This made the watchmen be the less regarded,and perhaps occasioned the greater violence to be used against them.I mention it on this score to observe that the setting watchmen thus to keep the people in was,first of all,not effectual,but that the people broke out,whether by force or by stratagem,even almost as often as they pleased;and,second,that those that did thus break out were generally people infected who,in their desperation,running about from one place to another,valued not whom they injured:and which perhaps,as I have said,might give birth to report that it was natural to the infected people to desire to infect others,which report was really false.
And I know it so well,and in so many several cases,that I could give several relations of good,pious,and religious people who,when they have had the distemper,have been so far from being forward to infect others that they have forbid their own family to come near them,in hopes of their being preserved,and have even died without seeing their nearest relations lest they should be instrumental to give them the distemper,and infect or endanger them.If,then,there were cases wherein the infected people were careless of the injury they did to others,this was certainly one of them,if not the chief,namely,when people who had the distemper had broken out from houses which were so shut up,and having been driven to extremities for provision or for entertainment,had endeavoured to conceal their condition,and have been thereby instrumental involuntarily to infect others who have been ignorant and unwary.
This is one of the reasons why I believed then,and do believe still,that the shutting up houses thus by force,and restraining,or rather imprisoning,people in their own houses,as I said above,was of little or no service in the whole.Nay,I am of opinion it was rather hurtful,having forced those desperate people to wander abroad with the plague upon them,who would otherwise have died quietly in their beds.
I remember one citizen who,having thus broken out of his house in Aldersgate Street or thereabout,went along the road to Islington;he attempted to have gone in at the Angel Inn,and after that the White Horse,two inns known still by the same signs,but was refused;after which he came to the Pied Bull,an inn also still continuing the same sign.He asked them for lodging for one night only,pretending to be going into Lincolnshire,and assuring them of his being very sound and free from the infection,which also at that time had not reached much that way.
They told him they had no lodging that they could spare but one bed up in the garret,and that they could spare that bed for one night,some drovers being expected the next day with cattle;so,if he would accept of that lodging,he might have it,which he did.So a servant was sent up with a candle with him to show him the room.He was very well dressed,and looked like a person not used to lie in a garret;and when he came to the room he fetched a deep sigh,and said to the servant,'Ihave seldom lain in such a lodging as this.'However,the servant assuring him again that they had no better,'Well,'says he,'I must make shift;this is a dreadful time;but it is but for one night.'So he sat down upon the bedside,and bade the maid,I think it was,fetch him up a pint of warm ale.Accordingly the servant went for the ale,but some hurry in the house,which perhaps employed her other ways,put it out of her head,and she went up no more to him.
The next morning,seeing no appearance of the gentleman,somebody in the house asked the servant that had showed him upstairs what was become of him.She started.'Alas l'says she,'I never thought more of him.He bade me carry him some warm ale,but Iforgot.'Upon which,not the maid,but some other person was sent up to see after him,who,coming into the room,found him stark dead and almost cold,stretched out across the bed.His clothes were pulled off,his jaw fallen,his eyes open in a most frightful posture,the rug of the bed being grasped hard in one of his hands,so that it was plain he died soon after the maid left him;and 'tis probable,had she gone up with the ale,she had found him dead in a few minutes after he sat down upon the bed.The alarm was great in the house,as anyone may suppose,they having been free from the distemper till that disaster,which,bringing the infection to the house,spread it immediately to other houses round about it.I do not remember how many died in the house itself,but I think the maid-servant who went up first with him fell presently ill by the fright,and several others;for,whereas there died but two in Islington of the plague the week before,there died seventeen the week after,whereof fourteen were of the plague.This was in the week from the 11th of July to the 18th.
There was one shift that some families had,and that not a few,when their houses happened to be infected,and that was this:the families who,in the first breaking-out of the distemper,fled away into the country and had retreats among their friends,generally found some or other of their neighbours or relations to commit the charge of those houses to for the safety of the goods and the like.Some houses were,indeed,entirely locked up,the doors padlocked,the windows and doors having deal boards nailed over them,and only the inspection of them committed to the ordinary watchmen and parish officers;bat these were but few.