The Web of Authority • 227most prominent plaguetime acts in the capital, however, centered on main-
taining public order. The plague had kept alive the Puritan era’s millenarian
hopes of a Second Coming of Jesus and the end of the world as it was
known; God’s Destroying Angel was a new sign of a divine plan for the
earth. However demoralized by defeat and repression these dissenters were
in reality, Restoration officials, led by Albemarle, continued to fear the
specter of old revolutionaries turning the world upside down right through
this visitation and beyond.^21
“Monstrous spirits” were demonstrating outside Saint Paul’s cathedral,
Stephen Bing reported to the absent dean. Canon Bing could hardly contain
himself as he wrote. These mad dissenters blamed the clergy and magistrates
for spreading this disease. “Down with them that would down with gov-
ernors and government,” Bing thundered. Sancroft’s physician, Peter Bar-
wick, was equally incensed at the subversive tracts hawked on the streets,
“printed noe body knows for whom nor by what.” Whoever the tract writers
were, they seemed bent on pulling down the pillars of authority, starting with
absent doctors and priests.^22
Foremost in Albemarle’s mind was the resurfacing of one of the Crown’s
most wanted men. Colonel Danvers, a former revolutionary soldier and fer-
vent millenarian, had voted for Charles I’s death as a member of the high
court created by Cromwell to try the defeated monarch. “A Grand Contriver
of the late conspiracies and long sought after,” a newsletter reported. A war-
rant was out for his arrest, with execution likely to follow. Royal revenge ran
deep: Cromwell’s body had been removed from its Westminster Abbey crypt
at the Restoration, ceremonially hanged, and reburied in ground set aside for
common criminals; several of his surviving regicidal comrades were hunted
down and executed, their bodies drawn and quartered. Danvers had an un-
canny ability to slip through the net thrown over his hideouts. A lucky break
led royal forces to his capture in a hideaway in Moorfields. On the way to the
Tower, an obliging guard let him stop at a tavern to quench his thirst. His
brother was nearby with a band of dissenters, and they whisked the colonel
away before the alarm could be sounded.
Pepys got wind of this “great ryott” two days later. News of the daring es-
cape reached the ears of Charles II at Salisbury. His privy council called on
reinforcements for keeping the peace, doubling the royal forces at Hyde
Park, Whitehall, and the Tower. At the Cockpit, Albemarle had to settle for
embarrassing excuses. The hapless captain who had allowed the escape was
sent to the Gatehouse jail in Westminster, sharing quarters with Quakers
and jail fever.^23 The event was devastating for Albemarle. Bell calls him “a