‘For he, on top of all (this tree) above the shade,
His scholars, taught; where they such verses made
As spread his honours, and do blaze the fame
Of Hampstead School—I’ll trumpet up the same!’
It is he who lets us into the seeming secret of the birth of the Wells, and sings of the
‘air, and hill, and well, and school,’
as if the reputation of each was publicly known and appreciated. Codrington indirectly tells us that the elm was attempted to be put to another use ‘by some of the new religion, that would make a preachment beneath its shade.’
In the reign of Charles II., when the Great Plague was ravaging London and the Merry Monarch and his merry Court had discreetly withdrawn from its neighbourhood, Hampstead and the Heath had other experiences, for hundreds of the wretched citizens who had fled from the city to the suburbs, driven forth from the village with scythes and pitchforks, lay down to die in the fields and woods and ditches in the vicinity. This was the occasion of the obloquy levelled at the Hampstead people by Taylor, the Water-poet. And as a consequence, having almost wholly escaped the visitations of 1603, Hampstead suffered considerably in 1665, when the burials—which in the first year of the plague numbered only seven, and in the next twenty-three—rose to 214, more than seven times the ordinary averages of the period.[30]
Twelve months later, when the Great Fire swept out as with the besom of destruction the germs of the plague, many of the fugitives from London watched from the Heath the destruction of their homes and property, the smoke of the city ascending ‘like the smoke of a great furnace,’ a smoke so dense and fearful that it ‘darkened the sun at noonday, and if at any time the sun peeped through, it looked as red as blood; through the long night there was no darkness of night;’ and, to add to these horrors, on the dreadful Wednesday night ‘the people of London, now of the fields,’ heard the murmur that the French were coming, and though, in the quaint language of the writer of the ‘City Remembrancer,’ ‘the women, naked and weak, did quake and tremble, many of the citizens began to stir themselves like lions or bears bereaved of their whelps, and “Arm! arm!” resounded through the woods and suburbs.’
These scenes, of which Hampstead Heath has been the centre, have long since faded out of the traditions of its inhabitants, like those of that still older night in 1588, when the cresset upon Beacon Hill blazed the approach of the Armada to its fellow on Hadley Church tower, and thence from cresset to cresset to the farthest North—scenes full of the tragic passions of human perplexity and terror.