A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 2 (of 2) / From the Extinction of Plague to the Present Time

by Charles Creighton

Retrospect of the great Fever of 1623-25.

The most instructive instance of pestis mitior in Britain is not the pestilential fever which led up to the last plague (1665-6), but the great epidemic of fever all over England and Scotland which reigned for two or three years before the great outburst of plague in 1625. I go back to this because it was not wholly or even mainly a famine fever (although it was as general as one of the medieval famine-fevers), and because in that respect it furnishes a close parallel to the fever of 1685-86, which I regard as the successor of the plague. After this interlude in the history, we shall proceed to consider the question of the final extinction of plague.

In Scotland the fever of 1622-23 was directly connected with famine, but in England it was not obviously so according to the records that remain. The dearth in Scotland began as early as the autumn of 1621: “Great skarsitie of cornes throw all the kingdome,” the harvest having been spoiled by wet weather and unheard of river floods; however, abundance of foreign victual came in, and the scarcity was got over[40]. In England the same harvest of oats was abundant, and probably yielded the “foreign victual” which relieved the Scots; but the price of wheat rose greatly[41]. It was the year following, 1622, that really brought famine and famine-sickness to Scotland, as the second of two bad harvests had always done. On 21 July, 1622, a fast was proclaimed at Aberdeen for “the present plague of dearth and famine, and the continuance thereof threatened by tempests, inundations and weets likely to rot the fruit on the ground[42].”

In an entry of the Chronicle of Perth, subsequent to July, 1622, it is said: “In this yeir about the harvest and efter, thair wes suche ane universall seikness in all the countrie as the ellyke hes not bene hard of. But speciallie in this burgh, that no familie in all the citie was frie of this visitation. Thair was also great mortalitie amonge the poore.” From which it appears that the autumnal fever of 1622 was among all classes in Scotland. The famine in Scotland became more acute in the spring and summer of 1623; the country swarmed with beggars, and in July, says Calderwood, the famine increased daily until “many, both in burgh and land, died of hunger.” At Perth ten or twelve died every day from Midsummer to Michaelmas; the disease was not the plague, but a fever[43]. At Dumfries 492 died during the first ten months of 1623, perhaps a ninth part of the inhabitants, about one hundred of the deaths being specially marked as of “poor[44].” The “malignant spotted fever” which caused numerous deaths in 1623 in Wigton, Penrith and Kendal is clearly part of the famine-fever of Scotland extending to the Borders and crossing them. This is a famine-fever of the old medieval type, like that of 1196 which, according to William of Newburgh “crept about everywhere,” always the same acute fever, putting an end to the miseries of the starving, but attacking also those who had food.

The same spotted fever was all over England in 1623, but it did not, as in Scotland, come in the wake of famine. It is true that the English harvest of 1622 was a good deal spoiled; a letter of 25 September says[45]: “Though the latter part of this summer proved so far seasonable, yet the harvest is scant, and corn at a great price by reason of the mildews and blasting generally over the whole realm,” rye being quoted a few weeks later at 7/- the bushel and wheat at 10/-, although the average of wheat for the year, in Rogers’s tables, is not more than 51/1d. per quarter, while the average of next year falls to 37/8d. These were not famine-prices in England, and there is no evidence of general sickness directly after the harvest of 1622, when corn was dearest. Also, although the autumn of 1623 was a time of “continual wet” in England[46], the price of wheat remained moderate, and even low as compared with the rather stiff price of the winter of 1622-23. But it was not until the summer and autumn of 1623 that the spotted fever became epidemic in England. Short’s abstracts of the registers of market towns show how sickly that year was:

Year.		No. of registers examined.		No. with excess of burials.		Buried in the same.		Baptised in the same.
1622		25		4		442		345
1623		25		16		2254		439 (sic)
1624		25		9		978		714
1625		25		9		666		563

In September, 1623, the corporation of Stamford made a collection “in this dangerous time of visitation,” and sent £10 of it to Grantham, the rest to go “to London or some other town, as occasion offered.” A London letter of 6 December, 1623, from Chamberlain to Carleton says[47]:—

“Here is a contagious spotted or purple fever that reigns much, which, together with the smallpox, hath taken away many of good sort, as well as meaner people.” He then gives the names of notables dead of it, and adds: “Yet many escape, as the dean of St Paul’s [Dr Donne, who used the occasion to compile a manual of devotion] is like to do, though he were in great danger.” One of the Coke family writes early in January, 1624, from London[48]: “Having two sons at Cambridge, we sent for them to keep Christmas with us, and not many days after their coming my eldest son Joseph fell suddenly into the sickness of the time which they call the spotted fever, and which after two days’ extremity took away his life.” From another letter it appears that one of his symptoms was “not being able to sleep,” the unmistakable vigil of typhus. Although there is no word of the epidemic continuing in Scotland in 1624, it was undoubtedly as prevalent in England in that year as the year before, and prevalent in country houses as well as in towns and cities. Thus, on 7 August, 1624, Chamberlain writes: “The [king’s] progress is now so far off that we hear little thence, but only that there be many sick of the spotted ague, which took away the Duke of Lennox in a few days. He died at Kirby,” a country house in Northamptonshire[49]. On 21 August he writes again: “This spotted fever is cousin-german to it [the plague] 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.” A letter of 4 September says there was excessive mortality in London, in great part among children (doubtless from the usual infantile trouble of a hot autumn, diarrhoea), while “most of the rest are carried away by this spotted fever, which reigns almost everywhere, in the country as ill as here.” Sir Theodore Mayerne, the king’s physician, confirms this, under date 20 August, 1624: the purple fever, he says, was “not so much contagious as common through a universal disposing cause,” seizing upon many in the same house, and destroying numbers, being most full of malignity[50]. It was clearly an inexplicable visitation. The summer was hot and dry, from which character of the season, says Chamberlain, “some have found out a far-fetched speculation, which yet runs current, and would ascribe it [the spotted fever] to the extraordinary quantity of cucumbers this year, which the gardeners, to hasten and bring forward, used to water out of the next ditches, which this dry time growing low, noisome and stinking, poisoned the fruit. But,” adds Chamberlain, “that reason will reach no farther than this [London] town, whereas the mortality is spread far and near, and takes hold of whole households in many places.” He then gives the names of several eminent persons dead of it, and speaks of others who were “still in the balance[51].” On 9 October, “the town continues sickly still,” and Parliament had been put off, “in consideration of the danger,” from 2 November, 1624, to 15 February, 1625. On Ash Wednesday, 1625, the Marquis of Hamilton died of the pestilent fever at Moor Park, Rickmansworth. Thus far there had been no plague; and if the spotted fever were cousin-german to the plague, as Chamberlain said, it was remarkable in this that it prevailed in the mansions of the rich in town and country and took off more victims among the upper classes than the plague itself even in its most terrific outbursts. However, a plague of the first rank followed in London and elsewhere in the summer and autumn of 1625.

The cucumber-theory, above mentioned, shows how puzzled people must have been to account for the spotted fever, or “spotted ague” as it was also called, in 1624. Sir Theodore Mayerne did not think contagion from person to person could explain it, but referred it to “some universal disposing cause.” It is conceivable that the famine-fever of 1622 and 1623 in Scotland and the Marches may have spread by contagion into England in the latter year; but in 1624 there is nothing said of fever in Scotland or of scarcity as a primary cause in England.

Besides the famine-fever of Scotland in 1622-23, there was another associated thing which should not be left out of account. Before the famine and fever had begun in that country, the notorious Hungarian fever was raging in the Palatinate, and continued to rage for four years. “Hungarian fever” had become the dreaded name for war-typhus of a peculiar malignity and diffusive power. It had been so often engendered since the 16th century in campaigns upon Hungarian soil as to have become known everywhere under the name of that country. Its infection spread, also, everywhere through Europe; thus it is said to have even reached England in 1566, and again in 1589, although it is not easy to find English evidence of it for either year. It was this type of fever which broke out in the Upper Palatinate, occupied by troops of the Catholic powers, in 1620, and continued through the years 1621, 1622 and 1623; as the title of one of the essays upon this outbreak somewhat fantastically declares, it spread “ex castris ad rastra, ex rastris ad rostra, ab his ad aras et focos[52].” Was the epidemic constitution of “spotted ague” in England in 1623 and 1624 derived from the centre of famine-fever in Scotland, or from the centre of camp-fever in the Palatinate? In the last years of James I. communications were frequent with the latter country, and there was of course much intercourse with Scotland.

The spotted fever or spotted ague of 1623-24, the plague of 1625, and the country agues of the same autumn make really a more instructive series of epidemic constitutions than any that fell under Sydenham’s observation, so instructive, indeed, that it has seemed worth while to revert to it for the sake of illustrating the doctrine of epidemics then in vogue. That doctrine made little of contagion from person to person; yet the idea of contagion was familiar, and had been so since medieval times. If we might assume contagion to explain such cases as those that occurred in the houses of squires and nobles, we might find a source of it either in the famine-fever of Scotland or in the war-fever of the Palatinate. But the teaching of the time was that it was in the air; and if the infective principle had been generated either in Scotland or on the upper Rhine it had diffused itself in some inscrutable way. The doctrine of epidemic constitutions seems strange to us; but some of the facts that it was meant to embrace are also strange to us. Were it not for an occasional reminder from influenza, we should hardly believe that any fevers could have travelled as the Hungarian fevers, the spotted fevers or “spotted agues” of former times are said to have done.

On the other hand, we have now a scientific doctrine of the effects of great fluctuations of the ground-water upon the production of telluric miasmata, which may be used to rationalize the theory of emanations adopted by Sydenham and Boyle. From this modern point of view the remarkable droughts preceding the pestilential fevers and plagues of 1624-25 and 1665, and preceding the fever of 1685-86, which is the one that immediately concerns us, may be not without significance.

The London fever of 1685-86 having been suspected at the time to be the forerunner of a plague, as other such fevers in the earlier part of the century had been, and no plague having ensued, the question arises most naturally at this stage, why the plague should have never come back in London or elsewhere in Britain after the great outbreak of 1665-66.