Natural death could strike at an early age in seventeenth-century England. It was not uncommon for a baby to die soon after leaving its mother’s womb. If the child was fortunate enough to survive for more than a few days, there was still a good chance that it would be dead before it had reached its milestone first birthday. Mortality rates for infants below the age of one were resolutely grim throughout the century, with roughly 165 out of every 1,000 babies born expected to die before they had turned a year old in the first 25 years after 1600. The next quarter-century saw this figure drop slightly, to 153 out of every 1,000 infants, but in the latter 50 years of the 1600s the statistics climbed sharply again. From 1675 until the turn of the eighteenth century, close to one in five births resulted in the death of the child before the celebration of its first birthday.
The death of a newborn baby in seventeenth-century England could be quick and distressing. The country squire Nicholas Assheton recorded in February 1618 that his wife had undergone a labour so ferocious that the infant was dead only half an hour after being delivered. Alice Thornton, an autobiographer residing in North Yorkshire, complained before the imminent birth of her daughter in 1652 that the unborn child, ‘was greatly forced with violent motions perpetually, till it grew soe weake that it had left stirring’. Her daughter was delivered and pronounced dead after a mere 30 minutes of life, not living long enough even to be baptised, although a minister was sent for in case she survived.
Those infants that survived the initial birth, but which were nonetheless destined to die young, arguably faced a more traumatic end.
Alice Thornton vividly recorded the premature deaths of several of her children, disclosing to posterity the awful experience through which many parents were forced to live. Her son, William Thornton, died less than a fortnight after being born in 1660. After a ‘hard’ and ‘hazardous’ labour, her initial reaction was that she had been blessed with a ‘happie child’. The Friday following the birth, however, things changed rapidly. Having had William dressed in the morning, she noticed that he had become unsettled and irritated. After three hours of sleep, the situation had taken another undesirable turn, with the child breaking out in ‘red round spotts’ the size of halfpennies and ‘all whealed white over’. Alice tried to comfort her ailing child, holding him in her arms as he slept, and remarking that every so often he would lift his eyes to the ceiling, as if he ‘saw angells in heaven’. Perhaps he had. That night young Willy Thornton’s sickness took hold completely and fatally. On Saturday morning the baby died, leaving Alice bereft that he had been taken from her so soon. Alice’s husband took the news equally as badly, lamenting that he had lost a son and heir.
Ralph Josselin, vicar of Earls Colne in Essex from 1640, suffered a similar blow in February 1648. His wife gave birth to a son on 11 February, which was in his view the ‘easiest and speediest labour that ever shee had’. By the seventeenth day of that month, however, the child was severely ill and ‘full of phlegme’, causing a physician to be promptly sent for who attempted to revive baby Ralph with a remedy of syrup of roses. At this point Jane Josselin, the child’s mother, was convinced that her son would die. Ralph Senior similarly expected the infant to be dead by the following morning. The child survived the night to the great relief of his parents, but the warning signs were there for all to see, and Ralph swiftly set about organising for his son to be baptised and formally admitted into the Christian Church. The tiny infant was accordingly washed and sanctified the following day. The child’s condition had not improved by 19 February, by which time Ralph had resigned himself to the fact that his sick offspring would not be recovering. Drawing strength from his religious convictions, so imperative to the life of a seventeenthcentury English citizen, he soothed himself and his wife by maintaining that little Ralph would soon be in ‘the land of rest, where there is no sicknes nor childhood but all perfection’. That night the baby cried less, but Ralph noted that it kept up a distressingly frothy mouth; the next morning, the despairing father witnessed ‘some redd mattery stuffe’ coming out in place of the foam. The end was near. On 21 February, a mere 10 days after his birth, with such promise of life ahead of him, baby Ralph departed the world without uttering a sound. Ralph Senior turned back to religion to ease his bereavement, commenting in his diary that God had been merciful in giving him and his wife time to prepare for the child’s passing.
Reaching a first birthday did not by any means signal that the danger of dying a premature death was over, as Ralph Josselin would have been all too aware. Seventeenth-century England witnessed many cases of children dying before their tenth birthday, including Ralph’s daughter Mary. His diary entries suggest that Mary had been sick for some time before her condition suddenly worsened. He relayed that on 22 May 1650, just two years after the death of his son, his eight-year-old daughter was dangerously ill with worms. Ralph hurriedly ventured down to Colne Priory to fetch some medicine back for his sick child, feeling hopeful that she would make a full recovery from the ailment with the assistance of an earthly remedy. He came home to find that she had passed a stool containing three ‘great dead wormes’, a good sign, and the next day he remarked that she had successfully ‘voyded’ six more. In the morning she slept peacefully, another good sign, but by nightfall the terminal gravity of her sickness was evident. Ralph was woken by his wife in the middle of the night, sobbing that Mary was dying. The following morning all hopes of saving this young girl’s life were extinguished, and as he had done with his baby son, Ralph offered his daughter up into the reassuring arms of the Lord. She died on 27 May, to the utter lamentation of her father:
‘This day a quarter past two in ye afternoone my Mary fell asleepe in the Lord […] shee was 8 yeares and 45 dayes old when shee dyed; my soule had aboundant cause to blesse God for her, who was our first fruites […] it was a pretious child, a bundle of myrrhe, a bundle of sweetnes; shee was a child of ten thousand, full of wisedome, womanlike gravity, knowledge […] tender hearted & loving […] it was to us as a boxe of sweet ointment; which now its broken smells more deliciously then it did before.’1
The extent to which a parent grieved for their deceased child depended on how old the child was at the time of his or her death. The general rule of thumb stipulated that the younger a child was when it perished, the less inclined the parents would be to express an outpouring of genuine sorrow for the loss. Part of the reason for this trend probably stemmed from the underdevelopment of the bond of affection between a newborn baby and its parents, as well as from the tendency for early modern individuals to view tiny infants as not-quite-developed people. Nicholas Assheton may have lost a child merely half an hour after its coming into the world in 1618, but that did not stop him from embarking on a carefree hunt in the snow the following day. John Evelyn, the famous writer, diarist, and resident of London, was somewhat reserved when recounting the death of his son John, who died of ‘convulsion-fits’ in January 1654 at the age of just three months. The passing of his son Richard in 1658, who had reached the age of five when he succumbed to an ague and thus was much older than his younger brother had been, was much harder for the writer to bear. Describing how Richard had suffered ‘six fits of a quartan ague’, Evelyn continued that, ‘it pleased God to visit him…to our inexpressible grief and affliction’. The enormous pain of losing his five-year-old boy was laid bare in the passionate admiration he expressed for his deceased son and his many extraordinary talents, especially for one so young. Evelyn wrote feverishly in his diary about the number of languages the boy could read, the unequalled ability he possessed for conjugating foreign verbs and memorising Latin and French vocabulary, and the ‘astonishing’ piety Richard had demonstrated as a Christian, particularly in his understanding of the historical parts of the Bible. The writer remarked that, ‘he was all life, all prettiness, far from morose, sullen, or childish in any thing he said or did’. The modern reader would be forgiven for thinking that he was describing a literate teenager of 15, not a little boy of five. He would clearly be sorely missed.
The trauma of losing a child could still affect a parent years later. Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, took to marking the day of her son’s death annually as a way in which to channel her continued grief. In 1667 she wrote:
‘I kept a private fast, being the day three years upon which my son died. As soon as up, I retired into the garden to meditate; had there large meditations upon the sickness and death of my only child, upon all his sick-bed expressions, and the manner how God was pleased to awaken him, with which thoughts my heart was much affected.’2
Lady Warwick was fortunate to be alive herself. Childbirth risked the life of the mother as well as endangering the prospective life of the baby. It is estimated that throughout the whole of the seventeenth century a mother had a one per cent chance of dying during her pregnancy or in labour, making it a considerably riskier business than childbearing in the twenty-first century. Oliver Heywood, a nonconformist minister living in the north of England, reported in 1684 that he had heard of two women dying in childbirth in a single day in Bradford, with another woman dying the day after in the same tragic fashion. Very soon after these deaths, Heywood stated that his wife had been called to the bedside of yet another expectant mother who had fallen ill during the trials and tribulations of early modern labour. In this case the mother survived; the child did not. Although the wealthier sort might have more ready access to physicians and other professionals while inhabiting the childbed, this did not necessarily mean that the risk of maternal death was any less present for them. The daughter-in-law of Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester, was said to have ‘delivered of a daughter very well’ in Charing Cross in 1652, but the next day she was gripped by a violent fever that caused her to ‘lose her senses’. The physicians could do nothing for her, and so she died.
Although it was quite acceptable for an individual to count themselves lucky in the event that they survived the hazards of childhood in seventeenth-century England, they were by no means left invincible as an adolescent or adult. Life expectancy was low even for grown men and women. An adult might reach the age of 60 and consider it a fortunate stroke of luck, but most people living in the 1600s could expect a lifespan of somewhere between 30 and 40 years. To the modern observer living in England in the twenty-first century, this is a startlingly young age, tantamount to dying in the prime of life. For those residing in the country four centuries ago, this would have been nothing more or less than the accepted norm. Early onsets of disease were a considerable killer, the prevalence of which has led some to believe that it is likely that most people felt ill most of the time in the seventeenth century.
While by no means the biggest killer disease of the period, bubonic plague is often remembered as the worst. Its horrible symptoms, coupled with the cruel way in which it snatched away whole families and decimated entire towns, has meant that even today the sickness holds a fearsome reputation in the popular imagination. England suffered a deadly outbreak of plague in the middle of the fourteenth century. Known to posterity as the Black Death, it has been reasonably suggested that during this visitation up to a third or even half of the population was totally wiped out by the disease. By the beginning of the seventeenth century plague had become much less devastating in England, but frightening and considerable outbreaks were still known to occur until the mid-1660s. Significant visitations of bubonic plague occurred in the country in 1603, 1625, 1636, and 1665, mainly affecting London and those unlucky towns that straddled major trade routes out of the capital. The disease’s symptoms were ugly. After receiving the fateful fleabite, sufferers were struck down with a high temperature that led to excruciating headaches, vomiting, agitation, and confusion. At the same time, black carbuncles burst out of the skin wherever the victim had been bitten, and the lymph nodes in any of the groin, armpit, or neck began to swell and fester, giving the infected individual a swollen, unsightly appearance. A contemporary observer of the plague marvelled at the number of different symptoms that sufferers could display during an outbreak, commenting that one week ‘the general distempers’ might be ‘botches and boils’, the next ‘clear-skinned as may be’. He continued:
‘One week, full of spots and tokens; and perhaps the succeeding, none at all. Now taken with a vomiting and looseness, and within two or three days almost a general raging madness. One while patients used to linger four or five days, at other times not forty-eight hours; and at this very time we find it more quick than ever it was. Many are sick, and few escape. Where it has had its fling, there it decreases; where it has not been long, there it increases.’3
The plague brought with it upon every major visitation in seventeenthcentury England varying levels of fear, frenzy, and disarray. The lawyer and merchant Walter Yonge, writing from the safety of Devon in 1603, commented with apparent terror that London had undergone that year ‘the greatest pestilence that ever was heard of or known by any man living’, reporting anxiously that at its height 3,000 people were dying every week. The plague travelled north in 1604 to York, causing further disorder and resulting in the deaths of over 3,500 of its helpless citizens, a third of the city’s population. In an attempt to quell the spread of infection York Minster was shut up, the city’s markets were suspended, and the diseased were rounded up and taken to plague lodges or booths at various designated locations on the outskirts of the town, where fate would decide whether they lived or died. London was faced with two more lethal onslaughts of black carbuncles and unsightly swellings in 1625 and 1630. The 1630 visitation sped northwards to East Anglia, breaking out in the spring at Cambridge and Norwich and causing wealthy town dwellers to flee in panic into the surrounding countryside. In May the Reverend John Rous wrote in his diary that three houses had been shut up in Norwich, a measure resulting from official instructions stipulating that buildings housing sick residents should be quarantined at all costs in order to stem the spread of infection. But for many the plague was simply unstoppable. During the summer of 1630 Rous reported that the pestilence was still very ‘sore’ in Cambridge, to such an extent that the Stourbridge fair held annually in the town had been cancelled.
The powerful influence of religion in seventeenth-century England caused many to view the coming of plague as a divine punishment from God for the sins of mankind. Reflecting on the outbreak that struck Newcastle in 1636, the religious merchant John Fenwick stated gravely that God had spoken to the town’s citizens by mortally infecting 5,500 people and making the streets grow ‘greene with grasse’. The Reverend Edward Burghall, writing earlier in 1631 following a visitation of the plague in Lancashire, agreed wholeheartedly with this celestial explanation. He believed that Cheshire had been protected from the sickness only because public fasts had ‘turned away’ God’s hand, leaving other areas, such as Preston, to be depopulated and turned rotten. If this was the case, then the epidemic of 1665 was by far God’s harshest biological punishment of the century. Approximately 100,000 people would die in the catastrophic event that has become known as the Great Plague of London, although in actual fact it affected many areas outside of the capital too. None would be exempt from God’s arrow, barring those who could afford to leave the city quickly. Citizens living in squalor in London’s slums were invariably doomed to an uncertain, and often unpleasant, fate. Plenty would be reduced to a death in the gutter. Officials and professionals with religious and civil obligations, such as vicars and searchers (the latter consisting of women hired to seek out corpses and determine the cause of death), were likewise vulnerable to infection. Hysteria and paranoia would reach fever pitch as many obsessed over the incessant weekly recordings of the number of plague deaths in the capital printed in the Bills of Mortality, which seemed to stack higher with every new edition. The Great Plague was a blight on the English people like no other epidemic in the seventeenth century had been before it, but it would also bring a resounding end to the sporadic outbreaks of major plague in the country.
The first isolated cases of plague were reported in London in late 1664. By the spring of 1665 the disease had reared its fearsome head again, but this time it was more worrying, for the hot summer months were a period in which plague was known to thrive. Samuel Pepys, the famous London diarist, noted nervously on 30 April that there were ‘great fears of the sicknesse here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up’. A month later he recorded that the plague was ‘growing upon us in this towne’. By June, it was clear that London was sliding into a serious epidemic. On the twenty-ninth Pepys noticed ‘against his will’ that two or three houses were shut up in Drury Lane, with red crosses painted on the doors of each and the words ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ written alongside them. News began to reach the provinces that the plague – that dreaded disease – was on course to overrun the capital, provoking frantic responses from concerned family members. Sir Ralph Verney’s Aunt Isham urged her nephew to wear a quill filled with quicksilver, sealed with hard wax, and sewn up in a ‘silke thinge’ around his neck for protection against the disease while he was in town. July saw the mass exodus of 1,800 families from London as the plague began to take hold in earnest, by which time King Charles II and his courtiers had already fled to Hampton Court. The poor could do nothing but stay and pray. Ralph Josselin, watching events unfold agitatedly from Earls Colne, wrote on 9 July that, ‘the plague feares the Londoners; they flie before it and the country feares all trade with London’. On 28 July he reported again that the ‘plague grows hott; persons fall down in London streets, 1843 of plague’. Five days later, he partook in the first monthly public fast for the capital, which his parish hoped would convince God to stop the disease in its tracks.
The Bills of Mortality announced the deaths of 2,817 from plague in London in August 1665. It was now the height of summer, the worst time of year in which to attempt to control the contagion, and to firsthand witnesses it must have appeared as though people were dropping like flies. Bodies were everywhere. The crowded and cramped nature of the city, with its narrow streets and entranceways, and stacked housing, helped the plague to spread rapidly. Pepys recalled on 15 August meeting ‘a dead corps of the plague’ in a narrow alleyway. On 7 September John Evelyn, having sent his wife and children to Wotton in Surrey to keep them safe, lamented the sorrowful condition of the city:
‘Came home, there perishing near 10,000 poor creatures weekly; however, I went all along the city and suburbs from Kent Street to St James’s, a dismal passage, and dangerous to see so many coffins exposed in the streets, now thin of people; the shops shut up, and all in mournful silence, not knowing whose turn it might be next.’4
Pepys ruminated on the desolation of his city on 14 September, penning in his diary that he had found ‘the Angell tavern at the lower end of Towerhill, shut up, and more than that, the alehouse at the Tower-stairs’. The plague slowed in the autumn months of 1665, but thousands of lives were still lost. By the beginning of 1666 exterior commentators had begun to be hopeful that the coming of cold weather would finally halt the disease. On 26 January Josselin spoke of ‘the greatest plague in England since [that] in Edward the thirds time, and yett it continues […] What God may doe, the weather being now cold frostie, I know not, but hope well’. The city authorities had tried their best to prevent the spread of infection, but with limited knowledge of how the plague was transmitted from person to person they were left to issue speculative orders to London’s citizens in the hopes that they would prove effective. Preventative orders published on behalf of the king in 1666 were imaginative, if not wholly convincing. Fires were to be made ‘in moveable Pans’ for ‘all necessary publique Meetings in Churches’ and other ‘convenient Fumes to correct the Air’ were also to be burned; the authorities hoped that this would cleanse the bad air that they believed aided the plague’s transmission. Cats, dogs, swine, and pigeons were banned from roaming the streets, and rotten meats, fish, and other flesh were forbidden to be sold in shops and markets. One measure that is likely to have had a positive effect on the stemming of the disease was the shutting up of infected dwellings, ideally allowing the sickness to burn itself out in a controlled and demarcated environment. This was bad news for symptomless residents trapped in houses with sick relatives and friends, but good news for the rest of London. The setting up of pesthouses by local officials performed a similar service.
2. An excerpt from the Bill of Mortality for the week commencing 15 August 1665. It lists the many causes of death in the capital at this time in London’s history. The Bills had been printed on a regular basis in London since an aggressive outbreak of plague in 1603. They provided a way in which citizens could keep abreast of the mortality statistics stacking up around them, being especially devoured when plague epidemics broke out. The Bill here reflects the large numbers of people who were dying from plague in the summer of 1665, with 3,880 deaths recorded for this week alone.
By the middle of the year London was recovering from plague. Shops that were once boarded up had reopened, and the king and his court had made a reassuring return to the city in early February. But the pestilence would continue to rage elsewhere in the country throughout 1666, as it had done since its initial outbreak in London the previous year. The capital city had certainly not been alone in its sufferings. Samuel Newton, alderman of Cambridge, related in September 1665 that the ‘Great Danger was alsoe then heere in Cambridge, severall dyeing then heere…and at the pesthouses of the sicknes’. By royal proclamation the Stourbridge fair was cancelled again that year. The antiquary Anthony
3. A reproduction from a broadside printed in c.1665 during the Great Plague of London. At a glance it shows the myriad ways in which plague cataclysmically upended daily life for Londoners. The top left-hand image depicts at least three people reduced to sickbeds in one room. The image below it captures wealthy townspeople attempting to flee the capital, only to be barred from making their escape by an armed party. Across from and below this scene can be viewed the unorthodox burial practices to which authorities were forced to resort as a result of the high numbers of plague dead. Mass graves can clearly be seen in the bottom left-hand image.
Wood conveyed from Oxford in July 1665 that a watch had been set up at night there to ‘keepe out infected persons’. The plague had likewise flared up in Chelmsford at this time, being infected by the many ‘hecklers’ that came to the town from London. A contemporary correspondent observed regretfully that it was not unusual for Chelmsford to be visited by the plague if it had broken out in the capital. The situation did not appear to have improved by October when Betty Adams wrote to a member of the Verney family from Great Baddow in Essex:
‘The sickness is at Chelmsford a litel mile from me which coseis me to be veri fearfull, so many of our town goes that way to Markit, thos which bee shut up would run About did not sum stand with guns redy to shoot them if they stur.’5
Rumours abounded of the plague’s spread in the provinces, instilling both fear and disquiet in the preoccupied minds of the English, who could do nothing but wait with bated breath as events took their uncertain course. A dog was supposed to have carried the disease from Wendover to Ellesborough. Local hearsay had it that a pesthouse erected on the outskirts of Aylesbury had been overtaken by fraught sufferers who were burning ‘sheep-racks and gates’ for fuel. In Whissendine, Rutland, an invasion of traders bringing their goods in the night from an infected town in October 1665 caused the husband of Mrs Sherard to arm himself with a pistol and demand that they be shut up with those who had been foolish enough to receive them. Much further south of Rutland, in Ipswich, the burial register for the parish of St Nicholas exploded with entries in September as the plague bedded down there. By November around 22 plague-related deaths had been recorded in the parish, revealing that in some cases whole families in the town had succumbed to the disease. The Garwoods, the Wades, and the Diers were particularly affected.
By the summer of 1666 the plague had still not subsided. It continued to cause misery in Winchester, where it was thought that 11 people had died in a single day in June. Reports of violence from infected inmates who had been shut up in their houses persisted across the country. In July, further rumours reached the ears of a seventeenth-century correspondent of a violent outbreak of plague on the south coast. Slowly but surely, however, the sickness’s reign faltered, and the sickly hubbub that had many obsessed and engrossed began to die away. The Great Plague was the last major epidemic of its kind in England. Plague would never again bring the country to its knees, although other killer diseases would readily take its place in the future. Bubonic plague has a reputation that lingers even to the present day, with many assuming that it was always fatal once caught, that it was the very worst death sentence that an early modern individual could face. It is true that plague was normally fatal, but sometimes people lived to tell the tale. Elias Ashmole remarked airily in 1645 that his maid Elizabeth ‘fell sick of the plague, but escaped’.
An epidemic disease that was much more widespread in seventeenthcentury England, and that also killed, was smallpox. It is no exaggeration to suggest that most people living in the country at this time either caught smallpox themselves or knew somebody who would develop the condition, be they a vague acquaintance or an immediate family member. It differed from plague in many ways, with an obvious distinction being that it maintained a seemingly constant presence in England from the beginning to the end of the century. A successful vaccine against the disease would not be developed until 1796, leaving seventeenth-century England with an unshakeable problem. Smallpox was a disease that sometimes left people bemoaning the lifelong disfigurements it caused rather than the number of deaths it resulted in. But it was nonetheless greatly feared, and so it should have been, for some estimates have proposed that the fatality rate amongst the infected could be as high as 60 per cent. Ralph Josselin wrote gravely in his diary on 11 July 1674 that, ‘the small pox [is] next doore to my house, God preserve mee’. Typically smallpox started with a severe fever accompanied by headaches, lack of sleep, a reduced appetite, and vomiting, before the characteristic spots ‘erupted’ on the skin, which could be foul-smelling. The appearance of these marks probably confirmed in many cases the presence of the disease. On occasion the infection also caused sufferers to go temporarily or permanently blind.
Smallpox and the long shadow of ill health and death that it cast was a constant blemish on the social landscape of seventeenth-century England. Adam Winthrop of Groton in Suffolk reported in the century’s early years, in September 1602, that many of the villagers had fallen sick and died of ‘the poxe’ there. News came of a ‘sad outbreak’ of smallpox at Preshaw in 1656. In 1662 the disease ‘raged with much malignity and proved mortall to many’ at Oxford University, but Anthony Wood was quick to point out that those who allowed physicians to let blood from them invariably survived. The Countess of Warwick, Mary Rich, was ‘much affected’ in 1668 when she reflected on ‘the great mercy of having my family kept from the small-pox, when it raged so much; and that, in the time of my being here [in London], I had not one servant that died’. Edmund Bohun recorded in vivid detail the spread of smallpox through his family in early 1678, and the debilitating symptoms that could accompany infection. On Christmas Day 1677, Bohun was given a warning: his friend John Blome sent him a letter explaining that Mary Brompton, the daughter of Bohun’s aunt, had purportedly contracted smallpox, and that while Bohun’s son had been staying with them he had shared a bed with the said girl. Edmund was told to be on his guard for signs of infection in his own child. Unfortunately, on 2 January 1678 the disease revealed itself:
‘The little one fell ill of this disease and was very full of it. On the 22nd, Mary Stiles, one of my servants, fell ill, and was very full. By degrees, however, she recovered.’6
A month later Edmund’s wife was also ill, although she displayed ‘less of the eruption’ that pockmarked the faces of his child and maid. The fact that she was pregnant, however, caused her husband to lead ‘a miserable life, in the greatest distress of mind and body’. Towards the end of February Edmund himself sickened, and as the disease took hold he believed himself to be more at risk of death than the rest of his bedridden family. He recounted:
‘I myself sickened, and was in great danger of dying than any other of my family. For nine days I lost the use of my eyes and my senses. For two days I suffered a most violent spontaneous salivation, which exhausted my strength but saved my life. At length, after tossing about in my bed for sixteen days, I rose, more like a skeleton than a man, and as weak as a new-born babe. […] The nurses, at least, acknowledged that scarcely any other person had escaped under the same circumstances. At length, however, I regained my strength, though very slowly, being kept back by fever, pustules in the throat, and other afflictions.’7
Edmund had been extremely unwell, but he had miraculously survived. One of his servants, who went on to present with smallpox in March, was less fortunate. Tragically, the stress of seeing her eldest son contract the disease in the same month caused Bohun’s wife to miscarry, she having been ‘overcome with anxiety and grief’.
The last moments of a patient with a fatal case of smallpox could be nasty. Robert Hooke, the Londoner and renowned seventeenth-century natural philosopher, lost his servant, Tom Gyles, to the disease in the 1670s. In his final hours Gyles was ‘pissing blood’ and haemorrhaging at the mouth and nose, ending his life in a macabre fashion that most would not wish on their worst enemy. Yet for some in England the horror of smallpox only extended as far as the potential damage done to social appeal, particularly amongst landed gentry circles. Lady Anne Clifford remarked in 1619 that, ‘my Lady Suffolk at Northampton House about this time had the Small-Pox’, which, ‘spoiled that good face of hers’. Even when Lady Anne contracted the disease herself in 1624, having it so ‘extremelie and violently’ that she thought herself to be at ‘deathes Doore’, she despaired afterwards that it did ‘so marter my face, that it Confirmed more and more my mynd never to marrie again’. Sir John Reresby feared for his daughter’s good looks and prospects when she fell ill of the smallpox in 1681, but fortunately, through God’s pleasure, she was restored ‘without prejudice to her features or complexion’.
The age at which a person died a natural death in seventeenth-century England probably varied according to where they lived, but there was some consistency in terms of the types of illness that people succumbed to. According to the Bills of Mortality, dropsy resulted in the deaths of between 185 and 931 people annually in London during the years 1629-60. It was frequently reported as the cause of death outside of the capital too. In 1672 Oliver Heywood visited a Mr Samuel Mitchel, who was ‘lying near death of a dropsy’, a swelling of the soft tissues due to the accumulation of excess water. Six years later his ‘good old friend’ Ellis Bury died of the same complaint. Anthony Wood jotted in his journal that Dr John Lloyd, Bishop of St David’s, died ‘of a dropsie’ in the principal’s lodgings at Jesus College, Oxford University, in February 1687. Ralph Josselin greatly feared that the condition would kill him in 1683, complaining that his leg ‘sweld wonderfully’ and ‘issue run out litle’; ‘the thoughts of ye dropsie returnd on mee’, he wrote, ‘God remove the fear of death from mee’.
Agues and fevers were also a prevalent cause for concern, and could be fatal, particularly in small children. Dying from complications of ‘the stone’ was a common occurrence, the disorder having been made infamous through the accounts that Samuel Pepys provided in his diary of his daily sufferings. Walter Yonge noted the death of the Bishop of Exeter in August 1621, revealing that he had been living with ‘seventeen stones in his bladder, and twenty-nine at the neck of his bladder’. Mary Wood was supposed to have died from a complication of the stone in February 1667. Anthony Wood recalled:
‘She had bin troubled with a paine in her right hip about 4 months before, which at length rising to a head Dr. [Edmund] Dickenson applied a broad plaister of cantharides, as thick as a pan-kake and broader than both a man’s hands, to raise a blister. This was one the Monday, Feb. 25; but before midnight it put her to such extreame paine and heated and distempered her blood soe much that all that morning from about 4 to 11 she was greiviously troubled with the heat of the urine which continually came from her, supposed all the while of her sickness by the doctor and those about her to be the stone.’8
Attempting to remove bladder stones was a dangerous and sometimes fatal business. Sir Francis Russell, ‘being much troubled with infirmities’, decided to consult a doctor in London in April 1664 to get to the bottom of his bodily woes, where it was discovered that he was suffering from the stone in the bladder. Russell was given opium for the surgery and two stones were cut out of him successfully, weighing around two ounces each, but afterwards his surgical wound refused to heal and most likely became infected. He died six days after the operation, probably in agony. Pepys underwent surgery to remove a bladder stone in 1658 and survived, against all the odds and without pain relief. He commemorated the procedure’s success for many years afterwards with an annual banquet.
‘Apoplexy and sudden death’, two terms that appeared to be synonymous with one another in seventeenth-century England, was a solid addition to the Bills of Mortality printed in London. For the year 1665, even with plague taking so many lives, there were still 116 deaths recorded in this category, and so too it was mentioned as a cause of death in many other parts of the country throughout the century. Thomas Crosfield described apoplexy in 1633 as a condition that, ‘deprives a man of all sense and motion for 48 houres, in which space he is not to be buried: and tho he revive yet never is he perfectly sound’. As twenty-first-century commentators we might interpret this as having a stroke, or possibly a heart attack. Sir Simonds d’Ewes of Suffolk recorded in his autobiography how his friend, Sir Martin Stuteville, had died suddenly at Bury St Edmunds of an apoplexy in 1631. John Rous added some substance to this account, writing that Stuteville had entered a tavern, ‘and there being mery in a chayer, either readie to take tobacco, or having newly done it, leaned backward with his head, and died immediatlie’. More commonly acknowledged was a sudden passing that had no apoplectic definition attached to it, with a level of confusion often conveyed as to how an individual could drop down dead without warning. Jacob Bee relayed in January 1684 how Robert Hilton, a justice of the peace in Westmorland, had ‘died very suddenly, having been abroad at supper the night before, and went very well to bed the night before’. In 1693 Oliver Heywood noted in his burial register that James Kighly of Thornton ‘fell down dead’ while digging for potatoes. The burial register for the parish of St Nicholas in Ipswich merely recorded that Rose Barber, a widow, ‘died suddainlie’ in November 1629.
Cancer was inadequately understood in the seventeenth century and likely to have been misdiagnosed as other ailments in some instances, but it was nonetheless acknowledged as a very real killer by contemporaries of the period. As many as 56 fatal cases were recorded in the Bills of Mortality in 1665. Its slow progression could prove distressing to both the sufferer and his or her loved ones. In 1673 word was sent to Isaac Archer, a Suffolk minister, that his uncle had died of a ‘sore in his cheeke’, which he supposed ‘was a cancer, which began last May, and had almost eaten his whole cheeke away’. Cancer surgery was risky, painful, and very often unsuccessful. John Ward, vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon, reported in 1666 that a Mrs Townshend of Alverston had gone under the knife to have a cancerous tumour removed from her breast. The skin was cut ‘cross’ by the surgeons and pulled back, before they ‘workt their hands’ in the tissue and carefully slid the tumour out, which once opened released a ‘gush of a great quantitie of waterish substance, as much as would fill a flaggon’. Afterwards one of the surgeons marvelled at the patient’s resilience on the operating table, observing that, ‘shee had endured soe much, that hee would have lost his life ere hee would have sufferd the like’. Unfortunately the surgery was ineffective and the woman later died, meaning her impressive fortitude was all for nothing. A committed family member, friend, or servant might take it upon themselves to remove a tumour in the absence of a surgeon. In 1624, William Lilly was willing to do whatever it took to relieve the agonies of his cancer-stricken mistress, who had developed a painful lump in her left breast. As early as 1622 she complained of the discomfort in her breast, ‘whereon there appeared first a hard knob no bigger than a small pea; it increased in a little time very much, was very hard, and sometimes would look very red’. Surgeons gave her advice on how to manage the ailment, including the application of ‘oils, sear-cloths, plates of lead, and what not’, but by 1623 the lump had swelled to a very great size, and was extremely ‘noisome and painful’. Lilly recalled that his mistress’s pains became so acute that he was sometimes forced to dress the breast two or three times in one night. Eventually he took matters into his own hands, quite literally. Not long before she died, and ‘by degrees’:
‘…with scissars, I cut all the whole breast away, I mean the sinews, nerves, &c. In one fortnight, or little more, it appeared, as it were, mere flesh, all raw, so that she could scarce endure any unguent to be applied. I remember there was a great cleft through the middle of the breast, which when that fully appeared she died, which was in September 1624.’9
It was a drastic act on the part of the servant, but in his view he had been left with little other choice.
The Bills of Mortality catalogued a mass of other natural causes of death in seventeenth-century London, many of which can also be established as common killers in other parts of the country. The annual return for 1665 included ‘consumption and tissick’, ‘spotted feaver and purples’, ‘griping in the guts’, the ‘king’s evil’, ‘stopping of the stomack’, ‘collick and winde’, ‘French pox’, and ‘bloody flux, scowring & flux’, along with some more unusual entries, for example ‘rising of the lights’ and ‘plannet’. Combined these disorders accounted for the deaths of over 9,000 people in London alone. Writing from Yorkshire Alice Thornton described how her ‘mother Gates’ died of a ‘flux of blood by siege’ in 1655, ‘as it was suposed to have a veine broaken inwardly, which by fits troubled her many yeares, haveing broaken it by a vomit of antemony to strong for her stomacke’. In Suffolk Isaac Archer lost his sister to ‘stoppings’ in 1664, which resulted in a ‘swelling in her face and body’ and ‘twiddles’ under the skin. On 28 April she fell into ‘convulsion fitts’, with the fourth fit killing her. Archer watched his wife surrender to a similar complaint in 1698. At this time a professional informed her that her ‘inwards were obstructed’, with pills and drops doing little to improve things, and in September she ‘lost her stomach, and had cold sweats’. Death was not far away.
Seventeenth-century England continued to contend with many of the illnesses that had plagued the centuries before it; however, there were a handful of supposedly new natural threats to be dealt with too. Rickets only appeared as a cause of death in the Bills of Mortality from 1634 onwards. It went on to kill 557 individuals in London in 1665. The story was the same for the ‘stopping of the stomack’, which first hit the headlines in the Bills in 1636 and ended 332 lives in 1665. Thus, the rich tapestry of natural deaths in England was embroidered with new bloodred thread. These, along with every other natural eradicator of the period discussed in this chapter, could make life short, sharp, and sickly for a good proportion of the English population living in the 1600s. Natural death was omnipresent and all too often premature. Although English men and women would have known no different, it still caused vicar Henry Newcome to curse the way of things in 1661:
‘O the sad things which the Lord sendeth amongst his poore creatures!’10