money contributed in charity by well-disposed people of every kind,
as well abroad as at home, been prodigiously great, it had not been in
the power of the Lord Mayor and sheriffs to have kept the public
peace. Nor were they without apprehensions, as it was, that
desperation should push the people upon tumults, and cause them to
rifle the houses of rich men and plunder the markets of provisions; in
which case the country people, who brought provisions very freely
and boldly to town, would have been terrified from coming any more,
and the town would have sunk under an unavoidable famine.
But the prudence of my Lord Mayor and the Court of Aldermen
within the city, and of the justices of peace in the out-parts, was such,
and they were supported with money from all parts so well, that the
poor people were kept quiet, and their wants everywhere relieved, as
far as was possible to be done.
Two things besides this contributed to prevent the mob doing any
mischief. One was, that really the rich themselves had not laid up
stores of provisions in their houses as indeed they ought to have done,
and which if they had been wise enough to have done, and locked
themselves entirely up, as some few did, they had perhaps escaped the
disease better. But as it appeared they had not, so the mob had no
notion of finding stores of provisions there if they had broken in. as it
is plain they were sometimes very near doing, and which: if they bad,
they had finished the ruin of the whole city, for there were no regular
troops to have withstood them, nor could the trained bands have been
brought together to defend the city, no men being to be found to bear arms.
But the vigilance of the Lord Mayor and such magistrates as could
be had (for some, even of the aldermen, were dead, and some absent)
prevented this; and they did it by the most kind and gentle methods
they could think of, as particularly by relieving the most desperate
with money, and putting others into business, and particularly that
employment of watching houses that were infected and shut up. And
as the number of these were very great (for it was said there was at
one time ten thousand houses shut up, and every house had two
watchmen to guard it, viz., one by night and the other by day), this
gave opportunity to employ a very great number of poor men at a
time.
The women and servants that were turned off from their places were
likewise employed as nurses to tend the sick in all places, and this
took off a very great number of them.
And, which though a melancholy article in itself, yet was a
deliverance in its kind: namely, the plague, which raged in a dreadful
manner from the middle of August to the middle of October, carried
off in that time thirty or forty thousand of these very people which,
had they been left, would certainly have been an insufferable burden
by their poverty; that is to say, the whole city could not have
supported the expense of them, or have provided food for them; and
they would in time have been even driven to the necessity of
plundering either the city itself or the country adjacent, to have
subsisted themselves, which would first or last have put the whole
nation, as well as the city, into the utmost terror and confusion.
It was observable, then, that this calamity of the people made them
very humble; for now for about nine weeks together there died near a
thousand a day, one day with another, even by the account of the
weekly bills, which yet, I have reason to be assured, never gave a full
account, by many thousands; the confusion being such, and the carts
working in the dark when they carried the dead, that in some places
no account at all was kept, but they worked on, the clerks and sextons
not attending for weeks together, and not knowing what number they
carried. This account is verified by the following bills of mortality: –