124 • Confusioncorded the burial of Mary Ramsey, daughter of a poor man living in one of
the draper guild’s almshouses, the first plague death recorded in the parish.
In fact, a sister of this girl had been laid to rest the day before—without the
telltale Pafter her name in the same register. The next day a poor parish boy
boarding with the Ramseys died from the sickness and joined these two girls
in the lower churchyard of the parish.^21 The burial grounds seemed ample for
additional bodies.
The scene at the far reaches of Westminster was sobering. On the eight-
eenth Pepys approached Hyde Park, where Albemarle’s soldiers were
camped in tents in case a riot should break out among citizens protesting the
shutting up of houses or dissenters should plot an uprising. Pepys was star-
tled to learn that these troops had been pressed into plague work and were
burying the dead of Westminster in the open Tothill Fields, “pretending
want of room elsewhere.” He thought the act dehumanizing. During the last
visitation the New Chapel churchyard had been walled in for public burials;
now only those who paid a burial fee could be interred there. On his way
home he passed through King Street, shocked at how the plague had spread
throughout this main thoroughfare, shutting up its taverns and inns, includ-
ing the Axe on the cul-de-sac where Elizabeth and Samuel had lived before
they moved to Seething Lane.
The next day Pepys paused at the Spring Garden down by the river, ex-
pecting to mingle with the crowd. But instead of the usual throng of towns-
people and visitors dressed provocatively and sipping wine and flirting, Sam-
uel saw not one guest, “the town being so empty of anyone to come thither.”
A solitary woman out of her mind scolded the proprietor for letting her
newly dead kinswoman be thrown in a plague pit instead of using his in-
fluence to arrange her burial in the churchyard.^22
Pepys doggedly kept to his rounds at the Exchequer and the Royal and
New Exchange, stopping in at the Customs House tavern. There was no ac-
tivity here. He borrowed an alarm clock at his watchmaker’s while his was
being repaired and donned his black silk suit for an appointment with his
distant cousin, an upholsterer on Cornhill. But these were petty tradesmen—
small fry. What about the high-society people whose consumer tastes fueled
much of London’s economy and who were frequently shopping and making
merry on the Strand? Pepys had been at the Cockpit for instructions from
Captain General Albemarle (who was not only in charge of the local troops
but also a key player in naval supplies as admiral general of the fleet). Pepys
had become cautious about how he traveled, going by boat as often as possi-