A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2) / From A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague

by Charles Creighton

Malignant Fever preceding the Plague of 1625.

The period of immunity from plague both in London and in the provinces, which began about 1611, was at length broken in 1625. The health of London, and of country districts as well, had not been good for two years before, but plague was not the reigning type of disease. Thus, in London, the burials rose from 8959 in 1622, to 11,102 in 1623 and to 12,210 in 1624. The letters of the time enable us to see what it was that disturbed the public health. On August 21, 1624, Chamberlain writes from London to Dudley Carleton[997]:

“We had 328 died this week, a greater number than hath been these fifteen or sixteen years, and yet no mention of plague. God keep it from among us, for we are in danger. But this spotted fever is cousin-german to it at least, and makes as quick riddance almost. The Lady Hatton hath two or three of her children sick of it at her brother Fanshaw’s, in Essex, and hath lost her younger daughter, that was buried at Westminster on Wednesday night by her father; a pretty gentlewoman, much lamented.” Again, on September 4: “We have here but a sickly season, which is easily seen by the weekly mounting of our bill, which is come this last week to 407, and yet we will acknowledge no infection [i.e., of plague]. Indeed, by the particulars we find about 250 of them to be children, most of the rest carried away by this spotted fever, which reigns almost everywhere, in the country as ill as here.... The mortality is spread far and near, and takes hold of whole households in many places.” On October 9: “The town continues sickly still, for this week there died 347.” On October 23 we hear of the Lord Keeper being “troubled with the fluent disease of the time”—the flux, or flix. On December 18 (as well as previously on August 21) a cure of smallpox is mentioned in a person of quality.

These, then, were the prevalent types of epidemic sickness, in the houses of the great as well as among the poor—spotted fever or typhus, dysentery or flux, and smallpox. Two of these continued into the plague-year, 1625, as Taylor, the Water-poet, says of that occasion:

“Thou see’st the fearful plague, the flix and fever,
Which many a soul doth from the body sever.”

An eminent victim of the “pestilent fever” was the marquis of Hamilton, who died of it while at Moor Park, Rickmansworth, on Ash-Wednesday, 1625[998]. His residence in London was the house called Fisher’s Folly (mentioned by Stow) outside Bishopsgate in a parish which was now “pestered” with tenements of the poor.

The fever was not always called the spotted fever. It may have been the same disease that is often spoken of under the name of ague—“the ague with a hundred names,” as Abraham Holland says (1625). Thus, Mead, of Christ’s College, Cambridge, writes on September 4, 1625: “Agues grow wonderfully rife both here and everywhere; so that one told me yesterday that about Royston and Barkway they wanted help to gather their harvest out of the fields”—perhaps the same sort of “burning fever” which we shall have to trace a few pages later, both in town and country, in time of peace as well as in the Civil Wars, the type of sickness which became the common one in England when the plague had ceased, reaching its highest point in the 18th century. But here again we meet the old difficulty of “influenza.”

These historical glimpses of spotted fevers, or pestilent fevers, in the houses of the great, as well as among the common people, are in accordance not only with the London bills of mortality for the respective years, but also with the registers of country parishes and market towns as abstracted by the laborious Dr Short. Repeating the form of table used in a former chapter, which dealt with the epidemic years 1557-8 and 1580-82, we find the years 1623-25 distinguished as follows:

Country Parishes.

Year.		No. of registers examined		No. of unhealthy parishes		Baptised in same		Buried in same
1622		85		11		177		223
1623		84		30		601		836
1624		87		19		362		511
1625		88		13		246		327

Market Towns.

Year.		No. of registers examined		No. of unhealthy towns		Baptised in same		Buried in same
1622		25		4		345		442
1623		25		16		439		2254
1624		25		9		714		978
1625		25		9		563		666

The incidence upon the year 1623 is the more noteworthy as there appears to be no record of plague in England that year in its more usual seats, except an entry in a parish register at Banbury. Fever, we may take it, was the prevalent epidemic types both in London and provincial places, urban and rural. In his other treatise Short calls it “malignant spotted fever,” and refers specially to the parish registers of Keswick, Penrith, and Wigton for its prevalence in 1623[999].

Chamberlain, in the letter of August 21, 1624, says the spotted fever was cousin-german at least to the plague; and therein he expressed as a layman an opinion which was afterwards formally expounded by Willis Sydenham and Morton. Along with the flux and the smallpox it stood for the unhealthiness of London in 1623 and 1624 and the first months of 1625, just as the trio were the chief causes of epidemic mortality in the capital in the latter part of the seventeenth century and throughout the whole of the eighteenth. But in 1625 London was not yet done with plague. As the year passed from spring into summer, the spotted fever did not, indeed, cease (as we may infer from casual references and from the known facts of the analogous plague-years, 1636 and 1665); but it was soon overtaken, surpassed, and eclipsed by the greater infection, the old “common infection” of the sixteenth century, the bubo-plague itself. To explain the existence of typhus in the Liberties and out-parishes of London in 1623 and 1624, we find ready to hand the evidence of overcrowding while the plague was quiet from 1611; the births in 1624 were about half as many again as immediately before the last great plague of 1603, and the deaths were twice as many. The fringe of poverty had grown once more, despite the epidemic checks of flux, fever and smallpox: the harvest was ready for the sickle, and the reaping took place in the summer and autumn of 1625. The infection of plague was lurking in London, as it had been for nearly three centuries; but it depended for its activity upon the times and seasons, and the season of 1625 was a favourable one.