202 • The Abyssresidents refused to put them up. The navy office’s temporary home in
Greenwich was unsafe because of infection in the dockworkers’ living and
working quarters. By the year’s end 231 died of plague in the port town, and
many more followed in 1666.
Pepys was anxious at the Greenwich office, but Evelyn was nearly desper-
ate. Unless the king outfitted an empty ship at anchor between Woolwich
and Deptford as a hospital vessel, he pleaded, the whole fleet could become
infected from sick sailors in port. To add to his worries, thirty houses had
been shut up near his own home. Fear went through his household when a
servant became sick “of a swelling.” Mary Evelyn, who was expecting their
seventh child, objected strongly to leaving with the children, but she finally
relented at John’s insistence. She took the children to her brother-in-law’s
home in Surrey, while John remained at their Sayes Court estate, “a living
monument of God Almighty’s protection,” he said.^10
Country people were as afraid as ever of catching the plague from Lon-
don, as new arrivals from the city came their way every week. The harvesting
season brought a new threat from migrant farm workers. At Paddington,
then a village west of London, the vicar believed that the contagion had
come in with a crowd hired for pea picking who had been housed in a
farmer’s barn. From rural Kent, word reached the peripatetic king that har-
vesting made it virtually impossible “to keep people in good order.” “That
one parish of St. Giles at London,” the informant added bitterly, “hath done
us all this mischiefe.”^11
Reverend Josselin found some comfort in his farm’s bountiful harvest as he
pondered the empty pews of his church. The approaching plague was drawing
huge crowds to itinerant preachers calling on everyone to repent before it was
too late. The beleaguered pastor’s diary jottings had become a jumble: “God in
mercy stop infection.” “The weather sad, but this day cooling.” “Died in Lon-
don: plague 4237 ; all 5568 .” Saddest and most frightening of all was the danger
at hand: “Colchester [people] seeke into the country for dwellings.”^12
It was only six weeks since Josselin had first taken note of the massive
flight from London. Now wealthy merchants, professional people, and em-
ployers of the Dutch cloth workers in Colchester, a great provincial center of
10 , 000 to 12 , 000 inhabitants, began fleeing from their town’s plague. God’s
Destroying Angel had visited the town heavily in 1579 , 1603 , 1626 , 1631 , and
most recently during the Civil War in 1644. Colchester’s current Bills of
Mortality recalled this unhappy history (see table 8 ).
During the first seven weeks of the current visitation in Colchester, the
parish searchers had viewed 787 plague corpses; 894 townspeople had died