The Great Plague
When Margaret Ponteous, a doctor's daughter, was buried at St Paul's, Covent Garden, on 12 April 1665, the
cause of death was given briefly. Pla' was all the clerk wrote in the church register. The symptoms of bubonic
plague were all too well known Inflamed blotches, purple, black or scarlet on the body, swelling in groin or
armpit. Since1603 there had been only four years without some deaths from the dreaded and familiar scourge.
Margaret's death gave no clue to suggest the start of the worst epidemic in London' s history.
In a single room are seen all the horrors of the plague when houses were sealed and families cooped up together in fatal proximity. Plague
quarantine was forty days. Two victims together in the bed on the right are approached by a doctor. A woman, lame with plauge sores,
carries a stick. A coffin lies ready for one body tht is laid out.
The next plague death came a week later, this time in St Giles-in-the-Fields. Attempts by the parish officer to
seal the infected house were frustrated. Neighbours wiped the red cross off the door, and released the inmates
Deaths in this district of crowded tenements multiplied rapidly - over a hundred in the second week of June - and
infection, carried by fleas, spread along Holborn and down Chancery Lane to the Strand. In the City the worst
affected parish was Cripplegate which lost 6,640 people during the three months, July, August and September.
The very first case in the Great Plague appears in the burial register of St Paul´s, Covent Garden, seen here as the background to the pallbearers. They are preceded by a man carrying a warning bell and two women searchers whose white wands mark them as ‘official searchers’
for plague victims.
In the hot, rainless weather, the death roll mounted alarmingly. Plague carts rumbled through the streets carrying
naked bodies to quickly dug pits. All who could fled. Probably two-thirds of the population went into the
country, and the Court moved to Oxford. In Whitehall the sole representative of the Government was George
Monck, Duke of Albemarle, and in the City Sir William Lawrence, the Lord Mayor, stayed behind to organize
relief.
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The Great Plague
As churchyards overflowed, plague pits had to be dug in open ground in many outlying parishes. Near the church at Aldgate, perhaps
depicted here, 1114 corpses from this parish and Whitechapelwere thrown, according to Defoe, into ‘one dreadful gulf’ in a fortnight.
During the worst week in the middle of September over 12,000 died, and bodies lay about the streets or in
houses because burials could not keep pace with death. Quack remedies abounded. Doctors were brave but
helpless. The streets glowed with fires lit in the vain belief that they would purge, the infectious air. There was a
final spasm of horror during this month before things improved. The disease suddenly became more virulent :
victims died in fortyeight hours instead of four to five days. But as autumn gave way to freezing winter the
mortality figures fell. By Christmas many refugees felt it safe to come back, though the King did not return until
February.
As the plague subsided, people trickled back to London. By December (when the first week’s mortality roll was down to 210) country
coaches and carriers’ waggons were loaded with returning refugees. Here they are seen coming into the City from the north.
How many really died will never be known. Many deaths were concealed by families fearful that they would be
locked up with the victims. Thousands were shovelled into mass graves without record. In the official Bill of
Mortality 68,596 deaths are attributed to the disease. The true figure is probably nearer 110,000. If so, the Great
Plague claimed one person in three who remained in London.
A red cross on the locked door marks a London house visited by the plague. Over it is a notice on which would be inscribed: ’Lord have
mercy on us’. With a raised stick, a dog killer is about to strike. Dogs, like cats, were widely thought to carry the disease wrongly supposed
to be contagious. Black rats, real harbourers of infected fleas, were not suspected.
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