Pepys became increasingly impatient with the way in which the Tangier accounts were mismanaged by its treasurer, Thomas Povey, a rich man with an interest in foreign trade but little head for figures; and in 1665, by mutual agreement between the two, Pepys took over the treasurership. The appointment was a lucrative one, and there was a private clause to the agreement, which later led to a dispute. Meanwhile Povey, friendly and hospitable, also introduced Pepys into the Royal Society, where he could meet the most intelligent company in the land. This was in 1665 – its president was Lord Brouncker, who had become an active Navy Board commissioner in 1664 and worked closely and on the whole amicably with Pepys. Brouncker was a ship designer, a mathematician with an interest in musical theory and a freethinker.
In October 1665 Pepys put his own name forward to be surveyor-general of victualling for the navy, a post he had invented and to which he was duly appointed in December with the support of Coventry.39 He held it for eighteen months and resigned it at the end of the Second Dutch War, in July 1667; by now he had increased his capital to about £7,000. In 1667 and 1668 Pepys defended the Navy Board in the House of Commons, where it was under attack for mismanagement; it was a culminating point of his career during the Diary years, when he addressed a full House for three hours to the admiration of all who heard him. Later that year he submitted his report on the state of the navy to the duke of York and began to make plans to enter parliament – an idea first suggested to him in 1661.40 Although he did not succeed in being elected until 1673, the year in which he also became first secretary of the Admiralty Commission, the trajectory of his career, briefly indicated here, shows just how astonishing he was in his energy, his ambition and his range of abilities. He had a realistic grasp of what he could hope to achieve, how he could use one job to support another and how he could turn friendship to account. He encouraged and promoted able men, binding them to him and building up a body of loyal followers: for instance, he recommended Richard Gibson of Yarmouth as a local officer for victualling in 1665, then took him on as his chief clerk at Seething Lane; he trusted him to carry his gold out of town during a crisis two years later; he listened attentively to Gibson’s views on the navy and used them in his memoranda to the duke.
Pepys could also be pitiless when he knew he could get away with it. The Diary records his admiration of Povey’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, to which he was invited to sample the fine wines and admire the pictures; it also gives many rude comments on Povey’s intellectual failings. What it does not set out are the details of the private pact Pepys made with Povey when he took over the Tangier treasurer’s job in 1665: the terms, which we know from other papers, were that he would pay Povey four sevenths of all ‘rewards & Considerations’ received through the job within three days of receiving them.41 The treasurership, like Pepys’s clerkship at the Navy Board, brought unofficial offerings from contractors on top of the official salary. For instance, the Diary shows Pepys making £222 of personal profit from his services to Tangier contractors in August 1665; he was given £500 by a Tangier victualler on 30 December in the same year and another £200 on 15 June 1666 – totalling nearly £1,000 in under a year.42 Yet it appears that he passed not a penny on to Povey, who complained, nine years later, that he had received nothing – nothing, that is, except Pepys’s ‘sullen and uncomfortable return, that you have made no other profits, than from the bare salary’. Povey found it impossible to believe this, as well he might, and said so. It was an ‘improbable thing that what afforded in my unskillful hands some measure of honest advantage, should yield nothing, being transferred to yours… which I may believe have seldom had so ill success in other cases’.43 Povey wrote again on 23 February 1674 complaining that Pepys had broken their agreement. Pepys put him off again.
Povey persisted with more letters: ‘I do therefore still imagine (a word you are pleased to use in contempt of that ignorance I am kept in) that you cannot but have received some benefit at least, from the gratitude of such as you have had opportunities to oblige, seeing I found the same persons civil.’44 Still Pepys denied making any profits as treasurer, the tone of his letter one of injured innocence and magisterial dignity: ‘Pray therefore let us have no more of this sort of correspondence between us, for as I am one too stubborn ever knowingly to endure being imposed upon, so shall I with much less willingness be ever provoked to violate the known simplicity of my dealings, especially with one from whom I have always owned my having received such civilities as may challenge and shall meet with all expressions of gratitude on this side admitting of a manifest wrong.’45 The ornate prose in which he chooses to tell his lies makes an interesting contrast to the concise language of the Diary.
Pepys was playing a shameful charade, treating Povey as a gull, confident that nothing could be proved. Povey tried writing to Sir Denis Gauden, for many years chief victualler for Tangier, to ask about his accounts with Pepys, and got nowhere with him. But Povey was not an entire fool, and when Pepys told him he had never asked Gauden for anything, he answered that he had never asked him either, because they both knew that Gauden gave without being asked. There the matter remained; Pepys was unbudgeable. In 1685, twenty years after the gentleman’s pact had been drawn up between them, a period during which Povey performed several acts of notable kindness towards Pepys, he was still getting nothing but ‘Contempt, Neglect, or Superficial Evasions, or Obstinate or affected Silence’.46 By then Tangier had been given up, the great Mole knocked back into the sea again and the Moors left in possession.
His formidable way of dealing with officials he found wanting appears on many pages of the Diary. A striking instance is his tersely written account of a row he had with a dilatory assistant to Anthony Ashley Cooper, the commissioner of prizes. The man kept Pepys waiting, couldn’t find the necessary papers and said it was too late in the day. Pepys cowed him by referring to the man’s political past. ‘We then did our business without the order in less then eight minutes.’ You can see why Pepys got where he did. He knew how to insist and how to threaten, scaring the man he was dealing with by telling him he knows that he worked for the commonwealth. Although Ashley Cooper and Pepys himself had both done as much, the threat worked. Pepys expected and got others to go at his pace and with his commitment.47
Yet he had his own times of inefficiency and disorder. After taking over the Tangier treasurership from Povey, he found himself in an alarming muddle with his accounts in October 1665, ‘where I have had occasion to mix my monies, as I have of late done my Tanger treasure upon other occasions, and other monies upon that’.48 He had contrived to mix up his private accounts with the public ones and got into such a state that he was ‘ready to break my head and brains’. ‘I never was in such a confusion in my life, and that in great sums.’ Night after night he sat up to master them and still could not. Under the circumstances it has its funny side, but for Pepys it was humiliating and dismaying. The misery went on for months, made worse by a new anxiety about his eyesight, until the following July, when at last he sorted something out.49
This was an exceptional episode. He was as a rule a superb organizer, able to see the importance of getting the details right, and then looking beyond them to a larger vision. He prided himself on his orderliness and efficient running of his office. He was the first to keep written records of both officers and ships, and you can still admire the tidily ruled and written lists turned out by his clerks. When he wanted to prove a point – say, about the costliness of buying shipbuilding supplies on credit – he could ask one of the clerks to produce the evidence, as Hayter did in the winter of 1668, listing every item bought from the ironmonger, the chandler, the turner, etc. – double-spring locks, single-spring locks, door handles, scuttle hinges, table screws, sail needles, fire shovels, scrapers and much more – and giving for each the price paid first by the king and then by the ordinary merchant; and so showing what might be saved in every £100. It must have been a nightmare to compile, and Pepys gave Hayter full credi
t, submitting his work to the commissioners with his name upon it.50 Sadly, it did no good. All such efforts were useless as long as the finances of the navy remained subject to the caprices of the king and the suspicions of parliament. All the same, Pepys was right to establish how much money was being wasted and in what fashion. In this as in many other ways he was a link between the efficient administrators of the commonwealth and the future, as he pressed for efficiency in the dockyards and a well-ordered, educated, professional body of officers. No wonder he became the hero of the navy that evolved in the nineteenth century, in which everything was docketed and everyone examined.
The Diary sends a beam of light into the way in which government officers and businessmen worked together, through clubs, through hospitality, through trips that mixed business and pleasure, through well-chosen and discreetly given presents and through cultivating the friendship of those in a position to be helpful in giving contracts or licences. The circumstances were different, but there is something eerily familiar about it too: today’s arms and building contracts, entertainment of clients, quiet words at the club, conferences in luxury hotels, boardroom rivalries and contributions to favourite charities are all in the same tradition. Pepys was, among other things, mapping a recognizably modern world.
10. Jealousy
Elizabeth always blamed Pepys’s jealousy for making her walk out on him in the early months of their marriage. She may have been justified, although we have no way of knowing; but we do know almost everything there is to know about a second jealous crisis in 1663, because it is covered in the Diary. The episode lasted for months and began with a case of dancing mania.
Pepys came to dancing late. He was invited to a dinner at the Dolphin by a sail-maker who wanted to soften him up in order to win contracts with the Navy Board. This was in March 1661, soon after his twenty-eighth birthday. The party included the Penns and the Battens, with their servants. They were given such a good time that they all stayed on into the evening. Elizabeth was not with them – she was at home in bed, suffering from her period – and Pepys did not feel inclined to hurry back to keep her company. He was persuaded to sing and to play his fiddle with a group of musicians who turned up at the Dolphin. Then the dancing began, and to his own surprise he found himself joining in. It was the first time he had ever attempted to dance. Dancing was not something a scholarly boy of his generation was brought up to; during the interregnum it was associated with the court, with masques and plays, and also with semi-pagan country celebrations, and mostly disapproved of as a form of self-display and sexual provocation. With the return of the king things changed. Charles was a dancer and had brought over French dances with him; although what most struck Pepys that first evening was not any display of French dancing, but the skill of Batten’s black servant, Mingo, invited to show what he could do.1
Pepys made a second attempt a few weeks later, this time during a working trip to Rochester. Elizabeth was again absent. John Allen, the clerk of the ropeyard there, had two pretty daughters, and after a dinner of wine and oysters there was music, and the young women took the floor. Pepys felt impelled to join in, and although he was uncomfortably aware of his own deficiencies – he said he made ‘an ugly shift’ of it – he was also game. This was partly because he had developed a crush on Rebecca Allen, and he was rewarded for his efforts by being allowed to escort her home.2
So the bait was taken. Still he remained cautious for a long time after this. Later in the year Captain Robert Ferrer, Lord Sandwich’s master of horse and a dashing fellow, talked him into visiting a dancing school in Fleet Street to see the girls. Pepys was intrigued but felt he had to express disapproval of their being encouraged to vanity.3 Soon after this Elizabeth joined in some dancing at Lady Sandwich’s, at the Wardrobe: Captain Ferrer seems to have been the instigator again, and he danced with Elizabeth. Then the subject of dancing seems to have lapsed until the following year, when Elizabeth announced to Pepys that she wanted to learn to dance ‘against her going next year into the country’.4 By the country she meant Brampton, and she can hardly have expected old Mr and Mrs Pepys to arrange dances; it looks as though she and Ferrer had talked it over and planned to dance at Hinchingbrooke. He had been there at the same time as her that summer of 1662, and he and Lord Sandwich had both been attentive to her.5
Pepys humoured her by buying a book of country dances – this was in December 1662 – and when, after their great quarrel about her loneliness, a companion was found for her, she turned out to be a keen and practised dancer. Elizabeth’s brother, Balty, discovered the companion, Mary Ashwell; she was his landlady’s niece, and he began his recommendation of her to Pepys by saying she was pretty and could sing. Pepys found out that she was a girl of good family, her father working in the Exchequer, and that she was teaching in a school in Chelsea. He was in no hurry to settle anything, and there were several visits by her parents as the two families sized one another up. Her wages were discussed with her father; they would be very small. But when Balty brought her to dinner, Pepys took to her at once; he liked her looks and her witty conversation. She agreed to come to them in a few weeks’ time, and meanwhile invited Elizabeth to visit the school at which she taught, where the children were appearing in a play and she was taking part in another. Everyone was happy, and she arrived on 12 March. Pepys expressed the hope that, although she would cost him something, she would also be a cause of content. They were missing their maid Jane, who had left them in February. Now Elizabeth could no longer complain of loneliness, and the whole family would feel the benefit. He could not have been more mistaken. Ashwell, as she was always known to them, was charming – a ‘merry jade’, he called her – and hardly put a foot wrong. She played the virginals and taught them card games. But her presence in the house turned out to be a catastrophe, precipitating domestic turbulence worse than anything the Pepyses had gone through since their separation in the 1650s.
It began when Pepys incautiously expressed his admiration of Ashwell’s ‘very fine carriage’. This immediately prompted Elizabeth to say she was ‘almost ashamed’ to see herself so outdone and to add that she must have dancing lessons to put the situation right. Slightly rattled, Pepys refused Ashwell permission to go out to the ball she wanted to attend with some old friends, and gave way about the lessons for Elizabeth. Wayneman Birch, the boy whom Pepys had just beaten for staying out for longer than he should in the streets, was sent out again to inquire for dancing masters in the locality. He came back with two names. Even before one could be decided on and summoned, Pepys obligingly took out his fiddle and played for Ashwell to dance in the room above, ‘my best upper chamber’.6
The chosen dancing master was a Mr Pembleton, and the lessons began the very next day, while Pepys was out struggling with a particularly demanding session at the office, imposing his will on Batten over the appointment of a ship’s mate. But in the evening he again played for the two women to dance, only commenting with husbandly wisdom in the Diary that he doubted Elizabeth would be much good as a dancer because she was too sure of herself. The next day, a Sunday, the family went for a picnic – Pepys, Elizabeth, Ashwell, Wayneman and the dog – taking pieces of cold lamb to eat. They gathered cowslips along the south bank of the river, and Ashwell entertained them with stories of the masques in which she had performed at Chelsea. But already on Monday Pepys was beginning to worry that he had made a mistake in letting Elizabeth learn to dance. He feared that she now expected to have more pleasures than he could give her. And what were these pleasures? He broke off from his office work the next day to go home ‘to see my wife and her dancing-maister at it’. What he saw partly reassured him: ‘I think after all she will do pretty well at it.’7 This was his first meeting with Pembleton, whom he later described as ‘a pretty neat black man’ – black, as usual in Pepys’s time, referring to the colour of his hair.8
Having got her way did not improve Elizabeth’s housekeeping or her temper. When Pepys scolded her for neglecting the
house she became angry, and soon they were exchanging insults. He called her ‘beggar’, just to remind her that she had brought no dowry, and she answered with ‘prick-louse’, i.e., son of a tailor. The next day, a Sunday, she stayed in bed sulking, and Pepys took Ashwell to church and then gave her a music lesson, which both of them enjoyed. Elizabeth objected to his staying with Ashwell instead of coming up to talk to her, and Pepys saw she was jealous, and that he must be careful.9 Suddenly jealousy was in the air. On the Monday he was due to go to Woolwich; he set off, then made an excuse to turn back and go home to take another look at Pembleton. The dancing master responded to this display of interest by persuading Pepys to take a lesson himself, suggesting he should start with the Coranto. This was the favourite dance of Louis XIV of France and the first to be learnt by a nobleman, as Pembleton no doubt explained. It was performed on tiptoe, with slight jumping steps and many bows and curtsies. Pepys decided it would be ‘useful for any gentleman and sometimes I may have occasion of using it’.10
From this point the Diary has almost daily references to dancing lessons. On 5 May Pepys tried out his Coranto after dinner. On the 6th Pembleton arrived at supper time, and they all went ‘up to our dancing room’ for three or four country dances. After that another ‘practice of my coranto… Late and merry at it.’ On the 8th Pepys took both ladies to the theatre, Pembleton came round after supper, and they danced again, ‘and they say that I am like to make a dancer’. Everyone was cheerful, and there was more dancing on the 11th. Then on the 12th clouds began to form once more, because Elizabeth decided that it was not enough for Pembleton to attend her once a day, he must come twice. Perhaps she did not like sharing her lessons with her husband; and for his part he felt she was ‘minding nothing now but the dancing-maister’. On the 13th they all fell out because she would not listen to any criticism of her dancing from either Pepys or Ashwell.
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self Page 21
