1622 25 4 442 345 1623 25 16 2254 439 (sic) 1624 25 9 978 714 1625 25 9 666 563 In September, 1623, the corporation of Stamford made a collection “in this dangerous time of visitation,” and sent £10 of it to Grantham, the rest to go “to London or some other town, as occasion offered.” A London letter of 6 December, 1623, from Chamberlain to Carleton says[47]:-- “Here is a contagious spotted or purple fever that reigns much, which, together with the smallpox, hath taken away many of good sort, as well as meaner people.” He then gives the names of notables dead of it, and adds: “Yet many escape, as the dean of St Paul’s [Dr Donne, who used the occasion to compile a manual of devotion] is like to do, though he were in great danger.” One of the Coke family writes early in January, 1624, from London[48]: “Having two sons at Cambridge, we sent for them to keep Christmas with us, and not many days after their coming my eldest son Joseph fell suddenly into the sickness of the time which they call the spotted fever, and which after two days’ extremity took away his life.” From another letter it appears that one of his symptoms was “not being able to sleep,” the unmistakable vigil of typhus. Although there is no word of the epidemic continuing in Scotland in 1624, it was undoubtedly as prevalent in England in that year as the year before, and prevalent in country houses as well as in towns and cities. Thus, on 7 August, 1624, Chamberlain writes: “The [king’s] progress is now so far off that we hear little thence, but only that there be many sick of the spotted ague, which took away the Duke of Lennox in a few days. He died at Kirby,” a country house in Northamptonshire[49]. On 21 August he writes again: “This spotted fever is cousin-german to it [the plague] at least, and makes as quick riddance almost. The Lady Hatton hath two or three of her children sick of it at her brother Fanshaw’s in Essex, and hath lost her younger daughter, that was buried at Westminster on Wednesday night by her father; a pretty gentlewoman, much lamented.” A letter of 4 September says there was excessive mortality in London, in great part among children (doubtless from the usual infantile trouble of a hot autumn, diarrhoea), while “most of the rest are carried away by this spotted fever, which reigns almost everywhere, in the country as ill as here.” Sir Theodore Mayerne, the king’s physician, confirms this, under date 20 August, 1624: the purple fever, he says, was “not so much contagious as common through a universal disposing cause,” seizing upon many in the same house, and destroying numbers, being most full of malignity[50]. It was clearly an inexplicable visitation.