I'm John Batchew with Professor Jonathan Healy. His first book is The Blazing World,

which was a stunning achievement for me because I didn't know any of this. And now I've had a

very good 20th century education. I read a lot of history in university, and I've read a lot since.

Jonathan's book introduces you to a world that we come from. The 17th century, you remember your

date, 1607. That's Jamestown. 1619. That's the Pilgrims. All of this material is watching England, Great Britain,

in civil war, or building towards civil war in the 17th century, when power would pass from

the king to the parliament. Constitutional monarchy, we call it today. That would be the model

for the founders in the 18th century, which is why all this

backstory is so helpful to understand our institutions. We come now to not an institution, but the

question of health of the republic or health of the empire or health of the kingdom, the plague.

It returns in the 17th century, never more worrisome than in 1660s.

But it strikes that winter in only London, Jonathan, or was it throughout the land?

Well, at this point, the plague tended to hit city by city.

When the Black Death first arrived in England in the 14th century, it just swept through the country very, very quickly.

But now, ever since that, it sort of pops up in one place and then disappears and then go somewhere else.

So it was in other places a little bit, but the main centre at this point was London and

Westminster.

And that summer in particular, you know, the summer of 1641 had been very, very bad.

Plague got a lot, had been, you know, killing quite a lot of people.

By the wintertime, because of the particular kind of seasonality of plague, it was starting to die out.

But yeah, it had been a sickly year.

The reason the plague is important here is because members of the House of Lords and those who could afford it in Commons have fled the city and are a call to return to Parliament.

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