Epilogue
[263]Of Once and Future Plagues
O let it be enough what Thou has done,
When spotted death ran arm’d through every street,
With poison’d darts, which not the good could shun,
The speedy could out-fly, or valiant meet.
—John Dryden,Annus Mirabilis( 1667 )Twenty Years After
“Men eat, and drink, and laugh as they used to.” The words came easily from
the pen of the greatest economic forecaster of the age. Twenty years had
passed since the Great Plague, and Sir William Petty was as happy as anyone
to focus on England’s good fortune. “The Exchange seems as full of Mer-
chants as formerly; no more Beggars in the Streets, nor executed for Thieves
than heretofore,” he joked. The number and splendor of coaches exceeded
former times, the theaters were magnificent, and the king had a greater navy
and stronger guards “than before our Calamities.” Yet Petty’s statistical mind
told him that the calamity of pestilence returned to England every twenty
years; this time, he calculated, it would kill 120 , 000 persons in the capital.^1
The public authorities also remained wary, keeping that special column for
plague in the metropolitan Bills of Mortality until 1703 —just in case. But no
plague death was entered in that column after a single case in a remote
downstream parish in 1679.