London

Defoe, in his cataloguing way, which is the surest way of bringing a thing home to every one's understanding, enumerates all the different trades thrown out of work. That is to say, he catalogues all the trades of London. Let it be understood that the population of London was then about 350,000. This means about 100,000 working men of sixteen and upward. All these craftsmen, living from week to week upon their wages, with nothing saved, were turned out of employment almost at the same time – they and their families left to starve. Not only this, but clerks, book-keepers, serving-men, footmen, maid-servants, and apprentices were all turned into the streets together. Add to this the small shopkeepers and retailers of every kind, who live by their daily or weekly takings, and we shall have a population of a quarter of a million to keep.

The Lord Mayor, assisted by the Archbishop and the two lords, Albemarle and Craven, began and maintained a service of relief for these starving multitudes. The King sent a thousand pounds a week; the City gave six hundred pounds a week; merchants and rich people sent thousands every week; it is said that a hundred thousand pounds a week was contributed; this seems too great a sum – yet a whole city out of work! Employment was found for some of the men as constables, drivers of the carts that carried the dead to the burial-places, and so forth – and for the women as nurses. And, thanks to the Mayor's exertions, there was a plentiful supply of provisions during the whole time.

The disease continued to spread. It was thought that dogs and cats carried about infection. All those in the City were slaughtered. They even tried, for the same reason, to poison the rats and mice, but apparently failed. The necessity of going to market was a great source of danger; people were warned to lift their meat off the counter by iron hooks. Many families isolated themselves. The journal of one such household remains. The household, which lived in Wood Street, Cheapside, consisted of the master, a wholesale grocer, his wife, five children, two maid-servants, two apprentices, a porter, and a boy. He sent the boy to his friends in the country; he gave the elder apprentice the rest of his time; and he stationed his porter, Abraham, outside his door, there to sit night and day. Every window was closed, and nothing suffered to enter the house except at one upper window, which was opened to admit necessaries, but only with fumigation of gunpowder. At first the Plague, while it raged about Holborn, Fleet Street, and the Strand, came not within the City. This careful man, however, fully expected it, and when it did appear in July he locked himself up for good. Then they knew nothing except what the porter told them, and what they read in the Bills of Mortality. But all day long the knell never ceased to toll. Very soon all the houses in the street were infected and visited except their own. And when every day, and all day long, he heard nothing but bad news, growing daily worse, and when every night he heard the dismal bell and the rumbling of the dead cart, and the voice of the bellman crying, "Bring out your dead!" he began to give up all for lost. First, however, he made arrangements for the isolation of any one who should be seized. Three times a day they held a service of prayer; twice a week they observed a day of fasting; one would think that this maceration of the flesh was enough in itself to invite the Plague. Every morning the father rose early and went round to each chamber door asking how its inmates fared. When they replied "Well," he answered "Give God thanks." Outside, Abraham sat all day long, hearing from every passer-by the news of the day, which grew more and more terrifying, and passing it on to the upper window, where it was received with a fiery fumigation. One day Abraham came not. But his wife came. "Abraham," she said, "died of the Plague this morning, and as for me, I have it also, and I am going home to die. But first I will send another man to take my husband's place." So the poor faithful woman crept home and died, and that night with her husband was thrown into a great pit with no funeral service except the cursing and swearing of the rough fellows who drove the cart. The other man came, but in a day or two he also sickened and died. Then they had no porter and no way of communicating with the outer world. They remained prisoners, the whole family, with the two maids, for five long months. I suppose they must have devised some necessary communication with the outer world, or they would have starved.

Presently the Plague began to decrease; its fury was spent. But it was not until the first week of December that this citizen ventured forth. Then he took all his family to Tottenham for a change of air. One would think they needed it after this long confinement, and the monotony of their prison fare.

By this time the people were coming back fast – too fast; because their return caused a fresh outbreak. Then there was a grand conflagration of everything which might harbor the plague – curtains, sheets, blankets, hangings, stuffs, clothes – whatever there was in which the accursed thing might linger. And every house in which a case had occurred was scoured and whitewashed, while the church-yards were all covered with fresh earth at least a foot thick.

All this is a twice-told tale. But some tales may be told again and again. Consider, for instance, apart from the horror of this mighty pestilence, the loss and injury inflicted upon the City. If it is true that a hundred thousand perished, about half of them would be the craftsmen, the skilled workmen who created most of the wealth of London. How to replace these men? They could never be replaced.

Consider, again, that London was the great port for the reception and transmission of all the goods in the whole country. The stoppage of trade in London meant the stoppage of trade over the whole land. The cloth-makers of the West, the iron-founders, the colliers, the tin mines, the tanners, all were stopped, all were thrown out of work.

Again, consider the ruin of families. How many children of flourishing master-workmen, tradesmen, and merchants were reduced to poverty by the death of the father, and suddenly lowered to the level of working-men, happy if they were still young enough to learn a craft? How many lost their credit in the general stoppage of business? How many fortunes were cast away when no debts could be collected, and when the debtors themselves were all destroyed? And in cases when children were too young to protect themselves, how many were plundered of everything when their parents were dead?

Defoe, writing what he had learned by conversation with those who could remember this evil time, speaks of strange extravagances on the part of those who were infected. Very likely there were such things. Not, however, that they were common, as his story would have us believe. I prefer the picture of the imprisoned citizen, which represents a city sitting in sorrowful silence, the people crouching in their houses in silence or in prayer, gazing helpless upon each other, while the blue sky and the hot sun look down upon them, and the Plague grows busier every day.

When it abated at last, and the runaways went back to town, Pepys among them, he notes the amazing number of beggars. These poor creatures were the widows or children of the craftsmen, or the craftsmen themselves whose ruin we have just noted.

This was in January. The Plague, however, dragged on. In the week ending March 1, 1666, there were forty-two deaths from it. In the month of July it was still present in London, and reported to be raging at Colchester. In August, Pepys finds the house of one of his friends in Fenchurch Street shut up with the Plague, and it was said to be as bad as ever at Greenwich. This was the last entry about it, because in a week or two there was to happen an event of even greater importance than this great Plague.

Observe that this was the last appearance of the Plague. Since 1665 it has never appeared in Europe, except in Marseilles in the year 1720. It is not extinct. It smoulders, like Vesuvius. There is nothing, so far as can be understood, to prevent its reappearance in London or anywhere else, unless it is the improved sanitation of modern cities. For instance, it was at Astrakhan in 1879. But it travelled no farther west. It is generated in the broad miasmatic valley of the Euphrates; there it lies, ready to be carried about the world, the last gift of Babylon to the nations. When that great city is built again, the centre of commerce between Europe and the East, the valley will once more be drained and cultivated, and the Plague will die and be no more seen. But who is to rebuild Babylon and to repeople the land of the Assyrians?

There were two great Plagues of London in the seventeenth century before this – the last and greatest – one in 1603 and the other in 1625. I have before me two contemporary tracts upon these plagues. They illustrate what has been said of the Plague of 1665. Exactly the same things happened. In listening either to him of 1603, or to him of 1625, one hears the voice of 1665. I think that these tracts have never before been quoted. Yet it is quite clear to me that Defoe must have seen them both.

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.

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!"

Now for another twice-told tale.

The last cross had not been removed from the last infected house, the last person dead of the Plague had not been buried, before the Great Fire of London broke out and purged the plague-stricken city from end to end.

Three great fires had destroyed London before this of the year 1666, viz., in 962, in 1087, which swept away nearly the whole of the City, and in 1212, when a great part of Southwark and of the City north of the bridge was destroyed.

This fire began early in the morning of Sunday, September 2d. It broke out at the house of one Farryner, a baker in Pudding Lane, Thames Street. All the houses in that lane, and, one supposes, in all the narrow lanes and courts about this part of the City, were of wood, pitched without; the lane was narrow, and the projecting stories on either side nearly met at the top. The baker's house was full of faggots and brushwood, so that the fire instantly broke out into full fury and spread four ways at once. The houses stood very thick in this, the most densely populated part of the City. In the narrow lanes north and south of Thames Street lived those who made their living as stevedores, watermen, porters, carriers, and so forth; in Thames Street itself, on either side, were warehouses filled with oil, pitch, and tar, wine, brandy, and such inflammable things, so that by six o'clock on Sunday morning all Fish Street was in flames, and the fire spreading so fast that the people barely had time to remove their goods. As it drew near to a house they hurriedly loaded a cart with the more valuable effects and carried them off to another house farther away, and then to another, and yet another. Some placed their goods in churches for safety, as if the flames would respect a consecrated building. The booksellers, for instance, of Paternoster Row carried all their books into the crypt of St. Paul's, thinking that there, at least, would be a safe place, if any in the whole world. Who could look at those strong stone pillars with the strong arched roof and suspect that the stones would crumble like sand beneath the fierce heat which was playing upon them? All that Sunday was spent in moving goods out of houses before the flames caught them; the river was covered with barges and lighters laden with furniture. Pepys watched the fire from Bankside. "We stayed till, it being darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side of the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long; it made me weep to see it. The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the crackling of houses at their ruin." On Monday morning Pepys puts his bags of gold and his plate into a cart with all his best things, and drove off to Sir William Rider's, at Bethnal Green. His friend, Sir W. Batten, not knowing how to move his wine, dug a pit in his garden and put it there. In this pit, also, Pepys placed the papers of the Admiralty.

On Wednesday he walked into the town over the hot ashes. Fenchurch Street, Gracechurch Street, Lombard Street, Cheapside, he found in dust. Of the Exchange nothing standing of all the statues but that of Sir Thomas Gresham – a strange survival. On Saturday he went to see the ruins of St. Paul's: "A miserable sight; all the roofs fallen, and the body of the Quire fallen into St. Faith's; Paul's school, also Ludgate and Fleet Street."

The fire was stayed at length by blowing up houses at the Temple Church, at Pie Corner, Smithfield (where the figure of a boy still stands to commemorate the fact), at Aldersgate, Cripplegate, and the upper part of Bishopsgate Street. It had consumed five-sixths of the City, together with a great piece beyond the western gates. It had covered an area of 436 acres, viz., 387 acres within the walls, and 73 without; it had destroyed 132,000 dwelling-houses, St. Paul's Cathedral, eighty-nine parish churches, four of the City gates, Sion College, the Royal Exchange, the old Grey Friars Church, the Chapel of St. Thomas of Acon, and an immense number of great houses, schools, prisons, and hospitals. The area covered, roughly speaking, an oblong nearly a mile and a half in length by half a mile in breadth. The value of the property destroyed was estimated at £10,000,000. There is no such fire of any great city on record, unless it is the burning of Rome under Nero.

Their city being thus destroyed, the citizens lost no time, but set to work manfully to rebuild it. The rebuilding of London is a subject of some obscurity. One thing is quite certain: that as soon as the embers were cool enough to enable the people to walk among them, they returned, and began to find out the sites of their former houses. It is also certain that it took more than two years to clear away the tottering walls and the ruins.

It was at first proposed to build again on a new plan; Sir Christopher Wren prepared one plan, and Sir John Evelyn another. Both plans were excellent, symmetrical and convenient. Had either been adopted, the City of London would have been as artificial and as regular as a new American town, or the City of Turin. Very happily, while the Lord Mayor and aldermen were considering the matter, the people had already begun to build. A most fortunate thing it was that the City rose again on its old lines, with its winding streets and narrow lanes. At first the houseless people, 200,000 in number, camped out in Moorfields, just north of the City. Very happily, these fields, which had long been a swamp or fen intersected by ditches, a place of pasture, kennels, and windmills, had been drained by the City in 1606, and were now laid out in pleasant walks, a place of resort for summer evenings, a wrestling and cudgel playing-ground, and a ground for the muster of the militia. Here they set up tents and cottages; here they presently began to build two-storied houses of brick.

As they had no churches, they set up "tabernacles," whether on the site of the old churches or in Moorfields does not appear. As they had no Exchange, they used Gresham College for the purpose; the same place did duty for the Guildhall; the Excise Office was removed to Southampton Fields, near Bedford House; the General Post-office was taken to Brydges Street, Covent Garden; the Custom-house to Mark Lane; Doctors' Commons to Exeter House, Strand. The part of the town wanted for the shipping and foreign trade was first put up. And thus the town, in broken-winged fashion, renewed its old life.

On September 18th the Houses of Parliament created a Court of Judicature for settling the differences which were sure to arise between landlord and tenants, and between owners of land, as to boundaries and other things. The Justices of the Court of King's Bench and Common Pleas, with the Barons of the Exchequer, were the judges of the Court. So much satisfaction did they give that the grateful City caused their portraits to be placed in Guildhall, where, I believe, they may be seen to this day.