A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (35 page)

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.’
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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’.
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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’.
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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.’
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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 left 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’.
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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’.
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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’.
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