The Story of London

by Henry B. Wheatley

Monke, Duke of Albemarle, and Samuel Pepys were two of the most prominent public servants who remained in London during the plague of 1665. The clergy and the doctors fled with very few exceptions, and several of those who stayed in town doing the duty of others as well as their own fell victims to the disease.

Dr. Hodges, author of Loimologia, enumerates among those who assisted in the dangerous work of restraining the progress of the infection the learned Dr. Gibson, Regius Professor at Cambridge, Dr. Francis Glisson, Dr. Nathaniel Paget, Dr. Peter Barwick, Dr. Humphrey Brookes, etc. Of those he mentions, eight or nine fell in their work, among whom was Dr. Wm. Conyers, to whose goodness and humanity he bears the most honourable testimony. Dr. Alexander Burnett, of Fenchurch Street, one of Pepys’s friends, was another of the victims.[181]

Sweating Sickness.—The sweating sickness did not appear until the end of the Middle Ages, viz., the year 1485, when the Battle of Bosworth was fought, and there were five outbreaks of the epidemic up to 1551, after which date it did not appear again in England. Dr. Creighton has taken some pains to trace the origin of the disease. He writes: ‘The history of the English sweat presents to the student of epidemics much that is paradoxical although not without parallel, and much that his research can never rescue from uncertainty. Where did this hitherto unheard of disease come from? Where was it in the intervals from 1485 to 1508, from 1508 to 1517, from 1517 to 1528, and from 1528 to 1551? What became of it after 1551? Why did it fall mostly on the great houses—on the King’s Court, on the luxurious establishments of prelates and nobles, on the richer citizens, on the lusty and well-fed, for the most part sparing the poor? Why did it avoid France when it overran the Continent in 1529? No theory of the sweat can be held sufficient which does not afford some kind of answer to each of these questions, and some harmonising of them all.’[182]

Those who wish to follow these inquiries must consult Dr. Creighton’s book. Suffice it to say here that the author is of opinion that suspicion falls justly upon the foreign mercenaries who landed with Henry Tudor at Milford Haven on the 6th of August 1485 as the carriers of the disease.[183]

Dr. Creighton found among the British Museum manuscripts (Addit. MSS., No. 27, 582) a treatise on the Sudor Anglicus, or English Sweat, dedicated to Henry VII. by the author, Thomas Forrestier, M.D., a native of Normandy, who lived for a time in London. Stow says that the sickness began in London on the 21st September, and continued till the end of October, ‘of the which a wonderful number died’; but Forrestier gives the date as the 19th.

The second sweat was in 1508, when many died in the city. In August public prayers were made at St. Paul’s on account of the plague of sweat. The third epidemic was in 1517, and the fourth in 1528. On the 5th of June of the latter year, Sir Brian Tuke wrote to Bishop Tunstall that he had fled to Stepney ‘for fear of the infection,’ a servant having died in his house. Anne Boleyn, her brother George and her father caught the infection and recovered. Her brother-in-law, William Cary, died at Hunsdon. A large number of persons caught the disease, but a very considerable proportion recovered.

The fifth and last outbreak was in 1551, and it is interesting to note that Dr. John Caius, the famous physician, wrote a treatise on it. Dr. Norman Moore[184] describes this as ‘the first original treatise published in England, by which I mean the first treatise in which the modern idea of observing the disease and writing a complete account of what was actually seen was carried out.’

In Machyn’s Diary it is said that ‘there died in London many merchants, and great rich men and women, and young men and old of the new sweat’; and Sir Thomas Speke and Sir John Wallop are instanced among others. Hancocke, a minister of Poole, Dorset, refers to ‘the posting sweat that posted from town to town thorow England, and was named “Stop-gallant,” for it spared none. For there were some dancing in the Court at nine o’clock that were dead at eleven.’

In taking stock of diseases and epidemics in London, we may note that many of the pestilences previous to the Black Death were due to famine. Dr. Creighton says of the year 1258 that ‘so great was the pinch in London from the failure of the crops and the want of money that fifteen thousand are said to have died of famine and of a grievous and widespread pestilence that broke out about the Feast of the Trinity, 19th May.’ The number is that given by Matthew Paris, and Dr. Creighton adds: ‘It suggests a larger population in the capital than we might have been disposed to credit. The same writer says that London was so full of people when the Parliament was sitting in the year before (1257) that the city could hardly hold them all in her ample bosom. The Annals of Tewkesbury put the whole mortality from famine and fever in London in 1258 at 20,000, but the whole population did not probably exceed 40,000.’[185]

Small-pox and measles were not known to the ancients, and the latter seems to have been first noted in the fourteenth century.