Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  20. For Lawson, see Bernard Capp’s Cromwell’s Navy (1989), particularly Chapters 10 and 11.

  21. Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, p. 357.

  Part Two: 1660–1669

  7. Changing Sides

  1. See the royalist John Lane’s complaint of Downing to Sir Edward Nicholas, 30 Mar. 1658, cited in John Beresford, The Godfather of Downing Street: Sir George Downing 1623–1684 (1925), p. 93; and p. 97 for attempt to assassinate him in summer of 1658.

  2. The details of Downing’s behaviour are mostly in John Beresford’s Sir George Downing, pp. 92–122.

  3. Harrington’s Oceana, published in 1656, laid out a plan for a republic with a rotating senate, votes for all freemen (servants were not enfranchised), partial religious toleration (Jews and Catholics were excluded from it) and restrictions on property owning. Henry Neville was another republican and atheist member of the Rota. Others were Roger Coke, a grandson of the great Sir Edward Coke, and the republican and Leveller John Wildman. According to John Aubrey, the club was formed in 1659 and ‘The Doctrine was very taking, and the more because, as to human foresight, there was no possibility of the King’s return.’

  4. Pepys put a portrait of Harrington in his collection in the Pepys Library. Oceana was reissued in 1887 and is still discussed to this day. Harrington is now considered a forerunner of Adam Smith and the science of political economy. See Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution 1603–1714, p. 161. Harrington’s theories also had an influence in the future United States: see Godfrey Davies, The Restoration of Charles II (1955), p. 291.

  5. F. R. Harris, The Life of the First Earl of Sandwich (1912), vol. I, p. 171; Richard Ollard, Cromwell’s Earl: A Life of Edward Montagu, First Earl of Sandwich (1994), P. 77.

  6. The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke 1605–1675, ed. Ruth Spalding (1989), p. 574.

  7. Richard Creed eventually moved to Monmouthshire, where his father-in-law, Walter Cradock, had been a puritan divine and a leading Propagation commissioner in the county, responsible for ejecting royalist clergy. Creed had clerked for him in the 1650s and also acted as parliamentary surveyor. Cradock died in 1659, but Creed was specifically named in the Act of Indemnity as one excluded from ever holding public office again, and he ended his days as a humble schoolmaster in Llangwm Uchaf. He died in 1690 and his memorial tablet recorded that he had served admirals Blake and Sandwich, but nothing about Harrison. Information from Julian Mitchell’s unpublished essay ‘Monmouthshire Politics 1660–1706’.

  8. Diary, 12 Apr. 1664, for Pepys plotting to get Will Howe Creed’s job with Lord Sandwich: ‘And I would be glad to get him secretary and to out Creed if I can – for he is a crafty and false rogue.’

  9. Diary, 12 May 1661.

  10. Diary, 18 Jan. 1665, where it is Edward Montagu’s wife, by then Lady Sandwich, who has heard this bad report of John Creed. ‘I told her I thought he was as shrewd and cunning a man as any in England, and one that I would fear first should outwit me in everything – to which she readily concurred.’

  11. Diary, 8 Mar. 1660. This was Captain Philip Holland, a good fighting officer, who later defected to the Dutch and then returned and got his pardon by giving information about them: see Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy (1989), pp. 388–9, 391.

  12. Diary, 19 Mar. 1660. For details of Blackborne’s career, see G. E. Aylmer, The State’s Servants: The Civil Service of the English Republic (1973).

  13. Diary, 16 Mar. 1660.

  14. Diary, 17 May 1660.

  15. Robert Blackborne to Edward Montagu, 7 May 1660, National Maritime Museum, Sandwich Journal, vol. III. fol. 213. The figure of Cromwell on the prow appears not to have been removed until 1663, when Pepys reports a conversation about its being pulled down and burnt, and deplores ‘the flinging away of £100 out of the King’s purse to the building of another – which it seems must be a Neptune’. Later on the same day he makes the point about the waste of money again, and says that it has in any case been forgotten whose head it was. Diary, 14 Dec. 1663.

  16. Godfrey Davies, The Restoration of Charles II, p. 349. Thurloe was arrested a fortnight later for high treason, but released six weeks later.

  17. Diary, 3 May 1660.

  18. Pepys heard of it in advance, Diary, 13 May 1660: ‘I heard… how Mr Morland was knighted by the King this week, and that the King did give the reason of it openly, that it was for giving him intelligence all the time he was clerk to Secretary Thurloe.’ Morland, when he engaged to work for Charles, made it a condition that he would not bear witness against his old colleagues ‘if upon his restauration they should happen to bee arraigned at the barr of justice’. H. W. Dickinson, Sir Samuel Morland: Diplomat and Inventor (1970), p. 21.

  19. Diary, 4 May 1660. Montagu told Pepys he feared Crew’s support for Presbyterians would damage his chances, but Charles accepted Montagu’s plea and made Crew a baron.

  20. Diary, 20 May 1660. Until the Reformation, ‘a month’s mind’ meant the period of commemorative masses for the dead. It was then mysteriously transmuted into the sense of having a liking or fancy for something or someone, as in Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, I.ii.133, ‘I see you have a month’s mind to them’. Congreve uses it in this sense in The Way of the World, III. i: ‘She has a Month’s mind; but I know Mr Mirabell can’t abide her.’ Pepys’s usage possibly also suggests that he has endured a month – actually two months – of sexual abstinence.

  21. Diary, 17, 19 May 1660.

  22. Diary, 15 May 1660.

  23. Years later, in Oct. 1680, he took down in shorthand, at Charles’s request, a narrative of his adventures and escape from England after the battle of Worcester.

  24. See Diary, 25 May 1660.

  25. Given as direct speech in the Diary, 2 June 1660.

  26. Diary, 18 June 1660.

  27. See Diary, 15, 19 June 1660.

  28. When Lady Pickering called on the Pepyses on 14 July 1668, Pepys was too busy to see her. ‘But how natural it is for us to slight people out of power, and for people out of power to stoop to see those that while in power they contemned,’ he wrote in his Diary.

  29. Edmund Ludlow, John Carew, Thomas Scott, Sir Hardress Waller and Adrian Scrope were some who gave themselves up, believing the promise of pardon. Waller was a friend of Montagu, and all of them known to him. Ashley Cooper was responsible for saving Haslerig from being tried, but he died in the Tower during the winter of 1660/61.

  30. Information from The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke and from Ruth Spalding’s The Improbable Puritan: A Life of Bulstrode Whitelocke (1975).

  31. Diary, 21 June 1660, and footnote for information. Note too a petition to Lord Sandwich from the governors of the ‘Hospital’ installed in the Wardrobe not to have it taken from them.

  32. G. E. Aylmer, The State’s Servants, p. 337. For Pepys’s objections, see his memo of 3 Apr. 1669, in his ‘Navy White Book’, printed in Samuel Pepys and the Second Dutch War, ed. Robert Latham, transcribed by Charles Knighton and by William Matthews (1995), p. 196.

  33. There is no picture of Seething Lane and it is not possible to construct any plan, but the whole complex must have been vast and each house substantial, with up to ten rooms apiece and two or three storeys high, with cellars. The existence of the ‘leads’ that means so much to Pepys – areas of flat roofing covered in lead that would be used as a terrace – suggests that there was a narrower upper storey that left roof space over the one below.

  34. See Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, pp. 280–81 and pp. 290–91 for his good work as navy commissioner, p. 371 for his leaving England.

  35. National Maritime Museum, Sandwich Journal, vol. I, item 27.

  36. Charles’s remark cited in Godfrey Davies, The Restoration of Charles II, p. 353.

  37. Diary, 10 Aug. 1660.

  38. Diary, 15 July, 7, 22 Oct. 1660.

  39. Diary, 7 Nov. 1660.

  40. Diary, 22 Oct. 1660, and note by Latham.

  41. Diary, 3 Oct. 1660.

 
42. Diary, 7 Oct. 1660.

  43. See M. Noble, Lives of the English Regicides (1798), p. 332.

  44. Diary, 16 Oct. 1660.

  45. Diary, 20 Oct. 1660.

  46. Diary, 20 Oct. 1660.

  47. Diary, 6, 7 Nov. 1660.

  48. Diary, 19 Nov. 1660.

  49. Diary, 4 Dec. 1660.

  50. For the payment to see the body, The Diurnal of Thomas Rugg 1659–1661, ed. W. L. Sachse (1961), p. 143, and for the placing of the head, note by Latham to Diary, 5 Feb. 1661, the day Pepys saw it. Cromwell’s head remained unburied until 1960, when a head believed to be his was laid to rest at his old college, Sidney Sussex, in the ante-chapel.

  51. George Downing to Sir Edward Nicholas, 17 Mar. 1662, cited in John Beresford, Sir George Downing, pp. 146–7, from British Library, Egerton MSS, 2538, fols. 37–8.

  8. Families

  1. Diary, 1 Jan. 1661.

  2. Diary, 8 Feb. 1662.

  3. Diary, 26 May 1663. Pepys is frank about the contents of the chamber pot: solid and liquid.

  4. Diary, 3 Nov. 1661, and alluded to earlier in the Prologue.

  5. Diary, 22 Sept. 1660.

  6. Diary, 14 Mar. 1661.

  7. See Diary, 28 June 1661.

  8. Diary, 12 Nov. 1660.

  9. Diary, 2 Jan. 1661. Compare Ralph Josselin, East Anglian clergyman, writing in his diary in 1644, when his sister Mary arrived ‘under my Roofe as a servant, but my respect is and shall be towards her as a sister, god might have made me a waiter upon others’. Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683, ed. Alan MacFarlane (1976).

  10. Diary, 18 July 1660.

  11. Diary, 11 Aug. 1660, for Will’s tears.

  12. Diary, 8 June 1662: ‘Observe my man Will to walk with his cloak flung over his shoulder like a Ruffian; which whether it was that he might not be seen to walk along with the footboy, I know not, but I was vexed at it; and coming home, and after prayers, I did ask him where he learned that immodest garb, and he answered me that it was not immodest, or some such slight answer, at which I did give him two boxes on the ear; which I never did before, and so was after a little troubled at it’.

  13. Diary, 24 Feb. 1662.

  14. Diary, 8 Jan. 1662. Sir George Carteret, the treasurer, made the accusation and expressed his anger against Will to Sir William Penn, who advised Pepys to sack him. Pepys questioned Will without revealing the source of the accusation, saw that he understood and did nothing more. Pepys himself saw less of Blackborne after this.

  15. See, for example, Diary, 18, 28 Jan. 1664, and again 19 Oct. the same year.

  16. Information about variant spellings of Hewer from Dr Charles Knighton. The variants on Pepys I have taken from the ledgers of Hoare’s Bank, where he had an account from the 1680s, except for the last, which is found in a document describing Pepys’s collection shortly after his death, Bodleian Library, Rawlin-son MSS, D 396, fol. 35. Also Pyppes in Rawlinson MSS, A 180, fol. 406, and Phips in another, fol. 369.

  17. For sale of the lease, Diary, 17 Sept. 1660. For Betty Lane at the house, 12 Aug. 1660, and for Diana Crisp, 4 Sept. 1660.

  18. Pepys is sworn in as JP 24 Sept. 1660. For Sherwyn’s fall, see G. E. Aylmer, The State’s Servants: The Civil Service of the English Republic (1973), pp. 253–4, and later references in Diary, for example, 17 Jan. 1665, when Pepys finds it ‘mighty strange’ to sit with his own hat on ‘while Mr Sherwin stood bare as a clerk’.

  19. Diary, 22 Nov. 1660.

  20. Diary, 9 Apr. 1661.

  21. Diary, 24 July 1661.

  22. Penn was close to Lawson and Fifth Monarchy men, just as Montagu was known as a religious radical. See Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy (1989), p. 294.

  23. Diary, 2 Apr. 1661.

  24. Diary, 9 Apr. 1661.

  25. The Quakers were the first group to object to slavery on principle, in 1671. William Penn the younger, who became a Quaker leader, had of course experienced slave ownership in his father’s house.

  26. DNB, and Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1664–5, PP. 407–8, letter from Sir William Coventry to the earl of Arlington, 4 June 1665, praising Penn’s conduct in the battle of Lowestoft.

  27. Diary, 27 Mar. 1661, 1 Nov. 1660. They were called servants, and seem to have been affectionately treated in the families they served, but they were really slaves, brought from Africa, without rights. Pepys saw the little Turk and Negro acquired by Lord Sandwich to be pages to his family on 30 May 1662. Note also a letter from Pepys to Sandwich, ?23 Oct. 1664 (National Maritime Museum, Correspondence of Samuel Pepys, LBK/8), about the Dutch success on the Guinea coast and ‘defeating them in their great Contract with Spain for Blacks’. The slave trade had been going for forty years, and Bristol, home town of Batten and Penn, was one of the two chief ports in England used by the slaving ships, Liverpool being the other. Neither puritans nor cavaliers saw anything wrong in slavery. George Downing observed and approved slavery at Barbados, writing to his cousin John Winthrop on 26 Aug. 1645, ‘If you go to Barbadoes, you shall see a flourishing Island, many able men. I believe they have bought this year no less than a thousand Negroes, and the more they buy, the better able they are to buy, for in a year and a half they will earn (with God’s blessing) as much as they cost.’ Later, on another island, he calls Negroes ‘the life of this place’. John Beresford, The Godfather of Downing Street. Sir George Downing 1623–1684 (1925), pp. 44, 45. Charles II encouraged the formation of the Royal Africa Company, which dealt in slaves. Pepys himself later owned two black slaves (see below, p. 180).

  28. Diary, 28 May 1661.

  29. Diary, 12 Oct. 1660.

  30. Diary, 15 Nov. 1660.

  31. Diary, 16 May 1661.

  32. Diary, 22 May, 15 June 1661.

  33. 33. The London to Oxford coach took twelve hours. Pepys needed a guide because there were no road maps – John Ogilby’s were the first to be published, at the request of Charles II, and appeared in 1675.

  34. Diary, 16 Jan. 1661.

  35. Diary, 18 Jan. 1661.

  36. Diary, 24 July, 25 Oct., 1, 9, 24, 27 Nov. 1661.

  37. Diary, 31 Aug. 1661.

  38. Diary, 12 May, 3o June 1662.

  39. Diary, 21 Apr. 1664.

  40. Diary, 29 Apr. 1664.

  41. Diary, 6 June 1665.

  42. See his accounts with the Sandwiches dated 15 June 1670, in which he charges ‘interest for two years at 6 per cent…£12’ on the £100 ‘supply’d my Ladie’. Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MSS, A 174, fol. 437.

  43. The only other example I know of is Shelley’s, writing to his second wife, Mary – ‘my best Mary’. Pepys uses it in his letter to Lady Carteret of 4 Sept. 1665, after the wedding of the two ladies’ children. ‘My Lord Sandwich is gone to sea with a noble fleet… My best Lady Sandwich, with the flock at Hinchingbrooke, was, by my last letters, very well.’ Letters and the Second Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. G. Howarth (1932), p. 24.

  44. Diary, 10 Oct. 1667.

  45. National Maritime Museum, Sandwich Journal, Appendix, fol. 130.

  46. Diary, 9 Oct. 1667.

  47. For Charles’s letter to Pepys, 15 Mar. 1697, Private Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers of Samuel Pepys 1679–1703, ed. J. R. Tanner (1926), vol. I, p. 138. His spelling is wonderful, e.g., ‘harrey caen’ for ‘hurricane’, ‘Scowayer’ for ‘squire’. But his status as a Pepys with sons meant he was a residual legatee in Pepys’s will.

  48. Diary, 8 Apr. 1662.

  49. Diary, 1 June 1660 – Elizabeth writes to Pepys to tell him about the Joyces. For the story about Tom, see Chapter 11.

  50. Diary, 26 Aug., 5 Sept. 1661.

  51. Diary, 31 Dec. 1663.

  52. Diary, 16 Jan. 1667.

  53. Diary, 7 Feb. 1668.

  54. Diary, 2 Mar. 1668, for news of wedding; for letter to father, Diary, 7 Mar. 1668.

  55. Diary, 24 May 1668.

  9. Work

  1. See, for example, Diary, 1 Sept. 1666, when Pepys is ‘horribly frighted’ to see Henry Killig
rew, son of the dramatist and groom of the Bedchamber to the duke of York, with his friends, at a performance of Polichinelly Pepys attended with Penn, Elizabeth and Mercer: ‘we hid ourselfs, so as we think they did not see us’. Even Lord Brouncker, a personal friend of the royal family as well as a Navy Board official, was worried about being noticed at the theatre by the king, and when he and Pepys set out to see a play together they agreed to take a high box ‘for fear of being seen, the King being there’. Diary, 29 Oct. 1667.

  2. At Pepys’s level he might be expected to save money, but the cases of two of his clerks illustrate how vulnerable they were: when Tom Edwards died young after an illness, Pepys saw personally to helping his widow and sons, otherwise destitute. Richard Gibson, who served the navy for more than five decades in various positions of trust and outlived Pepys, sent pathetic letters enclosing testimonials in 1712, begging to be given a post as a steward at Greenwich Hospital in order to support his family.

  3. Diary, 8 Nov. 1600. The Catherine was finished in May 1661.

  4. Colonel Thomas Middleton, appointed to the Navy Commission, Portsmouth, in 1664, had fought for parliament and sometimes compared the poor organization and discipline of the 1660s with the superior conditions prevailing under the commonwealth.

  5. Diary, 16 Aug. 1660.

  6. See Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy (1989), p. 375.

  7. Pepys saw his first actresses on 3 Jan. 1661. He saw Betterton in Hamlet on 24 Aug. 1661 and again on 27 Nov. in the same year (and on 28 May 1663 and 31 Aug. 1668), and decided he was the best actor after seeing him in Massinger’s The Bondman. He also saw him play Bosola in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi on 30 Sept. 1662 – ‘to admiration’.