Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  As he wrote this letter, his father was dying at Brampton. John Pepys had reached eighty and Sam, now forty-seven, could be said to be his one success in life; the two men lived in different worlds, but the son had never failed to treat his father with respect. His death signalled a general change at Brampton. Pall’s husband, Jackson, had died a few weeks before, Pall herself was ill, the estate had to be sorted out, the house needed repairs, and Pepys’s nephews Sam and John had reached the age when they must be educated if they were not to be bumpkins like their father, a man ‘of no education nor discourse’.2 Pepys hurried back to London and returned in his own coach to take charge, bringing with him Paul Lorrain, a young French Protestant who had been clerking for him for three years, and bundles of paperwork, including the half-completed ‘Mornamont’. Many bits of legal business had to be dealt with, and a schoolmaster sought; happily the current headmaster of the grammar school, John Matthews, was a distant cousin and prepared to take the Jackson boys as boarding pupils.3 There was not much joy for anyone at Brampton. Hinching-brooke stood across the meadows unchanged, but no longer to be visited as family; Pepys’s families were all in London now. He sent off letters to Hewer, to the Houblons, to Lady Mordaunt, to the Skinners. Houblon and Hewer kept him informed of what was happening in the reconvened parliament, where Harbord and Shaftesbury’s party were keeping up their call for the duke of York to be excluded from the succession and for driving Catholics out of public life.

  December saw Pepys back in Buckingham Street, leaving Lorrain at Brampton to supervise the building work. Pall came to London for medical advice. Sometimes Pepys thought of disposing of Brampton, sometimes he revived his old idea of retiring to live the life of a modest country squire. In the spring he worried about the pasture and how the maid he left there should deal with the two cows and a calf; and he took himself back in June and stayed for another six weeks of summer weather.4 While he was there he went into Cambridge and considered a proposal that he might become provost of King’s. The offer was tempting enough to allow him to dream of being installed there and settling to write the great naval history Evelyn was urging him to take on; but he hesitated, and lost his chance.5 London was in any case too strong a draw. Should he find a town house of his own? Hewer refused to allow the idea, protesting that he had never been so happy as he was with Pepys in his house: ‘if I know my own heart, I am much more contented in my present condition, then I ever was in any’.6 They were joined by shared ambitions and labour, by twenty years of memories in common and by their beloved dead. It is possible that Will felt himself to be Pepys’s guardian, as he had once been appointed by Elizabeth; then against Deb, now against Mary. Will could be prim. He referred to Lord Brouncker’s consort Abigail Williams as ‘the Lady belonging to the… family’, as though he could not bring himself to name the shocking creature; but he could be trusted with Pepys’s petty secrets, like the volume of Rochester’s rude poems kept in the right-hand drawer of his desk.7 Pepys remained in Buckingham Street.

  At Brampton he had builders working on a new staircase. Now the idea came to him that the place could become a temporary solution to the problem of St Michel’s family. He had arranged a posting in Tangier for Baity, and Esther was as usual unprovided for. Pepys dispatched her to Brampton with her five children and an allowance of a pound a week. There she remained for a year, complaining, not unreasonably, that this was not enough to live on. Pepys insisted that he and Elizabeth had lived on no more for several years in London, adding that he still had her accounts to prove it.8 Esther explained that food was more expensive in the country: ‘All Gardinage is derer here A peny in too pence,’ she wrote. She also passed on a message from his builders: ‘the worke men which were Imployed About your honers stare Case are in great distres for want of there mony and desiers to be remmebred [sic]’.9 Although she failed to move Pepys on the matter of her allowance, to the impartial reader she makes her point. Pepys need not have done anything at all for the St Michels, and he had many calls on his charity, but Baity had done well for him in Paris, and Esther was not a countrywoman who knew how to grow her own vegetables; he could have spared a few extra shillings. She remained at Brampton throughout the winter, and Pall joined her in the spring of 1682; the two women came from different compartments in his life and did not make friends. Esther departed in August. Meanwhile Baity hated Tangier and was manoeuvring to return.

  When Pepys wanted fresh air now he went with the Houblons to a villa they rented together at Parson’s Green. He lived quietly, keeping his head down while Shaftesbury mounted a final attempt to defeat the duke of York in the spring of 1681. People were nervous of a return to the ‘tumults, confusions and rebellions of 1641 and 2’, although no one has left a description of the atmosphere to match his accounts of London in 1659 and 1660.10 Pepys advised Morelli to stay out of town. Morelli, hearing Pepys had a fever, asked him to send nail clippings and hair, proposing a magical cure. Pepys applied to Mills, still vicar of St Olave’s, for another sort of magic, a certificate of regular attendance at church, as well as one proving that Elizabeth died in the Protestant faith. They show how vulnerable he still felt, and Mills obliged, crediting him with an attendance record that owes more to his good nature than to the truth. Hewer was one of the signatories of the document, Mary Skinner’s father another. Of Mary herself there is not a shred of news. She was still kept in her separate compartment; but her brothers did not hesitate to ask favours of Pepys. Between 1680 and 1683 he helped three of them, ‘Little Obrian Skinner’, Peter Skinner, who expressed a wish to go to sea and was found a place by Pepys, and Daniel, on his travels again, for whom he wrote a letter of introduction to an old friend, Will Howe from the Sandwich household, now a judge in Barbados.11 Mary’s mother told Pepys later that one of her husband’s last wishes before he died in 1684 was that their son Peter should be ‘brought up with you’, which suggests a degree of intimacy.12 Young Daniel did nothing in Barbados, and turned up in Cambridge again in 1681 to swear the oaths of allegiance and supremacy and to be seen taking communion as a good Protestant.13

  Other old friends were given a helping hand. At a guess it was Pepys who put in a good word for Betty Martin when she was awarded a pension of £100 a year in the summer of 1680, on a Privy Seal warrant, two years after her husband died in a debtors’ prison. Pepys did not forget personal favours. In December 1681 he wrote to Lord Brouncker recommending William Bagwell, master-carpenter of Deptford, for further promotion and praising his diligence, sobriety and fidelity in the service of the navy; whether Mrs Bagwell still had charms for him as she approached forty is not on record; six years later he wrote to her husband telling him to keep her away from his office.14 The obliging Mr Mills’s son-in-law was also found a place at the Navy Office.15

  The political situation changed again in 1681 when the king summoned a parliament in Oxford only to dismiss it, depriving Shaftesbury of his power base; he was arrested and imprisoned, and, although no London jury would find him guilty of treason, he had come to the end of his career. Dry den, at the king’s suggestion, immortalized him cruelly as the false Achitophel: ‘In friendship false, implacable in hate: /Resolv’d to ruin or to rule the state.’ Shaftesbury, broken and ill, took himself into exile and died in November 1683. The king ruled without parliament until the end of his reign, and the duke of York’s succession seemed secure. Whatever this meant for the country, it made things easier for Tory Pepys. Still no job, but as soon as Shaftesbury’s defeat was certain, he was invited to rejoin the governing board of Christ’s Hospital. The school became a major interest, and when the death of Tom Edwards in December 1681 left Jane with two young children, he saw how he could help her. She returned to London to work at Buckingham Street – Hewer had always thought highly of her – and Pepys arranged for ten-year-old Sam Edwards to be admitted to Christ’s Hospital, where he flourished.16

  At the same time Pepys was engaged in commissioning a large painting for the school. Once again he chose to d
efy anti-Catholic prejudice, inviting Antonio Verrio, a Catholic painter from Naples, to carry out the work. He was favoured by the king, his ‘antique and heroical’ frescos adorning Windsor Castle, and the new work was intended to honour Charles’s benefactions to Christ’s Hospital. Pepys himself was to be one of the solemn figures standing alongside the king; he borrowed scarlet robes from a City alderman friend in which to be painted.17 He was invited to Newmarket again in March 1682; Pearse the surgeon, still rich in gossip, was in attendance. Pepys sent off a skittish account to Lord Brouncker, saying the town was full and ‘I have not yet been at Mrs Nelly’s [Nelly Gwyn], but I hear Mrs Knight is better, and the King takes his repose there once or twice daily.’ The once or twice is the point: Charles was fifty-two – three years older than Pepys – and Mrs Knight was the latest addition to the royal harem.18

  The duke of York was also at Newmarket. He had come from Scotland, and was due to return to Edinburgh in May to fetch his duchess. He decided to make a sea voyage of it and gave Pepys a last-minute invitation to join his party. Pepys feared seasickness, and when he went aboard the duke’s ship, the Gloucester, he found it crowded with courtiers and decided to move himself to a half-empty yacht, a decision that probably saved his life, because the weather turned fierce, a pilot made a misjudgement, and at dawn the next day the Gloucester hit a sandbank. The duke was escorted into a boat with John Churchill; his dog was also rescued. Apart from that, one other boat carried a few grandees to safety and a few more were taken up out of the water; two hundred courtiers and sailors drowned.

  Pepys remained remarkably calm, sent reassuring letters to his friends, and once on dry land again did not allow the tragedy to interfere with his sightseeing. Glasgow was ‘a very extraordinary town for beauty and trade’, he noted, but the Scots in general he found short on hygiene, as he explained with Johnsonian candour to Hewer: ‘a rooted nastiness hangs about the person of every Scot (man and woman), that renders the finest show they can make nauseous, even among those of the first quality’.19 Travelling south again, he visited Berwick, Holy Island, Newcastle, Durham and Hull – and was then summoned home by what he took to be an urgent note from Hewer. In fact it was a hoax, written in a disguised hand by Lady Mordaunt, intended as ‘a sportful revenge’ for his having left London without telling her. There was a touch of spite about it, since it cut short his enjoyable tour; also a touch of possessiveness; but if Pepys resented it he was flattered too, because he copied it out into his letter book.

  In his absence, Colonel Scott had reappeared in London, to crown his career by murdering a hackney coachman in a quarrel over the fare. He had to flee the country and did not trouble Pepys again, although word sometimes came of him from places as distant as Norway, where his fantastical boasts and stories of betrayal were brought out for wondering listeners. Morelli also left England; from Brussels he kept in touch with his old employer, but fell out of favour when he did not let him know he was getting married. Pepys never liked his servants or relatives to marry without consulting him.20

  In other ways the years had changed him. The young man who wanted to know, do and conquer everything, and who could look into his own heart and write with so much fluency and freedom, had stiffened a little, and grown more cautious. His backbreaking service to the king and the navy had been rewarded neither with honours nor with a great fortune. His exertions and prudence meant he was comfortably established, but his fortune could not begin to compare with that of a James Houblon. He had no real home of his own, no place in which his taste and imagination could express themselves; no children to carry his name forward and keep his memory alive; instead, many dependants, most of them embarrassing ones. He had suffered wounds, private and public, of a kind that do not easily heal. One was the death of a wife whom he had partly loved and used ill: remorse and loss go badly together. Another was the attack from men he had expected to welcome him to the House of Commons and respect him as a colleague, and who had instead pitched him into a nightmare, unmerited and pointless. A third was the carelessness of the king, his failure to appreciate the value of Pepys’s service or to help him. ‘Most princes… think that they ought never to remember past services, but that their acceptance of them is a full reward,’ wrote his contemporary Bishop Burnet, meaning Charles.21 Pepys set down part of what he felt about his behaviour during the Popish Plot in his naval notes: ‘No king ever did so unaccountable a thing to oblige his people by, as to dissolve a Commission of the Admiralty then in his own hand, who best understands the business of the sea of any prince the world ever had, and things never better done, and put it into hands which he knew were wholly ignorant thereof, sporting himself with their ignorance.’22 The king’s frivolity shocked him more than his ingratitude.

  All these circumstances meant that life was a heavier weight on his shoulders than it had been. He did not know where he was going next. He had thoughts of writing, and had he felt less oppressed he might have turned the collection of documents that make up ‘Mornamont’ into the narrative version it cried out for. Or he could have embarked on an earlier plan for a history of the Dutch wars, originally suggested to him by Coventry; Pepys thought it should be written ‘not in style of Panegyric or Apology, which sort of writing have seldom any great Authority or lasting reputation with Posterity’, and that it should include proper praise of the Dutch leaders, ‘by which the whole History will appear more candid and disinterested’. The work would have suited his intelligence and reporting skills; but he knew it required research in Holland as well as among English state papers, not something he could carry out at this point.23 It would have been a much more feasible project for him than the one Evelyn was encouraging him to pursue, the ‘General History of Navigation’ from biblical and ancient times to the present. Evelyn wrote enthusiastically, intending to be helpful, his letters so erudite and discursive they can only have been daunting; still, Pepys borrowed papers from him and made notes.24

  Suddenly, in August 1683, without any warning, the king found something for him to do. He was told to take himself, at two days’ notice – Stuart style again – to Portsmouth, ‘without any account of the reason of it’, ready to embark for an unknown period and destination under the command of Lord Dartmouth, whom he hardly knew but had at least met on the Scottish trip. There was no chance to make any farewells face to face, and he had to send hurriedly written letters explaining what had happened to his closest friends, the Houblons, the Gales, Deane, Brouncker, Lady Mordaunt, Evelyn, even to Mary – we can take it that the word ‘Woodhall’ in his list meant Mary.25

  He was at least to be paid, at a rate of £4 a day; and there were other congenial conditions. His one-time clerk Sam Atkins was appointed secretary to Dartmouth, and Pepys was also able to take his ‘neerest friend’, Hewer, with him, and to recommend the chaplain for the expedition, Dr Thomas Ken of Winchester: a good and amiable man, even if his sermons proved ‘weak’, ‘unsuccessful’ or even ‘forced meat’.26 Arrived at Portsmouth, he found they were to sail with a ‘very fair squadron of ships’ to Tangier, taking with them another old friend and charmer of Elizabeth, Henry Sheeres, the engineer responsible for the breakwater, or Mole, at Tangier. Pepys settled into his cabin aboard the Grafton and started a new diary; his eyes were good enough to allow him to write it himself in shorthand, but in every other way it is unlike the great Diary.27

  What had happened? Life had bruised him, it’s true. He had held a high position and hoped to do so again, and had perhaps come to think that discretion, even in communion with himself, was safer than fearless and brilliant self-exposure in one travelling as an official answerable to the crown. There is no zest in the Tangier Diary. The curiosity about himself and the world, the energy and stylistic inventiveness, are gone with the spring of his earlier prose. Nor is his heart what it was. Putting in to Plymouth Sound at the start of the trip, he calls on Anne, Lady Edgcumbe, whom he had known as a child, daughter of Lord and Lady Sandwich. She is now a mother herself, mistress o
f Mount Edgcumbe, and receives him ‘extreme kindly’; he views her house, garden and beautiful park, but has nothing personal, no allusion to the past or her parents, to add, even though Lady Sandwich is buried on the estate. And after this the voyage is a flat record of meetings, sermons, seasickness, letter writing, variable weather and the other features of life at sea: porpoises swim alongside, the sailors make music and dance, one is punished for drunkenness and another, a Turk, for attempted buggery (Pepys now knows what the word means). He reads the Bible, stargazes on a fine, still night, makes another attempt at Hudibras, studies Hooke’s Micrographia and argues against the existence of spirits with Dr Ken. It has period interest, naturally, but it could be almost anyone’s diary. Even when he arrives at Tangier and comes face to face with his brother-in-law he only notes that St Michel is ‘mightily altered in his looks, with hard usage as he tells me’, and that is all he has to say of him.28

  The object of the voyage was a strict secret until a week after embarkation, when Dartmouth told Pepys, but not the others, that the colony was being abandoned. They were going to evacuate it and blow the whole place up, including the Mole; and Dartmouth showed Pepys the detailed plans worked out in London. Sheeres was not informed until they were about to anchor that he was to be in charge of destroying his own work, a task so appalling to contemplate after his years of effort that it is surprising he agreed to carry it out. Even for Pepys, who dutifully wrote out a list of notes ‘towards reasons for justifying the prsent demolishing of Tangier’ on the voyage, there was an irony about the situation that may not have escaped the king. The idea that Tangier could become a naval base for the English in the Mediterranean had been Lord Sandwich’s, and when Portugal made it part of Queen Catherine’s dowry in 1662 it was he who chose the site for the Mole, which was to provide sheltered mooring. Through Sandwich Pepys had been put on to the Tangier Committee. He had worked closely with the engineers, first Hugh Cholmley, then Sheeres, as they put their best energies and skills into constructing the Mole that was now, after twenty years’ work, nearly 500 yards long and 30 yards wide, with houses built along one side, gun emplacements, moorings and huge arched cellars on the other. The expense had been vast not only for the work but for the maintenance of a garrison in a place encircled by hostile Moors. It was on the back of all this expenditure that Pepys had made so much money during his fourteen years as treasurer for Tangier; but, while it had brought wealth to him and a few others, it had not proved its value to England, and by the late 1670s questions were being raised about its future. Many naval officers said they preferred Gibraltar; and early in 1681 Sheeres was warned that parliament and some of the king’s advisers would like to see Tangier ‘blown up in the air’. Having tried to sell it, first to France and then back to the Portuguese, this is what the king was now about.