At the latter end of 1664, says Defoe, two men, said to be Frenchmen, died of the plague at the Drury Lane end of Long Acre. Dr. Hodges, however, a greater authority than Defoe, who wrote fifty-seven years after the event, says merely that the pestilence broke out in Westminster, and that two or three persons dying, the frightened neighbours removed into the City, and there carried the contagion. He, however, distinctly states that the pest came to us from Holland, and most probably in a parcel of infected goods from Smyrna.[474] According to Defoe, the family with which the Frenchmen had lodged endeavoured to conceal the deaths; but the rumour growing, the Secretary of State heard of it, and sent two physicians and a surgeon to inspect the bodies. They certifying that the men had really died of the plague, the parish clerk returned the deaths to “the Hall,” and they were printed in the weekly bill of mortality. “The people showed a great concern at this, and began to be alarmed all over the town.”[475] At Christmas Dr. Hodges attended a case of plague, and shortly afterwards a proclamation was issued for placing watchmen day and night at the doors of infected houses, which were to be marked with a red St. Andrew cross and the subscription “Lord have mercy upon us!”[476] By the next September the terrible disease had risen to its height, and the deaths ranged as high as 12,000 a week, and in the worst night after the bonfires had been burned in the street, to 4000 in the twelve hours.[477] Great Queen Street, so called after Henrietta Maria, the imprudent but brave wife of Charles I., was built about 1629, before the troubles. Howes (editor of Stow) speaks in 1631, of “the new fair buildings leading into Drury Lane.”[478] Many of the houses were built by Webb, one of Inigo Jones’s scholars. The south was the fashionable side, looking towards the Pancras fields; most of the north side houses must, therefore, be of a later date. According to one authority Inigo Jones himself built Queen Street, at the cost of the Jesuits, designing it for a square, and leaving in the middle a niche for the statue of Queen Henrietta. “The stately and magnificent houses,” begun on the other side near Little Queen Street, were not continued. There were fleurs-de-luce placed on the walls in honour of the queen.[479]