The Clockwork Universe (3 page)

Chapter Three
The End of the World

In the 1650s and '60s the long-simmering fear of God's wrath grew acute. Every Christian knew his Bible, and everyone knew that the Bible talked of a day of judgment. The question was not whether the world would end but how soon the end would come. The answer, it seemed, was
very
soon.

Almost no one believed in the idea of progress. (The very scientists whose discoveries would create the modern world did not believe in it.) On the contrary, the nearly universal belief was that the world had been falling apart since Adam and Eve were banished from Eden. Now, it seemed, the fall had accelerated. From high and low, in learned sermons and shrieking pamphlets, men pointed out the signs that the apocalypse was near.

At some moment, at
any
moment, in one historian's summary,
“The trumpet would sound, motion would cease, the moon turn
to blood, the stars fall like withered leaves, and the earth would burn to the accompaniment of horrible thunders and lightnings.”
In the midst of this chaos, the dead would rise, and saint and
sinner alike would receive a sentence that permitted no appeal and no pardon. In the minds of our ancestors, this was not rhetoric but fact. God had ordained it, and it would be so.

The debate about the timing of the end was intense and
widespread. Today warnings that “the end is nigh!” are the stuff of television preachers and
New Yorker
cartoons. In the seventeenth century this was urgent business. Deciphering biblical prophecies was as much a mainstream, high-stakes concern then as poring over stock market figures is now. Similar waves of fear had arisen before, for no clear reason, and then died down just as mysteriously. That was no consolation. “Books on the Second Coming were written by the score during this period,” one eminent historian observes, “and members of the Royal Society were preoccupied with dating the event.” They proceeded methodi
cally, looking for hidden meanings in biblical texts or manipu
lating numbers cited in one sacred passage or another.
³

Many scholars and scientists pointed with alarm to a par
ticular figure—1,260 years—that popped up at several different places in the Bible.
⁴
At some point in the past, they believed, the clock had started ticking. Twelve hundred and sixty years from that moment, the world would end. The question that obsessed the most powerful minds of the Royal Society was, when had the countdown begun? One frequently cited date—400
A.D.
, a time of “great apostasy” when true Christianity had been subverted. It did not demand the mathematical talent of Isaac Newton to see that 1,260 years from 400
A.D.
brought one to the year 1660.

Jesus himself had talked of the signs that would announce
the final days. At the Mount of Olives the disciples had asked
him, “What shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the
world?”

War and misery on Earth, Jesus had replied, and chaos in the heavens. “Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against
kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earth
quakes.” And then, after still more afflictions, “Shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven.”

Now, both on Earth and in the heavens, danger signs abounded.
Adulterers, blasphemers, and disbelievers had transformed London into a modern-day Babylon.
Such carryings-on were nearly inevitable, for a long, dour Puritan interlude had only recently ended. Following Charles I's execution in 1649, theaters had been closed, celebrations of Christmas banned, dancing at weddings outlawed.

After the restoration of the monarchy, in 1660, the mood
changed utterly, at court and throughout the nation. Charles I
had been earnest, stubborn, hidebound. Charles II was witty
and restless, always ready to play another set of tennis, gamble
on another hand of cards, chase after yet another beauty. Life
at court was notoriously indulgent, with everyone from the king on down “engaged in an endless game of sexual musical chairs.”
(The “Merrie Monarch” kept mistresses by the score, but in
these early years of his reign he observed a sort of fidelity, restricting himself to one mistress at a time.) For the wealthy and the well connected generally, the tone of the era was one of cynicism and self-indulgence.

Inevitably, many people ignored the prophets of doom or scoffed at their warnings and lamentations. But like distant
sounds of shouting at a party, the signals of something amiss tainted the festive mood. God would not be mocked. In 1662,
terrified onlookers in the English countryside reported that
several women had given birth to monstrously deformed babies. At the same time a brilliant star had mysteriously appeared in
the night sky. From Buckinghamshire, in southern England,
came reports that blood had rained from the sky. The heavens were all askew, just as Jesus had warned.

Then, in the fall of 1664, Europe and England saw a comet ablaze in the heavens. To the seventeenth-century mind, this was bad news. (The word
disaster
comes from
dis
, as in
disgrace
or
disfavor
, and
astrum
, Latin for
star
or
comet.
) The sky, unlike the Earth, was a domain of order and harmony. Comets were ominous intruders, and they had been feared for millennia. “So
horrible was it, so terrible, so great a fright did it engender
in the populace,” one eyewitness had written, about a comet in 1528, “that some died of fear; others fell sick . . . this comet was the color of blood; at its extremity we saw the shape of an arm
holding a great sword as if about to strike us down. At the end of the blade there were three stars. On either side of the rays of this
comet were seen great numbers of axes, knives, bloody swords,
amongst which were a great number of hideous human faces, with
beards and hair all awry.”

Comets were cosmic warnings, signs of God's displeasure akin to lightning bolts but longer lasting. “The thick smoke of human
sins, rising every day, every hour, every moment . . . [grow] gradually so thick as to form a comet,” explained one follower of Martin
Luther, “. . . which at last is kindled by the hot and fiery anger of
the Supreme Heavenly Judge.”

Unsettlingly, comets hung overhead for days before they disappeared. Where they went, or why, no one knew. Night after night, all one could do was check the sky to see if the dreaded
visitor had appeared again and guess at what calamity it might
foretell.

This newest comet refused to disappear. The fearsome sightings of 1664 persisted into November and then into December. On December 17, King Charles II and Queen Catherine waited late into the night to witness the spectacle for themselves. The public mood grew ever darker. In January, word came of an apparition near the comet—“a Coffin,” floating in the sky, “which causes great anxiety of thought amongst the people.”

An astrologer and member of the Royal Society, John Gadbury, warned that “this comet portends pestiferous and horrible winds and tempests.” Another astrologer foresaw “a MORTALITY which will bring MANY to their Graves.”

In March 1665, a
second
comet appeared.

Closer to home, the natural world seemed just as unsettled. Rumors and omens started with worrisome sightings—clouds of flies swarmed inside houses; ants smothered the roads; frogs clogged the ditches—and grew ever more lurid. Like Egypt in ancient days, England had angered God. Even the well educated passed along the latest news in horrified whispers, as frightened and fascinated as the most superstitious countrymen. “A deformed monster” had been born in London, the Spanish ambassador reported, “horrible in shape and color. Part of him was fiery red and part of him yellow. On his chest was a human face. He had the legs of a bull, the feet of a man, the tail of a wolf, the breasts of a goat, the shoulders of a camel, a long body and in place of a head a kind of tumor with the ears of a horse. Such
monstrous prodigies are permitted by God to appear to mankind
as harbingers of calamities.”

The greatest scientists of the age, Isaac Newton chief among them, believed as fervently as everyone else that they lived in the shadow of the apocalypse. Every era lives with contradictions that it manages to ignore. The Greeks talked of justice and kept slaves. The Crusaders preached the gospel of the Prince of Peace and rode off to annihilate the infidels. The seventeenth century believed in a universe that ran like clockwork, entirely in accord with natural law, and also in a God who reached down into the world to perform miracles and punish sinners.

Many of the early scientists tended not to pay much heed to monsters and bloody rains, but they pored over their Bibles in an urgent quest to determine how much time remained. Robert Boyle, renowned today as the father of chemistry, studied the Bible not only in English but in Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldean, to ferret out hidden meanings. Newton himself owned some thirty Bibles in various translations and languages that he endlessly perused and compared one against another.

Every word in the Bible was meaningful, just as every twig and sparrow in the natural world offered up a clue to God's intent. The Bible was not a literary work to be interpreted according to one's taste, but a cipher with a single meaning that could be decoded by a meticulous and brilliant analyst. Newton devoted thousands of hours—as much time as he spent on the secrets of gravity or light—in looking for concealed messages in the dimensions of the Temple of Solomon and trying to match the prophecies in Revelation with the battles and revolutions of later days. “The fourth beast [in the book of Revelation] . . . was exceeding dreadful and terrible, and had great iron teeth, and devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet,” wrote Newton, “and such was the Roman empire.”

* * *

With nearly everyone in agreement that the end had drawn near, the debate turned to just
how
the end would come. One faction maintained that the world would drown in a global flood, as it had in Noah's day; others held out for an all-consuming fire. The tide of fear rose ever higher as the ominous year 1666 appeared, because of the satanic associations of the number 666. Fear turned to panic when plague swooped down on England in 1665, a year ahead of schedule, and death carts began spilling their cargo into mass graves.

Chapter Four
“When Spotted Death Ran Arm'd Through Every Street”

For a thousand years, whenever God lost patience with his creation, plague had swept across Europe. For a few hundred years, those waves of disease had taken on a fearsome rhythm, appearing and vanishing at intervals of roughly ten or twenty years. In the deadliest assault, from 1347 through 1350, plague killed twenty million people. Somewhere between one-third and one-half of all Europeans died in that three-year span.

England's population crashed so far that it did not return to its pre-plague level for four centuries. In Florence the dead lay piled in pits “like cheese between layers of lasagna,” in the words of one repelled, stunned observer. The survivors could do little more than gape at the devastation. “Oh happy posterity,” wrote the Italian poet Petrarch, “who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable.”

This was the bubonic plague, a disease spread to humans by fleas that had bitten infected rats, though no one would know that for centuries. Plague sputtered along between full-fledged
outbursts, claiming a few lives almost every year but seldom
flaring out of control. For decades in the mid-1600s England had been granted a respite. Plague had devastated one European city or another through those years, but since 1625 it had spared London.

No city lay beyond reach, though, for plague traveled with ships, armies, and merchants—with any travelers who unknowingly brought rats and fleas with them. England had begun to grow rich in the seventeenth century, and much of its wealth was based on trade. From all over the world, ships brought tea and coffee, silk and china, tobacco and sugar, to England's teeming ports. Europe, in the meantime, had spent the 1650s and '60s watching helplessly as plague moved across the continent. Italy
and Spain had succumbed first, then Germany. In 1663 and 1664,
plague devastated Holland.

In England, all was quiet—a single plague death in London
at Christmas, 1664; another in February; two in April. On
April 30, 1665, Samuel Pepys mentioned plague in his diary for the first time.
⁵
Pepys was still young, just past thirty and newly
embarked on a career as a Royal Navy bureaucrat. The diary
that would one day become a world treasure was only a private diversion. Pepys's first reference to plague was brief, an afterthought following a cheery description of dinner and the state of his finances. He had gone through his account books and found, “with great joy,” that he was richer than he had ever been in his life. Then a quick observation: “Great fears of the sicknesse here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all.”

It is hard to read that first, ominous passage without hearing a horror movie's minor chords in the background. In the face of the calamity that lay ahead, Pepys's mention of “two or three” tragedies would come to sound almost quaint.

Plague killed arbitrarily, agonizingly, and quickly. “A nimble executioner,” in the words of one frightened observer, it could kill a healthy man overnight. No one knew the cause; no one knew a cure. All that was known was that plague somehow jumped from person to person. The sick fell and died, and the not-yet-infected cowered and waited.

The first symptom could be as innocuous as a sneeze (the custom of saying “Bless you!” when someone sneezes dates from this era). Fever and vomiting followed close behind. Next came “the surest Signes,” in the words of one pamphlet from England's epidemic of 1625, an onslaught of blisters on the skin and swellings beneath it. Blue or purplish spots about the size of a penny appeared first. Shortly after, angry red sores flared up, “as if one did burne a hole with a hot iron.” Then followed the dreaded black swellings that marked the end. They bulged out from the neck, armpits, or groin, sometimes “no bigger than a Nutmeg . . . but some as bigge as a Man's fist.” Victims oozed blood from the tender lumps and moaned in pain.

Once plague had struck, doctors could provide no help beyond a soothing word. Authorities focused all their attention on safeguarding the healthy. Those who had fallen ill were forbidden to step out of their homes; hired guards stood watch to keep the prisoners from escaping. Food was supposedly left on the doorstep by “plague nurses,” but they were as likely to rob their dying charges as to help them.

Many houses where plague had struck were nailed shut, with those inside left to die or not as fate decreed. (Thus Pepys's reference to “houses already shut up.”) Some slum tenements held half a dozen captive families. The houses of the condemned carried a large cross, marked on the door in red chalk, to warn others to keep away. Scrawled near the cross were the forlorn words, “Lord have mercy upon us.”

On June 7, 1665, Pepys first saw “two or three such houses” for himself. On June 10, he decided it was time to write his will. On June 15, he noted that “the town grows very sickly . . . there dying this last week of the plague 112, from 43 the week before.”

The numbers rose throughout the summer. Frightened Londoners discussed such patterns endlessly, as if they were trying to guess when a madman might strike next. On July 1 Pepys saw “seven or eight houses in Bazing-hall street shut up of the plague.” On July 13 he recorded “above 700 dead of the plague this week.”

The numbers were unreliable, for they were gathered by ignorant, despised old women called “searchers.” Their twofold task was to count the dead and to seek out signs of plague among the
living, so that officials could know which families to quaran
tine inside their homes. No one volunteered for such work. The searchers were poor women, on the dole, forced to take on their task by parish officials' threats to withhold their meager benefits. Shunned even in ordinary times, the searchers now bore the added stigma of carrying contagion with them. Passersby who saw the ragged women scurried to get away, and the law made sure that was easy. Searchers were required to carry a two-foot-long white wand as an emblem of office, and to walk close to the refuse channels in the street.

Shaky as the plague statistics were, the trend was unmistakable. Throughout the summer of 1665 the death toll rose from a few hundred a week in June to one thousand a week in July and then to six thousand a week by the end of August. London witnessed scenes that jarred even hardened witnesses. Children were more vulnerable than adults, but whole families fell ill in a matter of days. “Death was the sure midwife to all children, and infants passed immediately from the womb to the grave,” wrote Nathaniel Hodges, a doctor who performed heroic service all through the plague time. “Some of the infected ran into the streets; while others lie half-dead and comatose, but never to be waked but by the last trumpet; some lie vomiting as if they had drunk poison; and others fell dead in the market.”

At first, when the death rate was still low, Dr. Hodges had dared hope that the damage would stay in bounds. All such hopes were soon dashed. Plague was a “cruel enemy,” Hodges lamented, like an army that “at first only scattered about its arrows, but at last covered the whole city with dead.” Hodges told of priests in perfect health who went to comfort dying men and died alongside them. Doctors at the bedside keeled over next to their patients. Pepys heard about a now-commonplace disaster that had befallen an acquaintance. “Poor Will that used
to sell us ale . . . , his wife and three children died, all, I think
in a day.”