54 • BeginningsThe king was following the Plague Orders of his father and grandfather to
the letter. There was no time to rethink the logic of protecting the general
public by shutting up entire households when one person inside caught the
plague—a practice that ensured the death of many more persons. Nor was
there any mention of the unwritten custom of quarantining only the poor
in this sacrificial act. Isolating the infected poor apart from their healthy
family and neighbors was a pipe dream; only small pesthouse sheds, at the far
end of Saint Margaret Westminster, and the other makeshift facility, north
of the city wall up in Saint Giles Cripplegate, remained from the last Great
Plague.^32
Reaction in Saint Giles in the Fields to the forced incarceration was swift
and ugly. A “ryett” broke out at the shut-up Ship Tavern. The red cross on
the door was ripped off by friends in the street, “the door opened in a vicious
manner and the people of the house permitted to go abroad into the streets
promiscuously with others.” The king countered with an order to the West-
minster justices “to inflict upon the offenders in the said ryett (for such of
them as they shall find) the severest punishment.”^33
Charles II was acting like the legendary King Canute ordering the waves
back into the sea. Watchmen from Saint Giles were posted on the major
roads to prevent persons suspected of carrying the plague from leaving the
parish. The neighboring parishes mounted their own watch as self-protec-
tion. These futile gestures at a cordon sanitairewere soon given up. The dis-
ease had no trouble crossing parish boundaries.
Across town another drama unfolded. Two weeks after the riot in Saint
Giles in the Fields, the plague entered old London’s merchant center. The
bill for May 2 – 9 told the story: a house in tiny Saint Mary Woolchurch par-
ish had suffered a plague fatality. The family lived on Bearbinder Lane just
off Lombard Street. To the east were the Royal Exchange and the Great
Coffee House. To the west was the Stocks market, with its butchers’ and
fishmongers’ stalls. The stricken household was not identified in the official
record by class, religion, or national origin, but the neighbors were Anglicans
and dissenters, native English families and French and Dutch immigrants. A
few doors from the infected house, Quaker dissenters knew all about the fa-
tality and passed the word through the network of communications estab-
lished by these religious Friends in the metropolis.^34
Knowledgeable doctors and apothecaries had their own ideas about what
was happening. Out in pestered Saint Giles in the Fields, the neighborhood
apothecary William Boghurst surmised that the endemic plague in his par-
ish had spread eastward with the end of cold weather. Dr. Thomas Cocke,