by Don Jordan
As the plague was recognised as largely fatal, physicians concentrated on preventatives. Like the preparations of Dr Hodges, a variety of concoctions thought to ward off infection were to be eaten, drunk, stuffed up the nose – or, in the case of tobacco, smoked. Most herbal mixtures involved plants common in England, as outlined in Culpeper’s Herbal.14 Other herbs were brought from Europe along with exotic plants from America, the Far East and elsewhere. The most potent of oral remedies was Venice Treacle, an expensive cure-all known from ancient times, made from many herbs and often containing opium and the flesh of snakes. Galen made his own version. By the seventeenth century it was mainly imported from Venice, where it was manufactured and matured for many years, hence its great cost.
As the plague moved through London’s population, little cordd be done except quarantine the eity and wait for the epidemic to burn itself out. Those wishing to travel out of the city had to receive a warrant from the Lord Mayor certifying they were healthy. Surrounding towns and villages were wary of anyone not bearing such a certificate. The summer remained exceptionally warm and dry, the smell of death hanging in the narrow streets. John Evelyn observed the rising death toll from his home in Deptford. He sent his wife and family to the safety of Wotton House in Surrey, the home of his older brother George, and where he himself had been born in 1620. On 1 July, the Lord Mayor took the drastic step of enforcing the government’s emergency ‘Rules and Orders’ and ordered all houses in which inhabitants were infected to be boarded up, thus imprisoning the’ healthy with the ill. Watchmen were hired to ensure no one left the quarantined houses and to bring food and drink to the inhabitants. Evelyn recorded that in the second week of July 1100 died in London. In the following week the death toll almost doubled to 2000.15’ On Sunday 2 August a fast was held throughout the nation ‘to deprecate God’s displeasure against the land by pestilence and war’.16
On 12 August, in an act of kindness, the Lord Mayor issued an order for a curfew to be observed throughout London. At nine o’clock in the evening all healthy people were ordered to stay at home so that the infected and those who had been boarded up with them might leave their homes for one evening to take the air. With the death rate rising, the initiative was not repeated. By September, the death toll rose to its highest point, 7165 in one week. Mass graves were dug around the city fringes. They filled faster than they could be dug. As a description of the horror at this time, Nathaniel Hodges’ words speak more eloquently than most:
Who can express the calamities of such times? The whole British nation wept for the miseries of her metropolis. In some houses carcasses lay waiting for burial, and in others persons in their last agonies; in one room might be heard dying groans, in another the raving of delirium, and not far off relations and friends bewailing both their loss and the dismal prospect of their own sudden departure. Death was the sure midwife to all children, and infants passed immediately from the womb to the grave. Who would not burst with grief to see the stock for a future generation hanging upon the breasts of a dead mother? Or the marriage-bed changed the first night into a sepulchre, and the unhappy pair meet with death in their first embraces? Some of the infected ran about staggering like drunken men, and fell and expired in 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, while they were buying necessaries for the support of life.17
One of the reasons the plague was so virulent was that London gave it the opportunity to spread with ease. Households typically included large numbers of people. The poor lived in multiple-occupancy tenements, while even the ‘middling sort’ of people had large households. A shopkeeper or merchant of modest means could have ten or more people under his roof. A family with four children might have two maids and two or three apprentices living in the house with them. When the plague struck one member of a household, everyone who lived under the same roof was in danger.
In the parish of St Giles, where the plague had first been reported, the death toll was devastating. The parish had fewer than 2000 households, yet by the end of the year its graveyard held the bodies of 3216 victims. When the plague was raging at its height, Evelyn drove through the city in his coach to see the situation for himself. He wrote in his diary, ‘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; the shops shut up and all in mournful silence, not knowing whose turn might be next.’18
Despite the danger, Evelyn continued to travel about the city and up and down the Thames on his wartime business. Conscious as always of his public duty, he had undertaken the work of Commissioner for Sick and Wounded Seamen, a difficult enough task during the war, and now exacerbated by the numbers of seamen who contracted the plague in the docklands, where rats and infection multiplied. On a later journey through the city Evelyn was obliged on several occasions to alight from his coach to transact business. He found himself surrounded by ‘multitudes of poor, pestiferous creatures begging alms; the shops universally shut up, a dreadful prospect!’19
With whole families wiped out, fear gripped the living. People behaved abominably to one another. Families threw their infected relatives and servants into the street. People fought over scraps of food. Pepys observed that the plague was ‘making us cruel as dogs to one another’.20 Boarded-up houses condemned those within to probable death. Nathaniel Hodges thought the boarding up of the well together with the sick contributed to the death toll. He also condemned the actions of some of those assigned to help the afflicted: ‘what greatly contributed to the loss of people thus shut up, was the wicked practices of nurses (for they are not to be mentioned but in the most bitter terms): these wretches, out of greediness to plunder the dead, would strangle their patients, and charge it to the dis-temper in their throats. . . ‘21
Life was difficult not only for those inside the city but also for the majority of ordinary people who had fled on foot into the country, often reduced to sleeping rough and foraging off the land. Nevertheless, few were left in the city except for those who could not afford to leave for fear of their businesses being ransacked, or for love of their afflicted relatives. The only familiar figures on the streets were the drivers of death wagons, the watchmen, various city officials, some apothecaries and physicians, a few clergy, and poor wretches denied shelter and condemned to die. The only types of person to flourish amidst the chaos were preachers of doom. Sermonisers of the apocalyptic sort raved against mankind for having brought the catastrophe upon itself. The Old Testament was quoted from pulpits and street corners: ‘The wrath of the Lord was kindled against the people, and the Lord smote the people with very great plague;’ ‘And I will smite the inhabitants of this city, both man and beast; they shall die of a great pestilence.’22
The city was eerily quiet. Grass grew in the streets. Yet although commercial life ground to a stop, the people did not starve. This was thanks to the sharp-witted reaction of the Lord Mayor, the sheriffs and aldermen. The aldermen, a breed of independently minded men who had mostly either fought in Cromwell’s army or supported the Parliamentary cause, were used to difficult situations and not averse to standing up to their duty. The mayor, Sir John Lawrence, was a former Master of the Haberdashers’ Company. His house stood in Queenhithe ward, on the ground sloping from St Paul’s Cathedral to the river. He was a former colonel in the White Regiment, one of the Parliamentary trained bands. At the Reformation he relinquished his colonelcy and was knighted by the King. A strong-willed man, Lawrence continued to keep a coterie of former White Regiment men about him as a band of persuaders or dissuaders, according to the situation.
Among a raft of plans to keep the city from disintegrating, Sir John put in place a system for the provision of food. Daniel Defoe, with his businessman’s interest in all things commercial allied to a journalist’s interest in people, later explained how the city auth
orities decreed that the bakers had to keep their ovens going on pain of losing their privileges as Freemen of the city. To supply the bakers, country vendors came into the city along major streets that were kept clear of dead bodies or other possible carriers of disease. The mayor and his lieutenants maintained a daily patrol to ensure the flow of food continued through the various gates.23 To buy provisions, physical interaction between buyer and seller was unnecessary. The buyer surveyed what was on offer in the vendors baskets, said what he wanted, and the seller dropped the goods in the offered bag or on the ground. The buyer then put his or her money in a pail of vinegar to disinfect it. When all trading was done, the seller took the money from the pail and returned through the appointed gate. The work of Sir John and the other representatives illustrated the extent to which the city was well organised and run.
A more complicated form of food transaction was instituted to supply the many seamen, their families and friends who had taken to living on board ships moored on the river all the way from the Pool of London down to Limehouse and beyond. Watermen whose normal trade had ceased could earn a small income by rowing supplies out to the ships.24 Coal had to be discharged from ships lying in the river, a slow and backbreaking task if performed without cranes.
Several of the physicians who stayed to help died. Among them was George Thomson’s friend George Starkey, who, seeing he was infected, hung a dead toad around his neck in the belief that ‘atoms’ from its putrefaction would counteract the plague, a remedy widely held to be effective. Similar reasoning advocated the use of snake parts as remedies for poisoning – a little poison could counteract the greater threat, it was thought. This thinking was little more than a form of the sympathetic magic to be found in many supposedly much less advanced societies. As the symptoms spread, Starkey noted that after he drank a large quantity of small beer’ his pores closed, preventing the atoms from the toad from entering his body. In other words, the alcohol had made him dehydrated. Thomson looked after his friend as best he could, but to no avail. Starkey soon followed the toad to oblivion.
So how did Hodges and Thomson survive? The answer is, undoubtedly, down to luck. Unlike the fleas that usually feed off humans, rat fleas like to hitch a ride in clothing, helping the disease to be spread through social interaction. Whereas the primary cause of plague infection is via a bite from a flea, we now know that infection may be caused by close or direct contact – skin to infected skin, mouth to mouth, from the spittle in sneezes, and so on. Therefore, bubonic plague is not simply spread by infected fleas jumping from one host to another and biting the skin of the new host. Hodges, Thomson and their fellow doctors could therefore easily have been infected while examining their patients.
Some prophylactic measures taken by Londoners helped, if not in the way expected. The smoke from burning herbs would not have prevented infection through the air, as was thought, but might have simply kept fleas at bay. Smoke may similarly have worked for the men who brought the death wagons around to pick up the corpses, as they puffed on their prophylactic tobacco pipes while they manhandled bodies into their carts. Another factor at work was that the dead bodies no longer offered a blood supply, and so corpses were likely to be free of infected fleas, though the tissues of the dead could still have been deadly to the touch.
One school of seventeenth-century thought held that cats and dogs might carry the plague. They were therefore exterminated in great numbers. According to Defoe, tens of thousands of dogs were killed. An attempt was made to cull mice and rats in case they carried the infection. Of course, killing rats in any quantity without terriers trained for the job was hopeless. Little did the people of London know that by killing their pets they were indeed protecting themselves, for modern research has shown that many species of animal – including domestic cats and dogs – may carry the disease or become infested with the plague flea.
Towards the end of September, the tide turned. It has been said that because of the dry summer, the rat and flea population decreased, leading to a decline in the death rate. But the weather is unlikely to have been the cause of the improving situation. If anything, rat fleas, like their hosts, are more likely to thrive in warmer weather. It is much more probable that the disease began to subside because the rat fleas ran out of live flesh to feed off. A bubonic plague epidemic kills off the black rat population quite quickly; the hungry fleas then look for a substitute host. Since humans live in close proximity to black rats, they become the species most likely to be chosen. Once the human host begins to dwindle, the flea population also dies off.
The flea might have been master of events in London during 1665 but it was not infallible in its powers. Indeed, the fleas that carried the bubonic plague bacillus were not clever enough to realise that by killing off such a large proportion of their host popidation they were effectively committing suicide. This may explain the characteristically sharp rises and falls in plague epidemics throughout Europe and why they finally ceased altogether, although another theory has it that the rat population began to develop a level of immunity to the plague.
The plague had a profound effect, both upon the survivors and those who watched from the comparative safety of surrounding towns or their country estates. It may well have helped to nudge young William Penn towards the Quakers, a sect he was to join soon afterwards. He wrote that the ravages of the plague gave him a deep sense of the vanity of this world, and of the irreligiousness of the Religions in it’.25 The rather vain young man had possibly learned some self-scrutiny as he saw so many of the clergy abandon the poor to their fate.
In October, Charles convened Parliament at Oxford to discuss the continuing conflict with the Dutch. A further sum of £1.25 million was agreed to fund the fleet. For the relief of London nothing was forthcoming. In retrospect, the priorities of the Crown would be seen as a political blunder. Economic strain, allied to existential dread, took its toll in the capital both physically and politically.
The vast communal graves dug in a ring around the capital held thousands of Londoners. With them lay the hopes of many of those who had supported the return of the King. Along with hope lay the decomposing body of medieval medicine. Physicians – with a few honourable exceptions – had refused to treat the victims, leaving them to their own devices: to follow the physicians out of London if they could afford it, to stay if they could not, and to seek what help they could from nurses and other low-paid carers.26 The old medical remedies, based on theory rather than empirical evidence, had been tested and found to be mostly useless.27 The plague left more than the physical fabric of London in ruins. The world of medicine would never be quite the same again. If the old ideas hung on it was because there was little to replace them in terms of treatment. After all, the practice of medicine has always been to some extent about the delivery of hope.
By December, London was declared safe, though the plague carried on claiming victims well into the following year. At a terrible cost, the city had survived. On New Year’s Eve John Evelyn wrote, ‘Now blessed be God for his extraordinary mercies and preservation of me this year, when thousands, and tens thousands, perished and were swept away on each side of me.’ The Intelligencer, the official government newspaper published during the plague, reported that not one person of substance or authority had died. The plague was a disease of the poor.
* Though his exact date of birth is unknown, Defoe was probably about five when the plague broke out. He published A journal of the Plague Year in 1722.
† He succeeded: the year following the epidemic Hodges published a boob denouncing quacks and in 1672, after he had published ati account of the plague, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. He later became an examiner, or censor, of the college, and gave it a fire engine.
‡ A grain is a measurement of weight equivalent to that of a single grain of barley, or today 64.79891 milligrams.
§ Its charter was granted in 1518.
¶ Both of these survive to the present day, with
the College of Physicians continuing as the most important as it still administers professional medical qualifications.
CHAPTER 12
PESTILENCE, WAR AND FIRE
In the new year of 1666, with the plague dying out, London’s residents began to return to their city. By February, it was considered safe for the royal family to take up residence in Whitehall once more. Merchants and city grandees returned with their riches. Great houses were reopened. Ships sailed up the Thames into the Pool of London and offloaded vital food and supplies. The storehouses along the Thames were replenished. Drovers brought their sheep and cattle to Smithfield to be slaughtered. A few survivors emerged from their homes, emaciated and blinking. Refugees who had endured the hardship of the countryside walked ragged but relieved back into the city. New migrants came from around the country, sensing an opportunity. In the seventeenth century, life in a hazardous city was preferable to that of an agricultural labourer.
According to parish records the plague had killed 68,596 Londoners. If we take the total population of the city, including surrounding liberties and suburbs, at John Graunt’s 1662 estimation of 584,000, then the dead numbered 17.8 per cent of the population. Lord Clarendon thought the true figure was maybe twice that, or 35.6 per cent. If one took Sir William Petty’s 1665 estimation of the population as being up to 460,000, then the death rate as a proportion was considerably lower.
Today it is generally agreed that around 20 per cent of London’s population died. This would make the true number somewhere around 92,000, though many now accept a figure closer to 100,000. The contemporary official estimate of plague deaths in the whole country was put at 200,000.