It has not been usual to think of spotted fever, (or of influenzas), in that connexion; but a telluric source of the epidemic constitution of 1685-86 was clearly Sydenham’s view; and as the fever came in circumstances like those of the last great plague, and was thought at the time to be the forerunner of another great plague, its connexion with recondite decompositions in the soil, dependent on the phenomenal drought of two whole years before, cannot be set aside as a possibility, the less so that the fever, although of the type of typhus, was not a fever of cold, hunger, and domestic distress, but mainly of the warm, or mild, or soft weather following the long drought, and of many well-to-do-people, as in the great Netherlands fever of 1669. My view of it is that it was the modified successor of plague, the pestis mitior, which used to precede and accompany the plague, now become the dominant constitution. The authentic figures of its mortality come from London; but Sydenham says that its “effects were felt far more in other places”; although Short’s abstracts of parish registers, given above, do not indicate excessive mortality throughout England.
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.