Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  She sometimes gave him advice, telling him he should be more generous to Elizabeth, of whom she became particularly fond. She was not narrow-minded but ready to chat and joke, and enjoyed gossiping about the scandals at court, especially the king’s mistress Lady Castlemaine – admired by Pepys – and what would happen to her when he married. Pepys was especially helpful to her in the eleven months in which Sandwich was away at sea fetching the new queen from Portugal, during which Lady Sandwich gave birth to her daughter Catherine in London. The Diary records seventy-five visits to her over this period. ‘Shows my wife and me the greatest favour in the world,’ he writes; ‘my Lady very merry and very handsome methought’; ‘an hour or two’s talk with my Lady with great pleasure’; ‘stayed talking with my Lady all the afternoon, till late at night’; ‘stayed all the afternoon with my Lady alone, talking’; ‘an hour to two’s talk in Divinity with my Lady’. After this particular talk, Elizabeth arrived, and they were ‘very merry; and my Lady very fond, as she always is, of my wife’.36 In common with all mothers, Lady Sandwich was especially grateful for his attentions to her children. He took the older girls to the theatre, to Islington to eat cheesecake and to Bartholomew Fair; and the younger children to see the lions in the menagerie at the Tower. He and Elizabeth offered to have the three little boys, Oliver, John and Charles, to stay, and they came to Seething Lane in August when Lady Sandwich was about to give birth. After the birth, her friend Mrs Crisp told her she would get the king to be godfather to the baby Catherine, which embarrassed her so much, she told Pepys, ‘that she sweat in the very telling of it’. No sweat was needed, as the king did not become godfather.37

  She invited both Pepyses to go with her to Hampton Court and showed them over the palace. He took the children to see the king’s yacht, the Catherine, and later escorted her aboard it. This was the occasion of her first visit to Seething Lane, and she allowed him to lead her through the courtyard by the hand for everyone in the office to see, in her fine clothes and with her page holding up her train. After this they took a boat to Greenwich and walked to the top of the hill together – a considerable feat in a dress with a train – then returned on the water, ‘she being much pleased with the ramble – in every perticular of it. So we supped with her and then walked home.’38

  Pepys’s attachment to ‘my Lady’ was a little like Will Hewer’s to Elizabeth, a devotion to a woman who could safely be admired, even adored, because she was sexually inaccessible. For Pepys, she existed on a different level from the generality of her sex, and he never had a bad or seriously disrespectful word to say about her. When she made an unannounced visit to his house, and he, hurrying over from the office to greet her because Elizabeth was out, found her sitting on a chamber pot in his dining room, she blushed and he talked hastily to cover his embarrassment; but they both had enough aplomb to go on to discuss a debate in the House of Commons about a Dutch war before she made her dignified departure. The episode is surprising; she was in advanced pregnancy, with her last child, and it is her only other recorded appearance at Seething Lane. It clearly shook him somewhat: ‘mightily taken with her dear visit’ is what he wrote in the Diary.39 His visits to her had few constraints. He saw her when she had just given birth and was also recovering from measles; the measles worried him so much that when he called and found the children and my Lord had fled the house he thought she might be dead: ‘it will be a sad hour to that family should she miscarry’.40 He stood by her bedside on another occasion when she was ill; he admired her sangfroid as she waited for news of her husband after a sea battle, ‘in the best temper, neither confident nor troubled with fear, that I ever did see in my life’.41 He helped her to organize her daughter Jem’s wedding in the absence of Lord Sandwich and listened sympathetically to her fears that Jem might not like the match arranged for her. He lent her money, albeit reluctantly: even Lady Sandwich could not make him free with his money, and he charged her 6 per cent.42 He admired her unworldliness, which made her so different from himself and which he called her innocence. To him she was ‘My best Lady Sandwich’, in the phrase that discreetly singles out those who are especially loved.43

  Despite all this, time and circumstance changed their friendship. The quasi-feudal household ceased to attract him once he had established himself as a powerful and successful man in his own right, and he did not like it to be known that he had formerly been a servant. Once or twice she reproached him for not visiting her, and once she pressed him to come to Hinchingbrooke. She was much less in London after 1665, and Pepys was increasingly busy and preoccupied with war, work, the fire, his eye trouble and other worries. He managed to visit her briefly at Hinchingbrooke in the autumn of 1667, when they had long talks and she told him she looked on him ‘like one of her own family and interest’.44 He also wrote to her from time to time but may not have expected or got answers; writing was not her best accomplishment, as the few surviving letters to her husband show. This one went to him in Spain in the summer of 1668: ‘I weare in great straiths for money… and can get none from Mr More, and therfor am forsed to borow of my cosen Pepys, a 100 pound, which I doubt will not serve till you com. I pray God send us a happy and spedy meeting, if it be his wille. Hinchbrok much want your selfe although it now is plesent.’45 Her marriage suffered strains as well as long separations, but to Pepys she remained always ‘the same most excellent, good, discreet lady that ever she was’.46

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  Pepys was not enthusiastic about many of his blood relations. Like most people, he preferred the ones who did well in life. His favourite London cousin was Jane Pepys, later Turner, whose parents had taken him to Surrey as a child, who had made a good marriage and continued her parents’ kindness when she offered her house to him for his operation. He also got on well with the son of his Cambridge great-uncle Talbot, Roger Pepys, the lawyer. After this, there was a first cousin, Charles Pepys, who became a master-joiner at Chatham and referred to himself as ‘your honnor’s poor kinsman’ when writing to him in later life; Pepys kept up a kindly distant interest in him.47 Uncle Wight, his father’s half-brother, a London fishmonger and general merchant who did well and lost all his children, had an obvious claim on Pepys’s attention; his remarkable attempt to unite the two families is told in Chapter 13.

  He found his mother’s family more of a trial. Her nieces, Mary and Kate Fenner, married brothers, William and Anthony Joyce, sons of a rich tallow chandler but ‘dull company and impertinent’ in Pepys’s view.48 They called on him more often than he liked and took their cousinship seriously, commenting freely on family matters; for instance they laughed at the idea that Pepys might be knighted by the king when he came ashore in 1660; and they hurried round to tell Pepys that his brother Tom had the pox – falsely, as it turned out.49 Neither of their own marriages was happy, but they enjoyed suggesting wives for Tom and husbands for Pall. In the course of the Diary, Pepys had to help William when he got into trouble for trying to arrest a peeress for debt, and to lend money to Anthony after his house was burnt in the great fire; and when Anthony tried to drown himself in a fit of depression, dying shortly afterwards, Pepys helped his widow Kate to secure the estate. Even with these troublesome cousins, although he grumbled, he had too strong a sense of the obligations of blood not to do his duty.

  He showed less kindness to his own sister Pall than to many of his cousins. The attempt to make her into an extra servant at Seething Lane was not a success, and by the summer of 1661 he had decided to be rid of her. Following uncle Robert’s death, the Pepys parents were moving to Brampton, leaving the Salisbury Court house and the tailoring business to Tom. Sam’s plan was to send Pall to live with them in Huntingdonshire; he did not expect her to welcome the idea. First he informed his father; then he set up a great scene in which both men declared they wanted nothing to do with Pall; and only when they had ‘brought down her high spirit’ – a phrase reeking of a sour and bullying morality – did they relent and say she might at any rate go to Brampton. Poor Pall
had lived in London all her life and hated the idea of the country, but a few days later she was put into the slow carrier’s wagon with her mother and went into exile in floods of tears.50

  Her future was a worry to him. ‘God knows… what will become of her, for I have not anything yet to spare her, and she grows now old and must be disposed of one way or another’ – this in 1663, when she was twenty-three.51 He set aside £500 as a dowry and over the next years made several attempts to find her a husband, all of which failed. As we have seen, in 1667 he offered her to Will Hewer, who explained politely that he planned to remain a bachelor.52 He then tried to interest his school and college friend Richard Cumberland, with no more success; he was on his way to a bishop’s throne. In the end she may have found her own husband, since he was a Huntingdonshire lad, John Jackson, ‘a plain young man, handsome enough for her; one of no education nor discourse, but of few words… I shall have no pleasure nor content in him, as if he had been a man of breeding’, wrote Pepys when he met him.53 Neither he nor Elizabeth attended the wedding, which took place at Brampton on 27 February 1668. Pepys merely noted the news of it a few days later and wrote to congratulate his father, not Jackson or Pall herself.54 The Jacksons settled down to farm at Ellington, not far from Brampton, and old Mr Pepys went to live with them; and when Pepys visited he observed that she had grown comelier, ‘but a mighty pert woman she is, and I think proud, he keeping her mighty handsome, and they say mighty fond’.55 The three mightys showed he was not going to warm to his sister even as a bride enjoying her brief season of dignity and joy. It did not occur to him for a moment that pert Pall and her ill-bred husband were going to produce a son who would win his love, accept his guidance, act out his dreams, serve his projects and contribute largely to his own family happiness.

  9. Work

  Pepys’s office, the centre of his working life, was across the courtyard from his house. In a few steps he was at his desk, and in another few he was home again, and he went to and fro from early morning until midnight and after. There were no fixed working hours for the officers of the Navy Board, although their meetings were held twice weekly at Seething Lane, and they attended the duke of York as lord high admiral in Whitehall once a week on a Monday morning – sometimes they found he had gone hunting instead. Pepys’s duties took him out of the office a great deal, but when he wanted to leave town for any reason, he applied to the duke for permission. Taking time off to enjoy himself in London was his own affair; he took plenty, but sometimes worried about being seen idling in the company of women or at the theatre, by courtiers who might report him to the duke – not that there is any evidence that they ever did.1 Like almost everything connected with the navy, arrangements were informal, flexible, ad hoc and dependent on personal contacts. Pepys is often spoken of as an early civil servant, but there was no civil service as we know it: no career structure, no examinations for entry, no clear path of promotion and no pension system.2 However, if things went wrong, those held responsible were liable to censure or the sack, and sometimes arrest and imprisonment.

  The members of the Navy Board were appointed by the king and whoever he chose to listen to. In 1660 Sandwich, as vice-admiral, was one adviser, alongside the duke of York and his secretary, William Coventry. They agreed that the board should consist of four principal officers, as it had done under Charles I – treasurer, comptroller, surveyor and clerk of the acts – and three commissioners, a system that had worked well under the commonwealth. Sir George Carteret, an impeccable royalist whose service at sea had begun under Charles I and who had held Jersey for him, was appointed treasurer. He had official lodgings at Whitehall, a house in Pall Mall, another at Deptford and a country mansion near Windsor, and he was the highest paid, with £2,000 a year and the right to three pence in every pound he handled – this was a remnant of the old way of doing things. He was well disposed to Pepys, and Pepys knew he must cultivate him. The comptrollership went to two still more aged cavaliers, first Sir Robert Slingsby, who died within a year, then Sir John Mennes, whose naval career went back to the 1620s. He had fought at sea with Prince Rupert and no doubt against William Penn; and he was an educated man, a wit and a poet who had published imitations of Chaucer and encouraged Pepys to appreciate The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde.

  The surveyor, with particular responsibility for the dockyards and the design, building and repair of ships, was Sir William Batten, a professional who had served on both sides during the civil war. Of the commissioners, Penn, who was given a brief to take an interest in every aspect of the board’s work, also owed his appointment to his years of experience as a naval commander; both men made a useful practical link with the commonwealth regime. Another commissioner, Peter Pett, the master-shipwright at Chatham, had nothing of the cavalier about him and had served Cromwell zealously; but no change of government could unseat him, because the Pett family had a virtual monopoly of shipbuilding in the Thames yards, and he moved smoothly to work for the restored monarchy. In May 1660 he had been summoned on board the Naseby to prepare it for the king, and later in the year he started to build a royal pleasure yacht, the Catherine, greatly admired by Pepys.3

  These were the men with whom Pepys chiefly had to work; Lord Berkeley, the third commissioner, was appointed purely as a sign of royal favour; nothing was expected of him. There were further officers working at the more distant dockyards, Harwich and Portsmouth, some with histories of service to the commonwealth.4 Other minor officials left over from commonwealth days contrived to hang on in lesser jobs: Thomas Turner, clerk-general of the Navy Office from 1646, was disappointed in his hope of getting the job that went to Pepys, although he was allowed to remain as purveyor of petty provisions and kept a lodging at Seething Lane. Pepys did not care for him but enjoyed gossiping with his wife.

  Each officer of the Navy Board was served by his own two clerks, chosen by himself and usually owing their jobs to personal connections, just as their master did. Pepys was quick to defend his two, Tom Hayter and Will Hewer, against any criticism and to attack inefficiency among the others. The rest of the staff served everyone: two messengers, a doorkeeper, a porter and a couple of watchmen; and there were boatmen ready to take all the board officials up or down river at all times.

  Pepys started work with more doubts than zeal as he sorted and made inventories of the papers of the outgoing regime. He began to realize how much technical and procedural knowledge he would need to master if he were to be an effective member of the board. His function, as clerk of the acts, was to act as secretary, keeping minutes and records; and he was not at all certain he wanted the job. He learnt that there was another claimant to it, an old man called Thomas Barlow who had held it under Charles I and needed to be bought out with an annuity. Pepys was tempted by another man who offered him £ 500 for the job and then, as he hesitated, doubled his offer to £ 1,000. Sandwich had to explain to him that it was not the salary that made a man rich, but the ‘opportunities of getting money while he is in the place’.5 He appreciated the point as gold pieces, silver tankards, barrels of oysters and presents for Elizabeth came in. It took him much longer to start to enjoy his work. Only when he saw that he could extend it far beyond his official function and take an active part in policy-making did it become really interesting to him.

  During his first eighteen months at the board nobody was doing much beyond paying off ships as they came in from their voyages. By July 1661 the Cromwellian navy no longer existed, and it seemed unnecessary to maintain so large a fleet.6 London was still in a celebratory mood, cheerful enough to overcome a few alarms from religious anti-monarchists who took up arms believing that Christ’s Kingdom was coming and were ferociously put down; and there was the coronation to be attended to in April 1661. Pepys reported on it with all his bravura, from a 4 a.m. climb to perch on the scaffolding in the Abbey to waking in a pool of his own vomit the next morning – another set-piece. There were also the newly opened theatres, which he found irresistible, with
their repertoire of Elizabethan and Jacobean masterpieces, their many adaptations from the Spanish and the French, new works by Dryden and D’Avenant, and ambitious scenery. Throughout 1661 he went two or three times a week to either the King’s Company, managed by Thomas Killigrew, wit and courtier, or the Duke’s, under D’Avenant. In January he saw a woman on stage for the first time, and may have thought of his own boyish attempt at Arethusa. In August he was at Hamlet with Thomas Betterton and found it ‘beyond imagination’: Betterton, ‘the best actor in the world’, was taught the part by D’Avenant, who had studied it with Shakespeare himself.7 Other pleasures associated with his new position led to him being too drunk to conduct family prayers with the servants on a Sunday evening.8 After this had happened twice, he was ashamed enough to take a vow at the end of December to avoid plays and wine; and at least partly as a result of this 1662 became the year in which he learnt to love his work. He saw that it gave him the chance to prove his capacity, and he realized that, whatever superiority his fellow officers at the board possessed in rank and experience, in intellect and application he surpassed all but one of them.

  This one was William Coventry, the duke’s secretary. Coventry was replacing Pepys’s friend Blackborne, the commonwealth’s secretary to the Admiralty; but he quickly became Pepys’s hero, for his brains, his efficiency and his cool.9 In 1662 he joined the Navy Board, remaining secretary to the duke, and he was also in parliament, where he was an admired speaker. Five years older than Pepys, he was a gentleman born and socially far above him, the son of a high official of Charles I; after Oxford he had fought for the king before retreating into private life, making at least one visit to the Continent to assert his loyalty to Charles II in exile. At the Restoration the royal brothers chose him to head their procession into London. He had a reputation as ‘a wise and witty gentleman’ and also as one ‘void of religion’; and he had political ambitions.10 From the start of his acquaintance with Pepys he liked his intelligence and efficiency and made sure that he had ‘good access’ to the duke.11 He was also amused by his younger colleague and took an interest in his tastes; noticing his taste for gadgets, he presented him with a silver fountain pen. He wrote him personal letters; one of them specified charmingly, ‘This is not an answer to you the office but you as Mr Pepys.’ He listened to him singing. He accepted a spur of the moment invitation to dine at his home after they had been working together.12 On the river one broiling August day, he put the skirt of his own coat over Pepys to protect him from the sun, an oddly intimate and touching gesture. Pepys trusted and relied on him in return. When his clerk Hayter was in trouble for attending a Quaker meeting, he went straight to Coventry, who in turn spoke to the duke of York and brought back his verdict that, so long as Hayter did his work well, his religion did not bother him. Hayter kept his job, and Pepys thought the better of the duke.