Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  But the best clue to what happened next is to be found in what was taking place in Montagu’s life. For three years, from 1650 to 1653, he had lived quietly at Hinchingbrooke with his family. During this time Cromwell subdued Ireland, crushed the young Charles II and his army at Worcester and forced him to flee abroad again; defeated the Dutch in a trade war fought at sea; and dissolved parliament. Montagu played no part in any of this, but during Sam’s last summer at Cambridge, in 1653, he re-emerged into London politics as an MP in the short-lived parliament known as Barebones (so called by its enemies after Praisegod Barebones, the Fleet Street preacher, whom Cromwell had summoned to sit in the House). As soon as Colonel Montagu took his place in the House, Cromwell invited him to sit on his Council of State. Within months he was also made a commissioner of the Treasury, which brought him £1,000 a year, and put on the committee for Foreign Affairs, as well as a number of smaller committees. In November he was appointed lord president of the Council of State. In December parliament dissolved itself – Montagu helped to engineer this – and Cromwell became lord protector. The position was elective, but election was by the Council of State, and Cromwell himself had the final say in its membership. At twenty-eight Edward Montagu was suddenly a great man, one of the makers of the protectorate and a clear favourite of the protector.

  Cromwell now took up his residence in Whitehall, and Montagu was given substantial lodgings within the palace. They were at the western end of the great complex of buildings and extended over the King Street gate. The birth of another daughter, Anne, probably kept Jemima at Hinchingbrooke that winter, while Edward was busy in London. Until then he had been a soldier and a country squire; now he had to master economics, politics and foreign affairs. Early in the new year he was in Huntingdonshire fighting an election at which both royalists and republicans gave trouble; but he and Henry Cromwell prevailed, winning the two county seats. In London again, he entertained the French and Dutch ambassadors, and attended the celebrations that marked the end of the first war with the Dutch. On this occasion, in April 1654, Oliver Cromwell presided over a performance of instrumental music and psalm singing. In June Montagu was praised by Milton in his Defensio Secunda, alongside Cromwell, Bradshaw, Fairfax and Pickering; they were men of ‘highest ability and of the best culture and accomplishments’.23 Given his many new responsibilities, Montagu needed clerks and helpers, and this is where Sam Pepys became useful. Sam’s position was hardly more than that of a family dogsbody – a seventeenth-century Figaro now – who might equally be asked to order riding coats, caps or toys for the children, sort out problems with domestic servants or keep Montagu informed by letter of what was going on in London when he was at Hinchingbrooke; and although Montagu sometimes took a peremptory tone with his servant, he clearly trusted him, both to be discreet and also with the handling of substantial sums of money. Pepys was often at the house of Jemima Montagu’s father, John Crew, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he was well liked; and he was in and out of Montagu’s Whitehall lodgings. He was treated as family there and soon found himself a corner to bed down in; it was more convenient, and more congenial too than being at home with parents and siblings with whom he had ever less in common. To live in a palace, even as a servant among the other servants, would have appealed greatly to Sam’s sense of place and history.

  Dates are in short supply for his life during these years. We don’t know when he started working for Montagu. The earliest extant letter between them is dated March 1656, but it is clear that Sam was by then well established in his service. And in 1656 he acquired another job, and a more formal one, for which he had to thank George Downing. Downing’s career had prospered famously. He was now MP for Edinburgh and spoke often and confidently in the House; he had also acquired an aristocratic wife. When Cromwell decided to revive the government department of the Exchequer, which had become moribund during the wars, Downing was given a position within it; he must have remembered the St Paul’s boy to whom he had awarded an exhibition and offered him one of the many clerkships in his gift. There was another link with the Exchequer: in 1654 Richard Pepys, first cousin to Sam’s father, was made both lord chief justice of Ireland and baron of the Exchequer by Cromwell.24

  Pepys had only to walk along King Street from the Montagu lodgings to find himself at the Exchequer, another great complex of buildings on the east side of New Palace Yard, within the palace of Westminster; and Whitehall and Westminster, linked by King Street, with its old timber-built houses and taverns, became the territory in which he felt at home for the rest of his life, the very heart of the political and administrative machinery of the nation, where even the humblest clerk knew the glamour of being at the centre of things; where he passed great men in the street every day, and took delight in being so well informed about what was going on.25 Pepys gives us a glimpse in the early pages of his Diary of the lives of the young government clerks who became his colleagues and friends, with whom he went ‘clubbing’ – his word – in Cromwell’s time.26 Collectively, he calls them ‘the old Crew’ – he has known them for some years by then – and he shows us the anxieties and manoeuvres of their working lives as well as their convivial meetings in taverns and cookhouses: Wood’s in Pall Mall, Marsh’s in Whitehall, Harper’s and the Fox in King Street, the Westminster Swan and the Half Moon in the Strand, and a great many more. They gathered to talk politics in coffee houses like Miles’s in New Palace Yard. They enjoyed card games and musical evenings; they exchanged ridiculous bets – on whether the meat they were eating was veal or lamb – and gambled gently. A game called ‘Selling a Horse for a Dish of Eggs and Herrings’ is mentioned, and another called ‘Handicap’. They tried out new drinking places, and borrowed and lent small sums of money to one another. They gossiped about the great and made knowing jokes. Some lived with their parents, some with friends or in lodgings, others were already married to young wives. Some had rich uncles in the background, and most kept a keen eye on promotion possibilities. From Pepys’s scattered descriptions we get the first account ever written of how young men with meagre jobs, sharp wits and an appetite for experience live and work in a modern city, and we can see that it has not changed all that much over the centuries. You can find something similar going on in Keats’s letters, and in what Dickens conveys of his anxious, hard-working but enjoyable years as a parliamentary reporter; there is even a physical link in that Garraway’s Coffee House, which opened in 1658, was still in business when Dickens wrote the Pickwick Papers. The flash boys and girls working the stock market in the City of London in the 1990s and 2000s are distant descendants of the friends with whom Pepys went clubbing. Pepys, here as in so many places, has led the way with his account.

  We can glean a little more about his colleagues and friends from official papers. For instance, we know that in 1654 the seven under-clerks to Cromwell’s council, working directly under John Milton as the chief secretary, were paid by the day, at six shillings and eight pence; they included Will Symons, who became a good friend of Pepys, and the Leigh (or Lea) brothers Matthew and Thomas, also known to him; there was a Ewers too, and two Frost brothers, more names that link themselves with the Diary. The council sat from nine until one from Monday to Thursday, and all day Friday; Saturdays were free, so that although Sundays were strictly for churchgoing and not for pleasure, they did get a weekend break; but it looks as though they could not expect to earn much more than £1 a week. This fits with the £50 a year Pepys was getting when he first recorded his salary as an Exchequer clerk six years later. The job of the council clerks was to take minutes of the meetings, sometimes chaired by Cromwell, where Montagu sat with, among others, his brother-in-law Gilbert Pickering, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper and Henry Cromwell. Milton’s eyesight was failing, but he still attended the meetings; in April 1655 Montagu was present when Milton’s salary was discussed, and lowered, while that of Henry Scobell, chief clerk, was raised to £500 a year. Scobell was the uncle of Will Symons, and you can see how clerkships went
naturally to family members and friends.27 All these clerks except the Lea brothers were sacked in January 1660, when the political situation was changing fast, and another lot appointed. But there seems to have been little resentment: Symons, who was out, continued to drink with Peter Luellin, who was in. He was the son of an under-keeper at Windsor with a good claim to be a royalist, and a drinker and teller of rude stories that made them all laugh. The one about the friend who persuaded a gullible pretty woman to let him handle her private parts by pretending to be a doctor impressed Pepys so much that he went out looking for the woman. A real woman he and his fellow clerks got to know was Betty Lane, who worked in Westminster Hall, where a well-established community of stallholders sold linen, gloves, books and newspapers, and she ran a draper’s stall from which he sometimes bought his linen. Betty was a Nottingham lass who had come south to conduct her own business; she took a cheerful, pagan view of sex and its possibilities, she liked Pepys, and he was fascinated by her.

  In 1658 Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips, just such a young man about town as Pepys had become, published a book of advice to those eager to get on with girls. Its frontispiece shows the outfits of the day: smart young men wore their own hair, often down to their shoulders in curls; tall-crowned, wide-brimmed hats, short jackets, breeches to the knee with stockings below and neat shoes tied with laces. Phillips’s book was called The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence; or, the Arts of Wooing and Complementing, and it includes specimens of dialogue between the sexes, set in places such as the Spring Gardens at Charing Cross or Hyde Park, ‘a la mode Pastimes’, verses and plenty of indecorous jokes. It also includes some delightful proverbs: ‘He that hath a Woman by the waste, hath a wet Eel by the tail’ and ‘Love though blind can smell’, followed by its explanation: ‘This is the reason, that a man that runs passionately after a Woman, is said to have his nose in her tail, and is call’d a smell-smock.’ Suitors are advised, on outings to the park, to buy their sweethearts cheese-cakes, tarts, wine and sugar, and baskets of cherries, which were believed to be diuretic and so likely to send girls into the bushes. Gentlemen’s conversations run along questions like how many positions he knows, how many times he can lie with a woman in one night, how many mistresses he has and how many children he dares not own. There are dialogues between an apprentice and a young lady at a boarding school, who is wooed with food because she gets short commons from the mistress; and between a seamstress and a gentleman ‘lolling over the counter’. A lawyer’s clerk strikes lucky with his master’s daughter, who turns out to be the girl of every clerk’s dreams with her ‘Come, Robin, Clerk me no Clerks, I love thee: and if my father do compel me to marry another, yet Robin, thou knowst there are private corners in London… What do you think of a little horse-play in the mean time?… I love tumbling dearly.’ But a gentleman usher who asks his colleague, a waiting gentlewoman, to comb his head for him is fobbed off because she has a sweetheart already, a barber in Fleet Street. Hair combing, much enjoyed by Pepys, was an acknowleged erotic pastime.

  Phillips’s verses go straight to the point: ‘Dorothy this Ring is thine/And now thy bouncing body’s mine.’ ‘Ellen, all men commend thy eyes/Onely I commend thy thighs.’ ‘Katie I chose with hair so red,/For the fine tricks she plays in bed.’ And so on. Edward Phillips was reacting against everything his uncle Milton stood for. His book was a deliberately frivolous, even cynical, exercise, but it gives a feeling for what made some young Londoners laugh in the last years of the commonwealth period – young men like his uncle’s under-clerks and others with whom Pepys spent his leisure time. Beneath the harsh and troubled political surface there were still pleasant undercurrents of life to be enjoyed.28

  During 1655, the year Pepys was twenty-two, the political surface was exceptionally rough. The country was being governed by ordinance, without parliament and with censorship of newspapers; there were frequent attempts to suppress ale houses, gaming houses and houses of ill fame, together with horse racing, cock-fighting, theatres (yet again) and bear-baiting: the seven bears of the Hope Theatre on the south bank were finally shot by Colonel Pride a year later to save them from their torments.29 Major-generals were appointed to rule over the regions, and travel was policed in an effort to keep down royalist activities. The naval dockyards built a great ship, the Naseby, with the figure of Cromwell trampling down six nations at its prow. There was much talk of whether Cromwell would take the crown, and some of the old republicans were either kept under guard or imprisoned. In April news came of a massacre of the Vaudois Protestants, a harmless and pious people living in the mountains of Piedmont; all Protestant Europe was appalled, and Cromwell took immediate action, raising money to help the survivors and sending letters drafted by Milton and carried by Pepys’s old tutor Samuel Morland to the French king, Louis XIV, and the duke of Savoy, Charles Emmanuel. George Downing followed Morland as a special envoy and achieved some successful negotiation on behalf of the persecuted Protestants; and in October an Anglo-French treaty was signed. Whether this meant anything to the fourteen-year-old French girl, lately of Paris and currently living in the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, whose parentage was as mixed as her religious ideas, there is no way of knowing. Her name was Elizabeth Marchant de St Michel, and she was about to become the bride of Sam Pepys. Neither had a penny to their name.

  4. Love and Pain

  Pepys wooed the woman who was to be his wife with passion. Thirteen years after his wooing, he relived what he had felt during that time in a moment of intense, recaptured emotion. It came to him as he listened to music in the theatre. The music, he wrote in his Diary, was ‘so sweet… that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife’. Memory and music had merged into one another. ‘It ravished me’ and ‘wrapped up my soul’ and ‘I remained all night transported so as I could not believe that ever any music hath that real command over the soul of a man as this did upon me’.1 The music that brought about this magical effect was played, improbably perhaps to some modern ears, on recorders, and, although he does not say so, it accompanied the appearance of Nell Gwyn, as she made a carefully stage-managed descent from the flies to the stage, bearing a basket of fruit and flowers and playing the part of a winged angel. In Pepys’s collection of prints there is one of Nell Gwyn wearing little more than a pair of wings, and, though she would have worn rather more on the stage, there was no hiding the fact that she was the most celebrated erotic icon of the London theatre.2 The angel in Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr, the play Pepys was attending, comes on disguised as a boy during the first four acts and appears in heavenly form only in the last; and it could be that her provokingly desirable appearance, as well as the music, was responsible for plunging Pepys into the past in this Proustian way, and reheating the memory of his old love and longing for the body of his Elizabeth.

  The sickness of love and the sickness of the stone were the two preoccupations of his early twenties. To speak of love as a mixture of sweetness and sickness as he did is a striking conceit; clearly for him, at twenty-two, it had been an overpowering experience. So much so that it led him to fly in the face of what every intelligent clerk about town knew: that marriage was meant to be a step on the social ladder, and that a bride should bring some money and a worthwhile family alliance; it should not simply be a matter of running passionately after a woman with your nose in her smock. Pepys lost his good sense in his desire for Elizabeth. Nothing is known of how they met, whether in a bookshop or any other sort of shop, or through a friend; he may simply have got into conversation with her in the street. She was pretty enough to catch the eye, with her bright, definite face surrounded by curls, prominent eyes and expressive mouth; and she was a lively talker in two languages, which may have been what first caught the fancy of a man who loved to practise his own skills as a linguist. In the year he met her he bought himself a French Nouveau Testament.3 Being foreign marked her off from other young women. She had lived in Paris, her father was French, an
d both her parents could boast of a higher social Standing than Pepys himself. Alexandre le Marchant de St Michel came of a noble family in the Anjou, and her English mother also had grandly connected, landowning parents. All this sounded impressive, although in fact they were virtually destitute and friendless when Pepys met her.

  Never mind that. He wanted Elizabeth for herself. The pain of his illness, and the question mark it set over his future, can only have sharpened his determination to possess her as soon as he could. If life was to give him no more than this, then at least he would have had her. Whether his wooing was an honourable one from the start or not, it became so. He persuaded himself that he could support a bride on his scant earnings, take her to live in the Montagu lodgings in Whitehall and put everything else out of his mind. He did not discuss his marital intentions with his employer or, it would seem, in any serious manner with her family or his own. There was no question on either side of a marriage settlement.

  Elizabeth was fourteen, the same age as his sister Pall, but the two girls were as unlike as it was possible to be and notably failed to become friends, then or at any later time. Pall was only just literate and, according to her brother, far from lovely, ‘full of Freckles and not handsome in face’, whereas Elizabeth was vivacious as well as attractive, took trouble with her appearance and her clothes, and had acquired some education and polish in spite of her parents’ difficulties – she was a reader as well as a talker.4 Sam took trouble with his love letters; although none survive, the words of a young Cambridge contemporary wooing his future wife suggest the style of the times: Endeared Sweetheart, When I was last with you there fell into my Bosom such a spark of Love that nothing will quench it but Yourself. The Nature of this Love, is, I hope sincere, the measure of it great, and as far as I know my own Heart it is right and genuine. The very bare probability of success ravished my Heart with Joy… I hope the Lord has given You in part your father’s Spirit, and has made You all glorious within, he has beautified your Body, very pleasant are You to me. You are in my Heart to live and die in waiting on You; and I extremely please Myself in loving You, and I like my Affections the better because they tell me they are only placed upon You… sweet Mrs Betty as I have given my Heart to You, You ought in return to give me Yours, and You cannot in Equity deny it me.