Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  *

  Sandwich’s departure as ambassador to Spain followed the entry of the French into the war as allies of the Dutch. In June 1666 the English, this time with Albemarle and Rupert in command, fought an extended battle known as the Four Days’ Fight, in which they lost twenty ships and 6,000 men and the Dutch emerged as victors. Again Pepys heard the guns, this time from Greenwich, where he was overseeing the embarkation of 200 soldiers to help out at sea. He saw that most of them were drunk by the time they were shipped off. The following day, Whitsunday, he celebrated with Betty Martin after church (‘did what he voudrais avec her, both devante and backward’, he boasted to himself). After this he heard the first news that things were going badly at sea, and he and Creed shared their relief that Sandwich at least was no longer involved.

  Monday brought a visitor to Seething Lane, ‘black as the chimney and covered with dirt, pitch and tar, and powder, and muffled with dirty clouts and his right eye stopped with Okum’. This was Lieutenant Daniel of the Royal Charles. He had been put ashore at Harwich with a group of wounded men, and, in this state, the filth of battle on him and his injured eye untended, he rode with a friend to London. Pepys knew Daniel because he had lodged with his mother-in-law at Greenwich. He appreciated the drama of the situation and bore both men off to Coventry’s lodgings, then hurried into the park to find the king, who caught Pepys’s excitement and asked him to bring the men to him at once; and, standing in the park, Daniel gave his account of the battle so far: ‘what the consequence of this day will be, that we hear them fighting, we know not’. With the gesture of a king in a folktale, Charles pulled twenty-odd pieces of gold out of various pockets for the men, and gave orders that they should be cared for by a surgeon.26

  More seemingly good news came on 6 June, and bonfires were lit to celebrate victory; but the next morning contrary reports arrived, saying that the English had suffered a defeat. Pepys was plunged into despondency. He cheered himself by keeping ‘little Mrs Tooker’ – daughter or niece of his official messenger – in his chamber all afternoon ‘and did what I would with her’ while his family went out to see the launching of a new ship at Woolwich. That evening, after more grim accounts of the battle, he sat down to write to Lady Sandwich, giving her the latest bad news. She remained at Hinching-brooke, and he kept up his correspondence with her.27

  Another aftermath of this battle was the funeral of Admiral Myngs at Whitechapel. He was killed but accorded no great honours, and Coventry was the single ‘person of quality’ present at the modest ceremony at Whitechapel church, to which Pepys also went. Myngs was only eight years older than him, another of the commonwealth stalwarts who had gone to sea as a boy and become a captain at twenty; now he was dead at forty-one, shot through the face. After the funeral a group of seamen approached Coventry’s coach, tears in their eyes, and told him they would like to avenge the death of their commander by taking a fireship against the enemy. ‘We are here a Dozen of us that have long known and loved and served our dead commander, Sir Chr. Mings, and have now done the last office of laying him in the ground. We would be glad we had any other to offer after him, and in revenge of him – all we have is our lives. If you will please get his Royal Highness to give us a Fireshipp among us all, here is a Dozen of us… that shall show our memory of our dead commander and our revenge.’28 It was the grandest possible gesture of courage, offered out of loyalty and selfless love, and it came from a world whose values were remote from those prevailing in the circles about the king. According to Pepys, Myngs was a shoemaker’s son who had by his own efforts ‘brought his family into a way of being great’ but had ‘not had time to collect any estate’; he must also have been aware that Myngs had been one of the four officers who refused to take treasure from Sandwich’s prize ships nine months earlier. By dying now, Myngs would be ‘quite forgot in a few months, as if he had never been, nor any of his name be the better by it’ – so Pepys predicted. He admired Myngs, but he may have been thinking of his own future at the same time. Would he have time to collect an estate? And would he be quite forgotten a few months after his death, leaving no one of his name?29

  The funeral took place in the early evening of a long summer day, one in which long hours of light and sunshine kindled extra energy in Pepys. He had started with a board meeting in Whitehall with the duke of York, a cancelled Tangier Committee, a visit to the Exchequer with Baity, whom he then took to the studio of Hayls, the painter, currently working on a portrait of Pepys’s father; after this he bought two lobsters and proceeded to lose them, leaving them in the hired coach that took him home for dinner, still with Baity. Then he was off to a meeting at the Excise Office in Bartholomew Lane, behind the Exchange; from which he went on to the funeral in Whitechapel.

  For many this would have been a taxing day already, but Pepys kept going. He made his way to Deptford through the dusk and, once it was dark, at about ten o’clock, he presented himself at Mrs Bagwell’s and ‘went into her house and did what I would’. She then told him her servant had just died of the plague; and though she had disinfected the place by whitewashing the downstairs walls, he became extremely eager to leave. He bought himself a pint of sack, hailed a boatman and sat drinking as he was rowed upstream. At the end of the trip he handed over to the man what was left of the sack; and finally, almost at midnight, he called on a fisherman as he walked the last part of the journey home and paid the man three shillings for three eels. It was an impressive day’s activity, and the next day, and the next, were almost as busy. During these summer months he also reports, among his other doings, looking at Jupiter and its satellites through the telescope he has acquired; composing and music-making; scientific conversations with Royal Society colleagues about teeth and optics and the nature of sounds; and commissioning some specially made glass-fronted bookcases, because, he wrote, his books were ‘growing numerous, and lying one upon another on my chairs’. He helped to design them, they were built by a naval joiner, and they are the first-known purpose-built bookcases in England, and still in use.30

  The Dutch celebrated their success by displaying the embalmed body of a fallen English commander in a sugar chest in the Hague and parading a captured living officer through the streets.31 Two further military engagements that summer shifted the balance away from them again. On 25 July, St James’s Day, Albemarle and Rupert engaged them in another battle. Again the guns were heard, and Pepys went up on to the Whitehall roof with the king and duke to listen to them; afterwards he dined off some of the food left over from the royal dinner table, called on two of his regular women on the way home and went out again to look at a print of the crucifixion he intended to buy, and some optical instruments that interested him. Again, there was no firm news for four days; then it came, and again, although the Dutch were beaten, the victory was only partial. Pepys’s verdict was that there were ‘no great matters to brag on, God knows’. Nevertheless he celebrated on the day of the public thanksgiving in August with fireworks and the wildest party recorded in the Diary. There was drinking, daubing of faces with black from the spent fireworks, dancing and cross-dressing. At last Pepys had his chance to be a girl, as planned at Durdans many years before. He and two other men changed into women’s clothes, Mercer became a boy and performed a jig in a suit borrowed from Tom, and Elizabeth and Pegg Penn, whose father was away fighting, put on periwigs. No one went to bed until past three in the morning. Meanwhile in Holland the formidable Sir Robert Holmes destroyed much of the Dutch East India fleet as it lay at anchor, using fireships, and followed this up by landing a force on the island of Schelling, where he plundered and burnt the small civilian town to the ground.32

  The autumn of 1666, both before and after the great fire, brought complaints from Rupert and Albemarle, couched in ‘plain and sharp and menacing’ terms, about their fleets being inadequately supplied. Pepys was worried, Coventry resentful, and there was much discussion of accounting and shortfalls; the Navy Board warned that they could not execute their order
s to man, supply and send out ships without being provided with more funds. A crucial meeting on 19 October led Coventry to tell the duke he would rather give up his commission than go on serving ‘in so ill a place, where he cannot do the King service’, and Pepys backed him up; the duke promised to pass on the message to the king.33 But the king remained unforthcoming. Pepys noted how, after he had spoken on the affairs of Tangier at a council meeting, the king sat ‘like an image’ and ‘could not speak one word’.34

  In November Pepys wrote to the duke warning him to expect ‘total and imminent miscarriage’: the navy was without the means to repair ships, the men were unpaid, the officers forced to waste their time pressing, the workmen in the yards starving, ‘walking like ghosts’.35 John Evelyn, royalist to the core as he was, deplored the king’s inattention to affairs of state. The merchant family of the Houblons predicted disaster for trade if things went on as they were. At the end of the year Pepys characterized the court as ‘sad, vicious, negligent’.36 The new year produced a long litany of warnings to the king and bitter complaints by his subjects. In March Pepys made a speech before Charles, telling him yet again that failure to fund the navy would lead to disaster. In April Pepys noted that Coventry was again threatening to ‘abandon the King’s affairs and let them sink or swim’.37 In May Carteret told Pepys he feared the ruin of the state unless the king would ‘mind his business’, and in June Evelyn said the reputation of the kingdom was likely to be lost by the king’s behaviour and boldly contrasted him with Cromwell – ‘so much reputation got and preserved by a Rebell that went before him’.38

  These complaints preceded the Dutch attack on the Medway in June 1667, and it proved the point the Navy Board had been making by bringing the worst humiliation the nation had suffered for six centuries. Panic hit London as the Dutch sailed up the Medway, destroyed the fort at Sheerness, broke the defensive chain across the river, burnt several important ships, including the Royal James, and bore off the Royal Charles itself. Pepys’s Diary for the month of June gives what must be the most candid account ever written of the behaviour of a senior civil servant during a period of national crisis. On Sunday, 9 June, the day the Dutch landed on Canvey Island and the Kent militia were called out, he visited Coventry, eager that the world should see on what close terms he was with him; mocked at the ‘young Hectors’ setting off for Harwich to keep the Dutch at bay there and supposed they would debauch the countrywomen; went to church with Creed, left during the dull sermon and dined at home with his wife and father; returned to Whitehall and, after admiring Betty Michell in church, visited Betty Martin and ‘haze what yo would’ with her; took a boat for Barn Elms, alone, with a book; and finally got back to Seething Lane to find an order for fireships to be sent out, and Penn and Batten both arrived from their country places. On the Monday, with the news that the Dutch were now at the Nore, he set men to work at Deptford and went on to Greenwich, Woolwich and Gravesend, where he heard the Dutch guns and sneered at Albemarle, just arrived ‘with a great many idle lords and gentlemen with their pistols and fooleries’. In truth Albemarle, now in his late sixties, was on his way to fight. Pepys went home by boat, passing many boats laden with the goods of the frightened citizens of Gravesend.

  Evelyn reported general panic in ‘County and City’ on Tuesday, with everybody flying, ‘none knew why or whither’.39 Pett, in charge at Chatham, sent a message to the Navy Board reporting the loss of Sheerness and asking for assistance; Pepys described him as being ‘in a very fearful stink’.40 Brouncker and Mennes set off to help him, while Pepys, after going to Deptford to dispatch fireships, made sure his wages were fully paid up to date, and then amused himself by stalking Mercer through the streets for some time before returning to the matter of fireships. In the evening he heard that the City trained bands were being prepared to fight, so great was the fear that the Dutch would make an attempt on London.

  Pepys’s first thought when he got the news that the Dutch had broken the chain across the Medway and taken the Royal Charles on 12 June was that he must do what he could to secure his personal savings. His second thought was that the Navy Board might well be made scapegoats; but the money demanded immediate action. He sent Elizabeth and his father to Brampton with £1,300 in gold, and Richard Gibson after them with more, under the pretence that he was carrying an official message to the north. He contrived himself a belt in which he could carry another £300 in gold, sent for a poor cousin and entrusted her with his journal and some papers, and dispersed his more valuable pieces of plate among other cousins.41 Around the office the wives of seamen shouted, ‘This comes of your not paying our husbands.’ There were other cries that the country was being bought, sold and governed by papists; Tom Hayter took this seriously enough to tell Pepys that he, like other Nonconformists, was thinking of moving to Hamburg. Elizabeth’s parents actually left London for Paris.42 A gibbet was set up in front of Chancellor Clarendon’s great new house in Piccadilly: he had opposed the war, but he was to be one of the scapegoats for it. In fact the Dutch withdrew, in good order, and on 16 June celebrated their success with a service of Thanksgiving at home.

  In almost any other country, Pepys reflected, he would probably have had his throat cut by now.43 Even in England it was as well to prepare for trouble, and he began to prepare a defence of his office by assembling his correspondence with the duke of York. When news came that Commissioner Pett had been taken to the Tower he feared for himself again. On 19 June he joined in the attack on Pett at the council meeting, ‘for which God forgive me, for I mean no hurt to him’, and the following day he heard that people were reporting that he too was in the Tower. Henry Oldenburg, secretary to the Royal Society, was imprisoned there, for corresponding with a French scientist. Carteret resigned from his job as treasurer of the navy. With Elizabeth still away, Pepys launched himself into some private sallies, on his cookmaid Nell and the Penns’ maid Nan, and another attempt to get Pegg Penn on her own; in the office he fondled Mrs Daniel’s pregnant belly. On the last day of the month he and Creed set off before dawn for Rochester and Chatham and took a barge to visit the site of the battle, seeing the wrecks of their own ships and a few dead bodies beside the water. Pepys remarked on the honourable behaviour of the Dutch in neither killing civilians nor plundering.

  Pepys’s account of himself at the fringes of war is as unheroic as Shakespeare’s portraits of Falstaff and companions, or his Greeks and Trojans, and there are moments when he rivals Falstaff and Thersites as clown and rogue. As it happens, there is another, separate version of Pepys at war, also compiled by him, in which he figures as a diligent and blameless worker. This official face can be found displayed in his ‘Navy White Book’, in which the scope and scale of his preparations for the war are laid out in pages devoted to timber, sail-making, pitch, tar, ropes, contractors’ prices, problems of recruitment and food supplies for ships, attempts to deal with inefficiency and corruption in the yards, and exchanges and wrangles with his fellow officers.44 Here he appears as the impressive administrator he was, with every reason to be proud of what he did, and the ‘Navy White Book’ is an important and serious part of the record. But no one could call it a work of genius, whereas the Diary is just that.

  One reason is that Pepys found himself so entertaining that he did not want to miss anything out. His self-portrait, warts and all, is compelling enough to draw us in and makes us live uncritically inside his skin. Moving so fast through the events of each day and the crowds of people with whom he had dealings, his energy burns off blame, making it surprisingly hard to disapprove of him. Pausing for a moment to make a few vows intended to curb his own behaviour, he remarks that ‘my love of pleasure is such, that my very soul is angry with itself for my vanity in so doing’. He means, I think, that it is moral vanity in him to be making vows that aim above his real level, and that in his soul he thinks it might be better to remain his authentic, pleasure-loving self.45 More than once he says in the course of the Diary that it is right to enjoy th
e world while you can, because there will be times when you will not be able to.46 His authentic self is always so taken up with the immediate that he is quite unconcerned with glorifying his part in defending his country, and much more interested in conveying the texture and character of the world in which he is perpetually meeting new and exciting people and hearing and doing surprising things.

  The peace treaty with the Dutch was signed at Breda at the end of July and ratified at the end of August, giving little pleasure and some shame to the English. In the same week Paradise Lost was put on sale at three shillings a copy; it is one of the few disappointments of the Diary that Pepys neither mentioned nor acquired it.47 But he did read the work of Milton’s friend and fellow poet Andrew Marvell that made its appearance in September, Directions to a Painter, for Describing our Naval Business, satirical verses on the war. Marvell took on the scapegoating of Commissioner Pett, still under threat of impeachment:

  After this loss, to relish discontent,

  Someone must be accused by punishment.

  All our miscarriages on Pett must fall:

  His name alone seems fit to answer all.

  Whose counsel first did this mad war beget?

  Who all commands sold through the navy? Pett…

  Who all our seamen cheated of their debt,

  And all our prizes who did swallow? Pett.

  Who did advise no navy out to set,

  And who the forts left unrepairèd? Pett.

  Who to supply with powder did forget

  Languard, Sheerness, Gravesend and Upnor? Pett.