The Clockwork Universe Read Online Free PDF Page A

well-to-do—doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and merchants—shoved their way into the scrum. Coaches and carriages knocked against one another, their horses pawing the mud, while heavy-laden wagons fought for position. The frenzied pack fighting through the narrow streets reminded one eyewitness of a terrified crowd in a burning theater. Some fled toward the Thames and tried to commandeer fishing boats, anything that could float and take them to safety. Those who managed to escape the city had to brave the residents of the countryside, who greeted the refugees with clubs and muskets.
    The king and his brother, the Duke of York, fled London in early July. Most of the Royal Society had scattered by then, too, looking forward to a time “when we have purged our foul sins and this horrible evil will cease.” Pepys sent his family away, but he himself retreated only as far as Greenwich. At the end of August he ventured on a long walk in the city. “Thus the month ends,” he wrote, “with the plague everywhere through the Kingdom almost. Every day sadder and sadder news of its increase.” In the last week of August, Pepys wrote, plague had claimed 6,102 lives in London alone.
    Worse was to come.
    September 1665 unnerved even Pepys. “Little noise heard day or night but tolling of bells,” he lamented in a letter to a friend. (It was plague that had inspired John Donne to write, “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”)
    By now, with so many dead and so many gone, frenzy had given way to desolation. Grass grew in the streets of London. In place of the usual clamor of voices—street vendors had been banned, so newsboys and rat catchers and fish sellers no longer hawked their wares—silence reigned. “I have stayed in the city till above 7,400 died in one week, and of them above 6,000 of the plague,” Pepys wrote, “and little noise heard day or night but tolling of bells; till I could walk Lombard Street and not meet twenty persons from one end to the other . . . ; till whole families, ten and twelve together, have been swept away.”
    Now there were too many dead for individual burials. At night death carts rattled along empty streets in search of bodies, the darkness penetrated only by flickering, yellow torchlights. Cries of “Bring out your dead!” echoed mournfully. But with death striking willy-nilly, there were too few men left to drive the carts, too few priests to pray over the victims, too few laborers to dig their graves. The carts made their way to mass burial pits and spilled in their cargo. Many Englishmen recalled the somber words of King Edward III, eyewitness to the horrific epidemic of an earlier day. “A just God now visits the sons of men and lashes the world.”
    And then, mysteriously and blessedly, it ended. In mid-October, Pepys reported six hundred fewer deaths than the week before. The survivors began the gloomy process of taking stock. “But Lord, how empty the streets are, and melancholy,” wrote Pepys, “so many poor sick people in the streets, full of sores, and so many sad stories overheard as I walk, everybody talking of this man dead and that man sick, and so many in this place, and so many in that.”
    By the end of November 1665, people began to flock back to London. Within another month the epidemic had all but ended. The plague had claimed one-fifth of the city’s population, a total of one hundred thousand lives.
    Plague hit London harder than anywhere else, but all England had suffered. In some cases, as in the famous calamity in the village of Eyam, the cause could be pinpointed. In September 1665 a village resident named George Vicars opened a box. Someone in London had sent a gift. Vicars found a packet of used clothing, felt it was damp, and hung it before the fire to dry. The clothing was flea-infested. In two days Vicars was delirious, in four dead. The