Epilogue
But here the manuscript breaks off and another hand has written in a more flowing script:
These books removed for safe keeping
R. M. Whitstable, 17 May, 1695
On turning the page, I found an ancient newspaper cutting pasted in, so faded as to be scarcely legible and looking to be of much the same date as the manuscript. What it said was:
A strange and tragical accident interrupted the visit to Whitstable of the proprietor of a copperas factory at that fair port. Mr Richard Mount of the Mendfield House had purposed to inspect the works with his wife and a party of ladies and gentlemen from London, when a mechanic employed to run the copperas into coolers by a gross mischance slipped in up to his breast. Every assistance was given by Mr Knewstub, the manager of the works, and his men, but in twenty-four hours a mortification ensued and two hours after the man died at the World’s End, a tavern kept by Mrs Abigail Splint, where he lodged. His name was J. Churn.
‘How would Richard Mount have got hold of the memoirs?’
‘Oh,’ my fellow editor replied without hesitation, ‘he would have been quick to go through Jem’s things, to prepare himself for any revelations which might damage his social position, he had to destroy any incriminating material. He could have told Mrs Splint that he was anxious to make sure Mr Churn’s possessions were sent on to his relatives.’
‘Do you think she noticed the mysterious Mr Churn’s resemblance to Richard? Did Knewstub?’
‘They probably both did, but people were used to that kind of thing then. They’d hold their tongues to keep their job,’ Doddy said.
‘Anyway, RM’s son and his grandson kept the Mendfield House for most of the following century, so it worked out all right for them. Jem was like Banquo, I suppose, met an untimely death.’
‘“. . . thou shalt get Kings though thou be none.” Anyway, not so very untimely. By my calculations he was well into his sixties.’
‘Did Richard read it all, do you think?’
‘Yes, I imagine so, just to see what else he might find out about his father.’
‘In that case,’ I asked, ‘why didn’t he burn the memoirs after he had read them? I mean, they aren’t exactly a credit to the family name.’
‘No, I expect it was a kind of, well, piety,’ Doddy suggested. ‘Here was the last, the only record of his true parentage and it would have been somehow sacrilegious to get rid of it.’
I was not convinced by this and pressed on: ‘And why did Jem fall in the cooler? He must have known those platforms and ladders pretty well by then. You don’t normally hear of older workmen having the bad accidents. It’s usually the younger men, the ones who are more impetuous in their movements.’
‘Perhaps he was running to see his son,’ Doddy hazarded.
‘Or running away so as not to be seen by him.’
‘To spare him embarrassment, you think?’
‘Or not to be too much moved by seeing him again?’
‘You think so?’ Doddy said. ‘I think you’re giving Jem credit for too much delicacy.’
‘Not me,’ I said.
The archivist extraordinaire looked at me, grunted or smiled – perhaps both – and said he had to nip out to the bank before it closed.
After he had gone, an odd heaviness fell upon me. I felt almost paralysed and sat quite still for a minute or two, expecting the feeling to pass which it did but only to be succeeded by a clumsy restlessness. I stood up and began packing away the transcripts and the other papers and reference books we had been working on, but with a weird flurry as if there was some sort of closing time imminent. While I was shaking a pile of papers level on the table, my elbow knocked against the dumpy oak box and sent it crashing to the floor. I picked it up, put it back on the table, then began to put the original ledgers back in it. As I settled the last one in, there was a squeaky noise from the bottom of the box, quite faint and rather human, the kind of noise you might make when a child punches you in the stomach. I stood motionless for a few seconds. The noise seemed like a tiny protest. Then I took the ledgers out again, one by one, and felt the bottom of the box.
There was a bit of give in the bottom and another squeak, fainter still, when I pushed it down until there was no give left in it.
I put the box upside down and rapped it firmly on the bottom a couple of times. There was a slapping sound. Holding the box at an angle, I could see the delicately hinged flap that had come loose when the box had fallen. Prising it up with the tips of my fingers, I saw into the secret compartment.
How could we have been so stupid as not to realise that Jem would have been using one of his old captain’s portable libraries for his own?
There were only two objects in the secret compartment: a dusty, roundish thing and a piece of paper. The round thing had a minimal fragrance when I held it in my hand. It was shrivelled and studded with tiny black twiggy bits. When I blew the dust off it and held it to my nose, the fragrance seemed more familiar. I pulled off one of the tiny twigs and bit it. Cloves. A pomander. The one Nan gave him after his first visit to the Three Spanish Gypsies. I put the pomander back in the box and took out a piece of paper: stained, torn at one corner, the brown ink so faded that I had to take it to the window to read it. There were two lines of writing on it: the first easily legible in a tidy clerk’s hand: ‘To John Capps of HMS Lion seven pounds ten shillings’. Then below it, in a hastier scrawl: ‘paid to Mr Pepys’.
Notes
I The Marsh
Jem is Describing here the marshes of North Kent, between Canterbury and the Isle of Thanet, then as now a queer cut-off place with flint-and-ragstone churches rearing out of the low swampland, ancient, marooned, aloof, while half a mile away lorries roar by on their way to the Channel ports. Many of Jem’s kinsmen grow apples there to this day. Mount is still a common name in the Canterbury telephone book. The weirdness of Romney Marsh – which lies to the south-east on the other side of the North Downs – is legendary and noted by Wells, Dickens and Kipling (the saying ‘The world, according to the best geographers, is divided into Europe, Asia, Africa, America and Romney Marsh’ is first found in The Ingoldsby Legends, 1840–7). But the marshes round Churn are stranger still. Something about the sea light perhaps.
Although Jem gives no date, these fears of Dutch competition and of actual invasion must date from the late 1640s, when Jem would have been about sixteen. He nowhere gives us his date of birth, and the Churn parish register for those years has long been lost. The First Dutch War did not break out until 1652. It was in the Second Dutch War (1665-7) that Jem played a remarkable if brief part.
The erotic works mentioned here as part of Jem’s stock have mostly disappeared, apart from Aretine’s Postures, and The Night-Walker, a bestseller of the day. Waggoners Pilot was the standard series of chart-books which preceded The English Pilot and, later, Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot, of which we shall hear more. Waggoner was an Anglicisation of the Dutch surname Waghenaer. Many of the best early sea-charts were Dutch and accordingly pirated by unscrupulous English publishers, including Mount & Page.
II The Shop
John Aubrey also quotes the verse about the Five Women-Barbers in his portrait of General Monck. Like many other chroniclers of the time, he is scornful of Nan’s origins. Snobbery, a fruitful failing in a diarist, tends to handicap historians.
The Three Spanish Gypsies seems to have been one of the most successful mercer’s shops of its day. Yet its proprietor Thomas Radford has disappeared into thin air. Even in his own time, nobody knew when he died or what happened to his fortune.
William Fisher, Jr, had been in business as a stationer on Postern Row, Tower Hill, since the late 1630s. It was this same business that Richard was to marry into and bequeath to his sons.
Postern Row was a row of houses that formerly stood in the middle of the present roadway on the north side of the Tower and had once ended at the Postern Gate of the old City wall. After the wall was demolished,
Postern Row remained for another century and was itself demolished only in the nineteenth century when the road was widened as an approach to the new Tower Bridge. Apart from the premises in Postern Row, Richard Mount also owned a house at the back, in George Yard, where there was a toll bar (no doubt to compensate for the expense originally incurred in breaking through the wall), and the family collected the fees until 1766, when Parliament passed an Act to demolish the remainder of the wall and all the City gates. When becalmed in traffic beside the Tower, I like to think of Richard and his sons coming home from business in the evening and looking in at the tollbooth to inquire about the day’s takings.
The menagerie in the Tower of London continued in existence from Edward I’s time until 1834, when the last animals were moved to the new London Zoo.
The story of Jeremiah’s first meetings with the Two Messengers is described in The Acts of the Witness of the Spirit of Lodowick Muggleton (II.5 and III.4). Apart from the meeting recorded here, other contacts must have occurred for years after Jem lost his faith, because there is even a reference to one in the Calendar of State Papers: Charles II-4, Oct. 28 1663 ‘68. Jer. Mount to Mr Muggleton, of London. Private affairs. Sends letters to be forwarded.’ Yet there is nothing of this connection even in the immortal edition of Pepys’s Diary by R. C. Latham and W. Matthews, to which all Pepysians owe an unending debt. To this day, Jeremiah has succeeded in keeping dark his Muggletonian past. It was no way to get on in the Restoration Civil Service.
Mary Court married Ralph Mount in January 1654. Jem, unreliable in so much else, usually gets his dates right.
It may seem odd to us that General Monck should have been sent to command the fleet, knowing little or nothing of naval tactics or indeed of the sea. But life was less compartmented then, and Monck did beat the Dutch in this the First Dutch war. The Second Dutch War a decade later, when Monck was Commander-in-Chief, did not go so well.
III The Palace
The Cockpit, where Jem lodges in Peter Llewelyn’s old rooms, stood roughly where the Cabinet Office now stands. Much the same business is carried on there today, but only a few fragments of the old buildings remain.
I do not understand why the French should have complained that the London smog was blighting their vines, when the prevailing wind was then as now in precisely the opposite direction.
On 16 December 1653, Oliver Cromwell was declared by the Instrument of Government to be ‘Lord Protector for his life’. Among many other palaces and states, Hampton Court and Whitehall were vested in ‘the present Lord Protector and the succeeding Lord Protectors’. Cromwell took up residence at Hampton Court in April 1654, with several squatters from Kingston still in situ. Parliament allotted him £54,000 a year for the upkeep of his estates, rising to £100,000 in the last year of his life. Furniture and works of art valued at £35,497 which had belonged to Charles I were put at his disposal. Three of his daughters, Betty, Mary and Frances, and their husbands all had lodgings in Hampton Court.
This first meeting between Jem and Sam must have taken place some time in 1655, because Pepys and Elizabeth were married in December that year.
IV The Barge
Alan Broderick, a drunken crony of Clarendon’s, told his master that Nan was an ‘extreme good woman’ and ‘because it was (as she saith frankly) her old trade, she would save the king half in buying linen for his tables and beds’ (Clarendon State Papers iii.739). Others were not so appreciative. Thurloe described Nan as ‘an ugly common whore’, and Pepys could not stand her. Her greed on behalf of her relatives was much remarked on, though such behaviour was the norm among those of nobler birth than Nan.
While sailing with Mountagu to fetch the King, Pepys had been put in charge of his patron’s eldest son, Edward (‘the child’), then aged twelve, who kept on disappearing during their visits to Delft and the Hague, partly because Pepys was trying to pick up a woman. He had no luck.
Edward Mountagu, Earl of Sandwich (1625-72) was the son of a Royalist but himself joined the Parliamentary side, fought at Marston Moor and Naseby and then retired to his estates at Hinchingbrooke before returning to politics as a moderate friend and ally of Cromwell’s in the 1650s. Tired of revolutionary instability, he went over to the King and brought him back from exile and was accordingly showered with honours. As an Admiral, he won a brilliant victory at Lowestoft in the Second Dutch War, then fell out of favour, but resumed his command in the Third Dutch War, though opposed to it, and died in the Battle of Sole Bay. Linguist, musician and artist, he shared many of Pepys’s tastes, and traits – being talented, secretive, lecherous and ambitious – but they drifted apart before his death. His mother was Paulina, the daughter of John Pepys of Cottenham, usually described as Samuel’s aunt, in fact, great-aunt, but by a slippage of the generations Sandwich was only eight years older than his first cousin once removed, the tailor’s son, and on occasion Sam was not too subservient to shrink from giving ‘my lord’ unwelcome advice, such as that he must give up his mistress.
Sir John Robinson (1625-80) was Lieutenant of the Tower for nearly twenty years after the Restoration. He had been a colonel in the Civil War and Master of the Clothworkers’ Company. Pepys shared Jem’s opinion of him. His interminable views on the traffic problems of the City were a well-known conversational hazard of the day.
V The Tower
Before the Civil War, the Palace had no less than three tennis courts. After the Restoration, one was converted into Monmouth’s lodgings, another which had been converted under the Commonwealth into a garden belonging to Sandwich’s apartments was converted back into a tennis court, much to his annoyance, by Captain Thomas Cooke, Master of the Tennis Court for nearly forty years. There is no record of his employing M. de la Tuile. Charles II was an extremely keen player. It is hard to tell quite how good he was; Pepys says: ‘To see how the King’s play was extolled without any cause at all was a loathsome sight though sometimes indeed he did play very well and deserved to be commended; but such open flattery is beastly.’ The King liked to weigh himself before and after playing. After the game, he had sweated off 4½ pounds. Prince Rupert was also a keen player.
The Counter or Compter was the name given to the two prisons owned by the City and used for the punishment of civil offences, one in Great Wood Street, the other in Poultry. Both were destroyed in the Fire and rebuilt.
Alexander (d.1672) and Dorothea (b. 1609) St Michel: he was the son of a minor nobleman of Anjou, disinherited for turning Protestant and so came to England. After being dismissed from Henrietta Maria’s court, he went to Ireland where he married, in about 1639, Dorothea who was the widow of Thomas Fleetwood of Co. Cork. The children, Elizabeth and Balthazar – the erratic Balty – are said to have been born in Devon.
Prince Rupert (1619-82), son of the Elector Frederick and James I’s daughter Elizabeth. Commanded the Royalist Navy (1648-52) and was an Admiral in the Second and Third Dutch Wars, as brilliant a naval commander as he had been as a cavalry leader in the Civil War. Also a keen entrepreneur and trader, engraver and scientific dabbler or ‘projector’, the pejorative term used by his critics.
Will Hewer (1642-1715) was Pepys’s office-boy-cum-manservant, then moved with Pepys to the Admiralty in 1673, becoming Chief Clerk in 1674 and Judge Advocate-General in 1677. He was also briefly imprisoned by the incoming regime in 1679, used the same shorthand as his old master, and kept a diary (mostly lost). He made a huge fortune, no one is quite sure how. Bought what is now No. 12 Buckingham Street, then York Buildings, and shared it with Pepys. Also bought a country house in Clapham which he filled with Indian and Chinese curiosities and of which we are to hear more.
James Pierce was in fact the most celebrated naval surgeon of the day. He had been surgeon in the Naseby before the Restoration, rose to become Surgeon-General of the Fleet in the Second and Third Dutch Wars. Introduced hospital ships and the keeping of proper medical records. His report on the treatment of the sick and wounded is a landmark in military medicine. He was
also surgeon to the Duke of York and other members of the royal household, hence his fund of gossip. His beautiful wife Elizabeth bore him nineteen children.
VI The Laboratory
The stained-glass window of Catherine of Aragon and the wretched Prince Arthur, originally intended for Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster, first found its way to Waltham Abbey, then at the Dissolution of the Monasteries was transferred to Beaulieu and buried underground to preserve it from destructive Puritans, and then transferred again to New Hall at the Restoration. In the eighteenth century, it was sold to a Mr Conyers for £50, who in turn sold it to the parishioners of St Margaret’s, Westminster for 400 guineas. Today the window forms the East window of St Margaret’s, Westminster. It is the most beautiful window in London and one of the strangest survivals. New Hall still stands, or a large part of it does, a low rambling palace outside Chelmsford. Since 1799, it has been the property of the canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre, which is a nice revenge on the atheist Bucks.
In most respects, the Duke of Buckingham, ‘fiddler, chemist, buffoon’, was, as Dryden says, everything by starts and nothing long, but his passion was at least sustained in two fields: women and chemistry, of the applied sort (he hoped to make some money out of the latter to pay for the former). He took out a patent for making mirrors, drinking glasses and coach glasses and imported Venetian workmen for his Lambeth factory.
The Chelmsford doctor’s decoction of willow bark was in fact a primitive form of aspirin, quite common at the time although it took modern science another two centuries to manufacture an artificial compound (acetylsalicylic acid) with the same effects as were clearly spelled out by Culpeper. The word Aspirin is first found in 1899.
Jem (and Sam) Page 42
