It was the kind of day you were meant to remember. When the people of London woke up on 15 March 1604, the sky was grey and overcast. The sun 'had overslept himself, Thomas Dekker would write.¹ Dekker, a playwright, had a personal reason to pay attention to the weather. He had a stake in the day's events going well, since he had helped to create them. So it was no doubt something of a relief to him that the clouds had done nothing to stop a 'world of people' from descending on London. Every vantage point was filled. Men and women crowded the streets and children clambered on to market stalls to peer over their shoulders. The rich and the elderly, those who did not want to risk the noise and stench of the streets and had the means to avoid it, commandeered the windows of houses that offered a good view of the festivities. Those with foresight had gone to even greater lengths. A pedestrian looking up could see heads peeking out where some wily householders had removed their glass windows so that they could get a better view. London was waiting to greet its king.
James VI of Scotland, nephew to Elizabeth I and son of Mary, Queen of Scots, had been proclaimed king hours after Elizabeth's death on 24 March 1603. Under normal circumstances, the new monarch's ceremonial entry into his new capital city would have taken place soon after his coronation, but even kings have no control over the plague. We have Dekker to thank for a report on that too. The ban on all public gatherings to stop the spread of the infection had closed the theatres down, taking his livelihood with it. Like many of his contemporaries, Dekker found himself desperately trying to scratch out a living. His first attempt at that was a dark, whimsical, often savage little pamphlet called The Wonderfull Yeare, which describes a country teetering between despair and hope. First was the shock of the queen's death for a generation 'that was almost begotten and born under' Elizabeth. and 'never understoode what that strange outlandish word Change signified'. Then came the formal announcement of the new king. 'Upon Thursday it was treason to cry God save king James king of England,' Dekker noted with his playwright's eye for a dramatic turn, 'and upon Friday hye [high] treason not to cry so."2 Plague came soon after and transformed London into a nightmarish city under siege. The Wonderfull Yeare is that unlikely thing, a plague jestbook, one to read when the only thing to do if you are not to give in to damning despair is to laugh at human folly. Its pages are full of desperate people trying to escape inevitable death, and carrying death with them as they ride into the countryside. It echoes with the noise of lamentations, of mothers weeping over dead children, and orphans weeping over parents. Its London is eerily quiet. Entire streets and neighbourhoods are emptied out. Over 30,000 people died in London alone in that plague year. The city turned into a 'vast silent Charnell house', its pavements strewn with futile preventatives like 'blasted Rosemary: withered Hyacinthes, fatall Cipresse and Ewe [yew], thickly mingled with heapes of dead mens bones'. The air was thick with the 'noysome stench' of the sick and the dead.3
On that overcast day in May a year later, however, the city breathed freely again. The pestilence had exhausted itself. Instead of weeping and lamentations, music sung by a choir of 300 children greeted the king as he set off from the Tower of London for the Palace of Westminster under the curious gaze of his new English subjects.
