Fleeing or Staying? • 79alds and mounted escorts in full mourning dress as the coffin wended its way
from Westminster toward Salisbury for burial with the judge’s ancestors.
The tone of the letter grew more serious as Jacques got down to the per-
sonal affairs of his masters. He admitted having a hard time prying commit-
ments from the countess’s and earl’s favorite tailors in time for the holiday.
Full payment of past and current accounts had to be promised to secure the
making of the suit and hat the young earl desired and of dresses for his
sisters. Surely, they knew the countess would pay up eventually. Yet they were
pressing Jacques and their regular customers for cash.
Finally, Jacques came around to the likely reason behind the merchants’
urgency. “Here is still greate feares of the plague, and I wish it bee but only
our feares,” he admitted. “I am credibly informed that two houses are shut up
in Axe Yard nere St. Clements church in the Strand.” No sooner had the
master of the pesthouse shut up the infected residences than the household-
ers broke open their doors and escaped.
Jacques’ graphic account conjured up images of people with plague sores
breathing out the infection on the Strand, the best street of Westminster.
And while he did not say so directly, he certainly implied that merchants in-
side the wall were preparing to flee to the countryside. Lacking the resources
of great families like the Hastings, they had been gathering in as much cash
as they could from their customers to tide them over in a country inn or
boarding house until the plague abated. No doubt the countess of Hunting-
don, on reading Jacques’ lines in the safety of her Midlands manor (a four-
day carriage ride from the capital), hoped her relatives in the city and at court
were thinking of speeding northward toward Leicestershire. Nothing in
London could keep them back. If their country houses were not ready for
immediate habitation, the countess’s hospitality at Donnington Park would
be extended to them, as it had been in the past, for as long a stay as necessary.
Furthermore, they were reasonably secure in leaving their London residences
behind. Like royalty who took some of their belongings from residence to
residence, peers and gentry could take some valuables to their country man-
ors and leave the rest under guard by house servants they chose not to take
with them. By contrast, many city tradesmen lacked the staff to guard their
premises; if they left, their livelihood was in jeopardy, since their personal
property consisted of tools and goods in their ground-floor shop, plus fur-
nishings in the family’s living quarters above.
The metropolitan Bill of Mortality for May 2 – 9 was being readied as Jac-
ques wrote. When it appeared on the eleventh, the news was worse than he
had suggested. Among the nine reported plague fatalities was the first one