Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  Pepys, unlike Evelyn, never writes a formal character sketch. He is a pointilliste, building up his impressions with small touches. He shows friends, enemies and celebrities in action and allows them to reveal themselves: for instance, Lady Castlemaine simply going ‘puh’ when the king said he had not fathered her child, and the next day telling him, ‘God damn me! but you shall own it.’3 Or a story about George Downing, freshly brought to Pepys by his old neighbour John Hunt, now an excise officer in Cambridgeshire where Downing has acquired a country estate. On becoming the squire, Downing learns that it is customary to entertain the poor of the parish at Christmas. Sir George instructs his mother accordingly to prepare a meal for them; but instead of the traditional dinner of roast beef, she gives them only ‘beef porridge, pudding, and pork… and nothing said all dinner, but only his mother would say, “It’s good broth, son.” He would answer, “Yes, it is good broth.” Then his lady confirm all and say, “Yes, very good broth.” By and by he would begin and say, “Good pork;” “Yes,” says the mother, “good pork.” Then he cries, “Yes, very good pork.” And so they said of all things; to which nobody made any answer… and with this he is jeered now all over the country.’ The father of Downing Street is nailed for ever in his meanness and hypocrisy.4

  It is a scene good enough for Ben Jonson, whom Pepys idolized, and he has shaped it himself, since it came to him at second-hand. There is a different sort of dramatic splendour about the rhetoric of the old lord treasurer, Southampton, son of Shakespeare’s patron, whose questions were put directly to Pepys after hearing his account of the money needed by the navy: ‘Why, what means all this, Mr Pepys? This is true, you say, but what would you have me to do? I have given all I can for my life. Why will not people lend their money? Why will they not trust the King as well as Oliver? Why do our prizes come to nothing, that yielded so much heretofore?’5 I am inclined to think this is a verbatim record, noted down as soon as heard, partly because he judged Southampton’s words politically important and also because he responded to their dramatic, quasi-Shakespearean ring. Diary readers have to be cautious, but Pepys paraphrases so much more often than he offers a direct transcription that it seems reasonable to trust him when he does; another example is his brother Tom’s deathbed words, given in Chapter 11. Getting the words down as they were spoken interested him more as time passed and his feeling for what he could do with his Diary grew; in 1667 there was something like five times as much direct speech as in the first three years put together. After that it diminishes again, possibly because his painful eyes made it harder for him to make shorthand notes on the spot.

  What is striking about his use of direct speech throughout is the way he catches the different cadences, flavours and rhythms of individual speakers. Here is the combative Carteret, who cries out ‘Guarda mi spada’ (‘Watch out for my sword’) when he is angry and boasts to Pepys of his nearly fulfilled ambitions: ‘ “By God,” says he, “I will, and have already almost brought it to that pass, that the King shall not be able to whip a cat but I must be at the tayle of it.” ‘6 The duke of York’s impatient pride surges up in his words to the Tangier Committee: ‘All the world rides us, and I think we shall never ride anybody.’7 The duchess of Albemarle, coarse, loyal to her husband and effective in making her point, attacks Sandwich after he has left his naval command under a cloud and been given a royal appointment as ambassador: ‘If my Lord had been a coward he had gone to sea no more it may be; then he might have been excused and made an Embassador [meaning my Lord Sandwich]’ – ‘cursed words’ writes Pepys, but he sets them down.8 Batten, much as he disliked him, sometimes pleased him with his seadog’s turn of phrase: ‘“By God,” says he, “I think the Devil shits Dutchmen.”’9 Even a puritanical passer-by who noticed Pepys fondling Betty Martin in a Westminster window and alarmed him by shouting, ‘Sir! Why do you kiss the gentlewoman so?’ was put on record – hard to think anyone but Pepys would have done as much.10 Penn’s coachman shocked him by complaining of being sent out to fetch Lady Penn with the words, ‘A pox of God rot her! Can she not walk hither?’, but he wrote them down too.11 He liked his own ‘Cuds zookes!… What is become of my lobsters?’ when he found he had left them behind in a hackney coach.12 And his brother Tom’s description of their Joyce cousins: ‘they are sometimes all honey one with another and then all turd’.13

  He lets us hear Prince Rupert’s voice as he argues with the duke of York about whether naval officers should lose their command for being found drunk: ‘God damn me, if they will turn out every man that will be drunk, he must out all the commander in the fleet. What is the matter if [he] be drunk, so when he comes to fight he doth his work?’14 Batten, declaring his scorn for a boastful gentleman captain, Sir Frescheville Holies, dismisses him as ‘a wind-fucker’.15 Lord Sandwich gives Pepys his melancholy advice, four years after the Restoration: ‘take it from me never to trust too much to any man in the world, for you put yourself into his power; and the best-seeming friend and real friend as to the present may have or take occasion to fall out with you; and then out comes all’.16 And an exchange between Pepys and Coventry gives the tone of their private conversation as they consider their future prospects in the light of the failures of the Dutch war. Coventry says he is tired of his job, and that if there were to be another war, ‘they should not find a Secretary; “Nor,” said I, “a Clerk of the Acts, for I see the reward of it; and thanked God I have enough of my own to buy me a good book and a good fiddle, and I have a good wife;” – “Why,” says he, “I have enough to buy me a good book, and shall not need a fiddle, because I have never a one of your good wifes.” ‘ Coventry can be imagined allowing himself a very slight smile as he delivers his double entendre at the end of this perfect passage.17

  Coventry is quoted more than anyone else, and he gives some striking comments on the administration he served. Staunch royalist as he was, he told Pepys he knew the navy could not be run without its old officers from the commonwealth period. ‘“Why,” says he, “in the sea-service it is impossible to do anything without them, there being not more then three men of the whole King’s side that are fit to command almost.”’18 He offered a warning before retiring himself, ‘that he that serves a Prince must expect and be contented to stand all fortunes and be provided to retreat’. They were words Pepys must have called to mind more than once in his own later career.19

  We can see, as Pepys could not, that Lord Sandwich’s remark, ‘Why, Sir John, do not you think that he hath a great beauty to his wife? Upon my word he hath’, was a tease, not an innocent compliment.20 Pepys claimed to be offended by the ‘loose expression’ of Lady Robinson, wife of the lieutenant of the Tower: ‘Look, there is a pretty man; I could be contented to break a commandment with him,’ but to us she sounds like a Congreve heroine.21 One of his second-hand stories has the duke of Buckingham also talking like a character in a play as he takes his mistress, the countess of Shrewsbury, to his house and finds the duchess, his wife, at home. The duchess was born Mary Fairfax, daughter of Cromwell’s general and a pupil of Andrew Marvell – not, you would think, a woman to be trifled with – and she tells Buckingham it is not for her to share the house with his mistress. To which he replies, ‘“Why, Madam, I did think so; and therefore have ordered your coach to be ready to carry you to your father’s;” which was a devilish speech, but they say true,’ wrote Pepys. Only hearsay, but too sophisticated and too vile not to be recorded.22 Another piece of sparring between wife and mistress was told him of Lady Castlemaine addressing the queen, ‘“I wonder your Majesty,” says she, “can have the patience to sit so long a-dressing.” “Oh,” says the queen, “I have so much reason to use patience, that I can very well bear with it.”’23

  A quarrel with John Creed about what he should pay Pepys for passing his accounts with the Navy Office was moved towards a solution by a metaphysical conceit from Creed. ‘Says he, “After all; well,” says he, “I know you will expect, since there must be some condescension [i.e., giving
way], that it doth become me to begin it; and therefore,” says he, “I do propose (just like the interstice between the death of the old and coming in of the present king, all that time is swallowed up as if it hath never been), so our breach of friendship may be as if it hath never been.” ‘24 The idea that the eleven years from January 1649 to May 1660 had been wiped out by God in sympathy with the royalist cause was so ingenious, particularly coming from an old puritan zealot, that Pepys agreed the quarrel was over and accepted a lower payment than he had hoped for; but he liked Creed no better for his cleverness.

  Pepys enjoyed the gossip of high life,, politics, drama and wit, but simplicity of speech caught his fancy almost as often. The shepherd on Epsom Downs answered his question about the iron toes and heels of his shoes on a hot July Sunday with ‘ “Why,” says the poor man,” the Downes, you see, are full of stones, and we are fain to shoe ourselfs thus; and these,” says he, “will make the stones fly till they sing before me.”’25 This was natural poetry, and to Pepys the shepherd was a reminder of the Patriarchs, surrounded by his sheep and with his son at his side to read aloud to him from the Bible. The same plainness pleased him in the words of the gravedigger at St Bride’s preparing to bury Tom and finding the chosen space crowded, already quoted but worth repeating here: ‘I will justle them together but I will make room for him.’26 The Quaker woman who addressed the king, ‘replying still with these words, “O King!” and thou’d him all along’, earned her place in his gallery, and the small girl keeping cows beside the Dartford road who thought Pepys must be her godfather when he spoke to her, and promptly kneeled down ‘and very simply cried, “Pray, godfather, pray God to bless me”’.27

  With Lady Sandwich he had many conversations, on subjects ranging from primogeniture to religion, but he never gives her exact words. For instance, ‘with my Lady Sandwich (good lady), talking of innocent discourse of good housewifery and husbands for her daughters, and the luxury and looseness of the times and other such things, till past 10 a-clock at night’. Was her speech too inconsequential and rambling, or did he think it might be disrespectful? He was not so inhibited with her husband. A fortnight later, when Lord Sandwich has returned from sea and is addressing his wife in Pepys’s presence, he does give his exact words: ‘“How do you do, sweetheart; how have you done all this week?” – himself taking notice of it to me, that he had hardly seen her the week before.’ Pepys was troubled by Sandwich’s question to his wife because he blamed him for neglecting her since his return, but Sandwich’s perfectly easy tone, with the endearment dropped in to sweeten his neglect, suggests his charm, and Lady Sandwich was content with it.28

  Pepys’s exchanges with Elizabeth were differently conducted, and although there is no direct speech from her either, during the period of their worst falling out he comes close to giving her exact words when he writes that she calls him ‘a dog and a rogue’, ‘and that I had a rotten heart’, and a few days later again, ‘a false, rotten-hearted rogue’; and ‘she swore… that she would slit the nose of this girl, and be gone herself this very night from me’.29 It sounds authentic enough. And just once we hear him speak to her in the gallant voice of a wooer when, as he is planning a trip to Brampton on legal business, he turns to her with the words, ‘Shall you and I never travel together again?’, and she at once agrees to ride with him.30

  The most eminent figure Pepys had dealings with was Clarendon, the great lord chancellor, who first spoke to him ‘very merrily’ in the Hague in 1660, from his bed, where he was suffering from gout. During the next years Pepys sometimes felt the sting of Clarendon’s criticism, and observed him sleeping and snoring through committee meetings; he also admired the ease and authority of his public speaking so much that he talked of being ‘mad in love’ with him because of it. When Sandwich sent Pepys to the chancellor to apologize for the navy having marked for felling some of the trees on his Wiltshire estate, Pepys felt such ‘horror’ at what had happened that he cringed. ‘I was the unhappy Pepys that hath fallen into his high displeasure, and came to desire him to give me leave to make myself better understood to his Lordshipp – assuring him of my duty and service.’ Clarendon decided not to be angry and told him to come back after dinner, then invited him briskly, ‘Come, Mr Pepys, you and I will take a turn in the garden.’ He told Pepys to keep his hat on, treating him as an equal, and the two men walked together for an hour while others waited, and they parted with ‘kindness and respect’.31 The Diary also gives Clarendon’s withering remark to the king during a discussion of the Dutch attack on the Medway: ‘“Treachery?” says he, “I could wish we could prove there was anything of that in it, for that would imply some wit and thoughtfulness; but we are ruined merely by folly and neglect.” ‘32

  It also shows Clarendon’s gentleness and humanity. Pepys heard him making a private inquiry about his grandsons, the children of his daughter Anne who were princes of the blood and in line for the succession through their father, the duke of York. In the spring of 1667 both little princes were ill, and Clarendon sent for news of them from an official meeting at which Pepys was present: ‘and it was pretty to observe,’ he wrote, ‘how… my Lord did ask (not how the Princes or the dukes do, as other people do) but “How do the children?” which methought was mighty great, and like a great man and grandfather’.33 Everything about this pleased Pepys, who had a tenderness for children himself and liked to see a man of state behave simply, on the pattern of the Roman senators Clarendon and he both admired.

  As for the king, we have already noticed that he did not impress Pepys as a conversationalist. On seeing his own officials arrive at Whitehall, ‘“Oh,” says he, “here is the Navy Office.” ‘ Like his praise of Pepys’s speech to the House, ‘Mr Pepys, I am very glad of your success yesterday’, the words earn their place only because they came from the king.34

  Speaking for himself, he has a whole range of voices. One is as rude and alive as the language of the Jacobean playwrights, with their homely imagery of dogs and food, their double negatives and stark affirmations. ‘I shall be revenged of him,’ he writes, like a shout on the page.35 About an office enemy in trouble, ‘but all will not nor shall not do, for out he shall go’.36 Of Luce, an unsatisfactory cook-maid: ‘She was a very drudging, working wench; only, she would be drunk.’37 Worrying about plans that may miscarry, he fears that ‘All my cake will be doe still.’38 After a naval disaster, as allegations are made: ‘Out of all this, a great deal of good meat will be picked.’39 The mighty Carteret, brought low, ‘is now as supple as a spaniel’.40 Someone returns from France ‘an absolute Monsieur’.41 Pepys drives into town after the plague in Lord Brouncker’s coach: ‘But Lord, what staring to see a nobleman’s coach come to town – and porters everywhere bow to us, and such begging of beggars.’42

  He has the trick of switching from ornate to simple language in a sentence: ‘Took a turn with him in the Pell Mell, talking of the melancholy posture of affairs, where everybody is snarling at one another.’43 Another passage moves from light fantastic to basics: ‘It being a fine clear day I did en gayeté de Cœur propose going to Bow for ayre sake and dine there… They being come, we to Oysters and so to talk.’44 At other moments his delivery is entirely staccato, rattling off like gunshot as he sums up the bad state of things for the Navy Board: ‘And thus ends the month – with an ill aspect. The business of the Navy standing wholly still. No credit. No goods sold us. Nobody will trust us. All we have to do at the office is to hear complaints for want of money.’45 And there are odd flashes of poetry, as when ‘the City had a light like a glory round about it, with bonefyres’.46

  The garbled foreign phrases he often used for sexual incidents had something to do with concealment perhaps, much more with his pleasure in marking off sexual experiences through special words and so heightening the excitement of reliving them. Some words pleased him especially: ‘tocar’ (‘to touch’), ‘ella’ (‘she’) and ‘su’ (‘her’), ‘abaxo’ (‘below’), ‘douce’ (‘soft’ –
as in ‘skin very douce’), ‘mamelles’. He will use a single word that pleases him for its own sake: ‘formosa’, of the new maid at the Harp & Ball: ‘the maid, Mary, is very formosa’.47 He produces some delightful jumbles: ‘ella con the Roman nariz and bon body which I did heretofore like’.48 And when things are good with Elizabeth, she is treated to the special vocabulary too: ‘Waked betimes, and lay long hazendo doz vezes con mi moher con grando pleasure to me and ella; and there fell to talking, and by and by rose.’49 It is the clever schoolboy as lover, showing off to himself in two ways at once.

  Jonson’s satire on the sanctimonious puritan whine may have amused him, but he was not immune from it himself: ‘Lord, to see how unhappily a man may fall into a necessity of bribing people to do him right in a thing wherein he hath done nothing but fair, and bought dear.’50 ‘… reading a little of L’escolle des Filles, which is a mighty lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world.’51 At dinner with a City merchant who is making up to him, ‘and Lord, to see how I am treated, that come from so mean a beginning, is matter of wonder to me’.52 He reaches out for standard formulations using God’s name when he feels guilty (‘God forgive me’) or grateful (‘ought to be thankful to God Almighty’) or wants to add emphasis, ‘I pray God to make me able to pay for it’ when he buys an expensive new suit or ‘I pray God keep me from setting my mind too much upon it’ when he improves his house. There is a residue of childhood belief, the fear that some sort of lottery system of rewards and punishments is being run by God, which sometimes drives him to stronger affirmations; when he is thinking of his health a note of real thanksgiving is heard, and when he is in bad trouble with his marriage he takes his anguish momentarily to God. But this is rare, and elsewhere he invokes God’s name as non-believers and half-believers do, a figure of speech only.