England’s population crashed so far that it did not return to its pre-plague level for four centuries. In Florence the dead lay piled in pits “like cheese between layers of lasagna,” in the words of one repelled, stunned observer. The survivors could do little more than gape at the devastation. “Oh happy posterity,” wrote the Italian poet Petrarch, “who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable.”
This was the bubonic plague, a disease spread to humans by fleas that had bitten infected rats, though no one would know that for centuries. Plague sputtered along between full-fledged outbursts, claiming a few lives almost every year but seldom flaring out of control. For decades in the mid-1600s England had been granted a respite. Plague had devastated one European city or another through those years, but since 1625 it had spared London.
No city lay beyond reach, though, for plague traveled with ships, armies, and merchants—with any travelers who unknowingly brought rats and fleas with them. England had begun to grow rich in the seventeenth century, and much of its wealth was based on trade. From all over the world, ships brought tea and coffee, silk and china, tobacco and sugar, to England’s teeming ports. Europe, in the meantime, had spent the 1650s and ’60s watching helplessly as plague moved across the continent. Italy and Spain had succumbed first, then Germany. In 1663 and 1664, plague devastated Holland.
In England, all was quiet—a single plague death in London at Christmas, 1664; another in February; two in April. On April 30, 1665, Samuel Pepys mentioned plague in his diary for the first time.5 Pepys was still young, just past thirty and newly embarked on a career as a Royal Navy bureaucrat. The diary that would one day become a world treasure was only a private diversion. Pepys’s first reference to plague was brief, an afterthought following a cheery description of dinner and the state of his finances. He had gone through his account books and found, “with great joy,” that he was richer than he had ever been in his life. Then a quick observation: “Great fears of the sicknesse here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all.”
It is hard to read that first, ominous passage without hearing a horror movie’s minor chords in the background. In the face of the calamity that lay ahead, Pepys’s mention of “two or three” tragedies would come to sound almost quaint.
Plague killed arbitrarily, agonizingly, and quickly. “A nimble executioner,” in the words of one frightened observer, it could kill a healthy man overnight. No one knew the cause; no one knew a cure. All that was known was that plague somehow jumped from person to person. The sick fell and died, and the not-yet-infected cowered and waited.
The first symptom could be as innocuous as a sneeze (the custom of saying “Bless you!” when someone sneezes dates from this era). Fever and vomiting followed close behind. Next came “the surest Signes,” in the words of one pamphlet from England’s epidemic of 1625, an onslaught of blisters on the skin and swellings beneath it. Blue or purplish spots about the size of a penny appeared first. Shortly after, angry red sores flared up, “as if one did burne a hole with a hot iron.” Then followed the dreaded black swellings that marked the end. They bulged out from the neck, armpits, or groin, sometimes “no bigger than a Nutmeg . . . but some as bigge as a Man’s fist.” Victims oozed blood from the tender lumps and moaned in pain.
Once plague had struck, doctors could provide no help beyond a soothing word. Authorities focused all their attention on safeguarding the healthy. Those who had fallen ill were forbidden to step out of their homes; hired guards stood watch to keep the prisoners from escaping. Food was supposedly left on the doorstep by “plague nurses,” but they were as likely to rob their dying charges as to help them.
Many houses where plague had struck were nailed shut, with those inside left to die or not as fate decreed. (Thus Pepys’s reference to “houses already shut up.”) Some slum tenements held half a dozen captive families. The houses of the condemned carried a large cross, marked on the door in red chalk, to warn others to keep away. Scrawled near the cross were the forlorn words, “Lord have mercy upon us.”
On June 7, 1665, Pepys first saw “two or three such houses” for himself. On June 10, he decided it was time to write his will. On June 15, he noted that “the town grows very sickly . . . there dying this last week of the plague 112, from 43 the week before.”
The numbers rose throughout the summer. Frightened Londoners discussed such patterns endlessly, as if they were trying to guess when a madman might strike next. On July 1 Pepys saw “seven or eight houses in Bazing-hall street shut up of the plague.” On July 13 he recorded “above 700 dead of the plague this week.”
The numbers were unreliable, for they were gathered by ignorant, despised old women called “searchers.” Their twofold task was to count the dead and to seek out signs of plague among the living, so that officials could know which families to quarantine inside their homes. No one volunteered for such work. The searchers were poor women, on the dole, forced to take on their task by parish officials’ threats to withhold their meager benefits. Shunned even in ordinary times, the searchers now bore the added stigma of carrying contagion with them. Passersby who saw the ragged women scurried to get away, and the law made sure that was easy. Searchers were required to carry a two-foot-long white wand as an emblem of office, and to walk close to the refuse channels in the street.
Shaky as the plague statistics were, the trend was unmistakable. Throughout the summer of 1665 the death toll rose from a few hundred a week in June to one thousand a week in July and then to six thousand a week by the end of August. London witnessed scenes that jarred even hardened witnesses. Children were more vulnerable than adults, but whole families fell ill in a matter of days. “Death was the sure midwife to all children, and infants passed immediately from the womb to the grave,” wrote Nathaniel Hodges, a doctor who performed heroic service all through the plague time. “Some of the infected ran into the streets; while others lie half-dead and comatose, but never to be waked but by the last trumpet; some lie vomiting as if they had drunk poison; and others fell dead in the market.”
At first, when the death rate was still low, Dr. Hodges had dared hope that the damage would stay in bounds. All such hopes were soon dashed. Plague was a “cruel enemy,” Hodges lamented, like an army that “at first only scattered about its arrows, but at last covered the whole city with dead.” Hodges told of priests in perfect health who went to comfort dying men and died alongside them. Doctors at the bedside keeled over next to their patients. Pepys heard about a now-commonplace disaster that had befallen an acquaintance. “Poor Will that used to sell us ale . . . , his wife and three children died, all, I think in a day.”
Chapter Five
Melancholy Streets
The authorities flailed about in search of a solution. Plays, bull-baitings, and other entertainments were banned, because plague was known to be a disease of crowds. Was it the poor who carried this disease? The lord mayor tried to restrict the movements of the “Multitude of Rogues and wandering Beggars that swarm in every place about the City, being a great cause of the spreading of the Infection.” Were animals the culprits? In the summer of 1665, the authorities called for the immediate killing of all cats and dogs. Orders went out to Londoners to kill “all their dogs of what sort or kind before Thursday next at ye furthest.”6 Thousands upon thousands of cats and dogs were killed. The result was to send the rat population soaring.
Nothing helped. Throughout the summer panicky crowds bent on escaping the contaminated city clogged the roads out of London. The poor stayed put. They had no money for travel and no place to go, but the rich and the merely well-to-do—doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and merchants—shoved their way into the scrum. Coaches and carriages knocked against one another, their horses pawing the mud, while heavy-laden wagons fought for position. The frenzied pack fighting through the narrow streets reminded one eyewitness of a terrified crowd in a burning theater. Some fled toward the Thame
s and tried to commandeer fishing boats, anything that could float and take them to safety. Those who managed to escape the city had to brave the residents of the countryside, who greeted the refugees with clubs and muskets.
The king and his brother, the Duke of York, fled London in early July. Most of the Royal Society had scattered by then, too, looking forward to a time “when we have purged our foul sins and this horrible evil will cease.” Pepys sent his family away, but he himself retreated only as far as Greenwich. At the end of August he ventured on a long walk in the city. “Thus the month ends,” he wrote, “with the plague everywhere through the Kingdom almost. Every day sadder and sadder news of its increase.” In the last week of August, Pepys wrote, plague had claimed 6,102 lives in London alone.
Worse was to come.
September 1665 unnerved even Pepys. “Little noise heard day or night but tolling of bells,” he lamented in a letter to a friend. (It was plague that had inspired John Donne to write, “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”)
By now, with so many dead and so many gone, frenzy had given way to desolation. Grass grew in the streets of London. In place of the usual clamor of voices—street vendors had been banned, so newsboys and rat catchers and fish sellers no longer hawked their wares—silence reigned. “I have stayed in the city till above 7,400 died in one week, and of them above 6,000 of the plague,” Pepys wrote, “and little noise heard day or night but tolling of bells; till I could walk Lombard Street and not meet twenty persons from one end to the other . . . ; till whole families, ten and twelve together, have been swept away.”
Now there were too many dead for individual burials. At night death carts rattled along empty streets in search of bodies, the darkness penetrated only by flickering, yellow torchlights. Cries of “Bring out your dead!” echoed mournfully. But with death striking willy-nilly, there were too few men left to drive the carts, too few priests to pray over the victims, too few laborers to dig their graves. The carts made their way to mass burial pits and spilled in their cargo. Many Englishmen recalled the somber words of King Edward III, eyewitness to the horrific epidemic of an earlier day. “A just God now visits the sons of men and lashes the world.”
And then, mysteriously and blessedly, it ended. In mid-October, Pepys reported six hundred fewer deaths than the week before. The survivors began the gloomy process of taking stock. “But Lord, how empty the streets are, and melancholy,” wrote Pepys, “so many poor sick people in the streets, full of sores, and so many sad stories overheard as I walk, everybody talking of this man dead and that man sick, and so many in this place, and so many in that.”
By the end of November 1665, people began to flock back to London. Within another month the epidemic had all but ended. The plague had claimed one-fifth of the city’s population, a total of one hundred thousand lives.
Plague hit London harder than anywhere else, but all England had suffered. In some cases, as in the famous calamity in the village of Eyam, the cause could be pinpointed. In September 1665 a village resident named George Vicars opened a box. Someone in London had sent a gift. Vicars found a packet of used clothing, felt it was damp, and hung it before the fire to dry. The clothing was flea-infested. In two days Vicars was delirious, in four dead. The disease spread, but the local rector persuaded the villagers it would be futile to leave and dangerous to others besides. Outsiders left provisions at the village outskirts. The plague took a year to burn its way through Eyam. In the end, 267 of the village’s 350 residents lay dead. (The rector who refused to flee, Reverend Mompesson, survived, but his wife did not.)
Nearly always, though, plague seemed to rise out of nowhere, like some ghostly poison. The university town of Cambridge, which had weathered several epidemics through the centuries, had a long-established policy in place. (Builders would one day unearth mass graves beneath the idyllic grounds.) When plague settled onto the town, the university shut down and sent its students and faculty away, to wait for a time when it would be safe to gather in groups again. In June 1665 plague struck Cambridge, and the university closed.
A young student named Isaac Newton gathered up his books and retreated to his mother’s farm to think in solitude.
Chapter Six
Fire
In the fateful year of 1666, a second calamity struck London. Perhaps God had not forgiven sinful mankind, after all. Perhaps those who had prophesied that the world would end in all-consuming fire had been right all along. Plague had been insidious and creeping; the new disaster was impossible to miss. But the Great Plague and the Great Fire had one similarity that outweighed the differences between them. Both were the work of an outraged God whose patience was plainly drawing to a close.
The fire burned out of control for four days, starting in the slums near London Bridge and quickly threatening great swaths of the city. One hundred thousand people were left homeless. Scores of churches burned to the ground. Iron bars in prison cells melted. The stunned survivors stumbled through the ruins of their smoldering capital and gazed in horror. Where a great city had stood just days before, one eyewitness lamented, “there is nothing to be seen but heaps of stones.”
As for who had started the fire, everyone had a theory. Catholics had burned the city down, to weaken the Protestant hold on power. Foreigners had done it, out of envy and malice. The Dutch had done it, because Holland and England were at war, or the French had, because the French and the Dutch were allies. The king himself even figured in the rumors—he was, people whispered, a monarch filled with hatred for London (which had clamored for his father’s execution) and obsessed with building monuments to himself. What vengeance could compare with destroying the home of his enemies and then rebuilding it to suit his own taste?
But all such explanations were, in a sense, beside the point. To focus on who had set the fire was a mistake akin to confusing the symptoms of a disease with the illness itself. Any such calamity reflected the will of God. The proper question was not what tool God had seen fit to employ, but what had stirred his wrath. In any case, even the best of investigations would yield merely what Robert Boyle called “second causes.” God remained the inscrutable “first cause” of everything. He had imposed laws on nature when he had created heaven and Earth, and ever afterward he had been free to change those laws or suspend them or to intervene in the world however he saw fit.
The fire began in the early hours of Sunday, September 2, 1666, in one of London’s countless bakeshops. Thomas Farriner owned a bakery on Pudding Lane, deep in one of the mazes that made up London’s crowded slums. He had a contract to supply ship’s biscuits for the sailors fighting the Dutch. On Saturday night Farriner raked the coals in his ovens and went to bed. He woke to flames and smoke, his staircase afire.
Someone woke the lord mayor and told him that a blaze had started up near London Bridge. He made his way to the scene, reluctantly, and cast a disdainful eye at the puny flames. “Pish!” he said. “A woman might piss it out.”
At that point, perhaps, the damage might still have been confined. But a gust of wind carried sparks and flame beyond Pudding Lane to the Star Inn on Fish Street Hill, where a pile of straw and hay in the courtyard caught fire.
Everything conspired to create a disaster. For nearly a year London had been suffering through a drought. The wooden city was dry and poised to explode in flames, like kindling ready for the match. Tools to fight the blaze were almost nonexistent, and the warren of tiny, twisting streets made access for would-be firefighters nearly impossible in any case. (On his inspection tour the lord mayor found that he could not squeeze his coach into Pudding Lane.) Pumps to throw water on the flames were clumsy, weak contraptions, if they could be located in the first place and if someone could manage to connect them to a source of water. Instead firefighters formed lines and passed along buckets filled at the Thames. The contents of a leather bucket flung into an inferno vanished with a hiss and sizzle, like drops of water on a hot skillet.
Making m
atters harder still, London was not just built of wood but built in the most dangerous way possible. Rickety, slapdash buildings leaned against one another like drunks clutching each other for support. On and on they twisted, an endless labyrinth of shops, tenements, and taverns with barely a gap to slow the flames. Even on the opposite sides of an alleyway, gables tottered so near together that anyone could reach out and grab the hand of someone in the garret across the way. And since this was a city of warehouses and shops, it was a city booby-trapped with heaps of coal, vats of oil, stacks of timber and cloth, all poised to stoke the flames.
The only real way to fight the fire was to demolish the intact buildings in its path, in the hope of starving it of fuel. As the fire roared, the king himself pitched in to help with the demolition work, standing ankle-deep in mud and water, tearing at the walls with spade in hand. Slung over his shoulder was a pouch filled with gold guineas, prizes for the men working with him.
Propelled by strong winds, the fire roared along and then split in two. One stream of flames headed into the heart of the city, the other toward the Thames and the warehouses that lined it. The river-bound fire leaped onto London Bridge, in those days covered with shops and tall, wooden houses. At the water’s edge, the flames reached heights of fifty feet. Panicky refugees stumbled through the mud and begged boatmen to carry them away.
On the fire’s second night Pepys watched in shock from a barge on the Thames, smoke stinging his eyes, showers of sparks threatening to set his clothes afire. As he watched, the flames grew until they formed one continuous arch of fire that looked to be a mile long. “A horrid noise the flames made,” Pepys wrote, and the crackling flames were only one note in a devil’s chorus. People screamed in terror as they fled, blinded by smoke and ashes. House beams cracked like gunfire when they burned through. Hunks of roofs smashed to the ground with great, percussive thuds. Stones from church walls exploded, as if they had been flung into a furnace.
The Clockwork Universe Page 3