108 • ConfusionAgain Dr. Cocke was helpful. His little paper on plague preparations for
the poor was placed in bundles at the doors of suburban churches by order of
the duke of Albemarle.^25 Housewives could go to their kitchen cupboards
and find all the necessary ingredients: salt, London treacle (two or three
pence worth would do), vinegar, and saltpeter, plus broths, ales, and the run
of household herbs. At the top of every list stood garlic, the essential poor
person’s medicine in many folk traditions. Cocke included advice on sweat-
ing and keeping down the fever, how to induce vomiting and when to stop it,
as well as how to prepare homemade lozenges and plasters. At the Pestle and
Mortar in French Lane or the Queen’s Arms in Fan Church Street, his “blis-
tering plaister” sold for a penny or two. These plasters were to be placed on
buboes for up to six or eight hours, after which the swellings broke and were
anointed with oil of roses. Cocke grew enthusiastic as he ticked off the items
one could use: unguent of althea, cordials, and posset drinks made of sage to
aid in breaking and draining the buboes. But here he was forgetting his au-
dience, slipping back into the rich man’s balms that these poor people would
never see.
Daniel Defoe said that there had never been so many people consulting
astrologers and their almanac advice as during the plague epidemic, and he
may have been right. It cost a poor peddler only a penny or two to have
someone read Poor Robinaloud, and the almanac’s tips were laced not only
with outrageous humor but also with advice from astrological signs for
plague treatments. This pestilential season, the advice ran, will not cure mad
persons. The summer’s fleas “will lie with women without asking any leave,”
the almanac continued, and the noose at Tyburn will remain an “eye-sore” to
highwaymen and cutpurses. Only the last quip was a bit of a stretch; trials
had ended with the coming of the infection, and murderers were more likely
to die in a plague-infested jail waiting for the courts to start up again.^26
The celebrated astrologer William Lilly had been an artful dodger of both
Revolution and Restoration censors and had amassed a considerable fortune
along with making two profitable marriages and publishing sensational
prognostics containing vivid illustrations suggesting a great pestilence and
fire. His fame among the rich and poor spread throughout the land, and not
just for his almanac’s medical advice. His hands-on therapy attracted a steady
stream of patients to his rented lodgings on the Strand.^27
As early as April, Lilly had been fearful of a pestilential summer, yet he re-
mained in Westminster through May and into June, leaving only at the
request of his landlord, who panicked at the sight of sick patients who might
be carrying plague on their bodies.^28 Lilly and his family moved to their