London in Modern Times / or, Sketches of the English Metropolis during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.

by Unknown

London also witnessed other accompaniments of the restoration. The regicide trials took place soon after the king's return, and could not fail deeply to interest, in one way or the other, the mass of the citizens, many of them personally acquainted with the parties, and perhaps abettors of the acts for which they were now arraigned. Charing Cross was the scene of the execution of Harrison, Scrope, Jones, Hugh Peters, and others. The spirit in which they met their deaths was very extraordinary. "If I had ten thousand lives," said Scrope, "I could freely and cheerfully lay them down all to witness in this matter." Jones, the night before he died, told a friend that he had no other temptation but this, lest he should be too much transported, and carried out to neglect and slight his life, so greatly was he satisfied to die in that cause. Peters, whom Burke styles "a poor good man," said, as he was going to die, "What, flesh, art thou unwilling to go to God through the fire and jaws of death? This is a good day; He is come that I have long looked for, and I shall be with him in glory; and so he smiled when he went away." Others were executed at Tyburn; and there, too, the bodies of the protector Oliver Cromwell, Treton, and Bradshaw, were ignominiously exposed on a gibbet, having been dug out of their tombs in Westminster Abbey.

[[1]] He loved paintings and music, and encouraged proficients in elegant art. "I ventured," says Evelyn, in 1656, "to go to Whitehall, where of many years I have not been, and found it very glorious and well furnished."

[[2]] Perfect Politician, quoted in "London," vol. i, p. 360.

CHAPTER III.

THE PLAGUE YEAR IN LONDON.

Terrific pestilence had often visited London, and swept into the eternal world multitudes of victims; but no calamity of this kind that ever befel the inhabitants can be compared with the awful visitation of the great plague year. It broke out in Drury-lane, in the month of December, 1664. For some time it had been raging in Holland, and apprehensions of its approach to the shores of England had for months agitated the minds of the people. Remarkable appearances in the heavens were construed into Divine warnings of some impending catastrophe; and the common belief in astrology led many, in the excited state of feeling, to listen to the prognostications that issued from the press, in almanacs and other publications of the day. Defoe, in his remarkable history of the plague, which, though in its form fictitious, is doubtless in substance a credible narrative, describes a man who, like Jonah, went through the streets, crying, "Yet forty days, and London shall be destroyed." Another ran about, having only some slight clothing round his waist, exclaiming, with a voice and countenance full of horror, "O, the great and dreadful God!" Yet the forebodings which were excited by reports from the continent, the traditions of former visitations of pestilences, the actual breaking out of the disease in a few instances, together with the superstitious aggravations just noticed, only shadowed forth, in light pale hues, the dark and intensely gloomy colors of the desolating providence which the sovereign Ruler of all events brought over the city of London. Head-ache, fever, a burning in the stomach, dimness of sight, and livid spots on the chest, were symptoms of the fatal disorder. These signs became more numerous as the months of the year 1665 advanced; yet the cases of plague were comparatively few till the month of June. "June the 7th," says an observant writer of that period in his diary, "the hottest day that ever I felt in my life. This day, much against my will, I did see in Drury-lane two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and 'Lord, have mercy upon us!' writ there, which was a sad sight to me, being the first of that kind that to my remembrance I ever saw." Again, on the 17th of June: "It struck me very deep this afternoon, going with a hackney coach down Holborn from the lord treasurer's, the coachman I found to drive easily, and easily, at last stood still, and came down hardly able to stand, and told me he was suddenly struck very sick, and almost blind he could not see; so I light, and went into another coach, with a sad heart for the poor man, and myself also, lest he should have been struck with the plague." This description of the first sight of the marked door, and the coach going more and more easily till it stood still, with its plague-struck driver, places the reader in the midst of the scene of disease and sorrow, awakening sympathetic emotions with those sufferers in a now distant age.

The alarm increased as the deaths multiplied, and people began to pack up and leave London with all possible haste. The court and the nobility removed to a distance, and so also did vast numbers beside who had the means of doing so, and were not confined by business; yet the general terror was so great throughout the kingdom that friends were sometimes far from being welcomed by those whom they visited. "It is scarcely possible," says Baxter, "for people who live in a time of health and security to apprehend the dreadful nature of that pestilence. How fearful people were thirty or forty, if not a hundred miles from London, of anything they brought from mercers' or drapers' shops, or of goods that were brought to them, or of any persons who came to their houses. How they would shut their doors against their friends; and if a man passed over the fields, how one would avoid another, how every man was a terror to another. O, how sinfully unthankful are we for our quiet societies, habitations, and health!" But the bulk of the people, of course, were compelled to remain in the city, and, pent up in dirty, close, unventilated habitations, while the weather was burning hot, were exposed to the unmitigated fury of the contagion. The weekly bills of mortality rose from hundreds to thousands, till, in the month of September, the disease reached its height, and no less than ten thousand souls were hurried into eternity. The operations of business were of course checked, and in many cases entirely suspended by the terrific progress of the calamity. Several shops were closed in every street; dwellings were often left empty, the inmates having been smitten or driven away by the fatal scourge. Some of the public thoroughfares were nearly deserted. The markets being removed beyond the city walls, to prevent the people as much as possible from coming together in masses; the erection of houses also being unnecessary, and therefore discontinued for a while—carts and wagons, laden with provision, or with building materials, no longer frequented the highways, which, a few short months before, had been the scene of busy activity. Coaches were seldom seen, except when parties were hurrying away from the city, or when some one, affected by the disorder, was being conveyed home, with the curtains of the vehicle closely drawn. The grass growing in the streets, and the solemn stillness which pervaded many parts of the great city, in contrast with its previous state, are circumstances particularly mentioned in the descriptions of London in the plague year, and they powerfully serve to give the reader an affecting idea of the awful visitation. Few passengers appeared, and those few hurried on, in manifest fear of each other, as if each was carrying to his neighbor the summons of death.[[1]] The daughters of music were brought low; the din of business, and the murmur of pleasant talk, and the London cries were silenced. The shrieks, however, of sufferers in agony, or of maniacs driven mad by disease, broke on the awful quietude. People might be heard crying out of the windows for some to help them in their anguish—to assuage the burning fever, or to carry their dead away. Occasionally, some rushed towards the Thames, with bitter cries, to seek relief from their torments by suicide. The Rev. Thomas Vincent, who was residing in London at the time, describes some touching examples of sorrow, which were only specimens of what prevailed to an indescribable extent. "Amongst other sad spectacles," he says, "two, methought, were very affecting; one of a woman coming alone, and weeping by the door where I lived, (which was in the midst of the infection,) with a little coffin under her arm, carrying it to the new churchyard. I did judge that it was the mother of the child, and that all the family besides were dead, and that she was forced to coffin up and to bury with her own hands this her last dead child!" The second case to which this writer alludes is even more terrible than that now given, but out of regard to our readers' feelings we refrain from quoting it. A passenger, the same eye-witness adds, could hardly go out without meeting coffins; and Defoe gives us a picture, as graphic as it is awful, of the mode of sepulture adopted when the plague was at its height. He informs us that a great pit was dug in the churchyard of Aldgate parish, from fifteen to sixteen feet broad, and twenty feet deep; at night, the victims carried off in the day by death were brought in carts by torchlight to this receptacle, the bellman accompanying them, and calling on the inhabitants as they passed along to bring out their dead. Sixteen or seventeen bodies, naked, or wrapped in sheets or rags, were thrown into one cart, and then huddled together into the common grave.

The king of terrors sweeping into the eternal world so many thousands, is a picture which must excite in the mind of the Christian solemn emotions. It is pleasing, however, to learn from Vincent how tranquilly God's people departed in that season of Divine judgment. "They died with such comfort as Christians do not ordinarily arrive unto, except when they are called forth to suffer martyrdom for the testimony of Jesus Christ. Some who have been full of doubts, and fears, and complaints, whilst they have lived and been well, have been filled with assurance, and comfort, and praise, and joyful expectations of glory, when they have been laid on their death-beds by this disease; and not only more growing Christians, who have been more ripe for glory, have had their comforts, but also some younger Christians, whose acquaintance with the Lord hath been of no long standing." There were persons, however, who had lived through a course of profligacy, who, so far from being led to repentance by the awful dispensation they witnessed, only plunged into deeper excesses, driving away care by riot and intemperance, or availing themselves of the confusion of the times to commit robbery. The immorality, daring presumption, and reckless wickedness of a portion of the people during the London plague, as in the plague at Florence in 1348, and the plague at Athens, described by Thucydides, prove the depravity of the human heart, and the inefficacy of afflictions or judgments, if unaccompanied by Divine grace, to melt or change it. We learn, however, that by the preaching of the gospel some were graciously renewed and saved. Baxter informs us, that "abundance were converted from their carelessness, impenitency, and youthful lusts and vanities, and religion took such a hold on many hearts as could never afterwards be loosed." The parish churches were in several instances forsaken by their occupants, but many godly men who had been ejected by the Uniformity Act, now came forward, with their characteristic disinterestedness and zeal, to supply their brethren's lack of service. Vincent, already mentioned, with Clarkson, Cradock, and Terry, distinguished themselves by holy efforts for the conversion of sinners at that dreadful time. A broad sheet exists in the British Museum, containing "short instructions for the sick, especially those who, by contagion, or otherwise, are deprived of the presence of a faithful pastor, by Richard Baxter, written in the great plague year, 1665." Preaching was the principal method of doing good. Large congregations assembled to hear the man of God faithfully proclaim his message. The imagination readily restores the timeworn Gothic structure in the narrow street—the people coming along in groups—the crowded church doors, and the broad aisles, as well as the oaken pews and benches, filled with one dense mass—the anxious countenances looking up at the pulpit—the divine, in his plain black gown and cap—the reading of the Scriptures—the solemn prayer—the sermon, quaint indeed, but full of point and earnestness, and possessing that prime quality, adaptation—the thrilling appeals at the close of each division of the discourse—the breathless silence, broken now and then by half-suppressed sobs and lamentations—the hymn, swelling in dirge-like notes—and the benediction, which each would regard as possibly a dismissal to eternity; for who but must have felt his exposure to the infection while sitting amidst that promiscuous audience? It is at times like these that the worth of the soul is appreciated, and a saving interest in Christ perceived to be more valuable than all the accumulated treasures of earth. So far as their health was concerned, the prudence of the people in congregating together in such crowds, at such a season, has been often and fairly questioned; yet who that looks at the imminent spiritual peril in which multitudes were placed, but must commend the religious concern which they manifested; and who that takes into account the peculiar circumstances of the preachers, laboring without emolument at the hazard of their lives, but must applaud their apostolic zeal?—Spiritual Heroes, p. 289.

The plague reached its height in September—during one night of that month ten thousand persons died. After this the pestilence gradually diminished, and by the end of the year it had ceased. The visitation has acquired additional interest for us of late from the occurrence of cholera to an alarming extent. The former, like the latter, was increased by poverty and filth, and to a much greater degree; for, badly as houses have been ventilated, of late, and defective as may be our drainage, our fathers were incomparably worse off than we are in these respects. Houses were crowded together, and left in a state of impurity which would shock the least delicate and refined of the present day. There were scarcely any under sewers. Ditches were the channels for carrying off refuse; and as supplements to these imperfect methods of cleansing a great city, there were public dunghills. The effluvia from such sources was, indeed, humanly speaking, enough to cause a pestilence, and at the time of the plague must have been intolerable from the heat of the weather; while some means, also, adopted by the authorities for stopping the ravages of mortality, only promoted the evil—such as the shutting up of houses, and the kindling fires in the streets. The state of the metropolis then, and even now, may be assigned as an auxiliary cause of the spread of plague and cholera; but it must be confessed, there lies at the bottom of these visitations much of mystery, inexplicable by reference to mere human agencies. There is a power at work in the universe deeper far than any of those which our poor natural philosophy can detect. Not that these extraordinary occurrences show us the presence of a Divine providence which does not operate at other, and at all times; not as if the mysterious agency of God were sometimes in action, and sometimes in repose; not as if the Almighty visited the earth yesterday, and left it to-day; not as if his kingly rule over the world were broken by interregnums;—by no means; still these events are like the lifting up of the veil of second causes, and the disclosure of depths of power down which mortals ought to look with reverence. They suggest to the devout solemn views of nature and man—of life and death—of God ruling over all. Loudly, also, do they remind us of the malignity of sin, and the evils which it has brought on a fallen world. Happy is he who, amidst desolations such as we have now described, can, through a living faith in Christ, exclaim, "The Lord is my refuge and fortress: my God; in him will I trust. Surely he shall deliver me from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence."