Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  There was a further irony for Pepys in that he longed to travel and had been largely unable to satisfy his longing; but his ambition was to visit the great cities of Europe, and instead he found himself dispatched to a place that had almost nothing to interest and much to disgust him. He was allocated the job of assessing the value of the property of the about-to-be dispossessed residents; he formed a poor opinion of them and was shocked by the behaviour of the garrison. Under the Portuguese Tangier had been beautifully laid out and maintained, its castle, churches and narrow streets of whitewashed and flat-roofed houses provided with well-tended gardens and orchards; the English and Irish soldiers of the garrison, hard drinkers and badly disciplined, neglected and spoilt the place, even burning down the trees – olive, lemon, mulberry and fig – planted by their predecessors. On arrival Pepys wondered that anyone had ever thought it could be defended against the Moors encamped all round it, and expressed his amazement ‘that the king has laid out all this money upon it’.29 He was tormented by bed-bugs and mosquitoes, caught a cold that would not go away and was frightened by ‘old swimming in my head at my rising and most of the morning, which makes me melancholy, and a fear also of my right foot being lame’. When he felt better he washed his feet and thighs in brandy.30 Letters from England took a month. Pepys was disgusted by the sexual licence of the garrison. At the end of November he abandoned his diary.31

  The separate miscellaneous notes he kept include accounts of the dissolute habits of Colonel Percy Kirke, the governor, and Admiral Arthur Herbert, promiscuous and pox-ridden, of whom Pepys particularly disapproved. He detested everything about Herbert, a Shaftesbury supporter, very popular in the navy, surrounded by cronies and known to ill-treat his Turkish prisoners. Pepys also considers more general matters of naval discipline in a way that suggests he was hopeful they might become his province again, with the Whigs out of power; and notices how the attitude of officers towards him improves as the political situation shifts. The relative merits of gentlemen officers and those ‘tarpaulins’ who rose through the ranks comes up, and he criticizes Dartmouth for letting the gentlemen captains get away with things: ‘’Tis pretty to see how my lord himself can pass by anything in a gentleman captain and let it be made a jest, let it be never so clear a breach of order.’32 Pepys the meritocrat claims he could find in any gentleman’s family, if you looked back over three generations, evidence of ‘bastardy, disloyalty, knavery, mechanicry [working-class origins] or poverty’.

  He discusses whether captains should be allowed the ‘Good Voyages’ that earned them personal profits, paid by merchants whose money, plate and goods they agreed to carry while officially on duty serving the king. He considered it an abuse, while noting the view that employment was so uncertain for officers that they needed to make money whenever and however they could. He was also sternly critical of the king for undermining good naval discipline by favouritism and light-heartedness, and records disapprovingly how Charles had laughed at an officer and called him a fool for his correct behaviour in refusing a ‘Good Voyage’ and losing £4,000 for his own pocket.

  Many of Pepys’s virtues appear in these notes – his open-mindedness, for instance, as he insists on the superiority of the diet of the Turkish navy, almost meatless and rich in water, oil, olives and rice, over the beef-and-beer-obsessed English. We see the genesis of what became the Navy List as he jots down the idea of a list of all captains, to be drawn up: he saw that proper list-making was an essential adjunct to discipline. He was also insistent on the importance of captains keeping proper journals of all voyages, which many simply did not bother to do. He broods on the education of officers, and remembers Penn, who went to sea as a boy with his father before he was set to any formal study of navigation, and is now surprisingly elevated to the status of a model by Pepys.

  You sense that he is in his element here, practical, authoritative, ready to listen to captains and clerks but sure of himself when he delivers his own view of how things should be done in his beloved navy. Then, suddenly, in the middle of these busy notes, he describes taking a boat, going out rowing alone and experiencing a moment of sublimity: ‘I know nothing that can give a better notion of infinity and eternity than the being upon the sea in a little vessel without anything in sight but yourself within the whole hemisphere.’33 The lines tell us that a spark of the younger diarist who felt the beauty and strangeness of the world is after all still alight.

  Pepys had never thought of visiting Africa. What he had dreamt of was travelling in Europe, further than his brief trips to Holland and northern France, south to Italy and the great cultural meccas; so a visit to Spain had been in his mind from early in the Tangier expedition. He gave up any idea of being home by Christmas and asked Dartmouth if he and Will Hewer might be ferried across the straits when he had finished his work in the colony. Dartmouth agreed but wanted them back in three weeks; and they were taken to Cadiz aboard the Montagu at the beginning of December.34 They embarked in a downpour, and their bad luck was that the worst winter for decades had settled on Europe. In London the Thames was frozen thickly enough for carriages to cross the ice and stalls to be set up, and even in southern Spain there was steady, torrential rain and flooding. The two men struggled as far as Seville, where they were stuck for six weeks as rivers burst their banks and any further progress became impossible. Pepys jotted down a few terse, impersonal notes about Spanish life: ‘Won’t piss in the streets, but doors.’ ‘Rare to see a Spaniard drunk.’ ‘A ploughman, or even a beggar that has not shoes to his feet, will have slashed sleeves and his laced band sewed to his shirt.’ He managed to satisfy his curiosity about some celebrated miraculous cures, extracting a confession that they were faked to impress simple people, not aimed at clever ones like him. Pepys the sceptic was pleased with this piece of research; but the Pepys who went to Spain to store up impressions and add to his store of knowledge, to visit remarkable cities and admire renowned picture collections, was bitterly disappointed by the trip.35 As they returned to England with the fleet they were held up for further weeks by continuous storms that kept driving them back. His fifty-first birthday and the anniversary of his stone operation were both spent at sea; and, having expected to be away for two months when they set sail the previous summer, he and Will did not reach England until the end of March 1684.

  24. Whirligigs

  He was in London at the beginning of April 1684 to find everything changed. The Stuart whirligig was bringing in its revenges again, and its rewards too, and the king had resolved at last not only to rid himself of the Admiralty commissioners Pepys despised but to create a new position for him, restoring him to his official life. His five years in limbo were over. He was in effect given ministerial powers, as secretary for the affairs of the Admiralty of England, and in May he was back at Derby House as though he had never left, signing orders, sending for reports from the yards, reprimanding officers for slackness, drunkenness or failure to keep proper records and accounts, and finding jobs for the deserving. His salary came to £2,000 a year, with the usual extra payments for passes and appointments; on top of that he had nearly £1,000 due to him for the Tangier trip. The duke of York was now working closely with the king again; Pepys conferred with his royal masters at least once a week, and resumed his visits of inspection to the yards at Deptford, Chatham and Portsmouth. He expected to find signs of neglect and did: toadstools ‘as big as my fists’, he wrote, were growing in the unaired holds of some of the ships he had caused to be built five years before. He began to prepare one of his reports on the state of the navy and the ‘disorders and distresses’ into which it had fallen.1

  The king’s enemies were being punished vigorously. He had decided to abolish the ancient charters of city and trade corporations, known strongholds of Whig opposition. Even – and especially – the City of London, so proud of its power and independence, was to lose its charter. Pepys was called on to demonstrate his Tory loyalty by rewriting the charter of the Trinity House, on whose boar
d he had served for many years; and, when he was appointed to its mastership by royal command, he felt obliged to take immediate steps to remove ‘dissenters from the Church’ and any suspected of disaffection to the government from its membership. It was not the action of the old tolerant Pepys, but times had changed.2

  His new eminence attracted other honours. In December 1684 he was elected president of the Royal Society. He may have been chosen, like Joseph Williamson before him, for his influence and administrative skills, but he was also friendly with many of the scholars and scientists who met at Gresham College. In the same month he became president he was engaged with an ex-president, Christopher Wren, in putting up a gilded statue of the king’s grandfather, James I, at the Royal Exchange, commissioned by the Clothworkers’ Company and carved by Grinling Gibbons. Pepys’s own face, in the Godfrey Kneller portrait painted for the Royal Society in 1684, shows the same fleshy lips and nose as in earlier portraits, but the eyes more knowing: this is a man who has seen a great deal and has few illusions about the world, pleased as he is with his position.

  Behind the triumphant public foreground his domestic life was also changing discreetly. He arrived back from Spain to find that Mary’s father had died and that her foster-mother Dame Elizabeth Boteler was also on her deathbed at Woodhall. She died in April, leaving Mary enough to make her financially independent, but deprived of one she loved and relied on.3 At the same time Lord Brouncker, Pepys’s old Navy Board colleague and friend, died, and Pepys was executor to his will, which left his entire estate to his ‘beloved friend’, Abigail Williams. Pepys had always disliked and disapproved of her (‘doxy’, ‘whore’, ‘prating, vain, idle woman’), and even prevented Elizabeth from calling on her.4 Yet here he was faced with a striking example of a mistress allowed her dignity, fully acknowledged and made secure by her aristocratic lover, a man he respected. Whether or not this caused him to reflect that Mary had now been his mistress for fourteen years, and to take stock of their situation, by the following year she seems to have moved into Buckingham Street, and from this point Pepys and ‘Madam Skinner’ presided over a single household in something like a dignified partnership. Tactful Evelyn was soon referring to him as ‘so long the Master of a Familie, the Husband of so excellent a Lady’.5 Mary was never an intellectual companion, and he complained bitterly of boredom and loneliness when he did not see his men friends; they, however, found her an agreeable hostess. And he enjoyed teaching her and encouraging her artistic interests, as he had encouraged Elizabeth’s. Among his notes is a list of educational visits to be made with her, including one to show her Gresham College. Others are to see processes such as enamelling, copper and gold work, wire-making, ribbon and stocking weaving, gilding and founding of letters used for printing. Evelyn refers to her adorning a cabinet that he compares to those at Versailles in its beauty: Evelyn was a flatterer – he goes on to suggest there is no need to go to France for one who can see Mrs Skinner’s cabinet – but it shows she took her artistic work seriously.6

  Her installation may have been partly responsible for Will Hewer giving up his lease on the Buckingham Street house and moving out. He acquired another in the neighbourhood and took Jane Edwards to be his housekeeper there, while his mother settled in his country house in Clapham.7 In the summer before he moved there was nearly another fire disaster, with more panicky packing up of books, papers and household goods, and No. 12 was saved only at the last minute when troops were brought in to blow up its neighbour. In spite of this, Pepys asked permission to transfer the Admiralty Office from Derby House to Buckingham Street. So high was he in favour that it was granted, in what must be the only instance of a civil servant being allowed the privilege of bringing his place of work into his home. The office went with them when he and Mary moved three years later into a larger house at the end of the street, facing directly on to the river and with a strip of garden in front, planted with trees.8

  In January 1685 Pepys presented the king with his paper on the state of the navy. Charles did not read it because on 1 February he had a stroke. He lingered for a few days while his doctors tried their remedies, painful and distressing ones that he bore gallantly, and Dr Ken – now a bishop – offered him the sacrament according to the Church of England. This he refused, and his current French mistress, helped by the duke of York, smuggled in a priest to allow him to make his peace with the Catholic Church. It was a shifty arrangement, but he accepted it, and so he died in his mother’s faith. Charles was laid in his grave with little ceremony for fear of disturbances. Pepys soon heard a rumour of the Catholic deathbed. He was bold enough to question the new king, James II, and had it confirmed by him. He passed the information on to trusted friends, and Evelyn’s opinion was that James’s open Catholicism was preferable to Charles’s concealment.9 It was not a view shared by the nation.

  Having worked devotedly with James when he was duke of York Pepys could count on a continuation of royal favour. He walked prominently in the coronation procession, and was returned to parliament in the first election following it, for Harwich; Hewer also became an MP, as did Mary’s foster-father, Sir Francis Boteler. Pepys was invited to become deputy-lieutenant for Huntingdonshire. He had James’s support for his plan for a special commission to restore the navy to efficiency, and he had every reason to expect to be in charge of naval affairs until he chose to retire in a glow of success and splendour, ten years or more in the future. This did not happen for one reason only: whereas his agenda was the navy, the king’s was the restoration of the Catholic faith in England. It brought disaster to both of them in rather less than four years.

  The character of James II has not found much favour with posterity. His childhood began in the impersonal splendour that was the lot of royal babies, and became uncertain and frightening as the civil war started when he was nine; at thirteen he was handed over to the parliamentary forces and imprisoned in London, and two years later he escaped in disguise. The happiest years of his life were almost certainly those in which he was a professional soldier, serving with the French and then the Spaniards, and distinguishing himself by his bravery and dash. He showed the same energy and courage when he was given the chance to fight at sea after the Restoration. Otherwise the way of life at his brother’s court was enough to undermine any but the strongest character: lechery, intrigue, gambling, hunting and horse-racing. James did not resist the temptations on offer. He was not stupid, but his view of the world was narrow, as so easily happens with royalty, and he was without subtlety in his dealings with people. Like Pepys, he kept some sort of diary; unfortunately it did not survive, and the biography based on it and published in the nineteenth century is essentially political, self-justifying and without self-awareness or original insights.10 Whereas Charles had learnt to charm and prevaricate, James expected immediate compliance with his wishes; when he was opposed he became more rigid, and when the opposition threatened to succeed he was thrown into panic. His decision to become a Catholic seems to have been a quest for something serious and stable in his life; it was unfortunate that it was combined with the belief that he was entitled to absolute power when he became king.

  Pepys liked and trusted his new master, but he had no intention of converting to Catholicism himself, as his friend Dryden and some others did. He trod carefully. He contributed to funds to help Huguenot refugees driven out of France by Louis XIV’s Catholic persecution; but when Dr John Peachell, master of Magdalene and vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, wrote to tell him he feared he was going to lose his position for opposing the king in the granting of a degree to a Benedictine monk, there is no record of Pepys’s reply, and more than a year elapsed before he tried to help Peachell, who was indeed dismissed.11 Pepys naturally kept quiet when James talked about miracles enacted in Spain, which rested on the cheat Pepys himself had discovered; but he could not resist telling Evelyn the whole story.12 He was often at court, and sometimes privately satirical about aspects of what went on there: ‘Tonight we have ha
d a mighty Music-Entertainment at court, for the welcoming home of the King and Queene. Wherein the frequent Returns of the Words Arms, Beauty, Triumph, Love, Progeny, Peace, Dominion, Glory &c had apparently cost our Poet-Prophet more paine to find Rhimes than Reasons.’13

  James made greater demands on him than Charles. Notes by clerks for the summer of 1686 show Pepys attending Hampton Court or Windsor seven times in June and seven in July, four times in August and five in September; the following summer it was worse, ten times in June, thirteen in July, and a summons to accompany a royal progress in the West Country in August.14 However tiring, it was the price for being allowed to push through his programme of naval reform, and James agreed to all Pepys’s suggestions, allowing him to appoint his own special commissioners and to fix the rules for serving officers. Pepys set out to change the system of payments in the yards under which he had suffered so much in the 1660s, so that everything would be settled on the nail, clearly accounted for, with no accumulation of debts on which interest must be paid. Hewer was made responsible for this, and did as well as could be hoped, although many of the problems remained. Pepys called a conference of shipbuilders, put Anthony Deane in charge, and made plans to repair the yards as well as the ships, build two new frigates a year and improve the supply system. In this he was notably successful. Sir John Berry, a friend from Tangier and Cadiz, advised on discipline at sea, and the king put out a proclamation intended to end ‘Good Voyages’ and all the corruption and uncertainty that went with them; officers were to be compensated for giving up this source of income by increased allowances. It was an excellent reform in principle but it did not actually happen, because the new allowances were never paid, and ‘Good Voyages’ continued as before.15 A striking omission from Pepys’s reform programme was his failure to address himself to the worst abuse of all, the pressing of men: it was something he had defended in the past and which he saw no way of bringing to an end, and it remained a blot on the navy until 1815.16 His insistence on the importance of discipline, planning and the keeping of proper written records at sea and in the yards did, however, produce permanent benefits.