Fleeing or Staying? • 91If one had to stop over on the way, it was best to travel as far as possible
the first day on the road. Even wearing one’s best clothes did not guarantee
hospitality, though villagers kept their sights on ill-clothed beggars and
drifters thought to be most susceptible to carrying the contagion. “How fear-
ful people were thirty or forty if not a hundred miles from London,” a Puri-
tan preacher ruminated.^35
Up in Leicestershire, Lucy Hastings worried about the whereabouts of her
relatives and friends, expecting their approach any time. They, in turn, were
concerned about rushing to Donnington Park with the infection still on their
belongings. These reactions were sharply at odds with the self-absorbed
fleers and unwelcoming country hosts described in plague tract literature.
Anne Stavely, for example, had set out for Donnington Park during the
mass flight of late June. She was eager to rejoin her oldest daughter and re-
lieve Lady Lucy of caring for her. After the first days on the northern road,
Anne felt relief that no tokens or buboes had appeared on her or her chil-
dren. Still, she was determined not to risk frightening the young earl and his
sisters by arriving with her other children within the quarantine period as-
signed to infected households. So she sought out a safe haven in the Mid-
land countryside and stayed there for forty days.
But after the forty days, Anne was too weak to travel the last leg of the
journey northward. She took up her pen to say with profuse apologies that
she was “unable to rise to so long a journey.” Recalling Lucy’s many favors
“both formerly and latterly,” she expressed her hopes of soon being able to
relieve her of caring for her daughter.^36
The countess’s son-in-law had a different dilemma. Sir James Langham
and his children had stopped halfway to Donnington Park, in Northamp-
tonshire. Unfortunately, the damnable plague followed them and surrounded
the town. “We here enjoy (thanks be to God) a good health,” he informed his
mother-in-law. “But do with some trouble think we are like to be confined to
this place.” What could he do? Lucy Hastings would want to see him and
the grandchildren, but they would all have to wait out the contagion. “The
sickness dayly [increases] in and about London,” Sir James lamented, “and
there is scarcely any county [in] wh’ch the venome of that disease is not scat-
tered.”^37
The young London playwright John Dryden, who had climbed the social
ladder through theater contacts with nobility, was in the right place at the
right time. Through a fellow playwright, the sixth son of the earl of Berk-
shire, Dryden had met the earl’s daughter, Elizabeth, and married her at the
end of 1663. After royal orders closed Westminster’s theaters because of the