Business Not as Usual • 175of sadness as much as I can,” Pepys wrote. The sharing of working people’s
grief by a growing number of professional families in the city put him into
“great apprehensions of melancholy.”^40
A Cripplegate bookseller, Richard Smyth, kept his own obituary of
friends, acquaintances, and customers on both sides of the city wall; several
were above the artisan and middling ranks. The clerk of the vintners com-
pany had died ex peste,he noted. A goldsmith on Tower Street had expired,
the cause listed unconvincingly as “consumption.” Yet another goldsmith was
dead, this one on Lombard Street; his place of residence and payment of a
fine to avoid becoming an alderman marked him as a very substantial citizen
and guildsman. An attorney of the Court of Common Pleas also succumbed,
the death acknowledged to be plague, Smyth added. The coroner of London
fell to the common sickness, and so did George Dalton, the official city re-
membrancer in charge of recording memorable civic acts. Smyth felt the loss
of another individual doubly, as a friend and as a debtor who still owed him
£ 150. The bell was tolling now for some of the rich and almost famous Lon-
doners who had lost their gamble in staying in the mercantile heart of the
metropolis.^41
Smyth’s circle of deceased acquaintances and friends encompassed an
enormous economic, social, and occupational range—all but the peerage. He
heard that a “strong water man” (seller of spirits) had died, the report reach-
ing him the very night of his passing. A financially secure scrivener shared
the ignominy of death by plague with a scrimp-and-save vinegar man who
sold apples “by Mr. Ladores house.” Tragedy knew no social boundaries. A
short distance away, in the better area of Cornhill, a bookseller and printer,
Peter Lake, hanged himself in his warehouse in Leadenhall, “reported to be
distracted,” Smyth wrote. The historian of the Great Plague, Walter George
Bell, speculates that many persons like Lake may have been driven mad and
possibly to suicide by the unfolding tragic events.^42
Cast into this climate of material and emotional anguish, Samuel Pepys’
string of luck eventually met reality. Access to new money, which had long
been out of Turner’s reach but pivotal to Pepys’ success, finally eluded this ul-
timate entrepreneur of the Great Plague. On the fifteenth of October, he
took a country road to Sir Robert Vyner’s lavishly appointed manor house in
Middlesex. Sir Robert confessed to being “in great straits.” Pepys believed he
was telling the truth and not just holding him off. They discussed how the
fleet and sailors could be paid. Vyner did not think it possible as things
stood. No money was coming in from trade or from people in the city who