During the winter of one thousand six hundred and sixty-four it had been whispered about,that some few people had died here and there of the disease called the Plague,in some of the unwholesome suburbs around London.News was not published at that time as it is now,and some people believed these rumours,and some disbelieved them,and they were soon forgotten.But,in the month of May,one thousand six hundred and sixty-five,it began to be said all over the town that the disease had burst out with great violence in St.Giles's,and that the people were dying in great numbers.This soon turned out to be awfully true.The roads out of London were choked up by people endeavouring to escape from the infected city,and large sums were paid for any kind of conveyance.
The disease soon spread so fast,that it was necessary to shut up the houses in which sick people were,and to cut them off from communication with the living.Every one of these houses was marked on the outside of the door with a red cross,and the words,Lord,have mercy upon us!The streets were all deserted,grass grew in the public ways,and there was a dreadful silence in the air.When night came on,dismal rumblings used to be heard,and these were the wheels of the death-carts,attended by men with veiled faces and holding cloths to their mouths,who rang doleful bells and cried in a loud and solemn voice,'Bring out your dead!'
The corpses put into these carts were buried by torchlight in great pits;no service being performed over them;all men being afraid to stay for a moment on the brink of the ghastly graves.In the general fear,children ran away from their parents,and parents from their children.Some who were taken ill,died alone,and without any help.Some were stabbed or strangled by hired nurses who robbed them of all their money,and stole the very beds on which they lay.Some went mad,dropped from the windows,ran through the streets,and in their pain and frenzy flung themselves into the river.
These were not all the horrors of the time.The wicked and dissolute,in wild desperation,sat in the taverns singing roaring songs,and were stricken as they drank,and went out and died.The fearful and superstitious persuaded themselves that they saw supernatural sights-burning swords in the sky,gigantic arms and darts.Others pretended that at nights vast crowds of ghosts walked round and round the dismal pits.One madman,naked,and carrying a brazier full of burning coals upon his head,stalked through the streets,crying out that he was a Prophet,commissioned to denounce the vengeance of the Lord on wicked London.Another always went to and fro,exclaiming,'Yet forty days,and London shall be destroyed!'A third awoke the echoes in the dismal streets,by night and by day,and made the blood of the sick run cold,by calling out incessantly,in a deep hoarse voice,'O,the great and dreadful God!'
Through the months of July and August and September,the Great Plague raged more and more.Great fires were lighted in the streets,in the hope of stopping the infection;but there was a plague of rain too,and it beat the fires out.At last,the winds which usually arise at that time of the year which is called the equinox,when day and night are of equal length all over the world,began to blow,and to purify the wretched town.The deaths began to decrease,the red crosses slowly to disappear,the fugitives to return,the shops to open,pale frightened faces to be seen in the streets.The Plague had been in every part of England,but in close and unwholesome London it had killed one hundred thousand people.
All this time,the Merry Monarch was as merry as ever,and as worthless as ever.All this time,the debauched lords and gentlemen and the shameless ladies danced and gamed and drank,and loved and hated one another,according to their merry ways.
So little humanity did the government learn from the late affliction,that one of the first things the Parliament did when it met at Oxford (being as yet afraid to come to London),was to make a law,called the Five Mile Act,expressly directed against those poor ministers who,in the time of the Plague,had manfully come back to comfort the unhappy people.This infamous law,by forbidding them to teach in any school,or to come within five miles of any city,town,or village,doomed them to starvation and death.
The fleet had been at sea,and healthy.The King of France was now in alliance with the Dutch,though his navy was chiefly employed in looking on while the English and Dutch fought.The Dutch gained one victory;and the English gained another and a greater;and Prince Rupert,one of the English admirals,was out in the Channel one windy night,looking for the French Admiral,with the intention of giving him something more to do than he had had yet,when the gale increased to a storm,and blew him into Saint Helen's.That night was the third of September,one thousand six hundred and sixty-six,and that wind fanned the Great Fire of London.
It broke out at a baker's shop near London Bridge,on the spot on which the Monument now stands as a remembrance of those raging flames.It spread and spread,and burned and burned,for three days.The nights were lighter than the days;in the daytime there was an immense cloud of smoke,and in the night-time there was a great tower of fire mounting up into the sky,which lighted the whole country landscape for ten miles round.Showers of hot ashes rose into the air and fell on distant places;flying sparks carried the conflagration to great distances,and kindled it in twenty new spots at a time;church steeples fell down with tremendous crashes;