Jem (and Sam)

by Ferdinand Mount

  Throughout the Great Plague, it was frequently rumoured that evil men who knew they had the Plague would spend their last few days consorting with those they had grudges against. Many similar stories have been told during the Aids epidemic, but few actual cases proven, then or now.

  Despite the glass case, the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Laurence, was on the whole thought to have had a ‘good Plague’, as, of course, had Monck, Pepys, Evelyn and anyone else who stayed in London.

  The ring was indeed left to Jem in Peter Llewelyn’s will, though it was not there described.

  The Great Fire shows Pepys at his best: quick, decisive, inventive. As soon as he saw that nobody was doing anything effective to combat it, he went straight to the King at Whitehall, got his permission to create firebreaks by demolishing buildings that lay in the Fire’s path, then rushed back to the Lord Mayor whom he met in Canning Street ‘like a man spent, with a handkerchief about his neck’. To the King’s message, he cried like a fainting woman ‘Lord, what can I do? I am spent. People will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses. But the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it.’ It was not until the King and the Duke came down in person that afternoon that the orders began to be obeyed, by which time the fire was unstoppable. Even then, Pepys managed to save the Navy Office by getting dockyard hands from Woolwich and Deptford to blow up the houses round about.

  Pepys was just as much taken by surprise as everyone else by the Dutch raid up the Medway. Although he had had reliable report on the Saturday of a Dutch fleet of eighty sail off Harwich and of gunfire heard to the north-east of London the night before, he spent an agreeable weekend, including a visit to his mistress Mrs Martin, and a boat-trip up the river. It was only on the Monday that he rushed down to Deptford to get the ships ready. When he returned to London and, on the Wednesday, heard that the Dutch had broken the chain, he decided to send his wife and father into the country immediately with £1,300 in gold in their night-bag. His clerk Gibson was sent off to Huntingdon with 1,000 guineas. Pepys himself wore an extremely cumbersome girdle containing £300 in gold. He also had £200 in silver coin, which was too bulky to carry. He thought of throwing it into the earth closet but worried about how to get it out again.

  Commissioner Peter Pett (1610–72) succeeded his father as Navy Commissioner (superintendent of the dockyard) at Chatham. Since the family almost monopolised offices in the Thames yards, they had already come under attack for corruption and embezzlement, and it was natural that he should be made scapegoat for the disaster of the Medway. As Marvell put it in Last Instructions to a Painter:

  After this loss, to relish discontent,

  Some one must be accused by Parliament;

  All our miscarriages on Pett must fall;

  His name alone seems fit to answer all.

  There then follows a bravura sequence of rhyming couplets, each detailing some fresh blunder and the last word of each being ‘Pett’.

  Yet afterwards Pett was merely sent to the Tower for a short time, then examined by the House of Commons, and finally, despite talk of impeachment, allowed to retire into private life – one of those examples of the capriciousness of retribution in public life that often surprise one’s expectations.

  VII The Hospital

  Nan died at the end of January 1670, two months after Elizabeth Pepys, three weeks after her husband and a month after her son’s wedding. Elizabeth was buried in St Olave’s, Hart Street, the Navy Office church. A poignant bust of her, showing the liquid eyes and goofy teeth, is skied on the north wall of the chancel. Nan was buried alongside her husband in the Henry VII Chapel, where her son and daughter-in-law later came to join her.

  The Committee for Accounts, later called the Brooke House Committee from its meeting place, was nominated at the end of 1667 to inquire into the misconduct of the war and, more generally, the management of the Navy, but it did not get into its stride for another two years. Pepys’s brilliant performance before the Committee in March 1668 was only an hors d’oeuvre to the hearings in January and February 1670 at which the King intervened to save Pepys and himself. After this, there were no more hearings, and the Committee lapsed when Parliament was adjourned. Richard Ollard’s Life of Pepys disentangles the whole imbroglio beautifully.

  The murder of the beadle in Whetstone Park presented the King with a difficult choice: either to let off both his beloved Monmouth and old Monck’s son or to appease the righteous anger of public opinion. He chose the first, a politically damaging move which was held against him for some time.

  New Bedlam was built more or less on the site presently occupied by Liverpool Street Station in fifteen months between April 1675 and July 1676, and continued to be London’s leading lunatic asylum, until in 1815 the 122 remaining inmates were transferred by hackney coaches to the third Bethlehem Hospital across the river in St George’s Fields at a cost of £18. By a coarse irony, in 1936 this third Bedlam became the Imperial War Museum after the patients moved out to Kent. Cibber’s two stone figures, all that remains of the Moorfields Bedlam, still belong to the Bethlem Royal Hospital’s Museum at Beckenham.

  James Carcase was put in Bedlam for posing as a priest and other eccentric behaviour. He was one of the more popular patients with upper-class visitors, and his book, Lucida Intervalla, contains several poems addressed to them. Lucida Intervalla, published in a crudely printed edition in 1679, may well be the first book to have been published by a Bedlamite.

  The Popish plot, though invented by Titus Oates and eagerly backed by republicans and malcontents such as Shaftesbury and Buckingham, clearly owed a great deal to the fertile imagination of John Scott, and the Dog and Dripping Pan (a real tavern) was probably the centre of operations for the whole business which is marvellously described by Sir Arthur Bryant in The Years of Peril, the second part of his great three-volume life of Pepys. We owe much to Pepys himself who became obsessed with Scott and put together two volumes of evidence against that nonpareil of seventeen-century conmen, calling it ‘My Book of Mornamont’ after an imaginary castle that Scott claimed to possess.

  Theories of conception have varied so enormously in the pre-modern era that it sometimes seems as though every fancy which could come into a human brain had been proposed. One of my favourites is the belief practised by French aristocrats that if they bound up their left testicle before intercourse, they would be more likely to conceive a boy, the right side being the dominant or male side. The Duchess’s theory was, as Will Symons claimed, common practice at the time, though we may doubt whether it was seriously believed or only a convenient fiction for getting an heir.

  There is a fair case to be made for Kit’s tactics against Monmouth. By strictly obeying orders and holding back till Monmouth came towards Devon, Kit allowed him to be picked off and defeated decisively. The trouble was that it was not Kit who did the picking off. He was thus blamed for the palpitations the rebellion had caused and given no credit for the victory – a fate often suffered by the first commander in any campaign.

  VIII The Island

  Sir William Phipps (1651–95), the restorer of Kit’s fortune, began life as a ship’s carpenter and later became a merchant captain at Boston, Mass. After his treasure-seeking years, he returned to Massachusetts, where he led several naval expeditions against the French, though he failed to take Montreal. He eventually became Governor of Massachusetts, in which capacity he did nothing much to restrain the witchcraft mania then in full spate.

  Richard Mount was bound apprentice to William Fisher on 10 January 1669 when he was barely fourteen years old. He married Sarah Fisher, his employer’s daughter, in 1682. In 1684, the name of the business was changed to R. Mount, but it was probably still a partnership, as William Fisher was to live another seven years, though ‘very infirm’. Richard began to print Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot in the 1680s, and the firm continued to reissue the charts for another century or more. The Harwich chart, dedicated to Pepys at the zenith of his fame and power, was one
of the earliest, dated 1686.

  Hans Sloane (1660-1753) was born in County Down, studied medicine in Paris and Montpellier, was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1685 and its Secretary from 1693 to 1712, and later President from 1727 to 1741. He published the two volumes of his great Natural History of Jamaica – which is a travelogue as well as a botanical survey – in 1707 and 1725. He became an extremely fashionable physician, being consulted by Queen Anne and almost everyone else. Despite his generosity to poor patients, he grew rich enough to purchase the manor of Chelsea (hence Sloane Street and Hans Place). He bequeathed his collection to the nation. Under the guidance of Horace Walpole and others, this became the nucleus of the British Museum, whose first home, oddly enough, was to be Montague House, where both he and his collection had lodged sixty years earlier. He also founded the Chelsea Physick Garden, and the statue of him by Rysbrack, now much weathered, which used to be in the Physick Garden, now stands indoors in the hall of the present British Museum on the site of the old Montague House.

  It may seem peculiar that Sir Henry Morgan should have achieved such respectable status in later life, being known to posterity as a pirate (Captain Morgan’s Rum being only one echo of his fame), but the edge of empire was a rough and insecure place. The distinction between privateers, pirates and acknowledged servants of the Crown was blurred, and all assistance in holding territory and exacting tribute was gratefully welcomed. Morgan’s terrible massacre at Lake Maracaibo was conducted under the official British auspices of the then governor of Jamaica, Sir Thomas Modyford.

  The Muggletonians had a network of supporters across the Empire. Never very numerous and never attracting any socially important adherents, the religion was the only one of the Dissenting sects, apart from the Quakers, to survive the storms of the seventeenth century and to linger on into our own. Once shorn of the primitive materialism of John Reeve, Muggletonianism contained virtually no ritual and was not much encrusted by superstition and thus stood up quite well to the buffetings of nineteenth-century science. The last known Muggletonian, Philip Noakes, a farmer, of Matfield, Kent, died in 1979.

  The Prince of Wales, later the Old Pretender, was born on 16 June 1688. Kit died on 6 October 1688. William of Orange landed at Torbay the following month. The Duchess and her party did not set sail until 15 March 1689. They landed at Plymouth on 30 May.

  Pepys resigned the Secretaryship of the Admiralty on 20 February 1689, was imprisoned in the Gatehouse between May and July, resigned the Trinity House in August. He was again briefly imprisoned in the Gatehouse the following year before finally retiring into private life.

  IX The Coffee-House

  Kit’s will was the cause célèbre of the time, beginning shortly after his death and not being fully resolved until 1709, by which time Lord Bath was dead, Ralph Mountagu was dying and almost all of those who had originally hoped to benefit were dead, except the mad Duchess, who was by then entirely out of her wits.

  Coffee was first introduced into England from Arabia and sold in Oxford at various establishments along the High Street in the early 1650s. By the late 1650s, the City was full of coffee-houses. Tea, cocoa, sherbet, and later pills and potions, were also sold. Doctors would call on coffee-houses at specified hours to see their patients. The first mention of Lloyd’s coffee-house dates from the end of the 1680s, but marine broking and insurance were no doubt carried on at other coffee-houses, such as Jonathan’s and Garraway’s, well before that date. The present Stock Exchange is the lineal descendant of Jonathan’s, just as the Shipping Exchange originated in the Baltic coffee-house. The remarkable thing about Lloyd’s was that it remained a coffee-house throughout nearly a century of its progress towards becoming the world’s greatest insurance market. In fact, it seems to have retained something of its old informal character up to the present day, which may help to explain its downfall as well as its long supremacy.

  Half the fortune-hunters in the English nobility appear to have paid court to the Duchess in her widowhood. Ralph Mountagu’s stratagem sounds incredible, but it is attested to not only by that usually reliable gossip Horace Walpole but by other sources such as Granger’s Biographical History. The story was also appropriated by several dramatists of the period.

  The so-called China trade was in full flood by the end of the seventeenth century, but as early as 1613 a ‘cabinet of China worke’ was given as a wedding present to Princess Elizabeth, James I’s daughter. Gilt cabinets, embroidered cushions, lacquer chests, bedsteads and boxes were already being produced in English workshops, as well as the pseudo-Chinese pottery coming out of Delft and Nevers. London directors of the East India Company began to complain that genuine Indian fabrics being sent over were not suitable for the English market. Patterns had to be sent out to India to show Indian workmen how the English envisaged works ‘in the China fashion’. The story took an extra twist when these articles, further cross-bred by the Indian weavers, were then in the eighteenth century exported as novelties to China itself. ‘Japanesed’ cabinets were made as far north as Scotland and as far west as New England. Blue-and-white chinoiserie jugs and plates were made at Lambeth and Bristol, Chinese tapestries and screens in Soho. The distinction between India, China and Japan was never clearly established in the minds of either customers or designers.

  Throughout the war with France which followed the accession of William III and Mary II, British and Dutch merchantmen were constantly harried by French cruisers and privateers. But all previous losses were overshadowed by the disaster which overtook the Smyrna Fleet in May 1693. The 400 vessels had been waiting months for an escort and thought themselves well enough protected by Rooke’s 20 men-of-war. But Tourville slipped out of Brest and joined up with the Toulon squadron just round the tip of Portugal and destroyed or captured nearly 200 merchantmen. Although the Dutch, still far ahead in the carrying trade, lost more, the damage to English merchants and underwriters was so shattering that a Bill was brought in to help the underwriters, who included Daniel Defoe, or Foe as he was called in this one of his many diverse ventures. The Bill passed the Commons, but the Lords, influenced by the pleas of the creditors, threw it out, and legislation to regulate insurance had to wait for the second shattering blow a generation later, the South Sea Bubble.

  The Mr Harrison mentioned here is Edward Harrison whose Idea Longitudinis was one of the first books Richard Mount published; it has never been heard of since. Sixty years later, the firm also published the trail-blazing work of John Harrison (no relation, so far as we know): The Principle of Mr Harrison’s Time-Keeper (1767). In the furious controversy over the best method of measuring one’s easterly or westerly position at sea – a controversy which, through Dava Sobel’s little book, has excited our own day almost as much as it excited eighteenth-century England – Mount & Page scored a double hit by publishing not only the most celebrated work by ‘Longitude’ Harrison but also the works of his unyielding rival, the Astronomer-Royal Sir Nevil Maskelyne, who for so long denied John Harrison the £20,000 price offered by the Longitude Act of 1714. Even if poor Edward Harrison had found the answer, he would have been too early for the prize.

  It is not known when Richard Mount acquired his holding in the copperas house at Whitstable, but he must have been doing pretty well, for the Mendfield House was one of the larger establishments in what was a particularly thriving trade at the time. Richard and his heirs continued as proprietors of the Mendfield House until 1791, by which time copperas was about to be replaced by synthetic chemical dyes. Unlike Jem, the rest of the family knew when to sell, which is – a sad fact of life, I think – more important than knowing when to buy.

  A plaque still marks the site of these grim early-industrial establishments on the Recreation Ground, Tankerton Road, Whitstable.

  X The Shore

  Jem can hardly be blamed for believing that no other Clerk to the Council had kept a journal or a book of memorials. Pepys told only a couple of intimates of his Diary and only Will Hewer knew Shelton�
�s system of shorthand which Pepys used. The Diary, with ‘Journal’ clearly printed on the spines, languished undeciphered on the shelves of Magdalene College, Cambridge, for more than a century before the successful publication of Evelyn’s Diary spurred the dozy dons into action.

  Richard Mount lived on until 1722 when he died, at the age of seventy, of a fall from his horse when he was riding over London Bridge. He, like his wife Sarah and her father William Fisher, was buried in St Katharine by the Tower, a church obliterated a hundred years later by the building of Telford’s massive new dock. Frugal to the last (his motto was Prudenter et constanter), he desired that the £60 which might otherwise have been spent on his funeral be divided among his poorer relatives at Elmstead. Modest his funeral might have been, but there was a sermon preached at it by the celebrated Presbyterian minister John Newman, in which he described Richard as ‘a hearty friend to the Societies of Reformation of Manners and Suppression of Vice’ who did greatly lament the growing wickedness of the Time and Place in which he lived’. Was Richard thinking of his father in these lamentations? The sermon was afterwards printed together with ‘Some short heads of advice left by the Deceased to his Children and found under his own hand’. The advice included a warning to ‘be very cautious of being decoyed by the specious pretence of projectors or of trusting others too far in the management of any part of your Estate and have a care of adventuring in hazardous undertakings’ – all of which was advice that might have been better addressed to Richard’s father than to his sons, who turned out to be as prudent as he himself had been.