When Sandwich spoke to Pepys, his first question was to ask who were his informants. Pepys gave him a curious list: James Pearse the surgeon, Mary Ashwell, Sandwich’s nephew Pickering and john Hunt of Axe Yard, near whom Betty Becke had lodgings. He added that the whole City spoke of his neglect of business. He did not mention Sandwich’s employees, Moore, Howe or Ferrer, who were his chief informants, according to the Diary, no doubt to protect them. Sandwich defended the Becke family, then said he was intending to ‘live in another manner’. He went on to challenge Pepys’s claim that nobody else knew what he had written in the letter; Pepys kept quiet and hoped to get away with it. He thought Sandwich was troubled, but it was Pepys who wept, and Sandwich who moved the conversation on to a cheerful discussion of the king’s picture collection at Whitehall.28
The letter may have had some effect; or Lord Sandwich may have been planning to bring his summer romance to an end; or possibly not. He had sexual relations with his wife in October, as the birth of a tenth child the following July testified, but that does not rule out Betty Becke continuing to be his mistress.29 Pepys went on worrying about Sandwich’s displeasure for weeks and months, noting every cool encounter and treasuring more cordial ones. He rejoiced when my Lord asked after ‘his Cosen (my wife)’ at the end of the year, the first time he had done so since the letter.30 In the new year of 1664 Pepys wondered whether he dared to invite him to dinner and decided it was not possible. Sandwich continued to visit Betty Becke in Chelsea, and even arranged for his older daughters to lodge there for a while in the summer, allegedly sending them out when he made his visits; and Pepys saw and spoke to Betty, who impressed him with her fine figure and conversation: ‘I warrant she hath brains enough to entangle him,’ he wrote, pleased to have seen my Lord’s mistress.
There was no more talk of sexual scandals involving Sandwich, who was in any case soon at sea again. Pepys’s sexual conduct, on the other hand, took a sharp turn for the worse, as though his effort to set my Lord right had drained him of his own virtue. What neither of them could know was that five years later Elizabeth, in a Proustian moment of revelation, was going to confess to Pepys that Lord Sandwich had solicited her to be his mistress, sending Captain Ferrer as his go-between.31 The likeliest time for this to have taken place was during the late summer of 1662, when she was at Brampton while Sandwich and Ferrer were at Hinchingbrooke. She came back full of talk of Captain Ferrer, enough to give Pepys a twinge of jealousy, and of Lord Sandwich’s having drawn up some proposed alterations for Brampton while she was there; and Pepys wrote in his summary at the end of September, ‘My Lord Sandwich has lately been in the country, and very civil to my wife.’32
His approach had been a temptation, Elizabeth said when she made her confession, but she had refused him out of faithfulness to her husband. Had she succumbed, there might have been no Betty Becke in Chelsea, no dancing lessons with Pembleton and a very different letter of reproof from Pepys to his Lordship. The comedy of errors that filled the year 1663 could have turned into something more like Othello, and the whole course of the Diary been diverted into another direction.
11. Death and Plague
Pepys grew up with death at his elbow. Against the odds, he became a survivor, outliving all his brothers and sisters. In the Diary his responses to death vary from the briskly matter of fact on learning of the passing of his uncle Robert, whom he had known since he was a boy – ‘Sorry in some respect; glad in my expectations in another respect’ – to a mournful meditation on hearing the church bells toll for a dark-eyed girl he knew only from seeing her in church.1 He liked to call her ‘my Morena’ – my Moorish girl – to himself, and he learnt that she was suffering from a wasting illness. When she died he honoured her with a gracefully turned elegy: ‘This night was buried, as I hear by the bells at Barking church, my poor Morena – whose sickness being desperate did kill her poor father; and he being dead for sorrow, she said she could not recover nor desire to live, but from that time doth languish more and more, and so is now dead and buried.’2 Another local girl he observed, ‘crooked’ but not ugly, killed herself by taking poison, saying before she died that she did it ‘because she did not like herself, nor had not liked herself nor anything she did a great while’.3 Pepys had a writer’s response to these stories: their subjects lived in his imagination, and in that private place he allowed himself to be melancholy or appalled by their fates. Yet when his cousin Anthony Joyce was thought to have killed himself, he was chiefly concerned to find out what might happen to the property, which the law assigned to the king if suicide were established.4
As a survivor himself, he was generally more interested in the survivors than the dead. When the earl of Southampton died, Pepys’s first reaction was to describe the porter at the great man’s gate in tears; he felt sorry for him and tipped him on the practical grounds that he was not now likely to pick up many more tips: ‘he hath lost a considerable hope by the death of this Lord, whose house will be no more frequented as before’. Later he reported on the remarkable self-control shown by the earl, and how he had prepared himself to die by ‘closing his own eyes and setting his mouth, and bidding Adieu with the greatest content and freedom in the world’. Southampton had died in the agonies of the stone, so Pepys had particular reason to admire this stoicism; he had nothing to say about his spiritual condition.5 Another case, in which a colleague who was also a courtier died suddenly in the prime of life, led him to look at the court’s response: ‘I find the sober men of the Court troubled for him; and yet not so as to hinder or lessen their mirth, talking, laughing, and eating, drinking and doing everything else, just as if there was no such thing – which is as good an Instance for me hereafter to judge of Death, both as to the unavoydablenesse, suddenness, and little effect of it upon the spirits of others, let a man be never so high or rich or good; but that all die alike, no more matter being made of the death of one then another; and that even to die well, the prise [worth] of it is not considerable in the world.’6 What interested him was not the dead man and his possible after-life, but the reactions of the living and his reputation in this world.
Pepys was not given to repining over the dead himself, but the precariousness of life sometimes caught at his imagination. We have seen how, saying goodbye to his mother in 1660, he was suddenly frightened that he might never see her again, because she was ill with a cold.7 In October 1662 he arrived at Brampton to find father, mother, sister and two brothers Tom and John all assembled, and the thought came to him, ‘So now we are all together, God knows when we shall be so again’: and, as it turned out, they never were.8 When Elizabeth was taken ill after drinking cold beer at an inn one day while they were riding to Brampton on another occasion, he was suddenly terrified: ‘I thought she would have died, and so in great horror (and having a great trial of my true love and passion for her) called the maids and mistress of the house.’ It turned out to be nothing serious, and she was better the next morning, but for a moment he had seen the abyss.9
When his mother was really dying, at Brampton in 1667, he made no attempt to visit her; instead, like Proust with his grandmother, he contented himself by dreaming of her. On the day she died, which was two days before he got the news, he dreamt he was at her bedside and ‘laying my head over hers and crying, she almost dead and dying… but which is strange, methought she had hair on her face, and not the same kind of face as my mother really has; but yet did not consider that, but did weep over her as my mother’. When the news came, he did not go. to Brampton for her funeral or to comfort his father but put his entire household into mourning, proud of cutting a fine figure when he went to church in his black clothes. He must be the first writer to take note of the vanity of the well-dressed mourner in his own person.10 He dreamt of her again, coming to him and asking for a pair of gloves, and in the dream ‘thinking it to be a mistake in our thinking her all this while dead’ – ‘this dream troubled me and I waked’.11
This mixture of tough in practice, tender in imagination,
ran through all his dealings with death. His account of the last weeks of his brother Tom is particularly disconcerting in the way it alternates between callousness and sorrow. In the summer of 1663 Tom was ‘a very thriving man’, and the following Christmas he seemed well and cheerful, but ten weeks later he was dead. Tom had taken over their father’s tailoring business in Salisbury Court in 1661, but he was not much interested in the work and let out rooms to supplement his meagre earnings. Pepys made strenuous efforts to find him a wife with a dowry but without success, partly because Tom’s speech impediment worried prospective brides, and also because he lacked any of Pepys’s dynamism. He muddled along, was known as a good fellow, ran up debts and made just enough to send a small allowance to his sister. There is a letter to ‘sister Pal’ in his neat small hand and terrible spelling, dated 16 January 1664, which he signed off in words that suggest he was fond of her and may have had an inkling of what lay in store for him: ‘Your truly Loving Brother till Death’.12 The letter was written a few weeks after Pepys had heard that Tom was unwell, called on him and decided he was ‘not ill’. But from then on, he sank rapidly.
Pepys did nothing for him. He did not send for a doctor or a nurse, and he visited Tom no more than once a week, even though their cousin Jane Turner, who was Tom’s neighbour in Salisbury Court, told Sam that he had less than two months to live. He seems to have refused to believe what he was told, perhaps because he found it too upsetting, and distanced himself from what was happening. He had the excuse of his office work, as always, and just then his troubled relations with Lord Sandwich; still, he found time to walk in the park on Ash Wednesday and to see D’Avenant’s new play, The Unfortunate Lovers. When he did visit Tom on 8 March, he realized he was very ill, but then kept away again until the following Sunday, when other cousins, the Joyces, came to him and suggested he should find a woman to look after his brother. They added that they had heard, through an indiscreet doctor, that Tom had the pox, meaning syphilis. At this Pepys hurried round to Salisbury Court. He found Tom delirious and ‘with the face of a dying man’. By now a neighbour had engaged a nurse. Pepys, dismayed at the trouble he saw looming, whether his brother died or merely continued ill, talked anxiously with Tom’s maidservant, who had stories to tell of his inefficient ways as a businessman and of his disquieting sexual practices – although sitting up at night ‘doing something to himself does not sound very bad. The news that Tom had the pox spread around the family, followed by talk of his being in debt, and Pepys was in an agony of shame on his behalf. When another doctor declared Tom had not got it after all, Pepys was so relieved that he sent for oysters and enjoyed a celebratory dinner; afterwards he himself, together with the doctor, inspected Tom’s by now only intermittently conscious body and found no trace of any shameful disease. The truth was that he was dying of tuberculosis of the lungs, then called a consumption; it was often associated with venereal disease – Pepys talks of one of Batten’s clerks dying of consumption ‘got, as is believed, by the pox’ – but wrongly both in general and in the particular case of poor Tom.13
Pepys did not summon the local clergyman to pray over him or administer the sacrament, but his scepticism was not quite proof against his brother’s deathbed, and, as the end approached, he himself questioned Tom about where he thought he might be going. Tom’s answer, although given in a distracted manner, was a good one, and Pepys wrote it out: ‘Why, whither should I go? there are but two ways. If I go to the bad way, I must give God thanks for it. And if I go the other way, I must give God the more thanks for it; and I hope I have not been so undutiful and unthankful in my life but I hope I shall go that way.’ As Tom’s breath began to rattle in his throat, Pepys’s nerve failed him. He went out until he could be sure Tom was dead, then came back to cry at the sight of the ‘poor wretch, lying with his chops fallen’. After this his efficient self moved into action. He collected all Tom’s papers, took them to Seething Lane, wrote to his father and returned in the darkness to Salisbury Court, where Elizabeth had taken refuge at Jane Turner’s.
She invited them to stay overnight ‘in the little blue chamber. And I lay close to my wife, being full of disorder and grief for my brother, that I could not sleep nor wake with satisfaction.’ It would be hard to better Pepys’s words here. They take us into the room and the bed, where the warm body of Elizabeth is both a comfort and a reminder of the body of his brother, with whom, he must have bedded down many times when they were children – now lying alone and cold not far away.14 This is where the immediacy of the Diary is supreme. If Pepys had written about his brother’s death later, he would have been tempted to smooth and tidy the sequence of events to make it into a more seemly story; improved the number of his visits to Tom, cut out the theatregoing and oyster dinner, called a doctor and nurse earlier rather than relying on neighbours, omitted the rumour of the pox. Instead we get his jumble of reactions: yes, he loves his brother and sorrows for him, but he is also embarrassed by him and resents the interruption of his own activities. In describing Tom’s last hours, he reverses the order of events in the Diary, writing of Tom dead and laid out, then remembering and recording his earlier solemn questioning of his still living brother.
His first thought was to have Tom buried in the churchyard among their brothers and sisters, but he changed his mind and decided to pay the extra to have him put inside the church, close to their mother’s pew. A Shakespearean scene over the crowded vaults followed, the gravedigger telling a shocked Pepys that he would, for sixpence, ‘justle them together but I will make room for him’.15 The mourners, invited to Tom’s house for biscuits and burnt claret, arrived hours late and in larger numbers than expected; and only after they had eaten and drunk did they walk with the coffin to the church. Then Pepys, Elizabeth, Jane Turner and her family went back to one of the lodger’s rooms in Tom’s house and cheered themselves up with oysters again, and cake and cheese, ‘being too merry for so late a sad work’. Writing it up that evening, Pepys confessed that once his brother was dead he felt very little more grief.
But there was further trouble brewing. A few weeks later Pepys heard from an old servant of their father’s, John Noble, that twin daughters had been born to Tom’s maid Margeret, ‘an ugly jade’, of whom one survived. The baby, born as a parish pauper, was named Elizabeth Taylor and attributed to ‘John Taylor’, a fabricated name that at least suggested Tom’s trade. He had acknowledged that the child was his and paid out various small sums of money for her care. He had also planned to get rid of her by handing her over to a beggar woman, until Noble warned him he might be suspected of murder if she should be asked for later and he were unable to trace her. Tom’s next move was to give her to a local man with a lump sum of £5; this only led to the man being sent to prison for bringing a pauper child into the parish. The wretched baby was handed about further, and, when Tom died, Noble turned to Pepys and his father for money. Pepys declared there was no proof at all that Elizabeth Taylor was Tom’s child, although he referred privately to ‘my brother’s bastard’ and indicated he might do something for her; and the midwife testified that Tom had confessed to being the father and told her he had got the child on Bonfire Night, 5 November, a statement so ingenuous it sounds like the truth.
Tom’s daughter was the only grandchild the Pepys family had yet produced. There was plenty of room for a little girl at Seething Lane or at Brampton, and either of the two childless young women, Elizabeth and Pall, might have been willing to supervise her care. Nothing of the sort happened – the idea that the little girl was his niece seems not to have occurred to Pepys – and her disappearance from the Diary suggests she was dead before the end of 1664. Would Pepys have been more interested in his brother’s child if she had been a boy? Perhaps the taint of bastardy would still have been more important than the blood link; bastards were more readily accepted in the higher social circles than at Pepys’s level. Yet his absolute rejection of Tom’s offspring is faintly surprising, at a time when he had pretty well giv
en up hope of ever having a child of his own.16
The next year, 1665, was, as everyone knows, the year of the great plague in London. Pepys had heard rumours of its approach; it was in Amsterdam in 1664. Plague was in any case endemic in London, and severe outbreaks were expected every few decades: 1592, 1603, 1625, 1636 had all been bad years. In 1625,40,000 Londoners died, and a look at the parish registers shows deaths attributed to plague in almost every year of the century up to 1665. The rich could not count on being spared, but they usually left London when the plague was virulent; and since it was carried by a particular flea and fleas proliferated in town, getting away was certainly the best move. This is what the court and almost everyone else who could afford to do so, including many doctors and clergymen, did. The poor were the expected victims, squashed into their low-ceilinged, unaired rooms, their meagre, piled-up lodgings, narrow courtyards, alleys and streets. For most of them it was impossible to give up their occupations and move away. The plague was thought to be contagious, but no one knew how it actually arose or spread, which meant that none of the measures taken to control it, such as marking with a red cross and locking up houses where someone was known to be infected, were effective. In 1665 those who went to fight the Dutch at sea were preserved because the plague never reached the fleet: for once the sailors had a clear advantage over landsmen. For Pepys, who did not leave town until the end of August, the spaciousness and good condition of his house told in his favour. He may even have had a natural immunity. Some people’s blood is unattractive to fleas, and he observed when he shared a bed with a friend in Portsmouth in 1662 that ‘all the fleas came to him and not to me’. What seemed a trivial piece of good luck at the time may have had a much greater significance.17
The severity of the 1665 plague did not become apparent until June, and during the first five months, when it was no more than a threat, life in the Pepys family continued as usual. Towards the end of 1664 he noted with satisfaction the good state of his household consisting of Elizabeth, her new companion Mercer, three maids and Tom Edwards, who had been with them for six months. Mary Mercer was the daughter of a neighbouring widow who took in lodgers, among them Will Hewer, and it was Will who had recommended Mercer to the Pepyses; she was a merry, pretty seventeen-year-old, a good singer too, and Pepys was charmed by her.18 ‘And a pretty and loving quiet family I have as any man in England,’ he wrote in his Diary.19 This was not entirely true, since he had just blacked Elizabeth’s eye during a quarrel about her failure to control her servants properly; and she had attempted to bite and scratch back. Throughout the Christmas period Pepys and Elizabeth were running separate lives, not least because she felt unable to go out with her black eye. She stayed in bed during the day and rose to play cards and games with her servants at night, without Pepys. On New Year’s Eve he kissed her in the kitchen, and on New Year’s Day 1665 they celebrated together, but the next day he went out looking for other women. He had recently started a carefully planned affair with the wife of a Deptford ship’s carpenter, William Bagwell. The name Bagwell seems too good to be true, but it is there in the Deptford registers; and when Mrs Bagwell offered herself to Pepys, she was acting under her husband’s instructions. Pepys expresses no feelings for Mrs Bagwell and never gives her first name. He sometimes reproached himself for his own ‘folly’, but he enjoyed the sexual thrill of having her, sharpened perhaps by her reluctance. The story is a shameful one of a woman used by two bullies: her husband, hoping for promotion, and Pepys, who was to arrange it. Pepys did not present it in quite those terms, but it is clearly how it was. He shows it was furtive and squalid, and he even makes us see the funny side of his own behaviour, but it can’t have been funny, or fun, for Mrs Bagwell.
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self Page 23
