Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  Philip Henry comes closest to Pepys in his origins and formation. Born in London to an educated mother and a father who was servant to a courtier, he was sent to Westminster School and Oxford. Like Pepys he was present at the execution of Charles I, but, unlike him, was shocked by it; and he settled in the remote provinces, in Shropshire, and reared his family there. His diaries were written in pocket almanacs, four inches by two, and in longhand. He was a braver and a simpler soul than Pepys. He refused to conform when his religious practice was proscribed, and he routinely gave one tenth of all his earnings to charity. The acquisition of a new suit caused him to write, ‘lord, clothe me with thy Righteousness, which is a comely costly lasting everlasting Garment’. He agonized about accepting interest on a small sum of money left to his children and about attending the performance of a play put on by the same children; in both cases good sense happily prevailed over religious scruples. He noted many public events, the Turks at Vienna, the plague and the fire of London, and warmly approved the war against the Dutch, giving as good reasons the fishing dispute and their refusal to acknowledge British rights in the Channel, and only lamenting ‘they are Protestants, hinc Mae lachrymae’. He was credulous about divine intervention in human life, especially when death struck drunken or ill-behaved neighbours, like most puritans finding it hard not to look to heaven for direct rewards and punishments. Gentle, pious Henry and Pepys, streetwise and sceptical, are like the town and the country mouse: the purity of the country is admirable, but we shall have a better time in the company of the town mouse.

  Pepys’s Diary is from its first pages doing so many things at once that it can be daunting. It lists places visited and people encountered, without explaining where or who they are. It chronicles contemporary history: Londoners building bonfires to proclaim good riddance to a detested parliament, the ecstatic festivities accompanying the coronation of the restored king. It provides the first full and direct account ever of a man starting uncertainly on a professional career and finding, to his own surprise, that work is one of the major pleasures of life. It supplies much of the detail of his working practice, and also of his daily domestic experience. It is full of music, theatre, sermons, paintings, books and scientific devices. It is a tale of ambition and acquisition, and money is one of its obsessive themes: how it is made, how borrowed and lent, how spent, how saved, how hidden. Money in all its forms runs through the pages, as pieces of gold and bags of silver, shiploads of spices and silks, bribes, wages, debts, loans, payments, inheritances, Exchequer tallies (hazelwood sticks on which the amount of every loan to the government was notched) and the first paper promissory notes. When the Diary starts, Pepys has hardly £25 to his name; when it ends less than ten years later he has a fortune of £10,000.

  Within a few months from the start there is the joyous sense of the momentum of a young man’s life at last getting under way, the surprise of good luck, success, riches and the power of patronage all coming at once. In the first pages the Pepyses are too poor to keep their house warm in winter, and are driven out to get their Sunday dinner with his parents on the other side of town; by the end of the year he is enjoying a barrel of oysters pressed on him by a colleague whom he takes home to enjoy the piece of excellent roast beef he has at the fire for dinner. It was the sort of contrast he delighted in.

  And although in its pages Pepys delights in remembering the past and in planning the future, he is always conscious that now must be the best time to enjoy life. This is why he conveys pleasure so memorably, pleasure in the lengthening of the days and spring and in summer weather, in journeys out of town, in music made and listened to, and in the theatre, with great acting like Thomas Betterton’s and the astounding first appearance on the English stage of women to play women. He gives an unblushing account of the satisfactions of becoming successful and important; and prizes his own physical toughness and good health all the more because sickness had spoilt his boyhood and youth.

  The Diary is history – on the whole reliable history – and it is comedy, of which Pepys was also a master. Parts of it read like a novel, parts like a farce. Its near literary relation is the fiction of Chaucer, whom he admired so much, another Londoner who worked in colloquial language three hundred years before him. Chaucer put his anatomy of English society into poetry without ever losing the zest of common speech and displayed his characters at their lewd and rude worst much as Pepys showed himself. What Pepys does not do is explain, or fill in the background of what is happening. He rarely writes a character of a man or woman, just as he hardly ever asks himself why his wife might be behaving as she is. He gives scurrilous stories and gossip, especially about those he dislikes, but most of his circle of acquaintance are touched in with only the smallest strokes as occasion arises; there are no formal portraits such as we find in Evelyn. This lack of ceremony towards others is partly due to his curiosity being so squarely centred on himself, on ‘that entrancing ego of whom alone he cared to write’, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s phrase.15 The famous and obscure, the loved and the hated, everyone else revolved round him in his place at the centre of the universe. He is also, for the moment at any rate, talking to himself.

  One other thing about the Diary: as it opens, and at those moments when he puts in a summary of his current condition, or remarks on the state of the nation at the conclusion of a month or a year, it looks as though part of his intention in writing is to try to make order and clarity in his life, like a good accountant drawing up a balance sheet of profits and losses. But the totality of the Diary defeats any such aim. It becomes instead a demonstration of how impossible it is to make a tidy account of any one life. What we become most aware of is the bursting, disorganized, uncontrollable quality of his experience.

  Pepys started his Diary with some formal statements. The opening words thank God for his health, restored by the operation for the stone, clear evidence that he regarded this as the most significant event in his life so far. God continues to receive occasional thanks throughout the Diary; moments of guilty feeling bring on a ‘God forgive me’, and a serious crisis will drive Pepys to prayer, which is about as far as his relations with the deity go. For although he thought swearing on God’s name unbecoming, defended the Church of England – ‘the Religion I was born in’, he tells his mother firmly in the course of an argument – and enjoyed commenting on sermons, neither his Anglicanism nor his wider religious sense can be called enthusiastic on the evidence of the Diary.16 He takes family prayers on Sunday evenings, but rarely prays by himself, scarcely refers to the Bible, attends church irregularly, works on Sunday when he finds it necessary and never takes communion. God’s name comes up in his pages as a tic of usage, routine rather than reverential, except when Pepys is thanking him for his recovered health, when a note of sincere gratitude does sound; but when, in the course of the first year of the Diary, Montagu tells him that he is ‘wholly Scepticall’ in matters of religion, Pepys expresses his agreement privately with an ‘as well as I’.17 And when he found a thin congregation at the Abbey, he wrote, ‘I see religion, be it what it will, is but a humour, and so the esteem of it passeth as other things do.’18

  After God and his health, his next sentence places himself as the occupant of his house in Axe Yard and as the head of a family of three, flanked by his wife, whose name he does not find it necessary to give, and their servant, who is named as Jane. He goes straight on to the dashing of his hopes of his wife being with child by noting that, on the last day of the old year, she had what he calls her ‘terms’. Elizabeth’s monthly periods become a sad repeated message tolling through the years of the Diary under many different names, her menses, her months, her being unwell, ses mois, ceux-la, moys, mois – no doubt her own usage was French – or simply ‘those’. But for now they are just one of the features of his life that requires to be set down. And from this he turns to the condition of the state. It makes a striking start, this direct yoking of the private and public, of Elizabeth’s period and news of Gene
ral Monck with his army in Scotland. In fact it is so striking that until 1970 no edition of the Diary printed the complete text. Elizabeth’s period was simply removed, and Pepys’s clear signposting of the intended scope of his Diary went for nothing.19

  This is what he wrote in the opening paragraphs:

  Blessed be God, at the end of last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain but upon taking of cold.

  I lived in Axe yard, having my wife and servant Jane, and no more in family then us three.

  My wife, after the absence of her terms for seven weeks, gave me hopes of her being with child, but on the last day of the year she hath them again. The condition of the State was thus. Viz. the Rump, after being disturbed by my Lord Lambert, was lately returned to sit again. The officers of the army all forced to yield. Lawson lies still in the River and Monke is with his army in Scotland. Only my Lord Lambert is not yet come in to the Parliament; nor is it expected that he will, without being forced to it.

  The new Common Council of the City doth speak very high; and hath sent to Monke their sword-bearer, to acquaint him with their desires for a free and full Parliament, which is at present the desires and the hopes and expectation of all – 22 of the old secluded members having been at the House door the last week to demand entrance; but it was denied them, and it is believed that they nor the people will not be satisfied till the House be filled.

  As he wrote, he was still living in the world in which he had grown up, a republican state, but it was now in terminal confusion, with rival groups fighting and scheming for the upper hand and a fourth civil war very likely, an unbearable prospect for the exhausted population. The effect was that the first few months make a prologue distinct from the main body of the Diary, during which he does not know where either of his employers stands, and no one else knows who is friend and who enemy. The first page sketches the situation in a few cautious sentences. Essentially, it was this: the Rump parliament, residue of the Long parliament voted in nearly twenty years before and from which many MPs have been excluded, has become wholly ineffective. It had been suspended by an army junta in October and then recalled in December when the army leaders fell out among themselves; and it has now ordered the republican General Lambert to disband his troops in the north of England. But he has disobeyed them, because he and the junta want to re-establish a republican and puritan government.

  In Scotland General Monck, who has disavowed the army junta, is hovering with his troops on the border with England, his intentions mysterious. And if the ‘universal fear and despair’ Pepys reported to Montagu in December has given way to any glimmer of hope at all, it is being offered by the City Council, which has asked for ‘a free and full Parliament’, by which they mean a newly elected one. Pepys says this is desired, hoped and expected by all, but this is still wishful thinking; it has to be remembered that Pepys’s parents, and many of his cousins, are dwellers and workers in the City. The City Council has also sent a message to Monck asking for his support. Meanwhile troops continue to occupy the City, and Vice-Admiral Lawson, who is confusingly against the army and in favour of the Rump, has brought the fleet into the Thames and looks as though he might be preparing to blockade London, cutting off the coal and corn on which it depends; he has his own programme of republican reform that he has submitted to the City and had rudely rejected.20 The City Council, the Rump, the army junta, Monck and Lawson are all pursuing different and unclear objects, while in the background the exiled royalists stir, plot and hope.

  Pepys did not know that Montagu was waiting for the right moment to declare his support for the exiled Charles II, although he may have had his suspicions; he was certainly unaware of the fact that ‘Mr Downing, master of my office’, who appears at the end of his introduction to the Diary, was also considering how he could ingratiate himself with Charles. Neither Pepys nor anyone else could be sure what Monck or Lawson had in mind, because neither was sure himself yet; both had explicitly repudiated the idea of support for a restored monarchy, and Montagu suspected Monck of wanting power for himself and went on thinking this as late as March 1660.21 Bulstrode Whitelocke, until very recently one of the most influential men of the government and keeper of the Great Seal, had delivered up the seal and gone into hiding under the disguise of a grey wig on the last day of 1659, despairing of the future; he would come creeping out again, but meanwhile his wife destroyed as many of his papers as she could find. So it is not surprising that Pepys was cautious about expressing political opinions of his own, even in the private pages of his insignificant Diary, and that he concluded his introductory remarks with the reflection that his own position was ‘somewhat uncertain’.

  Yet what he does over these first months of the Diary is to cover with rare effectiveness one of the key periods in history when a whole population is changing its allegiance. It was a movement comparable to the political wave that swept Communism out of Eastern Europe in 1989, and like that wave it came out of a surge of feeling that had built up over a long period until it became an irresistible force. The feeling was very widespread, but everyone had to work out for himself individually what compromises or betrayals he must be prepared to make to keep afloat as republicanism and puritanism were thrown out. Some heads were bound to roll, and some rich rewards were to be won. Hard decisions had to be made, and the most delicate timing was required.

  PART TWO

  1660–1669

  7. Changing Sides

  Pepys’s luck was that both his employers, Edward Montagu and George Downing, each of whom had made his career through Cromwell’s army and government departments, negotiated their tricky changes of coat with perfect finesse. The Diary tells us that throughout January 1660 ‘Mr Downing, master of my office’, staunch official of the commonwealth and servant of the Rump, was in his Westminster house. He kept Pepys busy, and not only on Exchequer business. Downing liked to entertain lavishly at a local French restaurant, and Pepys was sent out with dinner invitations to his friends and important contacts among the parliamentary leaders; one was Arthur Haslerig, who had been Downing’s colleague since they served together in the army in the 1640s. Pepys was on call at all hours: mealtimes, late at night and early in the morning, when he took instructions standing by his master’s bed. He was also set to making ciphers, which Downing needed in preparation for his return to the Hague as the government’s envoy. Pepys obliged – he was good at ciphers – but when Downing flatteringly asked him if he would like to accompany him back to Holland, he did not take up the offer; he had the excuse of his obligations to Montagu, and Downing did not press him. He was civil to Pepys on leaving and offered to do him any service that lay in his power; and Pepys, a shade nervous of this formidable boss, suddenly thought a parting present might be in order. He sent a porter to fetch his own fur hat, but the hat was brought too late. This was at the end of January. Downing left without giving a sign that he had anything in mind but the continuation of his diplomatic service to the existing government of England. Known to the exiled royalists as ‘the fearful gentleman’, he was particularly loathed for having persuaded the Dutch to drive Charles out of Holland. They hoped either to assassinate or to hang him.1

  To Pepys’s considerable surprise, the next time he saw Downing, on 22 May, he had become Sir George, his knighthood conferred by Charles himself. With his inside knowledge of the commonwealth’s intelligence network, Downing had been trading his secrets for a royal pardon since March – no doubt using Pepys’s ciphers – and by May he had given away enough to be rewarded with the knighthood.2 His was a spectacularly successful conversion. Having come from puritan America to preach and fight for the commonwealth, he had served in its parliament, acted as Cromwell’s envoy in Europe, and been at the heart of the financial and diplomatic affairs of the republic. By 1660 he may have had enough of near-anarchy in England; he was also clear in his mind that he cared more for power and money than for any principle, and saw that he could sell his abilities to whoever wa
s in a position to bid for them.

  Montagu’s position was different, in that he had been negotiating with the royalists since the summer, although Pepys was equally in the dark about his intentions. Lying low at Hinchingbrooke throughout January and February, he relied on him for regular accounts of public events and gossip circulating in London, but gave away nothing in return. Pepys’s ignorance left him free to indulge his own political curiosity. In the early pages of the Diary he shows himself exploring ideological currents. In mid January he joined a republican club, the Rota, and went along to hear political theory discussed by a group of serious radicals. The founder, James Harrington, had published a book, Oceana, proposing a republic with a rotating senate, property limitations and a much extended franchise; another strikingly original member of the club was William Petty, physician, social planner, scientist and economist, who went on to become a founder member of the Royal Society and a good friend of Pepys. Cyriack Skinner, Milton’s pupil and friend, attended meetings, as did the one-time Leveller John Wildman and John Aubrey, at this date an enthusiastic republican; and there were other assorted politicians, City merchants, MPs and journalists who came to debate.3 They met at the Turk’s Head Coffee House in New Palace Yard to discuss current issues and political theory, taking a vote on topics such as how effectively ancient Rome had been governed. What made their meetings significant, and heady, was that they demonstrated a belief that discussion and argument were the best way of finding solutions to political problems. Pepys was intrigued and impressed; but the club did not last for more than a few weeks after he joined its sessions. Outside it, he observed that public opinion veered and shifted from day to day.