A visitation of plague to London as depicted in Thomas Dekker’s A Rod for Run-Aways, 1625.
In the summer months of 1625, while Parliament and the court were at Oxford debating Buckingham’s impeachment, the scholar and poet John Taylor chaperoned Queen Henrietta Maria, just arrived from France, on a trip up the Thames from Hampton Court to Oxford. Gliding on the royal barge through the lush countryside, past Runnymede, where the Magna Carta was signed, and the towers of Windsor Castle, the royal party found the gentle pleasures of a summer cruise transformed into a ‘miserable & cold entertainment’. Crowds of starving, homeless people lined the banks. They were Londoners, desperately trying to escape one of the deadliest outbreaks of the plague in the city’s history – at least as severe as the more famous Great Plague of 1665. Having reached the country, these refugees had faced what Taylor described as a ‘bitter wormwood welcome’ from the country folk. Greeted as wealthy tourists in better times, they were shunned for fear that they carried the contagion. ‘For a man to say that he came from Hell would yield him better welcome without money, than one would give to his own father and mother that come from London,’ Taylor observed.20
Back in London, a stray visitor would not at first have beheld the apocalypse, just empty streets deodorized with oak and juniper smoke, musket fumes, rosemary garlands and frankincense, and peals of bells. They would pass dormant houses, the staring eyes of their inhabitants glimpsed through windows thrown open to let in the fragranced air and the clarions. They would spot stray dogs who had lost their masters, ditches left undredged for fear of stirring up pestilential airs, lone pedestrians chewing angelica or gentian or wearing arsenic amulets to ward off infection, some coming to a sudden halt and holding out their arms in curious positions, as though carrying invisible pails of water – signs of the first twinges of the characteristic plague sores or ‘buboes’ that appear under the arms.21
‘The walks in [St] Paul’s are empty,’ observed Thomas Dekker, who having written about the last plague outbreak in 1603 found his fascination revived along with the contagion. Not a ‘rapier or feather [was] worn in London’. The rich were gone, the rest unable to bear the inflating cost of a ticket out. ‘Coachmen ride a cock-horse,’ Dekker wrote, ‘and are so full of jadish tricks, that you cannot be jolted six miles from London [for] under thirty or forty shillings.’ Shops were shut, businesses closed, ‘few woollen drapers sell any cloth, but every churchyard is every day full of linen-drapers’. Cheapside, London’s main market, was empty, ‘a comfortable Garden, where all Physic Herbs grow’.22
Physic herbs may have been plentiful, but not physicians. More Fellows of the College were in attendance to minister to James I during his final illness than in all of London during that deadly spring and summer of 1625. On 21 April, less than a month after the royal medical retinue had returned to the capital, the entire membership of the College was summoned to Amen Corner to undertake a solemn selection procedure to decide who should remain in the capital to deal with the epidemic. They filed into the Comitia room one by one and, before the President, Dr Atkins, named those they thought should stay to represent the College. The names that emerged were Sir William Paddy, John Argent (an ‘Elect’ or senior member of the College and soon to become its president), Simeon Foxe (another future president), and William Harvey. All the others were relieved of their collegiate duties, and most presumably fled.
The official College line for dealing with the plague was set out in a treatise entitled Certaine Rules, Directions, or Advertisements for this Time of Pestilential Contagion, first published in 1603 at the time of the last ‘visitation’, and reissued to deal with the current one. Written by Francis Herring, a College Elect, and dedicated to the King, its first words defined the plague in terms of a Latin dictum taken from the Bible, which translated as: ‘The stroke of God’s wrath for the sins of mankind’. This view of plague as a punishment, in particular for pride, was backed up by ministers like William Attersoll, who pointed out that God sent the first plague to strike the Israelites for ‘rebelliously contending against the high Priest, and the chiefest Magistrate to whom God committed the oversight of all’. ‘This is not only the opinion of Divines,’ Herring continued, ‘but of all learned Physicians … Therefore his [the physician’s] appropriate and special Antidote is Seria paenitentia, & conversio ad Deum: unfeigned and hearty repentance, and conversion to God.’23
The doctors did have some medical advice to offer. ‘Eschew all perturbations of the mind, especially anger and fear’ Herring wrote. ‘Let your exercise be moderate … an hour before dinner or supper, not in the heat of the day, or when the stomach is full. Use seldom familiarity with Venus, for she enfeebleth the body.’ As for remedies, they were various, in particular ‘theriacs’ or treacles of the sort used to treat James in his final illness. Herring did not provide recipes for these – it would break the College statutes to do so, and in any case he expected those educated and rich enough to read his treatise to consult a physician. However, he did provide a set of basic remedies for treating those too poor to afford medical fees. The aim of these was to produce beneficial sweating at various intervals in the illness’s development. They could be made at home and included ingredients that were relatively easy to get hold of, such as radish, caraway seeds, and ‘middle or six-shilling beer’.
Herring also provided advice to the city authorities, in particular relating to the matter of hygiene in public spaces. The College had a low opinion of urban health standards, noting the multitude of ‘annoyances’ that had been allowed to develop and which now aided the epidemic’s spread. Rampant development had produced overcrowding, ‘by which means the air is much offended and provision is made more scarce which are the two prime means of begetting or increasing the plague’; there was ‘neglect of cleansing of Common Sewers and town ditches and the permitting of standing ponds in diverse Inns which are very offensive to the near inhabiting neighbours’. More offensive still were the ‘laystalls’ or dumping and burial grounds accumulating beyond the city’s northern limit. Over the city wall at Bishopsgate or Moorgate lay an unsavoury landscape of fens, shacks, kilns, compost heaps, plantations, ruined abbeys, rubbish piles, firing ranges, laundries, dog houses, and pig stalls. This was the world of Bedlam, the famous hospital for mental patients, and the Finsbury windmills, built atop a vast heap of human remains excavated from a charnel house next to Amen Corner. This would also become the setting for Nicholas Culpeper’s practice, and where he and his comrades would muster for the future fight against the sovereign the physicians now served. As far as the physicians were concerned, the whole area was the brewery of infection. From this wasteland the ‘South Sun’ drew ‘ill vapours cross the City’, polluting the north wind, ‘which should be the best cleanser and purifier of the City’. It was upon these dumps of ‘well rotted’ waste that the city gardens were gorged, ‘making thereby our cabbages and many of our herbs unwholesome’.24
In response to such complaints, the authorities drew up a series of emergency ‘Orders to be used in the time of the infection of the plague within the City and Liberties of London’. The aim was to deal with the situation ‘till further charitable provision may be had for places of receipt for the visited with infection’ – in other words, in anticipation of an evacuation of plague victims to surrounding pest hospitals, a monumental undertaking which the authorities were not prepared to pay for out of city funds. The orders focused primarily on identifying sites of infection and sealing them off. Any house or shop in which a resident had died of, or become infected with, the plague was to be shut up for twenty-eight