The Great Plague. The Story of London\'s Most Deadly Year

46 • Beginnings

den “pestered places” in the suburbs, whereas the epidemics of Henry VIII’s
and Elizabeth’s times had centered inside the wall.^14 But once the infection

started to spread, could it be kept out of the courtier quarters in Whitehall
and Covent Garden or halted at the city gates?

Pestered Places

Increases of buildings in and about the city.

Inmates by whom the houses are so pestered [overcrowded] they become

unwholesome.

Carrying up of funnels to the tops of houses from privies.

Neglect of cleansing common sewers and town ditches.

Slaughter-houses in the city; butchers killing unsound cattle; tainted fish. Baking

unwholesome corn and selling musty corn in public markets.

Churches overlaid with burials.

—London College of Physicians’ list of “annoyances” leading to plague in 1630

The plague death in suburban Saint Giles in the Fields on Christmas Eve
1664 had been followed by uneventful weekly Bills of Mortality in January.^15
In the week of February 7 , another plague death was recorded out in Saint

Giles. The rest of February passed without incident, as did March and early
April. Then came the bill for April 18 – 25 , listing two more plague deaths in
the same parish near the winter fatalities. Elizabeth Pepys’ parents, Dorothea
and Alexandre St. Michel, were right in the path of the infection.^16

Alexandre le Marchant de St. Michel was an adventuresome French gen-
tleman who had come to England in the entourage of Charles II’s mother,
Henrietta Maria, and been cast adrift after a religious quarrel with a staff
member. He had had the good fortune to marry Dorothea, the widowed

daughter of an Anglo-Irish landowner, and hoped to strike it rich on both
sides of the English Channel with various inventions (a perpetual motion
machine, devices for curing smoky chimneys, a scheme for making ponds fit
for horses to drink). None of his ideas caught on. He was a hapless noble, de-

pendent on a pension from the fashionable French émigré church that held
Anglican services in Westminster and on offers of odd jobs from his son-in-
law Samuel Pepys at the navy office.
In 1664 , Dorothea and Alexandre settled into the Saint Giles neighbor-

hood on Long Acre north of Covent Garden. Long Acre was just the right
place for the couple. The street had a mixture of upscale and inexpensive