Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
Page 16
Everything was moving in Montagu’s direction. Word arrived that he was elected to parliament for Weymouth, with both Dover and Cambridge also eager to have him as their MP. After this came the most important news, from London, where the newly elected parliament received a ‘Declaration’ from Charles in Breda. It was drawn up by his chief adviser, Edward Hyde, a subtle diplomat, and promised a free and general pardon to all who within forty days claimed it and asserted their loyalty – the only exceptions to be those parliament chose to exempt. Liberty of conscience was also promised; parliament was to decide what should happen to sequestered royalist estates; and Monck’s troops and the navy would have their arrears paid. Hyde’s master stroke was to leave all contentious matters to be settled by parliament – later. Charles himself asserted his devotion to the Protestant faith and asked for divine blessings on parliament. On receiving the Declaration, parliament voted £ 50,000 for the king. This was on 1 May, and the news reached Montagu, and Pepys, the next day in a letter from Thurloe.16 Hearing that Londoners were drinking the king’s health on their knees in the streets, Pepys remarked that this was a little too much – in the privacy of his Diary. The same kneeling was going on in Deal, and maypoles, prohibited for so long, were being raised, topped with the royal flag.
Montagu instructed Pepys to read out Charles’s Declaration to the assembled officers and to follow it with the loyal response he had carefully written out for them. And although Pepys felt that ‘many in their hearts were against it’, they agreed to it formally; they were not going to make trouble now.17 As for the seamen, they had no reservations at all and shouted ‘God bless King Charles’ with genuine joy when Pepys spoke to them, no doubt throwing their caps in the air as they did so. Everyone had become a royalist. The state’s arms were to be removed from every ship, painters sent for from Dover to replace them with the king’s.
Visitors came and went ceaselessly in small boats, admirals and Admiralty commissioners, rejoicing royalists and nervous grandees eager to prove their perfect enthusiasm for the return of Charles Stuart. ‘General Penn’, the formidable sea captain who had fought alongside Blake and against Prince Rupert, lately appointed an Admiralty commissioner by Monck, came to dine with Montagu on his way to Holland and the king. Lord St John, a neighbour of the Montagus in Huntingdonshire, one-time lord chief justice and ennobled by Cromwell, arrived seeking a passage to Flushing, eager to justify himself to Charles. A triumphant Penn returned with a knighthood, but St John got the thumbs-down and crept back reduced to plain Mr St John, his career finished, to retire to the country and later into exile.
Ashley Cooper, who had been in correspondence with Charles since March, made the crossing and said enough to be pardoned and made a privy councillor, and soon a peer. Pepys’s old tutor Samuel Morland took himself to Breda and got his knighthood on 20 May.18 Lesser men schemed to get on board just as eagerly, one of them Pepys’s brother-in-law, Balthasar, who came with a bold request to be taken on as a ‘reformado’ (it meant serving at sea without a formal commission, but allowed the status of an officer). Since Baity was a wholly inexperienced twenty-year-old, this was awkward, and, although Montagu was civil to him at dinner and promised to put in a word for him, he was sent back to London with nothing more than a small loan from Pepys and letters to Elizabeth. Peter Luellin also turned up for a week, supped with Pepys in ‘the great cabin below’ and shared his breakfast oysters; and John Creed appeared, made himself useful and remained.
On 10 May Montagu’s eldest son, Ned, came aboard, and on the same day a message from Monck arrived, urging Montagu to fetch the king at once rather than hang about waiting for instructions from parliament. It would do him no harm with the king, and if it made him some enemies too, they were of no account. Montagu took the advice, and sailed on the 12th, leaving strict orders with the ships he left off the English coast to bring over no one but his cousin, his wife’s cousin and his brother-in-law. The importance of associating his own family with the great enterprise was something he kept steadily in mind. He had already written to the king asking him to look favourably on his father-in-law, John Crew, fearful that his political and religious affiliations would tell against him.19
Pepys was responsible for procuring the ‘rich barge’ that would be used to bring Charles ashore, and the professional musicians, trumpeters and fiddlers who joined the already crowded ship. The painters were still at work, and tailors were cutting out crowns and stitching flags, as well as preparing gold and silver embroidered clothes for Montagu to wear when he met the king. They anchored at Scheveningen, the port for the Hague, on 14 May. Letters were sent to inform Charles of Montagu’s arrival, carried ashore by his nephew Edward Pickering, who accompanied an official delivering a trunk containing £10,000 for the king from parliament. Pickering told Pepys that they found Charles and his attendants dressed in cheap and shabby clothes, and that when he saw the money he became ‘so joyful, that he called the Princess Royal and Duke of York to look upon it as it lay in the Portmanteau before it was taken out’. The scene tells everything about the conditions of his exile and explains a good deal of his conduct afterwards.
Over the next ten days Pepys made sightseeing trips ashore, days of intense experience in which he absorbed architecture and pictures, shopped for presents – small baskets for Elizabeth and Mrs Pearse, books for himself – lost and found young Ned, gawped like everyone at the king and assorted members of the royal family and at a gout-stricken Hyde receiving visitors from his bed, who spoke ‘very merrily’ to Pepys and Ned. Pepys contrived to kiss one fashionably dressed Dutchwoman in a coach and failed to make headway with another in a guest house where, by Dutch custom, men and women shared bedrooms; although, he wrote frankly, ‘I had a month’s mind to her’.20 There were other adventures, singing with a musical friend from Cambridge at the Princess Dowager’s country house, ‘a haven of pleasure in a strange country’, where there was an echo to increase the enjoyment; and a visit to a village famous for its thirteenth-century countess, who had given birth to 365 children at one delivery.21 Pepys was a determined tourist, and he was not going to miss anything on offer if he could help it.
Back on board, he heard more news from London. The new speaker of the House had proposed that all who had held arms against Charles I should be excluded from pardon. This was an absurdity, given that half the nation had opposed him. The speaker was reproved, but the House went on to exclude from pardon all who had taken any part in the king’s trial. It ordered the seizure of their estates, the closure of ports to prevent their escape and their arrest. Montagu knew that his brother-in-law Gilbert Pickering was one of those named, but there was nothing he could do at present. Pepys saw that the court party at the Hague was ‘growing high’, the clergymen among them sure of the restoration of all the Church lands; there was now nothing ‘to hinder them and the king from doing what they have a mind’. It was a shrewd account of the situation, since Charles was being restored without any formal conditions or limitations on his power.
For Charles, men such as Montagu, who had held arms against his father and him for years, had redeemed themselves by their change of heart and the help they were giving him now. Pepys asked Montagu in his cabin when he had been converted to the king’s cause and was told it was in the summer of 1659, in the Baltic, when he realized what sort of treatment he was likely to get from the commonwealth. He did not add that this was also when he was approached by Charles’s envoys with promises of great rewards if he would change his allegiance.22 Now, after so many months of danger and caution, the time had come for his rewards; and during the next days and weeks King Charles, with a proper sense of obligation to the man who had delivered the fleet to him, conferred these. He received an earldom, lands with a value of £4,000 a year and the Order of the Garter; he was also made a privy councillor, a Treasury commissioner, master of the Wardrobe and vice-admiral of the navy, under the new lord high admiral, who was to be the king’s brother James, duke of York.
Before the royal party left the ship at Dover, Pepys managed to get a word with the duke of York, who told him his name was already known and promised future favour. Then the royal party swept on to the shore. Montagu was ‘almost transported with joy’ at the perfect success of all his arrangements, while Pepys, casting himself in a favourite role as the plain man, expressed his pleasure at the behaviour of the king’s pet dog ‘which shit in the boat, which made us laugh and me think that a King and all that belong to him are but just as others are’.24
Pepys heard from Elizabeth, who had returned to London, that some cousins were suggesting he might be knighted by the king; he brushed aside the idea. ‘We must have a little patience and we will rise together,’ Montagu told him, following this elegant forecast with a more down-to-earth, ‘In the meantime I will do you all the good Jobbs I can.’25 It was his way of making clear to Pepys that he had proved himself efficient, intelligent, discreet and loyal in his duties, and would be rewarded.
He arrived back in London on 9 June. Things were in such turmoil that he did not return to Axe Yard for nearly two weeks, camping out instead at his parents’ house. ‘At my father’s found my wife’ was all he had time to write about their reunion, on Whitsunday, as he hurried round town for Montagu in the hot weather. Blackborne was assiduous in his attendance, Creed was much in evidence also, and Pepys managed a couple of meetings with his old friends from clerking days. Baity irritated him by asking him again to find him ‘a place for a gentleman that may not stain his family’ – when, as Pepys complained, ‘God help him, he wants bread.’26 There were more important matters to attend to. Montagu was hesitating over his choice of titles and visiting the new Admiralty offices installed at Whitehall Palace by the duke of York. ‘Court attendance infinite tedious,’ noted Pepys after accompanying him there one evening. Another was spent at Montagu’s elbow, looking over his list of captains and marking more of those he intended to put out of naval service as politically unreliable.
They were not the only ones for whom the times were difficult. Montagu’s sister, Elizabeth Pickering, ‘desired my assistance with my Lord, and did give me, wrapped up in paper, £5 in silver’: her husband was in danger – perhaps already in custody – and she was reduced to this humiliating procedure to reach her brother.27 Montagu did help, and Sir Gilbert Pickering became one of the very few who had sat at the trial of Charles I who escaped a death penalty, saved by his brother-in-law and £5 for Pepys.28 Some were contriving to escape abroad, some were in hiding, others gave themselves up, trusting to a pardon. Haslerig was already in the Tower; so was Thomas Harrison, who had fought at Marston Moor and Naseby alongside Montagu.29
Another of his old colleagues, Bulstrode Whitelocke, spent the month of June suing for mercy – not a heroic story but an instructive one. First his wife went to the MP and lawyer William Prynne, once an ally and the hero of the parliamentarians, who treated her ‘more like a kitchin wench than a gentlewoman’. Then he approached Monck and was dismissed brutally. Next he was dunned for £500 by a peer who told him he would make sure he was excluded from the general pardon if he did not pay up. He paid and then, at the cost of £250 to the man who arranged it, had an interview with the king, to whom he kneeled for pardon. Two years’ income from his estates were said to be the royal price. Finally, to his former friend Edward Hyde, now lord chancellor, he paid another £250, plus (he noted carefully) £32.18s.8d. in legal fees for an official pardon, written out and sealed. His life was effectively saved by money, helped along by his willingness to accept humiliation. It was not the end of his troubles, but he felt able take up his legal practice once more.30
Montagu, appointed master of the Wardrobe, a government department responsible for all the furniture, liveries and robes required by the court, took Pepys along to inspect the building that came with the job. It stood at Blackfriars, near Puddle Dock – where Queen Victoria Street is today, close to the church of St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe – and they learnt that for the past eleven years, since 1649, it had been run by a charitable body in the City as an orphanage and training school for needy children. A group of the children now came to Montagu, dressed in their tawny-coloured uniforms, to sing to him and present him with a petition in which they asked not to be turned out. But turned out they were. ‘My Lord did bid me give them five pieces of gold at his going away,’ wrote Pepys, and that was that.31
By the end of the month, Montagu was able to tell Pepys that he had secured him the job of clerk of the acts with the Navy Board, at a salary of £ 350 a year. And if Pepys had little idea what was involved in terms of work and was not even sure whether he wanted to keep the job or trade it in, he began to find out at once that it was worth more than the salary, as offers of money came in from people hoping to profit from his good fortune. He resigned his clerkship at the Exchequer, calling Downing a ‘stingy fellow’ in the process. The new position came to him solely through family patronage, making it an appointment of exactly the sort Pepys himself objected to later; as Gerald Aylmer, historian of the seventeenth-century civil service, has written, ‘on one view the Restoration delayed serious administrative reforms for 150 years’.32
A house came with the Navy Board job, and the story of how Pepys moved into his house, like so much that was happening all around, is both entertaining and shameful. The Navy Office houses were in Seething Lane, just west of Tower Hill, in a very large, rambling building divided into five substantial residences and office accommodation, with a courtyard and a communal garden stretching north-west to the edge of Tower Hill. There was an entry gate, shut at night by the resident porter, making it an early gated community.33 Pepys liked the place so much when he went to take a look on 4 July that he began to worry in case he was not allotted a house as promised, but excluded, or ‘shuffled out’. He was back with two of his new bosses two days later to take possession of the office, and he spent the next day there making an inventory of papers. Some of the officers of the departing regime were naturally still about, and his new clerk, Tom Hayter, was in fact one of the existing clerks. A week after Pepys’s first visit, he was annoyed to see a ‘busy fellow’ arrive, apparently to select the best house for Lord Berkeley, one of the new commissioners. Pepys reacted swiftly. He hurried home to Axe Yard, collected a pair of sheets and invited Hayter to accompany him back to Seething Lane, where he knocked at the door of the house he wanted. It was inhabited by Major Francis Willoughby, a commissioner since 1653 and a friend of Blackborne; Willoughby had visited the Naseby in April, as Pepys had noted in his Diary. Perhaps this made him less abashed at announcing that he wanted to spend the night in Willoughby’s house. Willoughby courteously agreed, Pepys enjoyed a good night’s sleep, and two days later asserted his right to the house. He received permission to start on some alterations and showed Elizabeth over ‘my house’ – a breathless sequence that leaves you impressed by his determination and effectiveness, if not by his sensitivity.
Few could allow themselves sensitive feelings in the great changeover. On the same day he observed that Major-General Whalley’s house was now the property of Madam Palmer – Barbara Villiers – already established as the king’s mistress. Houses and jobs were changing hands, and it was better to be moving in than out. And on the 17th, after a day’s delay caused by rain, he moved with his family into Seething Lane, just thirteen days after first seeing the house. He expressed a little disappointment when Major Willoughby sent for his own things nine days later. Not surprisingly, Willoughby chose to return to New England
, from where he, like Downing, had come to serve the republic.34
In July Pepys recorded his patron’s entry into the House of Lords. He was too tactful to recall that Montagu had been there before, as a baron, among Cromwell’s lords. His reinstallation was as the earl of Sandwich, with the further titles of Viscount Hinchingbrooke and Baron Montagu of St Neots. From then on he was known as Lord Sandwich, and will now become Sandwich in this book. Titles make confusion for us, but the new name must have been welcome not only for the honour but also for drawing a distinct line under one life as he embarked on another. He was thirty-five in July, halfway through the span allotted by the Bible, and it made a good moment to leave behind the young man he had been, pious parliamentarian, fellow officer, friend, neighbour and servant of the Cromwells. Enter instead the courtier, soon to be dispatched to fetch the queen mother, Henrietta Maria, from France, for a ceremonial visit to the country from which he had helped to drive her out. His son, little Ned, became Lord Hinchingbrooke, and a year later he and his brother Sidney would both be sent to France to receive the polished education that their father considered appropriate. Their mother was now countess of Sandwich; she remained in the country with the younger children through all the turmoil of the king’s return and did not see her husband until he joined her for a fortnight in August. Meanwhile he received the thanks of the Commons, who decreed that his service in bringing over the king should be recorded in their journal, ‘there to remain for your Honour so long as this World endures’.35 Pepys knew he owed every part of his good fortune to Lord Sandwich and rejoiced with him. How could he do otherwise? The world had turned over, and he had come out on top. The nation showed its joy at the restoration of the king with such a show of unanimity that Charles himself joked that ‘it was his own fault that he had been abroad so long, for he saw nobody that did not protest he had ever wished for his return’ – and Pepys rejoiced with the nation, and with his personal triumph.36