ABSTRACT
Looking back across the plague epidemics of the seventeenth century, John Graunt asserts, “That the Opinions of Plagues accompanying the Entrance of Kings, is false, and seditious.”1 By 1662 it had thus become common opinion that the transition between monarchs marked a dangerous opportunity for pestilence to erupt. Despite Graunt’s condemnation of this “false and seditious” opinion, it had long and deep associations. This should not be surprising, given that signifi cant outbreaks of plague did in fact accompany the transition from Elizabeth to James in 1603, and again from James to Charles in 1625.2 In this essay I examine the fi rst of these monarchical shifts, arguing that the particular circumstances surrounding Elizabeth’s death generated associations in the cultural imagination between the queen’s body and the social and economic devastation caused by virulent plague-contagious fi gurations that reverberated across the century.
