Contagion in the Countryside • 209surely pace, bringing along the king’s two nieces. The plague was not quite as
far away as Charles would have wished, however. Before he left Portsmouth
he ordered the town to build a pesthouse.^25
At Salisbury, Charles and Catherine hunted stags, visited Stonehenge, and
inspected a nearby noble estate in case they needed a new haven. Charles re-
sumed the hallowed royal tradition of touching scrofulous subjects, perhaps
to show he did not fear the plague. An attendant carefully inspected those
who approached the sacred monarch for his magical cure before they knelt;
the king healed scrofula, not the plague!
An ill wind blowing into the temporary royal capital soon claimed its first
plague victim, the wife of a groom in the queen’s stables. Charles’s entourage
swiftly banished to the open countryside everyone not on a list of courtiers
and town residents.^26 Angry citizens murmured at paying doubly for this
royal visit: first with a special tax to welcome their monarch and second with
the infection that a “horde of harpies” had brought in their baggage. The
royal court countered that the infection came from a poor, pestered suburb of
Salisbury and ordered several of its cottages shut up.
Charles stood above the fray, providing a royal coach for the Spanish am-
bassador after discreetly closing his infected carriage quarters. When a royal
farrier developed a swelling in his armpit that looked too serious to be ex-
plained by a kick from a horse (the initial story), the inn where he stayed was
shut up. The king happened to pass by the inn and asked from a safe distance
if they were all well. They politely replied that they were, and the obliging
monarch assured them they would want for nothing and he would take care
of the losses they sustained from their unfortunate confinement.^27
After roaming the safest areas around Salisbury while an advance party
prepared his next home, Charles galloped into Oxford, with its superb living
quarters in the colleges, on September 27. His brother the duke of York
joined him after a successful tour of the north, and the court was fuller than
it had been since the infection entered Saint Giles in the Fields and Covent
Garden.
In Oxford, the king summoned Parliament for its first session in six
months, and peers and commoners swelled the throng. Tales of court hedo-
nism and ribald verses on the pregnant condition of the king’s favorite mis-
tress reached London at an awkward time for the court: the capital was reel-
ing from the worst weeks of the infection, and the war at sea was not going
well. “The fleet came home with shame to require a great deal of money,
which is not to be had,” Pepys groaned. Either the sailors would come ashore
and catch the plague, or they would remain on their ships at a greater charge