When Pepys was thirteen a new surmaster, Samuel Cromleholme, arrived. Not yet thirty, he was an enthusiastic book collector who impressed his young namesake with his learning and rose to become high master in his turn. Pepys regarded St Paul’s with pride and affection after he left, presented books to the library, dropped in to see whether they were keeping up the standards of his day and was pleased to have his brother John follow him at the school. Tom had no chance of St Paul’s at all, with his speech problem and slowness; he was set to learn tailoring in their father’s shop, though he showed little talent or enthusiasm for that. The one thing Tom had an aptitude for seems to have been French, which he managed to speak fluently. So did Sam: another mystery, for where did they learn it? Not at school. Good French grammars were printed and sold in London, but Tom at least seems more likely to have picked it up directly. It is possible the Pepyses had a French lodger, since anyone with spare rooms and an uncertain income took in lodgers, as Tom himself did when he was in charge at Salisbury Court later.28
They did have a visitor from America this year, in the shape of cousin Richard Pepys, just returned from Boston. He had left England for religious reasons and returned with the abolition of the hated bishops; his lawyer father was soon to be appointed lord chief justice of Ireland by Cromwell. Another returning American emigrant in 1646 was George Downing, who began by finding work as an army preacher in the regiment of a Colonel Okey, from which he made a rapid rise through Cromwell’s administration. Within a few years he, like Montagu, exerted a crucial influence on Sam Pepys’s life, because when Sam put in for a leaving exhibition at St Paul’s, Downing was chairman of the judges who awarded it to him, and so played a crucial part in helping him to go on to Cambridge to continue his studies.29
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The sharp pain of the stone was still part of Sam’s life, but he did not let it prevent him from profiting by what St Paul’s had to offer. Boys were expected to work steadily and hard. Pepys took to this regime, and it gave him a lifelong belief in the power of education, as well as a model for his later working practice. In that large, light schoolroom he learnt how to apply himself vigorously to a subject and how to keep orderly notes, two things that helped to make him into the committed and meticulous administrator he became. Still, it is surprising that the school did so well by him, given what was going on all around. Outside, London was in almost continuous turmoil. There must have been days when it was difficult for boys even to make their way to and from St Paul’s, and others when it was impossible not to be distracted by the sights to be seen in the streets. During this period the cathedral itself was partly used as a shopping precinct and sometimes for stabling horses for the army. Twice – in the summer of 1647, when Sam was fourteen and again in November 1648 – the New Model Army marched in and occupied the City. The spectacle of 18,000 troops tramping through the streets and across London Bridge with Cromwell at their head was intended to overawe the citizens and must have drawn admiring schoolboys like a magnet.
There was plenty to look at, and yet more to avoid. Rioting was endemic, and if you did not want to be caught up in it you had to keep out of the way. The London prentices – Tom Pepys became an apprentice in 1648, when he was fourteen – were usually ready to turn out, supported by the watermen and any sailors who happened to be ashore; there were times when they were joined by members of the trained bands, and other times when they were attacked by them. Plenty of ordinary citizens were also ready to swell the numbers of the rioters when feelings rose high enough. Milton might see the City as the mansion house of liberty, but the crowd’s view of what constituted liberty shifted wildly and unpredictably. In July 1647, for instance, a mob from the City kicked in the doors of the House of Commons, terrorized the MPs, held the speaker prisoner and forced a vote inviting the king to London.
There was always a royalist element inside the predominantly anti-royalist City, just as there was always among the puritan majority a group who yearned for a return to the established form of church service, and who deplored the destruction of stained glass and statues and the removal of cherished landmarks like the old stone cross at Charing Cross, taken down in 1647 as an idolatrous object and sadly missed. The Pepys who wrote the Diary had become on the whole hostile to puritanism and necessarily a royalist, but the St Paul’s boy was a puritan and a republican. Religion made bitter divisions: parliament and army struggled against one another, parliament and City, and City and army. Outside London the king was moved about like a piece on a chessboard, alternately threatening and threatened. For the first six months of 1647, after the Scots handed him over to parliament, he was held in Northamptonshire, where Jemima Montagu’s father, John Crew, was one of those responsible for his custody. In June the army sent Cornet Joyce to abduct him into their power, and as a prisoner of the army he again visited Hinchingbrooke, probably still escorted by Crew. It was reported that he was ‘nobly treated’ by his hostess, Mistress Montagu – this was Jemima. She was, as it happens, again three months pregnant, and her husband was away attending parliament in London.30 From Huntingdon the king went on to Hampton Court; and in November he escaped to the Isle of Wight. After this parliament became reluctant to continue their negotiations with him.31
Christmas brought more trouble in the City when the branches of rosemary and bays that were traditional decorations appeared mysteriously in the churches, and a group of apprentices decked a pump in Cornhill with holly and ivy, all in defiance of the puritan ban on seasonal festivities. Troops sent to remove the offending greenery were driven back by angry crowds, and there was deep resentment against soldiers entering private houses to check on Sunday observance as well as to prevent the celebration of Christmas. Then there was the matter of the theatre. The Globe had been pulled down in 1644, but during the winter of 1647/8, some actor-managers, observing that the ordinance forbidding theatrical performances was due to run out on 1 January, got up plays and opened their doors on New Year’s Day. At once the streets were jammed with the carriages of eager theatregoers, all those men and women who had grown up with a tradition of playgoing and were now eager to resume it. Parliament furiously slapped down penalties, ordering the destruction of ‘all stage-galleries, seats and boxes’, the fining of spectators and the public flogging of actors, who were further required to promise to give up their profession for good. But the persecution was never entirely effective. It is impossible to unmake an actor, and a public reared on Shakespeare and Jonson was too enthusiastic to be denied. John Evelyn notes that he saw ‘a Tragie Comedie’ acted in London in February that year. There was also a tradition that the boys of St Paul’s put on plays, although their puritan high master must now have forbidden anything of that kind. Pepys, who had tasted the pleasures of amateur acting and developed a passion for playgoing as soon as he had the chance, either had to pretend indifference or, under Langley’s influence, went through his own phase of sanctimonious disapproval.
Another fracas occurred in the City in the spring, when royalists made bonfires in the streets to celebrate the anniversary of the king’s accession on 31 March, and forced passers-by to stop and drink his health. This was followed by an incident in which puritan intolerance provoked a full-scale royalist riot. On a fine Sunday in April a group of small boys was playing at tip-cat on the open green space of Moorfields. The game was a popular and harmless one, the ‘cat’ nothing more than a sharpened stick to be sent flying; but, because it was Sunday, the lord mayor sent a detachment from the trained bands to stop the sport. A crowd of apprentices decided to defend the children’s freedom to play games. Soon the apprentices were stoning the soldiers and went on to disarm them. By then a crowd several thousand strong had gathered, which proceeded to march along Fleet Street and the Strand, shouting ‘Now for King Charles’. Cromwell was in London, and he ordered out the cavalry and charged the crowd, killing two and injuring more. Very early next morning the apprentices secured the City gates at Ludgate and Newgate and fired shots through the lord
mayor’s windows. He prudently took refuge in the Tower, and by 8 a.m. – when Sam should have been at school – the City was in the hands of the rioters. The army then moved round the walls and brought troops in through Moorgate. Some of the rioters were killed, those suspected of being ringleaders were taken to prison, everyone else dispersed. Law-abiding citizens breathed a sigh of relief, and lessons were taken up again at St Paul’s.
George Downing, who was in London at this point and making himself noticed by Cromwell, wrote a good account of ‘the great divisions among us’ – ‘us’ meaning the army, parliament and the puritans – to his uncle in America:
One cryes out, settle church government, punish errours and blasphemyes…; another, remember your often declarations for liberty for tender consciences; one, bring home the King according to the covenant; another, it can’t stand with the preservation of the true religion and liberty, etc., and thus for want of a downright playne understanding of the foundation of this warre… we have been likely often to have been embroyled in a more bloody, and by our quarrellings to give occasion to any third party to devoure all… What the issue will be the Lord only knows, only he seems to be shaking the great ones of the earth.32
Shaken as they were, parliament even considered giving the crown to their fourteen-year-old captive, James, duke of York; but at the end of April he made his escape during a game of hide-and-seek in the park of St James’s Palace. He got away disguised as a girl, with a wig, a cloak and a specially made dress of ‘mixed mohair’ with scarlet under-petticoat, and in this humiliating get-up was whisked aboard a barge bound for Gravesend and so to Holland.33
In May the City churches remained almost empty when thanksgiving services were held for the defeat of royalist risings in Wales, and later in the month there were serious riots when Surrey petitioners marched through town shouting ‘For God and King Charles’. In the fighting outside the House of Commons the demonstrators threw lumps of coal and brickbats, the soldiers fired on them and at least eight were dead by the end of the day.34 After this parliament and the City decided they must get on to better terms, and the army was persuaded to remove its garrison from the Tower and allow the City to install its own militia again.
Outside London similar conflicts were being enacted in 1648. There was a riot about a maypole at Bury St Edmunds. Edward Montagu was held prisoner briefly by a group of royalists while trying to suppress their gatherings in Huntingdonshire; in July he successfully put down others in St Neots.35 This was what is known as the Second Civil War, during which Colchester was besieged and a parliamentary vice-admiral, William Batten, took his ship The Constant Warwick out to join the prince of Wales off Yarmouth and was knighted by him, but was back serving parliament within months: he and Pepys became colleagues twelve years later. Cromwell went north and defeated the invading Scottish army at Preston. In November the English army marched into London again under its commander-in-chief Fairfax, who had written to the lord mayor warning him that he expected to collect £40,000 ‘arrears’ from the City to pay his men. He quartered his troops in the citizens’ houses for a few days, long enough to persuade them of the wisdom of paying up.
Other elements of the army were now preparing to bring the king captive to London; they had decided that his deviousness made him impossible to negotiate with any longer. But he was still the king, and a substantial number of MPs voiced a hope that it might be possible to reopen discussions with him after all. To prevent any such move, a group of republican officers went into the House of Commons, arrested 45 MPs and sent away another 186 whom they judged unlikely to support their plans for getting rid of Charles. This decisive intervention, known as ‘Pride’s Purge’ – a Colonel Thomas Pride took a leading part – happened in December 1648 (those MPs who were permitted to remain became known as the ‘Rump’ parliament). Among the purged MPs were John Crew and Edward Montagu, neither of whom was enthusiastic about putting the king on trial. Montagu took himself quietly back to Hinchingbrooke and family life. In the Lords the earl of Manchester urged that to try the king was in contradiction with fundamental principles of law, and the plan was unanimously rejected. It made no difference but sealed the fate of the House of Lords, abolished shortly afterwards.
Cromwell returned to London, and the stage was set for the trial of the king. A special court was set up, and 135 commissioners were appointed to act as combined jury and judges. No more than 68 ever appeared to carry out their duties. Fairfax, whose name was among them, did not attend, and when the trial began his wife, openly royalist in her sympathies, made her own interventions. This was the true theatrical performance of 1649, for the court was held in Westminster Hall and open to the public. Troops stood on guard inside, but people came in freely through the entrance at the north end of the hall, and there were galleries set up in the corners for ladies and privileged persons. The king was seated in a crimson velvet chair. There he heard himself accused of a ‘wicked design’ to subvert the ancient laws and liberties of the nation, and there he refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the court. He found he was not without supporters. When Fairfax’s name was read out, Lady Fairfax called from the gallery, ‘He has more wit than to be here.’ Later, on hearing the king accused of being a traitor to his country, she shouted that, on the contrary, it was Oliver Cromwell who was the traitor. When her taunting grew too strong, an officer threatened to order his men to shoot into the gallery. She was persuaded to leave, but she had made her point. The soldiers shouted ‘Justice! Justice!’ when the king left the hall, but it was answered by ‘God save the King!’ from many of the civilian spectators.36
We know from Pepys’s own account how strongly republican he was at this point. He was fifteen, and his sympathies were entirely against the king; in this way he was far more radical than his cousin Montagu, who chose to stay away during the trial. Sam may well have got himself into Westminster Hall for a glimpse of the king in his crimson chair; he was certainly present at his execution. Since it happened on a Tuesday – 30 January – either St Paul’s sent the boys home or he made his own decision to go to Whitehall and take the consequences. The Westminster schoolboys were kept locked in for the day to prevent them from attending.37 He must have set off early, because the crowd was dense and there were lines of soldiers posted to prevent disturbances. The king walked across St James’s at ten in the morning, showing a dignity and courage that impressed itself even on his enemies, and entered the Banqueting House, where he said his prayers and from which he emerged through a tall window on to the scaffold just before two in the afternoon. Soldiers were positioned between the scaffold and the crowd to make it difficult for anyone to hear his last words. Philip Henry, an Oxford undergraduate a little older than Pepys, was present and has left a description of the moment when the executioner struck off the royal head: ‘The blow I saw given and can truly say with a sad heart, at the instant whereof, I remember well, there was such a grone by the Thousands then present as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again.’ Henry goes on to describe how two troops of soldiers were set to march in opposite directions between Westminster and Charing Cross in order to disperse the people; but there was no trouble in London that day, and in some respects life continued in its normal course, with the shops open and people going about their business.38 Pepys may even have gone back to school, because he remembers telling his friends there that if he had to preach a sermon on the king, his text would be, ‘The memory of the wicked shall rot.’ It is the only time he imagined himself in the pulpit, and he recalled it a shade nervously when, in 1660, a man he had known at St Paul’s reminded him that he had been ‘a great roundhead’ at school.39 Elsewhere in his Diary he remained studiously non-committal in what he had to say of the execution; for instance, when he witnessed the hanging, drawing and quartering of Thomas Harrison, one of those who had signed the death warrant of the king, he only commented, ‘Thus it was my chance to see the King beheaded at Whitehall and to see the first blood shed in reven
ge for the blood of the King at Charing cross.’40 The grown man was not going to express a grief he did not feel, or any remorse for the satisfaction he had felt.
The king was dead, but the king was also alive, since his son was immediately proclaimed as Charles II in his exile in Holland, and became the new focus for royalists everywhere. On Jersey George Carteret waved his hat, shouting, ‘Long live King Charles II.’ In England, however, a republic was declared. Monarch, bishops and lords were now all abolished or, as Evelyn put it, ‘Un-king-ship proclaim’d, & his Majesties Statues throwne downe at St Paules Portico, & Exchange’.41 And Evelyn went to Paris to kiss the new king’s hands, and to observe his mistress, Mrs Barlow, ‘browne, beautiful, bold but insipid’ and mother of the martyred king’s grandchild, the infant duke of Monmouth. London became more peaceful for a while, with only the odd incident like the shooting dead of a young trooper thought to be a Leveller in St Paul’s Churchyard, the beheading of a group of royalists outside Westminster Hall and the arrest, imprisonment and ejection from his office of Mayor Reynolds for refusing to proclaim the Act abolishing the kingly office. John Lilburne was also arrested and tried for publishing pamphlets in defiance of the censorship laws. He fought his own case and was acquitted by the jury to rejoicing and more bonfires all over the City. This was in October, and Cromwell was now fighting in Ireland.
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self Page 7