Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  Although the new century started so painfully for Pepys, it still allowed him his moments of grace and eloquence. ‘“What then,” will you say’ – he was writing to Evelyn – ‘“are you a doing?” Why truely, nothing that will bear nameing, and yet am not (I think) idle; for who can, that has so much (of past and to come) to think on as I have? And thinking, I take it, is working.’ And although he had few books at Clapham and missed his library, his thinking reminded him of his scientific interests, and in September he was sprightly enough to set up his own Newtonian experiment in optics, ‘collecting the Rays of light in a dark Room; I having done it to a degree of pleasure and Ease in its Execution as much exceeds what I have ever seen’.25 The summer was unusually warm and sunny, which meant not only that he could collect rays of sunlight indoors but also make expeditions into the country, to Windsor, Hampton Court, Richmond and as far as Epsom – with what pleasure and what memories of his service to two kings, and further back to his childhood visits to Durdans, can be imagined.26

  In Buckingham Street Lorrain was recataloguing the library, and Mary was getting the house ready for his return. Pepys was impatient to be back among his books but was persuaded to remain at Clapham until the late autumn. Another thought of the past came to him, and he wrote to Jackson, now in Cadiz, suggesting he should visit ‘my once Royal Mistriss our Queen Dowager’ in Lisbon: Catherine of Braganza had returned to her native country, and Pepys, attached to his memories of a queen he had found modest and innocent, wished to present his ‘profoundest duty’.27 After this came more sorrow, with the death of James Houblon, ‘one of the longest as well as most approved friends till now left mee in the world’; Sarah had died earlier, and James had been ill for months, but Pepys had hardly expected to outlive them both.28 Nor was he well enough to attend the funeral in the City. Even in his grief Pepys worked on one of his great letters, a disquisition on the place of music in education, ‘a science peculiarly productive of a pleasure that no state of life, publick or private, secular or sacred; no difference of age or season; no temper of mind or condition of health, exempt from present anguish, nor, lastly, distinction of quality, renders either improper, untimely, or unentertaining. Witness the universal gusto we see it followed with, wherever to be found.’ No education should be without music, he believed. Here too he looked back and invoked his old master, Edward Montagu, earl of Sandwich, for whom music had been a daily pleasure, right up ‘to that very hour wherein through a sea of blood and fire in the service of his Prince and country, he exchanged it for that of a State of Harmony more unspeakable and full of glory’. Pepys’s own love of music and profound belief in its importance were woven into memories and attachments, and further into his thoughts about a future state of unspeakable Harmony.29

  He had signed off the Memoires with a declaration that did not name God but attributed power and mystery to ‘Something above’ and ‘Incomprehensible’, ‘to which alone be Glory’; and it may be in these formulations of unspeakable Harmony and incomprehensible power that we should look for Pepys’s faith. It was certainly no ordinary or conventional one. Once, when asked to provide a reference, he wrote, ‘what his Religion or Creed is I neither know concerning him, nor ever thought worth enquiring after any other man’s; provided his Conversation be sober and honest’.30 And the motto he adopted in the last years of his life was essentially a humanist one, taken from Cicero, meaning ‘the mind is the man’.31 His charitable work for French Protestants fleeing persecution was surely inspired more by dislike of intolerance than zeal for their creed. His early scepticism about religion, his anthropological and aesthetic curiosity about other sects, his lack of interest in doctrine, Christ or the Bible, his indifference to regular church attendance allied to a perfect readiness to conform to the rites practised by his fellow citizens when convenient or expected, all suggest that he stood close to William Petty’s broadly based tolerance: happy to follow the conventional religious practice of his society but reserving the right to think for himself.32 He had many friends who made careers in the Church, but religion was not a topic of his correspondence with them, rather books, manuscripts, libraries, history, handwriting, even tales of second sight. Still, as he aged and saw his friends die one by one, there were more references to prayer, faith and the afterlife in his letters, and Evelyn’s gentle piety, often interwoven with classical references, touched and interested him as the two men prepared for what they both imagined as a voyage. ‘Pray remember what o’clock it is with you and me,’ wrote Pepys, and Evelyn replied that ‘an easy, comfortable passage is that which remains for us to beg of God, and for the rest to sit loose to things below’.33

  Sitting loose did not come easily to Pepys. In January 1701 he wrote to his cousin Matthews in Huntingdon about his nephew Sam Jackson, whom he imagined to be still under Matthews’ guidance: ‘And a very unwelcome surprize it is, to understand from you now that ‘tis otherwise; as suspecting his being guilty of something worse on this Occasion, than (for his sake) you have thought fitt to tell me. Which however I shall at present forbear any further Enquiry after.’34

  Throughout the first six months of 1701 he was in Buckingham Street, but so unwell that he could not go out of doors. No doubt his legs were too swollen, and it is likely that continence had become a problem. In his wretchedness he wrote to John Jackson asking him to return, knowing that the journey from Spain was likely to be slow, and in June he himself returned to Clapham. In August he wrote a will, leaving Brampton to Samuel and the rest of his fortune to John. Will Hewer, ‘my most approved and most dear friend’, was his executor, and was to have £500. Apart from an annuity to ‘my old and faithful Servant Jane Penny’ – who must be Jane Edwards, remarried and widowed again – that was all. The £28,007.25.11/4d. owed to Pepys by the state, if paid, should be put into land and divided between his nephews (it never was paid). He urged them not to be disappointed with what they got but to remember that it was more than he or they had been born with. A few days later, John arrived back in England.

  The circle at Clapham now consisted of Pepys, Will Hewer, John Jackson and Mary. Pepys longed to see Evelyn, preferably in this world, he joked, and before the winter was over; at Christmas he sent greetings from his three companions to all the Evelyns. There was never anything to tell of Hewer, always his quiet and peaceable self and always mindful of Pepys’s comfort. Mary was having her portrait painted, either by Kneller or his brother Zacharias, and, as well as going for sittings, she acted for Pepys, fetching from Fleet Street one of the boxes wrapped in sacking he had deposited at his banker’s in June: ‘Dld back one of them to Mrs Skinner’ entered the clerk in the ledger on 10 December.35 If John Jackson paid a visit to his brother Sam at Huntingdon, as he might well have done after so long an absence abroad, he must have learnt that Sam was married, and without consulting their uncle. Pepys soon heard of the marriage and sent off an angry letter. In April he wrote to Matthews complaining of the young man’s ‘Folly, Undutifulness & Obstinacy’. ‘As to whom, I protest to you, Sir,’ he went on, ‘that when I reflect upon the Perverseness as well as Stupidity legible in what he writes, I think it were best both for you and me, to ridd our hands of him.’36 But he took no further action as yet.

  He knew death could not be far off, but resisted it at every step. He was sixty-nine in February 1702, and it was only his body that was failing him; the mind was still the man, the wits were still sharp, and he continued to set himself new tasks that absorbed and satisfied him. One was the commissioning of a portrait of the mathematician John Wallis to present to the University of Oxford. This kept him in close touch with Kneller, with Wallis and the Royal Society, and with scholarly Oxford, which he jokingly called his aunt, Cambridge being his academic mother. And rather than accepting his separation from his books, he now had his entire library moved from York Buildings to Clapham. It was a sign that he did not expect to return to London; it was also a very big operation, although happily he had thought of how they were to be moved
from the start and designed the bookcases to be taken apart easily. The cornices were made to lift off, the central sections divided in two and the bases provided with carrying handles. Hewer prepared a large and splendid wainscotted room for their installation. As well as the bookcases and desk, double-sided pictures were set in the panels of the room, the two globes were installed on pulleys, and Pepys’s model ships were displayed in their glass cases.37 He could feel pretty well at home.

  He was reading the first part of Clarendon’s history of the ‘Great Rebellion’, newly published by his friend the second earl, with the pleasure that comes from finding the events of your own life transformed into official history; and he wrote to compliment Henry Hyde and to urge him to speed the publication of the further volumes.38 Compliments came to Pepys too, but he could still make fun of flattery. When young Evelyn’s Latin verses proclaimed there was no need to travel to Rome now that its pleasures could be enjoyed in the Pepys household, where Jackson’s loot was on display, Pepys remarked that Evelyn had ‘long since taught him to make all Mr Pepys’s Geese Swans’. And when the orator of Oxford University eulogized him following his gift of the Wallis portrait, he thanked him for raising ‘a new world of glory to me out of nothing’.39

  Two kings, both his juniors, his master James II and his enemy William III, died within six months of one another in 1701 and 1702, and Queen Anne was crowned in April. In June William Nicolson, a scholar with a particular interest in libraries, was called to London to be consecrated bishop of Carlisle by the new queen. He had borrowed books from Pepys earlier, and during his short stay in town he made a point of visiting him in Clapham, ‘in the pleasant House of Mr Hewer, formerly Mr Pepys’s Clerk’.40 Nicolson was a friend of Hickes and of Edmund Gibson, who went to Clapham with him; Evelyn was also there to meet them, and Nicolson wrote a description of the place and the occasion in his diary:

  In the House mighty plenty of China-ware and other Indian Goods, vessels of a sort of past[e]; harden’d into a Substance like polish’d Marble. Pictures in full pains of wainscot; wch (by haveing one moveable, painted on both sides) admits of three several Representations of the whole Room. Models of the Royal Sovereign & other Men of War, made by the most famous Master-Builders; very curious and exact, in glass Cases. Mr Pepys’s Library in 9 Classes [?Cases], finely gilded and sash-glass’d; so deep as to carry two Rows… of Books on each footing. A pair of Globes hung up, by pullies. The Books so well order’d that his Footman (after looking the Catalogue) could lay his finger on any of em blindfold. /Misscellanies of paintings, cutts, pamphlets, &c in large & lesser Volumes… A contracted Copy of Verrio’s Draught of King Ja. the II. and the blew-coats at Christ-Church Hospital (wth the Directors and Governours of the place, Lord Mayor & Aldermen &c) suppos’d to be one of the best Representations of the various Habits of the Times, postures, &c, that is an where extant…

  Nicolson also admired the ‘Gardens, Walks and Bowling-Green, Ponds, &c answerable to the House’, and the hedges of different heights and woods, bay, yew, holly and hornbeam; and he noted that Evelyn ‘own’d himself the causer of a deal of Luxury in these matters’.41

  In July Mary had to go to Lincolnshire, where her mother was dying. Mary and her sister Frances, Lady Buck, were joint executrices of Mrs Skinner’s will, chosen as the ‘beloved daughters’, and shared the largest part of their mother’s estate; it cannot have amounted to much.42 Pepys was soon making inquiries of a legal acquaintance about Mary’s duties and whether one executor could proceed without another.43 Mrs Skinner left him ‘two broad pieces of gold to buy him a ring’, which was more than went to some of her children; her daughter Elizabeth, working as a servant, got £100 on condition she did not marry a certain Thomas Byutt.44 Parents found it irresistible to try to control their children after death, and both Mrs Skinner and Pepys used their wills as a means of maintaining their power.

  He reached his seventieth birthday in February 1703. By now his bad kidney had reduced his strength to its lowest ebb yet: he was frail, emaciated and in pain. Urinary infections are acutely painful, and there was no effective treatment, where today antibiotics or surgical removal of one kidney might have saved him. Mary was dealing with the household finances, paying out money from her account at Hoare’s. She confided her worries about Pepys to a cousin, Mary Ballard, who wrote to him saying that ‘Madam Skynner’ thought he did not take care of his health as his condition required and offering to prepare for him some of the ‘odd things which I now and then used to make which were not only healthfull but pleasing to your stomack’, such as jelly broth, hartshorn jelly, sego’.45 The gesture was kindly meant, but he was hardly able to eat. His last-known letter was written on behalf of his brother-in-law, a plea for a pension for St Michel to the commander-in-chief of the Fleet. It was, he said, the only request he had made since retiring from the navy.46

  In March he sent a message to Dr Hickes, who knew the Clapham household from earlier visits – one in the summer of 1700 – and he agreed to come when Pepys felt he was approaching his end. In April he was told he had no hope of recovery, after which John Jackson composed a careful letter to Hewer, asking him to assure Pepys that his nephew counted on nothing from him: its intentions were probably the opposite of its assertions, and he was in any case sure of Pepys’s affection.47 For Pepys, there was just enough time and energy left for a last dramatic stroke. Once he heard he could not recover, he set about a complete revision of his will, dictating two enormous codicils on successive days, 12 and 13 May. In the first he took away the Brampton estates from his nephew Sam, allowing him no more than an annuity of £40 a year. Brampton went to John with the major part of the estate.

  He was also given the library in trust, charged with joint responsibility with Hewer for finding the best means for preserving it ‘in one body, undivided unsold and Secure against all manner of deminution damages and embesselments; and finally disposed… for the benefit of posterity’. Two further sets of instructions specified what they were to do. All his books were to go to ‘one of our Universities’, and rather Cambridge than Oxford; to a library, preferably that of Magdalene, with Trinity as a fall-back; and the collection must be kept entire and separate, in a room to be chosen by Jackson in the new building, no one allowed to remove any books except the master, and he only as far as his lodge. He proposed a system of annual visitation by Trinity to check that his instructions were being obeyed in perpetuity, giving them the right to the library if they found any infringement by Magdalene. Everything about his instructions indicates that Pepys had prepared them with the greatest care and must have thought and planned the disposal of his library over a considerable period before it made its last-minute appearance in his will. They are also so idiosyncratic that he may have modelled the conditions on those of another Cambridge college library, that of Matthew Parker at Corpus Christi, which had been similarly protected to good effect.48

  This was not the only striking last-minute addition. Mary, not so much as mentioned in the earlier will, makes her first appearance in the 12 May codicil. ‘Whereas I hold myself obliged on this occasion to leave behind me the most full and lasting acknowledgment of my esteem respect and gratitude to the Excellent Lady Mrs Mary Skyner for the many important Effects of her Steddy friendship and Assistances during the whole course of my life, within the last thirty three years; I doe give and devise unto the said Mrs Mary Skyner One Annuity or yearly payment of Two hundred pounds of Lawfull money of England for and during the terme of her natural Life.’ That he should want to provide for her and to acknowledge that she had been an intimate part of his life for so long is understandable: but why only at this very last moment? The best explanation may be that he had intended some discreet private arrangement, worked out and agreed with his executor, Will Hewer; and that either he himself realized this was not good enough, or that Will tactfully suggested it would be wiser to put things in writing. Mary’s family and friends may have made representations, but more likely Mary herself
inquired and then insisted on her right to be acknowledged and provided for. If she did, you can only admire her spirit in the face of Pepys’s persistent tendency to exclude women from the masculine world of the written word. However it came about, it was a just decision, allowing her some dignity, ensuring her a comfortable independence when she should lose her home with him and informing posterity of the place she had filled at his side.

  As the end approached, Pepys began to think of more he could do for Mary. He may have been growing light-headed; she may have been putting on pressure. There is a lot of curious behaviour round deathbeds when there is money in question, as Pepys knew from his favourite playwright Ben Jonson. Another codicil assigned £5,000 of the £28,000 owed him by the government to Mary, and a verbal request, carefully noted down, stated his wish to give £50 of plate each to ‘Mrs Skynner, Mr Hewer, and J.J.’, as well as ‘Pictures and Goods to Mrs Skynner’.49 Whatever the final value of the estate that went to John Jackson, it was enough to ensure that he never had to work, although not enough to make Evelyn accept his proposal of marriage to his granddaughter. Family friendship or no, Evelyn turned him down on financial grounds.50

  On 14 May 1703 Evelyn, himself recovering from a broken leg, called to see Pepys and found him ‘[1] anguishing with small hope of recovery which much affected me’. The weather, he noted, was lovely, fair and temperate, the summer conditions Pepys had always delighted in. The two friends did not meet again, and it was left to John Jackson to give an account of his uncle’s last days.51 He did well. On Monday, 24 May, Dr Hickes arrived and found Pepys lying on a couch. He prayed by him and then, taking his hand and finding his pulse very weak, told him he should simply say, ‘Come Lord Jesus, Come quickly.’ Pepys, practical to the last, asked him to pray to God to shorten his misery. That evening he fell into convulsions, trembling and breathing with difficulty. At four in the morning he showed more signs of distress, and asked for the curtains and windows to be opened; no doubt Pepys wanted to see the light of dawn and feel the summer air. ‘Whilst lying on the couch he beckoned me to him, – took me by the hand, – the same by Mrs Sk, and speaking to me (as well as he could) said, “Be good friends; I do desire it of you”; in conclusion of which I offered to kiss his cheek; he turned his mouth and pressed my lips with an extraordinary affection. /Dr Hicks coming, Mr Hewer told him; upon which he ordred himselfe to be raised up in his bed, and the Doctor coming-in performed the Office for the Sick, and gave him the Absolution, laying his hand on his head. The Service done, U[ncle] said, “God be gracious to me”; blessed the Dean and all of us, and prayed to God to reward us all, and M.S. then appearing, said, “And thee in particular, my dear child.”’