Necropolis: London & it's Dead (7 page)

Sir William Dugdale, an antiquary, concerned about the effects the Civil War would have on church architecture, ‘foreseeing that God would be turned out of churches into Barnes; & from thence again into the fields and mountains, and under hedges’,
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recorded St Paul’s in great detail in the 1650s, drawing the monuments, copying the epitaphs and noting the arms on the walls, ‘that by Inke & paper, the shadows of them, with their inscriptions, might be Preserved for posterity’. Dugdale’s record of the old St Paul’s was invaluable. But even he could not have predicted that while St Paul’s might survive the ravages of the Commonwealth, it would be destroyed by the Great Fire; still less could he have foreseen the devastating epidemic which was to afflict London in 1665.

4: PESTILENCE

Diary of a Plague Year

In December 1664, a mysterious comet appeared in the skies above London. Pale and languid, slow and lethargic, it seemed a sinister portent. People heard voices, warning them to flee. Others saw visions in the sky: coffins, hearses, heaps of dead bodies. A ghost appeared several times near Bishopsgate, bowing out whenever the clocks struck eleven. Radical dissenter Solomon Eagle ran naked through the streets with a pan of burning charcoal on his head, warning Londoners to repent their wicked ways. Daniel, a patient at Bethlem Hospital, gazed at the cloud formations and saw an angel in white unsheathing the sword of pestilence over a guilty city.
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And, at Long Acre, Covent Garden, in the parish of St Giles’s, doctors in their sinister beaked masks and waxed black gowns stormed a Frenchman’s house. Rumours circulated, whipping up hysteria. It was claimed that, alerted by neighbours, the doctors had removed the bodies of two plague victims.

But Londoners had no inkling of the horrors that awaited them, nor that their capital was about to become a necropolis.

London beneath the sickly comet was a city ripe for pestilence. Following the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, people had
flocked to the capital, increasing the population to 200,000. Royalist families who had survived Cromwell’s Commonwealth were back in town. Ex-servicemen set up in trade. Fashionistas responded to the Court’s incessant demand for novelty. Tailors, wigmakers, clothiers and weavers streamed into the garment district of the East End, packing out the parishes of Whitechapel, Shoreditch and Spitalfields. William Dunbar, one of the first of many literary Scots to seek fame in London, might have praised the capital as ‘the flour of Cities all’
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but London was a dirty old town. An Act of Parliament in 1662 described London’s highways as foul, dangerous and inconvenient to the inhabitants.

Narrow streets were open drains of raw sewage, ditches and rivers dumping grounds for the carcases of dead animals and occasionally humans. Cromwell’s former chaplain, Hugh Peter, complained bitterly that it was impossible to walk anywhere without getting covered in dog shit and worse.

With the Great Plague of 1665, London faced its supreme challenge in burying the dead since the Black Death in 1348. A challenge that it would not meet again for over 200 years, when cholera struck.

As rumours spread in the stagnant air, two very different men chronicled the epidemic’s progress: Samuel Pepys, diarist, Civil Service mandarin and
bon viveur
, and Henry Foe, a saddler living in the East End, who followed events voraciously, as far as any man could, in an era where Cromwell had banned newspapers, and gossip was the only mass medium. Henry’s experiences were chronicled by nephew Daniel Defoe in
A Journal of the Plague Year
(1722), a triumph of investigative journalism. Reading Defoe, we live through the plague with Henry, witnessing the horrors he describes.

It was early in September 1664, before the comet had cast its melancholy influence across London, when Henry Foe first heard rumours
that the plague had returned to Holland, where it had been virulent in the past.

The very word ‘plague’ was designed to strike horror into the seventeenth-century mindset. Bubonic plague had haunted England for centuries, most notoriously in the outbreak of 1348–9. Once again, the pestilence stalked westwards, obliterating entire communities, leaving the dead to litter the streets and no one left to bury them. A series of epidemics culminated in the outbreak of 1625, when 40,000 Londoners died. The memory of that last epidemic was still fresh. And, even by seventeenth-century standards, the plague was a horrible way to die. The symptoms were unmistakable. Inflamed glands or ‘bubos’, about the size of a nutmeg, appeared in the victim’s groin, surrounded by areas of blackened skin. Plague spots or ‘tokens’ erupted–little silver pennies of gangrenous flesh–accompanied by violent headaches and vomiting. Death was inevitable.

‘Several Counsels were held about Ways to prevent its coming over, but all was kept very private,’ noted Henry.
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The rumours faded away, and people forgot about it until December 1664, when the grim discovery of the two dead Frenchmen was made in Long Acre. Despite the family’s attempts at a cover-up, these two unfortunates were the first recorded victims of the epidemic, appearing on the weekly Bill of Mortality–a list of deaths published by each parish.

Henry and his fellow Londoners gave a collective shudder, there were a few outbreaks of panic, and then the event was forgotten–until early January 1665, when a third Frenchman from the same house in Long Acre died of the plague, followed by a fourth man six weeks later.

People started to avoid St Giles’s. They didn’t go there unless they had to. And if business did take them to Drury Lane, they walked right down the middle of the street, avoiding any contagion that might lurk in the doorways.

Henry learned that burials in London had increased. The usual
number hovered at around 240 to 300 per week. But by early January 1665 (from 27 December to 3 January), these figures were rising to 349, and between 17 January to 24 January, to 474. To a general feeling of relief, cold weather had set in by February 1665, and appeared to see off the infection, although burials at St Giles’s continued to be disturbingly high. By March, rumours multiplied.

Henry heard that two more victims had been recorded, and twelve cases of ‘the spotted fever’, a variation of the plague virus. Pepys’s first reference appeared on 30 April: ‘Great fears of the sickness here in the city, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all.’
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Londoners panicked. Warm April weather, summer on the way, and the plague was spreading to other parishes: St Andrew’s, Holborn; St Clement Dane’s, the Strand; and the parish of St Mary Woolchurch, in Bearbinder Lane near the Stock Market. The casualty in Bearbinder Lane was a recent arrival in the City of London. Last Christmas the victim had been living in Long Acre, at the same address as the Frenchmen who were the first recorded victims of the epidemic. Desperate to escape infection, he had spread it to another part of town.

By May, the weather was clement, with no threat of a heatwave to incubate the pestilence. Londoners prayed that the plague would pass them by. The population of the City appeared healthy, only fifty-four recorded plague victims had been buried out of the entire ninety-seven parishes, and it looked as though the plague would be contained within the parishes it had already afflicted. The mortality rate was low. St Giles’s had buried thirty-two in one week, true, but only one was a plague victim. Listening to the word on the street, Henry Foe remained positive and concentrated on running his business.

But not for long. The
Bills of Mortality
were exposed as a pack of lies. Forty people were buried in the parish of St Giles’s in the second week of May, but they were not officially recorded as plague victims, for fear of the consequences. ‘Knavery and collu
sion’ by parish authorities to avoid panic and quarantine was rife. The death toll was higher than anyone could have imagined.
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By the end of May, the figure in St Giles’s had risen to fifty-three, but still only nine deaths were ascribed to the plague. By June, the authorities were facing an epidemic. The Court, with Charles II, moved to Oxford. Entire households were dying in St Giles’s. And it was at this point, when the spectre of the plague threatened the city, that the Lord Mayor and aldermen turned London into a police state.

Endowed with Draconian powers, the Privy Council appointed Searchers to seize dying victims, hidden by their families, and quarantine their households. On 7 June Pepys noted: ‘This day I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and “Lord Have Mercy Upon Us” writ there which was a sad sight to me, being the first of that kind that to my remembrance I ever saw.’
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The red cross, the fatal handwriting of death, became a horribly familiar sight over the following months as house after house was quarantined. With a plague victim in the family, a home became a prison without bars. As soon as an infected person had been identified, a period of twenty-eight days must pass before they (if they survived) or their family were allowed out. If one person had just emerged from quarantine, and then another member fell sick, the entire wretched procedure had to be repeated all over again. Families were plunged into despair: ‘The consternation of those who were thus separated from all society, unless with the infected, was inexpressible; and the dismal apprehensions it laid them under, made them but an easier prey to the devouring enemy.’
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Watchers were appointed to ensure that members of infected households could not escape. Nurses, who could do little to alleviate the suffering, were sent in, but soon became the stuff of urban myth, accused of suffocating and robbing their unfortunate patients, or succumbing to the plague themselves, dressed in their mistresses’
stolen finery. And then, after the merciful release, the bearers would arrive to take away the dead.

Appointed by the parish, these officials inevitably became victims themselves. A shortage of carts, horses and even coffins made matters worse, with coffins used over and over again to transport the dead to their burial place. The small sums due to nurses, bearers and watchmen continued to be paid regularly, putting a strain on meagre parish funds. As the death toll rose, the sum increased, but there were still not enough people to bury the dead, although, as Henry Foe noted, the poor displayed a kind of brutal courage by taking on the work, because they needed the money.

By June, London shimmered in the heat of the most baleful summer it had ever known. With the Court gone to Oxford, and entire neighbourhoods in quarantine, the streets were deserted yet somehow menacing. Sparkling Restoration nightlife was a thing of the past. A curfew shut pubs by nine. Public dancing rooms, gaming tables, music houses, puppet shows, had all been closed down. London was a ghost-town, eerily quiet, without so much as a dog’s bark to disturb the silence. Recognizing that they spread infection via fleas, the authorities had ordered a massive cull. All domestic animals were destroyed. The dog-catcher for St Margaret’s, Westminster, was paid for burying 353 dog corpses. The City Corporation prohibited the keeping of pigs, dogs, cats, weasels, pigeons and rabbits. The Corporation dog-catcher claimed payment for 4,380 dogs slaughtered. Figures for cats were considerably higher, as most households contained about half a dozen.

Inevitably, Londoners rebelled against these ruthless measures. Healthy people, driven to distraction by being incarcerated for a month at a time with their own families, made vigorous attempts to escape, through back doors, over walls, out of windows, down alleyways. Watchmen were distracted, in two cases attacked. One was even blown up with gunpowder.

Pepys’s neighbour, a Mr Marr, related the tale of an absconding servant girl:

How a maid-servant of Mr John Wright’s falling sick of the plague, she was removed to an out-house, and a nurse appointed to look to her, who being at once absent, the maid got out of the house at the window and run away. The nurse coming and knocking, and having no answer, believed she was dead, and went and told Mr Wright so; who, and his lady, were in great strait what to do to get her buried. At last resolved to go to Burntwood hard by, being in that parish, and there get people to do it but they would not; so he went home full of trouble, and in the way met the wench walking over the Common, which frighted him worse than before. And was forced to send people to take her; which he did, and they got one of the pest coaches [a secure sedan chair] and put her into it to carry her to a pest-house. And passing in a narrow lane, Sir Anthony Browne, with his brother and some friends in the coach, met this coach with the curtains drawn close. The brother being a young man, and believing there might be some lady in it that would not be seen, and the way being narrow, he thrust his head out of his own into her coach to look, and there saw somebody look very ill, and in a sick dress and stunk mightily; which the coachman also cried out upon. And presently they came up to some people that stood looking after it; and told our gallants that it was a maid of Mr Wright’s carried away sick of the plague which put the young gentleman into a fright and almost cost him his life, but is now well again.
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Pepys did not tell us what became of the maid.

The pest house, to which the wretched girl was removed, was no novelty in Restoration London. Pest houses, similar in spirit to the isolation hospitals of the nineteenth century, were holding places for the diseased and dying. Henry referred to two pest houses, ‘one in the fields beyond Old Street, and one in Westminster’.
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Demand was overwhelming, with the sick desperate to gain a place. And they were efficient, too, despite the deadly virus: