Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  He had lost his job before, and knew roughly what to expect in 1689. Many of the men now in power had been Shaftesbury’s allies; they took their old enemy seriously enough to pursue him. On 4 May he was arrested with Hewer and Deane, all three accused of ‘dangerous and treasonable practices against his Majesty’s government’. They were held in the Gatehouse Prison, in Tothill Street, close to Westminster Abbey. King William was about to declare war on France, as part of a grand alliance against the ambitions of Louis XIV, who, among his other interests, upheld the claim of his cousin James Stuart to the English crown; and James had already left Paris for Ireland to drum up support. Pepys’s imprisonment may have been a purely precautionary move, or he may have been suspected of communicating with his old master; and, guiltless as he and his friends appear to have been, in prison they remained until 15 June.

  He was bailed, but this was not the end of his difficulties. In July he was formally accused over an incident of 1685 involving an East India ship for which he was in no way responsible; Houblon, a committed Whig himself but staunch as always, intervened to clear the matter up. Then, as James left Ireland for France again, Pepys was hauled in front of a parliamentary committee to be interrogated about the condition of the English fleet currently in Bantry Bay. He dealt easily with this, and returned to sorting his papers and considering how much further he might have to withdraw from public affairs if he were to have any hope of being left in peace. In August he resigned from his position as Elder Brother of Trinity House, ending an association of many years. At the end of the year he responded to a request for his presence at Christ’s Hospital on the occasion of a visit by the new king and queen by writing ‘Went not’ on the invitation; but he did not sever his links with the school.3 When Deane wrote to him saying he expected nothing more now than ‘the old soldiers request, a little space between busines and the grave’, Pepys replied robustly, telling him to cheer up, and that for himself ‘the worse the world uses me the better I think I am bound to use myself; nor shall any solicitousness after the felicities of the next world… ever stifle the satisfactions arising from a just confidence of receiving… the reparations due to such unaccountable usage as I have sustained in this’.4 A man of this world Pepys had always been, and remained; righteous indignation buoyed him up, and he was not going to turn his face to the wall. He continued to attend the meetings of the Royal Society, to entertain, to buy books for his library, to work on its catalogue and to make plans for the future.

  When the last of his siblings, his sister Pall, died in November, he had a memorial stone put up in the aisle of Brampton Church – it can still be seen there – and let out the house. He had never cared much for her and had no time at all for her lumpish husband, but she had redeemed herself by giving him nephews. Sam Jackson left the navy and returned to Huntingdon, where he began to behave as though he were entitled to the Brampton rents, and had to be made to understand he was not.5 John, once he had taken his degree at Cambridge, was invited to move into Buckingham Street and set out to make himself agreeable. He was diligent and a decent scholar; otherwise no nephew could have been less like his uncle. He had a pert, pretty child’s face that survived into adult life, when Kneller painted him in a large pale wig. He was not a chancer like his brother, and had none of Pepys’s enterprise, originality or charm. Cautious and polite, he was proud of his education and of his status as a gentleman, and knew his future prospects depended on pleasing. The surprise is that Pepys was so very pleased with him. Mary was not, and she and Jackson viewed one another with suspicion.6

  She had a way of dealing briskly with demands on Pepys she disapproved of. St Michel gives a glimpse of a scene of raw emotions that took place when he called at Buckingham Street and found himself face to face with her. Pepys was absent – in prison – where he received a furious letter of complaint from ‘brother Balty’: ‘I understand that by the malicious inventive ill Offices of a female Beast, which you keepe, I am like allsoe to lye under your Anger and disgrace… but I hope, and humbly pray (though she told me impudently, and arogantly, you Scorned to see me) that with your Generous Usuall goodness, wisdome, manhood and former kindness you will not damn him Unheard whoe Shoold Joy to hazard… his dearest Bludd for your Service.’7 St Michel had just married again, and he must have been desperate for whatever help he could extract from his benefactor. In Mary’s eyes he was a scrounger who would never stand on his own feet and whose only claim was through Elizabeth Pepys, dead these thirty years. To Balty Mary was, as well as a female Beast, a kept woman, supplanting his sister and standing between him and his brother-in-law. His rudeness shocked Pepys, who was in any case no longer in a position to fix jobs for Balty. At least his St Michel godson, little Samuel, was already at sea. So was Mary’s twenty-year-old brother Peter, also helped by Pepys and also in trouble. Peter Skinner’s letters were as grovelling as Balty’s, and they came now seeking pardon for his faults, telling Pepys that Mary was ‘the Darling of my Repose, the Center of all my Happiness and all my Earthly Felicity’ and expressing himself eager to make ‘some Retaliation of all past kindnesses which I have received both from you and my Deare Sister’.8 If this were not enough, Pepys had difficulties with his housekeeper, whose ‘bitterness and noise of tongue’ he found insupportable; but Mary was her friend and twice saved her from being sacked.9 The competing claims continued.

  Pepys’s necessary retreat was his library, and there, or in an adjacent room, high up in the house where the light was good, he sat, alone or with one of his assistants to bring him the books he wanted, to replace them on the right shelf, sometimes to read to him and take dictation. Paul Lorrain had served him for many years, John Jackson was learning to perform some of the same functions, and there came a time when Mary also helped out as a scribe. Two other young men also worked intermittently in the library, David Milo and Thomas Henderson. Apart from this the house was run by a stately staff of nine servants, housekeeper, cook, two footmen, laundrymaid – did he ever recall to himself that this had been his mother’s profession? – and housemaid; with a coachman and a porter, and Jones, his personal attendant, who was assigned his own little house in Buckingham Street’s York Buildings. Pepys’s physical comfort was as well seen to as possible; and Mary was free to follow her own interests as she chose and to make visits to her family, her foster-sister Julia Shallcross in Hertfordshire and her blood sister Frances, Lady Buck, with whom her mother went to live at Hanby Grange, near Grantham in Lincolnshire.10 In 1690 her foster-father Sir Francis Boteler died, leaving Woodhall to Julia, now a widow.11

  In 1690 Pepys thought boldly of returning to parliament. Although he had suffered some bad hours in the House, there had been triumphs too, and he was proud of his skill and reputation as a speaker. He wrote to two former colleagues asking if they would help him find a seat in the coming election; if he had any answers – there are none in his files – they were discouraging. He had to accept that his parliamentary career was over. Then in June he was again arrested and imprisoned in the Gatehouse as ‘a suspected Jacobite’, this time during an invasion scare caused by the French fleet, sighted off the Isle of Wight. Again he was bailed. Will’s uncle, Robert Blackborne, whose friendship went back to 1660, put up part of the money; he had remade his career and was now secretary to the East India Company, the value of whose stock had risen spectacularly.12 James Houblon put up another part; he was knighted in 1691, and three years later, when the Bank of England was founded, he sat on the board alongside two of his brothers.

  Pepys was cleared of the charges against him in October. Things could have been much worse: his old colleague Dartmouth was charged with high treason and died in the Tower, aged forty-three. Another friend, Dr George Hickes, ejected from the deanery of Worcester for refusing the oath of allegiance to the crown, escaped arrest only by going into hiding and had to live under assumed names for years; even so his house was attacked by a mob after an assassination plot against King William was discovered in 1696. Henr
y Sheeres was arrested as a Jacobite at the same time.13 Pepys had to suffer nothing more severe now than double taxes for continuing to refuse the oath, and the consciousness that William Ill’s surveillance system kept an eye on him. In 1697 he wrote of ‘my infirmitys of age and jacobitism’ to a Huntingdon friend, and when he was preparing to send John Jackson abroad he provoked a flurry of interest and a suspicion that the young man might be conveying a message to Pepys’s one-time royal master. Although the matter was not pursued, the suspicion was not entirely surprising.14 Hickes had made a dangerous trip to St Germain to visit James II in 1693; his object was to get his blessing for the consecration of new, nonjuring bishops who rejected King William and asserted their loyalty to James; and in 1694 Hickes was secretly consecrated, along with others, in a private house in London, in the presence of Lord Clarendon. There was clearly a political agenda here alongside the religious one, and some inkling of it is likely to have reached Pepys, who was close to both men; Clarendon dined with Pepys not long after the consecration.15 His views were in any case well known in his own circle; on the accession of Queen Anne in 1702, the keeper of the Cottonian Library, Thomas Smith, another nonjuror, sent Pepys a highly indiscreet political letter enclosing ‘an epitaph upon the late high and mighty Dutch hero [William III] as also some few heroic lines upon Sorrell[the horse whose stumble had killed the king]; which after a single reading I presume you will throw into the fire’.16

  Pepys himself did not cross the Channel again. In 1690 his doctors testified that he had a life-threatening ulcer on one of his kidneys; they must have intended to speed his release from prison and the danger was not immediate, but it was a warning. He knew his own nature well enough to remain active. He still visited and wrote to Lady Mordaunt’s sister, Mrs Steward, in Lincoln’s Inn. He gave dinners and the occasional musical party, and kept open house on Saturday evenings, gathering friends for conversation, Evelyn, of course, and other botanists, book lovers and scholars, several from the Royal Society. One regular was Captain Charles Hatton, a Jacobite who had been imprisoned in 1690, accused of handing a treasonable paper to the press and held in the Tower.17 Another was Thomas Gale, drawn closer by the death of his wife Barbara, Pepys’s cousin. These Saturday evenings became the high point of his week, and when they lapsed in the summer months he complained of loneliness.18

  He continued to collect, discard and lend books, and to assist others with their collections; there are sums in his bank account paid to his French bookseller in London, Caillou, and many letters about acquisitions. The Houblons were helpful in getting their dealers to pick up rare volumes around the Mediterranean. He acquired manuscripts, including autographs of Queen Elizabeth, Mary Queen of Scots and Charles I. He also started new collections, one of ‘heads’, engravings of the famous. He began to bulk-buy collections of old ballads, the crudely printed songs that were sold in the streets, and had them sorted by subject and bound into volumes: ‘Devotion and Morality’, ‘Tragedy’, ‘Love, pleasant’, ‘Love, unfortunate’, ‘Humour, Frolic and Mirth’ and so on. His eclecticism made his library unlike any other; it occurred to no one else to preserve so much popular and ephemeral material, and the ballads proved their value within half a century, when Bishop Percy drew on them for his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.

  Evelyn was still urging him to write his naval history, and at last he made a gesture and produced a slim volume. Memoires Relating to the State of the Royal Navy was more polemic than history, an attack on the navy commissioners of 1679-1684 and a defence of his own work, largely drawn from the paper he had submitted to the king in 1685. It is passionately self-justifying, the language is unwieldy (probably because it was dictated), and it is bulked out with too many lists of names of ships and officers.19 Pepys was so uncertain about what he had produced that he read it to Evelyn, whose loyalty to his friend brought his enthusiasm to a rolling boil:

  When I Reflect (as who can but Reflect) upon what you were pleas’d to communicate to me Yesterday; so many, and so different passions crowd on my thoughts, that I know not which first to give vent to: Indignation, pitty, Sorrow, Contempt and Anger: Love, Esteeme, Admiration, and all that can expresse the most generous Resent’ ments of One, who cannot but take part in the cause of an Injur’d and worthy Person! With what Indignation for the Malevolence of these men, pitty of their Ignorance and Folly, Sorrow and Contempt of their Malice and Ingratitude, do I looke upon and despise them! On the other side, In what bonds and obligations of Love, Esteeme, and just admiration, ought we to Reguard him who dares Expose himselfe to all this suffering with so intrepid a Resolution…

  It is not a literary judgement, but it is a vintage piece of Evelyn, and was enough to persuade Pepys to publish.20

  The Memoires appeared in 1690, and their subsequent history is more interesting than the book itself. Until the 1980s its arguments were held to be indisputably true; but when the naval historian J. D. Davies took the trouble to research the background, what he found led him to doubt some of Pepys’s assertions. Davies believes that Pepys’s determination to damn the commissioners of 1679-84 made him less than truthful, and that they did not perform anything like as badly as he said they did. He also points out Charles II’s arbitrary and capricious behaviour made difficulties for even the most diligent naval administrators, and that the necessary funding for the navy was rarely made available by the Treasury.21 Pepys’s private notes tend to agree with these points, but he did not choose to make them publicly: in 1690 he put his loyalty to the Stuarts first. Copies of the book were sent out to friends and compliments received; and although he said he planned to publish more naval history, nothing else appeared. He must have seen that his skills did not lie in that direction.22 Instead, he used some of his notes on naval history to contribute to the work of a young scholar, Edmund Gibson, who was preparing a new edition of Britannia, the great popular guide to the British Isles first published a century earlier. Gibson acknowledged that ‘the account of the Arsenals for the Royal Navy in Kent with the additions to Portsmouth and Harwich so far as they relate to the Royal Navy were communicated to me by Mr Pepys’.23

  In January 1692 he was not well enough to attend the funeral of Robert Boyle with his fellow members of the Royal Society, but he invited Evelyn, Gale and Isaac Newton to dine with him to talk over Society matters. Henry Sheeres, also struggling with poor health, sent him a present of a turkey, eggs and bacon from the country; thanking him, Pepys wrote, ‘I have missed seeing you or your hand a great while, a welcome visiter being become a great dainty, at least to mee.’ A less welcome visitor, St Michel, wrote to thank him for his ‘generous goodness, favour, kindeness, and charity’ and begging for any old morning gowns, wigs or cloaks he had to spare.24 The spring was late, and there were fears of invasion by James, supported by the French. A naval battle off the Normandy coast at La Hogue in May gave the English their biggest victory for years. The French were humiliated, fifteen of their ships destroyed, and James abandoned his invasion plans. The navy’s triumph in such circumstances stirred complicated feelings in Pepys. One of the victorious English admirals was Clowdisley Shovell, with whom he had clashed on matters of discipline during the 1680s; yet Shovell had learnt his seamanship from Christopher Myngs, a hero of the 1660s much admired by Pepys. Now Shovell was getting medals from William III.

  Pepys knew his days of power would not return. He had problems to resolve. In the summer of 1692 he told all his friends he was going to the country. Mary had left town, perhaps for Woodhall, perhaps Lincolnshire. Meanwhile he stayed put and shut himself up in his library for over three months, in order to deal with papers ‘that I have so many years been tumultuously gathering and laying by, without a vacancy or hand or head ever to garble, sort, or putt in order for use either to myselfe or any that come after mee’.25 Only in September did he confess his deceit to Evelyn and Gale, and then he had also to admit that his months of confinement indoors had caused his left leg to swell so badly that he was now unable to p
ut on a shoe or get downstairs, let alone out of the house. What was the ‘small peece of Worke’ that demanded such absolute and uninterrupted solitude for a man who normally craved company? No explanation was offered, and the state of Pepys’s papers as they were left to posterity does not suggest that he spent the time in filing. A guess is that he was reading through his Diary, slowly, as his eyes required, and considering its future and his own. He knew now that he was not going to achieve literary immortality by writing naval history. To leave a book behind you is the surest form of afterlife, as Pepys, reader and collector of books, knew well. He had remarked years before on the death of an eminent doctor that he was a man of good judgement, ‘but hath writ nothing to leave his name to posterity by’.26 Pepys, however, had. There were six volumes, still decently veiled in shorthand, that might one day speak for him to posterity, if he had the courage to allow them to survive. Some time during the last years of his life he thought the matter over, and this mysterious solitary summer stands as a likely moment for him to have done so. The volumes of the Diary were replaced on the shelves and renumbered in the new catalogue he made in 1693.27