This was too much. My own humiliation had turned to anger and the anger was compounded by my being compared to St Samuel.
I think he would be less amazed than you think, if you told him.
What? she said. You think he believes I am unchaste? She cast her eyes around for a projectile and saw a bowl of flowers that were kept indoors in earth out of the frost, but I was too quick for her and seized the bowl and clasped it to my bosom.
No, I said, I meant no aspersion on your character, none at all.
On my husband’s then?
Well, I fancy he is not quite as innocent as you suppose in that respect. There is a certain place –
I don’t wish to hear such horrible things, she shrieked, you’re a monster, a liar, a lecher and I hate you for ever. Leave my sight now, now, NOW.
These instructions seemed tolerably clear. I put the flowers down on the table and said I was sorry that our friendship should end like this but was making haste towards the door as I said it, so as not to give her time to pick up the bowl. But when I closed the door behind me, I heard only the sound of her sobbing.
Halfway down the stairs, I met a young man with a mop of red hair coming up (the maid must have let him in just then, for she was at the foot of the stairs staring up open-mouthed). The young man addressed me familiarly in the way that London gallants will talk to a total stranger as though he were an old acquaintance.
Caught in the briars, are we? A touch of trouble upstairs? Choleric temperament, that’s what it is, for all that she’s so pale, it’s the French in her. But I know how to sweeten her, don’t you fret. Will Hewer, your servant, sir, clerk to Mr Pepys and friend of the family. My word, sir, you look as though you had been in the wars.
That was the last interview I had with Mrs Pepys. Although Llewelyn and I had dinner in that house once more, at her husband’s invitation, Mrs Pepys and I did not speak one word to each other, and after dinner she went out straight to see my Lady Sandwich, for she had no thought but to promote her husband’s career by which means she would have the advantages of better society.
Thence to the Cockpit, and there walked an hour with my Lord Duke of Albemarle alone in his garden, where he expressed in great words his opinion of me: that I was the right hand of the Navy here, nobody but I taking any care of anything therein – so that he should not know what could be done without me – at which I was (from him) not a little proud.
Diary of Samuel Pepys, 24 April 1665
VI
The Laboratory
YOU ARE ALWAYS in the dumps nowadays, Jem. I remember when you were such a merry fellow and I was enamoured of you.
More fool you then, madam. At my base I am of a melancholy temperament.
You should not call a duchess a fool – but she was in gamesome mood and cuffed me lightly on the cheek in mock punishment, yet I would have none of it.
Madam, be serious, you treat me as a plaything and will not see that my occupation’s gone like the Moor’s.
Have I not given you occupation enough?
Yes, as a serving man.
No, as a major-domo, a counsellor and friend, a secretary – and something else.
Oh that something else, I said in a weary voice.
No, she said, I meant not that. And her tenor roused me a little, for I saw the old light in her eye and I knew that some game was up.
I have another profession for you, you’re to be my architect.
Nan, don’t mock me. You know I’m quite ignorant of Vitruvius.
I speak not of Vitruvius, whatever that may be, I speak of New Hall. The Duke of Buckingham has left it in a destroyed state and I can’t undertake the refurbishment without a man of taste at my side.
New Hall? But it’s as big as Hampton Court. I could not, I cannot –
You will, Jem, you will. We shall go there, tomorrow, you and Kit and I and the General – the four of us.
I had not yet seen this great palace near Chelmsford which my lord had of Bucks very cheap some months before, for the other duke was short of cash, and my Duke had been given £20,000 by the Parliament. They had first offered him Hampton Court which would have tickled me, for I could then have taken my revenge on Mr Phelps and the other saucy merchants who had usurped that royal seat, but the old General said he did not like to sleep in Cromwell’s bed for fear he might catch the same disease (he meant overweening ambition), and so New Hall it was.
Though I knew Nan intended my new profession as a jest, yet I looked forward to our visit with a high expectation. Nor was I disappointed as we rode down the fair avenue planted with stately lime trees in four rows for near a mile in length and saw the long low palace built with brick, as wide as a small town but nowhere above two storeys high, with its spires and battlements and old windows of Henry VIII’s time. And to hear the heels of our horses ring on the flagstones as we came into the Great Court and to see the Duke who had gone ahead helping his Duchess out of her carriage: I began to feel that my position had its compensations.
Well, Jem, what d’ye think? Not bad for a farmer’s son? (In truth, old Sir Thomas Monck came from an ancient line in Devonshire, but I have noticed that great men who come from small beginnings like to make them smaller.)
Wonder of wonders! Honest George Monck, he who never spoke a word out of turn and made a profession out of keeping his feelings under lock and key, was as cheerful and garrulous as a schoolboy on holiday. He would show us round every door and picture and inscription:
Hey there’s Henry’s arms, d’ye see, Henricus Rex Octavus, he had it off old Sir Thomas Boleyn when he had his Anne, you tell me which was the better bargain. And there’s Queen Bess: Viva Elizabetha, and an inscription in Italian which I cannot make out, and Queen Mary too, they all lived here. She was here when they told her she was no longer to call herself Princess – her face must have been a study then, hey? And here’s a sea-piece, they tell me it’s very fine, Sir Francis Drake’s action against the Spaniards, anno domini 1580. A good Devonshire man.
We must find a painter to do a companion piece of another Devon man beating the Dutch.
Now, now, Nan, that’s not for me to think of. If some mayor and corporation take it into their noddles to do such a thing, though I’m a poor subject for a limner, God knows, then I can’t check ’em, but I won’t do it myself.
Yet I saw the proposal had caught his fancy and I could see his cunning old brain working how he might have such a picture painted. Without seeming to have asked for it. Or paying for it.
Come into the chapel now, there’s a painting by that Welshman, cost five hundred pounds.
What Welshman, my dear? (Though she knew well enough and so, I fancy, did he.)
Oh Inigo Jones, that’s the fellow, though come to think of it, Jones didn’t paint it himself, brought in old Gerbier.
Since he was acquainted with Sir Balthasar Gerbier, a considerably lesser man, he need not have hesitated over Inigo J., but his cunning was so habitual that he could not forbear to play the role of honest blockhead, which had taken him so far.
There now, d’ye see that window? It’s a fine thing, is it not?
Indeed it was a glorious glass, the fairest I had ever seen: Flemish work, I fancied, more than a hundred years old. In the outward lights knelt a young prince and princess beneath two saints, St George for England with his red cloak and St Catherine in a blue gown with her wheel. In between, Our Lord on the Cross with the two thieves beside and above a band of angels playing musical instruments.
Robs you of breath, don’t it?
The old man was touched by the beauty of it.
That’s Catherine of Aragon below her patron saint, and there, that’s Prince Arthur who would have been king if he hadn’t died. Her parents, the King and Queen of Spain, had it made for the wedding, but Arthur caught the sweating sickness, and so when his brother Henry took her over he didn’t want to be reminded. So he gave it to the monks at Waltham and they buried the glass pieces and then brought it her
e for safe keeping. Never engrave your schemes on glass, Jem, they’ll come back to mock you.
The old General stood in contemplation. He who had himself seen one king executed and brought in another, was near to weeping.
Curious, is it not, I speculated idly, feeling that I must say something and not stand there like a lump of stone, that all the doctors could not say for sure whether such a marriage be legitimate or not?
What, what, what do you mean by that? His voice was loud and terrible and it came to me – too late – that he thought I intended some reference to the murky circumstances of his own marriage. And he stumped off in great dudgeon, for I had piqued him on the point where he was most tender.
As he went down the passage, we could still hear him wheezing like a grampus, for the asthma had come upon him in his latter years and sometimes he had to check his speech to gather his breath. He was of a distempered complexion also. Nan said he had an infection of the kidneys which he had contracted during the Dutch wars and could not shake off. An old Navy doctor, a friend of Mr Pierce’s, had given him some pills that were reputed infallible for the asthma, which they may have been, but they were harmful to his other complaints and made him go blue in the face like a raw lobster, though his habitual complexion was jaundiced. Moreover, on an early visit to New Hall, when the place was new to him, he had fallen into a ditch and broken his ankle, which had not yet mended, for old men’s bones break easily and mend only with difficulty. Thenceforward he walked with a limp which gave him a rolling gait like that of a sailor, which was ironic for a land Admiral.
Yet I had thought him immortal until that moment when I saw him walk off down the dusty passage and clutch at the door-post for support, for his ankle grew worse with standing still. All at once, I perceived that he would not live for ever and that, when he died, why, then, we should be in a new world. Nan would be looking for a new husband. I knew the gentry at Court laughed at her behind her back, and she knew so too. She was a bold woman, but she was not insensible to slights and sneers, and I fancied she would seek a true friend, and where else should she look but at her loyal servant?
Moreover, it was not unheard of that, in order to maintain the dignity of the loyal relict of such a noble duke, his successor (I mean me) should be ennobled also, though it might be to a lesser degree – as, for instance, Earl of Chelmsford.
A penny for your thoughts, Jem?
Oh they’re not worth so much, madam.
No, but you’re in a rare study. You have become more thoughtful.
Is that so bad a thing?
No but I wish you were more attentive to me, and not for ever a daydreamer. The General is grown old and besides he is so often absent. I must have company to refresh me, Jem, I must be kept young.
So I bussed her upon the lips and chucked her under the chin, but it was uphill work and I foresaw that I must serve a hard sentence before I was to enjoy my reward.
We roamed the great rooms and cabinets and cloisters of New Hall with amazement that so large a palace should have lain neglected for so long, viz. ever since the Duke of Buckingham was exiled and deprived of his estates. There was dust upon every stair and banister and the grass grew long between the flags and the fish must have choked in the fishponds for the rubbish that was thrown in them.
We attempted to count the rooms, for it was said that there was one for each day of the year, that is, 365, but Nan said she had heard the same said of other palaces and did not believe it. So we counted, but we made several false starts because we doubled back upon our tracks without knowing it and counted the same room twice.
Have we not already seen that painted cupboard? she would cry, and back we would go to the doorway under Queen Bess’s arms, and begin again.
It was upon our third or fourth attempt that we came to a little low door in a high dark chamber furnished with a bed which was of fine Italian workmanship. The low door opened but stiffly upon its hinges, and we were in a long room with windows as in a cloister. On either side of the room were long tables all covered with dust and upon the tables an array such as I have never seen: of phials and goblets and retorts and crucibles of brass and an alembic or still, of copper, and pans and basins and troughs of clay and iron, all cobwebbed as in a magician’s cave. Behind these there were astronomical instruments – globes, monstrous brass telescopes, balances and prisms and perspectives. At the end of the room was a blackened furnace where great tongs and hammers lay negligently about as though a giant had lately dropped them there. Above our heads in the musty air, pulleys and rope cradles and an apparatus of wood that I knew not the purpose of depended from the beams, so that a man could hang himself in half a dozen ways, if he so fancied.
Bucks’s laboratory, Nan said, this is where he chased after the philosopher’s stone. They say he spent twenty thousand pounds a year on his chemistry. What silly toys will men beggar themselves to have.
How much do you know of chemistry?
As much as you, she said.
I hear his man has discovered a process for making glass equal to the best Venetian. He is to set up a manufactory at Lambeth. The Venetian Ambassador has already complained to the King.
Pooh, if you believe all that, she said.
But I moved about the laboratory in a trance, for I had long wished to dig into the mysteries of Nature but lacked a spade. Now here was a chemist’s utopia, a place where I might retire from the futile bustle of the Court and devote myself to the pursuit of true science.
So you fancy yourself a chemist, do you? You will doubtless soon consort with Mr Boyle.
Don’t mock, Nan. Why shouldn’t I better myself?
Because you have no grounding in that science, my dear boy. You will weary of the pastime in a fortnight. Let’s leave this place, I don’t like the smell.
I was determined to prove her wrong and had the maids sweep out the laboratory and clean the windows. There was a case of learned books under the table, and I began to delve into Principia chymica and other works that might teach me how to make such trials and experiments as would assist me to a deeper understanding of chemistry. I had no overvaulting ambition to become a Grand Master in that science, but it was an agreeable prospect that I might club with the Illuminati of the Royal Society and talk together of experiments, for chemistry was then a profession for gentlemen.
Each day I devoted an hour or two in the afternoon to study of chemistry, when the household was quiet, and I soon chafed to put my art to the practice. It was about this time that Nan began to be struck by intermitting fevers, which I dare say was on account of the marshy country that lay round about. The doctor came out from Chelmsford and commended a decoction of willow bark which he had not with him but would bring tomorrow.
I had read the method in Mr Culpeper’s English Physician and begged Nan that I might be allowed to prepare the medicine myself, for there were many willows growing by the ponds.
Poison me if you will, she said, I’m good for little else now – and lay back upon her pillows as though about to expire.
I stripped the bark from the low trees leaning over the water and then boiled it in canary wine in the duke’s copper still. It made a foul smell and I resolved to dilute it that it might be more potable.
Ugh, said Nan, and instantly vomited and went into minor convulsion. You’ll gain nothing by murdering me, she said, when she had recovered herself, I’ve left you nothing in my will.
You ought to have used the Peruvian bark, the doctor said the next day, though it is so dear. The white Essex willow will not do, and it needs drying first besides.
But her fever is abated, I said.
It would have gone in any case, he said. These fevers are short-lived at this season.
None the less, I chalked my first venture a success, and resolved to advance to more composite experiments that would bring into play more instruments in the Duke’s armoury.
The other Duke (I mean Albemarle, not Bucks) had lately complained about the costs of
governing the State:
In the old days, all it cost was breath. You told a fellow to go and he goeth, but now everything must needs be written down and a copy kept, that if there be any dispute proof of the true order shall be to hand. I never knew such expense, the cabinet’s full of reams of old paper, new offices built to lodge ’em, even the ink costs a king’s ransom.
The ink . . . there perhaps I could help. I dreamed of patents and commissions, of saving the State a fortune, of men turning as I passed and whispering: You must know him, that’s the fellow who invented the new ink. Accordingly I turned to Grimwade’s True Chemist, which was in Bucks’s case, and acquainted myself with the prevailing method.
To manufacture vitriol which makes the best ink
First you must gather from the foreshore of the Thames (or some other great river where they are to be found) the copperas stones or gold stones. Contrary to the suppositions of the foolish, these stones contain not one particle of copper or gold but are made entirely of iron, and the finest of them will serve as flints for muskets.
Place the stones on ground raised like the beds in gardens, one above the other, and let the rain come down upon them and dissolve them so that the liquid drains down into a trench or pipe that conveys it to the house wherein you are to set great pans, at least twelve yards long, of beaten clay where they are to be mixed with iron, then when the liquid is sour, let it flow into lead tanks where it is to be boiled for some days until it be thick, then let it run off into vats where it cools and affixes itself to branches of birch which are to be laid there a-purpose. Thus the liquid will come down to a candy that will hang upon the branches like a bunch of grapes. Then the branches may be taken up and the crystals shaken off them. This is the green vitriol, which is the iron sulphur, and makes the best ink as attested by the Company of Stationers.
Jem (and Sam) Page 18
