Prologue • 9chronicled in riveting detail by a local tanner, was its worst.^21 The great his-
torical demographer of plague, Jean-Noël Biraben, places the mortality from
this visitation at 45 percent ( 20 , 000 dead from a population estimated at
44 , 000 ), considerably greater than Barcelona’s Black Death toll of 36 percent
( 15 , 000 of 42 , 000 ). Some of the fatalities were connected with the famine
and war that accompanied this plague outbreak, but the impact of the disease
was nevertheless enormous, compounded because the local garrison and
neighboring peasants blocked all exits to prevent inhabitants of the city from
fleeing. Then there is the shocking example of Digne, a river town in
Provence, which suffered grievously from a killing epidemic in 1629. Assum-
ing a population before plague of 10 , 000 and between 1 , 500 and 2 , 000 after
plague, it has been estimated that Digne shrank by 80 – 85 percent. A cordon
sanitaireof guards even more vigilant than at Barcelona two decades later
had kept virtually the entire population inside. A century later, the town’s
numbers had climbed back to barely 5 , 000.^22
The British Isles suffered along with the European mainland. Water was
no barrier to the spread of the infection, thanks to the flourishing seaborne
trade between London and other English ports and Amsterdam, Calais,
Bordeaux, Lisbon, and Mediterranean ports of call. England’s one stroke of
luck was in avoiding the worst of the European wars that spread plague, dy-
sentery, and typhus among helpless civilians to the drumbeat of marauding
armies.
England’s political upheavals, however, did not augur well for London’s
battle with the Great Plague of 1665. A takeover of London’s civic govern-
ment by political-religious radicals in 1640 helped plunge the nation into a
civil war between 1642 and 1648. Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan-leaning
army defeated forces loyal to King Charles I, executed the king, and abol-
ished the Anglican state church and Parliament’s House of Lords. An uneasy
peace settled over the land under Cromwell’s Puritan rule in the 1650 s. On
the left, radical religious sects, anticipating Jesus’ Second Coming, pressed
for more religious and social changes. On the right, Anglican royalists re-
mained implacably opposed to the regicide of the nation’s sacred ruler and
the institutional destruction of the religious and social pillars of state. The
Puritan Revolution unraveled after Cromwell’s death in 1658 , and in 1660 the
king’s older son was called back from his exile on the Continent to rule as
Charles II.
The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, Anglican church, House of
Lords, and London’s old civic governors managed to hold, but an undercur-
rent of unrest remained in England: Cromwell’s surviving comrades resented