52 • BeginningsThe plague death counts in the Bills of Mortality for the next three weeks
did not seem to have any pattern. The first two announced fatalities were fol-
lowed by a week of no deaths. Then there was a sharp increase and almost as
sharp a dip (table 2 ). It was somewhat reassuring to see only fourteen deaths
and a relief that they were concentrated in the pestered suburbs of Saint An-
drew Holborn, Saint Clement Danes, and Saint Giles in the Fields some
distance from Whitehall. However, the Bills of Mortality missed at least one
fatality—in the choicest part of Westminster. On the twelfth of April, the
clerk of Saint Paul Covent Garden had made a secretive entry in his parish
register: “Margarit Daughter of Dr. John Ponteus Buried Church, plague.”^29
This little girl’s death had occurred at least a week before the two plague fa-
talities in Saint Giles in the Fields. More frighteningly, a society physician’s
household just off the Piazza was infected! The family and friends gathered
in the church for the funeral and interment of the leaded casket beneath the
church floor, as if nothing unusual had occurred. Afterward the clerk took
his tallies to the clerks’ hall in the city, listing no plague burials.The
doctor’s family did not want their house and all its inhabitants shut up as the
Plague Orders of past epidemics had required. Reverend Patrick also kept
quiet.
Friends of the king who lived around the Piazza of Covent Garden may
have passed word of this plague death to him. If so, that is as far as the news
traveled, for denial came fast on the heels of fear. Lord Brouncker and the
ever inquisitive diarist and overseer of the parish’s poor, Thomas Rugge, did
not want nearby tradesmen and professionals to flee, nor did they welcome
draconian plague controls in their neighborhood.
Courtiers may have assured the thirty-five-year-old Charles II that chil-
dren and old persons were more vulnerable to the infection than was some-
one in the prime of life—especially one so virile as their sacred ruler. But this
“merry monarch” always struck a carefree pose. He did so now; we do not
know whether he knew of the plague death at Covent Garden and was feign-
ing nonchalance or whether he was simply happy in love and war.
The naval conflict with the Dutch was going well despite misgivings by
Pepys and others in the know about the navy’s preparedness and supplies. On
April 3 His Majesty had enjoyed the play Mustaphawith his mistress Lady
Castlemaine, soon to give birth to their fifth child. On the fifteenth the
king’s schedule drew him to the College of Physicians for an anatomy lec-
ture. The Intelligencerreported him “enquiring into the seat and causes of in-
fectious diseases and... the most rational Means and Methods of preserving
and advancing the health of his subjects.” The ruler’s curiosity ranged from