Epidemic Times

Plague Searchers is a two-volume novel set in the London plague of 1665. The Searchers, along with the Viewers, have been appointed by official order of June 1665:

That in or for every parish there shall be appointed two sober Ancient Women, to be sworn to be Searchers of the bodies of such as shall die in time of Infection, and two other to be Viewers of such as shall be sick and suspected of Infection.

Their findings are reported to the constable and the parish clerk. The novel focuses on the parish of St Cyneswide and St Tibba, on the two Searchers, Goodwife Joan Brokefild and Widow Margaret Hazard, the crippled parish clerk Philip Carter and the churchwarden Francis Barrow. Their activities lead out to a wide cast of characters—children, low-life scoundrels, clergy, businessmen and more. The searching for the dead, the viewing of the infected and dying, and the recording of the deaths provide the events. The attempts to bribe the Searchers not to report infections, and the stratagems resorted to in attempting to deal with the plague, from a range of herbal medicines to covertly escaping to the country, are many.

Amidst it all we are given the interchange of the views and opinions of the various parishioners. And it is here that the uneasy condition of England is revealed. For although the restoration of 1660 had reinstalled the monarchy and the Church of England, few of the inhabitants show any enthusiasm for or acceptance of the current state of affairs. The parishioners represent a whole variety of opposition to the Anglican establishment, dismissing it along with the equally rejected Catholicism. The Puritan revolution had opened up a huge range of religious variety—Anabaptists, Antinomians, Muggletonians, Congregationalists, Quakers, Fifth Monarchists, Ranters and more. They form most of the characters of Plague Searchers, and they co-exist with the Anglicans who have welcomed the ejection of those preachers who do not conform to the Church of England. The specific theological differences between the various sects are not in themselves much dwelt on. The emphasis is on the variety and disagreement, discord and diversity, depending on how you interpret it.

Along with the religious fervour are the more political issues. King Charles II is repeatedly dismissed as the Scotch bastard, the foreign Catholic, the dissolute womaniser. His fleeing from plague-stricken London and setting up court in Oxford does not endear him to his subjects. The old parliamentarians, the supporters of Oliver Cromwell, are everywhere present. There is little enthusiasm for the idea of monarchy. The divisions within English society are presented as running deep. Nonetheless, there is an uneasy co-existence, people knowing each others’ views, and avoiding direct confrontation.

Amidst the increasing number of deaths and burials, a plot is hatched by which a group of republicans will attempt to take the city of London. The Good Old Cause, the belief in the parliamentary project, survives. Whether it can claim sufficient adherents to overthrow the current regime becomes one of the themes of the novel. Walter Scott captured the turmoil and deep divisions in 1650s republican England in Woodstock. Set a decade later, Plague Searchers shows those divisions as still existing.

The particular arguments of the various anti-monarchists are not presented in any more detail than the religious disputes. The old slogan of the Peasants’ Revolt is quoted: “When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?”

But we are not given the contemporary formulation of that insight, expressed by Gerard Winstanley in The True Levellers’ Standard:

In the beginning of time, the great creator Reason made the earth to be a common treasury, to preserve beasts, birds, fishes and man, the lord that was to govern the creation; for man had domination given to him, over the beasts, birds and fishes; but not one word was spoken in the beginning, that one branch of mankind should rule over another.

John Milton repeated the theme in Paradise Lost, writing that God                             

                                             Man over men
He made not Lord; such title to himself
Reserving, human left from human free.

But the particular social and economic arguments advanced by Winstanley, Milton and the Levellers, the army radicals, are left in the background here. People’s allegiances seem clear enough, or suspected. But they generally leave the particular issues of their beliefs unexpressed in an overall underlying ferment of disagreement.

And that other aspect of the civil war that led some historians to refer to it as the bourgeois revolution is the emergence of entrepreneurial, money-making schemes, that Presbyterian, Puritan underpinning of the emergence of English capitalism. It is here in the project developed by some of the tradesmen in the parish who see a new way to make significant money from burial shrouds, coffin wood, lime and cartage, and in the ambitions of one of the young characters, John Micoe, to set up new, profitable schemes, espionage included.

Rather than theologically or politically analytical, the overall tone of the novel is what used to be called “earthy”. There are lots of words once prohibited in print; turds, arses, cods, fucks, farts all abound along with a range of sexual activities and possibilities, while chamber pots are emptied into the streets from upstairs windows, and the collection of excreta by the dung men adds to the rich aromas of the city.

Plague Searchers in its two volumes and 800-plus pages presents an enduring immolation in the horrors of the plague with its suppurating sores, rotting corpses and over-filled churchyards. The book was begun in 2018, and a third of it had been written before the emergence of Covid. Explicit parallels between the two pandemics are avoided, but the similarities and differences are unavoidable, providing the novel with contemporary as well as historical fascination.

Plague Searchers: Vol. I: Red Wands; Vol. II: Flee Quick, Go Far
by Rob Wills
Arcadia, 2022, 470 + 362 pages, $29.95 each

Michael Wilding’s recent novels Find Me My Enemies and Cover Story were reviewed by Nicholas Hasluck in the April Quadrant