In some ways, I have been researching this book all my life.
Growing up in London helped. I believe that an event as traumatic as the Great Plague leaves a terrible scar on a city’s psyche, and its inhabitants can’t help but sense the impact somewhere deep within. I remember having plague pits pointed out to me as a child, and staring fascinated at grassed mounds of earth. I was told there was one under St. George and the Dragon at St. John’s Wood Roundabout, near Lord’s Cricket Ground. Certainly the skeletons of victims are still being excavated as the Crossrail project is dug through the city. We walk on plague corpses every day.
As a teenager, madly in love with history, I joined the Sealed Knot—an English Civil Wars reenactment group. I fought in a number of battles (including Lansdown, where Quentin Absolute fell) and rose to the rank of sergeant in the same regiment I have placed Captain Coke, Sir Bevil Grenville’s Regiment of Foote—whose colonel, in a marvellous literary link, was Count Nikolai Tolstoy, grandson of the novelist.
I also admit that I once went to a cockfight. I was travelling around Peru in 1988, staying near the famous Nazca Lines, and felt I should attend in the spirit of research—at least, that was my excuse! It was as brutal as you can imagine. The images lodged in my head, and are now out upon my pages.
Yet nothing could truly prepare me for the other horrors I was to read about and ultimately set down. The period was not one I’d studied much, except in that basic schoolboy way. The first shock was in reading about the English Civil Wars—the British, really, as they ravaged all the isles. I think I’d retained my Sealed Knot view of something rather chivalrous and romantic. They were nothing of the kind. The images we see each day from various parts of the world remind us that civil war is the most brutal of all. Close to a staggering 10 percent of the population died, many in battle, most of the starvation, sickness and violence that occurred away from the battlefield. I realized quite quickly that most of the former soldiers I turned into characters in this book would have been suffering the seventeenth-century equivalent of post-traumatic stress disorder. It does not excuse but may go a little way to explaining some of their actions.
There were happier areas of research—studying the English theatre, which I love and have been a part of; and studying that formative time when actresses were first allowed to grace the stage. (What would my life have been without actresses?) And the Twitter and email feeds of The Diary of Samuel Pepys I signed up for have been a daily joy, as well as vitally informative about customs, food, manners, songs … and pubs! Sam sure liked his bevy, from morning drafts for breakfast to Rhenish in the evening and many ales in between.
I was also fascinated by the turbulent religious times. The wars, fought at least partly about God and how you saw him, unleashed a massive diversity of belief—from the extremely puritanical to its opposite, as exemplified by the Ranters, who worshipped the Almighty by living in communes where they ripped off their clothes, swore, drank, smoked and practised free love. As Lawrence Clarkson, aka Captain of the Rant, wrote: “Devil is God, hell is heaven, sin holiness, damnation salvation: this and only this is the first resurrection.”
Such was the combustible mix at the heart of London. There were so many stunning books I read about the times, and the pestilence in particular, and I list them separately. One, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, was wonderfully evocative and expounded superbly in the notes in the Oxford Classics Edition. He coined the fabulous term for the plague: “The Monster in the Labyrinth.” It was, and London was, and it is with fascinated horror that I have wandered my native streets again, literally and on the page.
I hope I have come close to an accurate portrait of time and place. I am sure there are things I’ve got wrong. But before I receive letters, I need to confess something: I have changed a few dates. The Earl of Rochester attempted to abduct the heiress Elizabeth Mallet on May 26, 1665. The theatres were closed for the plague on June 5, 1665. For dramatic purposes, I have amalgamated the two events. I also reopened the theatres somewhat early. Also the earl may have only spent three weeks at his majesty’s displeasure, rather than the three months I have here.
There are so many people I need to thank for the creation of this novel that I have done so in the Acknowledgements. Here, I just need to thank, well, London. Since I no longer live there, I find I cannot stop writing about it. Each time I go back, I learn something new. And each time I also thank providence that I get to write about these extraordinary periods in history and do not have to live through them.
Scarify the buboes, indeed!
C. C. Humphreys
Salt Spring Island, B.C., Canada
July 2014