abandon their dwellings, leaving the place as a space of ground
designed by Heaven for an Akeldama, doomed to be destroyed from
the face of the earth, and that all that would be found in it would
perish with it. I shall name but a few of these things; but sure they
were so many, and so many wizards and cunning people propagating
them, that I have often wondered there was any (women especially)
left behind.
In the first place, a blazing star or comet appeared for several
months before the plague, as there did the year after another, a little
before the fire. The old women and the phlegmatic hypochondriac
part of the other sex, whom I could almost call old women too,
remarked (especially afterward, though not till both those judgements
were over) that those two comets passed directly over the city, and
that so very near the houses that it was plain they imported something
peculiar to the city alone; that the comet before the pestilence was of
a faint, dull, languid colour, and its motion very heavy, Solemn, and
slow; but that the comet before the fire was bright and sparkling, or,
as others said, flaming, and its motion swift and furious; and that,
accordingly, one foretold a heavy judgement, slow but severe, terrible
and frightful, as was the plague; but the other foretold a stroke,
sudden, swift, and fiery as the conflagration. Nay, so particular some
people were, that as they looked upon that comet preceding the fire,
they fancied that they not only saw it pass swiftly and fiercely, and
could perceive the motion with their eye, but even they heard it; that it
made a rushing, mighty noise, fierce and terrible, though at a distance,
and but just perceivable.
I saw both these stars, and, I must confess, had so much of the
common notion of such things in my head, that I was apt to look upon
them as the forerunners and warnings of God’s judgements; and
especially when, after the plague had followed the first, I yet saw
another of the like kind, I could not but say God had not yet
sufficiently scourged the city.
But I could not at the same time carry these things to the height that
others did, knowing, too, that natural causes are assigned by the
astronomers for such things, and that their motions and even their
revolutions are calculated, or pretended to be calculated, so that they
cannot be so perfectly called the forerunners or foretellers, much less
the procurers, of such events as pestilence, war, fire, and the like.
But let my thoughts and the thoughts of the philosophers be, or have
been, what they will, these things had a more than ordinary influence
upon the minds of the common people, and they had almost universal
melancholy apprehensions of some dreadful calamity and judgement
coming upon the city; and this principally from the sight of this
comet, and the little alarm that was given in December by two people
dying at St Giles’s, as above.
The apprehensions of the people were likewise strangely increased
by the error of the times; in which, I think, the people, from what
principle I cannot imagine, were more addicted to prophecies and
astrological conjurations, dreams, and old wives’ tales than ever they
were before or since. Whether this unhappy temper was originally
raised by the follies of some people who got money by it – that is to
say, by printing predictions and prognostications – I know not; but
certain it is, books frighted them terribly, such as Lilly’s Almanack,
Gadbury’s Astrological Predictions, Poor Robin’s Almanack, and the
like; also several pretended religious books, one entitled, Come out of
her, my People, lest you be Partaker of her Plagues; another called,
Fair Warning; another, Britain’s Remembrancer; and many such, all,
or most part of which, foretold, directly or covertly, the ruin of the
city. Nay, some were so enthusiastically bold as to run about the
streets with their oral predictions, pretending they were sent to preach
to the city; and one in particular, who, like Jonah to Nineveh, cried in
the streets, ‘Yet forty days, and London shall be destroyed.’ I will not