Twelve Out-parishes in Middlesex and Surrey.
| Stepney | 8598 | 6583 | ||
| Whitechapel | 4766 | 3855 | ||
| St Giles’s in the Fields | 4457 | 3216 | ||
| St Leonard’s, Shoreditch | 2669 | 949 | ||
| St Magdalen’s, Bermondsey | 1943 | 1362 | ||
| St James’s, Clerkenwell | 1863 | 1377 | ||
| St Mary’s, Newington | 1272 | 1004 | ||
| St Katharine’s, Tower | 956 | 601 | ||
| Lambeth | 798 | 537 | ||
| Islington | 696 | 593 | ||
| Rotherhithe | 304 | 210 | ||
| Hackney | 232 | 132 |
Five Parishes in the City and Liberties of Westminster.
| St Martin’s in the Fields | 4804 | 2883 | ||
| St Margaret’s | 4710 | 3742 | ||
| St Clement’s Danes | 1969 | 1319 | ||
| St Paul’s, Covent Garden | 408 | 281 | ||
| St Mary’s, Savoy | 303 | 198 | ||
| Pesthouse | 156 |
The Great Plague brought back all the familiar incidents of 1603 and 1625, and revealed no new feature. As before, all that could afford to do so made their escape at the outset. Sydenham, who fled with the rest, says that two-thirds of the population left; which may be true of the City proper, but certainly not of the populous Liberties and suburbs on both sides of the water, as Defoe points out. The poorer classes were left stranded, and bore the brunt of the calamity, as they had always done. Flight was, doubtless, the best step to take, the motive being to get “into clean air,” as cardinal Wolsey expressed it in 1515. Those that were left behind knew that they were in bad air, and knew that it mattered little whether they came into contact with the sick or not[1205]. Their employments and wages mostly ceased as the plague extended from suburb to suburb and to the City, so that with starvation on the one side and plague on the other, they held their lives cheaply and bore themselves with an unconcern which was strange to the rich. Their desperate case explains, as Defoe correctly saw, the ease with which the mayor could always get men to undertake for pay the disagreeable and risky work of day and night watchmen to the multitude of shut-up houses, of bearers of the dead, of buriers, of nurses, and distributors of the public charity. As soon as any fell in these humble ranks, others were willing to take their place; so that at no period of the epidemic was there any break-down in the work of expeditious burial or any failure in good order and decency. To carry the poor through the great crisis much money was needed; Defoe says that it was forthcoming from all parts of England and he estimates the distribution of relief at thousands of pounds weekly, although he failed to find the exact accounts, which, he thinks, had been destroyed in the fire of 1666. A thousand pounds a week, he says, was given from the king’s purse. The whole of this great system of relief was under the direction of the Lord Mayor, Sir John Lawrence, who proved himself worthy of the best traditions of his office. In the out-parishes there were Justices of the Peace who discharged the like duties.
The regular clergy for the most part left the town, but two are honourably mentioned as having stayed with the plague-stricken people, Dr Anthony Walker, of St Mary Aldermanbury, and Mr Meriton[1206].
Sometime in August Lord Arlington wrote to the bishop of London that the king was informed of many ministers and lecturers being absent from their posts during this time of contagion, and that nonconformists had thrust themselves into their pulpits to preach seditions and doctrines contrary to the Church. His majesty wishes the bishop to prevent such mischiefs to Church and State[1207]. The bishop replied, from Fulham, 19 August, that the sober clergy remain, that he had refused some that offered to supply vacancies, suspecting them to be of the factious party, though they promised to conform, that most of his officers had deserted him and gone into the country, but he could not learn that any nonconformists had invaded the pulpit[1208]. The bishop, however, was not likely to hear much within his garden walls at Fulham of what was passing at Aldgate. There can be no question that Church pulpits were occupied during the plague by ministers who had been ejected in 1662. Chief among them was Thomas Vincent, formerly minister of St Magdalen’s, Milk Street, who preached in St Botolph’s, Aldgate, Great St Helen’s, and Allhallows Staining[1209]. Vincent says that it was the opportunity of irregular practitioners both in the Church and in medicine, and he is disposed to say a good word for the latter from a fellow feeling with them. Besides Vincent, says Richard Baxter[1210], there were “some strangers that came thither since they were silenced, as Mr Chester, Mr Janeway, Mr Turner, Mr Grimes, Mr Franklin, and some others.” These all became prominent in London Nonconformity; and Baxter clearly traces their subsequent power to the opportunity that the plague gave them:
“But one great benefit the plague brought to the city, that is, it occasioned the silenced ministers more openly and laboriously to preach the Gospel to the exceeding comfort and profit of the people; in so much that to this day [1670] the freedom of preaching which this occasioned, cannot, by the daily guards of soldiers, nor by the imprisonments of multitudes be restrained. The ministers that were silenced for Nonconformity had ever since 1662 done their work privately.”
Baxter knew of none among the Nonconformist ministers remaining in London who fell victims to the plague, except “Mr Grunman, a German, a very humble, holy, able minister, but being a silenced Nonconformist, was so poor that he was not able to remove his family.” Two others of the sect, who fled, lost their lives—“Mr Cross, flying from the plague into the country died with his wife and some children as soon as he came thither, in the house of that learned worthy man, Mr Shaw, another silenced minister,” and Mr Roberts, “a godly Welsh minister, who also flying from the plague, fell sick as far off as between Shrewsbury and Oswestry and died in a little straw, but none durst entertain him.” Baxter himself found refuge in the house of the Hampdens, in Bucks[1211], leaving his family, as he says, in the midst of plague at Acton. Defoe draws from the incident of the Nonconformists in Church pulpits a somewhat sentimental moral; he sees nothing aggressive in it, but merely the levelling of differences by affliction, and a short-lived prospect of reconciliation.