CHAPTER IV.
SMALLPOX.
The history of smallpox in Britain is that of a disease coming gradually into prominence and hardly attaining a leading place until the reign of James I. In this respect it is unlike plague and sweating sickness, both of which burst upon the country in their full strength, just as both made their last show in epidemics which were as severe as any in their history. In the former volume of this work I have shown that smallpox in the first Tudor reigns was usually coupled with measles, that in the Elizabethan period the Latin name variolae was rendered by measles, and that smallpox, where distinguished from measles, was not reputed a very serious malady[808]. From the beginning of the Stuart period, smallpox is mentioned in letters, especially from London, in such a way as to give the impression of something which, if not new, was much more formidable than before; and that impression is deepened by all that is known of the disease later in the 17th century, including the rising figures in the London bills of mortality.
An early notice of a particular outbreak of smallpox is found in the Kirk Session records of Aberdeen in 1610, under the date of 12 August: “There was at this time a great visitation of the young children with the plague of the pocks[809].” In 1612 there are various references to deaths from smallpox in London in rich houses. In 1613, the Lord Harrington, who is said in a letter of Dr Donne’s to be suffering from “the pox and measles mingled,” died of smallpox (probably haemorrhagic) on the Sunday before 3 March, at which date also the Lady Burghley and two of her daughters were sick of the same disease. Those two years were probably an epidemic period. Another epidemic is known from a letter of December, 1621: “The smallpox brake out again in divers places, for all the last hard winter and cool summer, and hitherto we have had no sultry summer nor warm winter that might invite them. The Lord Dudley’s eldest son is lately dead of them, and the young Lady Mordaunt is now sick.” On 28 January, 1623, “the speech that the smallpox be very rife there [Newmarket] will not hinder his [James I.’s] journey.” The years 1623 and 1624 were far more disastrous by the spotted fever all over England; but smallpox attended the typhus epidemic, as it often did in later experience, the two together having “taken away many of good sort as well as mean people.”
The first epidemic of smallpox in London, from which some figures of the weekly mortalities have come down, was in 1628: this was the year before the Parish Clerks began to print their annual bills, but they had kept the returns regularly since 1604, and appear to have made known in one way or another the weekly mortality and the chief diseases contributing thereto. The smallpox deaths in London in the week ending 24 May, 1628, were forty-one, in the following week thirty-eight, and in the third week of June fifty-eight[810]. Such weekly mortalities in a population of about 300,000 belong to an epidemic of the first degree; and it is clear from letters of the time that the London smallpox of 1628 made a great impression. Lord Dorchester, in a letter of 30 August, calls it “the popular disease[811].” Several letters relating to a fatal case of smallpox in June in the house of Sir John Coke in the city (Garlick Hill) bear witness to the dread of contagion through all that circle of society[812]. One of the letters may be cited:
“It pleased God to visit Mrs Ellweys [Coke’s stepdaughter] with such a disease that neither she nor any other of her nearest and dearest friends durst come near her, unless they would hazard their own health. The children and almost all our family were sent to Tottenham before she fell sick, and blessed be God are all in health. Mrs Ellweys was sick with us of the smallpox twelve days or thereabouts.” Before she was out of the smallpox, she was taken in labour on 15 June, and died the next morning at five o’clock, being buried the same night at ten, with only Sir Robert Lee and his lady of her kindred at the funeral. The letter proceeds: “God knows we have been sequestered from many of our friends’ company, who came not near us for fear of infection, and indeed we were very circumspect, careful, and unwilling that any should come to us to impair their health.” Lady Coke was fearful to go to Tottenham because of the children who had been removed thither.
All the indications, whether from letters of the time, from poems and plays, or from statistics, point to the two first Stuart reigns as the period when smallpox became an alarming disease in London among adults and in the upper class. The reference to smallpox at Aberdeen in 1610 is to the disease among children; and so also is an unique entry, opposite the year 1636, on the margin of the register of Trinity parish, Chester: “For this two or three years, divers children died of smallpox in Chester[813].” In London, the disease had not yet settled down to that steady prevalence from year to year which characterized it after the Restoration. On the other hand, the periodic epidemics were very severe while they lasted. The epidemic of 1628 was followed by three years of very slight smallpox mortality in London; then came a moderate epidemic in 1632 and a severe one in 1634, with again two or more years of comparative immunity, as in the following table from the earliest annual printed bills:
Smallpox deaths in London, 1629-36[814].
| Year | Smallpox deaths | Deaths from all causes | ||
| 1629 | 72 | 8771 | ||
| 1630 | 40 | 10554 | ||
| 1631 | 58 | 8532 | ||
| 1632 | 531 | 9535 | ||
| 1633 | 72 | 8393 | ||
| 1634 | 1354 | 10400 | ||
| 1635 | 293 | 10651 | ||
| 1636 | 127 | 23359 |
For the next ten years, 1637-46, the London figures are lost[815], excepting the plague-deaths and the totals of deaths from all causes, but it is known from letters that there was a great epidemic of smallpox in one of them, the year 1641: the deaths were 118 in the week ending 26 August, and 101 in the week ending 9 September[816], totals seldom reached a century later, when the population had nearly doubled. In those weeks of 1641, it was second only to the plague as a cause of dread, and was, along with the latter, the reason that “both Houses grow thin,” for all the political excitement of the time. The next London epidemic was in 1649, when the annual bill gives 1190 deaths from smallpox. Willis says that the epidemic was also at Oxford that year, not so very extensive, “yet most died of it” owing to the severe type of the disease[817]. Five years after, in 1654, “at Oxford, about autumn, the smallpox spread abundantly, yet very many escaped with them.” The London deaths from smallpox for a series of years were as follows: