The Herbalist: Nicholas Culpeper and the Fight for Medical Freedom. Benjamin Woolley

way, but Wallington took it a step further: he wrote all his deliberations down, creating a journal of human struggle amounting to over two and a half thousand pages.

      The plague of 1625 represented one of the first major episodes to be examined by Wallington in this way, and his account of it provides a vivid street-level view of what it was like for the ordinary citizens of London left behind and how they dealt with it – not just medically, but philosophically and emotionally.

      Like the College of Physicians, Wallington assumed that the plague must have been sent by God. But where the College, taking its line from the religious establishment, saw it as a ‘general humiliation of the people’, Wallington believed it was a sign of how ‘idolatry crept in by little and little’ and how ‘cunningly and craftily hath the enemies of God’s free grace brought in superstition’.³⁵ In other words, it was a divine reaction to the established Church of England being drawn dangerously back towards the idolatrous rites and doctrinaire attitudes of Catholicism. Charles I had already revealed himself to be an enemy of Puritan reform, having chosen the controversial religious conservative Robert Montagu as his theological adviser. In a book ostentatiously dedicated to Charles that appeared in 1625, Montagu had attacked ‘those Classical Puritans who were wont to pass all their Strange Determinations, Sabbatarian Paradoxes, and Apocalyptical Frenzies under the Name and Covert of the True Professors of Protestant Doctrine’.³⁶ Puritans such as Nehemiah Wallington would have found it hard not to see the distorted reflection of themselves in Montagu’s caricature and to conclude that their beliefs were under threat.

      Thus the plague could not have descended on London at a more significant or sensitive time: it was part of the unfolding struggle between the Puritan saints and the courtly sinners. Wallington had already noted, a few years before, a ‘poor man of Buckinghamshire, that went all in black clothes, with his hat commonly under his arm’ and who for the space of a year stood before the palace gates at Whitehall calling to the King ‘for woe and vengeance on all Papists’. ‘I myself have seen and heard him,’ Wallington wrote, ‘crying, Woe to London, woe to the inhabitants of London.’³⁷

      Woe indeed. In the summer months of 1625, the tolling of the bells was ceaseless, and ‘could not but make us wonder at the hand of God to be so hot round about us’. Would even Nehemiah’s godly family be touched? He certainly did not regard himself as immune. He was a sinner too, all his efforts at saintliness, set out in a list of seventy-seven articles drawn up on his twenty-first birthday, proving paltry in the face of temptation. ‘I have many sorrows and am weak,’ he admitted to his journal.³⁸

      Through the summer weeks of 1625, all he could do was study the Bills of Mortality nailed to the door of his local church, St Margaret’s in New Fish Street: 5,205 dead in August, 43,265 in the year up to 27 October. He heard gossip about whole families – fifteen or sixteen in a single household – being wiped out, or perhaps leaving a lone survivor to endure a life of isolation, ‘a torment which is not threatened in hell itself, as the poet and preacher John Donne observed at the time.³⁹