Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  Whether or not Pepys wrote love letters as frank and delightful as this one, Elizabeth found him an eloquent and persuasive lover, and she was ready to be wooed and won.5

  They were married at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on 1 December 1655. Religious ceremonies had been declared invalid since August 1653, but churches were still used for the civil ceremonies that replaced them, and this one was presided over by a senior administrative figure, Richard Sherwyn, secretary to the Treasury commissioners and justice of the peace for Westminster.6 The notice of the civil ceremony on 1 December reads ‘Samuel Peps of this parish gent and Elizabeth March-ant De Snt. Michell, of Martin’s in the ffields Spinster. Published October 15th, 22, 29 And were married by Richard Sherwyn Esq. one of Justices of the Peace of the Cittie and lyberties of Westm. December 1st Ri. Sherwyn.’ But the Westminster ceremony was entirely eclipsed in the minds of the bride and groom by what they always remembered as their proper wedding, which took place on 10 October. This was the anniversary they celebrated with merriment and, when it came to the tenth year, with dancing.7 What they recalled was their wedding night, meaning the consummation, and the obvious explanation is that they went through a private – and unrecorded – religious ceremony on that day, which allowed Pepys to bed his so much desired bride. This was for them the real thing.

  It was also two weeks before her fifteenth birthday, which fell on 23 October. If this makes Elizabeth a child bride in our eyes, child brides were common enough; marriage was legal for girls at the age of twelve. The gentle and civilized John Evelyn, for instance, married his wife (in 1647) when he was twenty-six and she was twelve; and although he did not begin to cohabit with her until she was fourteen, she had a miscarriage at fifteen and her first full-term child two years later.8 Pepys bought a ring from a goldsmith near the new Exchange in the Strand – so perhaps the wedding took place in this part of town – and Elizabeth wore a petticoat adorned with gold lace.9 Bride and groom both showed what he called ‘bridal respect’ and ‘kindness’ towards one another.10 Afterwards they celebrated at a tavern in Old Fish Street in the City, not necessarily with family, because weddings were rarely large affairs, and the families may not have been inclined to rejoice much, the Pepyses regretting Sam’s romantic folly, the St Michels regarding a poor clerk as an unsatisfactory match for the daughter of a noble French house.11 And after the meal the poor clerk must have taken her back to his servant’s room in the attics of Whitehall. Arthur Bryant wrote of this moment, ‘And perhaps, than what was theirs at that moment, life offers nothing better’; but his tender view is hardly borne out by what happened next.12

  Since neither the St Michels nor the Pepyses were in a position to help the young couple, they were left to get on with their life as best they could. Things did not go well for them. The living was not easy, with one room not really their own and up a great many stairs, which Pepys sometimes referred to as his ‘turret’. They had almost no money, his health was poor, she was adolescent, with her head full of the French romances she enjoyed reading. It was not that she was impractical or idle: ‘How she used to make coal fires, and wash my foul clothes with her own hand for me, poor wretch! in my little room,’ he remembered later.13 But she could also weep, scold and storm, and her periods were monthly dramas that needed help and comfort he had no idea how to give. She was a virgin when they married, and he may have been just about one too, given how nervous he was of catching diseases from loose-living girls. No doubt he had engaged in much fumbling, but neither knew much about sex, and he was desperate for it. He needed help and comfort too, for his own agonies and embarrassments. The symptoms of the stone grew worse all the time, and by now he was probably suffering some pain and difficulty in urinating, and tenderness in those parts; while she, by dreadful coincidence, developed what he called boils on ‘the lip of her chose’.14 She was suffering from a condition well known to modern doctors but untreatable then, in which the glands at the entrance to the vagina become blocked and a cyst is formed, producing abscesses that are not only painful but also make sexual intercourse virtually impossible at times.15 He was in no way to blame, but she may have suspected he was. It would be hard to imagine a worse recipe for a honeymoon.

  The Montagus knew nothing about the extra presence among the servants in the Whitehall lodgings. Pepys seems to have kept Elizabeth out of their way very efficiently, because it was not until November 1660 that his cousin took notice of her for the first time.16 In any case Montagu had many important things on his mind, and Jemima was about to give birth again at Hinchingbrooke. In October 1655 he was appointed an Admiralty commissioner, and in December she presented him with twin sons. One was loyally named Oliver, the other given the family name of John. No sooner were they baptized than the great Oliver directed Montagu’s career in a new direction, appointing him general-at-sea and joint commander, with Blake, of the English battle fleet. This was in January 1656, and he prepared to set sail for the Mediterranean almost at once, with instructions to seek a permanent station there for the English. As a complete novice at sea, he took navigation manuals and models of rigged ships to study in his cabin aboard his flagship, the Naseby. Pepys saw him off from Lambeth when he embarked.17

  Then Pepys returned to his discontented bride. The basic trouble must have been their medical problems, but whatever else started them quarrelling – her disappointment in the daily reality of marriage, his disappointment in her response to his attempts at love-making, his jealousy when she smiled too sunnily at his cheerful and doubtless flirtatious friends, or hers when he stayed out late – both had tempers that flared up into violent rows. Had she become pregnant, they would have faced serious practical difficulties, but she would at least have been absorbed in preparing for the child. Only there was no sign of pregnancy. Pepys’s failure to father children has always been attributed to the effects of the surgery he underwent in 1658, so it is worth pointing out that none were forthcoming in the three preceding years.18 Love in a turret was not what either of them had imagined or hoped, and she was wretched. She simmered with resentment and complained to sympathetic friends; and then one day she simply walked out and did not come back. The message to her husband was as clear as could be. He had failed.

  Pepys was not accustomed to failure – he was the success of the family, the boy who did well and won scholarships – and the separation from Elizabeth, which lasted for many months, was terrible to him. He felt it as a wound, an insult, an affront to his dignity as man and lover. Afterwards, he took care to destroy all the letters relating to this episode and hated any mention of it.19 Years later he would still brood unforgivingly if something reminded him of what she had done; while she used it as a weapon against him, knowing she could wound merely by mentioning it. It had been her grand gesture, and became her way of holding her own in the battle of their marriage, with the implied threat of a repeat performance. The humiliation in front of his friends and family was cruel, and the loss of his bedmate, so ardently wooed, almost too much to bear. Like Milton, he had married in a glow of expectation, only to be forced back into miserable chastity.20

  Classically, an injured wife goes home to her parents, and this may be what Elizabeth did, to begin with at any rate. Not much was to be expected of them beyond affection, since they notably lacked any grasp of the practical side of life. Her father was a quixotic figure full of ingenious schemes – perpetual-motion machines and smoke-free chimneys – and her brother Balthasar had been reared to give himself the airs of a gentleman, with no resources to back them. The father’s story filters down to us through Balthasar’s not entirely reliable pen, which described him as ‘a Gentleman, Extreamely well-bread’, born a Catholic and converted to the Protestant faith. The conversion came about in his youth, while he was fighting as a professional soldier in Germany, and it allegedly lost him his inheritance in France. He next got himself a position in the suite of Princess Henrietta Maria as gentleman carver – a superior attendant at table in the formal court life of
the day – when she travelled to England in 1625 to become Charles I’s queen. This job he lost after a dispute with one of the queen’s friars turned into a fight. Silence then, until he appeared in Ireland in 1639, and there won the hand of Dorothea, thirty-year-old widow of a gentleman of Cork and daughter of Sir Francis Kingsmill. The marriage was not approved by her family, and things went downhill for the couple from the start. Balthasar and Elizabeth were apparently both born in 1640, in Devon, where their mother had inherited land.21 But this and everything else they possessed was lost in various unlucky episodes. They wandered from England to France, from Flanders to Germany; sometimes he served as a soldier, once he was imprisoned. He claimed to have fought under Cromwell in Ireland, from where his wife fled to Flanders without him, having first pawned whatever they had to finance her flight – so running away from husbands was something Elizabeth learnt from her mother.

  In 1652 Madame de St Michel was alone in Paris with her two children. She was persuaded to hand them over to Catholic friends, who placed Elizabeth in an Ursuline convent and Balthasar as page to the papal nuncio, a recollection that provoked him to a flash of wit: with such a start, he told Pepys, he might have ended up as either a cardinal or a catamite. The children were rescued by their indignant father, who carried the whole family off to London; this was shortly before Elizabeth met Pepys.22 The timing of Balthasar’s story is vague and the accuracy doubtful, since he wrote it down with the specific intention of proving that his sister was a staunch Protestant, whereas it is clear from Pepys’s own account that the Catholic faith never lost its hold on her: when, for instance, he bought a mass book for himself in 1660 and sat up late reading it, it gave ‘great pleasure to my wife to hear that that she long ago was so well acquainted with’.23 The circumstances of her upbringing suggest why she was in some ways mature for her age, and also restless and flighty. She seems to have moved on from her parents to stay with friends called Palmer, whose name crops up when Pepys mentioned what he always called his ‘differences’ with her. Palmer was a lawyer and may have pointed out to her the difficulties of the situation of a separated wife, and encouraged a reconciliation.

  The St Michel parents present another puzzle in Pepys’s life. During the whole period of the Diary he never once visited them or received them in his house. Elizabeth went to see them and took them gifts, money and old clothes, and even small jobs to do for Pepys, but he went to almost farcical lengths to avoid speaking to her father: once, for instance, when he saw him in Westminster Hall after dropping Elizabeth, he sent a porter with an anonymous message across the Hall to St Michel, remaining at a safe distance to observe his baffled response.24 Elizabeth was equally resistant to their coming face to face. Family arrangements are often puzzling to outsiders, and this is more bizarre than most. Perhaps the St Michels failed to encourage her to return to Pepys when she left him, and he furiously resented the fact. Perhaps he took a vow not to forgive them, since taking vows was a habit of his, and this became one of the vows he kept. Later, when questioned by Jemima Montagu about ‘how I did treate my wife’s father and mother’, he gave her ‘a good account’, but did not elaborate further – understandably, given the actual situation.25

  During this barely documented and unhappy period of Sam’s life we must assume he went on living in the Whitehall attics and attending to whatever instructions he received from his cousin and patron, General Montagu. His orders from aboard the Naseby to ‘my Servant Samuell Pepys at my Lodginges in Whitehalle’ were short and sharp: ‘You are upon sight hereoff…’ and ‘Hereoff you are not to faile’; and Pepys’s letters were formal and respectful, as was to be expected, addressing his employer as ‘your Honour’, ‘my honoured maister’ and ‘My Lord’. And, whatever his personal troubles, he kept a keen eye on public events and was ready to report discreetly on the struggle between the army republicans, who distrusted Cromwell, and those who wanted to give him greater power, of whom Montagu was one. Another of Cromwell’s keenest supporters was George Downing, now a well-established diplomat, MP and highly placed figure at the Exchequer; and about this time Pepys found himself his second and more official job as one of Downing’s clerks. The improvement in his income must have been very welcome as a way of impressing Elizabeth.

  Downing saw that Pepys was talented, but Pepys, though always respectful of Downing’s intellectual powers, never liked him. You can understand why. An example of his brutality came in the winter of 1656, when the case of James Naylor, a Quaker accused of blasphemy, was brought before the House. It excited Downing particularly. Pronouncing that ‘We are God’s executioners, and ought to be tender of his honour,’ he urged that if Naylor escaped the death penalty, he should at least be pilloried, whipped – in the event he received 310 strokes – and branded, and his tongue bored through with a hot iron for good measure. ‘You ought to do something with that tongue that has bored through God. You ought to bore his tongue through,’ insisted the religious Downing.26 Sir Gilbert Pickering proposed that hard labour and imprisonment would be enough punishment, and Cromwell himself attempted to intervene, but the savage sentences were carried out, while Naylor expressed forgiveness of his tormentors, and the crowd who watched him branded and bored stood bare-headed and silent in sympathy. Downing’s combination of bigotry and cruelty was far removed from Pepys’s tolerance and what has been called his ‘miscellaneous religious enjoyment’.27

  His other employer was back in England in the autumn. Montagu had justified Cromwell’s confidence in him and brought with him treasure captured from the Spanish fleet on its return from South America. Although it had actually been taken by another commander, the poet Edmund Waller greeted the new general-at-sea’s homecoming with the spoils of battle in an elegant couplet:

  With these returns victorious MONTAGU

  With laurels in his hand, and half Peru.28

  The cargoes of the captured Spanish ships were thought to be worth £600,000 – one estimate put it at a million – and the money was desperately needed to pay for the war with Spain. Montagu wrote piously to Cromwell’s secretary of state, John Thurloe, ascribing the triumph to God: ‘Blessed be his name who hath looked upon the low condition of the nation, and hath turned the reproaches of wicked men with shame upon their own faces… Indeed, my heart is very much warmed with the apprehension of the singular providence of God in bringing this about’.29 But the singular providence of God did not prevent the treasure from being plundered on its way to London, and by the time it arrived to be counted half of it had disappeared. ‘A private captain, they say, hath got to his own share £60,000, and many private mariners £10,000 a man; and this is so universal amongst the seamen and taken in the heat of fight, that it is not possible to get it again, or any part of it.’ This was Thurloe’s account, and, while it may have exaggerated the figures, it acknowledged the real problem, which was the assumption by both officers and men that they were entitled to help themselves to a large part of what they had risked their lives for – the more so since most of them were owed many months of pay.30 Montagu was personally blameless; it was his first experience of the troubles associated with prizes (ships seized at sea carrying valuable cargoes) that were to plague him later. For the present, in spite of the disappointment, he was thanked in parliament, and there was a day of official thanksgiving on 5 November. He remained long enough in London to attend some scientific meetings where there was also political talk, with Pepys at his side.31 Then he went home to Hinchingbrooke, leaving Pepys to sort out practical problems connected with prize goods.

  Pepys’s letters to his master, the earliest of his writings to survive, offer cool glimpses of what was happening in London without venturing opinions of his own. He wrote about the debate over whether Cromwell should be succeeded by an elected ruler or one of his own family; he described rehearsals of a song with Latin words, specially written in Cromwell’s honour, giving the fatuous text without comment. A thumbnail sketch of the behaviour of Mr Feake, a preacher from the
extreme religious sect of the Fifth Monarchists, newly released from prison, describes Feake preaching from a window, being silenced by order of the lord mayor and responding by saying he knows neither why he was imprisoned nor why released, and further, that ‘the Spirit which warranted him to speake was above Mr Protectors command, and therefore much more Mr Mayors’.32 There is just enough satirical edge in Pepys’s account to suggest he is more impressed by Feake’s wit than by the heavy hand of authority. More comedy inspired by religious differences came in a later letter, which tells how Cromwell, on being shown some ‘popish vestments’ confiscated from Jesuits, got his gentlemen to dress up in them, ‘causing abundance of mirth’.33

  The whole year of 1657, so privately wretched for Pepys, was crammed with public events. In January Downing, speaking in the House, urged the crown on Cromwell. In March Montagu was in London to bear the sword of state when Cromwell gave an audience to parliament in the Banqueting House. Over the next months Cromwell was repeatedly urged to take the title of ‘King’ and repeatedly declined on grounds of conscience. He described kingship as ‘a mere feather in a man’s hat’; in the end he went close to taking the feather. In a ceremony in Westminster Hall in late June, with the coronation stone in place beneath the royal chair of Scotland, he put on a robe of purple lined with ermine and a sword of state, and swore the new lord protector’s oath of office, sceptre in hand. He took the title of ‘Highness’ for himself and his wife, and his sons became lords. There was a great deal of velvet and gold, there were prayers and shouts, trumpets and hurrahs. Montagu was at Cromwell’s side and accompanied him in the coach that drove him through the crowds to Whitehall.34 No doubt all the clerks of Whitehall and Westminster were in the streets for the occasion. Montagu’s ascent continued. Cromwell appointed him to his new Advisory Council. In August Admiral Blake died and was given a hero’s burial in the Abbey; it left Montagu as sole general-at-sea. At the end of the year he was offered, and accepted, one of Cromwell’s new peerages. He was now Baron Montagu.