The London Plague of 1625.
The previous summer of 1624 had been unusually hot and dry. The weather in October was exceptionally fine, and the fruit crop was abundant. In January the weather was warm and mild. On February 25 there occurred one of those very high tides that come perhaps once in a generation. Thames Street was wrecked, Westminster Hall was “full three feet in water all over. But the greater loss we hear of in the drowning of marshes, and overthrowing the walls in Kent, Essex, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, and other places near the sea[1000].” For the first three months of 1625 the deaths from plague were two or three in a week, some weeks being clear. In the last week of March they were 11, and in the week after, 10. In the last week of May they were 69, reported from twenty parishes. The spring is described by the Water-poet as “wholesome;” but the early summer was unusually cold. On June 12 Chamberlain writes: “We have had for a month together the extremest cold weather ever I knew in this season.” The whole month of June was a time of “ceaseless rain in London[1001].” In the country, the hay-harvest was spoilt, and the corn-harvest was only a half crop[1002]. Another says (in verse), that the summer sun wore sallow hair and a languishing complexion; the air was full of black mists and damp, with no dewdrops at night, but a vaporous smoke[1003]. The following table of the weekly burials (with christenings) in London will show how the plague increased after the rains of June. The mortality of May and June had been a good deal higher for the season than in the moderate endemic years of plague, such as the last series from 1606 to 1611; but it was not until July that a plague of the first degree declared itself.
A Table of the Christenings and Mortality in London for the year 1625.[1004]
The deaths from all causes in May and June were so many more than the reported plague-deaths could account for that those who watched the bills of mortality (Mead at Cambridge, Salvetti in London) suspected that plague was being concealed. “It is a strange reckoning,” says Mead of the bill for the week ending June 30: “Are there some other diseases as bad and spreading as the plague, or is there untrue dealing in the account[1005]?” Probably there were both; at the end of the year the deaths from all causes were some 20,000 more than the plague accounted for; and at least half of that excess was extra to the ordinary mortality. The spotted fever and the flux doubtless continued side by side with the plague, having been its forerunners. The parishes most affected were, as in 1603, St Giles’s, Cripplegate, St Olave’s, Southwark, St Sepulchre’s, without Newgate, and St Mary’s, Whitechapel, corresponding to the mazes of lanes and twisting passages, “pestered” with the tenements of the poorer class, of which only a few examples now remain from 18th century London. The following are the parishes with greatest mortality, in their order (Bell):
| Total deaths | Plague deaths | |||
| St Giles’s, Cripplegate | 3988 | 2338 | ||
| St Olave’s, Southwark | 3689 | 2609 | ||
| St Sepulchre’s, Newgate | 3425 | 2420 | ||
| St Mary’s, Whitechapel | 3305 | 2272 | ||
| St Saviour’s, Southwark | 2746 | 1671 | ||
| St Botolph’s, Aldgate | 2573 | 1653 | ||
| St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate | 2334 | 714 | ||
| St Andrew’s, Holborn | 2190 | 1636 | ||
| St Leonard’s, Shoreditch | 1995 | 1407 | ||
| St George’s, Southwark | 1608 | 912 | ||
| St Bride’s, Fleet St. | 1481 | 1031 | ||
| St Martin’s in the Fields | 1470 | 973 | ||
| St Giles’s in the Fields | 1333 | 947 | ||
| St Clement’s Danes | 1284 | 755 | ||
| St James’s, Clerkenwell | 1191 | 903 | ||
| St Magdalen’s, Bermondsey | 1127 | 889 | ||
| St Katharine’s, Tower | 998 | 744 | ||
| St Dunstan’s in the West | 860 | 642 | ||
| 97 parishes within the walls | 14342 | 9197 |
The original printed bill of the Parish Clerks is extant for the worst week but one, August 4th to 11th[1006]. Its mortalities for the week in each of the 122 parishes are almost exactly in the order of the final summation for the year, so that the details throw no light upon the question, in what direction the infection spread, or what parishes felt its incidence most as the season advanced. The total mortalities for the week within the walls, in the Liberties, and in the nine out-parishes (within the Bills) are respectively 1144, 2717 and 994. The infection is said[1007] to have begun in Whitechapel, as we conclude that it did also in 1603; but the City had its due share at length, the parishes of St Stephen, Coleman Street (full of tortuous passages), of Allhallows the Great, and of Christ Church having the largest mortalities.
In the 97 parishes of the City, the 16 parishes of the Liberties, and 9 out-parishes, the deaths at the end of the year were 54,265 from all causes, whereof of the plague 35,417. But that was by no means the whole mortality. A separate account was kept for the parishes of Stepney, Newington, Lambeth, Islington, and Hackney, and for the Westminster parishes, in all of which the deaths from December 30, 1624, to December 22, 1625, were from all causes 8,736, whereof of the plague 5,896[1008]. The grand total of deaths in 1625 was, accordingly, 63,001, whereof of the plague 41,313.
The large parish of Stepney, extending from Shoreditch to Blackwall, was one of the worst plague-districts in London. It is mentioned as such by Dekker in 1603; and in the plague of 1665 it headed the list, with 8,598 deaths, whereof of the plague 6,583. We have some particulars of it for 1625: in the week July 18 to 24, there died in it 184, whereof of the plague, 144; and from July 25 to 31, 259, of which 241 were plague-deaths[1009]; and those figures would have been nearly doubled in the weeks of August. Stepney alone would have had about half the deaths in the additional bill for the year; the parish register of Lambeth gives 623 burials, of Islington 213, and of Hackney 170[1010], while Westminster with St Mary Newington (or Newington Butts, between Lambeth and Southwark) and Rotherhithe would account for most of the remainder. The parishes farthest out, and on higher ground, such as Hackney, Islington and Stoke Newington had fewer burials than in 1603.
The plague of 1625 was a great national event, although historians, as usual, do no more than mention it. Coinciding exactly with the accession of Charles I., it stopped all trade in the City for a season and left great confusion and impoverishment behind it; in many provincial towns and in whole counties the plague of that or the following years made the people unable, supposing that they had been willing, to take up the forced loan, and to furnish ships or the money for them. The history might have proceeded just the same without the plague; but historians would doubtless admit that all causes, moral and physical, should be taken into the account; and it will not be thought beyond the scope of this history to enter as fully as possible into these events of sickness. First as to the sources, other than statistical. Four or more poems were written on the plague of 1625—an interminable one by George Wither (with other topics brought in) in eight cantos and about thirty thousand lines[1011], a piece by John Taylor, the water-poet and Queen’s bargeman, not wanting in graphic touches[1012], a short piece by Abraham Holland[1013], the son of Philemon Holland, doctor of physic, and another short poem by one Brewer[1014]. Besides the poems, there were sermons, mostly when the epidemic was over, and various other moral pieces to improve the occasion. A broadside called The Red Crosse gives a few details of former plagues. The letters of Chamberlain to Carleton, those of Mead, at Christ’s College, Cambridge (whose relation Dr Meddus, rector of St Gabriel’s, Fenchurch Street, was in the City during the epidemic), and the diary of Salvetti, the envoy of the Grand Duke of Tuscany[1015], supply many particulars; while the Calendar of State Papers brings together other information both for London and the provinces. I know of no account of the plague of 1625 from the medical side[1016].
James I., prematurely worn out at fifty-seven, died at Theobalds on March 27, from the effects of a tertian ague, for which he preferred to be treated by the plasters and possets of an obscure ague-curer from Dunmow, setting aside his physicians, who would have succeeded no better. A great funeral, for which 14,000 “blacks” were given out, followed on May 7. Meanwhile the marriage of Charles I. to the princess Henrietta of France was being arranged. The king met his bride at Dover on June 13, and entered London with her on the 18th, passing up the river in a state barge to Denmark House, amidst an immense concourse of people on the houses and shipping, and in wherries on the water, with salvoes of artillery and demonstrations of welcome to the Catholic princess. On the 13th the Lord Keeper had written to Conway, Secretary of State, that cases of plague had occurred in Westminster, and that he could have wished that his majesty had determined to come no nearer than Greenwich. The nobility were kept in town to await the coming of the new queen, and some of them by the summons to Parliament. The Houses met on June 18, and were advised in the king’s speech to expedite their business on account of the plague. However, those who were disposed to refuse supplies until grievances were redressed could make use of the plague as well as the king, and it was proposed by Mallory and Wentworth to adjourn on that plea until Michaelmas. The Houses sat for three weeks, until July 11, when they were adjourned to meet at Oxford on August 1. On a day in June Francis, Lord Russell (afterwards earl of Bedford), “being to go to Parliament, had his shoemaker to pull on his boots, who fell down dead of the plague in his presence,” so that his lordship avoided the House. In the first week of July, the court removed to Hampton Court, and thence to Woodstock and to Beaulieu in the New Forest. The Coronation was put off until October, for reasons connected with the queen’s religion as well as for the infection, and eventually until February 2, 1626.
Before Parliament rose, it obtained the king’s sanction to a solemn fast. “This,” says the Tuscan, Salvetti, “is a ceremony which is performed in all the parishes, and consists in staying in church all day singing psalms, hearing sermons, the one shortly after the other, and making I know not how many prayers, imploring God for stoppage of the plague, and of the ceaseless rain which for a month past has fallen to the detriment of all kinds of crops.” At that date, July 1, he says that plague is now spread through all the streets and has reached other parts of the kingdom. A general exodus took place to the country, of all who had the means to remove. As in 1603, the magistrates, the ministers, the doctors, and the rich men seem to have left the city to take care of itself. On August 9, Salvetti, who had himself escaped to Richmond, writes: “The magistrates in desperation have abandoned every care; everyone does what he pleases, and the houses of merchants who have left London are broken into and robbed.” On September 1, Dr Meddus, rector of St Gabriel’s, Fenchurch Street, wrote: “The want and misery is the greatest here that ever any man living knew; no trading at all; the rich all gone; housekeepers and apprentices of manual trades begging in the streets, and that in such a lamentable manner as will make the strongest heart to yearn.” The city an hour after noon was the same as at three in the morning in the month of June, no more people stirring, no more shops open[1017]. This is re-echoed in verse by Abraham Holland:
“A noon in Fleet Street now can hardly show
That press which midnight could, not long ago.
Walk through the woeful streets (whoever dare
Still venture on the sad infected air)
So many marked houses you shall meet
As if the city were one Red-Cross Street.”
And by the Water-poet:
“In some whole street, perhaps, a shop or twain
Stands open for small takings and less gain.
And every closed window, door and stall
Makes every day seem a solemn festival.
All trades are dead, or almost out of breath,
But such as live by sickness and by death.”
The circumstances are so exactly the same as in 1603 that it is needless to repeat much: the sextons, coffin-makers, bearers, searchers, apothecaries and quacks are all profitably employed;
“And last to dog-killers great gain abounds,
For braining brawling curs and foisting hounds.”
The clocks striking the hours are not heard for the constant tolling of bells. “Strange,” says Holland,
“Strange that the hours should fail to tell the day
When Time to thousands ran so fast away.”
Of the sick, Taylor says there were
“Some franticke raving, some with anguish crying.”
—delirious ravings and cries of pain (from the buboes) which we know from the accounts for 1665 to have been no rhetorical exaggeration. There were the same crowded common graves as in 1603, probably in the same graveyards:
“My multitude of graves that gaping wide
Are hourly fed with carcases of men.
Those hardly swallowed, they be fed again.”
Or as Taylor says,
“Dead coarses carried and recarried still
Whilst fifty corpses scarce one grave doth fill.”
The treatment seems to have been mostly in the hands of quacks. Taylor says:
“On many a post I see Quacksalvers’ bills
Like fencers’ challenges to show their skill.”
The Water-poet, being Queen’s bargeman, appears to have had a proper feeling for all constituted authorities. After denouncing the quacks, as men who “pick their living out of others’ dying,” he proceeds to eulogise the regular practitioners, forgetting to add that they were now conspicuous by their absence:
“This sharp invective no way seems to touch
The learned physicians whom I honour much.
The Paracelsists and the Galenists,
The philosophical grave Herbalists,—
These I admire and reverence, for in those
God doth dame nature’s secrets fast inclose,
Which they distribute as occasions serve.”
—the prevalence of plague not being one of the occasions for revealing the secrets entrusted to them.
The medical faculty is hardly at all in evidence the whole time. Thayre’s surgical treatise of 1603 was reprinted; while a semi-empiric, one Stephen Bradwell, the grandson of Banister, a well-known Elizabethan practitioner, published a poor essay on plague, patched up from the usual stale sources and plagiarised even from the lay dialogue of the rector of St Olave’s in 1603[1018]. Bradwell addressed the reader, on July 15 “from my study in Mugwell-street, ready to my power to do thee any pleasure.”
“I have two powders. I have also an excellent electuary. I have likewise lozenges, and rich pomanders to smell of. These are all of my grandfather’s invention, and have been proved to be admirably effectual both by his and my father’s experience. I confess they are costly; but slight means and cheap medicines (however they promise) prove as dear as death. The first powder is 12 pence a dram. The second is 3 pence a grain (the quantity is 10 or 12 grains). The electuary is 2 shillings and 6 pence an ounce, the quantity is one or two drams. There is a fellow in Distaff-lane that disperseth his bills abroad, bragging of a medicine that was my grandfather Bannister’s. My grandfather was very scrupulous of giving any special receipts to others. But if any man can say he hath any receipt of his, I am sure, if it were of any value, I have the copy of it. Because many men know that I have a whole volume of excellent receipts left me both by my grandfather and my father, and lest they should conceive me as too strict and covetous in keeping all secret to myself, I have thought fit for the common good to divulge this excellent antidote following:”—the ingredients occupying a whole page.
This enterprising tradesman had been at Oxford, where he failed to take a degree in medicine, but he was a licentiate of the College of Physicians. He is the single literary representative of the faculty, so far as appears, in 1625; and there is nothing in his essay that concerns us, except the following corroboration of a well-known character of the epidemic:
“Poor people, by reason of their great want, living sluttishly, feeding nastily on offals, or the worst and unwholesomest meats, and many times, too, lacking food altogether, have both their bodies much corrupted, and their spirits exceedingly weakened; whereby they become (of all others) most subject to this sickness. And therefore we see the plague sweeps up such people in greatest heaps.”
It is impossible to know whether any considerable proportion recovered. It appears that, as in 1603, the buboes and boils might come out in the same person more than once, and that the best chance was from their suppuration:
“Some with their carbuncles and sores new burst
Are fed with hope they have escaped the worst.”
But the best hope was in flight, as Bradwell was candid enough to say, although he remained behind with his shilling powders and half-crown electuaries. Cito cede, longé recede, tardé redi—is the proverbial advice which he quotes.
However, the people in their flight, unless they were nobles or squires with country houses, fared but ill in the provinces. The story of their reception in country towns and villages is so like that of 1603 that one might suppose in this, as in other things, that the writers of 1625 were copying from Dekker. One of the versifiers, Brewer, has a section specially devoted to a “Relation of the many miseries that many of those that fly the City do fall into in the country.” They are driven back by men with bills and halberds, passing through village after village in disgrace until they end their journey; they sleep in stables, barns and outhouses, or even by the roadside in ditches and in the open fields. And that was the lot of comparatively wealthy men. Taylor says that when he was with the queen’s barge at Hampton Court and up the river almost to Oxford, he had much grief and remorse to see and hear of the miserable and cold entertainment of many Londoners:
“The name of London now both far and near
Strikes all the towns and villages with fear.
And to be thought a Londoner is worse
Than one that breaks a house, or takes a purse ...
Whilst hay-cock lodging with hard slender fare,
Welcome, like dogs into a church, they are.
For why the hob-nailed boors, inhuman blocks,
Uncharitable hounds, hearts hard as rocks,
Did suffer people in the field to sink
Rather than give or sell a draught of drink.
Milkmaids and farmers’ wives are grown so nice
They think a Citizen a cockatrice,
And country dames are waxed so coy and brisk
They shun him as they shun a basilisk.”
Taylor gives various instances in prose:
“A man sick of an ague lying on the ground at Maidenhead in Berkshire, with his fit violently on him, had stones cast at him by two men of the towne (whom I could name), and when they could not cause him to rise, one of them tooke a hitcher, or long boat-hook, and hitched in the sick man’s breeches, drawing him backward with his face grovelling on the ground, drawing him so under the bridge in a dry place, where he lay till his fit was gone, and having lost a new hat, went his way.”
One at Richmond was drawn naked in the night by his own wife and boy, and cast into the Thames, where the next day the corpse was found. The village of Hendon distinguished itself by relieving the sick, burying the dead, and collecting eight pounds, at the least (being but a small village) for the poor of St Andrew’s, Holborn, besides allowing good weekly wages to two men to attend and bury such as died. The village of Tottenham appears to have been equally hospitable; but as it was on the road to Theobalds, and some of his majesty’s servants dwelt there, the Privy Council on July 19, wrote to the justices of Middlesex to order the inhabitants of Tottenham, who had received into their houses “multitudes of inmates,” to remove the new-comers and not to receive any in future[1019]. Although the king was not at Richmond, yet as there was a royal residence there, the inhabitants sought to drive away citizens on the ground of the warrant forbidding them to approach any of his majesty’s houses[1020]. At Woodstock, where the Court was in August, no one was allowed to go from thence to London, nor any to come thither, and for contraveners a gibbet was set up at the Court gate[1021]. It was hardly possible to get a letter smuggled into London[1022]; in the provinces “no one comes into a town without a ticket, yet there are few free places.” At Southampton on August 27, a stranger died in the fields: “He came from London. He had good store of money about him, which was taken before he was cold[1023].” Dr Donne, the dean of St Paul’s, confirms these experiences in a letter of November 25, from Chelsea[1024]:
“The citizens fled away as out of a house on fire, and stuffed their pockets with their best ware, and threw themselves into the highways, and were not received so much as into barns, and perished so: some of them with more money about them than would have bought the village where they died. A justice of the peace told me of one that died so with £1400 about him.”
Meddus, rector of St Gabriel’s, heard of one sad case of a citizen in Leadenhall-street who removed to the country with his seven children, “but having buried all there is come again hither,” in July[1025]. In October, the people began to come back, although the infection was by no means over; Salvetti, who was himself near Huntingdon, says that many of the returning artisans caught the infection in the city, which is probable enough, as it happened also in 1665. On October 15, a correspondent of Mead’s wrote that in his passing through London he found the streets full of people, and the highways full of passengers, horse and foot. On October 24, we hear of great distress among tradesmen, artificers and farmers round London, and of discontent at the forced loan[1026]; although the Court itself was in as great extremity during the plague for want of money as any private house could have been. On November 22, the lord mayor and aldermen wrote to the Privy Council that the great mortality, although it had taken many poor people away, yet had made more poverty by decay of tradesmen, the want and misery being still very great[1027]. Still, the effect of this great plague on London, cutting off some fifty thousand in a year, or more than a fifth part of the population, must have been, like that of all other great plagues in London, to cut off the fringe of poverty and broken fortunes, and to raise the general average of well-being of those that remained. Trade would come back; but the submerged tenth, or sixth, or fourth, or whatever fraction they made, were drowned for good.
London soon filled up the gaps made by the plague, doubtless by fresh blood from the country. In 1627, the christenings were again at 8,408, having been at a maximum of 8,299 the year before the plague. In 1629 they actually exceeded the burials by more than a thousand (9,901 to 8,771), and continued to be slightly in excess until the next plague of 1636.