In May 1665, worrying reports of plague cases crop up inside the walls of London; by June the summer heat was oppressive and it became clear – the plague  had returned. Charles and his court left to terrorise Oxford while Londoners died; in plague-stricken Eyam, the villagers cut themselves off to protect their neighbours

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Transcript

Parts of Derbyshire’s Peak District can be very bleak, with high moors covered with piles of black peat, heather and a vicious wind. But among the moors are patches of fertile lowland; which is where the little village of Eyam drew its name, Old English for an island, an island of fertility among the wastes. And there were riches in those bleak limestones hills around – if you were prepared to suffer danger and back breaking work to work the lead from its veins deep in the rock.

So Eyam was a pretty and prosperous village of 700 souls. But if you visited Eyam in 1666, you would have found a weird silence. You might see some villagers on the moors above, watching Eyam, watching and waiting, keeping their distance. You might have seen an estate worker from the nearby big house at Chatsworth approach the outskirts of the village, hurriedly, leave a large food package by a Well, pick up some coins left there, soaked in strong smelling vinegar – and leave as quickly as possible.

You might have wondered at the houses with crosses painted on their tight-shut doors; and at the mass of freshly-dug  burial mounds – not in the churchyard with its Celtic cross, but in the gardens of individual houses. Because the whole village was a charnel house. Eyam was a plague village.

 

Hello everyone and welcome back to the History of England episode ***

Eyam’s story is a remarkable one, and you can still see memorials if you wish it, and any time spent in Derbyshire’s Peak District is time well spent, whether it’s in the bleak, gritstone Black Peaks of the north, or the gentle Limestone White Peaks of the south; Eyam sits the middle of the two. There were lots of ancient traditions that defined the year in Eyam, and one of them was Wakes Week, a series of festivals in August celebrating their patron saint; probably St Lawrence, a patron saint of the poor and also comedians, as it happens. Traditions like this, and the tradition of Well Dressing, still survive in many parts of Derbyshire, and they could become rowdy, drinking dancing and the like, although the form in Eyam may have been more restrained, because Eyam had a strong Puritan tradition.nyway back in 1665, the local tailor, Alexander was getting ready for the business that always came his way at Wakes Week, and so had ordered a bale of cloth from London. When it arrived, his assistant George noticed it was a bit damp, and so he opened it up and set it to dry. George was only visiting Eyam for the week to help out; and it was the worst decision he ever made, because very soon he began to feel hot, and feverish, until he was confined to bed with a raging fever of about 40 degrees C. He was vomiting constantly until there was nothing left to bring up except bile, his head beat furiously with pain, and as he raved in a sweaty, delirious haze, lumps appeared on his groin, neck and armpits, and gradually turned black with infected blood. And where the flea had bitten him  – because a flea had bitten him if you were in any doubt – there grew a monstrously vile, greenish black carbuncle. Because George had been bitten by a flea hidden in that bale of cloth, a flea infected with yersinia pestis, and the Black Death had returned.

By November 1665, the plague had spread, and 42 parishioners had died. Desperation grew, and now many villagers were beginning to talk – to talk of fleeing their village, and fleeing death. But In Spring of 1666, the Vicar William Mompesson called people to the church, and made a dramatic proposal. Although no one at the time had any proper understanding of germ theory and the idea of contagion, they did know that quarantining and isolating sufferers made a difference; and it was common practice, as had been in place for ships from Amsterdam and Hamburg into London since 1664. Vicar Mompesson proposed that Eyam would voluntarily quarantine themselves, shut themselves off from the outside world; if they fled now, they might carry plague to the nearby towns of Sheffield and Bakewell, and from there who knew how many more people must die?

It was an enormous sacrifice to ask people and their families to make. And Mompesson was the wrong man to ask it, because few of them liked, respected or trusted this minister, who had been forced on them by a tyrannical Anglican church, with their BCP and oath of uniformity. The minister they loved and respected was Thomas Stanley, a puritan who had been their minister for 20 years, until forced out against his conscience. So Mompesson went to Stanley and together they again gathered the villagers; and spoke in unison; and this time everyone agreed – they would not run, they would stay, and cut themselves off, they would not be responsible for spreading death. Food would be brought to them from Chatsworth, left on the well or a Boundary stone, paid for by money they would leave there, soaked in vinegar to prevent infection. This was the future Eyam chose.

There are quite a few stories that have survived from letters and diaries from the village. Stanley stayed with the villagers because they would be needing someone to write their wills – and he would be the man to do it. Mompesson of course stayed, but tried to persuade his wife Catherine to leave. She refused to desert the villagers, and over the following months she tended to the sick and dying; Mompesson wrote of the air of ‘sadness and death’ hanging over the village; he was terrified, as they all must have been, and wrote

I’m going to die in pain and there is nothing anyone can do about it’.

In August 1666 a year after the plague started, he and Catherine went for a walk, and his wife spoke about the sweet smell in the air; she died the following morning, aged 27.

Elizabeth Hancock was a farmer. In the space of 8 days, she buried six of her children and her husband. She buried them all herself, on the farm, because everyone had agreed that they should stay as separate as possible, and not take bodies to the church yard to bury.[1]

Marshall Howe recovered from the plague; convinced he could not catch it twice, he helped bury bodies – because sometimes complete families died, and leaving no one to bury them. Marshall himself had to bury Joan, his wife, and William, his two year old son.

Farm worker Abraham Morten was the last to die from plague in Eyam in November 1666. By the end of the it all, 273 people had died, from 76 families, a death rate of about 35%. Their sacrifice meant that the plague spread to none of the surrounding villages and towns, and lord knows how many lives they saved. But at such a cost; as the village re-opened, Mompesson wrote

Our town has become a Golgotha, the place of a skull. My ears have never heard such doleful lamentations – my nose never smelled such horrid smells, and my eyes never held such ghastly spectacles.

I think there’s a museum in Eyam, and they hold an annual ceremony in the place outside where services were held during the plague, rather than in church where everyone would have been crammed together. I have a delightful place name for you here – service were held in a cave, called Cucklet Delph, which you can find west of Jumber Brook. How nice is that? All I can find out is that Delph comes from an Old English word for a natural hollow.

My excuse for telling you about Eyam, should explanation be necessary, is of course because I am going to tell you about the Great Plague of London. But I thought before that I might give you a whistle stop tour of medicine and stuff in Early Modern England, just because…well just because actually![2]

To begin at the beginning…the basics of medical theory date back to Hippocrates, a taxi driver in Clapham, no from Greece about 400 BC ish, and developed by the Roman Galen. Basically, you had to balance the four humours, blood, choler, yellow bile and black bile. So that gives you a sort of rule book for corrective action – for example, if you have too much blood you get sanguine, wildly optimistic which is in nobody’s interests, and so a bit of blood letting is needed. Things are beginning to change; the classical framework which described the world is being chipped away at, those famous names like Copernicus and Galileo and all; and in 1628 William Harvey described the circulation of the blood, so that got rid of the idea that there were two types of blood. And so we progress.

God is not written out of this however, a Physician works as a conduit of God’s power to heal, and if he annoys God in anyway, he won’t be effective, so when you are picking your doctor – make sure he’s of good, Godly character; God created all the diseases in the world to carry out his mysterious ways, but he created cures too, for physicians and herbalists to discover. Richard Talbot acquires massive fame in the 1670s when he achieves amazing cures with quinine – which the Jesuits had discovered in Cinchona bark. Though actually, he discovered Talbot had discovered all this from the work of Thomas Syndenham.

Now Sydenham was a Physician of international fame, described by a Herman Boerhaave, [Heer-mahm boor-haah-vuh] the contemporary chemist, botanist and Professor at the Dutch university of Leyden as “The light of England, the skill of Apollo, the true face of Hippocrates”. Syndenham studied, of course, under the Commonwealth at Oxford, and adopted the English tradition of Francis Bacon, that observation, not received wisdom was the thing, rejecting dogma and religious sources of cures. Instead, he saw each ailment as specific, and that the cause of disease is nature trying to expel what he called Morbific particles; the trick was to work with nature, to treat each patient and their specific needs – and crucially – to do no harm – a bit like the medical philosophy of my favourite Leveller, William Walwyn. There are loads of stories about Sydenham, no idea if they are all true; as an example, one of his patients he found exhausted and hysterical and convinced death was on the way. Realising he was weakened, not by imbalanced humours but because he was exhausted by worry and lack of food he wrote

I therefore ordered him a roast chicken and a pint of canary

Sounds good to me though I have no idea if the patient survived

Syndenham wrote prolifically, and Natural Philosophers like Robert Boyle and John Locke followed his work and recognised his genius; Locke wrote of him

You cannot imagine how far a little observation carefully man by man not tied up on the four humours or salt, sulphur and mercury,  or to acid and alkali…will carry a man in the curing of diseases.

He’s known for some specific ideas; there’s one wonderful, though terrifying quote that

A man is as old as his arteries

And I have been talking to my arteries to gee them up and make them feel young ever since. But his real fame rests on the new practical methods and better ethics of practice which slowly spread from his example and people like him, and became more and more widely adopted.

In terms of medical practitioners, Physicians like Syndenham had to be qualified by the college pf Physicians for England and Wales, and the Scots set up their own in 1681. Below that is a whole cascade of medical advisors; as Ian Mortimer describes, you are your own first responder, and every family has a bank of remedies culled from here and there, and bossed often by the women of the household. Local gentlewomen often feel it their responsibility to tend the weak and ill in their parish, and may have considerable skill, learning and experience; and were often a point of reference for all with their knowledge of herbs and traditional remedies. You would be far better to trust their advice that one of the travelling quacks you should really avoid like the plague.

There are other more semi official sources. This is the age of the Apothecaries, who might support physicians but have plenty of concoctions of their own; the demand for drugs is growing like topsy, and apothecary shops with it, and some are seriously deranged. I therefore have it on good authority that Sparrows Brains are good for inducing lust, though please don’t try this at home. And again while things are changing, I go back to the observation that one of the greatest minds of the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes, who wrote copiously about natural philosophy, had less scientific knowledge than a child today in lower secondary school. So – Robert Boyle, a God of scientific experimentation and discovery, prescribes powered human skull as part of a cure for apoplexy. Again, don’t try this at home – even if you happen to have a human skull to hand, of course, and if you do, well, please don’t get in touch.

And then there are surgeons, who deal with external problems such as broken bones, boils and stuff. They are quite interesting, because I guess we are used to depictions of barber surgeons little better than butchers, but actually these guys they get a lot of practice at practical stuff – setting bones, removing teeth, bullet wounds that sort of thing – and so are probably the most effective of all; and I think work done on civil war survival rates have recently demonstrated that a skilful and experienced surgeon gave you a significantly improved chance of recovery. Also, they are the easiest people to get hold of, because they can’t treat you remotely by letter, you have to take your broken arm to them, and so they spring up in most towns around the country. Since they have a local market and a good set of knowledge they add other strings to their bows, and hand out the sort of advice Physicians might normally give. In this maybe is the start of one of the wonders of the modern world, the GP, the General medical Practitioner.

Anyway, I need a couple of gruesome stories before we get onto the deaths of tens of thousands of people in London, and I have two, inspired by Pepys diary. First of all there’s the very common procedure of removing gall stones; Pepys has one, records he was ‘cut for the stone’ – it seems incredible anyone could survive, horrifyingly painful. Are you ready? You might want to turn away? OK? Ready for this? Here’s what happened:

The surgeon tied him to a table, made a three inch incision between scrotum and anus, pulled everything away to reveal a path to the bladder, then sticks his fingers in to remove it. I mean I know it’s fashionable to take a pop at the modern world, logic, progress and all that capitalism and lament what we have lost, but give me the modern world any day – anaesthetics just one of many, many things to celebrate. Pepys’ stone was the size of a tennis ball. He kept in in a little glass case, and every year he held a slap up dinner to celebrate the fact that

1. He survived and
2. it was over[3]

The other interesting thing I am going to share was that Prince Rupert was trepanned by a surgeon, probably 2 or three times – he had a hole dug into his skull. Interesting – explains a lot. The rumour was put about that it was syphilis, but it seems to have been an old war wound. Among Rupert’s less unattractive traits was an interest in and talent for science; and he is credited with a few things, including improving the trepanning kit – and you can see he’d have had a strong incentive to make improvements. I don’t know how many of the things attributed to Rupert are really his, but there seems to be good evidence that he was very much part of the scientific revolution. Another interesting little tale is the story of Rupert’s Cube, which was brought to my attention by a member of this parish. Rupert wanted to know if a cube could be passed through another of the same size without splitting it. He had a good mind at hand to answer; John Wallis was a prof at Oxford, cryptographer to the Commonwealth, a member of the Invisible college in the 1650s and founder of the Royal Society. He was also a mathematical genius credited with creating work in algebra and infinite series which inspired Isaac Newton to do his thing in calculus; I don’t know what any of that means, and don’t tell me because I failed my AO maths at O level, let’s just accept he was a clever man; also credited with inventing the sign for infinity. Like many natural philosophers he looked everywhere for inspiration did Wallis, including the 13th century works of Islamic mathematician Sadr al-Tusi, on the parallel postulate. Please. Just don’t ask. I did look it up, something to do with parallel lines, not the classic Blondie album, but geometry.

Where was I? Oh yes Ruperts Cube, not to be confused with Rubric’s cube; John Wallis proved mathematically as well as physically that you could pass a cube through another of the same size. Snaps to John Wallis. And good lord why do you let me go on like this, I’m supposed to be telling you about the great plague of London not rattling on about Cubes. But one more thing, forgive me; In 1665 there is another remarkable event in the history of science; the publication of Micrographia by Robert Hooke.

Robert Hooke – founder member of the royal society of course – was a wonder with things mechanical. In Wadham college when anyone needed something designed for the next mad as frogs experiment, as likely as not it’s Hooke they’d turn to. Well Hooke had his own projects, with lenses, to look inwards rather than outwards, microscopes. As always he was standing on the shoulders of others; Galileo I think did something in 1609, but I think it’s Hans and Zacharias Janssen who are credited with the first microscope with compound lenses – they were spectacle makers in the Netherlands.

Hooke developed his own microscopes though, and had them built by one of the myriad and growing instrument workshops in the wonderland that was London, a man called Christopher White. Micrographia was the astounding outcome – copper plate images in fine detail of tiny creatures and materials – fleas, gnats, cork; detail no one had ever seen before that opened up a new world. It was Hooke who first coined the word ‘cells’, and saw the building blocks of life. Samuel Pepys of course loved it “the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life,”

But others thought it was not much more than window dressing. Margaret Cavendish was not alone in wondering what was the point of the detail of the flea; it told you nothing about how it was conceived, created, what animated it. She was not alone – many others would agree; it was not messing about with experiments that counted, reason and logic would uncover the secrets of the universe, not observation of its surfaces. But the Royal Society was spreading its message – to all who were interested. Henry Oldenberg was a German natural philosopher who was attracted to England during the Commonwealth, a good friend of Milton and Boyle. As the first secretary of the Society, in March 1665 he started publishing a journal, Philosophical Transactions; his market was – well, everyone, or as he put it[4]

Such Englishmen as are drawn to curious things, yet perhaps do not know Latin

Right, that’s it. Let’s get to that blessed plague.

In 17th century England, most people didn’t die of plague of course; the biggest killer by quite a way was Consumption, so it wasn’t just for 19th century Russian novels; Tuberculosis accounted for about 18% of all deaths in London. Fever and the indefinable ague was next, small pox and measles took 7%. But in 1665 and 1666, it’s the old enemy – the Black Death, bubonic plague.

So we left London’s story with a couple of deaths outside the walls, and then in May there was one inside, at which point the Mayor started to take some notice, and ordered bonfires, and a clean of the streets. In June, the temperature rose, it was hot and dry, the water courses were even more clogged with detritus and dead and rotting stuff. You probably don’t need me to tell you again that London was an absolute dream for your average plague bacillus. I mean I don’t know where plague bacilli go to hang out and catch up with the news, but wherever that is, I have no doubt there are old hands advising their mates to head over to London. Outside the walls there were  sort of shanty towns among the smarter ‘burbs; Evelyn described the City as

A congestion of Houses; some of the principal streets are so narrow, as there is nothing so deformed’

As people crammed into London, thousands migrating in every year, housing could not keep up. So houses were sub divided, into tenements, and then subdivided some more. Then there were houses that had been deserted by Royalists in the Commonwealth and they’d not made it back – often these too they were split up for multiple families.

John Lawrernce, the mayor, ordered more pesthouses to be built. These were places where people with plague were strapped into a sedan chair and taken from their home to the Pesthouse to be quarantined; it was not the sort of provision that could cope with an epidemic though, nowhere near enough of them. Instead as the numbers rose, as soon as a house was found to have an occupant with the plague, it was ordered to board itself up, and Watchers appointed to make sure they stayed in quarantine for 40 days. On 7th June, Pepys was on his rounds, but found it

the hottest day that ever I felt in my life

So he took himself and his friends to the New Exchange on the south side of the Strand, for a refreshing drink. Pepys took to travelling by Water as much as possible to avoid en-plagued people, but

This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and “Lord have mercy upon us” writ there; which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that, to my remembrance, I ever saw. It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell to and chew, which took away the apprehension.

Pepys took baccy to take away the bad smelsl; because it was thought that bad smells caused infection, malaria, miasma, and by golly I bet there were some bad smells in London on the hottest day ever in 1665. So people smoked tobacco and pressed pomanders to their noses to drive away the miasma.

The number of deaths grew through June; 47 one week, then 118, then 168 then 267. The Mayor sent teams out to kill dogs, cats and pigeons. The death toll went up further; 470 a week, 1000 a week. Surgeons were ordered to carry white wands so people could avoid them, more bonfires were built, street hawkers were banned, beggars swept from the street. By the end of July, 2000 were recorded dead from plague every week; but it was probably 125% higher, because people bribed officials not to record their deaths as plague, so they wouldn’t be boarded up

People were leaving the city in droves, in their thousands, had been since June. Sometimes, they were met by angry locals with pitchforks and cudgels, forcing them to go back. Elizabeth Pepys went to Woolwich, but Husband Sam stayed in Seething lane – too much work to do at the Admiralty to leave.

Everybody’s looks and discourse in the streets is of death

He wrote, and in the coffeehouses people scoured the published reports from Bills of Mortality to see if this thing was passing. It wasn’t; and then the coffeehouses were closed anyway, and the plague was in every London parish except 4. Outside of London, towns tried to protect themselves – Bath banned anyone who had been to an infected place within 20 days; but many places failed to fight the plague off – 3,000 would die in Norwich. The Dutch Newspapers were loving it

The English nation is now brought down so low with plague that a man may run them down with his finger

People with the means – Physicians, clergy, merchants, nobility – took to the road. The King and his court were of course some of the first to run for it. As his people were packing, Charles called in George Monk, told him he was in charge now. Ta ta so long abysinnia, lifted his frilly knickerbockers and legged it to Salisbury. Of course it didn’t go unnoticed as their carts rumbled out of the city.

What shall the poor doe that behind do stay

Death makes them rich, by taking them away

Sang one ballad. Again – the idea that the disease is no respecter of rank is sort of right, and sort of not. Charles was very keen to counteract this kind of bad publicity, there can sometimes be such a thing as bad publicity. So in November 1665, the London Gazette was created as an official publication, not a commercial thing, a sort of newsletter, sent by post to subscribers, carrying positive messages about the King and his court – I’m told it’s still going to this day. One ballad in this charm offensive sang

Rejoice Oh London in thy King

Who to thy city does such comfort bring[5]

To be fair, Charles did send one surgeon back to help out, so there’s that. Among the acts of cowardice or plain terror, there were plenty of others did stay and did help; William Boghurst the apothecary in St Giles, for example, is credited with seeing 60 patients a day. There are no doubt countless displays of heroism from nameless clergy, doctors, or indeed searchers after the dead; these were normally older women with white wands who came to identify bodies; though it has to be said they were very short on training and not averse to taking the odd bribe or two, but you know, at least they went.

And then there were the bearers – who took bodies to be buried. They had a job and a half, because at the height of the plague there were 8000 dying every day. so the whole idea of locking everyone up was a distant dream, and anybody you met might have got it already, so hugging and kissing was out, not even a quite ‘mawh, mwah, daaaarling how are you’ air kiss. This is barge pole territory we are in.

Plague pits opened up outside the walls, but there were just too many coffins to be cleared away easily; John Evelyn travelled in a coach through London to St James and wrote in his diary that it was

dismal and dangerous, to see so many coffins exposed in the streets and the streets so thin of people

Pepys was also horrified at the deserted and silent streets; almost no watermen plying their trade any more, the wherries empty and tied up on the banks, the streets empty

Lord how empty the streets are, and melancholy so many poor sick people in the street, full of sores…And they tell me that in Westminster there is never a physician and but one apothecary left, all being dead

In September the court moved to Oxford, because a parliament was needed, because war against the Dutch or anyone is an expensive business so more money was needed. It was a difficult parliament because so many MPs stayed away. It was a difficult parliament for the inhabitants of Oxford who had a bunch of rowdy courtiers descending on them like gaily dressed locusts. The academic and writer Anthony Wood complained furiously that they were

Rough, rude, whoremongers. Though they were neat and gay in their apparel yet they were very nasty, and beastly, leaving at their departure their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coalhouses cellars

And that’s not all. They gambled outrageously and obviously as Londoners died in their droves; there was outrage at the very public affair between the king and Castlemaine, there were rude ballads about her gentle listener, but she cared not one jot, gambling away with the best of them – on one single occasions, £580, which is north of £60,000 quid in today’s money.

The Oxford Parliament, small though it was, obediently did its duty and voted another £1½m in the Bill of Supply, though there were numerous fallings out among government ministers along the way, so all a bit chaotic. One of the reasons, was Charles’ habit of saying yes to everyone in private and then saying something else in public; George Downing came for a chat, Charles agreed with a bunch of new things to add to the Bill of Supply; but didn’t tell anyone else. So, there was the confusing sight of government ministers opposing a government bill because they thought it was not royally sanctioned. Clarendon was back in the ascendant, though, after a period in the wilderness for initially opposing the war, and opposing Charles’ Declarations of Indulgence for Dissenters. But he had managed to hack off the most powerful of other ministers – the Earl of Arlington. Arlington, and several others, were now gunning for our Clarendon.

In the background there was money trouble despite the passing of the bill. Parliament might vote the money from customs dues and trade; but where was the money they promised to be found? The plague in London had taken a huge chunk out of England’s trade. Another huge chunk had been sunk or stolen by Dutch privateers, who seemed to be much more effective than their English counter parts. Together it meant that between Easter 1665 and Easter 1666 public revenues actually collected, halved. That may be partly the reason for a series of diplomatic failures that would leave England without allies in the new campaigning period –promising discussions with Brandenburg-Prussia, Denmark and Sweden were all sunk by money from De Witt and the Dutch States General. Arlington, the minister leading the initiatives, was forced to admit that like Greta Garbo, England wanted to be alone, and would fight without the encumbrance of friends or lovers in 1666.

Public rumours about corruption abounded, specifically that all that money collected last year had not been spent on the navy, but gone into courtiers’ and royal pockets; probably this is wrong – Pepys himself as Surveyor General now had a firm grip on Navy accounts, but the perception given by the court’s extravagance and the King’s behaviour fuelled the rumours. You have to rather admire the towering levels of insensitivity, that as thousands continued to die in the capital and diplomatic bids to end England’s isolation were failing, Charles sponsored a prize for a new horse race at Newmarket, and turned up to join in. He thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. They had a favourite wheeze; the king and his companions would wait for the competing horses half way along the 4 mile course, and then join in, riding alongside them towards the flag. Charles would enjoy doing this for much of his reign in both spring and summer.

Still, in London at last the numbers of deaths were falling, helped by the cold weather as winter set in; by December, the carts of the rich were returning, and in February 1666 even the king and his courtiers felt safe enough to return, carts piled high with possessions, rumbling and clattering through the streets.

London recorded 68,000 plague deaths during the epidemic; probably the total was much higher for the reasons previously noted. Across England and Wales, there were 87,000 more deaths than normal in 1665. The death rate was nothing like it had been 1349; but maybe claimed 20% of Londoners, and 2.5% of people across England and Wales. Same as the civil wars sort of thing.

Still, war waits for no plague, And the lists were opening for the new 1666 Anglo Dutch season. The catastrophic fall in trade meant that the Navy had a financial shortfall of £1¼m as it prepared for the campaigning season. Charles led a desperate campaign for public loans, and eventually 79 ships were equipped for the coming fight. In March, there was more bad news though – Louis XIV had finally lived up to his treaty obligations, and declared war on the English in support of his Dutch allies. The English once again turned away from plague, and set their faces for war.

And we will hear about war and other forms of death and destruction next week here on the fun-packed, never a dull moment history of England. I was at this point going to make some lame joke by saying that despite this, absolutely nothing happened in Loughborough in 1666, but then I just thought I’d check, and I was wrong! Loughborough was on Fire in 1666. Quite literally. Nudge nudge and all that. Which we can talk about next time.

So, something to look forward to then everyone. Until then, thank you very much for listening, and if you are a member don’t forget to grab the App at History of England.co.uk, it’ll help you get the most out of membership, advert free listening and shedcasts and all. Good luck everyone, and have a great week.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-35064071

[2] Mortimer, I: Time Traveller’s guide to Restoration Britain’, pp289-320

[3] Mortimer, I: ‘Toime Travellers Guide…’

[4] Healy, J: ‘The Blazing World’, p340

[5] Lincoln, M: ‘London and the 17th century’, pp 198-204