The Other London • 47housing, with Irish, French, and Dutch neighbors for easy conversation. The
King’s Company staged plays nearby on Bridges Street, and its rising actress,
Nell Gwyn, lived around the corner from Long Acre in Drury Lane—a fa-
vorite haunt of theater people. Perhaps the new neighborhood would bring a
turn in Alexandre’s luck, for the king’s influential aide, the earl of Craven,
was just up the street from the St. Michels.
However, there were problems with the new setting right from the start.
Alexandre’s son-in-law spoke dismissively of the St. Michels’ “ill-looked”
lodgings “among all the bawdy-houses.”^17 In fact, Samuel Pepys had as little
contact as possible with his father-in-law. He had married the man’s daugh-
ter for love, not money, and wouldn’t darken his door (sending a few pounds
by a servant if Elizabeth nagged him). There had been a considerable
amount of construction around Long Acre and Drury Lane in recent times,
most of it illegal. One developer, John Ward, had created blind alleys off
Long Acre no wider than sixteen feet, each crammed with a dozen or so cot-
tages having two rooms each on the ground and first floors.^18 The plague
death on Christmas Eve 1664 was (historical legend would later hold) right
on the St. Michels’ street. Now, in April, plague returned to the neighbor-
hood. Two houses had been shut up in the Drury Lane area.
Rumors flew thick and fast, outpacing the posting of the weekly Bills of
Mortality. “Great fears of the Sickeness here in the City,” Pepys wrote in his
secret journal on April 30. “It [is] said two or three houses are already shut
up. God preserve us all.” He tried to keep his wits about him, knowing that
people called the pestilence “the poores plague.” Samuel turned to his
month-end accounting, a reassuring ritual. “Herein I with great joy find my-
self to have gained this month above £ 100 clear,” he wrote. His assets totaled
more than £ 1 , 400 , “the greatest sum I ever was worth.”^19
Across the river in Southwark, word of the infection reached John Allin a
day before the bill announcing the return of plague. “I heard yesterday there
are 2 houses shutt up about Drury lane for the sicknes,” he informed Philip
Fryth at his old country parish near the English Channel. “I comitt you to
God, Your loveing friend, John Allin.”^20 Allin said that he had no time “to
enlarge.” What brooding thoughts and dark fears was this unlicensed physi-
cian and devoted alchemist-astrologer withholding from his old friend?
Saint Olave Southwark was a notoriously unhealthy waterfront parish, with
hundreds of immigrant families and watermen crowded into cheap housing
along the Thames and thousands more in nearby alleys.
Rich and middle-income Londoners believed that the “sluttishness” of the
poor and their overcrowded housing, called “pestered places,” bred disease,