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At The Crossroads Between Time & Eternity
350 Years Ago The Great Plague Comes To London
Samuel Pepys kept his diary for ten years from the
first of January 1660. Loosely bound in six volumes
he catalogued it with his library of books suggesting
that he did want it to be read at some point but not by
his wife for it detailed his many and varied infidelities.
Mostly he wrote in a 17th century shorthand but
sometimes in French and even used a bit of mirror
writing for extra privacy when describing his
encounters with women.
On 23 February 1665 Pepys turned 32. He’d been
born just off Fleet Street, one of eleven children,
only four of whom survived to adulthood. His father
was a tailor of modest means who made clothes for
lawyers from the Temple. With a grant from the
Mercer’s Company he graduated from Cambridge
aged 21 and a year later he married 14 year old
Elisabeth de St Michel from a Huguenot family.
While still in his twenties Pepys began a long career
in public service by working for George Downing,
then a Teller of the Exchequer and later a property
developer after whom the famous street is named.
By 1665 Pepys had a finger in many pies but was
mostly employed by the Navy Office and living in
some comfort in Seething Lane near the Tower of
London. Always a hard worker, always chasing a
pound note, during 1665 Pepys quadrupled his
fortune. His biographer Claire Tomlin tells us that
The most notable fact about Pepys's plague year is
that to him it was one of the happiest of his life.
Were you to be whipped back in time to March 1665
to meet Samuel Pepys the first thing you’d do is clap
your hand over your mouth and nose. For, like most
people back then, the man would have reeked to high
heaven! It was his habit each October time to have his
housemaid smear his naked body in goose lard and
then sew him into his long woollen underwear in
which he would stay until the following spring.
Of course London itself stank. The Romans had
indoor plumbing installed in their London houses
but after they left it all went, quite literally, out of
the window until the Victorians built their sewerage
system. In Pepys day open drains flowed along
narrow winding streets and the cobbles were slippery
with animal dung and other filth. People went about
their business with nosegays pressed to their faces.
The walled City of London was surrounded by a ring
of suburbs known as the Liberties which came under
the jurisdiction of the City. The Liberties were little
more than shanty towns crowded with the craftsmen
and trades people drawn to seek their fortune in
London. To the east the Tower of London was an
independent liberty and to the west from Aldwych
a string of grand houses lined the Strand or beach of
the River Thames allowing their wealthy occupants
