Fleeing or Staying? • 81The timing of this society pastor’s removal from his rented Westminster
lodgings and his church and congregation suggested another reason for this
action. Patrick’s renowned physician friend, Dr. Thomas Willis, had discov-
ered the spa at Astrop the year before and was there at this very time. Per-
haps part of the draw was this medical wunderkind’s knowledge of plague,
which he had discussed in his recent book on fevers.
Or perhaps the Reverend Patrick may have been avoiding the thought of
an approaching epidemic, as were many Londoners this May. The metropol-
itan bills sustained this denial by false reporting to spare people the ignominy
of plague in their family or neighborhood. During the last week of May,
there had supposedly been 23 burials for spotted fever—an astonishing fig-
ure. Surfeit had claimed 13 lives, and “teeth” or teething 19 persons of a
tender age. Rickets was right up there, too, with 14 fatalities. The first week
of June saw the figures for these and other diseases shoot up even higher. The
terrifying figure of 43 plague deaths alongside 20 for smallpox and 16 for
spotted fever made the accuracy of the latter two attributions suspect. And
how to account for 31 deaths from convulsions, 27 of dropsy, 27 caused by
griping in the guts, and an astounding 63 attributed to consumption? Some
of these counts were 40 percent higher than those reported for the same mal-
ady during the same time in prior years (see appendix A).
The unofficial spinner of good news about the king and capital tried to
nourish this social amnesia. On June 4 , Roger L’Estrange’s Intelligencerde-
cried the rumors of “multitudes that dye of the Plague in this Towne... I
shall very briefly deliver the truth of the matter,” L’Estrange editorialized:
“There have dyed 2 , 9 , 3 , 14 and 17 in these five last weeks ( 45 in all, and none
of these within the walls and but 5 parishes infected of 130 ).” This bland re-
assurance was plainly at odds with the increasing number of advertisements
in the Intelligencerhawking all manner of plague preventives and remedies.
Any merchant inside the wall could see through L’Estrange’s claim that
only a few of the suburban poor were dying of the sickness. At the city
pesthouse, two burials had already been reported by the end of May—per-
haps servants of an unlucky merchant or professional household in the cen-
tral business district. Pepys’ physician’s servant would be among the later
casualties.
The toll in the western suburbs was more alarming and not just in
numbers. By the first week of June, plague burials had occurred in ten
parishes, ranging from the very poor to the extremely wealthy. At the high
end stood Symon Patrick’s Covent Garden, with its 7. 7 mean number of
hearths—the top figure for London’s 130 parishes. At the other end was