Aftermath

By late autumn, the death toll in London and the suburbs began to slow until, in February 1666, it was considered safe enough for the King and his entourage to come back to the city. With the return of the monarch, other people began to come back. The gentry returned in their carriages accompanied by carts piled high with their belongings. The judges moved back from Windsor to sit in Westminster Hall, although Parliament, which had been prorogued in April 1665, did nor reconvene until September, 1666. Trade recommenced and businesses and workshops opened up. London was the goal of a new wave of people who flocked to the city in expectation of making their fortunes. Writing at the end of March 1666, Lord Clarendon, the Lord Chancellor, stated "... the streets were as full, the Exchange as much crowded, the people in all places as numerous as they had ever been seen ...". 

Plague cases continued to occur sporadically at a modest rate until the summer of 1666. On the second and third of September that year, the Great Fire of London destroyed much of the City of London, and some people believed that the fire put an end to the epidemic. However, it is now thought that the plague had largely subsided before the fire took place. In fact, most of the later cases of plague were found in the suburbs, and it was the City of London itself that was destroyed by the Fire.

 

According to the Bills of Mortality, there were in total 68,596 deaths in London from the plague in 1665. Lord Clarendon estimated that the true number of mortalities was probably twice that figure. The next year, 1666, saw further deaths in other cities but on a lesser scale. Dr Thomas Gumble, chaplain to the Duke of Albermarle, both of whom had stayed in London for the whole of the epidemic, estimated that the total death count for the country from plague during 1665 and 1666 was about 200,000.

 

The Great Plague of 1665/1666 was the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in Great Britain. The last recorded death from plague came in 1679, and it was removed as a specific category in the Bills of Mortality after 1703. It spread to other towns in East Anglia and the southeast of England but fewer than ten percent of parishes outside London had a higher than average death rate during those years. Urban areas were more affected than rural ones; Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester, Southampton and Winchester were badly affected, while the West of England and areas of the Midlands escaped altogether.

The population of England in 1650 was approximately 5.25 million, which declined to about 4.9 million by 1680, recovering to just over 5 million by 1700. Other diseases, such as smallpox, took a high toll on the population even without the contribution by plague. The higher death rate in cities, both generally and specifically from the plague, was made up by continuous immigration, from small towns to larger ones and from the countryside to the town.

There were no contemporary censuses of London's population, but available records suggest that the population returned to its previous level within a couple of years. Burials in 1667 had returned to 1663 levels, Hearth Tax returns had recovered, John Graunt contemporarily analysed baptism records and concluded they represented a recovered population. Part of this could be accounted for by the return of wealthy households, merchants and manufacturing industries, all of which needed to replace losses amongst their staff and took steps to bring in necessary people. Colchester had suffered more severe depopulation, but manufacturing records for cloth suggested that production had recovered or even increased by 1669, and the total population had nearly returned to pre-plague levels by 1674. Other towns did less well: Ipswich was affected less than Colchester, but in 1674 its population had dropped by 18%, more than could be accounted for by the plague deaths alone.

As a proportion of the population who died, the London death toll was less severe than in a number of other towns. The total of deaths in London was greater than in any previous outbreak for 100 years, though as a proportion of the population the epidemics in 1563, 1603 and 1625 were comparable or greater. Perhaps around 2.5% of the English population died.

Sources of information: wikipedia.org, nationalarchives.gov.uk, historylearningsite.co.uk