234 • SurvivingLooking back in prosperous old age on that early testing time, George re-
called his experiences as vividly as if they had just occurred.^2 The country
house George senior had purchased for his parents and single sisters could
not accommodate the five Boddington children, but they could be boarded at
a safe distance beyond the Cripplegate exit. From his bookkeeping George
junior knew that family savings would pay for the children’s lodgings and
keep his parents in food and drink at their city home for the duration of the
epidemic, even if their trade completely collapsed. Material considerations
were not alone in the parents’ decision to remain in London, however, and
young George Boddington knew it. He turned their trust in God to his own
purposes.
George used two arguments. First, he had been attending a secret conven-
ticle, and the minister’s message of God’s abounding grace had him on the
verge of a formal commitment to his Savior. Surely his parents could not ob-
ject to him trusting in the Lord in the plague-ridden city. If that was not ar-
gument enough, George added a second: the neighborhood’s pulpits, de-
serted by their Anglican rectors, were filling with dissenter preachers, and he
begged to stay on to hear their inspirational sermons.
Hannah and George senior resisted, but in the end his faith overcame their
reservations about the vulnerability to plague of someone so young. And so
the three of them remained in the handsome converted inn that had become
the family home on the north side of Lothbury Street, near the Guildhall. In
October, mother, father, and son celebrated their survival and his nineteenth
birthday. He occupied himself by running errands and keeping accounts cur-
rent as if there were no plague at all. The Lord’s Day was special. Every Sun-
day George went to hear at least one sermon. The first Wednesday of the
month found him devoting almost the whole day to the long services in
nearby churches, where he received “abounding consolations.”
George got through most of the plague without his faith being fully
tested. Perhaps his youthful self-confidence and middle-class clothes were
enough to disarm wary country guards during his weekly visits to his sisters
and brothers in Middlesex. On his return through infected Saint Giles Crip-
plegate, he claimed not to have been afraid, even when he saw sixty corpses
being carried from the roadway to a common grave. He passed by “without
any amazement” about his own danger, he recalled, for he saw the plague as
“the Arrow of the Almighty and directed by Him.”
George’s crisis of faith came unexpectedly. He had gone out as usual on a
Friday to see his younger siblings. On the way to Harrow-on-the-Hill, he
met friends returning. They had been prevented by wary country people