Necropolis: London & it's Dead (8 page)

For very many were sent out again whole, and very good Physicians were appointed to those Places, so that many People did very well there…and they were so well look’d after there in all the time of the visitation, there was but 156 buried in all at the
London
Pest-house, and 159 at that of
Westminster
.
¹⁰

The first pest house in London had been set up in 1630 by Sir Theodore de Mayerne, Charles I’s physician, inspired by the L’Hôpital St Louis in Paris. It served as a hospital for nine out-parishes. On the approach of the long but less harmful Plague of 1640–7, it was acquired by St Giles’s for its own patients, and the building then converted into a workhouse.

As the outbreak of 1665 gathered terrifying force, the authorities ordered the construction of a new pest house to cope with the victims from St Giles’s. A meadow near the village of Marylebone, known as Mutton Field, appeared to be the perfect location, and the owner was willing to sell. But, in a predictable burst of nimbyism, there was uproar among the villagers. The Privy Council rushed the sale through despite all protests, offering local residents use of the pest house if they became infected. The building was rapidly constructed. Like others, it was timber-framed upon a foundation course of brick. The site was walled in, and a surgeon named Fisher appointed.
¹¹

Magistrates also ordered a pest house to be built in St Martin-in-the-Fields. It was erected on five acres of ground called Clayfield in Soho Fields. Dr Tristran Inard, a physician, became master of the pest house. Paid £170, he also had a practice in Long Acre, where he sold his Grand Preservative or Antidote Epidemical, one of the many spurious patent medicines circulating during the epidemic. For, with antibiotics long in the future, there was little to be done to ‘cure’ the plague. Herbal remedies, fumigation, leeches and poultices were the only means of alleviating the symptoms.

Accommodating over ninety patients, the Soho pest house was the largest in London. At the height of the plague it served not only
St Martin’s, but St Clement Dane’s, St Paul’s, Covent Garden and St Mary Savoy as well. Pest houses even provided a rudimentary form of medical research. Dr Nathaniel Hodges and other leading lights of the medical profession took on the plague as it continued its merciless advance across London. The pioneering Dr George Thompson carried out a post mortem on a plague victim in a desperate attempt to find a cure and almost died in the attempt.

At Westminster, a pest house was improvised at Tothill Fields, opposite the Abbey, in the area now known as The Sanctuary, behind Victoria Street. Surrounded by a ditch with access gained by a bridge, it was also equipped with its own burial ground, since pestilence and death were near neighbours. Known as ‘The Five Houses’ or ‘The Seven Chimneys’, these establishments were still standing at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
¹²

Tothill Fields had been the site of a plague pit during earlier epidemics. According to the Victorian historian Mrs Isabella Holmes, Tothill Fields had also served as a burial ground for over 1,000 Scottish prisoners and their wives, captured during the Civil War and interred in the churchyard of St Margaret’s, Westminster.
¹³

By the second week of June 1665, temperatures were soaring, along with the mortality rate. One hundred and twenty people had been buried in St Giles’s. Officially, sixty-eight of these died of the plague, although one hundred was a more accurate figure. Up until this point, with the exception of the unfortunate Frenchmen in Bearbinder Lane, the City had remained plague free. But in this second week, four deaths were reported–one in Wood Street, another in Fenchurch Street, and two in Crooked Lane.

Henry Foe lived in Aldgate, near Whitechapel, and the pestilence had not reached his side of the city. This neighbourhood remained buoyant. Up West, panic had set in. On 10 June, Samuel Pepys heard that the plague was coming into the City. By 15 June, ‘the town grows very sickly’.
¹⁴
On 17 June, he had a terrifying experience during a trip from the Treasury to Holborn. Pepys’s driver abruptly stopped the coach and ‘came down hardly able to stand
and told me he was suddenly struck very sick and almost blind, he could not see’.
¹⁵
By 23 June, Pepys was observing that travelling by Hackney coach is ‘very dangerous nowadays, the sickness increasing mightily’.
¹⁶

By 18 July, he was offering his friends the Mitchells a pint of wine, since they, like so many others, were getting out of town. And a week later, he had another scare when his clerk, Will, complained of a severe headache and went for a lie-down on Pepys’s bed, ‘which put me in extraordinary fear!’
¹⁷

‘A Plague is a formidable Enemy,’ observed Henry Foe. And the only way to escape the plague was to run away from it. Anybody who could do so, left town. In a seventeenth-century
War of the Worlds
moment, the narrow streets were jammed with terrified citizens heading out of London. The aristocracy and wealthy merchants escaped to their second homes in the country, clutching the certificates of health issued by the Mayor of London that enabled them to travel. The frenzy to escape was exacerbated by rumours of Government plans to install turnpikes, roadblocks and armed guards to turn back Londoners and prevent them spreading the plague. London Bridge was gridlocked with carriages, carts, horses and people, fleeing for their lives. It filled Henry with ‘very serious Thoughts of the Misery that was coming upon the City, and the unhappy Condition of those that would be left in it’.
¹⁸

Although Whitechapel appeared safe, Henry’s brother pleaded with him to come to Northamptonshire. But Henry had his business to consider, with a client base in America built up over many years. And, although a bachelor, he had a family of servants, a shop and a warehouse. He was also religious, with a fatalistic turn of mind. Much to his brother’s disgust, he felt it was his destiny to stay in London.

As rumours reached him of life outside the capital, Henry had less cause to regret his choice. Many escaped only to meet a grim and lonely end. Fleeing to the country, they were turned back by mobs of vigilantes, armed with pitchforks and flaming torches.
Others became messengers of death, carrying the contagion to the remotest parts of the kingdom. Wherever the plague spread, in all the great cities of England, exiled Londoners were held responsible.

Taking pity, some country people left food, at a safe distance. And when the victims died, they dug pits and dragged the bodies into them, using poles and hooks, careful to operate wind-ward of the corpses, for fear of contagion. Long experience of the depredations of the murrain (a cattle disease) had taught country people to bury deep and stay away. Once filled in, the pits remained undisturbed, although their function and location remained a source of anecdote for generations. Stoke Newington, Camberwell, Gypsy Hill–these and many other fields outside London become unofficial burial grounds, their contents unknown and unmourned.

These interments possessed a simple dignity that was lacking back in London, where the very nature of burial was changing as the plague taxed the resources, the patience, and the energy of the authorities in a manner that was unprecedented. Under the emergency legislation, burial of plague victims followed a strict procedure, with interment taking place at night, between sunset and sunrise, with only the church-wardens or Constables in attendance. Family and friends were banned from attending, on pain of quarantine or imprisonment. The consequences for those who flouted the rules could be fatal. Many attended the funeral of a friend one evening, only to go to their own long home the next.

By August, when Pepys’s parish bell was hoarse with tolling for the dead six times a day, the authorities were forced to reconsider their position: ‘The people die so, that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the nights not sufficing to do it in. And my Lord Mayor commands people to be within at nine at night, that the sick may have liberty to go abroad for air.’
¹⁹

By the end of August, death stared London in the face. Pepys’s own physician, Dr Burnett, died after performing a post mortem on a plague victim. ‘It is feared the true number of the dead this week is near ten thousand, partly from the poor that cannot be taken
notice through the greatness of the number, and partly from the Quakers and others that will not have any bell ring for them,’ noted Pepys on 31 August.
²⁰

And even life’s little luxuries were tainted, a source of anxiety. On 3 September Pepys put on a new silk suit, and unpacked his new periwig: ‘but darst not wear it because the plague was in Westminster when I bought it. And it is a wonder what will be the fashion after the plague is done as to periwigs, for nobody will dare to buy any hair for fear of the infection that it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague.’
²¹

Far worse was to come. A shortage of coffins was one thing, but then London began running out of graves. Despite the burgeoning population during the Restoration, no serious attempt had been made to increase the number of available burial grounds. One or two pest houses had their consecrated graveyards, but otherwise burial was limited to existing churchyards and hospitals such as Bethlem and St Bartholomew’s. Conditions at Bethlem were grim, with complaints to the Court of Aldermen about noisome stenches arising from the great numbers of dead bodies buried there.

These existing facilities were totally insufficient for the crisis that loomed in August: the disposal of thousands of rotting corpses. Today, we would regard this as a public health issue, but in the London of 1665, the cost of burial was the major concern. With so many families dead and dying, few could afford to pay for funeral services, the burden of which fell on the parish. The authorities had no option but to dig mass graves.

For the faithful, there was another dimension to this horror. The Bishop of London refused to consecrate land that could not be held in perpetuity, meaning that plague pits were unconsecrated. All plague-pit burials took place without benefit of religious ceremony. The devout poor, unable to afford the extortionate fees necessary to procure an oversubscribed space in the churchyard, viewed this development with alarm. Pepys was

much troubled this day to hear at Westminster how the officers do bury the dead in the open Tuttle-fields [Tothill Fields, Westminster], pretending want of room elsewhere; whereas the New-Chapel church-yard was walled in at the public charge in the last plague time merely for want of room, and now none but such as are able to pay dear for it can be buried there.
²²

Meanwhile, Henry Foe observed that: ‘They Died in Heaps, and were buried in Heaps,’ as he witnessed the excavation of several plague pits in his native East End. Safe for so long, his own neighbourhood was now threatened. The plague had been a long time coming, but when it did, ‘there was no Parish in or about
London
where it raged with such Violence as in the two parishes of
Aldgate
and
WhiteChapel
.’
²³

Once the dead-carts start to circulate, at the beginning of August, the first plague pits receive fifty or sixty bodies each. Then larger holes were dug:

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wherein they buried all that the Cart brought in a Week, which by the middle, to the End of
August
, came to, from 200 to 400 a Week; and they could not well dig them larger, because of the Order of the Magistrates, confining them to leave no Bodies within six Foot of the Surface; and the Water coming on, at about 17 or 18 Foot.
²⁴

As the pestilence stalked across London, frantic efforts were made to bury the dead. The precise number of casualties will never be known, for thousands of deaths went unrecorded. The dead carts were filled and emptied and filled again from sunset to dawn, and no account was kept of the numbers thrown into the plague pits.

In Stepney, 1,000 people died in a week. The churchyard was full, so a pit was dug at the corner of Mile End Road, followed by another at the site of the old Roman cemetery in Spitalfields. In Southwark, vast numbers were interred in Deadman’s Place (now Park Street, behind Tate Modern). Pepys witnessed two or three burials in broad daylight on Bankside, with at least forty or fifty mourners publicly flouting the law against funeral processions.
²⁵

When space ran out in Westminster, bodies were brought to the burial ground of the pest house in Tothill Fields, where a rough cemetery had been staked out, enclosed with a stout fence. Cartloads arrived daily, each with its grim harvest of thirty, forty, fifty bodies. Meanwhile, in west London, the army dug trenches in Hyde Park, and great pits were sunk in the remote village of Knightsbridge. Further west still, the orchards at Lillie Road, Fulham, were choked with human remains.

Visiting the plague pits was forbidden. Initially, this was to prevent infection, and subsequently, because the bereaved and the dying gravitated to the pits in a spirit of despair. Nearing their end, victims hurled themselves into the mass graves, while officials had the unenviable task of dragging them out again. At the pit in Finsbury bodies were discovered still warm, buried alive. An entire cart and horses plunged into a pit when the driver lost control; he was later identified by his whip.

The bearers, who collected the corpses, were foul-mouthed, frightening onlookers with their swearing and cursing as they brought out the dead. One particularly unpleasant specimen was an individual named Buckingham, infamous for his habit of picking up the body of a young child by one leg, holding it upside down, and bawling: ‘Faggots, faggots, five for sixpence!’
²⁶
At the lip of the gaping pit, he took ghoulish pleasure in exposing the naked bodies of young women to public view. Subsequently arrested, he was publicly flogged and sentenced to one year in gaol.