210 • The Abyssto the Treasury. “As things look at present, the whole state must come to Ru-
ine,” he wrote in his secret diary.^28
John Evelyn complained to a noble friend that no one at court cared about
the state’s needs.^29 Evelyn and his fellow commissioners were falling deeper
and deeper into debt trying to cover housing and medical expenses. Nothing
short of two thousand pounds a week would save them from utter collapse.
Salary charges for physicians, surgeons, and officers, as well as quarters and
medicaments, were eating up all reserves. The plague ships and makeshift
hospitals and prisons were hopelessly overcrowded.
In desperation, Evelyn traveled to Westminster to plead his case to Albe-
marle at the Cockpit. Albemarle suggested stopgap solutions and wrote to
the king for approval. But even this intrepid statesman had no solution to the
overcrowding, and his mind was on public order. Some of Evelyn’s prisoners
had escaped to the countryside, he admonished him. Evelyn and his subordi-
nates must tighten security at the hospital-prisons and be satisfied with the
facilities they had.^30
Pepys was managing to hold off his victualers with promises of money. But
Evelyn and Doyly faced hundreds of new charges coming off the English
and Dutch ships every week, most of them maimed or sick. Albemarle got
£ 5 , 000 to Evelyn from the sale of booty from captured Dutch treasure ships
and another £ 2 , 000 from a goldsmith in London. The commissioners placed
their needs at £ 60 , 000!^31 No personal remuneration, Evelyn said, could in-
duce him to continue. His servants and officers, and Doyly’s also, had fallen
to the plague. “We have nothing more left us to expose but our persons,” he
informed a royal councilor. “We are every moment at the mercy of a raging
pestilence by our daily conversations and an unreasonable multitude [of
maimed and sick sailors] who dye like doggs in the streets unreguarded.”
Only faith and duty kept Evelyn at his post.^32
Parliament’s three-year supply of £ 2 , 500 , 000 for the Dutch war was all
but gone after twelve months. Without blinking, the Lords and Commons
voted a Royal Aid of £ 1 , 250 , 000. But how could this tax be collected? Pepys
was skeptical. The king owed the city of London money, houses were vacant,
and trade was in the doldrums. A desperate privy council ordered tax collec-
tors to break open empty houses in London and sell what they found.^33 Eve-
lyn and Pepys would see little of this money, if any.
The king and Parliament faced an even more daunting challenge from the
plague, which they had been sidestepping so long. The subcommittee of the
council assigned at the beginning of the epidemic to suggest new measures
had disbanded with the flight of the court with little to show for its discus-