58 • Beginningscontagiously by an infected person’s breathing or maybe just by a frightening
gaze at a stranger passing by. It was not even safe to open the windows and
let in the fresh air. People hesitated to allow their pet dogs and cats out for
fear they might become carriers of the infection, as had happened in past
epidemics. Stray animals were most suspect, so when the master went out on
business or a servant was sent on an errand, they had to stay clear, if they
could, of wild cats and dogs. No place was completely safe, for these wild
creatures roamed the streets even in Cheapside and on the Strand.
From peer to pauper, foreboding thoughts like these conjured up a famil-
iar image of God’s Destroying Angel punishing a sinful people with her poi-
soned spear and noisome breath. How easy it was for writers like George
Wither, who was both a religious person and a keen observer of past plagues,
to personify this unpredictable curse of human society as an inscrutable
agent of the Lord.^2 With all the elusiveness of a femme fatale, pestilence
made a sudden arrival without a prior appointment and remained mysterious
about its itinerary. “Where oh where will ye take your flight? God’s arrows fly
by day, as well as night,” warned a gloomy rhymer, before he himself was
struck down in the prime of life.^3
With a street map and Bills of Mortality in hand, one can trace the
plague’s early advance. In the six short weeks after the acknowledged fatali-
ties at the end of April 1665 , death marched eastward from Saint Giles in the
Fields along the Holborn road to Saint Andrew Holborn and on to Saint
Sepulchre by the polluted Fleet River, perilously close to the inn kept by
Samuel Pepys’ cousin and her husband. From Holborn the pestilence veered
south along Chancery Lane, where panicky law teachers and their students
at the Inns of Court recessed their classes and vacated the premises. Turning
into the Strand, the infection settled into the parish of Saint Clement Danes
near Drury Lane. From there the malignancy made its progress along Fleet
Street, bringing death to the middle-income parish of Saint Dunstan in the
West and to the poor, densely populated parts of Saint Bride’s, where Sam-
uel Pepys had grown up (see maps 1 and 3 ).
By mid-June the rampaging contagion had gone completely around the
wall. It was close to Ludgate and Newgate on the west, Cripplegate and
Bishopsgate on the north, and Aldgate on the east. From outside Aldgate it
had leapt across the Thames to John Allin’s parish of Saint Olave South-
wark. If it were to branch westward along the southern bank near the palatial
headquarters of the Church of England at Lambeth and leap back over the
Thames to Saint Margaret Westminster, the king and queen at Whitehall
would be hemmed in on all sides by the contagion.