Smallpox in the 17th Century.
The gradual rise of smallpox to prominence in England about the end of the Elizabethan period and in the first years of the Stuarts cannot fail to strike anyone who is occupied with the English records of disease as a whole. Smallpox and measles may have been, and almost certainly were, observed in England in the earlier part of the 16th century; but they make no such figure in the records, domestic and other, as they do from the beginning of the 17th century onwards. Perhaps the first mention of smallpox, in English literature proper, occurs in a collection of lyrical poems published in 1602[904]. In some verses “Upon his Ladies sicknesse of the Small Pocks,” the poet, Th. Spilman, apostrophises the “cruel and impartial sickness” and asks,—
Are not these thy steps I trace
In the pure snow of her face?
Th’ heavenly honey thou dost suck
From her rose cheeks, might suffice;
Why then didst thou mar and pluck
Those dear flowers of rarest price?
In two letters of Dr Donne, dean of St Paul’s, written probably a few years before his death in 1631, reference is made to the smallpox in London. In the one he says:
“At my return from Kent to my gate, I found Peg had the pox: so I withdrew to Prickham and spent a fortnight there. And without coming home, when I could with some justice hope that it would spread no farther amongst them (as I humbly thank God it hath not, nor much disfigured her that had it), I went into Bedfordshire” etc.
This dread of smallpox infection is quite unlike anything that we meet with in the earlier 16th-century domestic memorials; in them it is only the infection of the plague that comes in. Donne’s other reference is to the sickness of my lord Harrington: “a few days since they were doubtful of him; but he is so well recovered that now they know all his disease to be the pox and measles mingled[905].”
Cases of smallpox among the upper classes are occasionally mentioned in the letters written by Chamberlain to Carleton in the reigns of James I. and Charles I.[906]. On December 17, 1612, “The Lord Lisle hath lost his eldest son, Sir William Sidney, by the smallpox, which were well come out.” On December 31, the same year, Carleton, writing from abroad, mentions that the duke of Mantua had died of the smallpox about three weeks since, of which he buried his only son not three weeks before. Also on December 31, Chamberlain writes to him, that the Lady Webbe was sick of the smallpox, of which, he says in another letter, she died: “She was grown a very proper woman, but loved the town too well, which in a short time would have drawn her and her husband dry as well in purse as in reputation.” It is the year 1614 that is given (by Horst) as the worst season of smallpox all over Europe and the East; England is mentioned by the foreign writer as among the countries affected, but there is no trace of an epidemic in our own records. On April 20, 1616, Chamberlain mentions the case of the duke of Buckingham, the favourite; “he hath been crazy of late, not without suspicion of the smallpox, which, if it had fallen out, actum est de amicitia. But it proves otherwise.” Buckingham’s illness, for which he took much physic, produced an imposthume on his head (an effect which followed in the more notorious illness of Wolsey), and he is elsewhere said to be suffering from the morbus comitialis. The suggestion of smallpox appears to be the same euphemism which was resorted to in the cases of other exalted personages.
On August 21, 1624, having written of the great mortality from fevers, Chamberlain adds: “Lady Winwood, hearing that her only daughter was fallen sick of the smallpox at Ditton and that they came not out currently,” had gone to her. On December 18, 1624, “the Lady Purbeck is sick of the smallpox, and her husband is so kind that he stirs not from her bed’s feet.” In the first week of June, 1625, the famous composer Orlando Gibbons died at Canterbury, not without suspicion of the plague[907], but according to another opinion of the smallpox[908].
With the year 1629, the causes of death in London began to be published by Parish Clerks’ Hall in a rough classification, smallpox being a regular item from year to year. For the first eight years the deaths from “flox, smallpox, and measles” were as follows:
| 1629 | 72 | |
| 1630 | 40 | |
| 1631 | 58 | |
| 1632 | 531 | |
| 1633 | 72 | |
| 1634 | 1354 | |
| 1635 | 293 | |
| 1636 | 127 |