by Uglow, Jenny
That Inadvertency, Ignorance in the Law, and Passion were the occasions of his offence. That had hee reflected on the fatall consequence of incurring your Majesties displeasure, he would rather have chosen death ten thousand times then done it. That your Petitioner in all humility & sence of his fault casts himself at your Majesties feet, beseeching you to pardon his first error, & not suffer one offence to bee his Ruine.4
The comically self-abasing appeal would have fitted straight into a stage tragedy. Perhaps amused, Charles released him and bundled him off with a note to Sandwich, enlisting him as a ‘volunteer’ for the fleet.
While the court debated points of honour, both romantic and military, the Privy Council rushed to get ready for war. Urgently needing accurate information about the Dutch plans, they expanded the network of spies, both men and women. One person recruited was another future playwright, the first professional female English writer, the young Aphra Behn. In Surinam in 1663, Behn had met the dissident William Scott. He was clearly attracted to her, and Governor Willoughby alerted Bennet, who saw that such a connection might be useful. Tom Killigrew, who knew her well, also backed the idea of employing her. Behn was given vague instructions and set off to find Scott, who was now in Flanders, with the intention of gleaning information and persuading him to work for the British.5 Her code name was Astraea, and Scott’s Celadon. But this was no starry personal romance. Scott fed her false information, Bennet failed to pay her and she had to pawn her rings to keep out of debtor’s prison.6 The whole intelligence system was a shambles. And while the information from abroad was scanty, the government were distracted by scare-mongering reports from informers at home, insisting that radical groups were colluding with the enemy and were waiting for the Dutch to invade so that they could rise up and topple the King.
By late spring, the hard-working Navy Board had managed to pull together a fleet of over a hundred ships, including converted merchantmen. But despite heroic efforts by civil servants like Pepys, vital supplies of tar and canvas and guns were still low, and un-paid suppliers refused to fill further orders. When the ships did sail, they were short of clothing and food, and indeed of sailors. Thirty thousand men were needed for a large wartime fleet and countless seamen were impressed against their will from country towns and fishing villages, and the back streets of Britain’s cities. They deserted by the dozen when they reached port. Those who served could expect little reward. Instead of pay they received vouchers called ‘tickets’, which they often sold at lower value in the nearest seaport, made desperate by waiting for the cash.
Another problem, as Clarendon noted bitterly, was the need to make provision for the injured, and for the prisoners of war. In mid-April two Dutch vessels were captured and brought back to London. Technically any prisoners were now under the charge of the newly appointed commissioners for the prisoners of war, one of whom was John Evelyn. Since the other commissioners were either in the country or had volunteered to serve at sea, he rushed to Whitehall to take advice. Now came a moment, almost medieval, where courtesy and conflicting loyalties cut across hostilities, indicating again how Charles’s court was poised between ancient and modern. Charles asked for one of the captains among the prisoners to be brought directly to him. This was twenty-three-year-old Cornelis Evertsen, the eldest son of the vice admiral of Zeeland, the Dutch province most friendly to the House of Orange. When Evertsen arrived, Charles gave him his hand to kiss, granted him his freedom, questioned him about the battle and sent him off to the Dutch embassy with a gift of gold pieces, to await his passport home. His generosity was a gesture of honour. Orangists were not, he felt, and never would be his enemies, only republicans.
Samuel Pepys in 1666, by John Hayls
Meanwhile guards were sent to watch the prisoners at Chelsea, and Evelyn arranged for doctors to attend the wounded, ‘both Enemies, & others of our owne…severall their leggs & armes off, miserable objects God knows’.7 His experience brought home the suffering of the combatants and their families. Like many people, he sought someone to blame. Against a date at the start of this month, on the day set aside for public fasting, years later he added a note to his diary. This had been a day of humiliation and prayers, he remembered, ‘for success of this terrible Warr, begun doubtless at secret instigation of the French &c to weaken the States, & Protestant interest’.8 And this was only the prelude.
24 Lord Have Mercy upon Us
Ring o’ ring of roses
A pocketful of posies
A’tishoo, a’tishoo
We all fall down.
ANON.
NOW ANOTHER DEADLY ENEMY ARRIVED. A wave of bubonic plague, carried by the fleas from infected rats, had been spreading slowly westwards across Europe. The plague was not unusual – in the last hundred years there had been at least four outbreaks, the most recent in 1626 – but its very familiarity filled people with dread. One or two cases appeared in Yarmouth in late 1664, and by early spring the outbreaks were sufficiently widespread to frighten wealthy Londoners.
The time seemed full of portents. The plague was linked to the war, and was said to have arrived on British shores in bales of silk from Holland, as if steered by Dutch malice. At the same time, at the end of February 1665 the great frigate the London, moored off the Nore, was destroyed by an explosion. More than three hundred men perished, with only a score surviving, horribly burnt. As a replacement, the City of London offered to give a ‘great ship’, to be built to a new design by Captain John Taylor, and a grateful Charles II decreed that its new name should be the Loyal London. Rumours arrived, untrue, of Dutch atrocities in Guinea, and others, sadly all too true, of British sailors capturing a French ship and torturing the sailors, burning their feet to make them confess their cargo was bound for Holland. Distressed and angry, Charles had the captain cashiered, the crew flogged in front of the fleet, and the goods sent back to the French owners. This did not bode well for his ‘strict friendship’ with France.
And all the time the plague spread. It took two forms. If the infected flea-bite was in the leg or arm, huge ‘buboes’ developed in the lymph glands, especially the groin: fever and vomiting followed, then delirium and coma and death within five days. Very occasionally people recovered, but with the second, less common form, where the infection went straight to the lungs, there was no hope. By March it had taken hold in the slums of St Giles, and the London rich began to pack up their goods. ‘The ancient men’, wrote Clarendon, ‘who well remembered in what manner the last great plague (which had been near forty years before) first broke out, and the progress it afterwards made, foretold a terrible summer. And many of them removed their families out of the city to country habitations.’1 In April Charles prorogued his parliament until September, telling them that he should be glad to meet them then, ‘if it pleased God to extinguish or allay the fierceness of the plague’.2
In May Henrietta Maria left for France, and Catherine and her ladies, including Barbara, went down to Tunbridge. London was emptying. The savants of the Royal Society picked up their equipment and their notebooks and retreated to Durdans, Lord Berkeley’s house at Epsom, with its beautiful gardens, fountains and sculptures, grottoes, bowers and summerhouses. Here Evelyn found Wilkins, Hooke and Petty in early August, ‘contriving Charriots, new rigges for ships, a Wheele for one to run races in, & other mechanical inventions’.3 When the plague closed Cambridge colleges, the twenty-two-year-old Newton went home to Woolsthorpe, where he tackled mathematical series, optics and theory of colours and, as he said, ‘began to think of gravity…For in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention & minded Mathematicks & Philosophy more than at any time since.’4 A generation older, a different kind of genius, John Milton, left his house in Bunhill Fields and retreated to Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire, with his third wife Elizabeth and his angry, put-upon daughters. Here among the leafy lanes, with the city of death in the distance, the blind poet worked with his helpers on the final revisions of Paradise Lost. Dryden also lef
t town. On the Wiltshire estate of his wife’s family, the Howards, he worked on his long narrative poem Annus Mirabilis, celebrating the victories at sea, and on his Essay on Dramatick Poesie. The Essay took the form of a discussion between four characters, or rather an argument between Dryden himself and three courtiers and wits: Crites (Howard), Eugenius (Buckhurst) and Lisideius (Sedley). Its opening scene had the ring of a real event, as the four men drifted in a barge on the Thames on a summer evening, listening for the sound of cannon at sea, distracting themselves from fears for absent friends by arguing over the theory and practice of drama.
By early June 1665, when his scene from Dryden’s Essay was supposed to take place, a heatwave was beginning. The sickness spread like fire. ‘It stroke me very deep this afternoon’, wrote Pepys on 17 June, who had taken to chewing tobacco as a preventative, ‘going with a hackney coach from my Lord Treasurer’s down Holborne – the coachman I found to drive easily and easily; at last stood still, and came down hardly able to stand; and told me that he was suddenly stroke very sick and almost blind.’ Pepys got down, and found another cab, ‘with a sad heart for the poor man and trouble for myself…But God have mercy upon us’.5
The full court did not leave London until the end of that month. On 29 June the courtyard at Whitehall was crammed with carts and coaches as people packed their bags. On 4 July Charles held his Privy Council at Sion House in Twickenham rather than Whitehall, and soon all his household were assembled at Hampton Court. Here and in nearby Kingston the houses of reluctant townsfolk were commandeered as lodgings, first for court and government officials and then for foreign ambassadors and their entourages. In the first fortnight of July it was estimated that thirty thousand people left the city. As they left, the Newes announced that by the Lord Mayor’s orders, houses that were visited by the plague were to be shut up with all their inhabitants, and marked with a red cross in the middle of the door, with the words ‘Lord have mercy upon us’, until the danger passed. For many, this was a death sentence. Week by week the tally soared.
By mid-July the weekly toll was over a thousand lives, and rising. It was hard to find food, with the houses of so many brewers and bakers shut up. Many families camped in tent cities on the outskirts, but the plague found them there. For those who stayed, city life ground to a halt: ‘no rattling coaches, no prancing horses, no calling in customers, no offering wares; no London cries sounding in their ears’.6 People remained indoors, venturing out as little as possible. If they did, they might meet plague-infected people wandering the streets, or hear appeals from those shut up, calling through their windows for help. No one wanted the work of tending the sick and dying and removing their corpses, even at the rate of a shilling a day. Plague nurses came from the roughest class and many of them robbed those in their care and then abandoned them to their fate. Even worse were the ‘searchers’, old women – often understandably drunk – dressed in black and carrying white sticks. Their task was to go through the houses examining each corpse and reporting the cause of death. The pay was fourpence per body. Dogs and cats, who were thought to be carriers, were killed in their thousands, and the stench of dead animals and people filled the streets.
A Plague broadside, showing the plague nurses and the ‘searchers’ with their staffs, the carts carrying the dead, people fleeing from the city and families carrying coffins and bodies on trestles, while other victims lie unburied in the street
The infection was highest among the poor in their crowded tenements and to begin with the upper classes were sure that they would not suffer; ‘the air has not been corrupted as yet’. But this changed. In early August, deaths rose to nearly three thousand a week, ten times the average, and by the end of the month the deaths reached four thousand, then five. Orders were read to the army and navy that anyone who fell sick must declare it at once: the ships stayed out at sea to avoid infection, and by this simple means most of the navy completely escaped. But on land, even on a country walk you could stumble across a dead body in the middle of a lane.
Most doctors fled London but the quacks that remained made a fortune, selling remedies such as Venice Treacle, Celestial Waters, Dragon Waters. The priests fled too, and some brave ejected ministers used their absence to return to their old parishes, earning the lasting gratitude of the stricken citizens. Wild preachers cried aloud in the streets that God’s vengeance had come. As the plague worsened, government departments scattered to outlying districts, the Exchequer to the crumbling Nonsuch Palace in Surrey, the Navy Board to Greenwich. Charles arranged for Albemarle, who seemed undaunted by the threat, to stay in his Whitehall lodgings to supervise order in the capital. He was helped by William, Earl of Craven, Lord Lieutenant of Middlesex, who was himself the son of a London alderman. With furious energy, Craven organised the shutting up of houses and the mass burial of victims, handing out money from his own purse to feed the poor.
London’s Loud Cryes to the Lord by Prayer. This broadside, published on 8 August 1665, contains texts appealing for mercy, repenting of sins, and begging God to hear the prayers of the people. Below are listed the numbers dying each week from plagues since 1591. In the woodcut, a skeletal Death with scythe and hour-glass salutes the fleeing people.
A guard at Hampton Court died, and Charles moved his court again, this time to Salisbury. The departure was a vast bustle (the queen’s Portuguese attendants and priests alone took up eight coaches), and a vast expense, as coachmen and carters, exploiting the desperation of the people and fearing infection themselves, charged ever higher rates. But as the court moved, the disease moved faster. In Salisbury a royal groom fell ill and a man dropped dead in the street within a stone’s throw of the king’s house. Trying to overcome their fear the ladies of the court played bowls and developed a craze for telling each other their dreams.
Few things illustrated the gulf between classes more than the attitude to the plague in these months. To begin with there was fear but also a horrified curiosity as gentry, courtiers and diplomats noticed doors marked with crosses, or people with white rods walking in the street. Then came irritation: after all, the wealthy relied on the class most at risk, on tradesmen and grooms, on cooks and servants going to market. If one of their servants died they too might have to shut up their house. When a man died after spending a night with the servants of the Spanish ambassador Molina their house was shut up, and the ambassador’s carriages were locked away. And when at last the eighteen-day quarantine was near its end, the woman who had washed the dead man’s clothes fell ill, and the whole term of confinement began again. Molina’s rage at the absence of those servants was incandescent.
The death toll in London reached its peak when the Bills of Mortality recorded 7,165 deaths from plague alone in the week ending 19 September. Increasingly too, as people travelled, the disease was reaching out into the countryside. In the famous case of Eyam, in Derbyshire, where the village shut itself off completely to prevent the infection spreading, the plague arrived in a parcel of cloth which was hung by the fire to dry, releasing the infected fleas. Slowly, across the country, the toll lessened as the cold weather came, killing the fleas. Those who had survived tended to have greater immunity, but the contagion lingered until spring the following year, and isolated cases occurred until November.
In London in the early autumn of 1665 coffins lay strewn in the streets, but they were too few for the mass of dead. Instead, the bodies were simply limed, piled onto carts and thrown in their hundreds into public burial pits. The shops were shut, the streets and alleys empty, and grass grew in the courtyards of Whitehall. The people of the great city shivered ‘all in mourneful silence, as not knowing whose turne might be the next’.7
25 Fortunes of War
To all you ladies now at land
We men at sea indite;
But first would have you understand
How hard it is to write;
The Muses now, and Neptune too,
We must implore to write to you,
With a fa, la, la, la, la.
CHARLES SACKVILLE, Lord Buckhurst, Song Written at Sea, in the first Dutch War, 1665, the night before an Engagement
AS IF TO BOOST his own spirits, in the spring of 1665 Charles bestowed honours on his favourites, raising their status as wartime leaders. Henry Bennet was created Baron Arlington, while Charles Berkeley was made Baron Botetourt of Langport and Earl of Falmouth. His trips to Paris as an unofficial diplomat were now at an end, and he was one of the first to volunteer to go to sea. At the same time Charles finally gave a dukedom to the Marquess of Newcastle.
In May the fleet gathered at Harwich under the Duke of York’s command. The duchess too arrived in port with her throng of ladies. ‘For the next fortnight,’ wrote Sandwich’s first biographer, ‘the business of victualling was relieved by intervals of merrymaking…Night and day were made merry by the sailors’ wives and sweethearts. Countess, courtesan and country wench, jostled one another both in cabin and forecastle.’1 The mood of these jollifications was caught in Buckhurst’s playful song of farewell: