The current lockdown situation is a challenging, demanding time for us all. We have watched with worry as COVID-19 has spread around the world at lightning speed. Our focus has been on trying to limit and control the spread of the virus, and to provide our healthcare systems with breathing space to tackle the increased numbers of patients. The Coronavirus Act (2020) outlines our government’s response to the current crisis.

I’m a historian of eighteenth-century British politics, and it struck me how many similarities there were between what the current British government is doing and what British governments in the past have done. While we thankfully no longer execute people who break lockdown or illegally land at ports, many of our approaches remain startingly similar. 

The eighteenth century was filled with numerous health (plague) scares, and British politicians looked to try to control the impacts of the disease in some similar (and some not so similar!) ways to our present situation. Our current pandemic is not the first outbreak of a global health threat, and the British government has sought to legislate through numerous past outbreaks – or fear of outbreaks – with varying levels of success. The Great Plague of London (1665-1666) is one of the better-known examples, and memory of its impact on British politics for generations to come. Fear of the plague has haunted British politicians and the British public alike.  

The Coronavirus Act (2020) gives government wide-ranging powers. Extending from emergency registration of healthcare workers, through details of our food supply and closure of schools, to the ability to close ports, the Act allows the government to put into place many of the restrictions that are currently trying to flatten the curve of infections. These approaches are in many ways not new, and haven’t changed in hundreds of years. While our understanding of the cause and cure of viruses has advanced, many (but, thankfully, not all!) of our emergency solutions remain the same. 

The challenge of trying to enforce a quarantine of 40 days for anyone infected with the plague had been a significant difficulty for the government throughout the 1600s. The Parliament in Westminster had struggled with trying to balance what they saw as the rights of ‘free-born Englishmen’ to conduct trade and commerce with the need to lockdown the economy to protect those same free-born peoples. 

 In the 1720s, almost 100,000 people died in Marseilles as a result of plague. Britain’s politicians panicked at the thought of this mysterious killer crossing the English Channel into British ports. An earlier Act, the Quarantine Act (1710) was quickly replaced with an updated version, the Quarantine Act (1721), in January of that year. Later that year, another debate in Parliament allowed politicians the ability to express their concerns with the Act.  

Proposals to shut down all commerce for a year were viewed to be too extreme. The Act allowed government to detain anyone infected in specially-created ‘pest-houses’. Anyone who escaped was judged ‘guilty of Felony, and shall suffer Death as a Felon without Benefit of Clergy’. Any infected towns or cities could have trenches dug entirely around them to ‘cut off the Communication between such infected City, Town, or Place, and the Rest of the Country’. Anyone who illegally crossed the trenches would also be guilty of a felony and put to death.  

These measures shocked some politicians, and they lodged a great number of protests and complaints. This treatment of British subjects was, the politicians argued, ‘unknown to our excellent constitution, inconsistent with the lenity of our free government’. Worse still, they argued, the government’s measures seem to have been ‘copied from the arbitrary government of France’. 

The debates in Parliament continued, but the law wasn’t changed. The 1721 Act was never tested; the plague that had hit France did not arrive in Britain. British politicians’ fear of plague infecting great swathes of the country didn’t, however, vanish; the 1721 Act was updated and expanded numerous times (in 1743, in 1788 and in 1831). It wasn’t until 1896 that the 1721 Act was replaced by the Public Health Act (1896).  

While we thankfully no longer put people sick with Coronavirus to death for travelling, a number of the provisions of the 1721 Act are still adopted now. We’ve closed ports; we’ve restricted movement; we’ve isolated people known to be carrying the virus. In the words of the 1721 Act: ‘some further provisions are necessary to be made, in case it should please Almighty God to permit these kingdoms to be afflicted with the plague; for remedy thereof; be it enacted. Which is right’. 

 While the current times and current crisis feels entirely unprecedented, we have in the history of the British Parliament a document of how previous governments have – successfully or not – tried to deal with similar emergencies. While the 1721 Act thankfully never needed to be put into practice, the debates around the extent to which government can and should control the day-to-day lives of the people to limit a national health emergency remain across the centuries.