48 • Beginningsespecially the “feavers.” Westminster’s justices, reflecting the royal court’s
nervousness, took dead aim at Saint Margaret’s “close and insalubrious lanes,
courts and alleys.” A few paces from the fancy inns on King Street where
Samuel Pepys consulted with high royal officials, the locals found relief from
their daily burdens in back-room alehouses. Every fourth building had one
of these dens of iniquity, if one believed the authorities. They harbored
“Lewde and bade people [whose] squalid misery and poverty struggle with
filth and wretchedness,” warned the justices. All of this created an “atmos-
phere in which the worst diseases are generated and diffused.”^21
There was something to be said for linking the living conditions of the
poor with disease, for day laborers and skilled workers were sicklier and died
younger than those higher up on the economic ladder. But environmental
stress was not just the product of an unholy trinity of poverty, uncleanliness,
and immorality. Many “nuisances” and “annoyances” in the Greater London
area were not connected in any way with uncleanly living conditions. Most
Londoners breathed miasmatic air emanating from effluvia in the soil, trav-
ersed streams fouled by slaughterhouses and tanneries on the banks, and
contributed to the rubbish that piled up on the streets. Pollution was a com-
mon hazard, and public health was everyone’s concern.
The country gentleman whom Charles II had put in charge of the king’s
sick and wounded sailors had a blueprint for attacking this sickly condition
of the nation’s capital as well. John Evelyn had already served on a royal com-
mission for the “improvement” of the streets and sewers of London and
Westminster and on an advisory board drawing up badly needed repairs for
Saint Paul’s cathedral. These patchwork projects and the lack of clean air and
public health facilities in the nation’s capital frustrated this bold dreamer,
who had traveled the Continent and declared Milan’s great plague hospital
fit for a king.^22
Evelyn penned a study bristling with ideas and aimed it directly at the
king. “One day as I was walking in Your Majesties Palace at Whitehall,” he
boldly began, “a presumptuous smoak” created such a haze that courtiers
could scarcely make each other out. This page opener led the king to Evelyn’s
solution: The capital’s “atomical effluvia” and “epidemicall aer” would be
cleansed by the removal of industrial coalfires, animal slaughterhouses, and
human burial grounds to the outskirts of Greater London. In their place
Evelyn would plant trees and shrubs to sweeten the air with their perfumes.^23
Despite Evelyn’s urgings and the justices’ diatribes against pestered places,
the environment of London remained little changed. There was not even a
decent facility for sick people, like the Hôpital Saint Louis for plague victims