The Plague of 1625 near London.
In the immediate neighbourhood of the capital the parishes on the Kentish chalk below London, such as Deptford, Greenwich, Lewisham, Eltham and Bromley had more plague in 1625 than in 1603. Kensington, for some unknown reason, has 80 deaths from all causes in the register, as against 32 in 1603 and 62 (of plague 25) in 1665. The group of parishes in Middlesex, such as Enfield, Edmonton and Finchley, had each a large number of deaths, but somewhat less than in 1603 and 1665, and the same holds for Hackney and Stoke Newington, Islington and Hampstead. Places up the Thames all the way from Battersea to Windsor were infected, including Wandsworth, Putney, Isleworth, Richmond, Kingston and Hampton Court. Eton was “visited;” even the sequestered village of Stoke Pogis had houses shut up “by reason of the contagion” and a collection made for their impoverished inmates. Among the Hertfordshire towns to which Londoners resorted in plague-times, Watford is known to have had plague-deaths in 1625. In Essex,—Stratford, Tottenham, Romford and Barking had each a large number of plague-deaths, and, in Surrey, Croydon and Streatham. At Carshalton, oddly enough, the heavy mortality was the year after (1626) “not from plague, but from a disease somewhat akin to it[1028].”
Plague in the Provinces in 1625 and following years.
It is stated by Salvetti and other gossips of the time that the infection of plague in 1625 was carried all over the country from London by the fleeing citizens, and that few places remained free from it, just as it was said afterwards for the plague of 1665. So far as records show, one would not be warranted in inferring a great provincial prevalence of plague either in 1625 or in 1665. There was plague at Plymouth, and in the south-western counties, under very special circumstances, as we shall see. There was plague also at Norwich, said to have been brought from Yarmouth, and at Colchester the year after. Newcastle, also, which hardly ever escaped the infection when it was afoot, had one of its minor visitations. But, on the whole, it is impossible to show by local evidences that the plague of 1625 was diffused universally over England, either in that or in the following year, or that it grew to a great epidemic in but a few provincial centres[1029]. Probably all the plague-deaths in the provinces together, in 1625 and 1626, would not have made a fifth part of the mortality in London.
The interest centres in the plague at Plymouth, with which the outbreaks at Ashburton, Exeter, Dartmouth, Bridport, and perhaps Portsmouth, Rye and other places, may be connected, if not causally, yet in neighbourhood. The first that we hear of sickness at Plymouth is under date July 26, 1625; some of the ships arrived there had been visited with sickness, and the sick had been landed and lodged under sails[1030]. It is not called “the sickness,” and it is not clear that it was bubo-plague. There may, indeed, have been real plague on board ships of war: Stow says that it was in the fleet in 1603, and there is evidence of its existence now and again in the Venetian galleys of an earlier day. But we are now come to the period of the beginnings of ship-fever, as we shall see in the next chapter; and, for the present, we must not assume that the sickness on board ship in 1625 was all plague, or chiefly plague.
The ships at Plymouth in July were doubtless a part of the squadron of ninety sail, which sailed thence in autumn, carrying ten thousand men to make war on Spain, in accordance with the anti-Catholic policy which had been forced upon James I. in the last years of his reign, and was now being carried out by Charles I. and Buckingham. This was not the first fruit of that policy. The immediate result of it was Mansfeld’s English troops for the recovery of the Palatinate to Protestant rule. That expedition failing to effect a landing was speedily broken with disease, and before it had been many days on shore in Holland was burying 40 or 50 men a day. The fleet eight months later had a similar experience. The ships were victualled with rotten food, and the men were supplied with worthless clothing. As the facts were never investigated, the king having interfered to shield the duke of Buckingham from the attack on him by Sir John Eliot, peculation and jobbery were never proved, although it was known to everyone that honesty was the last quality to be looked for in those about the king and the favourite. The fleet reached the Bay of Cadiz and made a futile demonstration there. It is in the month of November that we begin to hear of sickness. On the 9th Viscount Wimbledon writes from on board the ‘Anne Royal’ to Secretary Conway that there are not men enough to keep the watches owing to sickness. On December 22, the Commissioners at Plymouth write to the Council that about thirty sail had arrived there with 4,000 soldiers “in such miserable condition as for the most part to be incapable of such comforts as the country would afford them.” Captain Bolles, who died since their coming in, declared the occasion of his sickness to be scarcity and corruption of the provisions. Great numbers of the soldiers are continually thrown overboard. Yesterday seven fell down in the streets. The rest are weak, and want clothes, for the supply of which some thousands of pounds were needed. The despatch of December 29, says, “They stink as they go, and the poor rags they have are rotten and ready to fall off if they be touched”[1031].
So far there is no word of plague; on the other hand there is a strong probability that the sickness was ship-fever, or typhus. It is not until the spring of 1626 that the plague is mentioned at Plymouth. On March 18, sickness increases at Plymouth and the plague is wondrous rife. On March 28, the plague is dispersed about the town. On April 5, the sickness increases very much. On the 11th, 40 died last week and twenty houses are shut up; some of the sick died and were buried in less than twenty-four hours. On 8th June, the plague is very bad in Plymouth, and the town is destitute of its best inhabitants. The town-council records bear witness to a rate having been levied for the relief of the plague-stricken, and to attempts as late as 1628 to collect their share of it from those who had fled the town in 1626. The deaths at Plymouth are stated in a manuscript book of the municipal annals to have been 2,000[1032].
Meanwhile plague appeared in other parts of Devonshire. In Exeter it had been prevalent sooner than in Plymouth itself; a letter of November 17, 1625, speaks of the afflicted state of the city, and of the weekly contributions for the plague-stricken. Some particulars of the state of Exeter at this time are given in a memorial to the Privy Council by the mayor and bailiffs of the city, dated October 15, 1627. During the great sickness which fell on their city, and was not cleared in sixteen months, all trading was stopped and the inhabitants generally left the town. To appease a mutiny of the more disordered people, who threatened to burn the city, a rate was assessed generally on the city, but most of the inhabitants being absent, the corporation took up the amount at interest on their own credit. The persons whose names are inclosed, being inhabitants who have returned to the city, now refuse to pay the rate assessed in their absence; and the Council is petitioned to summon them before it[1033].
On May 17, 1626, the plague is reported to be rife “in Devonshire,” and specifically, on July 28, at Okehampton and Ashburton. The epidemic at Ashburton was on the same severe scale as at Plymouth. It began in the end of 1625, but was most fatal in April and May, 1626. The deaths in a twelvemonth were 365, “probably a fourth of the inhabitants[1034].” (In 1627 there were only 27 deaths, doubtless from the empty state of the town.) The same summer it is heard of in Dorsetshire. On September 2, the deputy lieutenants and justices of the county petition the Privy Council that the 1000 soldiers who were to be removed from Devon and Cornwall, should not be quartered in Dorset, but in Somerset, as the former was visited with the plague[1035]. Perhaps Bridport was the centre of plague referred to. Sometime later in the year, perhaps in November, the bailiffs and burgesses of that town explain to the Council that, although they had subscribed to the loan, yet they were unable to pay the amount subscribed as the town was destitute by reason of a twenty weeks’ visitation of plague[1036].
The last of this series of outbreaks in the south-west appears to have been at Dartmouth in the summer of 1627. On June 29, it was reported that the plague was so hot there that the inhabitants had left. The mayor wrote on July 19 to the Privy Council that it was true the inhabitants were still away, but the plague had ceased; only 15 houses had been infected, the inhabitants of which had all been removed to the pest-houses remote from the town[1037].