I could fill this account with the strange relations such people gave every day of what they had seen;and every one was so positive of their having seen what they pretended to see,that there was no contradicting them without breach of friendship,or being accounted rude and unmannerly on the one hand,and profane and impenetrable on the other.One time before the plague was begun (otherwise than as I have said in St Giles's),I think it was in March,seeing a crowd of people in the street,I joined with them to satisfy my curiosity,and found them all staring up into the air to see what a woman told them appeared plain to her,which was an angel clothed in white,with a fiery sword in his hand,waving it or brandishing it over his head.She described every part of the figure to the life,showed them the motion and the form,and the poor people came into it so eagerly,and with so much readiness;'Yes,I see it all plainly,'says one;'there's the sword as plain as can be.'Another saw the angel.One saw his very face,and cried out what a glorious creature he was!One saw one thing,and one another.I looked as earnestly as the rest,but perhaps not with so much willingness to be imposed upon;and I said,indeed,that I could see nothing but a white cloud,bright on one side by the shining of the sun upon the other part.The woman endeavoured to show it me,but could not make me confess that I saw it,which,indeed,if I had I must have lied.But the woman,turning upon me,looked in my face,and fancied I laughed,in which her imagination deceived her too,for Ireally did not laugh,but was very seriously reflecting how the poor people were terrified by the force of their own imagination.However,she turned from me,called me profane fellow,and a scoffer;told me that it was a time of God's anger,and dreadful judgements were approaching,and that despisers such as I should wander and perish.
The people about her seemed disgusted as well as she;and I found there was no persuading them that I did not laugh at them,and that I should be rather mobbed by them than be able to undeceive them.
So I left them;and this appearance passed for as real as the blazing star itself.
Another encounter I had in the open day also;and this was in going through a narrow passage from Petty France into Bishopsgate Churchyard,by a row of alms-houses.There are two churchyards to Bishopsgate church or parish;one we go over to pass from the place called Petty France into Bishopsgate Street,coming out just by the church door;the other is on the side of the narrow passage where the alms-houses are on the left;and a dwarf-wall with a palisado on it on the right hand,and the city wall on the other side more to the right.
In this narrow passage stands a man looking through between the palisadoes into the burying-place,and as many people as the narrowness of the passage would admit to stop,without hindering the passage of others,and he was talking mightily eagerly to them,and pointing now to one place,then to another,and affirming that he saw a ghost walking upon such a gravestone there.He described the shape,the posture,and the movement of it so exactly that it was the greatest matter of amazement to him in the world that everybody did not see it as well as he.On a sudden he would cry,'There it is;now it comes this way.'Then,'Tis turned back';till at length he persuaded the people into so firm a belief of it,that one fancied he saw it,and another fancied he saw it;and thus he came every day making a strange hubbub,considering it was in so narrow a passage,till Bishopsgate clock struck eleven,and then the ghost would seem to start,and,as if he were called away,disappeared on a sudden.
I looked earnestly every way,and at the very moment that this man directed,but could not see the least appearance of anything;but so positive was this poor man,that he gave the people the vapours in abundance,and sent them away trembling and frighted,till at length few people that knew of it cared to go through that passage,and hardly anybody by night on any account whatever.
This ghost,as the poor man affirmed,made signs to the houses,and to the ground,and to the people,plainly intimating,or else they so understanding it,that abundance of the people should come to be buried in that churchyard,as indeed happened;but that he saw such aspects I must acknowledge I never believed,nor could I see anything of it myself,though I looked most earnestly to see it,if possible.
These things serve to show how far the people were really overcome with delusions;and as they had a notion of the approach of a visitation,all their predictions ran upon a most dreadful plague,which should lay the whole city,and even the kingdom,waste,and should destroy almost all the nation,both man and beast.
To this,as I said before,the astrologers added stories of the conjunctions of planets in a malignant manner and with a mischievous influence,one of which conjunctions was to happen,and did happen,in October,and the other in November;and they filled the people's heads with predictions on these signs of the heavens,intimating that those conjunctions foretold drought,famine,and pestilence.In the two first of them,however,they were entirely mistaken,for we had no droughty season,but in the beginning of the year a hard frost,which lasted from December almost to March,and after that moderate weather,rather warm than hot,with refreshing winds,and,in short,very seasonable weather,and also several very great rains.
Some endeavours were used to suppress the printing of such books as terrified the people,and to frighten the dispersers of them,some of whom were taken up;but nothing was done in it,as I am informed,the Government being unwilling to exasperate the people,who were,as I may say,all out of their wits already.