The Plague and The Fire

JAMES LEASOR

The Plague and the Fire

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James Leasor Ltd at Smashwords

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ISBN 978-1-908291-23-3

First published 1962

This edition published 2011

© James Leasor 1962, 2011

CONTENTS

The Squalor in the City

The Signs

The Great Plague Strikes

Rigorous Measures

No Mercy for the Stricken

Symptoms, Cures and Preventatives

Bring Out Your Dead

The Plague at Eyam

Plague Pits and Bonfires

The End of the Pestilence

A Fire in Pudding Lane

The City Devoured

The Fire Spreads Westwards

The End of the Fire

A Scapegoat is Hanged

A Selective Bibliography

CHAPTER ONE

The Squalor in the City

On every night in that cold, clear week before Christmas 1664, the thick white candles had burned late in the Palace of Whitehall. Their dim trembling glow cast gentle shadows on the tapestried walls and was reflected in the smooth silent waters of the wintry river outside.

Lord Sandwich, the Admiral commanding in Portsmouth, had reported that from the West Country a strange new star had been sighted. News of this star had also come from places as far apart as Spain and Danzig.

King Charles II, superstitious, fascinated by the occult, by signs and portents, moved by the utterances of astrologers and soothsayers, and only recently restored to his throne after the end of Cromwell's dictatorship, decided to see this for himself. A comet was not seen unless great and moving events were due; it was conceivable that these might affect him. Thus, each evening he had waited patiently in the huge ground-floor withdrawing room, hung with tapestries for warmth and effect, heated by a fire crackling in a metal grate large enough to hold logs as long as a man.

He waited in no discomfort for its appearance: his Palace had a frontage of nearly half a mile along the river bank, and was unquestionably the greatest house in his Kingdom, and also much more than a King's Palace; it was his home, his office, a meeting place for scientists and courtiers, a centre of royalty and intrigue, a city within a city. The Palace was surrounded by gardens, and it was the King's custom to walk in them every morning and check the accuracy of his watch by a sundial.

King Charles was fascinated by time and how it was measured. Beyond the great room where he awaited a sight of the new star, a small staircase led to his Closet, possibly the only room where he could be himself, without bothering with the pretence of Royalty; where his collection of clocks with moving figures, gilded pendulums, strangely wrought hands and figures chimed and ticked away the hours of waiting.

It was hot near the fire, but elsewhere in the high-ceilinged room the dark velvet curtains that hung across the doorways moved and trembled under the fingers of the wind. Beyond this withdrawing-room was the King's bedchamber, overlooking the Thames, with the fishing boats, the barges and all the traffic of the river.

The King's fiddlers and musicians played endlessly, softly, impersonal as eunuchs in the background, and then suddenly came the news they expected. The music stopped, and the King crossed to the windows of thick cloudy glass and opened them. Stars glittered like a thousand eyes above him in the freezing sky; and then across the frozen arch of heaven he saw a strange star moving.

It seemed larger and yet less bright than the others and for a comet was disappointing; it had no tail and no one could be positive where it had originated or where it went, for abruptly it melted away in the infinite darkness. King Charles was left in the suddenly silent room with the cold wind from the river blowing on his face.

In the City of London, about two miles to the east of the Palace, thousands of the King's subjects also sat up to see the passage of what they called The Comet'. They stood on higher ground than the Palace, and many swore that it almost touched the rooftops; an exaggeration, but an indication of their alarm and dread at the unknown. It had been visible on several nights, and with each sight of it the feeling grew that this must surely herald some event of immense importance to London. If not, then why had it come so close?

Samuel Pepys, the Secretary to the Admiralty, went out with his porter at two o'clock on the morning of Christmas Eve to see this star for himself. Lord Sandwich, who had first reported it, was a relation and had nominated him to a clerkship in the Admiralty. Pepys made it his business to see and note all occurrences of interest. The arrival of a comet naturally aroused his curiosity.

Someone told him that it could best be seen from Tower Hill. The night was bright and cold, with nearly a full moon, and the ruts in the road left by carriage wheels had frozen and glittered silver with frost as they climbed. Pepys saw the comet very clearly, noting that it passed 'so very near the houses' that many people considered 'this imported something very peculiar to the City alone'.

And what a small, strange City, lying under the hard mantle of frost, did the faint and flickering trail of that comet illuminate! The City of London stickled with short twisted chimneys, thick as the bristles on a brush, with its 109 church spires, and the houses of lath and tar and plaster; with huts and hovels where thousands crowded together for warmth and necessity, had more in common with the Middle East and the Middle Ages than any Western city since.

It was a city of unbelievable contrasts; a nobleman's house could contain sixty servants, from Steward, Gentleman Usher, Gentleman of the House, to scullions; yet there would be no proper lavatory, apart from a stinking 'house of easement'. Although Sir John Harington had invented the water-closet seventy years earlier, and Queen Elizabeth had copied his design for Richmond Palace and Queen Anne had installed a WC in Windsor Castle, most people still considered this an unnecessary affectation. Servants were so cheap - a good maid cost barely thirty shillings a year - that there was no lack of labour to clear away filth. Bathrooms were similarly rare; a man was old at forty and senile at fifty; yet if he were rich he lived on a scale virtually impossible today. Breakfast for the wealthy consisted of oysters, anchovies, tongue, wine and Northdown ale. And this was only a preparation for the main meal at noon.

Here in the large houses in Covent Garden and Whitehall they ate huge quantities of soups, roast mutton and fish served with pungent sauces; tarts, pies and cheese. Salads contained such strange and exotic ingredients as rosemary, borage flowers, even violet buds. They ate until the sweat streamed down their faces: huge steaming joints of pork, beef or venison, capon, teal, pheasant, snipe, pigeons and larks.

The poor did not fare so well: they lived on bread and roots stolen from farms, on any small animals they could snare, or what the rich men left them.

In London, then as now, rich and poor lived close together; in one street would stand a mass of garrets and filthy tenements swarming like hives with people; across the way could be the town house of a nobleman costing £50,000.

Physically, the City was tiny. It covered barely 448 acres, two-thirds the size of the present-day borough of Chelsea, one-sixth the size of London Airport, about half the total of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens put together.

Superimposed upon a modern map of Greater London, its river boundary extended for barely a mile, a curving stretch of water from the fifteenth-century Baynard's Castle at Blackfriars to the Tower.

A stout city wall, more than thirty feet high, and nearly as thick, a relic of days when armed bands would ride in from the country round about to loot and rape, ran north from Blackfriars to the first of the City gates - Ludgate, a short distance east of what is now Ludgate Circus. From there the wall enclosed the site of the present Old Bailey, and continued on to Newgate, another of the main City gates with which was combined one of London's chief prisons. On to Aldersgate, the wall turned north to Cripplegate, then east along London Wall to Moorgate and Bishopsgate. Finally, it bore south to Aldgate and the Tower.

On a map of the present-day London Underground system, the extent of the old City, commemorated by the names of its gates, forms only a small loop at the eastern end of the Circle Line. Yet this tiny area was the richest, most important city in north Europe. In this small, cramped area, roughly half a million people lived and worked; and here in the summer and autumn of the year 1665 nearly one in every four died of the Great Plague.

Londoners were very parochial in attitude and outlook; to all of them Knightsbridge and Kensington were remote villages on the Bath Road, dangerous to reach and seldom visited. Nearly a hundred years later, this road west to Kensington was still described by Lord Hervey, then Lord Privy Seal, as 'a great impassable gulf of mud'. In 1665 it was far worse: a river of liquid mud and manure in wet weather; a dusty, rutted, indefinite lane through fields in summer.

The small hills around London, which slowed down the unsprung coaches and carriages and the farm carts drawn by teams of shaggy Shire horses, were thick with highwaymen, footpads and gangs of thieves; with Army and Navy deserters, desperate for food and afraid to venture into town. Such men would hold up any coach and kill for a few coppers. If caught, they were strung up on a gibbet above the road they had terrorized, for birds to pick; the body of one such criminal swung from a tree on top of Shooter's Hill on the Dover Road all through that year. Most of them escaped this rough justice; they bribed coachmen to bog their coaches in the mud so that they could ambush them more easily, and paid postillions to drop the reins.

Professional highwaymen had their own beats, their own limits. On Finchley Common some would hide behind a large oak tree in wait for unsuspecting, unaccompanied riders. This tree regularly received a fusillade of bullets from zealous guards on passing coaches, in the hope of hitting at least one highwayman.

If a journey beyond the City walls, out west through the marshes of Uxbridge and Hillingdon, or south-west to Dover, was dangerous in summer and virtually impossible in any other season, it was also enormously expensive. The coach from Aldersgate, highwaymen permitting, took three days to reach Salisbury; a seat on it cost twenty shillings. For £2 - more than the annual salary for a good woman servant - a man could travel twice the distance to Exeter.

Travel within the City also had its peculiar hazards, although from the south bank of the Thames the City certainly presented a noble view.

Dominated by St Paul's Cathedral, the skyline was castellated by slim church spires. At the eastern end, old London Bridge threw its nineteen arches across the Thames, not unlike the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. Inside the City, however, the scene was distinctly less ethereal and more earthy. Streets were tortuous and narrow, paved with cobbles, slippery with dung and urine; timber-framed Tudor houses leaned across them from either side, like old crones whispering secrets to each other.

The Restoration of Charles II to the throne had brought with it a wave of optimism in the future; rich and poor had flocked to London in the confident expectation of a settled reign and a new prosperity.

Overcrowding was fantastic; twenty, thirty, forty people would live crammed together in a three-roomed house, sleeping and eating by rota. The stinking side-streets wound meaninglessly and without plan into squares and yards and still more streets. Open drains trickled down their centres, buzzing with dark swarms of flies in summer, and dangerous roaring rivers of sewage after rain. Most houses lacked gutters and so rainwater streamed in cascades from their eaves. Into these drains also went all kitchen waste and garbage. The next downpour of rain would carry away along the crude culverts everything the scavenging dogs, cats, pigs and beggars could not remove. Pedestrians had to pick their way through these streaming streets, and at the same time avoid buckets of night soil or faeces that householders emptied out of upper windows with no word of warning or thought for those beneath. Many wore pattens, odd-shaped metal platforms which fitted beneath their shoes, and which could be removed before entering a house, to keep their feet out of the muck.

The City Corporation employed 'rakers' and scavengers to clear away the worst of the filth, but the work was foul and most people, even in the poverty of that time, considered hunger or crime preferable to shovelling away these crawling streams of putrefaction. Refuse and excreta would accumulate until the whole city reeked like a giant privy: the stench was oriental.

The scavengers had, in any case, no effective means of disposing of what they had collected. Piles of decomposing matter were merely heaped in pyramids, known as 'lay-stalls', around the outskirts of the City. There they rotted, fouling the air with their stench. Sometimes they were dumped into the river; then they polluted the water and killed the fish.

Courtiers and ladies of fashion carried scented handkerchiefs or held posies of flowers to their noses to filter the air they breathed. When the Plague began, the stench of the dead and dying increased the foulness of the atmosphere, so that much reliance was placed .on 'pomanders' and 'pouncet-boxes' -collections of pungent or sweet-smelling herbs that people carried or wore in an attempt to sweeten the air they breathed. Some even went so far as to plug their nostrils with pellets of wormwood and rue and breathed through their mouths.

Seventeenth-century England was not a fastidious country, but even Londoners born in the City and accustomed to these conditions since childhood, found them intolerable. There were frequent complaints to the Lord Mayor about the rivers of liquid manure that coursed through the streets; about alley-ways and side-streets almost knee-deep in mud; about half-paved thoroughfares overflowing with water because there were no drains, and rows of gutterless houses where filthy water showered down on passers-by long after a storm.

The City Fathers had made some half-hearted attempts to remedy the worst of the horrors. The Town Ditch, an open sewer, was being filled in, but below Ludgate the Fleet River contained the bloated bodies of dead animals and even unwanted babies. Some farmers drove their pigs into its stinking slime in order to fatten them more quickly.

Short of rebuilding the entire City, there seemed little chance of substantial improvements; and when the Fire finally gave the City Fathers this opportunity, they were too dilatory to make use of it.

The only access from the suburbs to the old walled City, the centre of commerce and industry, was through one or other of the City gates, or across London Bridge. Several of the gates, including Aldgate, Aldersgate, Newgate and Cripplegate, had been rebuilt and widened since 1630, but without any thought or regard to the fact that the population of both City and suburbs would more than double in thirty years, and that industries within the walls would also develop enormously, with a consequent increase in traffic.

Many of London's necessities and the raw material for these industries - such as coal - arrived in barges, but an ever-increasing amount came in on horses and carts. This meant chaos at the City gates. Long lines of carts pulled by teams of heavy horses, plus beautifully painted and accoutred coaches, and hackney carriages, frequently queued for hours for admission. Travellers suffered what one of them called 'intolerable stops and embarrasses'. Sometimes the drivers fought each other for the right to go through first. Little barefoot boys nipped between the coaches and stole anything removable. In rainy weather, with steaming weary horses, soaked passengers, cursing coachmen and horses falling down in the mud, delays were infinitely worse.

On London Bridge congestion was even more severe. It had been built in the thirteenth century, during the reign of King John. It extended for about 400 yards, nineteen arches of masonry supporting it twenty yards above the river. Apart from a drawbridge at the centre, raised to let through high-masted vessels, the bridge was lined on both sides by decrepit, overhanging houses, so that its full width was barely thirty feet. This meant almost continual traffic jams in the narrow thoroughfare.

To add to the confusion, half-hearted attempts had been going on for twenty years to repair serious damage which the bridge had suffered in a fire thirty-three years earlier, when in eight hours more than forty houses at the northern end were completely gutted. The fire-fighters' efforts had been hampered by the fact that the Thames was frozen over and they could not break the ice to draw water. The blaze began because of 'the carelessness of a needlemaker's servant near St Magnus' Church, leaving a tub of hot ashes under a pair of stairs'. Its effects were still being felt, for little had been done in the meantime to restore the damage, apart from nailing up a row of planks to stop drunks from falling into the Thames.

Once inside the City, the confusion and congestion was as bad as at the gates. No pavements or sidewalks existed, and the roadways extended, often without interruption, from wall to wall of the houses facing each other across every street. Frequently these roads were so narrow that the gables of facing houses almost met above the heads of passers-by, shutting out the light. Only after the Great Fire had virtually destroyed the City did the King authorize an Act which stipulated that the more important roads should have a minimum width of fourteen feet.

The unhappy pedestrian, unprotected by raised footways, walked in far greater fear of injury than at any time since. Licensed hackney carriages had been plying for trade for the past thirty years, and the huge carriages of the rich had multiplied with the return of the Monarchy. In these wooden-wheeled vehicles, as large as a small room, the well-to-do trundled through the stinking streets, spraying less fortunate pedestrians with mud and filth from their gigantic wheels.

In some streets foot passengers could leap from under the pounding hooves of horses and hold on to thick wooden posts, known as 'massy' posts, and originally intended as a kind of bumper to prevent damage to houses from passing carts and drays.

Sedan chairs had also become a fashionable mode of conveyance since Charles I had brought three back from his travels in Spain. They provided not only a novel but frequently a quicker method of travel than the coach in these congested streets: they had become the seventeenth-century equivalent of the bubble-car. Thus, the pedestrian taking shelter behind the 'massy' posts was quite likely to escape being trodden down by the foam-flecked horses of the rich, only to be knocked unceremoniously aside by sweating chairmen rushing some highly born burden to a lunch with his mistress.

Another cause of confusion arose from the fearful smoke pollution. Nearly all the manufacturers - the iron smelters, the makers of soap, the brewers and others who day and night burned great quantities of coal - had their factories within the City walls. Dense, choking clouds of thick black smoke hung over the rooftops, making the air foul and adding to the grime. The smoke became so thick (for even the chimney stacks of the furnaces were no higher than the roofs) that people could scarcely see one another in the streets, and stumbled about coughing and spluttering, as though walking in a never-lifting fog.

With 15,000 houses also using coal for heating their rooms and boiling their water, it was not surprising that John Evelyn, a middle-aged Government official with a habit of making notes on all he saw, should write a pamphlet on the subject.

This horrid smoke obscures our churches and makes our palaces look old,' he wrote. 'It fouls our clothes and corrupts the waters, so that the very rain and refreshing dews that fall in the several seasons precipitate this impure vapour, which with its black and tenacious quality, spots and contaminates whatever is exposed to it.'

King Charles immediately commanded Evelyn to prepare a Bill incorporating reforms which could be placed before Parliament. But, of course, before the matter reached the Commons, the Plague and Fire had effected reforms far more dramatic.

Many noble families and some rich merchants had already abandoned the crowded City and set the fashion of moving westwards. They built fine, spacious houses along the river towards Westminster, at Whitehall, at Knight's Bridge, across the low-lying ground divided by a stream known as West Bourne; and at the village of Paddington. Farther west, the villages of Brompton, Chelsea (already famous for its buns) and Battersea had also started to grow.

Along what is now Victoria Embankment stood several great houses: Arundel House, Somerset House and Northumberland House among them. Around Hyde Park, Bays Watering and Mary-le-Bone new houses were also being built. Soho Fields, Pall Mall and St James's were the choice of those with a taste for solitude, and the Haymarket, which served the function its name implies, contained only one house.

In neighbouring Piccadilly not even one house was built: here the ground rose to command an uninterrupted view over lawns, woods and the park of St James's Palace towards Westminster and the river.

Tremendous business was done round the clock in upwards of a thousand taverns within the City limits. These included many 'dives' or cellars that specialized in bawdy and depraved entertainments; men, women, boys, even animals were among the performers. Pornographic spectacles were not uncommon, even in public; a great fair, which was held on a site near Piccadilly each May, was suppressed several times because of the crude excesses perpetrated there, although it managed to survive, in a censored form, until 1809.

Venereal disease was a scourge of the times, and two lock-hospitals' at Southwark and Kingsland were maintained to treat the sufferers. Hundreds, probably thousands, died from this disease every year, although the causes of death were often disguised in parish registers as 'ulcers', 'sores', and other more respectable ailments. According to one account, only the parish clerks in St Giles-in-the-Fields and St Martin-in-the-Fields honestly recorded the true number of deaths from 'the Pox', and these probably only because they had to. Their two parishes contained 'most of the vilest and most miserable Houses of Uncleanness' to be found.

Drink was another London weakness, and often fatal; no less than 3,986 people are officially admitted to have died of dropsy caused by alcohol between 1657 and 1665; this figure was again probably only a fraction of the real total.

The Court also treasured a well-deserved reputation for licentiousness and debauchery. Anthony a Wood, an Oxford scholar in his thirties at the time of the Plague, made some outspoken comments in his private journals about the Royal circle, which moved to Oxford to escape the epidemic. The chief courtiers, noted Wood bitterly, were 'high, proud, insolent and looked upon Scolars no more than Pedants... Very nasty and beastly, leaving at their departure their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, colehouses, cellers'. They were, in the main, 'rude, rough, whoremongers, vaine, empty, carelesse'.

Despite the wealth of London, the main buildings were not notably impressive and generally in poor repair. St Paul's Cathedral was one of these. In 1630 the renowned architect Inigo Jones had been commissioned to restore this Cathedral, which had been in a semi-ruined state since being severely damaged by lightning half a century before. Jones rebuilt the nave in Portland stone and transformed the west front into a magnificent near-replica of a Roman temple. To the Puritans during the Commonwealth his grand design savoured of Popery; their soldiers used the cathedral as stabling for their horses, tore down the ancient carving for woodwork, and showed their final contempt by playing ninepins in the splendid portico.

Nor did the Restoration change the public attitude towards the Cathedral. Itinerant vendors still used the aisle as a place of barter, young bloods and 'swaggering roisterers' would call there for assignments, for prostitutes found it a popular promenade. Now, a dilapidated mixture of Gothic and Renaissance, the City's first place of worship was surrounded by a mass of grimy, tottering timber houses which had crept up to its walls.

The Tower, a steel-grey fortress standing guard over the river, was in little better condition. Around it ran an evil-smelling ditch, soggy with sewage and the decomposing bodies of cats and dogs. On the far bank stood huddles of decayed houses. Even the ancient Guildhall was hidden from view by a maze of streets and jumbled rooftops and lacked any open approach from which a visitor could admire it.

Such was London in the year the Plague broke out, a city of contrasts: hunger and prodigality, filth and luxury;