Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  Pall was also offered a place in the household. She was still living at Salisbury Court with her parents, and, to make sure she had no illusions about the position they expected her to occupy with them, she was told bluntly that she was to come, ‘not as a sister in any respect but as a servant’. The tears she shed, Pepys decided, were brought on by her joy at the prospect of working for them; and perhaps she did expect to have more fun with Elizabeth and Jane than with her mother, and accepted that a brother who had risen to such heights of success might be entitled to forget to be civil to his own sister.8 She arrived early in January 1661 and, to emphasize what had already been said, was forbidden to sit down at table with her brother and sister-in-law on her first day in the house.9

  The third new member of the family came to them through Pepys’s friendship with Blackborne. The Diary is studded with references to drinks, meals and other meetings between the two men, as Black-borne, intent on salvaging something from the wreck of his past career, put his knowledge, contacts and advice at Pepys’s disposal; in exchange he got his sister’s young son William Hewer a job with Pepys, in the combined roles of personal servant and clerk. It was a master stroke for a man faced with the end of the regime in which he had flourished, to get his nephew into the organization from which he himself had been ejected – a Darwinian coup, ensuring that his family genes retained their influence. And Will Hewer succeeded beyond any dream Blackborne can have had. Pepys noted his arrival at the house in Seething Lane but omitted any account of how he came to employ him other than that he was Blackborne’s nephew.10

  Will, the son of Thomas Hewer, a stationer, was an unfledged, fair-haired boy of seventeen, and Pepys felt free to bully him and box his ears, sometimes reducing him to tears.11 But he learnt to defend himself and to argue back. Over the next few years he even managed to misbehave with some style. He stayed out late. He became too friendly with the maids, corrupting them, according to Pepys, although it seems to have meant little more than discussing their employer with them behind his back. He got drunk. He refused to go to church. He wore his hat in the house and flung his cloak dramatically over his shoulder in the street ‘like a Ruffian’.12 He said he would not be treated like a slave.13 In short, he did his best to become the son Pepys failed to beget. He was only ten years younger than his master, but you would hardly guess that from Pepys’s treatment of him. Pepys complained of Will’s behaviour to his uncle Blackborne more than once, and the point was even reached when he angrily turned him out of the house – though not out of his clerkship – and told him he must live in lodgings. Will was much too good at his work to be sacked, and Pepys defended him when he was attacked by others. In January 1662, for instance, there was a complaint from the highest official of the Navy Board that Will was telling office business to his parliamentarian uncle, Blackborne, described as ‘a rogue’, and Pepys was advised to sack him. Though troubled, Pepys did no such thing. He simply had a cautionary word with Will, who took the warning and presumably became more discreet in visiting his uncle Blackborne. Nothing more was heard of the matter.14

  The arrival of this clever, good-natured young man enriched the emotional possibilities within the household. He was only two years younger than Elizabeth, and if he took on the role of son to Pepys, he also seems to have given his heart to her. It was an innocent passion as such things go, and also a definitive one. When some years later Pepys tried to persuade him to marry Pall, Will made it clear that this was out of the question, adding that he had no intention of marrying anyone. He never went back on this resolve. At Christmas 1667 he offered Elizabeth a diamond locket, which she kept for some weeks before showing it to her husband, who insisted on her returning it: since Will was earning only £30 a year, and the locket was worth £40, he had obviously already learnt how to profit from his position in the office. Pepys had no objection to that, but suffered from twinges of jealousy over his friendship with Elizabeth; she often invited Will to escort her when she went out or to keep her company at home when her perpetually busy husband was absent.15

  But at the beginning, in the summer of 1660 when Will arrived, he was nothing more than a bright, shy boy, ready to make himself useful. He read Latin with his master, learnt to use his shorthand when Pepys asked him to; and he could soon turn out accounts every bit as neatly and nimbly. Another thing they had in common was a name that defeated almost everyone who tried to write it down. Will Hewer’s appeared in variations ranging exotically through Ewre, Ewere and Eure to Hewers, Hewest, Yewers and Youar, though he seems to have stuck to ‘Hewer’ himself, as Pepys did to Pepys, although he appeared as Pepies, Paypes, Pepes, Peeps, Peppiss, Peipes, Peepys, Pypss and more.16 Hewer’s intellectual and business abilities, his even temper, his central position in the household as friend to both husband and wife and the way he withstood Pepys’s bullying made him not only a surrogate son but, as the years went by, his closest friend.

  The lease of the house in Axe Yard (‘my poor little house’) was got rid of in the autumn of 1660, although not before Pepys had taken advantage of its emptiness to entertain two different young women there: his old friend Betty Lane, with whom he was ‘exceeding free’ and she ‘not unfree to take it’; and Diana, daughter of Mrs Crisp, his neighbour in the Yard. He had suspected Diana of being not as good as she should be over drinks at her mother’s house one evening, when her brother Laud was leaving to serve Lord Sandwich; when Pepys got her alone he found her surprisingly compliant, and for the first time resorted to a foreign language in the Diary to record his success: ‘nulla puella negat’, he wrote in Latin, meaning ‘the girl refused nothing’.17 He salved his conscience towards Elizabeth by taking her out and buying her a pearl necklace costing £4.10s. the following day. This was a variant on his system of moral accounting, in which he made vows – to abstain from drink or theatregoing, for instance – and paid money into the poor box to atone for each broken vow; by spending money on his wife he compensated for his infidelity.

  He had now become, in addition to his other offices, a justice of the peace, his rising path crossing with that of Richard Sherwyn, the JP who had presided over his wedding five years before: Sherwyn was then secretary to the Treasury commissioners and a valued colleague of Downing; now he was out, reduced to finding what work he could as a humble clerk.18 Pepys’s new status was full of these surprises. He found himself receiving a five-gun salute when he escorted Lord Sandwich to his ship. He was invited to dine by the lord mayor. He was able to escort his wife into the presence room at court to observe the queen mother at close quarters: ‘a very little plain old woman and nothing more’ is what he saw.19 Men who would not have deigned to speak to him a year ago now came cap in hand, as he noted with relish, and sea captains were so deferential that he had to learn ‘how to receive so much reverence, which at the begining I could not tell how to do’.20 It took time for him to believe in himself as a gentleman; on the death of his uncle Robert in the summer of 1661 he exaggerated the value of his Brampton inheritance to his colleagues at the Navy Office, because he felt he must try to impress them.21

  He was the youngest of the officers there, the poorest, the least experienced and one of the few without a title. The two he got to know first, because they were also his new neighbours in Seething Lane, Sir William Batten and Sir William Penn, were naval commanders of long service with distinguished fighting records; the Pepyses gave their first dinner party for them in January 1661. Penn had taken Jamaica for the English, and Batten, a man of sixty, had been surveyor of the navy under Charles I and knew everything there was to know about the naval yards where ships were built. To a junior colleague who had been to sea only twice and had no knowledge of ships, they were potentially alarming figures. Both were West Country men who had gone to sea as boys; Batten had trained Penn, who was a generation younger, not yet forty. Both had served the commonwealth and made good money, and Penn had acquired estates in Ireland. Both owned fine country houses at Walthamstow. Penn had risen to vice-admiral u
nder Cromwell. Blackborne told Pepys that Penn had put on a ‘pretence of sanctity’ in order to get promotion; but puritan piety had been required when he was young and was standard at the time, as Sandwich’s history bore witness.22 Penn had fought against the Dutch alongside Blake and Monck, and pursued Prince Rupert furiously in the Mediterranean. In 1652 he claimed he had not set foot on land for a whole year; but he was not just brawn and bluster, for he had drawn up a code of naval tactics for Cromwell and served as a commissioner on his Navy Board. He had also had some inconclusive contact with the exiled Charles and been briefly imprisoned by Cromwell; yet he had accepted a knighthood from Richard Cromwell. With Monck’s support he made another approach to Charles, which explained his favourable reception and second knighthood in 1660, and his reappointment as a commissioner to the new Navy Board.

  In short, like the majority of his fellow countrymen, he had changed and adapted with time and circumstance. Batten too had gone over to Charles for a while in the early 1650s – he had received his knighthood from him then – and then thought better of it; and finally both men had contrived to be on the right side at the right time. When Pepys, drinking at the Dolphin with them, listened to them ‘betwitt’ and reproach one another with their behaviour under the commonwealth, he said he felt ashamed to hear them; but there must have been a lot of this sort of talk going on, and Pepys’s remark seems oddly inappropriate given his own patrons’ history.23 Batten bought some commonwealth ships’ carvings and coats of arms that were being sold off, some to be made into garden ornaments, others to burn on the night of Charles II’s coronation, which suggests he didn’t take these things too seriously.24 He had been reappointed surveyor to the board, and Pepys observed that he lived like a prince with his young second wife in their Walthamstow house. Penn’s half-Dutch wife came from their Irish estates to join him in London; Pepys described her as ‘an old Dutchwoman’. They had a daughter Pegg, and two sons, the elder, William, at Oxford, just getting into trouble for his Nonconformity: he became a Quaker, to his father’s initial fury, and was the future founder of Pennsylvania.25 Pepys was snobbish about both families, which he had no right to be; his only claim to superiority was his university education, but it allowed him to look down his nose at them for not being gentlemen. The truth was they were exactly the sort of naval officers he came to approve of, ‘tarpaulins’ who had worked their way up from boyhood and knew all the ropes, as opposed to the gentlemen officers who expected to be given commands without knowing anything of the discipline of the sea. Penn in particular was an energetic and intelligent man, and soon drew up a new version of his code of tactics that became standard, put out as ‘The Duke of York’s Sailing and Fighting Instructions’. ‘Vieux Pen’, as the duke called him in 1665 when he was forty-three, went to sea against the Dutch again, although ill with gout, was appointed ‘Captain of the Fleet’ and fought bravely.26

  The two Sir Williams were sociable and hospitable neighbours, entertaining Pepys and Elizabeth with meals, theatre expeditions and visits to Walthamstow. Pepys was intrigued by the black domestic servants each of them owned, Mingo and Jack, slaves from the African trade; it was fashionable for officers to own one, and Sandwich had also acquired a little Turk and a Negro boy for his family.27 Batten invited the Pepyses to celebrate his election to parliament at Rochester with an outing and a festive dinner, and his third wedding anniversary with some fancy pies; on another occasion Penn invited them to his eighteenth wedding anniversary, at which eighteen mince pies were served. The three men arranged to watch the pre-coronation procession together. There were occasional fallings out of the kind neighbours have – Lady Batten felt that Mrs Pepys did not show her all the respect she should – but there was a great deal of conviviality and cooperation too. Pepys and Batten collaborated on having new top floors for their houses constructed in the shipyards at Deptford. Pepys joined in bawdy songs with Penn, but he also listened carefully when he talked of ‘things and persons that I did not understand’ during the commonwealth.28 At first he shared an office with them, but in 1662 he insisted on a private office for himself, leaving the two Sir Williams to share.

  While Pepys was head of the family at Seething Lane, he remained a member of another family in which he felt almost equally at home, but where the role he had to play was quite different. When ‘my Lady’, countess of Sandwich, arrived in town in October 1660, he naturally called on her at once. He found her alone at supper in the Whitehall lodgings, and she pressed him to sit down with her and to stay on afterwards, ‘she showing me most extraordinary love and kindness’ and talking to him about his uncle Robert at Brampton, known to her for many years at Hinchingbrooke.29 She was now thirty-five and mother of eight children, all alive and well including the twin boys – a rare record of success at that date. Her life had been distinguished by courage and discretion, since she had been more often than not in charge of her husband’s house and estate in his absence, and supported him through difficult and dangerous times year in, year out. Entering the new and transformed London society for the first time as a countess and preparing to appear at court, she may have been a little nervous of what she would find and what was expected of her, not least by her husband. And indeed nothing in her life till then had prepared her for the court of the new king, with its pursuit of pleasure, its nights spent in gambling, its showy, competitive beauties; her beauty lay in a gentle face, thoughtful eyes and a tranquil mind. Pepys, whom she had known for years, could still be talked to in the old way; they could gossip, and she could trust him.

  Two days after her talk with Pepys she invited him to bring Elizabeth to supper with her, Lord Sandwich being absent at the chancellor’s; and, on Sandwich’s going to sea a few days after that, Pepys became a regular visitor at the Whitehall lodgings. He had after all lived there and knew all the servants as well as the children; and although no longer exactly a servant himself, something of the role remained, and he made himself generally obliging and useful. When a French maid arrived, Elizabeth went along to interpret, because Lady Sandwich knew no French, a language not much studied in puritan families during the civil war and commonwealth period. Pepys noted that it was on this occasion, in November 1660, that Lord Sandwich, for the first time ever, took notice of Elizabeth ‘as my wife’. For five years she had been invisible; now suddenly he could see her.30

  Lady Sandwich did nothing to discourage Pepys from considering himself as one of the family, and he felt free to turn up for meals either at Whitehall or at the Wardrobe, where she moved in May 1661, whenever he felt like it. Sometimes he ate with the servants, sometimes with my Lady and sometimes, when he was there, with my Lord. For instance, Pepys noted the excellent quality of the food when he dropped in casually with Creed in May 1661 and ‘we, with the rest of the servants in the Hall, sat down and eat of the best cold meats that ever I eat on in all my life’.31 A week later he enjoyed a venison pasty for dinner with Lord Sandwich and all the officers of the Wardrobe. He also noted how the food deteriorated once Sandwich went to sea again in June and his wife economized: ‘went and dined with my Lady; who now my Lord is gone, is come to her poor housekeeping again’.32

  The Diary provides a marvellously detailed study of this near-feudal arrangement prevailing in the middle of the seventeenth century and of its slow shift into more modern attitudes. In 1660 Pepys still took his membership of the Sandwich household absolutely for granted; for years he had eaten and slept among the Sandwich servants whenever he chose to, and he still indulged in casual sexual familiarities with the housekeeper Sarah. He also knew that he owed duty, deference and practical assistance to Lady Sandwich, especially in the absence of her husband; both of them enjoyed his attentiveness to her. For instance, in January 1661 he promised to accompany her to Chatham to show her over the ships, my Lord having been much too busy to do so and now gone to sea. As the agreed time approached, Pepys had to spend three nights at Deptford inspecting the yard and forgot his promise. He arrived home from Deptford to b
e told that she had already set off by coach, expecting to meet him in Rochester; and, tired as he was, he at once put on his boots, hired a horse and a guide, and covered the thirty miles to Rochester in a speedy four hours.33 There he found ‘my Lady and her daughter Jem and Mrs Browne and five servants, all at a loss not finding me here’, but ‘at my coming she was overjoyed’.34 Pepys liked to emphasize her expressions of affection in the Diary, but there is no reason to doubt she made them.

  She had planned to make her visit incognito, but, unsurprisingly, the captain of the Charles recognized her, and there was a cheerful supper party. Pepys shared a bed with her page and breakfasted with her. The whole group was then taken by barge, first to the biggest ship in the fleet, the Royal Sovereign, built before the war, in 1637; it had six lanterns in the stern, and everyone managed to squeeze into one of them. Then on to the Charles, on which Pepys had sailed to Holland when it was the Naseby; he was delighted to revisit ‘the ship that I begun my good fortune in’, and she to hear him describe how everything was arranged for her Lord when he was aboard. Another breakfast was served, and there were gun salutes; then Pepys, always the eager teacher, insisted on showing her a small ship, so that she might appreciate the difference. He carried out his role to perfection, handing out tips and escorting her back to her coach. The weather turned so bad on the return journey to London that they were forced to spend the night at a Dartford inn, where, over dinner, Pepys and Lady Sandwich amicably argued the rights and wrongs of primogeniture. Afterwards he went off with the captains, looking for a pretty girl they had heard about who played a guitar; but they failed to find her. In the morning they all went back separately to London in the rain. She was in early pregnancy; he went straight to consult his doctor about the ‘decay of my memory’ that had made him forget his appointment with her, for which Hollier advised him to cut down his drinking.35 The trip had turned out an undoubted success, a little interlude of pleasure for them both; and there were to be more.