Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  Pepys appreciated Coventry’s conversation enough to write some of it down. There was his ‘rule of suspecting every man that proposed anything to him to be a knave, or at least to have some ends of his own in it’. Another maxim was ‘that a man that cannot sit still in his chamber… and he that cannot say no… is not fit for business’ (to which Pepys added, ‘The last of which is a very great fault of mine, which I must amend in’). He believed that Coventry could do more to reform the abuses he found in the shipyards – among them badly made contracts, poor regulation of repairs, the disastrous system of paying seamen by ticket – than the rest of the board put together and wrote to him early in their association, in 1662, urging him to give more time to its work: ‘Would to God you could for a while spare 2 afternoons in a week for general debates.’ Although there is no sign that this happened, the two men discussed office business and public affairs together regularly throughout the years of the Diary. Their private lives remained in strictly separate compartments: Coventry did not meet Elizabeth; and, while Sir William Penn made a toast to Coventry’s nameless mistress, she makes no appearance in the Diary, and he never took a wife.13

  Pepys enjoyed Mennes’s literary conversation, his stories and his mimicry, but saw that he was too old to work and useless as comptroller.14 He threw many a ‘dotard’ and ‘old fool’ at him in the Diary, and after two years of his incompetence told Coventry he intended to take over a good part of Sir John’s work, without of course saying anything to him. ‘I thought the Comptroller would not take it ill,’ said Pepys, to which Coventry ‘wittily replied that there was nothing in the world so hateful as a dog in a manger’.15 Mennes was past the age of ambition and no doubt happy to have his work taken over by his junior. Other officers were not so acquiescent, and there was a nasty scene when Penn checked Pepys as he began to make out a contract and ‘most basely told me that the Comptroller is to do it’. It was done in the presence of Coventry, and Pepys argued with Penn and lost the argument. The humiliation angered him so much that he wrote down that Penn ‘did it like a base raskall, and so I shall remember him while I live’; and so he did. Pepys had a long memory for both favours and slights.16

  All the officers made visits to the shipyards at Deptford, Woolwich, Chatham and Portsmouth, to inspect ships and pay off the seamen as they came in from their voyages. It was work, but there were some trips that combined pleasure with work, as Pepys shows in the Diary. In Chatham he flirted with the pretty daughter of the official in charge of the ropeyard. On another occasion Elizabeth and Creed went with him to Portsmouth, and he allowed Hayter to bring his wife along too, making it into a short holiday; they had their wives shown over a ship, took a walk on the walls of the town and saw the sights, including the room in which the duke of Buckingham had been murdered in 1628.17 For the nearer yards, Pepys could travel up and down the Thames by boat, charging expenses of seven shillings for every visit to Deptford or Woolwich.18 Rather than taking a boat, he very often walked along the south bank of the river, into Redriff (now Rotherhithe), and on through the orchards and meadows to Deptford, Greenwich and even Woolwich. He enjoyed walking, and the river bank and adjacent countryside were so little frequented that he often read a book as he followed the familiar grassy footpaths, breaking off to climb stiles. You can take his route today through housing estates, past grimy churches and scraps of garden and over the foully polluted River Ravensbourne, your imagination struggling to clean up and empty the world as you go. The river was unembanked then, and at low tide a wide beach appeared. There is still a Cherry Garden Pier marking where he bought cherries in the orchards close to the river, and an inn at the water’s edge between Southwark and Rotherhithe on the spot where he often stopped for a drink. The fifteenth-century tower of St Nicholas’s Church also remains at Deptford, where skulls grin over the churchyard gate. The green hill of Greenwich, rising solidly before you as you round the loop of the river, has changed little in three hundred years, and for Pepys this was one of the most familiar views in his working life. He described walking in Greenwich Park in the spring of 1662 with Penn, seeing the young trees newly planted by the King and the steps just made up the hill to the castle, ‘which is very magnificent’ – Wren’s observatory, built in the 1670s, now stands on the site. From the top of the hill he could look back across the loops of the river, crowded with sails, and the miles of green country, back to London’s spires and smoke; whether he walked or took a boat home would depend on the tide.

  The board made contracts with suppliers of shipbuilding material – timber, hemp, tar, canvas, resin, nails – and with victuallers, who provided the food and drink served on board. These were primarily the responsibility of Batten as surveyor, but Pepys took to watching closely and critically, and very soon he was making contracts himself. His own account reveals him as too inquisitive, too clever, too ambitious and pretty soon too conscientious not to interest himself in the detail of everything he saw and heard, and shows him embarking on systematic studies of each area of supply and administration. His zeal was altogether admirable and exceptional, and greatly to the benefit of the navy; and it did not take him long to realize that understanding the procedures, as well as benefiting the navy – the king’s good, as he put it – would also allow him to make profits for himself. Indeed he was quickly targeted by suppliers who saw him as a valuable ally. William Warren, the biggest of the timber merchants, with his houses and yards in Essex, Rotherhithe and Wapping, came to him with friendly offers of financial advice, backed by presents indistinguishable from bribes, as Pepys was well aware: for example, a pair of gloves containing forty gold pieces. By such means Warren won a virtual monopoly, beating Batten’s candidate for timber contracts in the process. Pepys claimed he was serving the king’s interest by choosing the best supplier, but he would hardly say otherwise, and he defended himself stoutly when Pett challenged him.19 The duke’s official ‘Instructions’ to the Navy Board urged complete disinterestedness in purchasing goods, but they were not taken too literally by anyone. Pepys and Batten were often at loggerheads, each with his own reasons for backing a particular supplier.20

  The sums of money involved were huge, because the navy was the biggest industrial concern and the biggest employer in the country. It spent more than any other department in the state, and even in peacetime needed £400,000 a year to maintain it.21 Tens of thousands of men were on its payroll as officers, sailors, victuallers and slop-suppliers, ‘slops’ being the clothes worn by the common sailors, the red caps, canvas suits and blue shirts; there was no uniform. There were also the shipbuilders, rope-makers, sail-makers, mast-makers and suppliers of everything that went into building and repairing ships. The life of a ship was reckoned at three human generations: it took about eight months to build and was expected to outlast its builders’ children. A mast, on the other hand, lasted for only ten years. England did not produce enough wood, and much of it was shipped in from the Baltic countries; there were running arguments about the quality of the wood supplied. The legacy of the commonwealth in 1660 was a fleet of 157 ships, the largest number ever yet in service in England; one reason for Cromwell’s high reputation at home and abroad had been the size and effectiveness of his navy.22 The safety and prestige of the nation remained deeply involved with its successful running, but, while the duke and the king were eager to maintain its reputation and showed great interest in shipbuilding, they had no proper plan for funding it; and parliament was not inclined to vote money, at least not in peace time. After a year in his job, Pepys observed that ‘the want of money puts… the navy out of order; and yet I do not see that the King takes care to bring in any money’.23 It was to be his refrain throughout his years of service.

  He began to dream of the rewards his application would bring him. Lying late in bed with Elizabeth on a Sunday morning in March 1662, he talked of becoming a knight and keeping a coach, once he had saved £2,000 by frugal living.24 At that moment, his whole fortune stood at a quarter of that, £530.
He began to do monthly accounts and worked out some strict spending rules for himself, swore to God to observe them and set himself penalties for failure to do so. By now he was confident he would become rich, it was more a matter of how soon.25 As he began to enjoy his work he worked harder. He rose early, usually at four in the summer months; he dined at about noon, either at home or out with friends, then went back to the office and might be still there at midnight. ‘My business is a delight to me,’ he wrote; and it ‘has taken me off from all my former delights’.26 Again, ‘I find that two days’ neglect of business doth give me more discontent in mind than ten times the pleasure thereof can repair again, be it what it will.’27 Elizabeth approved of this new sobriety and application. He gave up the Privy Seal job, and by the end of the year heard with satisfaction that the world said he and Mr Coventry ‘do all the business of the office almost; at which I am highly proud’.28

  There was sometimes a price to be paid. For instance, in May 1662 he was asked to find and hand over papers relating to Sir Henry Vane, the ablest and most important naval commissioner under the commonwealth, who was being tried for his life. Vane was not a regicide, but an idealist who believed in religious toleration. His ideas were far ahead of his time, and their eccentricity had made him many enemies. In 1660 he refused to submit himself to the king and was perceived as dangerous; parliament and the king both wanted him dead. He defended himself bravely and was condemned on a single piece of evidence, his signature on a Navy Committee letter, written on the day of Charles I’s execution: it was taken as proof that he had not opposed the execution, on the grounds that he would have stayed away from work if he had. It was a slender thread on which to decide a man’s life, and Pepys, whether he knew it or not, must have supplied the fatal letter. He went to see Vane executed on Tower Hill on 14 June, the anniversary of Naseby – this was a royal public relations exercise – and wrote a long account of the condemned man’s courage and dignity in the Diary, as well as a letter to Lord Sandwich, who, like Penn, Batten and Blackborne, had worked with Vane.29 A few days afterwards Pepys dined with the Crews, and they spoke of Vane’s courage as miraculous; another old Treasury clerk he met in the street called him a saint and martyr, and accused Pepys of wickedness: ‘At all which, I know not what to think.’ But he passed on the comments to Sandwich; and, reading about Vane some months later, declared that he had been ‘a very wise man’.30 Vane’s last words, deliberately made inaudible to the crowd by drumbeats from the attending soldiers, have passed into history: ‘It is a bad cause which cannot bear the words of a dying man.’31

  Like the well-trained scholar he was, Pepys had embarked on the study of everything he needed to know to carry out his service to the navy, from its early records to its recruiting methods, from the multiplication tables and the use of the slide rule to the best methods of timber measurement, from rope manufacture to victualling and ships’ pursers’ accounts, from sea charts to tide tables, from flag-making to the language of sailors. To learn about shipbuilding he had himself taken round by a shipbuilder, going into every hole and corner of as many vessels as possible. He took lessons in how to draw ships. His programme still inspires awe for its thoroughness, and through it he began to identify with the navy, and to take a personal pride in its history and organization. He was not the sort of man who could have commanded a ship or fought a sea battle; he had been to sea only on his Baltic trip and the crossing to Holland, and in the whole course of his career added only another Channel crossing, a coastal voyage to Scotland and the Tangier expedition, made at the king’s behest. The romance of the navy came to him not through wind, water and tides but through papers, contracts and ledgers, rows of figures and dockyard visits; but it cast its spell over him as strongly as over any of the fighting officers who sailed the oceans. It is one of the reasons that he is revered by naval historians.

  His growing feeling that it was his navy, and that he knew best how things should be done, made him impatient with his colleagues, proprietorial and jealous. From very early in the Diary, he expressed his contempt for their professional failings. Only Coventry was entirely exempt from criticism. Batten and Penn came in for perpetual attacks, and we have seen how he insisted on a private office away from them. His jealousy of their experience and status, and his many quarrels with them, drove him to malice, sharpened by his determination to prove his own superiority and to be in control of what happened at the office and in the yards, and to be seen to be in control.32 Mennes might have been a dotard, but he did not threaten Pepys; whereas Penn, friendly and generous as he was in their private dealings, was prepared to take him on and invoke precedents when Pepys exceeded his appointed powers, as he did over the drawing up of contracts in front of Coventry. Pepys never forgot or forgave that. ‘Strange to see how pert Sir W Penn is today, newly come from Portsmouth with his head full of great reports of his service and the state of the ships there. When that is over, he will be just as another man again, or worse. But I wonder whence Mr Coventry should take all this care for him… when I am sure he knows him as well as I do, as to his little service he doth,’ he wrote in the summer of 1664.33 A few months later Pepys attacked Mennes too, for a poor report he had drawn up, speaking to him in front of Batten and his lady: ‘I was in the right, and was the willinger to do so before them, that they might see that I am somebody.’34 Pepys’s absolute determination to impose himself on the men placed above him, but inferior to him in ability, is all in the phrase.

  Rude and belittling remarks about Penn and Batten become a tetchy leitmotif, so predictable that rather than convincing they sometimes encourage you to sympathize with the men he is attacking. As Batten is repeatedly accused of corruption in his dealings with timber, hemp and tar merchants, flag-makers and rope-makers, you ask yourself, are these not the very groups of men with whom Pepys himself is engaged in profitable negotiations? Hard as it is to be categoric about the financial details of the contracts made by either Batten or Pepys, it seems likely that both were offered and both accepted the sweeteners that were standard for their time. If Batten was a rogue, then so was Pepys.

  Still he called Batten and Penn rogues, accusing them of idleness, avarice, incompetence and hypocrisy, mocked their minor mistakes and gathered impressive quantities of evil gossip about them. Batten’s young second wife was a whore and he was a cuckold.35 Penn, for all his active service, was a coward.36 In the real world, Batten, though neither saintly nor brilliant, was hospitable, friendly and capable of sustained hard work, for instance during the Second Dutch War when he was in charge at Harwich; and Penn was clever, competent and brave, going to sea to fight the Dutch again in 1665.37 But Pepys had decided they were his enemies and was not amenable to reason. His hostility and aggression take on particularly dark colours when he describes himself making sexual advances to Penn’s daughter Pegg. To attack the honour of a rival family through a sexual assault on one of its women is a primitive ploy, and it is clear that for Pepys it was a matter of power and humiliation of his enemy rather than attraction – he had described her as unattractive, and even suspected her of having the pox – and that he was more interested in slyly humiliating Penn than in gratifying himself when he fondled Pegg’s breasts or thighs. He also claimed that she was compliant and even enthusiastic (‘fort willing’); it does not absolve him from setting out to defile the daughter of a colleague and neighbour whose hospitality he regularly accepted. He had bouts with her both before and after her marriage to Anthony Lowther, a respectable MP and founding fellow of the Royal Society, where Pepys too was a fellow from 1665. Had he not supplied the information himself, it would be hard to believe; but there it is, set down in his own words, with the same admirable exactitude he would have used in describing the process of rope-making.38

  As clerk of the acts, Pepys could hardly fail to acquire rich and powerful friends, and the Diary charts his social and professional rise among ambitious men jostling for positions and property. He was invited to join bodies like the T
rinity House, an organization that controlled pilots’ licences and navigation on the Thames, made appointments and ran seamen’s charities, as well as acting as a gentlemen’s club – something between a Freemasons’ Lodge and the Garrick Club – with regular and carefully planned gastronomic dinners for its members, in the course of which much business must have been discussed, all the more effectively for being unofficial. Pepys became a ‘Younger Brother’ in 1662, when Sandwich was master, progressed to ‘Elder Brother’ and rose to be master himself in 1676, and again in 1685. In 1662 he was also appointed to the Tangier Committee, set up by the king to run the new colony brought as a dowry by his Portuguese bride. This was another Sandwich concern: he had made a survey of Tangier for Cromwell and declared it could provide something the English had long wanted: a base for their fleet in the Mediterranean, despite the fact that it was entirely encircled on the land by hostile Muslim tribes. He was there again for the king when the Portuguese handed it over in 1661. A garrison was installed and the building of a huge breakwater, or ‘Mole’, undertaken by English engineers: these were the business of the Tangier Committee.