Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  Like Hinchingbrooke, it is still standing, still with a large garden and surrounded by open fields.5 A footpath round the back of the garden leads to the church, and to the Bull Inn, both well known to Sam.6 Captain Pepys must have got his nephew on to a horse and riding like a country boy, because when he was a man Sam thought nothing of riding a hired horse from London to Huntingdon in a day. But whether he spent more time at Brampton or at Hinchingbrooke is an open question: great houses maintained large numbers of servants and dependants and easily absorbed an odd boy into the family; and long afterwards, when Sam was married and had his own home, he still behaved as though he belonged to the Montagu family, dropping in uninvited for meals with the other servants and staying overnight whenever he felt like it.

  As a boy with a sense of his own worth, whose schooling so far had been meagre, he must have been avid for education; and serious teaching is what you got at a grammar school, all day long, from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon. Two hours were allowed for lunch in the middle of the day, time to walk to Brampton and back, although the Hinchingbrooke kitchens would have been handier. Huntingdon School had a reputation, made under its headmaster Thomas Beard, who had sent his best pupils on to Cambridge, Oliver Cromwell among them. Latin was the chief subject, and the master’s job was to put Latin into the heads of the boys, so forcefully that they could think and write in Latin as easily as in English.7 Very little else was studied except for some Greek by those who did well with their Latin and a bit of basic Hebrew for the exceptional pupil. Mathematics was hardly mentioned, beyond learning the Roman numerals, which took precedence over the Arabic ones, and Pepys had to learn his multiplication tables when he was twenty-nine.

  Once past elementary grammar and vocabulary, Latin was taught largely by translating classical texts into English and then back into Latin, the object being to finish as close to the original as you could. It was common for boys to be punished if they failed to talk to one another in Latin, and parents occasionally complained of their sons forgetting how to read English.8 In any case they did not study English writers – no Chaucer, Bacon, Shakespeare, Jonson or Donne. They learnt instead to compose verses, essays and letters in Latin, and became familiar with a list of ancient authors that included Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Terence, Juvenal and Livy. The aim was admirable for anyone who wanted to correspond with foreigners, since Latin was used by all educated Europeans; Milton was appointed ‘Latin secretary’ to Cromwell when he became lord protector, in order to compose diplomatic correspondence for him in that language. Pepys was a good scholar, able to read Latin for pleasure all his life; and that very skill may have helped to leave his English free and uncluttered for the Diary, the language of life as opposed to the elaborately constructed formulations of the classroom and study.

  By the time Sam arrived at Huntingdon School Cromwell’s teacher Thomas Beard was no longer in charge, and his successor, Henry Cooke, was not interested in the job. He paid a substitute £10 a year to teach the boys, and it was this nameless and no doubt penniless scholar who gave Sam a good-enough grounding to allow him to go on to St Paul’s School in London, and to do well there.9 How long he was at Huntingdon School we don’t know. It may have been only a year, possibly two, but only one friend from the school puts in an appearance later, Tom Alcock, whom he met again in the spring of 1660, remarking that he had not seen him for sixteen years, i.e., since 1644.10 The headmaster of St Paul’s, John Langley, particularly disliked taking pupils over the age of eleven, on the grounds that the school suffered from boys ‘who have been tossed about from schole to schole until 13 or 14 yeares of age and then come fitted for nothing but knavery and Idlenesse and soe drawe lesser and more towardly children by their example into rudeness and idlenesse’.11 If Langley was serious about this, Sam may have been back in London and attending St Paul’s before he was twelve in February 1645. But not before he had plenty of time to get to know Huntingdon, with its four churches, its ancient bridge over the Ouse, its straggling half-mile of high street and its green surrounding territory.

  The other good thing Sam found at Huntingdon was Hinchingbrooke House. Even if any meals he ate there were taken with the servants in the kitchen, the grandeur of the place, with its wide windows and high-ceilinged rooms, must have reminded him of Durdans. And with Jemima Montagu presiding over the place, its appeal would have been even greater. A boy of ten, far from his family and with a precocious susceptibility to women, could play Cherubino to my Lady, a young bride, also separated from her family, with her husband away at the wars, and no baby yet in prospect. If so, it was the beginning of an intimacy that persisted into his adult life, when she always looked on him ‘like one of her own family’, entrusted her children to his care, scolded him, joked with him, borrowed money from him, consulted him and confided in him. And he reciprocated with devoted admiration and respect; for him she was always the model of what a woman should be.

  Hinchingbrooke, Brampton and Huntingdon are all remarkably little changed by the passing of the centuries since Pepys knew them. The nuns placed their abbey very well on one of the few areas of high ground above the water-meadows, and when they were evicted the cloister became a courtyard, the chapel a library, the refectory part of a great hall; the chapter-house entrance was simply bricked up, coming to light again only at the end of the twentieth century.12 Two magnificent bay windows were brought from Ramsey Abbey, as well as a triple-arched gatehouse sporting the figure of a Green Man; and another big semicircular two-storey stone bay was added to the façade. The mixture of medieval grey stone and rich Tudor red brick, the jumble of outbuildings, the parade of tall chimneys, the formally planted gardens and trees all added to Hinchingbrooke’s charm. It was ‘old, spacious, irregular, yet not vast or forlorn’.13 The terrace, face to the sun, offered spectacular views over the flat countryside below, and the park sloped down to one of the Ouse’s tributary streams and a series of wide, glinting ponds.

  You can still walk from Robert Pepys’s house in Brampton, past Hinchingbrooke and on to Huntingdon and, traffic apart, enjoy most of the sights past which Sam trudged in the 1640s: the Nuns’ Meadows on the left, and on the right the huge expanse of Portholme Meadow, supposed to be the biggest in England; it has lost its windmills and watermill and taken in a railway embankment, but is otherwise very much the same as when it was described as ‘the largest and most flowery spot the sun ever beheld’.14 A dip in the path takes the walker across Alconbury Brook by the Nuns’ Bridge, and up what is still the old lane along the edge of Hinchingbrooke Park and beneath the wall of the terrace, then on past the gatehouse and close to the windows of the house itself. This is about halfway between Brampton and the centre of Huntingdon, and the road continues straight on into what was George Street in the seventeenth century – named for St George – and still bears the same name. Today the town starts with the railway station, a row of nineteenth-century villas and almshouses, and there is a ring road to cross, but after that you are again alongside buildings well known to Pepys: the George Inn on the left, All Saints’ Church on the right, with the market place beyond it, all facing on to the high street ahead. The school building, in his day encased in red brick, now shorn away to reveal its original medieval stone, is on the other side of the high street.15

  As a grown man, Pepys’s opinion of life in the country veered between condescension towards the poverty and ignorance of ordinary rural people and occasional bursts of appreciation of the scenery and the quiet life that could be lived there. He wrote about how much he enjoyed a walk in Portholme Meadow with his father in the summer of 1661, and the following year the same meadow inspired him to one of his most lyrical passages: ‘with my father took a melancholy walk to Portholme, seeing the country-maids milking their Cowes there (they being now at grasse) and to see with what mirth they come all home together in pomp with their milk, and sometimes they have musique go before them’.16 The ‘sometimes’ tells you this was not the first time he had watc
hed and listened to the milkmaids; and of course it was not, because he must have seen and heard them often when he was a boy.

  But cows and milkmaids were of less moment at Brampton and at Hinchingbrooke in 1644, when the talk would have centred around the war that was being fought, bitterly and confusedly, all over England. News of the military campaigns and the part played in the fighting by the young master of Hinchingbrooke – Sam’s own kin – was eagerly awaited. Montagu, tall and as handsome as his enemy Prince Rupert, and with the same shoulder-length curls, was only eight years older than Sam, and he was galloping about the country risking his life, and often at the side of a still greater local hero. Not only had Hinchingbrooke belonged to Cromwell’s grandfather, half the gentry of Huntingdonshire were Cromwells when Oliver Cromwell was born in the town, and he had been elected its MP in 1628. It did not prevent the town from being politically divided, in the same way the Montagu family was divided. Sir Sidney remained unbudgeably loyal to the king, refused a levy made by parliament and was imprisoned briefly in the Tower; he then remained in retirement in Northamptonshire, no doubt nursing some bitter feelings about his son and his son-in-law Gilbert Pickering, as well as their cousin, the earl of Manchester, who became major-general in charge of all the parliamentary forces in East Anglia in August 1643. Edward found in Cromwell a hero, a friend and perhaps a surrogate father, and so he remained for fifteen years, during which he fought beside him, participated in his government of the country and accepted high appointments from him. A few months before Cromwell’s death he expressed his continuing strong personal attachment to him.17 He also shared Cromwell’s religious faith: it is strongly expressed in his letters during these early years.

  Edward was given a commission to raise a regiment in Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely in the autumn of 1643. In the winter he was in Bedford, raising more men and horses. Early in 1644 he went with Manchester to Cambridge to purge the university of senior members suspected of royalist sympathies; eleven of the sixteen heads of the colleges were turned out and replaced by puritan scholars.18 After this came his first experience of battle at the storming of Hillesden House under Cromwell’s leadership in March. The summer of 1644 was spent fighting gloriously in the north. He led his men in hand-to-hand combat in the assault on Lincoln in May, fought in the thick of Marston Moor in July and received the surrender of York on behalf of the earl of Manchester soon afterwards, when he was just nineteen. After this proud moment he was back recruiting again in Huntingdon in the autumn – once the harvest had been brought in – and was at Hinchingbrooke to tell his battle stories and receive the admiration of his household. That September his father died, as far as we know unreconciled.

  At this point the earl of Manchester began to have doubts about the cause. Accused by parliament of dragging his feet, he told Cromwell, ‘If we beat the king ninety and nine times, yet he is king still and so will his posterity be after him; but if the king beat us once, we shall all be hanged, and our posterity made slaves.’ To which Cromwell replied, ‘My Lord, if this be so, why did we take up arms at first?’19 Montagu took Cromwell’s side in the argument and joined in public criticism of the earl; and Manchester gave up his command in the spring of 1645, when the New Model Army was being formed. Montagu was made governor of Henley, where he had to put down mutinous, because unpaid, troops, and in the summer he was fighting in the West Country.

  Cromwell was now established as a great figure in the eyes of the whole nation, enemies as well as friends. Prince Rupert called him ‘Old Ironsides’, and his soldiers became Ironsides too. When he went recruiting for his New Model Army in the Isle of Ely in June 1645, men flocked to join him. Among their thirty-seven officers, seven had risen from non-gentry families, a signal that the whole social order was open to change.20 Alongside these plain men Montagu fought at Naseby, not fifty miles from Huntingdon, in June 1645; and at Naseby the king’s infantry was effectively destroyed. Five hundred royalist officers were taken among the 5,000 prisoners, most of whom were marched to London and paraded through the streets of the City in front of triumphant crowds. Montagu went on to take part in the storming of Bristol in September, and with his brother-in-law John Pickering received Prince Rupert’s surrender. Sam, with his City background and watching his cousin’s dazzling military successes, could not fail to be a fervent enemy of the king. He may have been back in the City to see the procession of prisoners from Naseby, or if he was still in Huntingdon in August he would have witnessed what happened when the king himself rode into the town after a skirmish, and his men fell to plundering. By then Jemima Montagu was expecting her first child – conceived in May, between battles – and her husband was with Cromwell in the west. The king was welcomed by the mayor – either loyal or obsequious – but his troops proceeded to terrorize the people on whom they were billeted. On being told that four of his soldiers had stolen from a glove-maker, the king ‘caused lots to be cast… and one to be hanged therefore, and, at his departure, gave the town and county thanks for their kind entertainment of him’. This account from a parliamentarian source adds that the soldiers ‘knocked off the irons of all the felons and other prisoners in Huntingdon Gaol’, all of whom at once joined the cavalier army. But it also acknowledges that the county was still divided between royalists and parliamentarians. ‘One providence is observable, that divers of the best affected to the Parliament have escaped with the least loss,’ it says, suggesting that Hinchingbrooke did not suffer badly. Some accounts say Charles lodged there – he had stayed at the house more than once in the past – while others put him at the George Inn, which seems more likely. Jemima Montagu would have received the king with perfect politeness, but he knew her husband was fighting against his forces. And she must have shared in the distress and indignation of the local people at the damage and losses they suffered, her agent Captain Pepys of Brampton among them: the departing cavaliers drove off all the cattle and horses from the fields round Huntingdon for their own use.21

  The autumn of 1645 brought Colonel Montagu to London to receive the thanks of parliament for his victory at Bristol. Within a month he had a seat in the House and was appointed to the Army Committee.22 With this his fighting days were over for the time being. In February 1646 he became a father; his first child, a daughter, was given her mother’s name. The war effectively ended in March, although there was mopping up until June, when Oxford was taken, the king fled to the dubious protection of the Scots and the thirteen-year-old duke of York (James) was handed over to parliament and held prisoner in St James’s Palace with his younger brother and sister. In September the earl of Essex, who had led the parliamentary forces in the early stages of the war and held Turnham Green against the cavaliers, died at his house in the Strand. Parliament decreed a splendid funeral, and Sam was taken to see the embalmed body lying in state in Essex House.23

  At home with his parents again, Sam was already the best educated member of the family, with a mental world he could hardly share with them. The divide would grow steadily greater. Now his daily walk took him across the Fleet ditch instead of the Alconbury Brook, towards St Paul’s School beside the cathedral. The boys put in a six-day week, with a free afternoon on Thursdays. All 150 of them sat in one room sixty feet long, with high windows on which the words AUT DOCE, AUT DISCE, AUT DISCEDE (‘Either teach, or study, or leave’) were inscribed. They had benches, not desks. At one end sat the high master, John Langley, beneath the bust of John Colet, the school’s founder, and at the other the surmaster, although he spent more time walking about to supervise. There were eight classes, and the pupils were divided by achievement, not age: a boy might be still in the Second Form at thirteen or already in the Seventh at twelve. Since Pepys was still at school in 1650, when he was seventeen, he had clearly made steady, rather than spectacular, progress. Greek was started in the Sixth Form, Hebrew in the Eighth. The day began with Latin prayers and a chapter of the Bible, which, judging from the sparse biblical allusions in the Diary, did not take his
fancy. All the boys learnt to speak as well as to write; they had to undergo regular oral examinations and also to deliver their own compositions, in Latin, like so many young Roman orators. It was a good training and made Sam into an effective speaker in adult life, as well as a stern critic of those who were not. They included his cousin Montagu and the future king Charles II, about whose poor public performance he was particularly scathing.24

  His fellow pupils came from widely different levels of society, ranging from the sons of baronets and MPs, through country parsons, to booksellers, soap-boilers and drapers; Sam was not the only tailor’s son, and one boy’s father was a humble carrier. Poor boys could win awards for going on to a university, as Sam did in due course. Langley had a particularly good record for getting his pupils into Cambridge; the Cambridge to Oxford ratio was three to one. Cambridge possessed a powerful Calvinist body of teachers, and St Paul’s was the most strongly puritan of the London schools at this time. Approving Calvinist preachers sent their sons to be educated by Langley, who had been persecuted by Laud and got his revenge by testifying against him before the House of Lords Committee in 1644 (Laud was executed on Tower Hill in January 1645). Langley wanted the abolition of bishops, and saw it achieved the next year. The irony of fate, and no doubt the effect of his excellent teaching, meant that several of his pupils went on to become bishops when episcopacy was brought back in the 1660s; but by then Langley was dead too, albeit from natural causes.25

  Langley’s reputation as a strongly religious man, a scholar and an antiquarian was backed by ‘a very awful presence and speech that struck a mighty respect and fear into his scholars, which however wore off after they were a little used to him; and the management of himself towards them was such that they both loved and feared him’.26 No doubt he beat his boys, as every schoolmaster was expected to do; Sam grew up quite ready to beat in their turn the children who worked for him, although he sometimes hurt himself more than his intended victim in the process, never acquiring the easy schoolmasterly swish. Langley’s boys became lord mayors, bankers, engineers, academics, booksellers, MPs, administrators – and of course writers. St Paul’s was responsible for the education of two of the great writers of the century, Milton – under an earlier high master, Alexander Gill – and Pepys. The fact that both have been found shocking is in itself a tribute to the quality of the education they got there.27