Business Not as Usual • 171you have occasion to draw on me, it will be best if you do it at 8 or 15 days [af-
ter] sight,” Sir William advised.^30
So it went into the worst of the plague season. Turner’s letters to France
featured constant complaints of money not coming in to the Golden Fleece.
A few delinquent customers in the countryside would promise to pay their
bills through the post; then nothing happened. At the end of September,
Turner informed his partners: “Mr. Wade and all other [of ] our debtors are
out of towne. I can receive nothing.” He sounded uncharacteristically apolo-
getic: “I would bee glad to pay you some money, but I cann have none to pay
you.”^31
Thanks to his extraordinary credit, Sir William Turner was riding out the
storm, even if he was not making any money. Left unstated in his business
dealings was the other great underpinning of his survival: the working-class
people who provided the goods and services that allowed him to stay on in
the city and conduct his financial operations from the Golden Fleece. There
was an implicit contract, which the merchant-alderman Turner acknowl-
edged by his public-minded deeds while keeping his motivations to himself.
A strong sense of civic duty surely lay behind Turner’s continuous service
on the emergency medical committee and other Guildhall assignments
while most of his fellow aldermen were either in the country or closeted in
their city residences. The “Praise to God” line at the top of his ledgers and
his generous donations to Saint Giles in the Fields at the first sign of plague
bespoke a religiously based conscience.^32 Self-survival was also at play, for if
he had abandoned the Golden Fleece and the persons assigned to guard his
goods had succumbed to the plague, thieves could have carried off his costly
stock of unsold goods.
Pepys, too, was connected with the struggle for survival of those beneath
him, though this could hardly be detected in his emotional detachment from
their personal tragedies. Long after his colleagues had fled to the Navy
Board’s temporary quarters in Greenwich, he lingered in the city, negotiating
naval contracts that employed London workers. After he left, his repeated
return visits to Seething Lane and the Cockpit involved the services of wa-
termen and tavern keepers and still more contractual arrangements that
breathed a little life into the capital’s moribund economy.
At the other end of the relationship between the wealthy and the poor, a
few laboring persons were doing better than surviving. The cathedral’s faith-
ful assistant, John Tillison, had an unusual tale of role reversals in the met-
ropolitan marketplace for Dean Sancroft. Tillison had gone upstream for