Pepys is giving his description of a scene that has been played and replayed all over the world from that century to this, one we have seen on our television screens so that every point is familiar. It is the first eyewitness account of an urban riot, young people clashing with armed soldiers, since the Jewish historian Josephus; and it shows how good he was at taking the pulse of the streets and fixing on essential details, the rubbish thrown at the horses, the football in the frosty street, the stones thrown from rooftops and the soldiers unable to bear the contempt of the boys and so shooting them dead.
On 8 December Pepys continued with this story, taking it into court now at the Old Bailey:
The present posture of the City is very dangerous, who I believe will never be quiet till the Soldiers have absolutely quitted the town. These circumstances (my Lord) may give your Lordship the best guess of the City’s condition. viz. The Coroner’s inquest upon the death of those that were slain on Monday have given it in Murder and place it upon Colonel Huson [Hewson], who gave his Soldiers order to fire. The Grand Jury at the Sessions this week in the Old Bailey desired of my Lord Mayor that the Soldiers might be removed out of the town, who answering that he knew not well with the safety of the City how to do it, they offered in open Court to indict their officers and undertake to bring them before his Lordship… One passage more I shall add, that in the common council house upon the reading of the Prentices’ petition, Brandrith [Henry Brandreth, member of the Committee of Safety] stood up and inveighed highly against the Insolence of the boys to meddle in such businesses, whereupon he was hissed down by the whole Council and answered by Wilde the Recorder, who particularly defended the whole petition with a general applause. This is the present fate of the City, who are informed how the army have sent in Granados [grenades] to Pauls [St Paul’s Cathedral] and the Tower to fire the City upon an extremity (which is certain) and I am confident will not rest but in chasing away the soldiers out of town.
Another letter, posted later on the same day, ended, ‘Never was there (my Lord) so universal a fear and despair as now.’ Londoners were anxious and exhausted, but Pepys’s vitality still bubbled: his postscript, about a family debt due at Christmas, reminds us that even during weeks of fear and despair people need to keep accounts. He also made time to look into London’s only synagogue and found the Portuguese Jews lamenting the death of one of their merchants following his operation for the stone. It had been carried out by Pepys’s surgeon, Hollier, and must have given him pause, to pity the victim and congratulate himself on his own good luck. This was a piece of news he thought worth passing on to those who cared for him at Hinchingbrooke.
At home in Axe Yard, Elizabeth believed herself pregnant at last. She had not had a period since before the great funeral. Lady Montagu sent the Pepyses some brawn from Hinchingbrooke at Christmas, and her husband put it about that he was ill, ‘confined to my chamber by a distemper’. He also stalled when asked to sign a proclamation prepared by Lawson asserting the navy’s republican loyalties, and waited, while Lawson brought the fleet into the Thames and Monck moved his army slowly south to the Scottish border.29 Neither Downing nor Montagu discussed his difficulties with Pepys. Both had made their careers through friendship with Cromwell, and it was precisely the power Cromwell had given them that put them in a position to have something valuable to offer Charles Stuart when they thought the time had come to do so. Montagu was driven by dismay and disgust at what had happened since Cromwell’s death, and, like most of the nation, he feared the prospect of anarchy and renewed civil war. Downing was altogether more cynical and opportunistic. Both were sharp enough to know they must judge exactly when to jettison their loyalty to the remnants of Cromwell’s regime and to make their submission to the king, and then to make it so acceptably that he would reward them for it. The year 1659 ended in political confusion and uncertainty for everyone; and on the last day of the year Elizabeth found she was not after all pregnant – a fact we know for the one very good reason that it appears on the first page of the Diary Pepys started to keep on 1 January 1660.
6. A Diary
When Pepys was in Cornhill on 5 December 1659, the day he saw an apprentice shot through the head by soldiers, the shops had their shutters up against the violence in the streets. On another day before the end of the year he was in Cornhill again, and this time he went into the stationer’s shop at the sign of the Globe, where John Cade sold paper and pens as well as the prints and maps Pepys loved to leaf through; and there he bought himself a paper-covered notebook, too fat to go into his pocket, and carried it home to Axe Yard. Over the next days he ruled neat margins in red ink down the left-hand side and across the top of each plain white page: seven inches down, five inches across. It was a long task, given that there were 282 pages, and he did not number them. This was his preparation for 1 January and the start of his Diary. That first notebook brought home from Cornhill still exists, bound into leather and with gilding on the edges of the pages, otherwise exactly as he wrote it. Now, together with its five successor volumes, it has become one of the great literary manuscripts of the world and is priceless – a change in value that would have appealed greatly to Pepys.
What made him embark on a diary? It is just possible he knew and was impressed by the fact that both his employers kept journals, although they, as high officials serving the state, had good reason to keep records of their meetings and travel, while he had no reason at all, coming of an undistinguished family, poor and without prospects. Whatever sense of destiny he had as a boy had culminated in a Cambridge degree and then failed to carry him any further. He had not begun to justify his education or fulfil his promise. Marriage had if anything made his situation worse. The times were uncertain and threatening. It was an unpromising moment to embark on a record of his daily activities, and the activities themselves were nothing to boast about.
Yet set against this was the very fact that he had no important, interesting or demanding work to absorb him and take up his energy. In preparing to keep a journal he was giving himself a task, and his temperament and training meant he was going to take the task seriously. The idea that he was singled out by fate was encouraged when he survived the stone operation, and, even if he had no idea of what he might achieve, he appears to have seen himself as a man who might do something in the world. Without his enthusiasm for himself, the Diary would hardly have begun to take shape as it did.
He was a passionate reader and cared for good writing. He had already tried his hand as a novelist and discovered a flair for reporting history in the making. Like many others, Pepys started off wanting to write something without quite knowing what it was, and the Diary could be a way of finding out. He may have seen it as a source book for something grander to be undertaken later. The high drama of the world in which he had grown up, the still continuing conflict between republic and monarchy, the heroic figures set against one another, paralleled the conflicts of the ancient world he had studied in classical texts. And principally there was his curiosity about himself, which made him see his own mental and physical nature as not merely a legitimate but a valuable and glorious subject for exploration. He did not yet know Montaigne’s essays, and his circumstances and status were as different as could be from those of Montaigne, who was born into a prosperous landed family in France; but he breathed the same intellectual air.1 He may have read Francis Bacon’s recommendation to keep a diary, although that was specifically aimed at travellers: ‘It is a strange thing that in sea voyages, where there is nothing to be seen but sky and sea, men should make diaries, but in land travel, wherein so much is to be observed, for the most part they omit it; as if chance were fitter to be registered than observation. Let diaries therefore be brought in use.’2
Whatever nourished the idea of the Diary in his mind, he took care over its physical appearance and condition. It was to be written in ink, black or brown as it came to hand, with a quill pen, sharp when newly cut and even when blunt good enough to allow him to for
m shorthand symbols no more than two millimetres square. He spaced the lines evenly, with between twenty and thirty to a page. He gave curly ornamentations to the capital letters for the name of the month at the head of each page – very occasionally forgetting it was a new month, so that he had to delete ‘December’ and put in ‘January’. September and October were given particularly lush capitals, and February’s F always came out looking scratchy with its straight double up-and-down strokes. Some pages have browned to a pale toast colour with the years, but more have remained a fresh, almost chalky white; there are thin, fragile pages, and others that feel downy, almost velvety to the touch. Pepys was a fine calligrapher when he made time to write slowly, as he did for his Diary, and his pages are as beautiful as pieces of embroidery, with their neatly spaced symbols, the curly, the crotchety and the angular, interspersed with longhand for names, places and any other words that took his fancy, on one page a dozen, as many as forty on another. The longhand leaps out at you tantalizingly as you turn the pages, each word suggesting its own stories – Axe-yard, Mr Downing, Jane, Hinchingb., Deptfd, Whitehall, Monke, Easterday, emerods, venison pasty, pigions, Uncle Robert is dead, Uncles corps, Queen, DY [Duke of York], Robes, papists, Clergy, conventicles, tumults, subsidys, Justice, Sessions, Sr WP, gentleman, yellow plume, petty coate, drawers, summer, amours – small packets of meaning surrounded by the elegant, impenetrable shorthand.
The shorthand made the Diary inaccessible to casual curiosity, which was obviously his intention, although Shelton’s system was popular – at least one of his clerks learnt it.3 In any case Pepys guarded it carefully, and says he mentioned its existence to only two people, Lieutenant Lambert, the young naval officer he first met in the Baltic, to whom he showed ‘my manner of keeping a Journall’ in the spring of 1660, and much later a discreet and trusted senior colleague, William Coventry.4 At first he wrote it at home in Axe Yard, and on one occasion, in February 1660, he mentions Elizabeth being in the room while he set down ‘of this day its passages’ before going to bed, standing up to write.5 But if she knew what he was doing, the subject did not come up in any recorded conversation between them; in any case, she knew no shorthand; and it was not long before his circumstances changed and he could be sure of privacy when he wrote. It is clear that he made up his mind from the start that each day was to have its entry. He kept to this plan, and when he was not able to write on the day he would catch up, as he often explains he is doing in the text, occasionally expressing his pleasure in the process. He maintained the separation of each day on all but a handful of entries where one carries over into the next because he has been up all night or travelling. Sometimes he kept loose written notes to draw on, and there is also mention of a ‘by-book’ in which he put down material to be transferred later.6 More important, he trained his memory and shaped passages in his mind, a process he describes: ‘enter all my Journall since the 28th of October, having every day’s passage well in my head, though it troubles me to remember it; and what I was forced to, being kept from my lodging, where my books and papers are, for several days’.7 Plainly there was an element of mental exercise as well as literary skill in the process.
He intended from the start to cover public events but also made it clear from the first page that it was to be a chronicle of intimate experience. For this he had no model. Montagu’s and Downing’s journals, supposing he got a glimpse of one or the other, were largely official and impersonal and altogether different from what Pepys was about to embark on.8 As for other examples, there was a wave of enthusiasm for diary-keeping in England in the seventeenth century – it is the earliest period from which diaries have been preserved in considerable numbers – and Pepys may well have had an inkling that others were recording their lives; but he cannot have seen any them, since almost all remained unpublished until the nineteenth or twentieth century.9 If he was in fashion, he hardly knew it. It has been suggested that he may have encountered at Cambridge puritan divines who recommended Christian diary-keeping as a valuable exercise, a form of moral accounting that encouraged the individual to watch and discipline himself. And he may have looked at John Beadle’s The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian, published in 1656, which also approved the keeping of a diary and suggested it should include both public events and private experience.10 Supposing Pepys pondered any of this, he took his time and formed a very different view of what constituted the interest of private life from that of Beadle, who suggests listing experience of divine assistance, moments of calling, deliverance from danger, answers to prayers and the commemoration of parents, schoolmasters and benefactors. Nothing could be further from what we find in Pepys, whose private themes were to be not spiritual but intensely human: work, ambition, avarice, worldly pleasure in all its forms, jealousy, friendship, gossip, cheating and broken vows. Beadle’s likening of the diary to a tradesman’s shop book or merchant’s account book, a lawyer’s book of precedents or physician’s of experiments, or even state records, could well have appealed to Pepys, but his inspiration was all his own, and from the first page he produced a narrative with an entirely individual and wholly worldly point of view.
A look at some of his contemporaries’ diaries, with their various emphases on political, public and spiritual experience, family life, science and travel, underlines the originality and pre-eminence of his achievement.11 Among those from a generation older than his, Bulstrode Whitelocke, born in 1605 – the young man who organized the music for a masque from his house in Salisbury Court when Pepys was a baby – produced one of the fullest and most informative records of a successful career in public life during the interregnum; he started his diary in 1644 and wrote up the earlier parts of his life only after 1660, when his political fall made him anxious to justify himself.
The Jersey sea captain, George Carteret, who was to be Pepys’s colleague later, wrote a journal of his adventurous voyage to Africa in 1638.12 The royalist and scholarly John Evelyn’s immense diary, also begun in the 1640s when he was in his twenties, was a conscientious record of travels, sights, public events, work undertaken, sermons, family matters and meetings with important people. Evelyn started ‘in imitation of what I had seene my Father do’, his father being a methodical man of affairs, and after many years noted his own belief in the ‘infinite benefit of daily Examination; comparing to a Merchant keeping his books, to see whether he thrived, or went backward; & how it would facilitate our reckonings, & what a Comfort on our death bed’.13 Both Evelyn and Whitelocke cover wide areas of interest and are crammed with information, but neither has Pepys’s candour or immediacy, and neither engages the reader in his narrative as strongly as Pepys does. Another of their generation, Nehemiah Wallington, a London tradesman with little formal education, kept a commonplace book in which he recorded great events such as the escape of Pym and Hampden from arrest by the king: ‘tell it to your children’, he wrote, ‘that they may tell it to their children, how God did miraculously deliver his servants’. His political and religious passions are vividly conveyed, and he also set down private matters; like Evelyn, he mourned in his diary the death of a beloved child: ‘The grief for this child was so great that I forgot myself so much that I did offend God.’ But he is without Pepys’s curiosity about himself.
Ralph Josselin, an Essex clergyman, farmer and schoolteacher, born in 1616, kept a diary steadily from the mid 1640s until the year of his death, 1683. It is a remarkable record by an intelligent man: like Pepys, Josselin studied at Cambridge, read and collected books, took an interest in public and foreign affairs and gave an account of his domestic life. He was a Nonconformist, served as a chaplain to the parliamentary army, rejoiced at Naseby yet did not approve the execution of the king. But although he records a dream in which he was secretary and adviser to Cromwell, it was only a dream, and he lived out his days in a small village, chiefly preoccupied with the weather, the state of the crops and his own health. His children, once past the age when they were always falling into fires or down stair
s, gravitated towards London, and London stirred him to his only aphorism: ‘On good and bad of London: they must be good that miscarry not, there are so many temptations, and very bad that miscarry, so many opportunities for good’ – a countryman’s view that might have amused Pepys. Josselin’s diary becomes dull, partly because his experience is so confined, and still more because his language is weighed down with routine religious phrases. Hardly a day goes by without him thanking the Lord for being gracious to him, or seeking to understand why the Lord has punished him with a bad leg or a disobedient son. Josselin is Pepys’s contemporary, but, compared with Josselin’s fixed habits of thought, Pepys’s curiosity and scepticism, expressed in vivid, flexible and varied prose, take his Diary into what feels like the modern world.
Philip Henry, Pepys’s close contemporary, also kept a lifelong diary covering domestic and parish activities as a Nonconformist clergyman. Henry was a sweet-tempered and scrupulous man, devoted to his wife and children. He never ceased to grieve for the firstborn son full of promise who died at five, but he ensured that his daughters received unusually good educations, including classical studies. Oliver Hey-wood, another Nonconformist minister, also born in the 1630s, kept journals recording his work as well as his private struggles – he was greatly tormented by what he named, in a phrase of Shakespearean gorgeousness, ‘my darling and dalilah lusts’. He wrote of his brief happy marriage, the death of his young wife and the bringing up of their children with the help of a chaste maidservant. Yet another of Pepys’s contemporaries, the greatly gifted scientist and architect Robert Hooke, secretary of the Royal Society, recorded the facts of his daily life and work in the driest and most secular of diaries – no token churchgoing, hardly even any naming of God – its laconic entries also allowing a disconcerting view into his domestic arrangements. He was known to Pepys and will be discussed later.14 From women there are no known diaries, although Anne Fanshawe and Lucy Hutchinson, both of Pepys’s generation, would have been quite capable of keeping them, and each wrote spirited memoirs, from opposing political standpoints.
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self Page 13
