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As summer approached many who could afford to would
flee the capital. The court went first to Salisbury and then
to Oxford. But some stayed throughout the pestilence –
Pepys packed his wife off to Woolwich but he himself
stayed at his house in Seething Lane and carried on his
daily business throughout the capital. Another who stayed
was William Boghurst an apothecary who traded from the
sign of The White Hart at ground zero of the Great Plague
in the parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields. Like Pepys
Boghurst kept a record of events throughout 1665 telling
us a great deal about life and death that year. Enthusiastic
and optimistic Boghurst advertised that he was willing to
attend any man, woman or child who fell sick. Today we
know that absolutely nothing Boghurst prescribed could
cure or prevent the plague, not even his top-drawer
antidote that retailed for eight pence an ounce, nor the
mastiff puppy he placed
on the breast of a fat woman
while she drank his concoction of dill, pennyroyal, fennel
and aniseed. Boghurst advised drinking a pint of sherry
a day to ward off the melancholy that might make a man
succumb to the plague. For those who couldn’t afford
sherry he suggested an ounce of ginger and the same of
sugar with half an ounce of camphor but he advised
against smoking tobacco, drinking brandy or relying on
charms. From the studies he made of his sick patients this
man of his times nevertheless concluded that:
The essence of the pestilence is lodged in some peculiar
venom that is contrary and destructive to the vitall
principles of man – a body or concretion of many little
bodies, though very subtle and insensible.
No doubt Boghurst had read Robert Hooke’s work -
Micrographia,
or, Some physiological descriptions of
minute bodies made by magnifying glasses
,
which was
the first major publication of the Royal Society published
in January of 1665. Pepys had certainly read it recording
in his diary that it was
t
he most ingenious book that
I ever read in my life.
But
it would be another 229 years
before the discovery of Yersinia pestis, which causes
bubonic plague and 263 years before Alexander Fleming
discovered the antibiotic property of Penicillin. William
Boghurst survived the plague by twenty years and was
buried in his birthplace of Ditton near Maidstone.
Gervaise Jacques was the trusted servant of Lucy Hastings,
the Countess of Huntingdon at Donnington Manor in
Leicestershire. He'd been sent to London to buy clothes,
to settle her accounts with London merchants and call in
on her relatives including grandchildren who lived in the
capital with her recently widowed son-in-law. Jacques had
written to his mistress at the end of April 1665 with the
tragic news that her nephew had been killed in a duel over
a drinking and gaming bill in Covent Garden and had been
buried at St Martins-in-the-Fields. Also her niece Jane
Clifton had been struck down with smallpox on the eve
of her wedding. It had been smallpox that had claimed
the Countesses eldest son and her husband the Earl of
Huntingdon. Lucy had married the Earl when she was just
ten years old though her first son was born when she was
seventeen. This must have been quite a letter to receive
for it went on to explain that the brides parents had
removed to Holborn because:
this (smallpox) and the fever (plague) are muche in towne.
A fortnight later, five days before Whitsuntide, Gervaise
Jacques wrote again to the Countess. The letter was mostly
city gossip but it too contained alarming news for Gervaise
had to explain that the London merchants were pressing
for full settlement of accounts outstanding before they'd
allow any new credit because:
Here is still greate feares of the plague, and I wish it
bee but only our feares. I am credibly informed that two
houses are shut up in Axe Yard nere St Clements church
in the Strand.
He was implying that the merchants were trying to collect
together as much cash as possible ready to flee to boarding
houses, inns and other lodgings in the countryside. By the
end of May a veritable exodus had begun. There was a
surge in the number of wagons and carts heavily laden
with personal belongings streaming through the City gates,
across the bridge and out along the Tyburn Road. For
although the number of plague deaths recorded in the
Bills of Mortality were low no one in London was fooled.
During the last week of May there was a sudden rise in
unlikely causes of death including 23 for something called
spotted fever, 14 for rickets and 19 for teeth. In the newly
built society church of St Paul's Covent Garden a second
plague fatality was laid to rest and although her death was
not recorded as such in the Bills Of Mortality, the Rector
of Covent Garden quietly packed up his belongings and
rode out of town.
From 20 November 2015 to 28 March 2016 join us for
Pepys: Plague & Fire
a full day tour that tells the story
of these two calamitous events visiting the evocative
parish of St Giles in the Fields and following the course
of the plague and subsequent fire in the City of London.
In the afternoon we visit the blockbuster Pepys exhibition
at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
More information on this tour
