[The following is in regards to the coronation of James VI and I, which took place during a great plague.]
By ancient tradition the coronation was held on a holy day. James’s choice, 25 July, was the feast day of his namesake, St. James, and an eminently suitable choice. The hotter sort of Protestant disapproved of holy days, but the commemoration of the life of an apostle was less offensive than that of an ordinary saint. The only difficulty with the date was that it fell during the height of summer, when the plague spread fastest, and the current epidemic was proving the worst in living memory.
[…]
The area around St. Paul’s grew quiet in the brief lull that followed before people flooded back into London for the coronation, stubbornly ignoring the mounting death toll. About a thousand people were now dying each week, “in every house grief striking up an alarum, servants crying out for masters: wives for husbands, parents for children, children for their mothers,” Dekker recalled. At night it was like being boarded up “in a vast silent charnel house… hung (to make it more hideous) with lamps dimly and slowly burning, in hollow and glimmering corners.”
Source:
Lisle, Leanda De. "An Anointed King" After Elizabeth: The Rise of James of Scotland and the Struggle for the Throne of England. New York: Ballantine, 2005. 237-38. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Dekker, Wonderful Year, pp. 102-5.
Further Reading:
[Thomas Dekker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Dekker_(writer)
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