Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
Page 27
Who all our ships exposed in Chatham’s net?
Who should it be but the Fanatic Pett?
Pett, the sea-architect, in making ships
Was the first cause of all these naval slips:
Had he not built, none of these faults had been;
If no creation, there had been no sin.
But his great crime, one boat away he sent,
That lost our fleet and did our flight prevent.48
Not surprisingly, Pett’s impeachment was adjourned until February and never revived. You could say he sank into obscurity except that he lives for ever in the lines of Marvell’s scintillating defence. Pepys said it ‘made my heart ache to read it, it being too sharp and so true’.49
The chancellor, Clarendon, was successfully scapegoated because he was distrusted by parliament, unpopular with the people and detested by Lady Castlemaine; and the king, to whom he had been a wise adviser for so long, was tired of being advised wisely. He let him go into banishment. Attempts to make Coventry another of the scapegoats for the failure of the war did not succeed, but he had had enough, and he left the Navy Board, telling Pepys that ‘the serving a prince that minds not his business is most unhappy for them that serve him well’. Pepys found board meetings ‘flat and dull’ without him.50 Coventry also gave up his position as secretary to the duke of York, who resented his criticisms of Clarendon, his father-in-law.51 Both Penn and Batten told Pepys that they had ‘cut him out’ to take over as the duke’s secretary, but he was not asked, and stoutly maintained that he would not have liked the disruption of his family life that the job would have brought with it.52
The end of the war meant he had to give up his position as surveyor-general of victualling – losing £300 a year – and lay off the extra clerks he had acquired. Penn faced worse: he was impeached for his part in the prize ship affair. There were also renewed attacks on the absent Sandwich. Parliament set up a committee to look into what had gone wrong in the war; Pepys was amused to find that it was to be chaired by an old commonwealth official, Colonel John Birch: ‘it is pretty to see that they are fain to find out an old-fashion man of Cromwell’s to do their business for them’.53
His eyes were giving him trouble, but he did not slacken his pace, and in March he spoke for three hours before the whole House of Commons in defence of the Navy Board. He was sick with nerves the night before and had to fortify himself with sack and brandy in the morning, but he made such an impression with his speech that he received compliments for weeks afterwards; even the king and the duke came up to him in the park to congratulate him.54 This was the high point of his professional life so far, and it encouraged him to think of going into parliament. And so the war, which had brought shame and disaster to England and finished the careers of many of his colleagues, turned almost miraculously to his advantage. It was an outcome no one could have predicted.
13. Marriage
The Diary starts and ends in considerations of marriage. Pepys marks it as the central fact of his life at the beginning, and on each of the last two days he records being ‘called by my wife’. The nine and a half years between give as good an account of the married state as has ever been written, its struggles, its woes, its pleasures and its discontents. You might put the Diary into the hands of a Martian to explain the institution and its workings, at least as it existed for the middle classes for three centuries, from the seventeenth until the twentieth, when men held economic and intellectual sway over their wives; and in many aspects it is still perfectly relevant, because its great achievement is to map the tidal waters of marriage, where the waves of feeling ebb and flow from hour to hour and month to month. The Pepyses were always moving between dependence and resentment, protectiveness and impatience, pride and shame, jealousy and anger, complicity and indifference, love and hate. They were capable of low abuse and physical violence towards one another, and also of delicacy, tenderness and forbearance. Whether it was a happy or an unhappy marriage is as difficult for us to pronounce now as it was for them at the time – everything depends on where you happen to be looking – but no one could accuse Pepys of not being in touch with his feelings about it at any given time.
The Diary describes long-running battles and sudden flares of rage. There were nights when she kept him awake with her complaining, others when he sulked. But ‘And so we went to bed and lay all night in a Quarrell’ is followed in the next sentence by ‘This night I was troubled all night with a dream that my wife was dead, which made me that I slept ill all night.’1 He was capable of blacking her eye, or twisting or pulling her nose, thoroughly nasty behaviour though casual violence, like a boy’s angry lashing out, rather than calculated brutality; Pepys did not go in for husbandly beatings, and he and Elizabeth, like most couples, agreed that his blows were a private matter, shameful to them both and best kept concealed from the world. Jealousy, as we have seen, ran through their lives, binding them in a tormenting double chain. Elizabeth always wanted more of his time and attention than he gave her, as the letter of reproach with which this book began made clear. As head of the household, he wanted docility from her, and was disturbed and upset by her perpetual rows with the servants. After a quarrel with one departing maid, the girl went on to gossip about Elizabeth, suggesting she sat too long in the dark with Pepys’s boy Tom Edwards, and kept him idle; Pepys expressed his anger in the Diary ‘that all my trouble in this world almost should arise from… the indiscretion of a wife that brings me nothing almost (besides a comely person) but only trouble and discontent’.2 He worried too that his rising prosperity would make her careless with his money: ‘I fear she will forget by degrees the way of living cheap and under a sense of want,’ he wrote in 1664.3
He could be blisteringly rude to her face too; as they walked to church one Sunday he was so critical of her clothes that she went home again, and then took herself to a different church. Another day he called her a whore for wearing ill-matched ribbons.4 But she was not easily crushed. After a row over her kitchen accounts he wrote, ‘I find she is very cunning, and when she least shows it, hath her wit at work; but it is an ill one.’5 She learnt how to bargain with him, offering to give up the false hair she liked, and he hated, on condition that he stopped seeing his actress friend Mrs Knipp. Criticism of clothes and hair was strictly one-sided, and nowhere in the Diary is there any mention of Elizabeth commenting on his appearance. Even when he decided, in November 1663, to let his barber cut his hair and sell him a periwig, and reports his anxiety about the response of his neighbours, colleagues, bosses and even maids, he says nothing about what she thought of the change, although for her it meant that the man she had married was transformed into a quite different creature, who went to bed with a shorn head and put on by day the sign of power and status.6 The fashion for periwigs came from France – the word is an Anglicized perruque – and Pepys was one of the first to adopt it in England. A wig declared your social standing at first glance. It was expensive to maintain, you needed several, and they were made of hair bought from someone poor enough to be prepared to sell theirs – Pepys also had one made from the first cropping of his own hair, which is how we know it was dark brown. He had enough doubts to grow his own hair long again, but in May 1665 ‘I find the convenience of Perrywiggs is so great, that I have cut off all short again, and will keep to periwigs.’7 A wig meant that you need never go grey or bald in public; you appeared more of an icon, less of a person. This is why wigs had such a deadening effect on portraiture, stifling individuality under those great cushions of curls. Sadly all the portraits of Pepys show him as a wig-wearer; you have only to look at the few wigless representations of his contemporaries to see how much livelier they are: Evelyn old and grey, Newton’s little bust with thin hair drawn back, Dryden in a rare wigless portrait.8
There were as many good times as quarrels in the marriage, when he confided in her and delighted in her company. The Sunday mornings when they lay late in bed, talking of his hopes and plans, were a particular pl
easure and comfort to him; probably to her too, although we have to guess about that. Both enjoyed expeditions to theatres and shops together, as well as summer outings – on the river to Vauxhall or Barn Elms, or by coach to the country inns of Islington and Hackney. In October 1662 he reflected on how they have been ‘for some years now, and at present more and more, a very happy couple, blessed be God’.9 There were days when they cherished one another’s ailments sympathetically, she advising him to sit ‘long and upright’ when he tried to empty his bowels, often a problem for him; and he hurrying home from the office to comfort her when she sent a message to say she was ‘in great pain of those’.10 When he was exasperated by his colleagues or troubled about the office, he dreamt of enjoying life with her away from the Navy Board: ‘my wife and I will keep to one another and let the world go hang’.11 The afternoon might go to a mistress, but the evening talk was with Elizabeth, ‘with whom I have much comfort’.12
When things were easy between them, she happily took lessons from him: in music, arithmetic and astronomy. He prided himself on his teaching, and her eagerness to acquire knowledge and skills also tells us how she had been starved of education: to be a bright girl in that century was more frustration than joy. She took up painting and worked hard at it, turning out some work Pepys admired. What schooling she had enjoyed was in France, and part of her always yearned towards the country of her childhood and her convent teachers. The wandering habits and decayed gentility of her parents gave her the exotic aspect he was proud of but did not make her into the orderly housewife he also wished for: bœuf en daube and general resourcefulness, excellent; household accounts and discipline of servants, not so good. She liked long mornings in her dressing gown; when she passed an old gown on to her mother, Pepys remembered fondly that she had called it ‘her Kingdome, from the ease and content she used to have in the wearing of it’. It is one of the few Diary entries in which we hear her actual words.13
Like her husband, Elizabeth had a thorough appreciation of the pleasures of ordering and appearing in new clothes. She was a beauty – luscious and responsive in the Hayls portrait – and she cared for her appearance. As well as acquiring hairpieces, she had her teeth scraped by the royal dentist, wore patches and collected dew for her complexion. She was noticed with admiration by many men, including the duke of York, who eyed her ‘mightily’ in the park.14 She flirted with her admirers, capturing Will Hewer’s heart, enjoying herself with her handsome dancing master and disquieting her father-in-law by her receptiveness to an attentive Guards officer who shared a London coach with them.15 She appreciated the attentions of her Axe Yard neighbour John Hunt, and of Captain Robert Ferrer, both of whose names she put forward to be her Valentines in the year Pepys perversely chose to veto such expensive foolishness.16 Later he noticed her tendresse for one of the engineers of the Tangier breakwater, the charming Henry Sheeres, and suffered a jealous twinge. Sheeres offered to teach her the rules of perspective, and Pepys observed that he became even more attractive to her when he revealed that he was a poet as well as an engineer.17 She may have hoped for more poetry in Pepys, and in their life together.
What he called her vixen’s temper frightened him, and he was sometimes cowed by it. When she scolded him one day for not dining at home and he gave her ‘a pull by the nose and some ill words’ and left the house for his office, she followed him; and, fearing that she would carry on the quarrel in the hearing of his clerks, he diverted her into the garden to calm her down and ‘prevent shame’.18 She made scenes in public when she was infuriated by his attentions to their friends Mrs Knipp and Mrs Pearse. Pepys’s brother John was upset by her rudeness when he stayed at Seething Lane, and Pepys noticed her ‘carrying herself very high’ towards his father and sister at Brampton.19 She flew into a tremendous fury against old Mr Pepys after he told Pepys about her flirtatious behaviour in the coach; she held him in ‘absolute hatred’, she said, and would not consider having him to live with them after Pall married. ‘Very hot work a great while,’ wrote Pepys as she boiled up to deliver threats that she would also refuse to live with Pepys and shame him ‘all over the City and the Court’ with complaints about his meanness and her lack of freedom.20 He is unlikely to have felt too vulnerable to her accusing him to either the Court or the City, but she did know how to shake him. And about his meanness she was right, because he consistently spent more on his clothes and pleasures than he allowed her. About her freedom, less so: the Diary records her going out with friends, attending dancing parties and even staying out all night. At the same time he always felt it was bad for her to be away from his control, and that her character changed when he was not with her to keep her in order. When he visited her at Woolwich, where he took her during the great fire, he found her ‘out of humour and indifferent, as she uses upon her having much liberty abroad’.21 Another time, after she had stayed at Brampton for a long spell without him, he reflected on ‘my wife’s neglect of things and impertinent humour got by this liberty of being from me which is never to be trusted with for she is a fool’.22
The cycle of their relationship is established in the opening pages of the Diary, when she was twenty to Pepys’s twenty-seven, and they had been married for five years of poverty, illness, quarrels, separation and reconciliation, as political storms raged and their future was quite uncertain. Five years into the marriage he has not yet introduced her to his patron, Edward Montagu; her place is necessarily in the background of his narrative and he does not even give her name – ‘my wife’ was always enough for Pepys. Their social life is markedly with his family, not with hers: a visit to his parents, a Twelfth Night party with his cousins. She runs a race in the park with his cousin Jane Turner’s daughter Theophila, and borrows her mother-in-law’s woollen mantle and her brother-in-law John’s hat for Pepys to walk home in when it comes on to rain after their regular Sunday dinner en famille. She goes alone to visit her parents, and when her brother brings her a present of a dog, Baity is not named by Pepys either; he is pleased with the dog, but the pleasure does not last long, and soon he is telling her he intends to fling it out of the window ‘if he pissed the house any more’.23 It is her family’s fault. The first quarrel in the Diary comes when he goes out without her in the evening and she, objecting, follows him along the street. He escorts her firmly home, then sets out alone again and appears to have won the argument, but she has the last word, because she goes to her neighbours the Hunts and contrives to stay out later than he does.24 A fortnight into the Diary her fighting powers are well established.
Within the first month we are given a clear impression of how she lives, and indeed to women readers she starts as Everywife when on New Year’s Day she burns her hand doing up the remains of the Christmas turkey. We hear of her going to market to buy food, and preparing the dinner they give in the Montagu lodgings in Whitehall Palace, working late into the evening to make tarts and lard the chickens and larks. She cooks well and is practical, killing a turkey sent by Lady Montagu with her own hands. She sometimes gets lost in a book, like her husband, staying up at night after he has gone to bed because she can’t tear herself away from her French novel, Polexandre, about a beautiful queen who inhabits an inaccessible island and sends her knight to punish the royal suitors who aspire to her hand.25 But she is also a hard worker, up all through a frosty night doing the monthly wash with Jane. She takes a sisterly interest in Jane’s looks and does up her hair for her, to Pepys’s admiration. She and Pepys are more often comfortable together than not: lying in bed on a cold morning, she reads aloud to him while he is getting up. On another evening she watches as he writes, while a drum beats a single stroke outside, and they ask themselves what it can mean in those troubled times.
This ordinary life makes the backdrop to Pepys’s activities and the political events of the early months of 1660 – Monck’s arrival in London with his troops, Montagu and Downing each holding his breath for the right moment to make his submission to Charles. Elizabeth stayed at home wi
th Jane in Axe Yard when Pepys rode off intending to see Montagu at Hinchingbrooke; but as soon as he knew he would be going to sea for an indeterminate period, he made arrangements for her to leave London. There was no question in his mind of her being with either her parents or his in town, and he took the trouble to ride out again, this time to Buckinghamshire, on a borrowed horse, through the darkness and with a severe cold in the head, to settle proper lodgings for her with trusted friends, the Bowyers, where she could take Jane and her dog. Then he arranged a treat before their parting. They went to Fish Street together and bought eightpence worth of salmon – a substantial piece – and had it cooked in the Sun Tavern; and there, over dinner, ‘I did promise to give her all that I have in the world but my books, in case I should die at sea.’26 A few days later she was in Buckinghamshire, and he made his will as he had said he would, with the afterthought that the French books were to be hers. This was Pepys at his most tender and thoughtful. During his absence, they both wrote letters as often as possible, but on his return he was too busy to give her much attention until they settled in Seething Lane and took up a new pattern of life. From then on he fulfilled the primary duty of a husband, to be a good provider; they rose steadily up the social scale, and she no longer had to labour in the house but lived the life of a lady.
A wife was expected, in return for her husband’s support and protection, to supervise household matters and to provide regular sex. The early years of the Diary have little to say about this last point, but we know he expected it because he complained when the service failed. On 2 August 1660 she had a pain – ‘her old pain in the lip of her chose, which she had when we were first married’, so a recurrence of the cyst in her private parts – and by the 6th he was ‘not a little impatient’. He was allowed access again on the 8th. Even this short interruption gave him licence to look elsewhere, and within days he recorded an encounter with Betty Lane, his old flame from Westminster Hall. She had several admirers, among them John Hawley, Pepys’s friend, whom he sometimes urged her to marry. He encouraged Hawley to the marriage too, ‘God knows I had a roguish meaning in it’, he explained to himself in the Diary.27 Roguish seems a mild term for such behaviour; and there was no marriage between Hawley and Betty. She might have hoped to marry Pepys himself had he not already been taken, because she enjoyed herself with him. He would supply a bottle of wine and perhaps a lobster, and she brought unabashed enthusiasm to their love-making. Later he describes an athletic performance under a tavern chair, and how he was disconcerted by her showing her own enjoyment; on another occasion she left him ‘almost defessus [exhausted] of the pleasure’.28 Unlike her, he felt guilty about what they did together, and about what people would think if they knew. He could not resist what she offered, but it made him anxious: ‘my mind un peu troublé pour ce que j’ai fait today. But I hope it will be la dernière de toute ma vie,’ he wrote after the session under the chair; but it was not the last.29