The Awakening • 251and Elizabeth’s surgeons had risked death while continuing to serve the poor
at Saint Bartholomew and Saint Thomas Hospitals.
Pepys was curious to know what the rector of Saint Olave Hart Street
would say at his first service since returning. Snow had fallen the night be-
fore and mantled the churchyard’s bloated contents like a great burial
shroud, offering a mute reproach to a pastor who had left his flock to grieve
and pray on their own. Samuel and Elizabeth gathered with others in the
church to thank God and meditate on Reverend Milles’s sermon. Samuel
anticipated a “great excuse” from this man who had fled the parish before
anyone else and had come back last. “He made a very poor and short excuse,
and a bad sermon,” Pepys recorded.^16
There was much to be forgiven and many lessons to be drawn from this
collective human tragedy. Another great plague would surely come, with or
without the astrologers’ doomsaying predictions. Twelve aldermen—twice
the number of a few weeks before—now showed up at the Guildhall to
reckon with unpaid plague bills and battle the lingering contagion. The king
was back at Whitehall with reform of the Plague Orders on his agenda. The
question was: Did these leaders of the capital and country have the will and
the ability to act boldly?
Unfinished Business
The shutting up would breed a plague if there were none. Infection may have
killed its thousands, but shutting up hath killed its ten thousands.
—The Shutting up of Infected Houses, as it is Practiced in England,
Soberly Debated( 1665 )In January 1666 , Mayor Bludworth discharged the public physicians from
further duty to the city, and the court of aldermen thanked them for their
services. Monetary compensation for the surviving medical personnel and
the widows dragged on. The delay in final payments of Great Plague ex-
penses is puzzling. Perhaps the city cash fund was too depleted by the eco-
nomic impact of plague, and then of the Great Fire of September 1666 , to al-
low the Guildhall to pay all past and current bills, and nonplague items took
priority. In February 1666 , the city fathers asked Turner, Lawrence, and two
colleagues to determine whether the bills of several apothecaries were valid.
The last plague-related payment was sent to Edmond Higgs in July 1670 for