270 • The Great Plaguechurch, “whether he would or not.” Later in life he married and found this
alliance nurturing and satisfying. Elizabeth Gauden’s letters to him have not
been found, except for a few drafts on the back of his letters to her.
Twenty years after standing against the plague, Reverend Patrick was
thrust into the center of national turmoil over James II’s pro-Catholic cam-
paign. He debated with leading Catholic apologists and joined a successful
clergy boycott of the king’s attempt to legalize worship for Catholics. After
the Revolution of 1688 , he was elevated to the bishopric of Chichester and
soon after transferred to Ely, where he died in 1707 at age eighty.
Patrick was immortalized with a likeness above his gravesite inside Ely ca-
thedral and by his publications on life’s traumas. The dual themes of suffer-
ing and survival so prominent in his Great Plague sermons reappeared time
after time. At a Fast Day Sermon in 1679 , he reflected on sinners cut off in an
instant and sent down to the pit. What will be your destiny, he asked his lis-
teners “who still survive the war, the plague, and all the rest of God’s judg-
ments?” Let persons who think themselves blameless reflect, “Of those
eighty or ninety thousand that fell by the plague, think you that they were
sinners above all men that dwelt in London and Westminster?”^11
Reverend Patrick outlived the other protagonists of our story who had
grappled with the meaning of life and death in the midst of the plague. Eliz-
abeth Gauden, who had wondered about Symon’s certainty of the afterlife,
was gone, along with Denis. After her death, Symon’s letters were returned
to him, which cushioned the loss of his dearest friend and confidant. The
house at Clapham that he had visited so many times bore a triple loss: first
Elizabeth, then Denis, and finally Denis’s associate Samuel Pepys. Sir Wil-
liam Turner was also gone, leaving behind his account books and letters from
the time of the pestilence. In the countryside, John Allin and Ralph Josselin
had lived out the biblical three score years serving their communities as they
had during the time of the Great Plague. Allin moved to Woolwich, where
Elizabeth Pepys and her maids had waited out the epidemic, and obtained a
local license to practice medicine openly. He continued his chemical exper-
imentation and worked to free imprisoned dissenters. Reverend Josselin con-
tinued to serve his parishioners and farm at Earls Colne to the end of his
days.
Two Hundred Years Later
Long after the dramatis personaeof the Great Plague were gone, the disease
continued to threaten Europe from the Ottoman Empire and Central Asia,
which had become its apparently permanent base. Around 1680 it invaded