Fleeing or Staying? • 87God for the “signal victory” at sea and give generously to households suffer-
ing from the “sad disease of plague or pestilence.” “The town grows very
sickly,” Pepys wrote.^22
Pepys kept up his spirits with an energy that knew no bounds. At the
Royal Exchange he purchased stockings at a shop frequented by a class of
people thought unlikely to catch the infection. He placed orders at Sir Wil-
liam Turner’s Golden Fleece in Saint Paul’s churchyard and stopped by his
goldsmith-bankers, Vyner and Colvill, on Lombard Street to negotiate loans
for navy supplies. The pestilence had done nothing to rein in his libido; as his
hand reached into his purse to claim a dozen silver salts costing almost seven
pounds, a roving eye caught sight of Colvill’s pretty wife.
Three days before the national day of thanksgiving and mourning, Pepys’
spirits were at a peak as the king’s brother and other high naval officers re-
turned from sea to Whitehall, “all fat and lusty and ruddy at being in the
sun.” Pepys hired a coach and proceeded along the Holborn Road, which a
few short weeks before had been a safe haven from the Cliftons’ smallpox
episode. He was not so lucky; at the end of the road, he found the home of
the high royal official he was to see boarded up “because of the sickness.” The
entire family had fled out of town; Pepys’ meeting on finances was cancelled.
On his way home Pepys had one of the great frights of his life. The hack-
ney coach driver, whom he had hailed from the direction of Saint Giles in
the Fields, picked up speed and then went slower and slower until he came
to a stop, telling Pepys that he was “suddenly stroke very sick and almost
blind.” Pepys found another coach to take him home, but the terror of the
moment lingered “with a sad heart for the poor man and trouble for myself,
lest he should have been stroke with the plague—being at [the infected] end
of the town that I took him up. But God have mercy upon us all.”^23
It was time for bold measures. While Samuel attended to navy business,
Elizabeth shopped with his mother, Margaret, in preparation for sending her
off to Cambridgeshire. Then Elizabeth checked on her own mother, Doro-
thea St. Michel, who was staying put with her husband. They had no money
to tide them over in the country, and their son-in-law was not offering help.
He simply told his wife to avoid the streets and lanes most likely to be in-
fected around her parents’ neighborhood.
On the twenty-first of June, Pepys took a break from his business rounds
at the Cross Keys tavern by the Cripplegate exit from the city. He was in a
somber mood after the special service of victory and humiliation at his
church the day before, still muttering over the miserable sermon by the pas-
tor, whom he thought a shallow man. “I find all the town almost going,” he