80 • Confusioninside the wall. The infected house in Saint Mary Woolchurch parish was
not far from his relative’s cul-de-sac abode off Thames Street. Gervase surely
wanted to get back to the safety of the countryside, but he knew his duty as
a servant; he still had to check on the countess’s “great affair,” settle the last
of her accounts, and pick up the Hastings’ last orders. The Loughboroughs
and Cliftons and Langhams, we know from their later correspondence, were
all heading for the Midlands at this very time. So were the countess’s friend
Ann Stavely and her children; there was no point in keeping these young
ones in the path of the pestilence, as the great mass of poor London mothers
surely were obliged to do with their children, hoping that their offspring
would be among the survivors when the plague had run its course.
On May 26 John Allin broke the news of the early departures from West-
minster to his friends down in Sussex. The weekly bill from London had
listed three plague deaths a week before, he said, and fourteen this week, “but
its rather believed to be treble the number,” he confided. “At ye upper end of
the towne [Westminster], persons high and low are very fearful of it, &
many removed.” The flow of traffic in and out of London had suddenly
changed. Only four weeks before Jacques had remarked on the crowds of
people flocking in from the country. Now there was a surge of outward-
bound coaches, accompanied by wagons piled high with clothes and other
personal belongings. Fifty miles away in the far reaches of Essex (a long half-
day for the fastest male rider and an arduous two days by coach), Rev. Ralph
Josselin looked at the bill for the first week of June, listing forty-three plague
deaths, and exclaimed: “The plague certainly in London. Lord helpe us... to
turn away thy wrath.” He was relieved that an ailing parishioner was back
home after having a stone cut from his bladder by a London surgeon. Rever-
end Josselin’s eldest son had been planning to go down to the capital on busi-
ness; that trip had to be postponed.^7
Among the escapees from the western suburbs was the rector of Covent
Garden parish, Rev. Symon Patrick. On May 13 , his clerk had recorded a sec-
ond plague burial in the parish register. Again Mr. Ramsbury and Reverend
Patrick hid the true cause of death from the metropolitan bill. Shortly after
the body of Mistress Bowler had been lowered into a freshly dug churchyard
gravesite, the minister started northward toward Northamptonshire. He
wanted to see his parents because of their age and his father’s faltering
health, and a Midland spa at Astrop near their house would be good for his
own health. After moving from rural Surrey, Patrick had survived his first
years in the bad London air better than he had expected, but he felt in need
of rejuvenation.^8