The Great Plague. The Story of London\'s Most Deadly Year

Epilogue• 269

elor Sir William Turner remained a model civic magistrate with his Puritan-
tinged probity, as noted in his account book headings, “Laus Deo,” Praise to

God. As trade revived after the plague and fire, his private wealth grew enor-
mously, increasing his opportunities to shape the rich and poor citizenry of
London in the image of his scrupulous work ethic. In addition to being lord
mayor in 1668 – 69 , he was elected master of his guild a second time and

played a prominent role in the East India and Royal Africa Companies. The
energy that he had thrown into maintaining public health in 1665 was now
channeled into presiding over two civic institutions that housed members of
marginal groups of society: the mentally disturbed at Bethlehem and “able

bodied beggars” and prostitutes at Bridewell. He also founded a hospital and
free school in his family’s ancestral town of Kirkleatham, Yorkshire, where
his body was interred at his death in 1693. He had lived for seventy-seven

years and left more than forty thousand pounds in his will. A portion was be-
queathed to his guild for annual grants to three poor cloth workers.
To the end of his life, Sir William displayed the moralizing rectitude that
his customers and colleagues had witnessed during the Great Plague. He did

not shrink from challenging James II’s Catholicizing mission, and he
reached the height of his moral and political authority after the Revolution
of 1688 as Member of Parliament for London. A revealing epitaph took
Turner’s true measure:

Here lies interred, under this stone

A worthy magistrate, well known,

Lord Mayor of London in Sixty nine,

And one who led a life divine;

A true son of the English church,

Whose name to Harlots smells like Birch,

Who while he lived on this stage,

Made Bridewell their chiefest cage,

Then rest, dear ashes, in thy urn,

Until the earth consume and burn.^10

Turner’s ecclesiastical counterpart, Rev. Symon Patrick, continued faith-

fully at Saint Paul Covent Garden for two decades after the Great Plague.
He spurned an offer to move to neighboring Saint Martin in the Fields, the
most lucrative parish in all England. His parishioners, he said modestly, had
been wonderful to him, and he would not leave them. The honor of serving

as one of the king’s chaplains was bestowed on this modest servant of the