226 • Survivingpoor of Covent Garden and Saint Martin in the Fields by exposing bodies to
the public and offering them as firewood with a mock “London cry”: “Fag-
gots, faggots, five for sixpence!” Word reached Craven; he called together the
Westminster justices of the peace and had the offender taken to the pest-
house, whipped in front of the inmates, flogged through the fields, and then
imprisoned for a year with a life prohibition from public service of any
kind.^19
Craven had something beyond the strong will and independent disposi-
tion of Albemarle and Lawrence. Nearing sixty, he was already distinguished
by military service in Europe’s Thirty Years’ War and as a trusted advisor of
great nobles and royalty at home and abroad. What distinguished him most,
however, was his ability to look beyond himself; at a stage of his career when
others would have been content to be effective managers of the status quo, he
wanted change. The Great Plague made him restless and impatient to alter
the way his superiors looked at England’s perpetual cycle of public health
crises. Here was a person of great talent, dedication, and influence, eager to
rethink a national and metropolitan response to disaster that had been hob-
bled by hidebound beliefs, habits, and interests.
Traveling through the neighborhoods of Westminster, Craven saw the
folly of shutting up the healthy with the sick. Families were living in undoc-
umented hovels, hiding the sickness and escaping to the countryside when
they could. Perhaps the current notions of miasmas and contagion needed to
be rethought or adjusted to reality. He kept notes on the undocumented
poor, shabby housing, and woefully limited pesthouse quarters, waiting for
the chance to make a change. Once this nightmare was over, he promised
himself, he would push for an overhaul of the outmoded plague regula-
tions.^20
A shroud of secrecy obscured the role of Craven’s superior, Albemarle. The
captain general remained what he had always been—a military man of deci-
sive acts and few words. His greatest victory had been bullying the nation’s
wavering politicians into restoring the monarchy in 1660 by massing his
troops in the capital. The erratic turns of this epidemic proved a far more
elusive adversary. Albemarle’s antiplague strategy, if he ever articulated it, re-
mains buried in the archives. For all his authority as the king’s leading repre-
sentative in the capital, his name rarely appeared in public health measures
against the pestilential invader. When plague swept through the suburbs in
June and July, he dutifully ordered the distribution of sheets of Galenic
plague cures to each parish for their residents’ use. He collaborated with
Mayor Lawrence in the great fumigation experiment of September. His