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Plague and Nonconformity

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The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England

Part of the book series: Early Modern Literature in History ((EMLH))

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Abstract

The story of London’s judgements of pestilence and fire began years before those first few plague deaths noted in the bills of mortality in 1664 and long before fire swept through the city—at least according to one recorder of plague’s horrors. The reasons for plague have been aired in the tracts left behind, which are filled with views ranging from the most prolific in 1665, which see plague in natural terms, provide cures or describe the extent of the infection, to those linking social and moral causes to the spread of illness. While the beliefs in these tracts are often issued forth with precision and conviction, providing evidence to back their claims, few possess the passion of Thomas Vincent’s narrative voice in identifying the moment of London’s ‘introduction to the Plague’ as 24 August 1662. Vincent explains:

London had the Gospel, Ordinances powerfull, pure, plentifull. Ministers excellently qualified and rarely furnished with ministerial abilities; London had as many burning and shining lights as any one such spot of ground under the cope of heaven.

Thomas Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City (London: 1667), p. 25. (Vincent 1667)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, p. 24. (Vincent 1667)

  2. 2.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, p. 24. (Vincent 1667)

  3. 3.

    N.H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester University Press, 1987), p. 30. (Keeble 1987)

  4. 4.

    Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England, p. 31. (Keeble 1987)

  5. 5.

    Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England, p. 46. (Keeble 1987)

  6. 6.

    Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England, p. 20 (Keeble 1987). For further details on nonconformists’ writings, see Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). (Achinstein 2003)

  7. 7.

    An additional ‘150 dons and schoolmasters were ejected as dissenters’, Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution 1603–1714 (London: Abacus, 1978), p. 211 (Hill 1978); Keeble, however, notes: ‘Baxter reckoned that “When Bartholomew-day came, about One thousand eight hundred, or Two thousand Ministers were Silenced and Cast out”, and his estimate is the one confirmed by subsequent research’. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England, p. 31. (Keeble 1987)

  8. 8.

    Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720, p. 7. (Cambers 2011)

  9. 9.

    Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England, p. 83. (Keeble 1987)

  10. 10.

    Wallace notes: ‘the main consequences of these events for Puritan spirituality emerged: concentration on the spiritual life within the small fellowship and on the individual soul. This was a withdrawal from the more expansive and world-conquering zeal of an earlier day. Dissenters found themselves free within their conventicles to shape things as they wished…Thus there ensued a period of great productivity in the creation of a literature of the spiritual life’, Dewey D. Wallace, The Spirituality of the Later English Puritans: An Anthology (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), pp. xiii–iv. (Wallace 1987)

  11. 11.

    Wallace, The Spirituality of the Later English Puritans: An Anthology, p. 141. (Wallace 1987)

  12. 12.

    As Slack explains: ‘Twenty-one out of thirty-six publications on plague between 1625 and 1627 were sermons or devotional tracts, and twelve out of twenty-two in 1636 and 1637’, Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, p. 244, 399. (Slack 1985)

  13. 13.

    Slack explains that these texts ‘formed a smaller proportion of total publications’ in 1665, given that ‘at least forty-six publications concerned with plague appeared in 1665 and 1666’, Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, p. 244, 246. (Slack 1985)

  14. 14.

    Moote, The Great Plague, p. 231. (Moote 2004)

  15. 15.

    Porter, The Great Plague, p. 44. (Porter 2009)

  16. 16.

    ‘By order of the privy council only one type of public gathering was permitted, even encouraged: special plague services at the cathedral, abbey, and parish churches…Though many rectors had fled to the country, their assistants or temporary replacements courageously filled many of the gaps. No one seemed to mind that popular dissenting preachers ejected at the Restoration were flipping back into their pulpits and exhorting their old congregations to repent their sins and wait on the Lord’s mercy’, Moote, The Great Plague, p. 117. (Moote 2004)

  17. 17.

    Bell, The Great Plague of London in 1665, p. 70. (Bell 1994)

  18. 18.

    Symon Patrick, The Works of Symon Patrick, D.D. Sometime Bishop of Ely. Including his Autobiography, ed. by Alexander Taylor, vol. IX (Oxford: At the University Press, 1858), p. 444. (Patrick 1858)

  19. 19.

    Apocalyptic sentiment, however, was not relegated only to nonconformist writers responding to the outbreak in 1665. Henry Plomer has noted, in both sermons and religious treatises from outbreaks including and prior to that in 1665, that ‘The Divine Wrath theory was the keynote of them all’, in Plomer, ‘Literature of the Plague’, p. 216. (Plomer 1981)

  20. 20.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, p. 39. (Vincent 1667)

  21. 21.

    Elizabeth M. Knowles (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 133.

  22. 22.

    Beth Lynch, ‘Vincent, Thomas (1634–1678)‘, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press: 2004; online edn, 2008)<oxforddnb.com> [accessed 22 Oct 2012]. (Lynch 2008)

  23. 23.

    Lynch, ‘Vincent, Thomas (1634–1678)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (Lynch 2008)

  24. 24.

    Lynch, ‘Vincent, Thomas (1634–1678)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (Lynch 2008)

  25. 25.

    Lynch, ‘Vincent, Thomas (1634–1678)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (Lynch 2008)

  26. 26.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, p. 261. (Vincent 1667)

  27. 27.

    Warren Johnston notes: ‘Despite criticizing presumptuous conjecture over the apocalyptic significance of the year 1666 and proposing this as a reason that London had fallen then instead of papal Babylon, in another work from 1667 Vincent proclaimed that Christ’s second appearance on earth would “most certainly and very quickly be revealed from Heaven in flaming Fire” ’. Warren Johnston, Revelation Restored: The Apocalypse in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2011), pp. 100–101. (Johnston 2011)

  28. 28.

    Bell, The Great Plague of London, p. 228. (Bell 1994)

  29. 29.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, p. 50. (Vincent 1667)

  30. 30.

    Egerton Brydges portrays Vincent as follows: ‘Thomas Vincent, the author, was a Minister of the Gospel, whose enthusiasm, or fanaticism, was so great, that he remained in London during the time of the plague in 1665, and was an eye-witness of the fire in the following year. He reasons on both these events puritanically’. Egerton Brydges, Restituta: or, Titles, Extracts, and Characters of Old Books in English Literature, Revived (London: 1815), pp. 89–90. (Brydges 1815)

  31. 31.

    Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680, p. 277. (Wear 2000)

  32. 32.

    Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680, p. 277. (Wear 2000)

  33. 33.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, pp. 10–11. (Vincent 1667)

  34. 34.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, pp. 10–11. (Vincent 1667)

  35. 35.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, title page. (Vincent 1667)

  36. 36.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, pp. 88–181. (Vincent 1667)

  37. 37.

    Crawford Gribben, The Puritan Millennium: Literature & Theology, 1550–1682 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), p. 114. (Gribben 2000)

  38. 38.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, p. 129. (Vincent 1667)

  39. 39.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, p. 129. (Vincent 1667)

  40. 40.

    The addition of the sermon may be found in the sixth edition, positioned as a paratext to the body of God’s Terrible Voice in the City, following that text’s concluding page on 197, which finishes with a definitive ‘FINIS. Soli Deo Gloria’. A second title page for the sermon appears at this point, complete with the sermon’s title, author’s name and printer, George Calvert. Here, the gender of the deceased is given as Mr., suggesting an error on either the book’s or the sermon’s title page; Thomas Vincent, ‘A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of Mr. Abraham Janeway’, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, 6th edn (London: 1668), p. 199; This sermon also appears in a number of other editions of the text.

  41. 41.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, p. A2. (Vincent 1667)

  42. 42.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, p. A2. (Vincent 1667)

  43. 43.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, p. A2. (Vincent 1667)

  44. 44.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, pp. 72-73. (Vincent 1667)

  45. 45.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, p. 14. (Vincent 1667)

  46. 46.

    Gribben, The Puritan Millennium: Literature & Theology, 1550–1682, p. 116. (Gribben 2000)

  47. 47.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, p. 28. (Vincent 1667)

  48. 48.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, pp. 261–62. (Vincent 1667)

  49. 49.

    Bastian, ‘Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year Reconsidered’, p. 162. (Bastian 1965)

  50. 50.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, p. 29. (Vincent 1667)

  51. 51.

    Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City, pp. 29–30. (Vincent 1667)

  52. 52.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p. 34. (Dyer 1666)

  53. 53.

    Caroline L. Leachman, ‘Dyer, William (1632–1696)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press: 2004; online edn, 2008) <oxforddnb.com> [accessed 22 Oct 2012]. (Leachman 2008)

  54. 54.

    Leachman, ‘Dyer, William (1632/3–1696)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  55. 55.

    Leachman, ‘Dyer, William (1632/3–1696)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Bell writes: ‘Richard Edwards, rector of St. Anne and St. Agnes, held also the living of Chislehurst, and was broad-minded enough not to refuse the help in London of William Dyer, the Nonconformist and Quaker sympathizer’. Bell, The Great Plague of London in 1665, p. 226. (Bell 1994)

  56. 56.

    Leachman, ‘Dyer, William (1632/3–1696)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (Leachman 2008)

  57. 57.

    Edmund Calamy, The Nonconformist’s Memorial: Being an Account of the Ministers, Who Were Ejected or Silenced After the Restoration, Particularly by the Act of Uniformity, Which Took Place on Bartholomew-day, Aug. 24, 1662, ed. by Samuel Palmer (London: 1775). (Calamy 1775)

  58. 58.

    Calamy, The Nonconformist’s Memorial, p. 235. (Calamy 1975)

  59. 59.

    Calamy, The Nonconformist’s Memorial, p. 235. (Calamy 1975)

  60. 60.

    Calamy, The Nonconformist’s Memorial, p.54. (Calamy 1975)

  61. 61.

    Achinstein writes: ‘The impact of this culture of publishing and disseminating their material was greater than their particular cause; indeed, Dissenters contributed to a fundamental change in political culture in early modern England. By their repeated appearances in print, Dissenters would simply not go away; and by their commitments to publicity, openness, and generative dispute, they wrote for the many, barely literate included, expanding the culture of political knowledge at a time when there was a general expansion in the public sphere’, Achinstein, Literature and Dissent, p. 19. (Achinstein 2003)

  62. 62.

    Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England, p. 144. (Keeble 1987)

  63. 63.

    Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England, p. 144. (Keeble 1987)

  64. 64.

    Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England, p. 140. (Keeble 1987)

  65. 65.

    Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England, p. 140. (Keeble 1987)

  66. 66.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p. A3. (Dyer 1668)

  67. 67.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, n.p. (Dyer 1668)

  68. 68.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, n.p., A4. (Dyer 1668)

  69. 69.

    Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, p. 3; Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720, p. 7. (Cambers 2011)

  70. 70.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, n.p. (Dyer 1668)

  71. 71.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, pp. 32–33. (Dyer 1668)

  72. 72.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, n.p. (Dyer 1668)

  73. 73.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, n.p. (Dyer 1668)

  74. 74.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, n.p. (Dyer 1668)

  75. 75.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, n.p. (Dyer 1668)

  76. 76.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, n.p. (Dyer 1668)

  77. 77.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, n.p. (Dyer 1668)

  78. 78.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, n.p. (Dyer 1668)

  79. 79.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, pp. 45–86. (Dyer 1668)

  80. 80.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, pp. 127–149. (Dyer 1668)

  81. 81.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p. 34. (Dyer 1668)

  82. 82.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p. 34. (Dyer 1668)

  83. 83.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p. 34. (Dyer 1668)

  84. 84.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, pp. 75–76. (Dyer 1668)

  85. 85.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p. 76. (Dyer 1668)

  86. 86.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p. 45. (Dyer 1668)

  87. 87.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p. 52. (Dyer 1668)

  88. 88.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p. 53. (Dyer 1668)

  89. 89.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p. 62. (Dyer 1668)

  90. 90.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p. 46. (Dyer 1668)

  91. 91.

    Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England, revised paperback edn. (London: Verso, 1990), p. 146. (Hill 1990)

  92. 92.

    Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England, p. 148. (Hill 1990)

  93. 93.

    Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England, p. 155. (Hill 1990)

  94. 94.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p. 68. (Dyer 1668)

  95. 95.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p. 68. (Dyer 1668)

  96. 96.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p.127. (Dyer 1666)

  97. 97.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, pp. 127–128. (Dyer 1668)

  98. 98.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p. 128. (Dyer 1668)

  99. 99.

    Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4. (Kristeva 1982)

  100. 100.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p. 130. (Dyer 1668)

  101. 101.

    Dyer, Christs Voice to London, p. 131. (Dyer 1668)

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    Kathleen Miller

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Miller, K. (2016). Plague and Nonconformity. In: The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51057-0_4

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