Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  Sandwich secured him a second job, at the Privy Seal, where all petitioners to the crown went to have their documents signed, usually for a fee; Pepys had only to go in when he could, sign petitions and collect his fees. The money was useful, but it was tedious, and kept him busier than he liked to be. He complained that he had no time left to read newspapers or keep up with public affairs: ‘For this month or two, it is not imaginable how busy my head hath been.’37 He could not ride the crest of the wave all the time. Balty kept clamouring for a share in the good fortune, and even Pepys’s father pestered him for a job at the Wardrobe, with such persistence that he took to avoiding him. Pepys also had his moments of doubt about it all. In early August he was reluctant to give up the lease of his house in Axe Yard, ‘for fear of a turn’. He meant, in case of the overthrow of the monarchy and a return to a republic. He had seen enough turns in his lifetime to be able to imagine another easily enough.

  Sandwich necessarily remained the most important figure in his life, and the two men were in almost daily contact when he was in town. They were brought together by public business, Navy Board meetings, the Privy Seal Office and a new task of receiving the oaths of allegiance to the crown, required from every naval employee. Pepys also continued his old work of preparing ‘my Lord’s’ accounts and running his errands. And he respectfully noted many of Sandwich’s dinner engagements: with the king at the Tower, with Chancellor Hyde, about to become the earl of Clarendon, in Kensington with this lord or that, or at a supper with General Monck and the royal family. He kept watch on Sandwich’s health too, giving even a slight cold three mentions in the Diary. He noted when Sandwich sent him half a buck from Hinchingbrooke, ‘smelling a little strong’, it was true, but Pepys passed it on to his mother. All the while their intimacy grew, as they sometimes walked and talked in the Whitehall gardens, or attended the Whitehall chapel together. Churchgoing was expected, but Sandwich continued to declare himself without faith. In July he called himself a ‘Stoick and a Sceptic’, in October Pepys wrote, ‘I perceive my Lord is grown a man very indifferent in all matters of Religion’, and two weeks later Sandwich again asserted his perfect scepticism.38 The earl’s disavowal of the faith of his youth was understandable, since for him and his former party religion had failed. The people had turned against their puritan zeal, except for those who had tried to make it into a political instrument, and that had failed too. Sandwich began to remember that his father had been favoured by royalty – James I made him a knight of the Bath – and told Pepys it was his sense of gratitude for that royal favour that had brought him back to obedience to the present king.39 It was a neat piece of justification.

  This new Sandwich began to utter the kind of opinions aristocrats were expected to deliver and to make jokes like a man of the world. He thought sermons should be replaced in the churches by homilies that admonished the people to political obedience; no doubt he could recall many stirring sermons from his youth, given by radical puritans like Hugh Peters, now under arrest.40 The king asked Sandwich to bring his sister, Princess Mary, over from Holland – Pepys was impressed by the royal hug of farewell as he set off – and when he got back he invited Pepys to dine with him alone to discuss his great expenses and need for more money, adding, however, that ‘he believed he might have anything that he would ask of the King’.41 A few days later he again entertained Pepys, this time on a Sunday, with stories of the duke of York getting Chancellor Hyde’s daughter Anne with child after falsely promising her marriage. Pepys was riveted by the juicy gossip, relayed in French to keep it from the servants, but he was also somewhat disconcerted by this new aspect of my Lord’s talk and put it down to his indifference to religion. Manfully, he wrote down Sandwich’s version of a saying of his father’s, that a man who gets a wench with child ‘and marries her afterward it is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap it upon his head’.42

  The robustness of Sandwich’s conversation must have been partly a distraction from the painful aspects of his new position. The trials of those held responsible for the execution of Charles I were due in October, and he was required to sit on the bench, because these were show trials in which loyalty to the new regime must be displayed. It was a frightful situation for him, considering that some of the so-called regicides had been his friends and all of them his colleagues. The day before the trials began, Sandwich took to his bed, feeling unwell. He also sent for his wife; her loyal and undemanding presence would be a comfort. Then he took his place on the bench. Ashley Cooper, who had done his best to protect former colleagues, was in the same situation.

  Others who faced the imminent prospect of their old comrades being hanged, drawn and quartered took to drink. Blackborne uncharacteristically sat drinking healths one after another with Creed and Pepys at the Rhenish winehouse in King Street on the day some of the sentences were passed. Pepys himself went on 13 October to see the first execution, that of Thomas Harrison, who behaved with flawless courage. He had protested at his trial that he had been kept closely confined for six months and not allowed any counsel. ‘If I had been minded to run away I might have had many opportunities,’ he said, truthfully, for he had chosen to give himself up. ‘But being so clear in the thing, I durst not turn my back nor step a foot out of the way by reason I had been engaged in the service of so glorious and great a God.’43 He had begun his army career under the earl of Essex and fought at all the great battles; now, sustained by his faith, he endured the procedure of being first hanged and then cut down, still alive, and chopped to pieces. When executions are public, crowds gather to see them, drawn mostly by the deep ghoulish streak that exists in all of us. For some there was also the wish to witness and learn from another man’s courage at the end. Pepys, in one of his most famous formulations, wrote that Major-General Harrison looked ‘as cheerfully as any man could do in that condition’. Coolly impersonal, even perky, the remark may seem, but it was not just perkiness; Pepys had been under the knife and at risk of death himself, and he had a proper respect for courage. He added, distancing himself from the behaviour of the people, that they gave great shouts of joy when the head and heart were shown, and he went straight on to report respectfully Harrison’s, and Mrs Harrison’s, declared trust in the judgement of Christ.

  Pepys did not devote the rest of his day to higher thoughts any more than one of us, turning from famine or child murder on television, remains sombre an hour later. Other ideas supervene, we even try to cheer ourselves up, as Pepys did. He collected two friends from Whitehall and took them to a tavern for oysters. Then he went home and lost his temper with Elizabeth for leaving things lying about, and kicked and broke the little basket he had brought her from the Hague. After this he withdrew and put up shelves in his study. The flat account of what he did is more powerful than any attempt to moralize or lament.

  There were more days on the bench for Sandwich, and more executions. He sent for Pepys on the evening of that of Cromwell’s brother-in-law John Jones and ‘seemed to be in a melancholy humour’.44 His servant Will Howe put this down to large losses at cards, enough to upset a man no doubt, but there were more painful reasons. A few days later his spirits bounced up again to an almost manic high as he boasted to Pepys over dinner about how he would have a French cook and a master of his horse, and put his lady and child into black patches, the latest fashion fad, which Pepys found particularly surprising. ‘But he is become a perfect Courtier,’ he wrote in the Diary afterwards.45 Lady Sandwich was present at the dinner, and made the mistake of saying she would like to marry their daughter Jem to a good merchant, unleashing a scornful comment from her husband, who told her he would rather see Jem with a pedlar’s pack at her back than let her marry a common citizen. The countess had displayed the values of the puritan household in which she was reared and was being told unceremoniously to adjust to her new rank and the new society that had supplied it. Pepys went home thoughtfully, noticing on the way the limbs of some of the dead men set on Aldersgate, ‘which was
a sad sight to see; and a bloody week this and the last have been’.46 In November he read a book justifying the trials, which calmed some of his feelings about them.47

  The navy treasurer, Sir George Carteret, who had known Charles for many years, assured Pepys that he was so compassionate that, left to himself, he would acquit all the regicides, and it is true that he had no liking for the executions – of the twenty-nine condemned that autumn, only ten were put to death. But many languished to slow deaths in prison, prices were put on the heads of some who escaped abroad – £300 for Ludlow, for instance – and there were more victims to come.48 The king took no pleasure in cruelty, but he did not flinch from killing his enemies. This was made clear when a tiny group of about fifty Nonconformist rebels invoking ‘the heads upon the gates’, i.e., the executed regicides, and expecting King Jesus to arrive, rose up in London the following January: fourteen were executed, and their heads set up on London Bridge. And Pepys was horrified when he learnt that the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw were to be dug up and hanged on a gallows on the anniversary of Charles I’s execution. In the Diary he called Cromwell ‘Oliver’, as he had been known in the days of his protectorship, and deplored ‘that a man of so great courage as he was should have that dishonour’ – adding carefully, as if in fear of an eye over his shoulder, ‘though otherwise he might deserve it enough’.49 Sandwich was away, escorting Henrietta Maria back to France, when the ghastly exhumation took place, and Pepys kept away from it, but Elizabeth was among the thousands who went to watch the show. For sixpence you got a good close look at the body of Cromwell in his coffin. His head was cut off and set up on a pole at the south end of Westminster Hall, next to the houses of parliament and the most important public meeting place in London, where Pepys inevitably saw it in the course of his work within a few days. Every man, woman and child was bound to see it sooner or later; because there it remained, as a warning against rebellion and republicanism, throughout the twenty-five years of Charles II’s reign.50 Pepys kept his own counsel, but it is worth remarking that when, towards the end of his life, he put together a collection of prints showing the royal families of England, he included Cromwell among them – not one but several portraits, all representing him as a great ruler – and Richard Cromwell too, as well as the arms of the commonwealth.

  Sir George Downing displayed his change of heart and mind with particular dedication. In January 1662, when he was again acting as English envoy in the Hague, he got news that three old commonwealth associates who had escaped abroad at the Restoration were in Germany and might be lured to Delft. They were Sir John Barkstead, one of Cromwell’s major-generals; Miles Corbet, a lawyer of manifest integrity; and John Okey, in whose regiment Downing had served as chaplain when he first came to England. All three were implicated in the trial and execution of Charles I. Downing bribed a Dutchman whom they believed to be their friend to lay a trap for them and wrote his own cool description of their capture. He went himself with some armed men to the house where they were lodging, knocked and rushed in as the door was opened. The three were sitting

  by a fyere side with a pipe of tobacco and a cup of beere, immediately they started to have gott out at a back Doore but it was too late, the Roome was in a moment fulle. They made many excuses, the one to have gott liberty to have fetcht his coate and another to goe to privy but all in vayne. Corbet did not lodge in that house but had that night supped with Barkstead and… had we come a moment later hee had beene gone,… but fynding himself thus seized on, his body fell to purging upwards and downwards in the very roome afer a most strange manner.51

  After some difficulties with the Dutch, Downing had his victims shipped to London, where they were held in the Tower, tried and sentenced to the usual penalty for traitors. They said they had sought only to serve God and their country, and on the scaffold Okey forgave his former chaplain ‘that did pursue me to the very death’. Downing was rewarded with a baronetcy.

  There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of the nation wanted to see Charles II on the throne. They had had enough of fighting, they had never approved the execution of the king, they resented the puritan suppression of Christmas and Mayday festivals, dancing, the theatre and children’s games on Sunday. Men like Sandwich and Ashley Cooper, who had admired and supported Cromwell, were appalled by the disorder that followed his death and by the power of the military commanders. They came to believe that the restoration of the Stuarts was the best course, and they helped to bring it about as peacefully and as honourably as possible; and they also did very well out of the settlement that was reached. But there was a price to pay, in the betrayal of friends and principles; and although Charles gave them a warm welcome and heaped rewards on them, they carried the mark of men who had changed their loyalties, and were never allowed to forget it. In the next decades this would bring Sandwich to tragedy and lead Ashley Cooper into a fierce struggle against Charles; and in both these episodes Pepys would find himself involved.

  8. Families

  Whatever Pepys’s private feelings when he passed the protector’s head in Westminster Hall, and whatever his fears that there might be another political ‘turn’, he did not let himself forget that he owed his advance to the new regime that had put it there. In January 1661 he was in a ‘handsome and thriving condition’ and well settled at Seething Lane.1 For Pepys, the new house was the outward sign of his progress; it became almost the emblem of himself. Even though it was not his own freehold, he was from the start obsessed with altering, decorating and improving the place. If he was not rebuilding the staircase he was enlarging a window, adding an extra storey, putting in a new chimney piece, inserting a door where no door had been before or smartening up the cellar. It was rarely free of workmen in all the time he lived in it; the Diary is crammed with references to joiners, plasterers, painters and upholsterers, and the decorations grew more sumptuous from year to year. Even in the first months he refloored, redecorated and installed gilded leather hangings in the dining room. ‘I pray God keep me from setting my mind too much upon it,’ he wrote of his feeling for his precious house, but such prayers were formalities, and nothing was going to wean him from his passion.2 For the next twelve years Seething Lane was the centre of his life. It was to be not just clean, orderly and comfortable but elegantly laid out as to staircases and entrance hall, luxuriously decorated, with displays of pictures and maps; with silver and damask in the dining room, books for both husband and wife arranged on well-built shelves and rooms arranged for entertaining – dinners and card parties – as well as for music-making and quiet private study.

  Of course, like every house at that time, it smelt of bodies and hair not often washed, of the frequently overflowing ‘house of office’ underneath the building, either his own or the neighbours’, which needed emptying regularly; and of the chamber pots that had to be carried up and down and were, not surprisingly, sometimes spilt, a cause of merriment to Elizabeth as she cleared up the mess.3 But it bore no resemblance either to the house in which he had grown up or to the narrow farm house at Brampton. There may have been memories of rooms at Durdans and Hinchingbrooke in his head, and he was inspired above all by his sense of himself as a man of ‘liberal genius’ – that is, one temperamentally attached to gentlemanly pursuits and studies.4 He might be working on figures, contracts and estimates across the courtyard at the Navy Board, or tramping along the river to Deptford to inspect the shipyards; he might not have the elegant appearance or bearing of an aristocrat; but his inner self was that of an aesthete and an artist, and the house represented his aspiration to live by higher cultural values.

  Within months of moving in he doubled the size of his household; they were now a family of six. This must have been a relief to Jane, who had helped them single-handedly through the move from Axe Yard. She persuaded Pepys to take her younger brother Wayneman on as his boy servant, after he had made a brief trial of another and sacked him. Wayneman was between ten and twelve years old, and she had to
teach him his duties, how to put his master to bed, tidying away his clothes and fetching nightgown and cap, and how to comb his hair, the bedtime procedure Pepys enjoyed so much and sometimes made an occasion for horseplay: Jane may have been relieved to delegate this too. Pepys thought him a nice-looking boy and was pleased to find he could just about read, and might be taught to do better; he liked teaching as well as having his hair combed.5 Wayneman was provided with a livery, and sometimes called ‘young Pepys’ by the neighbours.6 As for a child of their own: a room was set aside hopefully to become the nursery.7