Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  All through January he was like a tom cat. He laid siege to his barber’s pretty servant, Jane Welsh; he hung about and kissed Sarah, the girl at the Swan Inn; he had Betty Martin, at this point seven months pregnant, afterwards reproaching her for her impudence; and he visited Mrs Bagwell, and was struck by her protestations that she loved her husband. He made a vow to ‘laisser aller les femmes’, but within days broke it; and he remained on bad terms with Elizabeth. Two of their maids left, one accusing Elizabeth of favouring Tom Edwards and quarrelling with everyone else in the house.20 Pepys made another vow to leave women alone, and this time kept it until it ran out on 15 May. His working life during these months was arduous enough for several men, and he was busy at the office, often till late at night, and in the yards, as another war with the Dutch became imminent. Men had to be prevented from leaving their ships and more men pressed – 30,000 were needed to make up the necessary crews; merchant ships had to be hired to supplement the naval force, and the entire fleet prepared for battle. He was also struggling to sort out the accounts for Tangier, which he took over in February. By the end of March the duke of York and Lord Sandwich were both at sea, and Pepys was dealing with the problem of financing the fleet.

  The plague did not deter his mother from coming up from Brampton to stay in May, and she enjoyed herself so much in town, shopping with Elizabeth, going out on the river and revisiting old haunts in Islington, that he had difficulty in persuading her to leave at the end of June, when the city suddenly and spectacularly emptied itself. She ‘had a mind to stay a little longer’, she said.21 On 5 July Pepys moved his family to Woolwich. The king and court went first to Hampton Court, then to Salisbury and from there to Oxford. For the rest of the year Pepys travelled up and down the Thames even more than usual, visiting his wife when he could, but effectively leading a bachelor life, which may have contributed to his unusually high spirits.

  Because the most notable fact about Pepys’s plague year is that to him it was one of the happiest of his life. It was also among the busiest. He worked long hours, profited by every opportunity to make money, and quadrupled his fortune. He sought and was given two appointments that extended his power and earning capacity, treasurer to the Tangier Committee and surveyor-general of victualling for the navy. This was the year of his election to the Royal Society; he attended some lectures and acquired his own 12-foot telescope.22 He continued his sexual rampages. He enjoyed a series of experiences that filled him with excitement and delight, from the wedding of the Sandwichs’ daughter Jemima, which he helped Lady Sandwich organize in the absence of her Lord at sea, to the autumn evenings when he was living in lodgings at Greenwich, made music with friends and composed his own best-known song. There was a period during the same autumn when he found the energy to keep two diaries, the second entirely concerned with his negotiations to buy prize goods from the trading ships captured by Lord Sandwich from the Dutch. The year was so packed with events that the plague was largely relegated to the background in the Diary as Pepys pursued his activities with triumphant energy. When the death figures were at their worst, he wrote that ‘everything else hath conspired to my happiness and pleasure, more for these last three months then in all my life before in so little time’. A few weeks later, ‘I do end this month with the greatest content, and may say that these last three months, for joy, health and profit, have been much the greatest that ever I received in all my life.’23 And at the end of the year he summed up 1665 with the words: ‘I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague-time.’ The parallel is obvious with men and women at war or under bombardment who have found themselves living on an adrenalin high that gives extra intensity to every experience; so Pepys, while something like a sixth of the population of London died around him, experienced months of euphoria, revelling in his own success and pleasures.

  Jemima Montagu’s wedding was a high point, giving him the chance to be in control of a social event, to adopt the role of mentor to the young couple and to serve Lady Sandwich. His part in the wedding preparations brought him a pleasure so intense that the terrors of the plague receded into the background of his consciousness. He was in on the arrangements from the start. Lord Sandwich, briefly returned from one naval engagement and about to go to sea again, charged him at the end of June with proposing a match between Jemima and the eldest son of Sir George Carteret. It was a task very much to Pepys’s taste, to be entrusted with an intimate affair between two noble families, acting for one and courteously received by the head of the other, who also happened to be his superior at the Navy Board. A good career move, clearly, but something much more: it put him in the know and virtually in charge. And indeed, hardly were the financial arrangements agreed and royal approval gained for the match than Sandwich departed suddenly with the fleet, leaving Pepys to take over. At this stage Jemima had not even met Philip Carteret; it was not a matter of concern to either of the fathers. Later, Sir George told Pepys that he would not have let his son have Lady Jem if he had been a debauch, as so many of the young men at court were, and Lady Sandwich expressed a mother’s anxiety to Pepys as to whether her daughter would like the match.24 But by then everything was settled.

  The Carterets were living at the treasurer’s house in Deptford because of the plague, and Lady Sandwich came to stay with them from Tonbridge, where she had been taking the waters, which, rather than doing her good, had made her ill. She was forty that summer; Pepys was in and out of the Carterets’ house, sitting in her room to talk everything over, ‘she lying prettily in her bed’, still unwell.25 Lady Jemima was sent to her aunt’s house, Dagenham in Essex, across the river; the marriage was to be celebrated there, not at Hinchingbrooke. Pepys met the 24-year-old bridegroom and found him modest and intelligent but awkward in his manner; he said he liked his first sight of Jemima – Pepys elicited this by eager questioning – but he did nothing to show it. Pepys felt moved to give him a little instruction in how to take a lady’s hand and lead her about the room, then the couple were left on their own for an hour in the gallery, and later in the garden. The weather was sweltering. Both appeared serious and shy. What they had in common as well as their rank was a physical disability, she her crooked neck, which had not been quite cured, he a limp, something their parents may have considered when they planned the match. Pepys was told she must be seen again by the doctor who had tried to straighten her neck before the wedding and that she needed new clothes, so he busied himself with these matters. He also questioned her on her reaction to her future husband and was pleased when she blushed, hid her face and said she could readily obey her parents’ wishes. Lady Carteret sent her jewels, beautiful bedding and presents of all kinds, ‘as if they would buy the young lady’, he wrote, ‘which makes my Lady and me out of our wits almost, to see the kindness she treats us all with’.26 Pepys shows himself responding as one with Lady Sandwich: he is taking all the roles, as father, brother, teacher and indispensable cousin.

  During the last days before the wedding, he continued to work at the office at Seething Lane, to visit the king and duke at Hampton Court and Greenwich to keep them informed; and to walk the city streets and the river banks much as usual. He advised his Joyce cousins to leave London for Brampton, ‘using all the vehemence and Rhetoric I could’, but they were unwilling to abandon their shop; and he heard that his old clerking friend Robin Shaw was a plague victim. Yet on this same day he declared he had enjoyed four days of ‘as great content and honour and pleasure to me as ever I hope to live or desire or think anybody else can live’.27 He caught up with his accounts, assisted by Will, and with his journal; and he travelled tirelessly between Seething Lane, Deptford and Dagenham, with a few quick forays to Woolwich to see Elizabeth. Once again, his energy appears more godlike than human. Twice he and the Carterets were held up by the tide in crossing the Thames with the ferry; they had to sleep in their coach on the Isle of Dogs one night, and on the day of the wedding itself, 31 July, they were again
delayed and missed the ceremony. Sir George charmed him by remaining ‘so light, so fond, so merry, so boyish’ throughout; the practical Lady Carteret supplied Pepys with a bottle of plague water, one of the many concoctions made up by physicians to ward off the disease.28

  In the confusion over the day and time of the wedding, the bride and groom did not put on their finery and wore ordinary clothes. Pepys, resplendent in a new silk suit with gold buttons and broad gold lace, thought Jemima looked sad and sober, and the day passed quietly, with dinner, cards, supper and prayers, but after this Pepys made a merry visit to the bridegroom as he undressed in his room, and then kissed the bride in bed and saw the curtains drawn. ‘The modesty and gravity of this business was so decent, that it was to me, indeed, ten times more delightful than if it had been twenty times more merry and Joviall,’ he wrote. Both in his Diary and in a letter to Lord Sandwich he expanded on the great joy and satisfaction afforded by the whole process; ‘thus end we this month… after the greatest glut of content that ever I had’ – adding, ‘Only, under some difficulty because of the plague’, as though it were a minor inconvenience.

  He was now called ‘Cousin’ by the Carterets, and, in the absence of Lord Sandwich or any of his sons, Pepys became the chief male representative of his family.29 It was a sort of apotheosis. In the days before the wedding his feelings had been stirred so deeply that he was driven to thank God for having arranged the whole thing: ‘For methinks if a man could but reflect upon this, and think that all these things are ordered by God Almighty to make me contented, and even this very marriage now on foot is one of the things intended to find me content in my life and matter of mirth, methinks it should make one mightily more satisfied in the world than he is.’30 Neither the language nor the ideas are quite clear, but the general sense is unmistakable: Pepys was pleased with his destiny.

  The marriage was made in spite of the plague, but the young couple did not have many years together. They settled in Bedfordshire at Hawnes, a large house with a deer park, purchased for them by Sir George Carteret. Three sons were born to them, and the birth of the third proved fatal to Jemima. She died in November 1671, aged twenty-five. Philip survived her by only a few months. After her death he took up the naval career he had abandoned when he married, only to be killed fighting the Dutch alongside his father-in-law Lord Sandwich the following May. The redeeming part of the story is that Sir George and Lady Carteret moved to Hawnes to care for their orphaned grandsons and raised all three successfully.31

  *

  After the wedding, Pepys’s habits of hard work and careful planning continued as usual. He put all his papers in order and rewrote his will, acknowledging that he might become a victim himself. He chewed tobacco against the plague and worried in case wig-makers might be using the hair of victims. He had a moment of ‘extraordinary fear’ in July when he heard that Will Hewer had come in to work with a headache and gone to lie down on Pepys’s bed. Pepys set his people very smartly to get him out of the house, although, he instructed them, ‘without discouraging him’.32 Will got over his headache. Early in August Pepys himself suggested the Navy Office should move from London to Greenwich, asking Coventry for the king’s permission, although he volunteered to ‘trust God Almighty and stay in town’ himself.33 Orders came for the move on 16 August, and, after making his gallant remark to Coventry on 25 August, ‘You, Sir, took your turn at the sword; I must not therefore grudge to take mine at the pestilence’, Pepys in fact immediately left town.34 Yet he sometimes behaved as though he were invulnerable. He was driven by curiosity, making a quite unnecessary visit to the plague pits in Moorfields, for instance, because he wanted to see a burial there; and even after the removal of the office he continued to go into London to look after his private business or fetch things he wanted from Seething Lane.35 He did not keep away from Westminster, though he knew it was badly affected, until he learnt of the death of ‘poor Will that used to sell us ale at the Hall-door – his wife and children dead, all I think in a day’.36 At the end of August he walked through the City to visit a goldsmith and remarked that the people he passed were ‘walking like people that had taken leave of the world’ – one of the few phrases in the Diary that gives a suggestion of the eeriness of the scene.37

  When the fathers of both Will Hewer and Tom Edwards died of the plague in one week in September, Pepys kept the young men busy working at Greenwich; it was probably the best way to treat them. He showed a fatherly concern for Tom, sharing a lunch of bread and cheese in the office with him when the other clerks went home for their dinner, and taking him on a trip to Gravesend and back on the office yacht. He believed it was better for everyone if he himself ‘put off the thoughts of sadness as much as I can; and the rather to keep my wife in good heart, and family also’.38 Keeping your spirits up was thought to be a way of fighting off infection. On the day Elizabeth told him she feared her father was ill, and he answered that he thought it was the plague, because Mr de St Michel’s house was shut up, he also got the news of Lord Sandwich capturing the Dutch trading ships and celebrated with colleagues and friends, Lord Brouncker and his mistress Mrs Williams, Sir John Mennes, Captain Cocke and John Evelyn, all in ‘an extasy of joy’, telling one another funny stories that ‘did make us all die almost with laughing’. To die of laughter was the best alternative to thoughts of dying any other way, and ‘in this humour we sat till about 10 at night; and so my Lord and his mistress home, and we to bed – it being one of the times of my life wherein I was the fullest of true sense of joy’.39 He could not pretend to be much troubled about Elizabeth’s father. In any case, old St Michel recovered from his illness.

  Pepys knew he had earned the right to be proud of his courage in remaining at his post in town as long as he did. He made as much clear in a letter to Lady Carteret in which he spelt out some of his experiences in a very different tone from anything in the Diary:

  I having stayed in the city till above 7400 died in one week, and of them above 6000 of the plague, and little noise heard day nor night but tolling of bells; till I could walk Lombard Street and not meet twenty persons from one end to the other, and not fifty upon the Exchange; till whole families (ten and twelve together) have been swept away; till my very physican, Dr Burnet, who undertook to secure me against any infection… died himself of the plague; till the nights (though much lengthened) are grown too short to conceal the burials of those that died the day before, people thereby constrained to borrow daylight for that service; lastly, till I could find neither meat nor drink safe, the butcheries being everywhere visited, my brewer’s house shut up, and my baker with his whole family dead of the plague. Yet, Madam, through God’s blessing and the good humours begot in my attendance upon our late Amours [he means the recent wedding] your poor servant is in a perfect state of health.40

  Again, the suggestion is that his good spirits have contributed to his immunity.

  Pepys’s journal of the plague year is above all an account of one man’s capacity to detach himself from disaster and rise above the horrors. Plague takes its place alongside, but never in front of, office work, naval battles and their consequences, Jemima Montagu’s wedding, family quarrels, music-making, sexual conquests and all the private interests and obsessions that made part of his daily life, more minutely chronicled than ever. Every month offers surprises and insights, some political, some personal, that are quite unconnected with the plague, and noted in detail and at length. For instance, at a council meeting to raise funds for the war, in April, the earl of Southampton, then in charge of the Treasury, asked, ‘Why will people not lend their money? Why will they not trust the King as well as Oliver? Why do our prizes come to nothing, that yielded so much heretofore?’ – questions no one present was able to answer.41 In November he was faced with rioting seamen, unpaid and starving, breaking the windows of his Greenwich office and threatening more violence. He took the view that ‘only money and a rope’ could deal with them, but chiefly money; and in December he complained t
hat the office had not received so much as a farthing for the men’s payment for two months.42