in one 1603 pamphlet that people who saw anything in the plague but a working of the divine will were âatheistes, mere naturians and other ignorant personesâ. Clapham had seen men and women, walking the streets, suddenly stumble and collapse, clearly knocked down by one of Godâs avenging angels. One only had to inspect them afterwards to see âthe plaine print of a blue hand left behind vpon the flessheâ. And what had medicine got to do with that? (The modern use of the word âstrokeâ to mean an apoplectic seizure is a faint memory of that angelic blow.)
By midsummer, London under plague now looked, sounded and smelled like a city at war. It was by far the worst outbreak England had known. Here now, grippingly, and shockingly, the first and greatest of the Bible Translators appears on the scene. It is not a dignified sight. Lancelot Andrewes was a man deeply embedded in the Jacobean establishment. He was forty-nine or fifty, Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was also Dean of Westminster Abbey, a prebendary of St Paulâs Cathedral, drawing the income from one of the cathedralâs manors, and of Southwell Minster, one of the chaplains at the Chapel Royal in Whitehall, who under Elizabeth had twice turned down a bishopric not because he felt unworthy of the honour but because he did not consider the income of the sees he was offered satisfactory. Elizabeth had done much to diminish the standing of bishops; she had banished them from court and had effectively suspended Edmund Grindal, the Archbishop of Canterbury whose severe and Calvinist views were not to her liking. Andrewes, one of the most astute and brilliant men of his age, an ecclesiastical politician who in the Roman Church would have become a cardinal, perhaps even pope, was not going to diminish his prospects simply to carry an elevated title.
Andrewes plays a central role in the story of the King James Bible, and the complexities of his character will emerge as it unfolds â he is in many ways its hero; as broad as the great Bible itself, scholarly, political, passionate, agonised, in love with the English language, endlessly investigating its possibilities, worldly, saintly, serene, sensuous, courageous, craven, if not corrupt then at least compromised, deeply engaged in pastoral care, generous, loving, in public bewitched by ceremony, in private troubled by persistent guilt and self-abasement â but in the grim realities of plague-stricken London in the summer of 1603, he appears in the worst possible light. Among his many positions in the church, he was the vicar of St Giles Cripplegate, just outside the old walls to the north of the city.
The church was magnificent, beautifully repaired after a fire in 1545, full of the tombs of knights and aldermen, goldsmiths, physicians, rich men and their wives. The church was surrounded by elegant houses and the Jewsâ Garden, where Jews had been buried before the medieval pogroms, was now filled with âfair garden plots and summer-houses for pleasure ⦠some of them like Midsummer pageants, with towers, turrets and chimney-topsâ.
But there was another side to Cripplegate. This was the London that was overflowing its own bounds, âreplenished with many tenements of poor peopleâ, many of the streets filled with bowling alleys and dicing houses, the part of London where, as one royal proclamation said, there was âa surcharge of people, specially of the worse sort, as can hardly be either fed and sustained, or preserved in health or governed from the dearth of victuals, infection of plague and manifold disordersâ. There were too many Irish people here, and, as all Jacobeans knew, the Irish meant plague. There was a playhouse, the Fortune, modelled on the Globe, and the air was thick with stench from the seventy breweries in the parish. This was the London of Grub Street, not yet filled with scribblers for the press, but with the diseased poor. No part of London suffered more horrifyingly in the plague of 1603. âOpen graves where sundry are buried togetherâ were dug in the parish, âan hundred hungry graves each to be filled with 60 bodiesâ. The graves, Thomas Dekker, the sardonic, sententious, gossiping newsmonger of plague London, wrote, were âlike little cellars, piling up forty or fifty in a Pitâ. At the beginning of the year, there were about 4,000 people in Lancelot Andrewesâs parish. By December 1603, 2,878 of them had been killed by the disease.
Andrewes wasnât there. He had previously attended to the business of the parish, insisting that the altar rails should be retained in the church (which a strict Puritan would have removed), doubling the amount of communion wine that was consumed (for him, Christianity was more than a religion of the word) and composing a Manual for the Sick, a set of religious reassurances, beginning with a quotation from Kings: âSet thy house in order, for thou shalt die.â And he certainly preached at St Gilesâs from time to time. But throughout the long months of the plague in 1603, he never once visited his parish.
It was generally understood that by far the best way to avoid catching the plague was to leave the city. Contemporary medical theory was confused between the idea of a disease spreading by contagion and by people breathing foul air, but the lack of certainty didnât matter: the solution was the same. Go to the country; fewer people, cleaner air. From late May onwards, James and his followers had been circling London, staying at Hampton Court and Windsor, hunting at Woodstock in Oxfordshire or at Royston in Hertfordshire, staying at Farnham, Basing, Wilton and Winchester. It was, as Cecil described it, âa camp volant, which every week dislodgethâ. For the king to absent himself (even though the crowds accompanying his travels took the plague with them, infecting one unfortunate town after another) was only politic. But for the vicar of a parish to do so was another question.
The mortality had spread to Westminster. In the parish of St Margaret, in which the Abbey and Westminster School both lie, dogs were killed in the street and their bodies burnt, month after month, a total of 502 for the summer. The outbreak was nothing like as bad as in Cripplegate, but Andrewes, who as dean was responsible for both Abbey and school, with its 160 pupils, was not to be found there either. He had ordered the college closed for the duration and had gone down himself to its âpleasant retreat at Chiswick, where the elms afforded grateful shade in summer and âa retiring placeâ from infectionâ. He might well have walked down there, as he often did, along the breezy Thameside path through Chelsea and Fulham âwith a brace of young fry, and in that wayfaring leisure had a singular dexterity to fill those narrow vessels with a funnelâ. He was lovely to the boys. âI never heard him utter so much as a word of austerity among us,â one of his ex-pupils remembered. The Abbey papers still record the deanâs request in July 1603 for âa butler, a cooke, a carrier, a skull and royerâ â these last two oarsmen for the Abbey boat â to be sent down to Chiswick with the boys. Richard Hakluyt, historian of the great Elizabethan mariners, and Hadrian à Saravia, another of the Translators, signed these orders as prebendaries of the Abbey. Here, the smallness of the Jacobean establishment comes suddenly into focus. Among the Westminster boys this summer, just eleven years old, was the future poet and divine George Herbert, the brilliant son of a great aristocratic family, his mother an intimate of John Donneâs. From these first meetings in a brutal year, Herbert would revere and love Andrewes for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, in Cripplegate, the slum houses were boarded up, the poor died and in the streets the fires burned. Every new case of the disease was to be marked by the ringing of a passing bell down the street. Each death and burial was rung out too so that âthe doleful and almost universal and continual ringing and tolling of bellsâ marked the infected parishes. From far out in the fields, you could hear London mourning its dead. In the week of 16 September, the outbreak would peak at 3,037 dead. Proportionately, it was a scale of destruction far worse than anything during the Blitz.
Was Andrewesâs departure for Chiswick acceptable behaviour? Not entirely. There was the example of the near-saintly Thomas Morton, one of John Donneâs friends and the rector of Long Marston outside York, later a distinguished bishop, who, in the first flush of this plague epidemic as it attacked York in the summer of 1602, had sent all his servants away, to save their lives, and attended himself to the sick and dying in the city pesthouse. Morton slept on a straw bed with the victims, rose at four every morning, was never in bed before ten at night, and travelled to and from the countryside, bringing in the food for the dying on the crupper of his saddle.
Alongside this, Andrewesâs
