Southampton, earl of, see Thomas Wriothesley.
Sir Robert Southwell, MP, diplomat, president of the Royal Society, friend and correspondent of SP.
Frances Stuart, duchess of Richmond, court beauty admired by SP.
Will Symons, government clerk and early ‘clubbing’ friend of SP.
Frances Tooker, probably daughter or niece of John Tooker, who was appointed shipping agent by SP: ‘a pretty child’, sexually abused by SP with the connivance of her mother.
Torrington, earl of, see Arthur Herbert.
John Turner, Yorkshire lawyer husband of SP’s friendly cousin Jane.
Antonio Verrio, Italian painter popular in England and employed by SP to paint a mural for Christ’s Hospital, in which SP figures among the benefactors.
Barbara Villiers, countess of Castlemaine, later duchess of Cleveland, principal mistress of Charles II for many years, admired by SP for her beauty and her reputation for erotic tricks.
George Villiers, second duke of Buckingham, son of the favourite of Charles I and brought up with the future Charles II; rich, brilliant, handsome, irresponsible and vile. While associate of Shaftesbury became paymaster of John Scott, who falsely accused SP of treason.
Vines family, living in New Palace Yard, father Christopher worked for the Exchequer, sons George and Dick drank, played cards and made music with the young SP.
Dr John Wallis, mathematician and member of the Royal Society whose portrait SP commissioned from Kneller for the University of Oxford.
Humfrey Wanley, brilliant young palaeographer befriended by SP in old age.
Sir William Wanen, rich Nonconformist timber merchant who successfully wooed SP for contracts, acquiring a virtual monopoly; later suffered severe losses through fires at his yards.
Jane Welsh, worked for SP’s wig-maker and briefly took SP’s fancy.
Bulstrode Whitelocke, lawyer and diplomat, prominent in Cromwell’s service; purchased pardon from king; diarist.
Bishop John Wilkins, inventor, secretary of the Royal Society, interested in universal language, foretold space travel, admired by SP.
Deborah Willet, EP’s maid/companion with whom SP fell in love.
Sir Joseph Williamson, SP’s contemporary and acquaintance with a similar but more successful career curve: scholarships, public service, MP, court favour, president of the Royal Society, late, grand marriage, weathered 1688 revolution, served William III as zealously as he had his predecessors.
Thomas Wriothesley, fourth earl of Southampton, lord treasurer, son of Shakespeare’s patron, known to SP through the Navy Board and the Tangier Committee.
York, duke of, see James, duke of York.
Prologue
At seven o’clock on a January morning, as the sky over London was growing light, a row broke out in a bedroom between a husband and wife. They had been to the theatre the night before, and afterwards had to wait nearly an hour for a cab. When they finally reached home, rather than going to bed, he insisted on returning to his office – it was across the yard – to finish some work. So although he was usually the first awake and out of bed on a weekday, on this particular day he was sleeping in; or at least he was hoping to. Instead he was woken by an angry and tearful wife.
Still lying in bed and only half awake, he began to take in what she was saying. At first it was a complicated complaint about a maid they had recently dismissed who was spreading stories, accusing her of giving away his money to her family. He had no intention of arguing about this and tactfully calmed her until they seemed to be friends again; but at that point her real grievance appeared, and turned out to be something different and worse. What was really upsetting her, she said, was that she was lonely. She suffered so much from loneliness that she had written him a letter expressing her unhappiness, she reminded him, and handed it to him two months ago. But he had refused to read it and burnt it without even glancing at her carefully chosen words.1
Now she told him she had kept a copy – it was something she must have learnt from his meticulous office habits – and she called their maid Jane into the bedroom, gave her the keys of her trunk and told her to fetch the bundle of papers she kept locked inside. Jane, who knew both of them well and had witnessed many scenes, brought the papers and discreetly left the room again. Elizabeth Pepys began to read the letter aloud to her husband. The scene is played out in front of us on the page of his Diary: it is Friday, 9 January 1663.
His wife’s letter impressed Pepys so much that he began to worry about its falling into anyone else’s hands. It was ‘picquant, and wrote in English and most of it true’ – he specified English because French came as naturally to her – and it would reflect badly on him. He asked her to tear it up, and when she did not respond he ordered her to do so. She refused. He snatched it from her along with the whole bundle of her private papers; then he got out of bed in his nightshirt and stuffed them all into the large pockets of his breeches, which were lying by the bed. He had to struggle into the breeches and put on his stockings and gown, defending himself from her attempts to retrieve her property. When he was half dressed, he started pulling the papers out again one by one and tearing them up, while she cried and begged to have them back. By now she was more distressed than she had been at the start of their talk, and he was in a rage. He let his anger flare up so fiercely that when he came to his own love letters he began to tear them up too. Then he tore the copy of the will he had written and given her, in which he had left her all he had.
Yet all the time a corner of himself was calm enough to notice and set aside certain papers. There was a bond and their marriage licence: money and the law must be respected. He also spared the first letter he had ever sent her; and, when he felt he had gone far enough to make his point, he took all the papers, the ones he had torn and the ones he had spared, into his own room and considered whether he should burn them. He put aside the pieces of his will and of her letter to him that had started the trouble, and all the papers he had left intact. Everything else went on the fire. After that he finished dressing and departed for the office, ‘troubled in mind’.
We know all this because he described it himself. In writing it down, he detached himself from the self who acted out the scene. He watched himself just as he watched Elizabeth, or Jane; just as he had watched the players and the audience in the theatre the night before. His conflicting emotions – indignation and anger, pity for her and acknowledgement that she was justified in what she had done – make this as absorbing as a scene in a play or novel. It is life, but as he writes it down it becomes art; and it is the art of a diarist of genius, one who does not choose to give himself the beau rôle. Later in his career Pepys sometimes stood greatly on his dignity, but here in the pages of his own Diary he assumes none of the gravitas we should all like to claim for ourselves in a bedroom row. He struggles into his breeches, he behaves unjustly and cruelly, he offers no justification of any kind for his behaviour except his anger and fear of being blamed. This is what he had seen and what he had felt, transmuted into words.
The quarrel was made up in the evening, but the morning scene was a painful landmark in the marriage. To both husband and wife the written word was of great importance. Both were readers, and destruction of the written evidence of their love and its history was a symbolic act. The marriage, which had never been calm, became increasingly stormy after this. In the long run even the torn pieces of Elizabeth’s letter failed to survive, and not a single line of her writing has reached us among all the masses of papers he preserved. His heirs, rather than Pepys himself, may have been responsible for this; and, in any case, if he himself controlled the record by destroying her complaint and leaving only his version, it is also true that his version was one she would probably have accepted as accurate and fair.
Other diaries of the seventeenth century were devoted to the spiritual life, to politics or to accounts of travel and sightseeing, and even those that do give some details of domestic life are discreet about mari
tal disagreements. It would not be too surprising to find that Pepys, as a busy government administrator, kept notes about his work and contacts, even his reading and theatregoing. What is extraordinary is that he went into areas no one else considered recording, looked at himself with as much curiosity as he looked at the exterior world, weighing himself and the world equally in the balance. Sometimes he divided himself as he wrote to report on his own condition: ‘a great joy it is to me to see myself in a good disposition to business’, he remarked on the first day of March 1666, having found himself guilty of backsliding with a woman on the last day of February. The shamelessness of his self-observation deserves to be called scientific. Just about every aspect of his behaviour is set out, from his working practices and his professional and moral struggles to his bowel movements and ejaculations. He knows how to shape his material, where to linger, where to give a piece of direct speech, where to hurry on. He is also singular in having the steady application needed to write regularly and at the same time a romantic and tempestuous nature that made almost every day an adventure of the spirit and the senses. It took the eye and application of a scientist and the pen of an artist to catch for ever in his tidy shorthand that cold midwinter morning in the bedroom in Seething Lane, in the heart of the City.
And much more. The Diary is best known for his reporting of the national disasters that struck England while he was keeping it: the great plague of 1665, the great fire of London in 1666, the Dutch attack on the Medway in 1667. The record of these and other public events is used by historians and read with enjoyment by schoolchildren, because his reporter’s eye was as keenly trained on them as it was on his private experience. What he was doing in such reporting was more significant than may appear at first glance, because the censorship imposed by the government of Charles II ensured that there were no newspapers at this period except for a single government-controlled information sheet, the London Gazette. It meant that no proper record of public events was being kept, and even parliamentary debates were not allowed to be reported. Pepys was performing a unique public function. He had grown up in the 1640s and 1650s when there was no censorship, and pamphlets and papers appeared at a great rate, sometimes as many as three a day, making a better-informed public than there had ever been. He was formed by that culture, with its faith in the power of the written word. He lived with it as a schoolboy at St Paul’s and as a student at Cambridge, and saw it hailed as a sign of national strength by his predecessor at St Paul’s and Cambridge, John Milton. It was after Cromwell imposed censorship again in 1655 that Pepys began to compose private newsletters for his patron and cousin, Edward Montagu, keeping him abreast of what was going on in London. The few of those letters to survive give all the evidence one could want of his abilities as a journalist. It was a natural step to proceed from composing newsletters to making his own record of events. The Diary gives both a cool critique of Charles II’s performance in the House of Commons and a panoramic account of London and its people – in political turmoil, at work and at play, in celebration and at war, and enduring disease, death and destruction.
As well as being a diarist, Pepys is regarded as one of the most important naval administrators in England’s history. He rose to a position of eminence and power and was proud of his work in organizing, disciplining and developing the navy, and in insisting that shipbuilding must be properly funded. Those who most admire the administrator are sometimes ambivalent about the Diary. The great Pepys scholar J. R. Tanner wrote that ‘At certain points in the Diary we can see the great official maturing, but in the main the intimate self-revelation of a human being seems far removed from official life. It is the combination of qualities that is so astounding, and those who regard Pepys only as “the most amusing and capable of our seventeenth-century diarists” – a mere literary performer making sport for us – do little justice to a great career.’2 Tanner was careful not to endorse the idea that Pepys is ‘a mere literary performer’, but he did describe the Diary as ‘an indiscretion of his youth’, and underlying his remarks was a preference for dwelling on the ‘great career’ and an assumption – which others have shared – that official life and intimate experience are indeed far removed from one another.
The truth is that the Diary demonstrates precisely how close and interdependent they are. Both the account of his working life and the great set-pieces of reporting insist on telling us this truth. Pepys lets us know that each of us inhabits a perpetually fluctuating environment, and that we are changed, moved and sometimes controlled by our inner tides and weather fronts even when we are most engaged in official functions. Committee meetings, office life and relations with colleagues are laid out in all their bristling competitiveness, jealousies, fears, pomposities, backbiting and disappointments. It makes high entertainment, and at the same time provides real insight into how administrative procedures work, good enough to be applied to today as well as to three hundred years ago. I don’t doubt that, had the Diary continued as frankly into the years in which he was secretary to the navy, we should have learnt much more.
But it did not, and his literary gifts were specific to the Diary and the unofficial letters. When, with much encouragement from his friend John Evelyn, he embarked on a history of the navy his genius deserted him. The single volume he published in 1690, Memoires Relating to the State of the Royal Navy of England, is a curiosity, of interest to naval historians only, its value disputed even by them.3 He must have felt unhappy with it himself, because the mass of materials he collected towards writing more naval history remained in note form, suggesting that, once he had tested himself as a historian, he understood that his skills did not lie there. He knew that the burden of his work as a civil servant had stood in the way of becoming more of a scholar and a writer, of developing what he called his ‘liberal genius’, and he sometimes regretted it was so.4
It is tantalizing to think that a less successful career might have given us more volumes of the Diary. His reason for abandoning it was fear that his eyesight was failing; yet his eyes, although they troubled him, served him to the end of his life. Why did he not return to it? It may have been that the break in his circumstances at the end of 1669, as though a line had been drawn under one part of his life, determined him not to revive it. Or that, like some other writers, he knew he could never equal what he had already written and decided he had done enough. He did keep two brief journals later, one of them an intermittent daily record of the early months of 1680, another in the autumn of 1683, known as the Tangier Diary.5 They are useful and informative but have none of the qualities of the first Diary. Something essential was missing – some grit that had caused him to produce his pearl. There were at least two sorts of grit at work in the great Diary. One was his determination to prove himself, to show what he was capable of, and how much better gifted and qualified to a position of power than almost everyone placed above him. The other grit was Elizabeth, to whom he was bound emotionally and imaginatively. The tension between his day-to-day relations with ‘my wife’ and what he wrote down and kept secret from her is palpable; her presence or absence, her provocations and her anger, are shown over and over again as touching his deepest self. The Diary could hardly have existed without his sense that he and Elizabeth were inextricably joined.
Yet it allows us to experience the world from inside his skin, and for all its huge, Shakespearean cast of characters, it is always essentially a rhapsody on himself at the centre. This is the controlling force throughout the work. Whatever the tensions with others, he is in love with his own nature, and the adventures each day brings must revolve round that adored, although often uncomfortable, self. When he behaves outrageously, his gift for comedy makes it easy for us to collude with him, and even as we sweat guiltily alongside him it is hard not to laugh. Shocked, but also sympathetic, we share in financial scandal and sexual farce, turning the rigid oughts and ought nots of life upside down for a couple of hours.
The politician Tony Benn has said that he w
rites his diary in order to experience everything three times, once as lived, once in the writing down, once in the later reading of what he has written. It is a good explanation, and there is a further reason, which is to offer yourself to posterity. Whether Pepys had any idea that he was embarking on a unique project when he began to keep his Diary on 1 January 1660, he must soon have come to see that he had done so. Yet he was alone in knowing this, and he lived and died alone in the knowledge. He made his reputation in the world in a wholly different way, as a naval administrator, a friend and colleague of the powerful and learned, an influential figure in the running of charitable foundations, a man of substance and virtue. The Diary keeper, his own young self, was only setting out on his career, and one of the basic principles of the Diary was that he allowed himself not a shred of dignity. When he was an old man, highly respected and respectable, he had to decide whether to destroy or preserve its six volumes. Happily he chose not only to preserve them but to bequeath and protect them in such a way that they were going to be discovered and read by posterity. ‘The greatness of his life was open, yet he longed to communicate its smallness also.’6 The greatest thing about Pepys, after the composition of the Diary, was his decision to preserve it. How such a man was formed and developed, and in what circumstances he came to embark on his Diary, are the themes of the first part of this book.
PART ONE
1633–1660
1. The Elected Son
He was born in London, above the shop, just off Fleet Street, in Salisbury Court, where his father John Pepys ran a tailoring business, one of many serving the lawyers living in the area. The house backed on to the parish church of St Bride’s, where all the babies of the family were christened and two were already buried in the churchyard; when he was a man, Pepys still kept the thought in his mind of ‘my young brothers and sisters’ laid in the ground outside the house of his youth.1 Salisbury Court was an open space surrounded by a mixture of small houses like John Pepys’s and large ones, once the abodes of bishops and ambassadors, with gardens; it was entered through narrow lanes, one from Fleet Street opposite Shoe Lane, another in the south-west corner leading into Water Lane and so down to the Thames and river steps fifty yards below.2 The south-facing slope above the river was a good place to live; people had been settled here since Roman times, and when Pepys was born in 1633 a Christian church had stood on the spot for at least five hundred years.3 A block to the east was the Fleet River, with the pink brick crenellated walls of Bridewell rising beside it; it had been built as a palace by King Henry VIII and deteriorated into a prison for vagrants, homeless children and street women, known to the locals as ‘Bridewell Birds’. A footbridge spanned the Fleet between Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill, and from St Bride’s you could look across its deep valley – much deeper then than it is today – with houses crammed up both sides in a maze of courts and alleys, to old St Paul’s rising on its hill above the City.
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self Page 3
