“To be sure it is. But they’ll never think of that in their zeal and their sudden godliness--for they’ll be in a muck-sweat o’ godliness now that they see what a visitation has been brought upon us by the vices of the Court. And this to happen at such a time, with the Dutch fleet, as they say, about to attack the coast!” She railed on. Disturbed out of her self-centred existence into a consideration of the world’s ills now that she found herself menaced by them, she displayed a prodigious volubility upon topics that hitherto she had completely ignored. And the substance of her news was true enough. The Lord Mayor was at that very moment at Whitehall urging immediate and drastic measures for combating the spread of the pestilence, and one of these measures was the instant closing of the playhouses. But since he did not at the same time urge the closing of the churches, in which the congregating of people was at least as dangerous as in the theatres, it was assumed at Court that Sir John was the cat’s-paw of the Puritans who sought to make capital out of the pestilence. Besides, the visitation was one that confined itself to the poorer quarters and the lower orders. Heaven would never be so undiscriminating as to permit this horrible disease to beset persons of quality. And then, too, Whitehall’s mind at the moment was over-full of other matters: there were these rumours that the Dutch fleet was out, and that was quite sufficient to engage such time and attention as could be spared from pleasure by the nation’s elect, following in the footsteps of their pleasure-loving King. Also a good many of the nation’s elect were exercised at the time by personal grievances in connection with the fleet and the war. Of these perhaps the most disgruntled--as he was certainly the most eminent--was His Grace of Buckingham, who found the nation sadly negligent of the fact that he had come all the way from York, and his lord-lieutenancy there, to offer her his valuable services in her hour of need.