Plague’s Progress • 127more to come if all his negotiations were successful. He had been received by
the king several times at Hampton Court and once down at Greenwich, to
his great pride (though he was crestfallen at having to stand while his supe-
riors sat at a sumptuous dinner). He was equally pleased with his part in bro-
kering the marriage of the shy daughter of his patron and distant relative,
Lord Sandwich, to the awkward son of the Carteret family. The negotiations
took place in the nearby Sussex and Essex countryside, where these noble
families and their relations were waiting out the visitation in London.
Pepys’ initial reception in the country startled him. He had managed for
weeks in the infected city, and he found it absurd that all these escapees and
the local residents were terrified at the slightest chance of someone bringing
in the infection. Samuel had to fib, saying he was living entirely with Eliza-
beth in Woolwich and had not gone near London. The chaplain who was to
marry the young couple had fallen into a fever and died, thoughtfully, a “long
way off,” Pepys said. Fearing for her daughter’s financial security, Lady Sand-
wich moved up the wedding date in case the groom should die of the plague.
Pepys, being a distance from them, hired six horses to get to the ceremony,
only to find the wedding party emerging from the church. They had been
joined in their “old clothes... the young lady mighty sad.” At dinner, the
guests celebrated, “yet in such a sober way as never almost any wedding was
in the great families.”^29
A darker shadow fell over this month’s pleasures. Pepys took a last boat
ride to Hampton Court on July 27. He dispatched all his business and then
lingered to see the king and queen speed off in their carriage to a new
haven—far from this riverside retreat, for the plague from London was clos-
ing in. Charles had chosen splendid quarters in the cathedral city of Salis-
bury, safely removed from his infected capital but with access to his beloved
sailing ships on the Channel. Albemarle and Craven were now completely
on their own in Westminster. Although they had a small horse guard to
maintain order, the distance of the monarch made it harder to threaten
working people in the suburbs with punishment by the king if they broke
open shut-up houses or gathered at their favorite alehouse in defiance of
plague regulations. At the Guildhall, plague controls fell squarely on the
shoulders of Mayor Lawrence, assisted by the few aldermen still in town, a
handful of justices of the peace, and a few dozen soldiers at the Tower of
London.