for that service.” The butcheries are everywhere visited, his
brewer is shut up, and his baker dead with his whole family.

On September 20, he writes in his diary:

“But Lord! what a sad time it is to all: no boats upon the river, and
grass grows all up and down Whitehall Court, and nobody but poor
wretches in the streets.”

Some three weeks later (October 11) Evelyn writes in his diary: “Went through the whole city, having occasion to alight out of the coach in several places about business of money, when I was environed with multitudes of poor pestiferous creatures begging alms. The shops universally shut up.” Vincent says that he would meet “many with sores and limping in the streets,” (from the suppurating buboes in the groins). Again:

“It would be endless to speak what we have seen and heard of:--some in
their frenzy rising out of their beds and leaping about their rooms;
others crying and roaring at their windows; some coming forth almost
naked into the streets”

--the delirium being sometimes of the gentle or foolish kind, and sometimes violent. These incidents are much enlarged upon by Defoe, who makes out the cries and groans (mentioned by Dekker and others for the earlier plagues) to have been from the pain of the hard and tense buboes. Boghurst says that the treatment by actual cautery and other escharotics caused more pain than the buboes.

As a set-off to the more horrible picture given by Defoe of the inmates of a house all dying together, their bodies being found by the watchmen and taken away in the dead-cart, we may turn to Vincent’s plain account of what happened in the house where he lodged, probably in the neighbourhood of Aldgate or Bishopsgate, when he came up from Islington to minister to the sick.