A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game Read Online Free PDF Page A

families camped in tent cities on the outskirts, but the plague found them there. For those who stayed, city life ground to a halt: ‘no rattling coaches, no prancing horses, no calling in customers, no offering wares; no London cries sounding in their ears’. 6 People remained indoors, venturing out as little as possible. If they did, they might meet plague-infected people wandering the streets, or hear appeals from those shut up, calling through their windows for help. No one wanted the work of tending the sick and dying and removing their corpses, even at the rate of a shilling a day. Plague nurses came from the roughest class and many of them robbed those in their care and then abandoned them to their fate. Even worse were the ‘searchers’, old women – often understandably drunk – dressed in black and carrying white sticks. Their task was to go through the houses examining each corpse and reporting the cause of death. The pay was fourpence per body. Dogs and cats, who were thought to be carriers, were killed in their thousands, and the stench of dead animals and people filled the streets.

    A Plague broadside, showing the plague nurses and the ‘searchers’ with their staffs, the carts carrying the dead, people fleeing from the city and families carrying coffins and bodies on trestles, while other victims lie unburied in the street
    The infection was highest among the poor in their crowded tenements and to begin with the upper classes were sure that they would not suffer; ‘the air has not been corrupted as yet’. But this changed. In early August, deaths rose to nearly three thousand a week, ten times the average, and by the end of the month the deaths reached four thousand, then five. Orders were read to the army and navy that anyone who fell sick must declare it at once: the ships stayed out at sea to avoid infection, and by this simple means most of the navy completely escaped. But on land, even on a country walk you could stumble across a dead body in the middle of a lane.
    Most doctors fled London but the quacks that remained made a fortune, selling remedies such as Venice Treacle, Celestial Waters, Dragon Waters. The priests fled too, and some brave ejected ministers used their absence to return to their old parishes, earning the lasting gratitude of the stricken citizens. Wild preachers cried aloud in the streets that God’s vengeance had come. As the plague worsened, government departments scattered to outlying districts, the Exchequer to the crumbling Nonsuch Palace in Surrey, the Navy Board to Greenwich. Charles arranged for Albemarle, who seemed undaunted by the threat, to stay in his Whitehall lodgings to supervise order in the capital. He was helped by William, Earl of Craven, Lord Lieutenant of Middlesex, who was himself the son of a London alderman. With furious energy, Craven organised the shutting up of houses and the mass burial of victims, handing out money from his own purse to feed the poor.

    London’s Loud Cryes to the Lord by Prayer . This broadside, published on 8 August 1665, contains texts appealing for mercy, repenting of sins, and begging God to hear the prayers of the people. Below are listed the numbers dying each week from plagues since 1591. In the woodcut, a skeletal Death with scythe and hour-glass salutes the fleeing people.
    A guard at Hampton Court died, and Charles moved his court again, this time to Salisbury. The departure was a vast bustle (the queen’s Portuguese attendants and priests alone took up eight coaches), and a vast expense, as coachmen and carters, exploiting the desperation of the people and fearing infection themselves, charged ever higher rates. But as the court moved, the disease moved faster. In Salisbury a royal groom fell ill and a man dropped dead in the street within a stone’s throw of the king’s house. Trying to overcome their fear the ladies of the court played bowls and developed a craze for telling each other their dreams.
    Few things