He still consulted with the duke of York about naval appointments, and worked closely with the king. He was with him at Chatham and Spithead in the summer of 1674, and at Portsmouth in the summer of 1675. He was also invited to a mock siege set up by the duke of York in the meadows at Windsor in 1674, where the duke and Monmouth showed off their tactical skills together with guns, mines and pretend prisoners, all lit by fires in the darkness. Evelyn was also present among the thousand spectators and found it ‘very divertisant’; and he and Pepys travelled back to London together in the small hours.16
Games apart, Pepys was pushing through his own ideas for the navy. In December 1677 he put forward the most notable of these. It was a proposal that no one should be appointed as lieutenant until he had served for three years, received a certificate from his captain and passed an examination in navigation and seamanship at the Navy Office. Prince Rupert opposed it, but the flag officers and the king supported Pepys, and the first examinations took place early the next year. Pepys had made history at a stroke, bringing about a revolution in the way the navy was run, fired by his belief that education and intelligence were more useful to the nation than family background and money; and that however gallant and courageous ‘gentlemen’ captains might be, the service needed to be professionalized. It was a very natural idea for one who had received his own education in Cromwell’s England. It was also to the king’s credit that he saw the point and accepted Pepys’s proposal.17 The same faith in education led him to persuade the king to give money to Christ’s Hospital School to endow a mathematics department where boys could be prepared for the navy; and Pepys was able to turn to friends at the Royal Society for advice, asking Robert Hooke to recommend a suitable mathematics teacher for the boys.18
He became a governor of Christ’s Hospital, and also of Bridewell Prison, where for the first time a schoolmaster was installed for child inmates in the year of his appointment, 1675. Honours came in plenty now. In 1676 he was master of Trinity House. His eloquence was not found up to scratch by Robert Hooke, who observed that ‘Mr Pepys master of the Trinity House made a long speech to no great purpose’, but no one else found fault.19 The next year he was master of the Clothworkers’ Company, following in the footsteps of Joseph Williamson, another self-made man he had long admired. His old college tutor, Samuel Morland, asked him to stand as godfather to his daughter.20 Like anyone seen to be doing well, he was invited to contribute to a new building at his old college, and did so.21 In his mid forties, Pepys appears a formidable figure, sure of himself, known to have the king’s ear, with rich friends in the City and clever ones at the Royal Society, and a substantial and growing fortune.
Shaftesbury’s sally could surely be forgotten. Pepys also felt he could brush aside Povey’s pleas to honour their old agreement about sharing the profits he received as treasurer from the Tangier victualling. A file of letters exchanged between them in 1674 and 1675 shows Pepys at his cheating and bullying worst.22 At the same time other friends benefited from Pepys’s powerful position. When Sir Denis Gauden, the Tangier victualler, was arrested for debt in 1677, Pepys was able to call off a creditor by putting Admiralty pressure on him. Gauden proved to be beyond rescue and became bankrupt, and at this point Will Hewer bought the lease of his country house in Clapham, allowing him to go on living in part of it.23 At a more modest level William Bagwell of Deptford, carpenter of the Resolution, was promoted by the Navy Board to be overseer of the Northumberland in 1677; and Tom Edwards was appointed muster-master and navy agent at Deal in 1678.24
In Huntingdonshire, old Mr Pepys lived quietly with Pall, her dull husband and their two little boys, Sam and John. Pepys kept in touch, sent his father medical advice from Hollier, made sure he had wine to drink and received him as a visitor in London in 1675. In March 1677 Pepys’s last surviving brother John died suddenly. He was only thirty-six. Pepys took out his Diary for 1664, in which he had entered the names and birth dates of his brothers and sisters, and added the single word ‘mort’. Morelli composed special mourning music that he and Pepys sang together.25 Pepys also had to sort out his tangled financial affairs; and he was led to think about the future of the family. He knew now there would be no Pepys descendants – he told his father he did not expect to have children of his own – and he began to take a greater interest in his sister’s sons. The Jacksons and old Mr Pepys moved back to the Brampton house later in the year.26 Pepys was also spurred to sit down and write a long, careful and fascinating account of his own health.
It makes you wonder how he ever got out of bed at all, let alone ran and reformed a government department, addressed parliament and attended the king wherever he happened to be. His words reveal his body as a rickety and uncertain machine with trouble in almost every part: shortness of breath, pains in the hip and knee joints, the back, shoulders, fingers and wrists. He is liable to allergic swellings, prickings and itchings all over, and loss of voice in wet weather. He experiences severe pain in his eyes every morning until he has ‘drained’ his head by spitting and blowing his nose, as well as pains in the bowel and bladder, sometimes spreading all over the body and dealt with by frequent use of suppositories, which he finds painful to insert. This might seem enough, but is by no means all. He goes into the history of his stone – a success story – and the trouble with his eyes. Until eight years ago they had worked perfectly, but ever since, looking at any near object, especially books and papers, has meant bad eye pain, with no relief from spectacles or any other device; he is obliged to use his clerks to read to him and write for him. ‘Other evils than these with reference to my bodily health (either chronical or other) I thank God I never knew,’ he concludes. Even by the standards of the time, when people had little choice but to accept pain, his refusal to let it interfere with his work is striking. Physical suffering may even have been a spur to activity for some. Shaftesbury also suffered chronic pain and recurrent jaundice for years from a cyst on the liver, for which he had surgery in 1668, and he lived thereafter with a tube in his side that was used to drain the wound.27
Among his symptoms, Pepys throws in a few details of his daily life. He never eats much when he is alone and gets small pleasure from eating at all because he has ‘very little taste’ – sad for the man who had once tucked so eagerly into anchovies, lobsters, oysters, venison pasties and the first peas of the season. He finds the coarser wines – claret, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Greek – more agreeable than light French ones, but in any case drinks little, and has altogether given up late suppers, which had made him ‘dizzy’. At sea, he is subject to violent seasickness; but then he is not often at sea. And he is bled in the arm once or twice a year but takes no regular courses of medicine. His condition is partly a tribute to Hollier’s skill and advice; his stoicism is all his own.
There was one other element in his life that goes unmentioned here. Like many successful men, Pepys had a secret. There are a few clues, one in the diary of Robert Hooke, who saw a good deal of Pepys in 1676 and noted in his diary for Friday, 15 December, that he ‘gave Mrs Pepys’ a recipe for making varnish. Who was this Mrs Pepys? A better clue appears in a letter to Pepys from Daniel Skinner, a young fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, in July 1676, asking for his help in finding work. Skinner was the eldest son and namesake of a neighbour and fellow parishioner of Pepys, a merchant with a house in Mark Lane and a large family. Daniel’s letter is in Latin and is not entirely clear at all points, but it does refer unambiguously to Pepys’s declared love for his sister some years back, and his kindness to young Daniel himself at the time; also to angry accusations made by their parents against Pepys and to the breach this produced between the two families. A third clue was provided by Pepys himself in a codicil made to his will in May 1703, less than two weeks before his death, which speaks of the ‘Excellent Lady Mrs Mary Skyner’ and her ‘Steddy friendship and Assistances during the whole course of my life, within the last thirty three years’. This puts the start of their relationship in 1670
, probably before Elizabeth’s monument was up in its place in St Olave’s.
Mary Skinner was the eldest daughter of Daniel Skinner Snr, a merchant from Braintree in Essex who had been living in Mark Lane and worshipping at St Olave’s since the 1650s, and his wife, Frances. But Mary was not brought up in the city. Because the Skinners had a growing family, and Frances’s sister Elizabeth was childless, Mary was sent as a child to live with her aunt in Hertfordshire. There Mary grew up as a cherished foster daughter (‘whom I have brought up as my own’, her aunt wrote in her will) to aunt Elizabeth and her husband, Sir Francis Boteler. They lived in a handsome Elizabethan manor house, standing in its estate of Woodhall, Hatfield, just north of Hatfield House and adjoining the Cecil lands; the River Lea, with its idyllic green banks and small watermills, marked part of the boundary. The famous Hatfield vineyard and gardens, visited and admired by Pepys in 1661 and again in 1667, adjoined the Boteler lands, and both Cecils and Botelers worshipped at St Etheldreda’s, the parish church of Hatfield, where Pepys admired the many ‘handsome faces and gentile persons’ of the congregation in 1667.28
Sir Francis had two daughters from his first marriage, Isabel and Julia, about ten years older than Mary, who grew up under their protective wing; Julia and Mary were especially close, and remained friends for life.29 The household was a cultivated one. Among their good friends were Sir Richard Fanshawe, who preceded Lord Sandwich as ambassador to Spain, and his brilliant wife, Anne, the memoirist.30 Both Sir Francis and Dame Elizabeth, as his wife was addressed, were well educated – he had been to Cambridge in the 1620s, and she had her own collection of books – and he was known for his courtesy and kindness to his children, and as a good neighbour and a churchgoer, hospitable to friends and charitable to the poor. She endowed a charity for five poor widows of Hatfield and Tewin in 1678.31 He liked to spend some of the winter months in London; she owned the lease of a house in Crane Court, off Fleet Street, although this was not necessarily where they stayed in town. In the 1680s he went into parliament. His daughters, Mary’s foster sisters, married local gentry, settled in nearby Hertfordshire villages, Tewin and Digswell, and started families of their own. You can judge something of the ease of life at Woodhall, and the position of Mary within the family, from Dame Elizabeth’s will, in which she bequeathed to Mary many jewels (including ‘my great jewel’), a ‘Picture Case set round with diamonds’ and ‘all my books in my closet’, as well as £1,000; and appointed her one of the trustees of her charitable endowment for poor widows.32
In this way Mary grew up comfortably, away from her real parents, and with different expectations from her younger sisters’. No doubt she appreciated the difference between life at Woodhall and at Mark Lane; but she remained no less dear to her mother and became an admired figure to her siblings. Her brother Daniel was closest in age; he was born in 1651, which makes it likely she was born about 1653, since the rest arrived at intervals of about two years between 1655 and 1668: Elizabeth, Frances, Robert, Obrian, Frederick, Corbet and the baby Peter.33 The Skinner family was large, and they fell into financial difficulties, but they were neither destitute nor ignorant. Daniel the younger wrote of the ‘disasters on land and sea’ and ‘heavy and bitter blows’ of fortune that reduced his father to comparative poverty in the 1670s; but he had kept Daniel at Westminster for seven years and sent him on to Trinity College, Cambridge, and Mary’s sister Frances married Sir William Buck, a well-connected Lincolnshire baronet. The younger children, however, did not have the same chances.34 It must also be said that neither Skinners nor Botelers did much for Mary’s formal education. Whereas Mrs Skinner wrote a perfectly decent letter, Mary’s spelling, like that of so many of her female contemporaries – and some males too – was of the picturesque school: ‘plaine inglish’, ‘mountianes’, ‘aplycasion’ and ‘afectionat unkle’.35
How did Mary and Pepys meet? Her parents attended the same church, so they may have met when she was visiting them at Mark Lane. Or he could have noticed her at the church in Hatfield, where he sometimes stopped on his way to and from Brampton; but St Olave’s is more likely. Churches acted as dating agencies: people stood about after the service and talked to their neighbours, and Pepys might easily invite Mr and Mrs Skinner to taste a glass of wine and a slice of cake and to view the treasures of his house – in 1670 he was still living in Seething Lane – and to bring their visiting seventeen-year-old daughter with them. And since young Daniel says he met Pepys through Mary – ‘long ago I first entered with happy omen into your grace through my sister’ – there must have been a reasonably long period of general family friendship. Pepys’s wooing techniques were likely to have been much the same as they were in the days of the Diary, and may have included offers to take her out on the water in a smart Navy Board vessel – at first with a younger brother or sister – and to Vauxhall or Greenwich; or for a coach trip, to enjoy cheesecakes and ale in the country. She liked him, and he seized his chance.
Seductions usually came to light when the girl found herself pregnant, and in this case there was no risk of that, although Pepys may still have thought of it: his joking reference to becoming a father in one of his speeches in the closing days of the Brooke House Commission in 1670 suggests as much.36 For a time the lovers enjoyed an entirely secret affair, while Pepys took a kindly interest in Daniel – he was friends at Cambridge with the Montagu twins, Oliver and John – and remained on cordial terms with the Skinner parents. Their discovery of what was going on between Pepys and Mary angered them so much that there was a total breach, and the Skinners may have succeeded in separating them for a period. Daniel refers to Pepys’s professions of love for his sister and to his estrangement from the family: ‘whether you can have been guilty of the charge my parents are so ready to make against you, is certainly not for me to examine or pursue… your friendship, which I counted among my greatest distinctions, and which I valued so highly, was broken and ruined’.37
Daniel’s letter is our only source, and those are all the details he gives. What happened after the discovery and breach is unclear. Mary may have retreated to Woodhall. What she told the Botelers, and what their attitude was, we don’t know, any more than whether she simply defied her parents’ anger and continued her affair with Pepys in the face of it or brought them round slowly. She could have chosen to settle in lodgings in London. The fire at Seething Lane meant he was in lodgings too, both uprooted creatures free to be together as they chose. There was nothing to prevent them marrying, but there was no marriage. Why not? Pepys may have felt he had experienced all he wanted of the married state. He may have vowed at his dying wife’s bedside that he would never take another bride. He was also a man for whom the double standard went unquestioned – friendly as he was with Lord Brouncker, he unhesitatingly labelled his much loved living-in mistress a whore – and he may have felt disinclined to marry a young woman who had already succumbed to him. Lord Sandwich’s warning story of the man who shits in his hat and claps it on his head comes to mind.
Pepys knew he was in a strong position, and he made the most of it. He could love Mary on his own terms. A semi-secret, unofficial love affair kept its erotic thrill and also left him free, allowing him to maintain his independent, unembarrassed bachelor social life with friends like the Houblons and Lady Mordaunt. Yet Robert Hooke’s assumption that Mary was Pepys’s wife in 1676 suggests that she was installed with him in Derby House at that point, and he seems to have been tending her health there two years later, as the next chapter will show.38 There were later periods when Mary lived in lodgings of her own, although this was when he was in difficulties and without a home himself; and it was not until the late 1680s that there was a general acceptance that she was his consort. Pepys always liked to compartmentalize his life, and Mary was able to look after herself when she had to. She may have possessed the same charm, cheek and enterprising spirit as her brother Daniel, allied to more patience. There was money about to ensure that her life was comfortable, from her Bote
ler aunt and uncle, and no doubt from Pepys too. Woodhall plainly remained her second home.
Over time her parents came to accept the arrangement and friendly relations were re-established between all concerned. There was the further consideration that Pepys was a rich and influential man who might help the Skinner boys as their father’s fortunes waned. As the years went by, Mary’s mother corresponded with him affectionately and asked his help in finding her younger sons careers; and Pepys wrote warmly to her, sending greetings to the Botelers.39 He records calling on Sir Francis in London about 1678 and in 1680.40 Mary’s father agreed to testify to Pepys’s irreproachable attendance record at St Olave’s when he needed a certificate to that effect in 1681.41 Mary was plainly in high favour when Dame Elizabeth drafted her will in the same year, and Mary was also a witness to Sir Francis’s will – her aunt died in 1684, he in 1690. She always had her own maid and in due course what looks like her own bank account; and her position within his household was in later years acknowledged by even Pepys’s most pious and discerning friends.
What we should most like to know about Mary Skinner would be Pepys’s account of her; but that is what we don’t have. In writing his Diary he was inspired by the condition of marriage itself; Elizabeth can be seen as its muse, without whom it might not have been written. It had been a glorious process but demanding and painful, and he was not going to repeat it. Mary was never allowed so close: neither wife nor muse. But she fought for her own place beside him, and she had the character to make their unconventional arrangement work in the long run. Without being wife or muse, she remained his companion for thirty-three years.
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self Page 40