Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  The political aftermath of the fire was almost as alarming as the fire itself. There were so many rumours of arson that parliament could not ignore them, and in late September Catholics were told to leave the City unless they had special permission to remain. Pepys, no bigot, was, perfectly happy to stand godfather to the son of his Catholic picture varnisher, Lovett, in October. He had just acquired a fine picture of the crucifixion, or possibly a crucifix, from him. A Capuchin, one of the queen mother’s priests, conducted the ceremony; he was wearing lay clothes, Pepys observed, considerably smarter than his own outfit.

  His easy tolerance was not the norm. In October there was alarm when a collection of daggers was found in the ruins of a house reputedly owned by papists, and in November there was talk of a Catholic plot to poison the king; and when Pepys visited the Crews on 5 November, Sir Thomas told him the fire had been plotted and bragged about by papists.4 In January 1667 a book appeared with what it claimed to be the evidence given to the House of Commons about the fire, saying it was started by French Catholics, Jesuits and the duke of York himself; Pepys was shown a copy but had nothing to say about it.5 In May 1668, when a meteor was seen in the sky, his clerks Hayter and Gibson reported that people feared it was a sign that the rest of the City would be burnt, and the papists would cut all their throats.6 The charge that they had been responsible for the fire came up again at the time of the Popish Plot in 1678, and in January 1681 parliament used it as part of the argument for the Exclusion Bill, intended to prevent the duke of York from succeeding to the throne. In the same year an inscription was added to the monument commemorating the fire, stating that it was caused by ‘the treachery and malice of the popish faction… to introduce popery and slavery’.7 By then religious tolerance like Pepys’s had become dangerous in itself.

  16. Three Janes

  There are many Janes in the Diary, and three of them are distinctive characters, brought to life in Pepys’s scattered comments. Of these the slightest is Jane Welsh – worth noticing for her cussedness and his curious obsession with her. She caught his eye at Jervas’s, his barber and wig-maker, another establishment in New Palace Yard; and he first mentions her in July 1664 as a ‘pretty innocent girl’ who has been in service there for some time. Elizabeth was in the country, and he invited Jane to an ale house, ‘sported’ with her briefly and felt encouraged to pursue her. For six months after this her name comes up regularly. First he hoped Jervas would send her to Seething Lane to deliver his newly cleaned wig but was disappointed. Further attempts to get her to talk to him in the shop got nowhere. When he managed to suggest a meeting outside the shop, she told him that her master and mistress did not allow her out without them, adding that they were trying to find her a husband. Pepys decided he would like to find her one himself, because she was such a good-natured, attractive girl; he saw no inconsistency between this and chasing her himself. At last she agreed to meet him, on a Sunday when the Jervases were due to be away; the appointed place was outside Westminster Abbey, but when the day came she failed to turn up. He kicked his heels from three in the afternoon to six o’clock, and the next Sunday he waited again, and again she did not come. When he called at the shop she was cool, and for the rest of the year she remained unresponsive.1 The effect of this marked indifference to his attentions was that by 9 December, when she again refused to have a drink with him at the Trumpet in King Street, he had developed ‘grand envie envers elle [desire for her], avec vrai amour et passion’.

  So far this was a straightforward Pepys pursuit. But in the new year Mr and Mrs Jervas told him they were worried about Jane because she now told them she had promised herself to a penniless fiddler and would not consider any other husband; and when Pepys volunteered to give her some good advice they were grateful. Several more of his attempts to meet her failed. Then, out of the blue, she suddenly turned up at his office one morning of her own accord, wanting to talk to him and announcing she had left her job with the Jervases for her violin-playing sweetheart. Without pausing to ask himself why she had come to tell him this, Pepys took her to a house in the fields on the south bank and gave her good advice just as he had promised the Jervases he would: she should return to them and to her job, and forget the fiddler. At the same time the opportunity for seduction was too good to miss. She let him launch himself on her, enjoyably enough for him, but she stopped him when he tried to go further than she thought right and ‘would not laisser me faire l’autre thing, though I did what I pouvais to have got her à me laisser’. Letting him go as far as she did was perhaps the price she had decided to pay for his attention, because she needed someone to talk to; and perhaps she liked him well enough for his patient pursuit over many months. But chiefly she wanted him to know that she was going to marry the fiddler, and why. She said it was because she ‘believed it was her fortune to have this man, though she did believe it would be to her ruin’.2

  This is what fixes Jane Welsh in the mind: her oddity, her stubborn insistence on doing something she believed to be against her own interests but for which she was destined; and her need to explain this to someone who would listen and just possibly understand. Pepys, even in the grip of his carnal desires, had the grace to grasp that she wanted to give an account of her sense of her own fate; and foolish, even self-destructive as he thought her, he took the trouble to write down her explanation.

  His portrait of Jane Welsh goes little further. Weeks later the Jervases told Pepys that Jane was ‘undone’, just as she had predicted she would be. She had been sleeping with her fiddler, they said, and now found out that he had a wife and child; and she was therefore leaving London for Ireland – why is not explained, but she may have had family there.3 This was almost but not quite the last word on her. Leaving when she did she had the good luck to miss the plague, and a year later, in April 1666, she was back in London safe and sound. Pepys caught sight of her near Westminster jetty and carried her off for a drink across the river again, this time not to the fields but to Lambeth. Under questioning she confessed that her lover had been married, and claimed she had not slept with him; but Pepys’s interest had waned and he was not curious enough to ask her anything more about her current circumstances. ‘There I left her, sin hazer alguna cosa con ella,’ was all he had to say. No longer in pursuit of her, he went on to treat some other young women to prawns and lobsters in Fish Street and finished the evening happily feeling Mary Mercer’s breasts at home.4 Jane Welsh, who for a few months had danced in his imagination, unpredictable and exasperating, disappeared back into an unchronicled life. From what he has told us she had a good chance of holding her own in the rough and tumble of London: she was good-looking, she was tough, and her fate was better than she had expected, since she had survived not only her false fiddler but also the plague.

  Jane Turner – ‘Madam Turner’ as Pepys sometimes called her – is a much more substantial case. She comes out of the Diary as the strongest character among the Pepys clan after Sam himself. They had known one another from his infancy and her childhood, because her father John Pepys was third cousin to his father and owned a large house in Salisbury Court; it may indeed have been part of the reason why his father set up his tailoring business there in the first place. These were the affluent cousins who took Pepys as a boy to Ashtead and Durdans, and Jane was the youngest of their three children, ten years or so older than Sam and plainly fond of him and interested in his progress long before he became a successful man. She was always well supplied with money. She married her lawyer husband John Turner, a York-shireman, around 1650: ten years older than her, he was educated at Cambridge, at the Middle Temple in 1634, kept his head down during the civil war and became recorder of York in 1662. He wished to live in his native Yorkshire but she preferred London; and, although she bore him four children, she was able to defy his wishes over considerable periods of time because she had inherited her father’s house in Salisbury Court. The ownership of this house was the crucial factor in her independence. When Turner bough
t an estate in the north, she preferred to be parted from him and even from some of her children; for instance in 1662 the Diary tells us that her two sons (‘very plain boys’) had spent the last three years in Yorkshire in the care of their father.5 He appears in Pepys’s pages only when he is consulted for a legal opinion and is described as ‘a worthy, sober, serious man’ – rather too sober, it appears, for Mrs Turner.6

  Careless as she seems to have been of her sons, to her cousin Sam she showed affection and generosity. She was the one who volunteered to look after him when he had the operation for the stone, a kindness that must have totally disrupted her household for two months. Six years later, when his brother Tom was dying, she again showed concern beyond the call of duty, sending notes to Sam urging him to visit Tom, sitting with him and dealing with doctors, giving a bed to the Pepyses on the night of his death and taking part in the funeral.7 Like Pepys, she enjoyed being busy and in charge of arrangements. He expressed his gratitude for her care during his operation by planning the annual ‘stone feast’ at which she was always to be the guest of honour. Like many such plans, this one lapsed: in 1660 he was away, and after 1666 there were other reasons – plague, pressure of work, his mother’s imminent death, Jane’s absence – to prevent it. There were, however, other parties and outings the cousins enjoyed together; and she was sometimes flirtatious. They went to Greenwich and Hyde parks, they indulged in a play-reading, and in 1669 he gave a great Twelfth Night dinner for her, after which she chose him as her Valentine.8 One day when he called as she was dressing by the fire she showed him her legs, of which she was proud. He duly admired them, without being stirred or tempted by the sight: she was too safely an elder sister figure. Still, when he came to choose her Valentine gift he bought her, as well as gloves and garters, some fashionable green silk stockings in delicate allusion to those fine legs.9

  She assembled her own London household around her at Salisbury Court, which included her widowed sister and cousin Joyce Norton as well as her team of servants; and there were usually other women friends in attendance.10 The next formidable member of the family was her daughter Theophila, known as ‘The’ and, unlike her brothers, always kept with her.11 ‘The’ makes her first appearance in the Diary on 1 January 1660, supping with Pepys’s father; she was a precocious, indulged and confident child and something of a brat. At nine she was ordering her own harpsichord and refusing to give Pepys a lesson on it when he asked her (although he could play several string and wind instruments, he never mastered a keyboard). When Elizabeth sent her a gift of doves, ‘The’distinguished herself by writing her a rude letter, complaining that they had come in an inadequate cage; she grumbled about not having a good place for the coronation; and she forced herself on Pepys as his Valentine.12 She did offer to play her harpsichord to him to console him after the death of his brother Tom, after which he wrote that ‘the Musique did not please me neither’.13 Her mother trusted her with commissions, and at the age of ten she was sent to ask Pepys to find their serving man John a place at sea; in her teens she was capable of escorting her two brothers and little sister Betty from Yorkshire to London and installing them in their schools in Putney. Mother and daughter made a remarkably strong-minded pair.

  Jane was also close to another Pepys cousin, Roger, the Cambridge MP, and interested herself in his children and his marriages. You can see in the course of the Diary how she and Roger appreciated Sam’s steady social rise as he made money and acquired power and influence – he was becoming one of them. And he enjoyed demonstrating that he was no longer among the poor Pepyses. In 1663 he was able to send her a present of wine and venison; when her brother died he was helpful about the funeral arrangements; and by 1669 he could lend her his own carriage horses. He showed off his grand new friends to her, taking her to Povey’s house to see his perspective paintings and ‘volary’ (birdcage).14 The benefits went both ways, her wealth and connections helpful to him; he wrote after one outing with her, ‘I think it is not amisse to preserve, though it cost me a little, such a friend as Mrs Turner’.15 He also knew he could count on her affection. When he had failed to call on her for six months while establishing himself at Seething Lane, he remarked that she was a good woman and ‘could not be angry with me’; yet he was genuinely fond of her and worried about her when she was ill.16

  When, however, her husband came to town to organize some Middle Temple dinners and expected Pepys to help with the food through his navy victualling office, he let him down and failed even to attend any of the dinners. She accused him of growing proud.17 She scolded him again in November 1666 when, after a long exile to Yorkshire during the period of the plague and the fire, she came south to look at the spot where her house had stood, now nothing but ashes. ‘She was mighty angry with me, that in all this time I never writ to her; which I do think and take to myself as a fault, and which I have promised to mend,’ wrote Pepys. The loss of her house and all its contents was a disaster that meant she could no longer insist on living in London. Pepys soothed her with a ‘noble and costly dinner’ and listened to her complaints about the dullness of Yorkshire: ‘She is quite weary of the country, but cannot get her husband to let her live here any more, which troubles her mightily… We sat long; and after much talk of the plenty of her country in Fish, but in nothing also that is pleasing, we broke up with great kindness.’18 A few days later she told him she was forced to leave London again: ‘She is returning into the North to her children, where, I perceive, her husband hath clearly got the mastery of her, and she is likely to spend her days there, which for her sake I am a little sorry for, though for his it is but fit she should live where he hath a mind.’19 A husband’s right to control his wife was not something Pepys would argue against. In fact within months ‘The’ brought the younger children to school in London, and in 1668 Madam Turner herself was back in high spirits; Betty, her second daughter, promised to be a beauty, and they were all as merry as ever in lodgings. There were theatre parties, dinners, suppers, music and visits to Mulberry Gardens. One night they danced until two at Seething Lane and slept there afterwards, all fifteen of the party, which included Roger Pepys and his wife and daughters. To accommodate them all Pepys and Elizabeth moved into the maids’ bedroom, the maids slept in the coachman’s bed and the coachman with the boy in his settle-bed. This high point of cousinly hospitality and pleasure comes almost at the end of the Diary, which gives a last glimpse of ‘my cousin Turner and The and joyce in their riding clothes’ preparing to travel north again.

  They must have been in London again in subsequent years. ‘The’ married a Devon baronet and became Lady Harris in 1673; but there are no further signs of them among Pepys’s papers, and, if he kept his promise to write to Jane, none of their correspondence has survived. A pity, because she would be worth knowing through her own words as well as his. She was a fine example of a woman whose natural liveliness and independence were given rein by her father’s legacy of a house. To her husband it may have been a nuisance, but to her it was an act of wisdom. John Pepys of Ashtead knew that economics determine social arrangements, and gave his daughter the means to live her life as she pleased.20

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  One of ‘The’ Turner’s last appearances in the Diary was as bridesmaid to the Pepyses’ maid, Jane Birch, when she married Pepys’s clerk Tom Edwards. Jane Birch is the most important of the Janes and the only one whose story can be taken from before the start of the Diary to the end of Pepys’s life. Within the Diary she appears on the first page already well established at Axe Yard at fifteen; at the end as a married woman and set to remain a family friend; and in the years between he tells us a great deal about her character and still more of what she had to put up with. Pepys once called her ‘harmless’, a word he also applied to Lady Sandwich, no doubt contrasting in his mind the natures of these two women with the more dangerous and unpredictable temperaments of his wife and his sister.21 Will Hewer, another peaceable character, also had a high opinion of Jane. During one of he
r absences he was overheard telling the other servants how good she was and how the Pepyses would never have a better maid; and in later years he employed her himself.22 Harmless as she may have been, she also kept on good terms with Pepys because, like Will, she learnt to resist his bullying.

  Much of her story is given in asides, and sometimes she is not even named, just indicated as the girl, or the wench, and you have to work out if this is Jane, and the right Jane; all the same she emerges as one of the most interesting of the women who engaged his attention in the Diary. From our point of view she was also a representative of a vast and little documented group. Being a household servant was the commonest occupation by far for girls and women in the seventeenth century; there were very few other ways of earning anything – which is why Pepys took his own sister as a servant. But while every household had its maids, little information has come down to us about the detail of their lives. Through Pepys’s account of Jane and her fellow maids a good deal can be gleaned. In his household, for instance, the maids slept sometimes in garrets, sometimes in cold weather by the kitchen fire and sometimes in other rooms, including his and Elizabeth’s bedroom, which one girl found disconcerting, though Jane did not. They were recruited through friends and paid between £2 and £4 a year in addition to their board and lodging; and they appear to have had no formal holidays. They might be given cast-off clothes and taken on outings; and living close to their employers as they did, they generally knew everything that was going on in the family. The system was hierarchical and intimate at the same time, and the gap between maid and employer was an elastic one, which meant Jane was part slavey and part hairdresser, masseuse, secretary, even daughter. Not only might she sleep in her employers’ bedroom, she also sometimes shared a bed with her mistress or sat beside the bed darning while her master was settling to sleep.