437 The Pale Horseman

·39 min·2 clips

As plague killed 2,000 Londoners a week in July 1665, Charles II fled to Salisbury — and a ballad followed him: 'Death makes them rich by taking them away.'

1. The History of England episode 437, 'The Pale Horseman,' covers the plague years 1665-66 in England, anchored by two stories: the village of Eyam in Derbyshire and the Great Plague of London. 2. Host David Crowther narrates solo, using Samuel Pepys's diary, John Evelyn's accounts, and local Eyam records to give individual human texture to statistical catastrophe. 3. The episode's purpose is to show how English society — from village communities to the royal court — responded to epidemic disease in the decade before the Glorious Revolution. 4. Eyam's plague began when tailor's assistant George Viccars opened a damp bale of London cloth and was bitten by an infected flea, developing the characteristic bubonic symptoms — black carbuncles, swollen lymph nodes, and raging fever — before dying. 5. By November 1665, 42 Eyam parishioners had died and villagers were debating flight; vicar William Momperson convened the village and proposed voluntary quarantine, reasoning that fleeing would carry plague to Sheffield and Bakewell. 6. Because the villagers distrusted Momperson as an Anglican imposition, he enlisted Thomas Stanley — the Puritan minister the church had expelled — to stand with him; together they secured unanimous agreement to seal the village. 7. Elizabeth Hancock, a farmer, buried six of her children and her husband herself in eight days, on the farm, honouring the agreement to avoid the churchyard and stay separate. 8. Catherine Momperson, the vicar's wife, refused to leave with her husband and tended the sick for months; she mentioned a sweet smell in the air on a walk the evening before dying at age 27. 9. By the time the plague ended in November 1666, 273 of Eyam's roughly 700 residents had died across 76 families — about 35% — but the plague did not spread to any surrounding village. 10. Crowther briefly surveys 17th-century English medicine, explaining the persistence of Galenic humour theory alongside emerging empirical methods: Thomas Sydenham, described by contemporaries as 'the light of England,' insisted on observation over dogma and prescribed 'a roast chicken and a pint of canary' for one exhausted patient. 11. Samuel Pepys had a bladder stone 'the size of a tennis ball' removed without anaesthetic — a procedure involving a three-inch incision between scrotum and anus — survived it, kept the stone in a glass case, and held an annual dinner to celebrate his survival. 12. Robert Hooke's 1665 Micrographia, produced using a microscope Hooke had built by a London instrument maker named Christopher White, showed copperplate images of fleas and gnats in unprecedented detail; Pepys called it 'the most ingenious book I ever read in my life.' 13. Hooke coined the word 'cell' in Micrographia; Henry Oldenburg, first Secretary of the Royal Society, began publishing Philosophical Transactions in March 1665 to make natural philosophy accessible 'to such Englishmen as are drawn to curious things yet perhaps do not know Latin.' 14. London's plague began with a few deaths outside the walls in May 1665; by June the mayor ordered bonfires and cat and dog culls; by July weekly recorded deaths reached 2,000, with the true toll higher because families bribed officials to avoid the plague designation. 15. At the peak, 8,000 Londoners were dying every day; plague pits opened outside the walls; Pepys wrote 'Lord, how empty the streets are, and melancholy — so many poor, sick people in the street, full of sores.' 16. Charles II and his court fled to Salisbury among the first wave of wealthy refugees; a contemporary ballad followed them: 'What shall the poor do that behind do stay? Death makes them rich by taking them away.'; Dutch newspapers gloated that England was 'brought down so low with plague that a man may run them down with his finger.' 17. The Oxford Parliament of autumn 1665 was attended by gentry courtiers who left their 'excrements in every corner in chimneys, studies, coal house, cellars,' according to academic Anthony Wood, while Lady Castlemaine gambled away £580 — equivalent to over £60,000 today — in a single session. 18. The plague's trade destruction halved England's public revenues between Easter 1665 and Easter 1666, undercut diplomatic negotiations with Brandenburg-Prussia, Denmark, and Sweden, and left England to fight the Dutch war alone. 19. Listeners who enjoy narrative history of epidemics, 17th-century social history, and the intersection of science, religion, and political failure will find this episode gripping. 20. Those expecting a full account of the Second Anglo-Dutch War or the political career of Charles II should note this episode is primarily focused on the plague years; military history resumes in the next episode.

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