20 • BeginningsFrightened whispers in a few other run-down parts of the suburbs spread
the word of a neighbor suddenly turning ill with suspicious symptoms. A
month before, two other persons had been struck down and carried off by the
pestilence. Such reports could not be brushed aside as idle gossip. During the
Christmas season, Dr. Nathaniel Hodges attended a feverish young man and
prescribed “a course of Alexiterial medicines,” a common antidote to con-
tagious infections. After two days “two risings about the bigness of a Nutmeg
broke out, one on each thigh; upon examination of which I soon discovered
the malignanty, both from their black hue and the circle around them, and
pronounced it to be plague, in which opinion I was afterwards confirmed by
subsequent symptoms although by Gods blessing the Patient recovered.”^3
No personal letter or published newssheet of the time mentioned the sol-
itary plague fatality in Saint Giles. It appeared only in the week’s printed Bill
of Mortality—a single-sheet tabulation of metropolitan fatalities and their
causes distributed at minimal cost every Thursday by the head office of the
London parish clerks from reports by the clerks of the 130 parishes through-
out Greater London.^4 The official report raised no general alarm. Every year
the odd case of plague carried away a poor person like Goodwoman Phillips
in some dense alley of a suburban parish. Certainly, the illness was a concern
for her poor neighbors, but it would not worry the better-off residents of
Greater London. Plague had not swept through their quarters of the suburbs
and city for decades. Moreover, plague epidemics in England flared up dur-
ing the hot summer months, not in the dead of winter. Everyone knew that.
Something else gave Londoners second thoughts about the deadly pesti-
lence, however. That same Christmas Eve, a comet streaked across the dark
winter sky. From London to Devon people stared in wonder at the sight; re-
ports came in from as far away as Holland, Spain, Germany, and Austria.
The brightly colored, fiery orb first appeared in the southeast sky on No-
vember 18 , 1664 , about 3 : 00 or 4 :00 a.m.and again on the first of December.
John Gadbury, a distinguished astrologer and member of the newly formed
Royal Society for the advancement of science, commented darkly on the
event. “This comet,” he wrote in De Cometis: or a Discourse of the Natures and
Effects of Comets,“portends pestiferous and horrible windes and tempests.”^5
The ambitious Royal Navy official and man about town, Samuel Pepys,
heard about the comet while gossiping at one of London’s coffee houses.
King Charles II and his queen, Catherine of Braganza, sat up late on the sev-
enteenth of December to see the comet for themselves.^6 The most fanciful
report described “a Blew and Purple cloud, full of leprous spots and a Great
Black Coffin in the sky over Hamburg and Flanders.”^7