Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  ‘Strange, the difference of men’s talk,’ he wrote, almost with a shrug, as the news of General Monck marching south, General Fairfax laying down his arms in Yorkshire and General Lambert attempting to block Monck reached London. Later, he said he had discussed the exiled king’s prospects with friends, and even drunk a covert cup to him in mid February at Harper’s; if so, he was too cautious to put it in his Diary at the time. The Rota fizzled out in February, and most of its members gave up theorizing, or at least kept their heads down. Not quite far enough down in the case of Harrington, who was considered dangerous after the Restoration, arrested and imprisoned; but, though his health was destroyed in prison, his book survived, and Pepys did not forget him.4

  The political uncertainty affected everyone’s lives in London during the early months of 1660. Several of Pepys’s friends among the clerks of the council lost their jobs in January, victims of power struggles at higher levels. The Diary, with its tumbling stream of information, is a reminder that the moods and demands of daily life easily blot out politics. Lack of cash was a more pressing problem for Pepys than any possible change of regime. He found himself so short of money in January that he had to borrow from Downing’s office to pay his rent, and was then forced to repay the loan by borrowing again from an obliging steward in the household of Lady Montagu’s father, John Crew. Pepys and his friend Peter Luellin agreed over a drink how much pleasanter their lives would be if only they owned estates and commanded private incomes. Instead, Pepys was kept busy visiting the Montagus’ eldest child, fourteen-year-oldjemima, under treatment at the house of a surgeon who had promised to straighten her crooked neck, and escorting her younger brother Ned to his boarding school at Twickenham. Their father might or might not be planning the overthrow of the state, but the children’s needs must still be seen to. Lady Montagu kept him supplied from Hinchingbrooke at Christmas.

  The Montagus’ Whitehall lodgings were still subject to dispute: Pepys had to negotiate with Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, who had his eye on them. When Ashley Cooper gracefully gave way, Pepys was entrusted with the keys and felt free to throw a dinner party of his own there to impress his parents and friends. Elizabeth cooked, his brother Tom came, and his new friend James Pearse, who had been Montagu’s surgeon aboard the Naseby, brought his wife, noted for her beauty. After the guests had left, and Pepys had put in some work on Downing’s ciphers, he and Elizabeth sat luxuriating in the heat thrown out by the great log in the palace fireplace. It made a fine contrast to their meagre fires in Axe Yard.

  There were other evenings when he stayed at home, knocking nails into the wall for hats and cloaks, or reading the poet Francis Quarles, whose Emblems offered delicious dialogues between Eve and the Serpent, and the Flesh and the Spirit. There was a difficult day when Elizabeth’s scissors and Jane’s book were both missing after a visit from his sister Pall, and Pepys had to go to Salisbury Court to speak sharply to her. Pall was set to be a troublesome presence, and another was Elizabeth’s brother, Balthasar, who enters the Diary bringing a present of a pretty black dog and goes away without asking for anything in return – uncharacteristically, as Pepys’s note implies. On that same day Pepys was at Salisbury Court again and heard that his brother John had won an exhibition from St Paul’s, but that he had also angered their uncle Robert at Brampton. This was regrettable, since uncle Robert had an estate to leave and must be kept in good humour. Pepys and his father went downstairs to the kitchen to talk undisturbed about the prospects of uncle Robert’s will.

  Neither Pepys’s days nor his weeks had a regular pattern. He carried out business for Downing and Montagu as they required it, and took his meals at home or out as it pleased him on the spur of the moment. Elizabeth would have been wasting her time had she tried to plan meals in advance. He might breakfast with friends at Harper’s, where cold goose and turkey pie were on offer, dine out in the middle of the day with a friend met by chance – and Westminster and Whitehall were small enough to make such meetings more likely than not – and stay out in the evening too, enjoying pot venison and ale till midnight with Will Symons, Peter Luellin and his friend Jeremiah Mount, who had his own bachelor room in the palace.

  These easy-going ways were interrupted on 2 February when Pepys had his first sight of Monck’s troops in the Strand. His immediate response was to take his small stock of cash to be hidden at Montagu’s Whitehall lodgings. From there, peering out of an upstairs window, he saw foot soldiers bawling for a free parliament and money, and threatening a confrontation with some cavalry; when the dispute resolved itself, Pepys took his money home again. The next morning he was out playing his pipe in St James’s Park in the sunshine and spent a good deal of the day agreeably with his Cambridge cousin Roger Pepys, son of Talbot; Roger was a good-humoured barrister about to celebrate his third marriage. A few days later the sight of soldiers treating Quakers roughly upset Sam again; he disliked religious intolerance and hated persecution. He had to go round to reassure Lady Jem, who was frightened by the arrival of the troops in London and still under doctor’s treatment. But what he mostly did was to walk the streets, eyes missing nothing, ears alert as he threaded his way east, west and east again, sometimes alone, more often with a friend, from Westminster and Whitehall to Charing Cross, from Somerset House to London Bridge, from St James’s to Fleet Street, from Gray’s Inn to St Paul’s, from the Temple to Aldgate, from Lincoln’s Inn Fields back to Whitehall. He knew the territory as well as an animal knows its runs.

  The first set-piece of the Diary comes on 11 February with his account of the rejoicing in the City when Monck made his decisive move against the Rump parliament and humiliated Haslerig and its leaders by insisting that it was unrepresentative and that a free election must be called. Pepys gives several pages to a running description of his own long day from noon, when he went into Westminster Hall, heard that a letter from Monck had been delivered to parliament and saw the faces of the men in the Hall outside changed with joy. An angry Haslerig was plucked by the arm by a Quaker as he left and told, ‘Thou must fall.’ After this Pepys tells how he walked dinnerless with his friend James Chetwynd towards the City, and with some difficulty found a pullet ready-roasted at Temple Bar; how they went to Chetwynd’s law office, where Pepys sang some cheerful songs; on then to the Guildhall, and there, after much standing about and drinking, saw with his own eyes Monck greeted with a great cry of ‘God bless your Excellence’; and how the people pressed drink and money on Monck’s soldiers, and Pepys stopped at the Star Tavern to write a hurried letter to Montagu; and how the church bells began to ring all over the City. By ten o’clock that night he could count thirty-one bonfires from the spot in the Strand where he stood. ‘Indeed, it was past imagination, both the greatness and the suddenness of it.’ And when he got home at last and found John Hunt sitting with Elizabeth, he took her out again to show her the fires.

  You can’t read these pages without being moved as Pepys becomes one with the crowd and its excitement and relief at Monck’s determination to break the political deadlock, and at the same time impressed by his capacity to watch, listen and take in everything. The entry may look as though it wrote itself, but the effects are worked with skill, the rhythm of the long unpunctuated sentences leading you through the streets, their momentum occasionally broken by natural pauses to drink, observe or talk. The three pieces of direct speech that do punctuate the passage raise the sense of immediacy, the warning to Haslerig, the greeting to Monck and the ‘God bless them’s of the people to the soldiers. Pepys is lucky enough, or skilful enough, to find Monck’s secretary Lock; he takes him to a tavern, extracts the substance of Monck’s letter to parliament directly from him and writes down its six points. This is businesslike stuff, but he also lets us feel how his own awareness of the importance of the day through which he is living expands and permeates everything as the hours go by: ‘But the common joy that was everywhere to be seen!’ he exclaims, as Bow bells start to ring. He has the good reporter’s gift for
being in the right place at the right moment, and the structure and rhythm of his sentences show how well he has mastered his medium.

  After this he sent off volleys of letters, many to Hinchingbrooke and one to Downing in Holland. The excitement in London gave no guarantees about the future, and he still committed himself to no direct expression of opinion in his Diary. On 20 February he mentions reading what he described as a well-written pamphlet in praise of the old form of monarchy. Later in the same day he went with Will Symons to the Rota Club and got the impression it would not meet any more; if it did, Pepys did not attend again. Visiting his parents in Salisbury Court, he noticed that the republican Praisegod Barebones had his windows broken in Fleet Street – again, he writes. John Crew urged Pepys to send for his master from Hinchingbrooke, since he was now assured of government employment again, and two days later, on Pepys’s twenty-seventh birthday, Montagu was indeed elected to the Council of State. Pepys decided to ride with his brother John, just starting his Cambridge studies, and to go on to Hinchingbrooke. But his communications were bad. He hired a horse and set off, only to learn in Cambridge that Montagu was already on his way to London.5

  At Magdalene, Pepys observed that the fellows of his old college spoke in new voices: they had abandoned the puritan twang he remembered from his undergraduate days. The change amused him, and he joined in their toasts to the king and the royal family, still made strictly in the privacy of their rooms. Then he hurried back to London. He was not yet in Montagu’s confidence. On 2 March he observed that ‘Great is talk of a single person [as ruler], and that it would now be Charles [Stuart], George [Monck], or Richard [Cromwell] again.’ On the same day, Whitelocke’s diary entry is ‘Monck & Montagu voted to be Generals at Sea, both fit for the intended design.’6 Montagu was replacing Lawson as commander of the fleet, a crucial appointment at this juncture, but he was still uncertain about Monck’s ultimate intentions. On 5 March Pepys committed himself to ‘Great hopes of the King’s coming again’.

  At last, on 6 March, Montagu opened his mind to Pepys and asked him, with exquisite politeness, if he could, ‘without too much inconvenience’, go to sea with him as his secretary, since he was going to need someone he could trust. He told him he believed the king would be restored and laid great stress on the affection of the people and the City – ‘at which I was full glad’. There were still republicans and adherents of Richard Cromwell about, and Montagu stressed that the king would have to carry himself ‘very soberly and well’ if he were to succeed, but for the first time, Pepys wrote, people felt free to drink the king’s health openly. And since this was good enough for ‘my Lord’, he would happily go with him to sea.

  He had been to sea only once, on his dash to the Baltic the previous year. Then Montagu had a secretary called John Creed. Now Creed lost his job to Pepys. There was nothing wrong with Creed’s abilities, only his politics and religion. He was known as a committed puritan, while his elder brother Richard was an important commonwealth official who had been clerk to the Admiralty Committee from 1653 and deputy-treasurer to the fleet from 1657, and served both under Montagu and under Major-General Harrison, zealot and regicide. Richard Creed, ordered to leave London in March, refused to do so and was imprisoned in the Tower for several months.7 So the name of Creed would have been a liability to Montagu, while Pepys’s discretion, personal loyalty and open-mindedness recommended him. John Creed’s ambitions turned out to be stronger than his convictions, and he adapted to the changing circumstances with impressive speed, although he was not quite quick enough to keep his job as secretary. He did, however, manage to remain in Montagu’s service, and he and Pepys maintained from then on an awkward relationship, part rivals, part friends. Pepys frequently expressed his dislike of Creed’s meanness and deviousness in the Diary, and even plotted to do him out of his job again; yet the two of them spent many hours and days together over the coming years, swapping stories and advice, sometimes collaborating, and pacing one another with beady eyes up the career ladder.8 Some of Pepys’s mockery of Creed is patently unfair – for instance, when they took a Sunday drink in a tavern together, a year after the Restoration, Pepys’s gibe was ‘Mr Creed, who twelve months ago might have been got to hang himself almost, as soon as to go to a drinking-house on a Sunday’.9 The change in Creed was of course part of the general change that affected everyone, including their master Montagu and Pepys himself. But although Creed tried hard, it took him time to lose the smell of his past, and five years later he was still talked of as ‘a fanatic and a false fellow’.10

  Almost the first advice Pepys got when his promotion was known was from a sea captain telling him how to fiddle his expenses by listing five or six non-existent servants when he went on board and claiming pay for them all. It made an interesting introduction to the workings of the navy.11 When he went to the Admiralty offices he met anxious officials who had served the commonwealth for many years. Robert Blackborne, a man of influence as secretary both to the naval commissioners and to the customs, expressed his fear that the king would come in and ‘all good men and good things’ be discouraged; he did not expect to keep either of his positions.12 There was nothing Pepys could say to this. He had become overnight a person with the power to hire or fire, and found himself courted by men who hoped for jobs and offered presents – wine, a rapier, a silver hatband, a gown for his wife. On top of this dream-like change of circumstances he also heard that his uncle Robert had just declared he was making him his heir. One day in the not too distant future he would come into his own country estate at Brampton. It was exactly the good fortune he and Luellin had wished for a few weeks before.

  With the news of uncle Robert’s will fresh in his mind, he sat down to write his own before setting off to sea. Everything was to go to Elizabeth except his books, which were bequeathed to John, although any books in French were to be hers. During his absence he arranged for her to go to the Bowyer family in Buckinghamshire. He wrote to inform Downing he was going to sea and suggested a substitute to take over his work. After this he spent a sleepless night worrying about the change in his circumstances and made a vow to give up drinking for a week. Meanwhile the Rump dissolved itself, elections were called, ‘and now they begin to talk loud of the King’.13 Monck began a purge of army officers and gave Montagu his support by moving troops out of Huntingdon, with the idea of pleasing the townspeople before the election.

  Pepys took a short, melancholy leave of his parents, expressing the fear that he might never see his mother again; she had nothing worse than a cold, but he was in a heightened state of emotion. His leave-taking of his friends among the clerks was longer and jollier, and on 23 March he took a barge at the Tower and boarded the Swiftsure with a group of Montagu’s servants and his own clerk and boy to serve him, the first he ever employed. There was a gun salute for Montagu, and a busy time began. Pepys had to compile lists of ships and men and write out orders and letters to the council and abroad. Soon a personal letter came to him from Blackborne, addressed as he had never been addressed before, to Samuel Pepys, Esquire, ‘Of which, God knows, I was not a little proud’. A few days later the astute writer appeared in person and surprised Pepys further by commending Charles Stuart as ‘a sober man’ whom he would be happy to serve. Sobriety was evidently the quality new royalists most wanted to see in the king: Montagu had said he would need it, Blackborne claimed it for him, and when Pepys saw Charles for the first time a few weeks later he also described him as ‘a very sober man’.14

  From this point two stories are being told in the Diary. One is a breezy account of shipboard life, in which Pepys enjoyed his snug cabin, set out to learn sea terms, walked on the deck to keep sickness at bay as they put out to sea and bravely dealt with rain blowing in and soaking his berth. He was always prepared to make the best of things. He made music with Montagu’s clerk Will Howe, consumed pickled oysters and radishes and, leaning out of a porthole, appreciated the sight of some handsome women aboard a passing East Indiaman
through a friendly lieutenant’s telescope – there were no women aboard his ship. He relished the drama of rattling guns and dense clouds of smoke that enveloped the whole fleet when they exchanged salutes with the three coastal forts of Walmer, Deal and Sandown. He played ninepins on deck; and he argued pleasurably with the ship’s chaplain, who, unlike Pepys, believed in extempore prayers. He explored below decks to see the ‘massy timbers’ and the storerooms where wine and provisions were kept. The insides of fighting ships were painted red, and the sailors lived among the powder magazines and stores, slinging their hammocks between decks less than a man’s height deep and inured to the stink made up of the bilge in the hold, their own sweat and the supplies of living chickens and meat that started the voyage fresh but was soon high: beef and pork were what seamen expected to eat. The officers were fed more delicately in their finely panelled quarters; Montagu had his own fireplace, a surprising arrangement in a wooden ship. Officers paid visits from one ship to another, dining one another and drinking well, and Montagu encouraged music-making, joining in himself on occasion, one evening with a rude song against the Rump.

  The other story that emerges from the Diary is the political one. From the Swiftsure Montagu and his party transferred to the Naseby, his former and much loved flagship, with the figure of Cromwell treading down six nations on its prow. He could hardly go to greet the king from a ship so decorated, and carpenters were summoned to start transforming its appearance. In London Blackborne busied himself arranging for new flags of acceptably royalist design to be rushed to the fleet.15 The ship’s decorations were not the only problem. Montagu started going through the list of his senior officers, getting rid of radicals and religious zealots, and dispatching others to far-off destinations to keep them out of the way. Most must have been personally known to him from the days when they fought together. It was a delicate and painful business, and he was nervous. He told Pepys he had doubts about even his own flag-captain’s loyalty. A gun salute that blew out many of the windows of his ship as he joined Lawson’s squadron at Tilbury may have increased his anxiety: was it enthusiastic greeting or warning? As it turned out, Lawson had decided to make his accommodation with the new regime, and his submission sent a useful message to all the other officers. Blackborne’s eagerness to serve Montagu reinforced Lawson’s signal to the captains who had been his friends for years that, if they hoped to go on working, they too had better change their coats.