The Awakening • 259A second trial was in the offing. In three days in September 1666 , the
Great Fire razed central London. The medieval Guildhall and old Saint
Paul’s were reduced to shells, while Covent Garden’s church and Whitehall
Palace were spared the westward spread of the flames. Four-fifths of the
housing within the wall vanished, leaving thousands of Londoners camped
out in tents in empty land near the city pesthouse.
Money poured in from a countryside still reeling from its own Great
Plague. Colchester was among the most generous towns, sending £103 8s. 9 d.
to the capital that had recently contributed so much to its relief. The town’s
inhabitants had responded from a deep gratitude for their deliverance.
As for the recent tragedy of London’s Great Plague, the official tallying at
the end of 1665 had counted 97 , 306 burials for the year, of which 68 , 596 were
listed as plague (see appendix A). The actual toll from all causes was at least
110 , 000. Thousands of unidentified bodies lay in plague pits, and hundreds
more were buried without official records, among them religious dissenters.
In 1666 , plague claimed 1 , 998 Londoners; again, the records were incom-
plete, this time partly because many churches within the wall had been de-
stroyed and their records suspended. But life went on. Sir William Turner
absorbed personal losses from trade and lived to profit once more. Parish life
returned to normal, and the city government resumed functioning as it was
supposed to. The five metropolitan pesthouses stood abandoned and in dis-
repair, as people struggled to forget. Much the same occurred in the country-
side. In Colchester, citizens dismantled boards from the pesthouse at Mile
End for their own needs, prompting the town assembly to sell what re-
mained.^38
The plague toll continued to decline in metropolitan London. In 1667 ,
thirty-five persons were listed as dying of plague, twenty-three of them
within the wall. In 1668 the figure was down to fourteen, and in 1669 a min-
iscule two. During the next decade only occasional outbreaks and rare plague
deaths occurred in southern England.^39
As the shadow of the distemper lifted, people’s concerns turned to other
diseases. “The smallpox [is] very much in London and other parts of Eng-
land,” Rugge lamented in January 1668. But there was a difference. Smallpox
lacked the wildly escalating fury and indiscriminate destruction of life and
livelihood that characterized plague and lived on in people’s memories. Fear
of the Destroying Angel’s returning to English soil carried well into the fu-
ture. The Royal Society’s secretary, who had stayed in Westminster through
the entire ordeal, was haunted by the mystery of this greatest of all diseases.
He ascribed the survival of people who would otherwise have fallen to “the