Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  The other cousins who were to play a crucial part in shaping his life were based in East Anglia. Sam’s Cambridgeshire grandfather had a sister, Paulina Pepys, who was orphaned young and married late, at thirty-seven – late but splendidly. Considering that she was then already middle aged, with a fortune of no more than £200, her marriage to Sir Sidney Montagu, distinguished younger son of an aristocratic and gifted family, suggests she was an outstanding woman and had wisely waited for the right husband. He was educated at Cambridge and the Middle Temple and had served as an MP in the time of Queen Elizabeth; one brother was an earl, another a bishop. Paulina’s marriage in 1618 made her cousin to a score of grandees. Her glory was acknowledged in Salisbury Court, where two of Sam’s sisters were named for her. A daughter and a son were born to the Montagus, but at three the boy, playing beside the moat, fell into the water and was drowned. His grieving parents had to take consolation in the birth of a third and last child, another boy, Edward, in 1625. With little Edward they moved to Hinchingbrooke, a great house outside Huntingdon.

  Hinchingbrooke had been an abbey until King Henry evicted the holy ladies and sold it to Sir Richard Cromwell; the Cromwells rebuilt it, and James I stayed there more than once and even considered buying it for himself. Sir Sidney paid £3,000 for it, and there Edward grew up, knowing the estate would be his one day, and went to the grammar school along the road in Huntingdon where their neighbour Oliver Cromwell had been a pupil. A cousin of his mother lived in his own modest farmhouse at Brampton, two miles from Hinchingbrooke, and worked as a bailiff for the Montagus. He was Robert Pepys, elder brother of Sam’s father, and this was the family connection that in due course brought Sam to the grammar school at Huntingdon, to lodge at Brampton and to be welcome at Hinchingbrooke, not as an equal to be sure, but as a cousin who could be useful and might deserve some help on his way.27

  Edward Montagu was put down for the Middle Temple when he was ten and Sam was three. But nothing went according to plan. His mother, Paulina, died when he was twelve. His father withdrew into melancholy, and by the time he was seventeen the country was at war. Instead of becoming a law student, Edward found himself in command of a regiment. Sir Sidney would not turn against the King, but Edward was a passionate parliamentarian, like his sister’s husband, Sir Gilbert Pickering; both were admirers and personal friends of Cromwell. In the excitement and impending danger of war Edward fell in love and decided to marry. He and his bride were both seventeen. Jemima was the daughter of a rich Northamptonshire MP and parliamentarian, John Crew, and the womanly virtues admired in her father’s family can be judged from the names of her grandmother and aunts, Temperance, Patience, Prudence and Silence.28 Jemima’s personal virtues included a warm heart, good humour and a straightforward disposition, some of which can be made out in an early miniature of her, which shows a tip-tilted nose and open, friendly face. She and Edward were married at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on 7 November 1642. Five days later King Charles’s nephew, Prince Rupert, sacked Brentford and the people of London braced themselves to defend Turnham Green, Westminster and the City against the forces of the King. Edward Montagu’s career was set on course as a fighting man.

  Pepys’s early life has to be explained in terms of families but it has also to be set against the political turmoil of the years leading up to the civil war. As a London boy, he saw in the streets the effects of debates he could not yet understand, played out with passion, cruelty, violence and reversals of fortune to equal anything in the theatre. ‘The war was begun in our streets before the King or the Parliament had any armies,’ wrote one wise observer, and Sam had the chance to see this in action, the propaganda fixed on the City walls, the rioting apprentices and sailors, attacks on suspected Roman Catholics, crowds surging to welcome their heroes and threaten their enemies, or assembling to watch the executions of detested figures.29

  In November 1640, for example, when he was seven, two men without ears rode into London at Charing Cross with branches of rosemary in their hands, escorted by crowds, ‘every man on horseback or on foot having bays and rosemary in their hats and hands, and the people on either side of the street strewing the way as they passed with herbs and such other greens as the season afforded, and expressing great joy for their return’.30 This extraordinary piece of street drama was for William Prynne and Henry Burton, a lawyer and a preacher, whose ears had been cut off publicly in Palace Yard, Westminster, four years earlier, before another large and sympathetic crowd. They had been punished – Prynne was also branded and sentenced to life imprisonment – for offending the king and Archbishop Laud. Now they were released by the power of the House of Commons. A week later there was a second triumphal return, with trumpets playing at the windows for Dr Bastwick, their fellow martyr to freedom of conscience and speech. Early the next year the king’s two most hated servants, Laud and the earl of Strafford, were taken to the Tower. City mobs agitated for Strafford’s execution, collected signatures demanding his death and posted up in the street the names of those MPs who opposed it. Shops were shut while a large and well-organized group of armed citizens accompanied the MPs who went to the king to urge him to sign the Bill of Attainder that would allow Strafford to be beheaded.31 The crowd that watched the execution in May 1641 included many soberly dressed women; there was more enthusiasm for this than for the wedding of two royal children, nine-year-old Princess Mary to the twelve-year-old Prince of Orange, which had taken place a few days before the execution.32

  The two passions fuelling parliament and people were religious fervour and the fear that the king, egged on by his Catholic wife, was aiming to become an absolute ruler. The religious rollercoaster of the previous century, when successive Tudor monarchs first overthrew the Catholic Church, set up Protestantism, restored Catholicism and then settled into uneasy compromise under Elizabeth, had left a legacy of fierce hatred of the Catholics and a burgeoning of Protestant sects. The movement came to be called puritanism, and the puritans, disliking the established Church with its bishops and tithes that bore harshly on the poor, became the allies of the political opponents of the king. Margaret Pepys, like a great many of her neighbours, seems to have veered towards puritanism, although she still attended St Bride’s church and had her own pew.33 Her boys grew accustomed to hearing puritan preachers in the street. In 1640 a local leather-seller called Praisegod Barebones set up his Baptist congregation right outside, in Fleet Street. Baptist ministers saw no need for church buildings, supported themselves by working at other jobs and welcomed women as preachers; and more Baptist congregations were begun in other parts of town.34 The City apprentices who gathered in Westminster in the winter of 1641 shouted ‘No Bishops’; there was some fighting, and in the days after Christmas the same boys blocked the river stairs to prevent the bishops newly appointed by the king from taking their seats in the House of Lords, and went on to attack them in their coaches. When the bishops protested, parliament found grounds for impeaching them and sent them to prison, at which the apprentices rang the City churchbells joyfully and made bonfires in the streets. The king then moved to impeach his chief enemies in parliament.

  Pepys was quite old enough to be on the streets when on 4 January 1642 the king pursued the five MPs he was trying to arrest from the House of Commons into the City. He was mobbed by huge numbers of tradesmen, apprentices and seamen, all shouting ‘privilege of Parliament, privilege of Parliament’ – a difficult mouthful for a mob, but they made it sound frightening. Although the king was not harmed, he was thoroughly scared. This was a spectacular moment in English history, and a week later Charles left London with his family. He was not seen there again until his execution in Whitehall, seven years later, when an approving Pepys was by his own account standing in the crowd.

  On the day after the king left, the five MPs he had threatened made a triumphal journey on the Thames from the City to Westminster, escorted by a flotilla of beribboned boats loaded with cheering and waving Londoners, while citizen soldiers marche
d along the Strand with drums and flags to meet them as they came ashore. These soldiers, known as the trained bands, were ordinary townsmen organized into fighting groups, their effectiveness depending more on enthusiasm than discipline. The next big street show was the execution in late January of two Catholic priests in front of an approving crowd. In March parliament began to raise its own army, and in May the City’s regiments were reviewed on Finsbury Fields in front of the assembled MPs. In June Londoners were asked for money by parliament and they responded generously, even though times were hard for tradesmen in the absence of the court. John Pepys’s lawyer customers had fewer clients and less to spend; and the prospect of civil war promised worse to come, as their one-time neighbour, lawyer Whitelocke, now in parliament, warned, saying the country was ‘at the pit’s brink, ready to plunge ourselves into an ocean of troubles and miseries… What the issue of it will be no man alive can tell. Probably few of us now here may live to see the end of it.’35 In July the royalist Mayor Gurney was impeached in parliament and sent to the Tower, where he remained almost until his death five years later. A puritan was appointed as mayor in his place. Milton called the City ‘the mansion house of liberty’, and as such it had to prepare to defend itself against the gathering forces of the king, who raised his standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642.

  This was the official start of the civil war. It was brought about essentially by the king’s refusal to accept the limitations parliament was determined to set upon his power, and by parliament’s refusal to accept his supremacy. The war split the nation, dividing families, cities, counties and social classes as well as the great bodies and institutions, the navy, the universities, the legal and medical professions; and the religious rift between those who held to the established Church of England and those who rejected it sharpened the bitterness of the fight. Within seven years the country would rid itself of king, lords and bishops; and though these reforms were reversed, it was never again ruled for any length of time without the cooperation of the elected House of Commons. From the English revolution came much of the inspiration for both the American and the French revolutions of the next century. The intellectual revolution that accompanied the war was as important as the war itself, so that ‘it is difficult for us to conceive how men thought before it was made’.36 Both the political and intellectual aspects of the revolution were to have a profound effect upon Pepys.

  Meanwhile parliament ordered the digging of trenches and building of ramparts and forts to close all the main roads into London. Islington, the fields round St Pancras Church, Mile End, Rotherhithe and Wapping were the sites of some of the twenty-four forts. A huge workforce was needed. It was found among the people of the City and the suburbs, women and children included; Sam and Tom Pepys may well have taken part. When announcements were made in the churches, citizens turned out with ‘baskets, spades and such like instruments, for digging of trenches and casting up of breast-works from one fort to another’. More than 20,000 people were said to have worked on the defences, a sixth of the population. They were directed by sailors and officers of the trained bands, and their effectiveness was observed with surprise and respect by the Venetian ambassador among others. John Evelyn, a supporter of the king, also came to view the ‘so much celebrated line of communication’.37 The work was in full swing in the autumn of 1642, the season of Edward Montagu’s marriage to Jemima Crew in Westminster and of Prince Rupert’s sacking of Brentford, which inspired John Milton to write his sonnet ‘When the assault was intended to the city’. It was addressed to the expected royalist invaders, ‘Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms’, and suggested they would be well advised to spare a poet.

  Milton’s plea proved unnecessary. The royalists were kept from London. They were tired after a long march, and short of supplies, and their nerve failed. The earl of Essex, with 24,000 of the trained bands, held Turnham Green for parliament. The London troops had good supplies, including the baskets of food brought to them by their wives and sweethearts. The success of the London trained bands was decisive, and the royalists never threatened the capital again. But the fear remained that Rupert would return and sack the City, and the work on the defences continued until the following summer of 1643.38

  These were the first ten years of Pepys’s life. They brought him bodily pain and the loss of his dearest playmates. Flesh, he learnt, was vulnerable as well as shameful, but also capable of taking intense pleasure: in music, in running about the streets, in playing with bows and arrows, in country trips and in cakes and ale. Child of a washmaid and a tailor, he found himself the exceptional, elected son and as such was given glimpses of a way of life other than the constricted one in the house off Fleet Street. This other life was luxurious, artistic and seductive. At Durdans he not only took part in acting, he delighted in the gardens and walked in the woods with a woman who gave him his ‘first sentiments of love and pleasure in a woman’s company, discourse and taking her by the hand’. Her name was Mrs Hely, and the impression she made on him was so strong that he remembered and wrote it down when he was thirty.39 So the private Samuel Pepys began to develop and yearn.

  At the same time he was a London boy through and through, eyes alert for every detail of a street scene that offered constant excitement, and quick-witted enough to be sent on awkward errands about town. For instance, while he was still a ‘little boy’, his mother dispatched him for word of his father, who had gone to Holland and left them without news. He had to go a long way, across the river to Horsley-down in Bermondsey, to get information out of the men at St Saviour’s Dock where the ships came in. Whatever his father was doing abroad, he turned up again safely and went on quietly with his tailoring. He may have been trying to do some business, although the tailoring trade seems an unlikely reason for travelling in wartime; and it may also be that Edward Montagu, already one of Cromwell’s lieutenants, used his cousin as a courier to the Dutch, since Dutch engineers were brought over early in 1643 to advise on the London fortifications.40 And maybe it was at this time that Montagu first noticed Sam, and thought of doing something for him.

  The London defences were still being worked on in the summer of 1643. In May the Venetian ambassador reported, ‘The forts round the city are now completed and admirably designed. They are now beginning the connecting lines. As they wish to complete them speedily and the circuit is most vast, they have gone through the city with drums beating and flags flying, to enlist the men and women volunteers for the work. Although they only give them their bare food, without any pay, there has been an enormous rush of people even of some rank, who believe they are serving God by assisting in the pious work, as they deem it.’41 But with summer also came the plague. There was nothing new about this, it had been making irregular appearances for years: there had been a very bad outbreak in 1625, when one City father noted that ‘three score children died out of one alley’, and there were lesser ones in 1630, 1636 and 1642.42 Fear of the plague would have been a good reason for sending Sam and Tom out of town to Kingsland and Hackney, and may now have contributed to the decision to send Sam away again. This time it was neither to Hackney nor to Surrey, but to somewhere quite strange to him, sixty miles north-east of London: into the misty fens of Huntingdonshire.

  2. A Schoolboy’s War: Huntingdon and St Paul’s

  Ordinary people travelling from London to Huntingdon went with the carrier, who arrived in London every Wednesday and set off homewards again on Thursday from Cripplegate, the northernmost of the City gates. The journey took two days of steady plod with load and passengers, through Kingsland, Enfield, Ware, Puckeridge, Royston and Caxton, little towns of two or three streets each clustered round a church, along the track of the old Roman road that was to become deeply familiar to Pepys.1 Once out of London the road was liable to disappear beneath mud or water, or simply to lose any definition; and outside London the world was very empty, very quiet and very dark at night. All this he already knew, but he liked travelling, he was always curious, and
the carrier was not going to get lost. Sam was on his way to visit his uncle Robert and to attend the Tree Grammar School’ in Huntingdon.

  In principle it was free only to the sons of burgesses of the town, but it was the school where Edward Montagu had been a pupil a few years before, and since he was also the local landowner he may have got Sam a free place, or even paid for him.2 Edward was now soldiering and on the move, but Sir Sidney had formally given over Hinchingbrooke to the young couple, and Jemima is likely to have been there in charge of the household.3 The house stands just outside Huntingdon, on a high point looking over a vast expanse of idyllic water-meadows bordering the River Ouse and its tributaries. Sam’s uncle Robert was employed as an agent on the Hinchingbrooke estate and lived only a mile from the big house, across the meadows in the village of Brampton. He had prospered enough to acquire some land, which he leased out to small tenant farmers, and he owned a small but solidly built house, two storeys high, with six low-ceilinged rooms. He served in the local militia as Captain Pepys – no doubt recruited by Edward Montagu and loyal to his parliamentary allegiance – and he had a wife but no children of his own. He took to his brother’s boy, strongly enough to decide to make him his heir; and the Brampton house became an important element in Sam’s life.4