Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  Perhaps because she was his first servant, Pepys did not take her for granted. From the start he was interested enough in her to note down some of the things he saw her doing, such as knitting stockings, possibly for herself, possibly for him. And he noticed too when she got up at two in the morning to start on the washing. He liked her well enough to take her along to Sunday dinner at his parents’ house, and he trusted her with his books: she was given the job of carrying the ones he had left in his turret room in Whitehall Palace to his house in Axe Yard. Just before they moved to Seething Lane, she fell ill – the only time we hear of such a thing – and spent two days in bed with a bad leg. ‘We cannot tell what to do for want of her,’ he wrote despondently, but he worked it out and took on a second servant to help, a boy. Pepys and Elizabeth made the move to their new house by coach, overtaking the carts carrying their goods, and presumably Jane and the boy, in the Strand. On arrival she at once started washing the house while Elizabeth went to bed. Pepys writes of sporting with her and the boy in the kitchen while they combed his hair, his bedtime ritual: a little horseplay and some jokes. A few weeks later, when Jane was sleeping in their bedroom with them, the new boy was in trouble for stealing, and she fancied she heard a noise downstairs. Elizabeth was frightened that the boy was planning mischief – Pepys says she shook with fear – and it was intrepid Jane who went down to investigate, lit a candle, locked the door fast and reassured her employers. The boy was sacked, and Jane saw her chance and brought her younger brother Wayneman into the household in his place. She set about teaching him his duties: putting Pepys to bed, folding his clothes, presumably, as well as the hair-combing and making sure the chamber pot was in place.

  December 1660 was a month of intimacies: on the 1st Pepys, finding the house untidy, let his anger rip and beat her with a broom until she cried ‘extremely’. This upset him – can he have supposed she would take it as another bit of sporting? – and he felt obliged to appease her (his word) before he went out. Not long afterwards he describes the delightfully peaceful scene in which, while Elizabeth was away with friends, he lay in bed reading himself to sleep while Jane sat companionably beside him darning his breeches. Two days before Christmas she and Elizabeth struggled together to get a great turkey on to the spit; and after Christmas Pepys was ill in the night (‘I think with eating and drinking too much’), called up Jane to bring a basin and recovered fast enough to be charmed by the innocent way she ran up and down in her night smock, presumably showing a good deal of arm and leg.23

  Jane was not timid and she knew how to stand up for herself. When Pepys’s or Elizabeth’s treatment became too much for her, she either gave in her notice or refused to submit to their scoldings and drove them to dismiss her; then she insisted on taking the dismissal they clearly hoped to renegotiate. She wept when she left, but she went. Pepys too was reduced to the brink of tears on these occasions. She left for the first time after she had served the Pepyses for three years, two in Axe Yard, one at Seething Lane. This was in 1661, and she gave as her reason that her mother needed her in the country. Wayneman was now working for the Pepyses and he would remain in London. We are not told what part of the country they came from, but it must have been reasonably close, given that she and her two brothers all came to work in London, and her toings and froings. One possibility is that she was a Buckinghamshire girl recommended to Pepys by his fatherly friend at the Exchequer, Robert Bowyer, who had a house in Buckinghamshire where Elizabeth stayed with Jane in 1660.

  When Jane decided to take herself home to her mother in 1661, Pepys said she had grown lazy, spoilt by having Pall to share the work with her, but he was still upset at losing her. It was especially annoying because he had just decided to get rid of Pall and send her to live in the country with their parents. Pall hated the idea of leaving London but was made to go; and, fortunately for the Pepyses, Jane enjoyed country life with her mother no more than Pall did with hers, and in the spring of 1662 she was back working for them again. In her absence Wayneman had got into trouble and been beaten for having gunpowder for Guy Fawkes’ night in his pocket. When Pepys took him down to the cellar to beat him again shortly after Jane’s return, she interceded for him, and Pepys called off the punishment. Later he felt obliged to explain to her that he was doing it for the boy’s good.24 Jane was tactful enough to accept this, but she was not happy about it. Wayneman got deeper into the Pepyses’ bad books for misbehaving at Brampton when he was there with Elizabeth in August and September. She accused him of behaviour ‘not fit to name’, and old Mr Pepys complained too, saying he would not have him in the house again, so he must have done something pretty bad.25 This was the summer when Ferrer and Lord Sandwich paid attention to Elizabeth, which may have preoccupied her so much that she allowed Wayneman to run wild. It was a complicated season for everyone.

  Jane remained at Seething Lane with Pepys, helping to deal with the chaos caused by his building works there. The roof had to come off before the new storey could be added, and heavy rain made the whole process into a nightmare; fortunately the Penns were away for several weeks, and Pepys and Jane were able to move into their house while the worst part of work was carried out. Pepys speaks of her ‘lying among my goods’ at the Penns at the end of August. The Diary also says he is hoping for ‘a bout’ with her but is held back by his fears that she would prove honest and tell Elizabeth if he suggested such a thing. Then he wrote, ‘I can hardly keep myself from having a mind to my wench, but I hope I shall not fall to such a shame to myself.’26 Nothing happened, or at least nothing more appears from the text, which suggests that Pepys controlled himself; but Jane was no fool, and at eighteen she is likely to have been aware of her employer’s interest.

  Some time after Penn’s return in September he told Pepys that Jane had attacked one of the carpenters working on the building site, cutting off his long moustache, a Delilah-like gesture that was probably self-defence. Girls in her situation needed to work out their strategies. The carpenter said his wife, when she saw the damage, assumed he had been ‘among some of his wenches’.27 After this there was another episode in which Lady Batten complained that Jane had insolently mimicked her way of calling her maid. Pepys felt he must ‘school’ her; but Jane knew he disliked Lady Batten and answered him ‘so humbly and drolly about it, that though I seemed angry, I was much pleased with her’.28 Then her combative spirit went too far even for him. At Christmas he scolded her for speaking saucily to Elizabeth and said she was growing proud and negligent. When he beat Wayneman again, for lying, in January 1663, she showed her anger, and at this Pepys told her to leave. She packed up her things to go. He ‘could hardly forbear weeping’, and she did cry, ‘saying it was not her fault that she went away. And indeed, it is hard to say what it is but only her not desiring to stay, that she doth now go.’29 She had effectively turned the tables on him.

  With his sister gone, Wayneman grew wilder. He wanted to leave too, although his brother William urged him not to; but, when the boy saw Pepys preparing to beat him for not writing out his lesson in his copy-book, he ran away. No one knew where he had gone until Pepys saw him playing on Tower Hill several days later; he must have been living in the streets, and in his best suit too. Pepys sent the Seething Lane porter to fetch him, made him change into his old suit and sacked him on the spot. Jane and William Birch came round together to beg Pepys either to take him back or to send him to sea as a ship’s boy. Pepys did neither. He took the whole episode seriously and was upset enough to describe his exchange with Jane in some detail: ‘though I could yet be glad to do anything for her sake to the boy; but receive him again I will not nor give him anything. She would have me send him to sea; which if I could I would do, but there is no ships going out. The poor girl cried all the time she was with me and could not go from me, staying about two hours with me till 10 or 11 o’clock at night, expecting that she might obtain something of me; but receive him I will not. So the poor girl was fain to go away, crying and saying little.’3
0 Pepys’s language becomes almost biblical in this emotional passage with its short words, its repetitions (‘the poor girl’) and emphatic inversion (‘receive him I will not’), also repeated; and its use of ‘fain’ in the sense of accepting the lesser of two evils – in this case, to depart unsatisfied rather than remaining to no purpose. He is trying to convince himself, and underneath the fine language he has doubts about what he is doing, punishing Jane, who is blameless and whom he loves, as well as Wayneman, who has disappointed him. Wayneman’s next employer found him uncontrollable too and prepared to ship him off to Barbados as an indentured servant. Pepys was again applied to and asked to get a release for him, but he refused, ‘Out of love to the boy; for I doubt to keep him here were to bring him to the gallows’.31 He had decided Wayneman was past any help or discipline he could give him, and the boy disappeared into the harsh life of the plantations, only a small step up from slavery. After this Jane kept away from Seething Lane for more than two years.

  It was Elizabeth who then sought her out in the spring of 1666, hoping to persuade her to return. Pepys almost babbled with delight in the Diary when she succeeded in weaning her away from her current employer. ‘This day my poor Jane, my little old Jane, came to us again, to my wife’s and my great content.’32 By now he had known her for almost seven years. He had quite forgotten the pride, cheek and ingratitude he had accused her of, and become certain that she had ‘all the marks and qualities of a good and loving and honest servant’. They decided to promote her to cook, which meant her wages would have gone up to about £4 a year. She had reached the age of twenty-one and done very well, rising from maid-of-all-work to this superior position in the household; there were now three other maids kept, as well as Tom Edwards from the Chapel Royal choir, who made music with Pepys, did some work as a clerk and lent a hand generally about the place. There were besides frequent visits from her old friend Will Hewer; and she was in high enough favour to be taken for outings on the river in a Navy Office boat on a Sunday afternoon, with Mrs Pepys and her waiting-woman Mary Mercer, and to walk on the lawns of Barn Elms on the Surrey bank. Some distinctions of rank were kept: for instance, she was never taken to the theatre by Pepys, although Elizabeth took her once, ‘to show her the play’, a new comedy called All Mistaken; or, The Mad Couple.33

  It was Jane who, working late at night preparing a dinner party for the next day, roused Pepys at three in the morning on 2 September 1666 to tell him she saw a great fire in the City. She kept an eye on it while she continued with her cooking. And although she agreed to go to Woolwich with Elizabeth as the City blazed, she also, with characteristic enterprise, brought herself back of her own accord before Pepys fetched her mistress, and worked hard and late with him putting his books back on his shelves. She and Tom Edwards also helped him lug his iron chests out of the cellar and back into his closet in October.34 Tom was a year younger than Jane and they became friends, living in the household together and sharing chores. Jane had no luck with her brothers – Wayneman was lost to her and in 1667 William died young, leaving a wife and two children – and she needed comfort. Pepys sympathized with her sorrow and gave her twenty shillings and wine for her brother’s burial; but it was Tom who filled the emptiness left by their loss. At some point in 1667 the two of them agreed that they would marry when they could afford to. That summer Elizabeth gave Jane one of her lace neckerchieves, and Pepys thought she looked ‘a very graceful servant’ wearing it when he met them beside the Thames near Rotherhithe one afternoon; it was more formal praise than usual.35 At this point he knew nothing of her engagement to Tom; they told Elizabeth first, and were so discreet in their behaviour that Pepys was unaware of it until she passed on the news in February 1668. Then he called Tom a rogue, because the story was that he had first wooed Jane, then slighted her, saying he was worried about displeasing Pepys. Tom understood how important it was to Pepys to be the dominant male in the household, and that his own position was a lowly one. All the same, Pepys wrote, ‘I think the business will go on; which, for my love to her because she is in love with him, I am pleased with.’ He took the view that Jane might have done better but decided he would give her £50, ‘and do them all the good I can in my way’.36

  The engagement did not proceed smoothly. In the summer Jane threw a hysterical fit, brought on by jealousy, it seemed. She had to be held down by five men for a good half hour. After this impressive display both Pepyses and Will Hewer questioned the lovers, and Pepys concluded that Tom had gone cold on the marriage project. He thought he would have to get rid of them both from his household; but his mind was on ‘other greater things’, and the whole matter was allowed to lapse.37 Or at least lapse in one way. A few weeks later, as he was dressing, Pepys ‘did begin para tocar the breasts of my maid Jane, which ella did give way to more then usual heretofore, so as I have a design to try more what I can bring it to’.38 The way he puts this makes it clear that he has done as much before, and on a number of occasions, behaviour too unremarkable, it now appears, to be regularly mentioned in the Diary. Having a go at the household maids was, it seems, a standard activity; Pepys mentions trying it with Susan, the ‘little girl’, among others, and Tom Pepys, we remember, got his maid with child.39 The scientist and architect Robert Hooke, secretary to the Royal Society and well known to Pepys, kept a diary in the 1670s, much briefer but in some respects as frank as Pepys’s, which reveals that he regarded the young female inmates of his house as his natural prey; he expected to, and did, have sexual relations with several of his maids, and later also with his niece, who came to him as a schoolgirl and progressed to be his housekeeper. Hooke was a man with poor health and an unpleasing physical appearance, but that hardly explains away his domestic habits. Here are two contemporary records kept by very different men, both distinguished intellectually, both of whom persistently harassed the young women of their households. It is unlikely they were the only two.40 It is also likely that Tom Edwards’s hesitations were connected with anxieties about the relations between Pepys and Jane.

  Elizabeth Pepys began to accuse her husband of being false to her with Jane. She alleged that Jane colluded by getting up late so that Pepys could watch her dress and allowing him into her room to do what he wanted – to be ‘naught with her’, a phrase indicating sexual misbehaviour. Jane must leave, she said. When Jane was summoned to their joint presence, she agreed to go at Easter but on condition that Tom could go with her.41 A solution was slowly being reached, since now Pepys told Tom he would not keep him on after Jane left but would ‘do well’ by him. He kept his word and found him other work for the Navy Board.42

  Elizabeth forgot her jealous rage at once and entered enthusiastically into the arrangements for the wedding of ‘Our young people’, as they now became. She helped to get the licence, and the day was fixed for 26 March 1669, brushing aside the fact that it was in the middle of Lent and also the anniversary of Pepys’s stone operation. She arranged for bridesmaids and bridesmen; two were Pepys cousins, ‘The’ Turner and Talbot, Roger’s son, and another was Will Hewer; and she offered them a wedding dinner at the King’s Head in Islington after the service and the use of the blue room for their wedding night. The blue room was one of the best bed-chambers in the house, in which she had spent ten days putting up the hangings herself and later had in upholsterers to make it more comfortable and complete the effect.43 But while Elizabeth was busy with her plans for the festivities, Pepys sulked. Rather than presiding benevolently over preparations, he showed how much he resented what was happening, and how much he detested seeing his Jane handed over to another man. His feelings were so strong that he decided to take a trip to Chatham, arranging it so that he set off just before the ceremony, ‘that I might be out of the way at the wedding and be at a little liberty myself for a day or two, to find a little pleasure and give my eyes a little ease’.44 The pain in his eyes was a real anxiety, although he might have rested them at home. He preferred to stay away for four days, sightseeing in Kent and fli
rting with his old acquaintance Rebecca Allen, daughter of a Chatham official and now married. Pepys remembered dancing with her in 1661, before her marriage, and he now pressed his attentions on her again. Noticing that her hand was moist when he pulled off her glove and that her manners were ‘mighty free’, he concluded he could have anything he wanted of her if only time allowed. He also called her names in the Diary: ‘ella is a whore, that is certain, but a very brave and comely one’.45 This was Pepys at his angry and aggressive worst. Gradually he calmed down. He thought of Tom and Jane being put to bed on their wedding night, and also of his stone anniversary, left uncelebrated; and stayed away from home until everything was over. Then his good humour reasserted itself, and when he did return and was told how enjoyable the festivities had been, said he was glad and went with Elizabeth to pay the bill at the King’s Head. He joked – at least you hope it was a joke – about how smug Tom and Jane both looked. Two days later they moved out into their own lodgings. That night Pepys cheered himself up in bed with a little fantasizing about the new maid, Jane’s replacement.

  This is almost the last of Jane in the Diary, which ends in May 1669. There are a few cheerful entries in April, when he took the newlyweds to a fashionable dining place, the Cock in Bow Street, and again noted his intention of giving them a wedding present, £40 for Tom, £20 for Jane from him and another £20 from Elizabeth. No doubt he carried out his promise. His other present may look symbolic to modern eyes, but to Pepys it must have been purely practical: he gave Tom a sword, with an old belt of his own to hang it on.46