The first is called The Wonderful Year, 1603. The author, who is anonymous, begins with weeping over the death of Queen Elizabeth. This tribute paid, with such exaggerated grief as belongs to his sense of loyalty, he rejoices, with equal extravagance, over the accession of James. This brings him to his real subject:
A stiffe and freezing horror sucks vp the riuers of my blood: my haire stands an ende with the panting of my braines: mine eye balls are ready to start out, being beaten with the billowes of my teares: out of my weeping pen does the inke mournfully and more bitterly than gall drop on the pale-faced paper, even when I do but thinke how the bowels of my sicke country have bene torne. Apollo, therefore, and you bewitching siluer-tongd Muses, get you gone: I inuocate none of your names. Sorrow and truth, sit you on each side of me, whilst I am delivered of this deadly burden: prompt me that I may utter ruthfull and passionate condolement: arme my trembling hand, that I may boldly rip up and anatomize the ulcerous body of this Anthropophagized Plague: lend me art (without any counterfeit shadowing) to paint and delineate to the life the whole story of this mortall and pestiferous battaile. And you the ghosts of those more (by many) than 40000, that with the virulent poison of infection haue bene driuen out of your earthly dwellings: you desolate hand-wringing widowes, that beate your bosomes over your departing husbands: you wofully distracted mothers that with disheueld haire falne into swounds, while you lye kissing the insensible cold lips of your breathlesse infants: you out-cast and down-troden orphans, that shall many a yeare hence remember more freshly to mourne, when your mourning garments shall looke olde and be forgotten; and you the Genii of all those emptyed families, whose habitations are now among the Antipodes; joine all your hands together, and with your bodies cast a ring about me; let me behold your ghastly vizages, that my paper may receiue their true pictures: Eccho forth your grones through the hollow trunke of my pen, and raine downe your gummy tears into mine incke, that even marble bosomes may be shaken with terrour, and hearts of adamant melt into compassion.
BELOW BRIDGE
In this extravagant vein he plunges into the subject. Death, he says, like stalking Tamberlaine, hath pitched his tent in the suburbs; the Plague is muster-master and marshal of the field; the main army is a "mingle-mangle" of dumpish mourners, merry sextons, hungry coffin-sellers, and nastie grave-makers. All who could run away, he says, did run; some riding, some on foot, some without boots, some in slippers, by water, by land—"in shoals swom they." Then the Plague invaded the City. Every house looked like Bartholomew's Hospital; the people drank mithridatum and dragon-water all day long; they stuffed their ears and noses with rue and wormwood. Lazarus lay at the door, but Dives was gone; there were no dogs in the streets, for the Plague killed them all; whole families were carried to the grave as if to bed. "What became of our Phisitions in this massacre? They hid their synodical heads as well as the prowdest; for their phlebotomes, losinges, and electuaries, with their diacatholicons, diacodions, amulets, and antidotes had not so much strength to hold life and soule together as a pot of Pindar's ale and a nutmeg." When servants and prentices were attacked by the disease, they were too often thrust out-of-doors by their masters, and perished "in fields, in ditches, in common cages, and under stalls." Then he begins to tell the gruesome stories that belong to every time of Plague. In this he is followed by Defoe, who most certainly saw this pamphlet. What happened in 1603 also happened in 1665. Those who could run away did so; the physicians—who could do nothing—ran; the rich merchants ran; there was a general stoppage of trade; there was great suffering among the poor; those who dared to sit together, sat in the taverns drinking till they lost their fears. His stories told, the writer concludes:
I could fill a whole uolume, and call it the second part of the hundred mery tales, onely with such ridiculous stuffe as this of the Justice; but Dii meliora; I haue better matters to set my wits about: neither shall you wring out of my pen (though you lay it on the racke) the villainies of that damnd Keeper, who killd all she kept; it had bene good to haue made her Keeper of the common Jayle, and the holes of both Counters; for a number lye there that wish to be rid out of this motley world; shee would haue tickled them and turned them ouer the thumbs. I will likewise let the Church-warden in Thames-street sleep (for hees now past waking) who being requested by one of his neighbors to suffer his wife or child (that was then dead) to lye in the Church-yard, answered in a mocking sort, he keept that lodging for himselfe and his household: and within three days after was driuen to hide his head in a hole himself. Neither will I speake a word of a poore boy (seruant to a Chandler) dwelling thereabouts, who being struck to the heart by sicknes, was first caryed away by water, to be left anywhere; but landing being denyed by an army of brownebill men, that kept the shore, back againe was he brought, and left in an out-celler, where lying groueling and groaning on his face, among fagots (but not one of them set on fire to comfort him), there continued all night, and dyed miserably for want of succor. Nor of another poore wretch, in the Parish of St. Mary Oueryes, who being in the morning throwne, as the fashion is, into a graue vpon a heap of carcases, that kayd for their complement, was found in the after-noone gasping and gaping for life: but by these tricks, imagining that many thousand haue bene turned wrongfully off the ladder of life, and praying that Derick or his executors, may liue to do those a good turne, that haue done so to others: Hic finis Priami; heeres an end of an old song.
The second tract was written by one whose Christian name is surely Jeremiah. It is called Vox Civitatis. It is the Lamentation of London under the Plague. The City mourns her departed merchants. "Issachar stands still for want of work." Her children are starving; her apprentices, "the children of knights and justices of the county," are rated with beggars, and buried in the highway like malefactors. As for the clergy, they did not forsake their flocks; they sent them away—all who could go—before they themselves fled. The physicians and the surgeons have fled. Yet some have remained—parsons, physicians, and surgeons. The Lord Mayor, too, remained at his post. Then he argues that no one, in whatever station, has the right to desert his post. None are useless. He declaims against the inhumanity of those who refuse shelter to a stricken man, and he calls upon those who have food to return. The whole composition is filled with pious ejaculations; it certainly is the work of some city clergyman. London is stricken for her sins; yet there is mercy in the chastisement. The author is always finding consolation in the thought that the punishment will lead to reformation. Yet the work is a cry of suffering, of pity, and of indignation. The writer does not relate, he alludes to what everybody knows; yet he makes us see the workshops closed, 'Change deserted, churches shut, all the better class fled, prentices thrust out to die in the streets, the people with no work and no money, the servants left to guard the warehouses dead; even in Cheapside not a place where one can change a purse of gold; "Watling Street like an empty Cloyster." The Plague is terrible, but it is the chastisement of the Lord. He hath taken the City into His own hands; that may be borne; the worst, the most terrible thing is the desertion of the City and the people by the masters; the abandonment of those dependent upon their employers—this is the burden of the cry. To those who study the gleams and glimpses of Plague-time in these papers, the worst suffering in every time of pestilence was caused by the cessation of work and of trade. The master gone, the servants had no work and no wages—how were the children to be fed?
With one little touch of human nature the tract concludes. The writer was a scholar; he is jealous concerning his style. "If," he says, "this Declaration wants Science, or that Eloquence that might beseem me, consider my Trouble, the Absence of my Orators, the shutting up of my Libraries, so that I was content with a common Secretary." It is Vox Civitatis London that speaks; her libraries are those of St. Paul's, Zion College, Gresham College, Whittington College; the "common Secretary" is the writer. Such is his proud humility—a "common Secretary!"