The oddest performance of the whole affair was Pepys’s letter to the commissioners in which he laid out his own defence. It began in a perhaps justifiable display of self-righteousness and self-congratulation and ended in bare-faced lies. His diligence during the plague, his frequent Sunday work and late hours, often until midnight, the greatness of the burden that he had shouldered and the damage to his eyes were all listed. What he said was undeniable, although it might have come better from someone else; but no one else could have been called as a witness in the tricky matter of corrupt dealings. Pepys claimed he had never asked for any fee, gratuity or reward, and that anything offered to him was accepted only if he believed the affair was to the advantage of His Majesty; he insisted that he was owed £400 in expenses – a fine counter-attack – and roundly asserted that his ten years of service had not bettered his estate by so much as one thousand pounds.24 Even Bryant, for whom Pepys could do little wrong, called this last statement a ‘daring lie’.25 He must have felt so secure in his accounting methods – and in Hewer’s support – that he could defy all questions. Referring obliquely to his Diary, he also boasted that he was ‘able upon oath’ to give an account of his daily employment during his entire time of working for the Navy Office; here too he was confident he could keep his documents to himself.26
By the end of the Brooke House sittings, which lasted for two months, everyone must have felt that, whatever criticisms might be levelled against Pepys, he was a good man to have on your side. He ended his own report by declaring that ‘the whole business of these Observations ended, with a profession of all satisfaction on his Majesty’s part in reference to every particular’.27 Of his fellow officials at the Navy Board during the war, Batten was dead and Penn close to death – he died in September 1670. Coventry and Carteret had left the board in 1667, Pett had been pushed out, and Sir John Mennes was not held responsible for anything – he died in February 1671. Only Brouncker and Pepys remained of the old guard to take the blame. Neither lost his job. Pepys’s retirement to the country could be postponed.
So, for the time being, were his hopes of entering parliament. He had lost the by-election at Aldeburgh, not surprisingly, given that he had been unable to visit the town. Now he returned to the routine of the office and the comfort of working with his chosen clerks, Hewer, Hayter, Gibson and Edwards. Will was the most intimate, trusted like a second self; with Tom he could make music as well as keep the shipping lists up to date; Hayter had been solidly with him from the start, and Gibson too was a man of his own age who knew the history of the commonwealth navy from his own experience, and besides could quote John Donne.28 They made an orderly, hard-working, intelligent and loyal team, the nearest thing to a family of sons and brothers. It was his real brother John who was a problem, kicking his heels at the Jacksons’ in Huntingdonshire. When Pepys heard in March of a clerkship going at Trinity House, the seamen’s foundation, he urged John to come to London at once, and on the same day wrote to the duke of York, to Sandwich, to Evelyn’s father-in-law Sir Richard Browne and to other worthies, asking them to support John Pepys for the post. He described John to them as a sober and diligent scholar whom he had long intended for such a position and coached personally with it in view; never mind that the truth was that he had been on poor terms with John, who was unemployed at twenty-nine and had never had a job.29 Pepys’s mighty effort on his behalf was successful, and John moved to the Trinity House in Water Lane. He worked there unobtrusively under his brother’s directions; his tobacco and wine bills have survived, as well as evidence that he sent gifts to old Mr Pepys and to Pall and her son – a little boy’s hat, some oysters, claret, a bottle of spirits and boxes of sweetmeats.30 Only a year before Pepys had launched a furious memorandum complaining of the way clerks were appointed, ‘chosen for the sake of acquaintance, kindred, or some other ground in which their present qualifications bore no part.’ He had forgotten his own start and failed to foresee his brother’s.31
The pattern of his life re-established itself. The minute books of the Navy Board show meetings starting at 8 a.m. every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. There were the usual contracts to be dealt with and visits to be made to Deptford, Woolwich and Chatham, though perhaps he went less often on foot now that he had his own coach, and was less inclined to walk through the fields between Rotherhithe and Deptford with a book to read. In May 1670 he prepared a summary of the financial state of the navy to present to the king. He calculated that £900,000 were needed to pay off last year’s debts and to repair and supply the ships and dockyards.32 In June he wrote a much fuller paper ‘for my own satisfaction’, showing how much more money was needed for the navy than the £200,000 projected for its maintenance this year: his estimate of the real cost was over twice that sum.33 Nothing like this was found. The king could never be trusted to follow a straight path, and he was busy with more thrilling projects. That same May he sent Sandwich to fetch his sister Henriette, wife of the brother of Louis XIV, from Dunkirk and went to meet her at Dover. She came with a secret treaty by which France offered Charles £150,000 to declare himself a Catholic and provoke a war with Holland when Louis was ready; there was to be more money – £225,000 a year – while the war lasted. Charles did not make any public declaration of his Catholic faith, but he was set on course for confrontations with parliament, and for a third Dutch war.
The tragedy of Pepys’s career is that it was spent serving masters, first Charles and then James, who wanted to build up their personal power and defeat parliament. For twenty-eight years they replayed the struggles of the 1640s, and took their French cousin, the absolute monarch Louis XIV, as a model; and in the long run they were bound to lose. By temperament and upbringing a parliamentarian, Pepys found himself trapped on the wrong side, professionally bound to kings whose ambition was doomed and patronage poisoned.
The Diary tells us enough about Pepys’s sensibility to suggest how, at Elizabeth’s death, he must have suffered, wept, recalled her beauty and his love for her, and reproached himself for his failings and bad behaviour. It also tells us that he was quick to recover from grief, and too interested in the world and his role in it to turn away from his busy life, so much of which had in any case been led apart from her. While she was alive, his entertainments had been the theatre, shopping and making improvements to the house; the Royal Society meetings; walks and excursions on the river; reading and music, whether listening or making it himself: he had written in the Diary on a cheerless day that ‘music is the thing of the world that I love most, and all the pleasure almost that I can now take’, and this remained true for him through good and bad times.34 There was also dining with friends and inviting them to the house, gossiping and pursuing women. None of these activities required the presence of a wife, and he was fully capable of ordering his own household, with some assistance at first no doubt from Mrs Edwards, his ‘little old Jane’, and then from a housekeeper.
The only entertainment he is known to have attended in January 1670 was the hanging of the highwayman Claude Duval at Tyburn, a very popular event; if he felt up to that, you have to hope he found better distraction in the theatre. That spring, Dryden made Nell Gwyn get up from her stage deathbed for a witty ending to his play Tyrannic Love.‘Hold! are you mad? you damned, confounded dog!’ she scolded the stage hands preparing to carry her offstage. ‘I am to rise, and speak the epilogue.’ She went on to offer to haunt the beds of the men in the audience: ‘And faith you’ll be in a sweet kind of taking/When I surprise you between sleep and waking.’ Perhaps Pepys dreamt of Nelly, as he had dreamt of other ladies who took the king’s fancy. Waking, a determined man might have traced Deb, but a remorseful one, remembering Elizabeth’s rage, was likely to have felt such a search would border on sacrilege; besides which, Deb herself could have other ideas even if he did succeed in finding her. There were still Betty Martin, her sister Doll and Mrs Bagwell to minister to one sort of itch, and Knipp for a glamorous fumble, and there is no reason to think he gave up
their company. He may even have kept up his hopes of Betty Michell, with her baby and her cross husband in the spirit shop by the river. He also found, with impressive speed, a new mistress, young and an undoubted lady; her story will have to wait for another chapter.
Pepys was an intensely sociable being, and he had friends for every occasion, the Pearses for gossip and good company; the Crews for serious conversation; the Hunts for talk of old times; Anthony Deane, the shipbuilder, when he was in London, for shop; Povey, a fool maybe, but good-hearted, rich, another gossip and a generous host. The playwright and poet Thomas Shadwell and his actress wife became close enough friends to ask him to be godfather to their son John.35 Brouncker was a colleague with whom he shared other interests than work, notably the Royal Society, of which Brouncker was a long-serving president; and Coventry was happy to talk politics with him. His cousin Barbara, daughter of Roger Pepys, married Dr Thomas Gale in 1674, bringing him a new friend both learned and convivial. Gale was a scholar of distinction and high master of St Paul’s School; and the youngest Gale boy became another godson to Pepys. The City bankers such as Sir Robert Vyner and Edward Backwell were well disposed to Pepys, who had nearly £7,000 on deposit with Backwell in 1671; and the hugely wealthy Sir John Banks of the East India Company, ennobled by the king for lending him money in 1661 and a steady supplier of loans to the navy, found Pepys a congenial companion. Creed, an irritant throughout the Diary, had leapt ahead with his marriage and was preparing to leave London to live as a country gentleman in Oundle, where he fathered eleven children and became high sheriff of Northamptonshire.36
The best of Pepys’s friends in the City were the Houblon clan, French Protestants who had brought their business skills to London from Lille in the 1590s, fleeing religious persecution. The older James Houblon was well established as a merchant by the time of the civil war and gave his support to the parliamentarians, to whom he supplied horses and arms, and probably money too. He reared seven sons, of whom five became merchants. Their trading and shipping business covered the world, and the origins of their friendship with Pepys lay in business connections, since a member of the Navy Board had obvious uses for merchants who depended on their ships getting about freely. So they cultivated him; he expected to benefit financially, and he did. The second James Houblon became his particular friend. Pepys dined with him in 1665 – a masculine dinner, although he was taken afterwards into another room to hear Mrs Houblon sing – and the Diary records a ‘present’ of £200 to Pepys in 1666, for licensing two voyages at a difficult time for shipping.37 They talked business and politics from time to time in the late 1660s. Five of the brothers supped with Pepys together on one occasion, on another he dined with them at a tavern without Elizabeth, and when James Houblon called he left his wife waiting outside in the carriage with a companion.38 So it was only after Elizabeth’s death that the relationship developed into an intimate family one. The younger James and his English wife Sarah were of an age with Pepys and had been married in 1658; and they welcomed him warmly into their home, a fine large house, formerly the Spanish ambassador’s, in Great Winchester Street, close to London Wall and between Moorgate and Bishopsgate. There the business was conducted and the four children brought up, and there they also entertained in splendid style. Evelyn described James Houblon as living ‘en prince’ when he dined with him, and Pepys, after another dinner, said none of the food or wine came from anywhere nearer than Persia, China and the Cape of Good Hope.39 Sarah appears from her portraits to have been a beauty, dark eyed and dark haired, dressed and bejewelled as sumptuously as a court lady.40
Many of Pepys’s friends in the post-Diary years were rich, and the Houblons were among the richest; and, while money spoke to Pepys, his friendship with them developed into something true and deep, involving the women of the family as well as the men. They found Pepys delightful, and he reciprocated. In December 1670 he wrote sending a ‘hand kiss’ to Madam, telling them to expect a Christmas visit and hoping they would make a return one to him.41 After this there were theatre trips and outings to Chelsea; Pepys and Sarah took to singing together, and in later years they all shared a holiday cottage at Parson’s Green. He called them ‘cousin’ and took an avuncular interest in the next generation, ‘my sweet W[ynne]’ and ‘little Jemmy’.42 Sarah told him that the children of the family were born with the instinct to wish him well, and Pepys lavished on them the affection he might have given his own children, had there been any.43 They had fun together, and exchanged intimate letters; Pepys sent a ‘merry, roguish, mysterious letter to S. H.’ – presumably Sarah – on his way to Tangier in 1683, and his letters to James are affectionate and witty.44 Because the Houblons had never known him young, poor, a servant, one who sat half tongue-tied and envying the talk of gallants in the theatre, he could be at ease with them and confident as the man of the world he had become; and they satisfied a yearning in him to be part of another, ideal family, a new version of the once idealized Montagus.
He may well have kept in touch with his various poor cousins, but almost nothing more is heard of them. In their place more recently discovered family connections appear on the scene.45 They were Lady Mordaunt and her sister Mrs Steward, cousins by marriage through Jane Turner’s husband – the Ashtead connection again – and they lived elegantly in Portugal Row, on the south side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Betty Mordaunt, twice widowed, still young, lively and sociable and with her own income, was happy to have Pepys as an escort to the theatre and a dinner guest; a little light, risk-free flirting took place.46 They were a far cry from Pepys’s Joyce cousins, also sisters, who had caused him trouble in the past. These two new-found connections were presentable enough to be introduced into the circle of John Evelyn, with whom Pepys dined for the first time early in 1671; and the growing friendship with Evelyn, gentleman-scholar and courtier, was another sign of his rising status in society.
He watched his finances as carefully as he had always done. In June 1670 he made a note that he was charging 6 per cent on the £100 he had lent Lady Sandwich two years earlier and the same on the £500 lent to Lord Sandwich; he did not consider waiving his interest.47 When the king, in one of his most unscrupulous acts, put a stop on the Exchequer in January 1672, which meant that no one who had lent money to the government could withdraw it, many of his subjects were ruined, and the big bankers put into severe difficulties, among them Pepys’s banker Backwell; but Pepys himself was unscathed. He had moved his savings elsewhere and converted his credit with Backwell to an overdraft, almost certainly because he had advance warning of the Stop.48
With a keen eye out for chances of promotion he gave dinners for important people. Ashley Cooper, soon to be lord chancellor and earl of Shaftesbury, with whom he had dined in 1667, made at least one social visit to Seething Lane at this time.49 Pepys reacted speedily when he heard of a chance of advancement. As Sir John Mennes lay dying in February 1671, he sent off a letter to the duke of York stressing the importance of appointing a man of proven ability to succeed him in charge of the Navy Board. It was not the first time he had made the point, and he was careful to disclaim any ambition to be given the job himself, but he was positioning himself. Sir Thomas Allen would be appointed this time, but next time, who knows?50
Another letter about promotion went off the following year when England was at war with the Dutch, in alliance with the French as the king had promised. The war was unpopular in England, and Lord Sandwich himself declared that he neither understood the reason for it nor approved of it. All the same, as vice-admiral he went to sea in the spring of 1672, with the duke of York in command of the fleet again. Sandwich was in a melancholy state of mind. He told friends he expected to die, and in so doing retrieve his reputation. He still resented the accusations of greed and cowardice that had been made against him in 1665, and may have felt his commonwealth past was not entirely forgotten or forgiven.51 When the Dutch fleet was known to be threatening the east coast in May, he advised caution and sensed that the du
ke suspected him of cowardice.
If so, the duke was wrong. Sandwich dined gloomily with a younger officer on the evening of Whit Monday, 27 May, and early the next morning, when news came that the Dutch were approaching, he had his valet tie back his long hair arid dress him in his full regalia as a knight of the Garter, with jewelled collar and star on breast, a black plumed hat on his head. After this ceremonious preparation, he commanded his flagship, the Royal James, so that it bore the brunt of the battle fought off the Suffolk coast, in Sole Bay, on 28 May. He was the first to engage the Dutch. The fighting was savage on both sides; Sandwich destroyed several enemy ships, but by nine in the morning his own hull was badly damaged by shot and many hundreds of his crew were dead or wounded. Still he drove off fireships and the Groot Hollandia when it came alongside, tangling the rigging of the two ships so that they had to cut themselves free. Then, in the dense smoke of the battle, another fireship set the Royal James ablaze. With most of his men and officers dead, and no help forthcoming from any other English vessel, Sandwich knew he could not save his ship.
There have been many conflicting accounts of what happened. Captain Richard Haddock tried to persuade Sandwich to leave his ship and failed; wounded himself, he slipped through a porthole and swam until he was picked up by an English boat. He was almost the only officer to survive; Sandwich’s son-in-law, Philip Carteret, did not. A few of the men got away in ‘the jolly-boat’. Some reported that Lord Sandwich was dead on board. Another said his body had been seen in the water but not moving. There was a suspicion that the men who got away in the boat had abandoned him, and the Dutch alleged that he was smothered in the boat by the crew jumping on him. Yet another story was that he ‘did endeavour to save himself by swimming, and perished in the attempt’. The sea was ‘as calm as a milk-bowl’ under a bright sun, and people watching from the coast had a clear view of the ship as she burnt all through the afternoon. By six she was reduced to embers. Sandwich’s fate, the subject of many rumours, remained unknown for twelve days.52
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self Page 38