The Awakening • 255That was not the end of it. In spring the number of deaths rose again, “the
plague, as we hear, increasing everywhere,” Pepys shuddered. The king re-
convened the privy council’s emergency plague committee, which had put off
major reforms at the beginning of the visitation. Albemarle had gone to
sea to fight the Dutch; Craven replaced him. Once more Craven argued
that plague was carried not through air but contagiously from person to
person. There was only one viable solution: large pesthouse complexes were
needed.^29
The privy council objected to the cost of a general hospital, and medical
theory was conflicted on its usefulness. If the disease were truly miasmatic,
what good would it do to segregate the infected from the healthy? Hadn’t ex-
ternal quarantining of ships, with their infected cargos and passengers, at
major ports, including Colchester and London itself, been a dismal failure?
So the king and his advisors decided to confirm the existing Plague Orders
with very modest changes. The most significant innovation, requiring every
town and city in the kingdom to maintain a permanent plague facility “in
readiness in case any infection should break out,” failed to dictate the size of
the facilities or provide any funding for them. As for home incarceration,
which by default was to be the lot of most poor households in a future visit-
ation, the new orders simply tacked on to the quarantine period an addi-
tional twenty-day fumigation period, with a white cross replacing the
dreaded red.^30
Plague without End?
It had been a year of prodigies in this nation: plague, fire, rain, tempest and comet.
—John Evelyn,Diary,March 6 , 1667Mary Evelyn and her children came home in February. John felt some relief
from his duties, and aunt Susan made up clothes for the family from country
cloth, feeling it safer than apparel from London. For the next few weeks, the
parish church at Deptford enjoyed a full congregation. “Blessed be God for
his infinite mercy in preserving us,” John wrote gratefully. Charles II and Al-
bemarle thanked Evelyn in person for tending the sick and wounded sailors
when “everybody fled their employments.” Albemarle was in a repentant
mood, telling Evelyn he would never have let the king appoint him commis-
sioner had he known of the mortal danger he faced.^31