Requiem for London• 195little comfort to persecuted dissenters and beleaguered churchwardens in the
following weeks. As vaults in the church of Saint Olave Hart Street began to
fill with plague-scarred bodies of well-to-do residents, Samuel Pepys wrote
with a mixture of pride and anxiety to Navy Commissioner Sir William
Coventry, “You, sir, take your turn at the sword [in naval engagement]. I
must not therefore grudge to take mine at the pestilence.” At Saint Paul’s ca-
thedral, John Tillison was awestruck by the wide path of death through
streets and homes and shops that had previously been passed over.^38 The
deadliness of the disease seemed greater now as the pool of healthy citizens
was reduced.
We will never know the fates of most who fled, but a sampling of London’s
General Bill of Mortality for 1665 reveals that poor persons in crowded hous-
ing outside the walls suffered the greatest losses among those who stayed on.
As summer ended, the infection swept into the eastern suburbs and south of
the Thames. It also burrowed far into the countryside, spreading northward
through the earl of Bridgewater’s Hertfordshire. It turned eastward past
Henry Foe’s saddler’s shop into Essex and narrowly missed Elizabeth Gaud-
en’s country haven outside Brentwood. The contagion appeared at the mouth
of the Thames beyond Deptford, where John and Mary Evelyn lived. The
archbishop of Canterbury issued a license to bury Greenwich’s victims in a
newly purchased site adjoining the pesthouse in Black Heath.^39
The desire for dignity in death led increasing numbers of mourners to
throw caution to the winds to give their friends a decent farewell. At Crip-
plegate, some wealthier congregants took up the tiles in the sanctuary to
bury the dead. In Greenwich, Pepys witnessed “the madness of the town” fol-
lowing a corpse all the way to the grave, in flagrant defiance of the law. The
innate desire for ceremony and finality was not to be set aside. Pepys and his
navy colleagues tried to stop the practice, using their authority as ex officio
magistrates of the dockyard town.^40
Grim humor reflected both the troubled time and the spirit of endurance
it evoked. A legend arose about a piper who collapsed on a London street in
a drunken stupor. The bearers placed him on a dead-cart and piled on other
bodies. As dawn approached the man regained consciousness and started to
play his bagpipes. The eerie sounds terrified the bearers, who thought they
were in the presence of the devil and fled, leaving the piper confused but very
much alive. Many versions of this story exist; it was a natural tale for A Jour-
nal of a Plague Year.An elfin statue of this legendary piper, sculpted by Caius
Gabriel Cibber, a Restoration artist, stands today in the Victoria and Albert
museum.^41