AT A TIME LIKE THIS…
Sarah Burton
‘How timely! How lucky!’ friends exclaimed, as my novel The Strange Adventures of H, which sees its heroine riding out the Great Plague of 1665 in a locked-down London, came into the world during the current pandemic. And of course it’s an ill wind which blows nobody any good, but with bookshops shut and literary festivals cancelled it looks as though H may well be another victim of coronavirus - and it is, after all, only a book, and with two elderly parents in care homes far away I have more significant concerns, and am well aware that many others have far more serious problems than mine.
So if I can’t share my book as widely as I’d like I can at least share with Lugg Blogg readers some of the interesting things that I learned while researching it about the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1665. The plague was not, of course, analogous with coronavirus on several levels: catching it was an almost certain death sentence and over a few months it killed a quarter of Londoners; there was no palliative treatment and no understanding of how it was spread. However its social effects, in particular its influence on notions of security, order and authority, were profound, and may offer insights on our own experience.
The figures give some idea of the extent of the plague: in Stepney alone, for example, at the height of the epidemic more than 600 people were dying each week, whereas 30 was the typical total. In a matter of months it killed at least 68,000 people in London alone (this was the official record; it’s likely the figure was nearer 100,000 – and this in a population of about 460,000).
But it is the eye-witness accounts which more vividly evoke the effects of the epidemic: for everyone who remained in the city during the hot summer of 1665, grief, shock, impotence and fear were ever-present. The sense in which Londoners felt the disease to be an external force, out of their control, is reflected in the common use of the words ‘visit’ and ‘visitation’ to describe the advent of plague. Puritan minister Thomas Vincent wrote that ‘the Plague compasseth the walls of the City like a flood, and poureth in upon it’, and that ‘Death rides triumphantly on his pale Horse through our streets, and breaks into every House’, an image closely echoed by Thomas Gumble, a chaplain: ‘Death, as it were, rode triumphant through every street, as if it would have given no quarter to any of mankind, and ravaged as if it would have swallowed all mortality’. The plague seemed an irresistible invader.
Paul Slack was the first historian to attempt to assess the impact of plague on seventeenth-century society, arguing that: ‘Sudden disastrous events such as epidemics illuminate many facets of the societies with which they collide. They create situations of stress which test the institutions, and the habits of mind and behaviour, which normally hold society together.’ Slack viewed plague as comparable with other disasters, such as famine and civil war, in that it ‘undermined any assurance men might normally find in family and friends, business and property, or even in government and nation’, but as especially destructive in its divisiveness: ‘For most men the impulse to preserve self and family necessarily triumphed over other loyalties and obligations.’
Daily reminders, in the form of sealed, guarded houses, where the healthy were imprisoned with the dying, and corpses awaiting collection by the roadside, caused Samuel Pepys to reflect, on more than one occasion, how the plague made people ‘cruel as dogs one to another’. An apothecary, William Boghurt, also condemned the general hysteria which made people ‘egregiously fearfull and consequently soe uncharitable, superstitious and cruel’ to each other. More than twenty of the watchmen set to prevent anyone leaving infected houses were reportedly killed by the inmates in their desperate attempts to escape.
Social life, instead of being the focus for pleasurable intercourse, became clouded by ever-present anxiety about infection, and only gatherings considered essential continued. ‘It is, I perceive,’ Pepys wrote, ‘an unpleasing thing to be at Court, everybody being fearful one of other, and all so sad, enquiring after the plague…’ London’s leisure spots were closed and in any event going anywhere in the city after dark involved the risk of meeting the corpses of plague victims being taken away for burial. London became increasingly isolated as fear of the plague spreading grew in the surrounding countryside, and both goods and people coming from the city were viewed with suspicion. In Chelmsford, where a number of refugees from London had been discovered and incarcerated, ‘thos which bee shut up would run About did not sum stand with guns redy to shoot them if they stur’. The city itself was transformed into a ghost town, the usually teeming streets empty of people, no boats on the Thames, grass growing in the main thoroughfares, the town ‘like a place distressed – and forsaken’.
The failure of the responsible authorities to take effective control of the situation created an environment in which money played a vital role, both in survival and in retaining the dignities traditionally accorded in death. As the plague reached such proportions that there were more bodies than places to bury them, the rich were able to pay (often dearly) for the few remaining spaces in consecrated ground, whilst the corpses of the poor were consigned to mass burial pits. Relations between servants and masters were put under particular stress by the plague. Servants with symptoms could be forcibly conveyed to the pest-house (which represented little more than a contained space in which to die), but were often literally turned into the street. When the vast majority of middle and upper class Londoners left the city, most abandoned their servants, who now found themselves with neither work nor lodgings.
Although servants were in the most distressed state, the rest of the working people were also hit by unimaginable hardship. As manufacturing, merchandising and trade of all kinds ground to a halt, and the many occupations associated with the river and its traffic (which was now at a standstill) ceased, many of those left in London were suddenly poverty-stricken: unable to leave the city and ill-equipped to sit out the epidemic. The removal of wealthy households to the country had the further effect of leaving London without the sources of philanthropy which might generally be turned to for alms in times of hardship. Likewise the departure of clergy who also fled the city, Thomas Vincent observed, left ‘the greater part of their Flock without Food or Physick in time of their greatest Need.’ In order to escape starvation many took the only work available – all of the most dangerous kind – nursing the sick, guarding infected houses, and collecting and burying the dead.
Poverty and pestilence fed on each other, the plague spreading fastest in the poorest and most overcrowded part of the city, facilitating the interpretation of the disease as a selective judgment on the sins of the lower orders. Although appeals for charitable contributions from the wealthy described the crisis as ‘a common calamity’, the epidemic was quickly labelled ‘the Poore Men’s Plague’. Yet if some believed that the poor, by self-neglect, had ‘in all appearances hastened their own destruction’, as one newspaper claimed, the plague was seen in many quarters as a judgment from God sent to punish profanity, vanity and the sins of the Restoration Court. Alternatively, it was interpreted as a punishment for the Great Rebellion and the execution of Charles I, or a sign of God’s wrath against a variety of religious groups. But that it was, indeed, a punishment from above, few doubted.
Parliament was not in session as epidemic disease gripped the capital. The Court quit London early in July and the Privy Council delegated responsibility for all aspects of the situation to a committee of nine men, six of whom left the city with the King. This committee, if such it can be called, proved indecisive and ineffectual in containing the epidemic and providing for its victims. In the course of the seven months in which 100,000 people died, the King and Privy Council only discussed the plague on three occasions, and the sole purpose of two of these meetings concerned securing from infection the place occupied by the Court. Once settled in Oxford, the Court seems to have successfully insulated itself against the tragedy unfolding in London, as the levity of this report from the city suggests:
‘There is no othere plague here but the infection of love; no other discourse but of ballets, dance and fine clouse; no other emulation but who shall look the handsomere, and whose vermillion and spanish white [cosmetics] is the best; none other fight than for “I am yours”. In a word there is nothing here but mirth, and there is a talk that there shall be a proclamacon made that any melancholy man or woman coming into this towne shall be turned out and put to the pillory, and there to be whep till he hath learned the way to be mary [merry] a la mode…’
The self-interest of the Lords ensured the failure of a new bill passed by the Commons, authorising various measures intended to contain the spread of disease. The peers felt they should be exempt from having their houses shut up, and also demanded that no pest-house or plague graveyard should be permitted close to ‘any considerable mansion house of any gentleman’. ‘No dignity can exempt from infection,’ retorted the Commons, ‘and therefore none to be freed from what is for the safety of the people. Death equals all.’ The bill fell.
A proclamation issued by Charles II before he left London clearly indicates his awareness of the vulnerable state in which he left the city. All disbanded officer and soldiers from the forces which had supported Parliament (rather than the monarchy) during the civil wars and the Commonwealth period were to withdraw from London and its suburbs within 24 hours to a distance of above 20 miles, unless they actually lived there, in which case they were forbidden, on pain of severe penalties, to bear arms. Fears of rebellion had reached fever pitch in 1665, as the plague added to failure in war destroyed the government’s credit, and it was felt that popular discontent might easily be whipped up by sectaries and dissenters.
Slack observed: ‘Of all the interlocking relationships on which the stability of a town depended, that most basic of ties between the rulers and the ruled was subjected to most strain during an epidemic.’ Certainly in the tensions the plague of 1665 revealed between government and people, employers and servants, rich and poor, this assertion is borne out. As the plague cases decreased in number, and a general return to the city began, doctors, clergymen and government officials who had been amongst the first to leave, were coldly received. As Daniel Defoe wrote in A Journal of the Plague Year, while it might have been hoped that this collective ‘near View of Death’ might reconcile people to set aside religious intolerance and social division, by contrast ‘the Breaches seem rather to widen, and tend to a widening farther, than to closing…’
My feeling is that the pandemic of 2020 has not necessarily widened the gaps in society but revealed them more blatantly. For example, we suddenly understand that we live in a society – one of the richest in the world – where schools are urged to reopen not just for the social and educational benefits for children but because a significant number of children will simply be abused ‘less’, while others will get their only substantial meal of the day. This, for these children, is their pre-Covid ‘normal’. We see those who work the hardest and in the most necessary jobs, such as carers, are the most undervalued and unprotected. This, too, is ‘normal’.
And we’ve also seen that massive change can happen, quickly. All kinds of organisations find new ways of working, community groups spring up to protect the elderly and the vulnerable, performers and musicians step up to raise morale, and many, many people find themselves seriously reconsidering what are the really important things in their lives.
And we all notice nature taking back the spaces we’ve vacated – Pepys was struck, at the height of the plague of 1665, not only by no boats on the Thames (usually the busiest thoroughfare in the city) but by the surreal sight of grass growing in the streets of Whitehall. Birdsong has replaced the hectic sounds of everyday pre-Covid activity. People are terming this period The Great Pause. So I was struck when I came across this paragraph about climate change in Dougald Hines’s essay ‘Negotiating Surrender’ in the Extinction Rebellion handbook This Is Not a Drill:
“When I think about what is at stake now, there’s a phrase that keeps coming back: this is about negotiating the surrender of our whole way of living. How much of the economic activity that you see around you could just go, overnight, and no-one would honestly miss it, if this could happen without anyone going homeless or hungry as a consequence? … Yet this is what surrender looks like: it’s about how much of the organised activity of a society can be decommissioned, not by 2050 or 2030, or even 2025, but as soon as possible.”
In 2019 none of us could have imagined this decommissioning taking place in an entirely unplanned unforeseen way, and that the government would (with varying degrees of success) aim to support the most vulnerable people. But it has happened, albeit, in theory, temporarily. And even though a return to normal is desired by a lot of people, it cannot happen immediately – there is time to reform if we resist the rush to return.
Pepys felt the plague brought out the worst in people, making them ‘cruel as dogs’ to each other. In many ways and on many levels the pandemic of 2020 has brought out the best in people. We’ve rediscovered the things that matter; now we have to resolve to hold onto them. This is not a drill.
Sarah Burton for the Lugg Blogg
June 2020
