The Web of Authority • 223center were unable to identify all the houses that were becoming infected.
People were coming in and out of them at will. Certainly that was true of the
Friends, who insisted on visiting their sick members whether their homes
were shut up or not.
Only eight aldermen answered Lawrence’s call early in the morning on
September 5 for the lighting of the fires. Alderman Turner was one of them.
Glaringly absent were the sheriffs-elect, mayor-elect Thomas Bludworth, and
Sir William Peake, Turner’s colleague on the medical advisory committee.^12
Sir John Lawrence was nearing the end of his mayoral year. Almost a year
had passed since Evelyn had watched from the high table as the new mayor
raised his golden goblet and drank to the king’s health. Sir John had grown
in office as the city struggled through the coldest winter in a decade and
faced the greatest plague epidemic of his generation. In the coming Age of
Enlightenment, Lawrence would be eulogized by the poet Alexander Pope
and Erasmus Darwin, the eminent scientist-physician and grandfather of his
more famous namesake. Walter George Bell, who has little good to say about
the king’s flight in his classic on the Great Plague, heaps praise on the mayor
as “a fearless, independent man.”^13
The journalist L’Estrange saw Lawrence as an embattled leader fighting
against the odds: “Throughout this dreadful visitation he has, in spite of all
hazards and mistakes, persisted in his duty.” Among the hazards was the ul-
timate fear of the time. Sir John lived with his wife Abigail and their nine
daughters; a son had died in infancy. In November, the Newescarried a
somber item: “His own family was infected and the whole neighborhood
utterly overspread with the Sickness.”^14
Sir John miraculously survived, but no records reveal whether his family
recovered or succumbed. Other civic servants were less fortunate. The re-
placement of fallen officials was critical, and at the aldermen’s last meetings
in July they wisely authorized the mayor to fill vacancies on his own; formal
aldermanic approval could come at their next meeting, whenever that might
occur.^15
Roger L’Estrange may have been correct in saying that no one in “prime
authority” was lost in the visitation, for many among the ruling elite had fled
and none of those who stayed fell. The distemper did carry off key civic per-
sons, however. Early on, one alderman died of suspicious symptoms. Grave-
yards swallowed up several parish clerks and churchwardens along with sev-
eral overseers and collectors of the poor. The grave beckoned the city’s
official remembrancer and its coroner, the master of Newgate jail, and three
sergeants attending Sheriff Doe. A new jail keeper, Walter Cowdery, was im-