Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  Fantasy and private pleasure was the simplest alternative to flesh and blood, and he writes of consoling himself with it, in church at the sight of another desired girl, or at home alone, calling up the image of a court beauty one night and boldly deciding to make it the queen the next.58 In the real world, like Mozart’s Don Giovanni, all his efforts left him with a low success rate. Perhaps this is why, however sorry you feel for some of the girls and women he pursued, you rarely lose all sympathy for him. He so often makes a mess of his attempts at wooing, and he does not attempt to justify his lewd and bungling behaviour. He had what may partly have provided an excuse, although he does not claim it as such, in his wife’s medical condition. Above all, he tells his stories of failure with an energy that lifts them to a sort of sublimity, close to the sublimity of Shakespeare’s (and Verdi’s) Falstaff, or the erotic poems of Goethe.

  Take for example the history of his infatuation with Betty Michell. This Betty, like Betty Lane, came from Westminster Hall, where her parents were shopkeepers and friends of Pepys and where she first caught his eye when she was still a child. He thought she looked like Elizabeth: ‘a pretty girl and one I have long called wife; being, I formerly thought, like my own wife’, he wrote in 1663. From then on he mentioned her often, reminding himself of how he used to call her his second wife, predicting that she would grow up into ‘a mighty handsome wench’ and ‘a fine handsome woman’ and declaring his love for her; he also pumped the older Betty for information about the younger.59 To her he must have seemed a jolly uncle who hung about her parents’ stall, liked and trusted by them both as customer and friend. After watching her in the Hall one day, he conducted an experiment that he noted down with scientific interest. He summoned a boat and ‘lying down close in my boat, and… without use of my hand, had great pleasure, and the first time I did make trial of my strength of fancy of that kind without my hand, and had it complete avec la fille que I did see au-jour-dhuy in Westminster hall’.60 By now she was about to be married to Michell, the son of one of Pepys’s booksellers; this was after being betrothed to his brother, who died in the plague, ‘which is a pretty odd thing’, thought Pepys.61 But he was pleased that the young couple was to move to his part of town, to run a shop selling spirits at the eastern end of Thames Street.

  Up to this point Pepys’s attitude to Betty was sentimental rather than rapacious. Now he became determined to have her. He embarked on a carefully thought-out campaign, described in all its deviousness in the Diary. He took Elizabeth to Westminster Hall to be introduced to Betty as a bride, daughter and daughter-in-law of long-established and friendly suppliers of his, and about to become a neighbour. Next he dropped in at the Michells’ shop to buy himself a drink and followed this up by creating an opportunity to give both husband and wife a lift in his boat. Then he went out of his way to do Michell a financial favour in the matter of a seaman’s ticket. So far so good, and, finding Betty alone when he called again, he decided the time had come to ‘steal a kiss or two’. The next move was to suggest to Elizabeth that the Michells might be invited to a Sunday dinner, as an act of kindness to the deserving young couple. They came, and after dinner the Pepyses took them out into the country in a hired coach. He was suffering badly from wind, but in spite of this the expedition was a success, because Elizabeth took to the Michells. She found them an attractive and innocent pair, and they were grateful for the Pepyses’ condescension and kindness. More invitations to dinner followed and were accepted.

  The great fire of September 1666 interrupted the progress of his plans, but not for long. The Michells’ house was destroyed, and they moved to Shadwell, still close enough to be dinner guests. Betty was now pregnant, and her mother had confided in Pepys that young Michell was not as kind to her as he might be, and suggested that he, as a wiser and older man, might ‘appear a counsellor to him’.62 Delighted by this licence to interfere, what he actually did was to give Betty a lift home in a coach and succeed in getting her hand under his coat ‘and did tocar mi cosa con su mano [touch my thing with her hand] through my chemise, but yet so as to hazer me hazer la grande cosa [make me make the great thing, i.e., orgasm]’.63 Here was a new game, and he was so taken with it that he proceeded to set up shared trips whenever he could, persisting even when her husband was with them and against her pleas that she had a headache. After a theatre and shopping trip together he made Elizabeth change places with him in the coach so that he could get hold of Betty’s hand. The Sunday before Christmas he went to church with the Michells; there was snow on the ground, and he kindly offered to collect them from her parents later in the day. This time he had to use ‘some little violence’ to get hold of her hand ‘contra su will’ and force it to where he wanted it, ‘she making many little endeavours para oter su mano [to remove her hand] still’. Once at Seething Lane, Betty ‘did seem a little ill’. But Pepys kissed her goodnight blithely and went into his chamber, where ‘with my brother and wife did Number all my books in my closet and took a list of their names; which pleases me mightily, and is a job I wanted much to have done’. Comic, if you put aside thoughts of Betty, feeling rotten, pregnant and at a loss how to deal with an old family friend who was in a position to do her and her husband good.64

  The climax of the affair came in February 1667. Pepys called on Michell and left an invitation to Betty to join Elizabeth and him that afternoon for some more shopping at the New Exchange. She turned up at five to find only Pepys, who made an excuse and insisted on buying her an expensive dressing box. It would take an hour to be prepared. He suggested a drink. She said she preferred to spend the hour visiting relatives near by and would return to the shop later. There they watched the work on the box being finished together. The next part of the story is one of Pepys’s virtuoso narratives. He mixes Spanish and French words into the English as he moves from delight to eroticism to fear, sweaty panic and relief:

  the mistress of the shop took us into the kitchen and there talked and used us very prettily; and took her [Betty] for my wife, which I owned and her big belly; and there very merry till my thing done, and then took coach and home, in the way tomando su mano and putting it where I used to do; which ella did suffer, but not avec tant de freedom as heretofore, I perceiving plainly she had alguns [some] apprehensions de me, but I did offer natha [nothing] more then what I had often done. But now comes our trouble; I did begin to fear that su marido [her husband] might go to my house to enquire por ella, and there trovando mi moher [finding my wife] at home, would not only think himself, but give my femme occasion to think strange things. This did trouble me mightily; so though ella would not seem to have me trouble myself about it, yet did agree to the stopping the coach at the street’s end; and yo allais con ella home and there presently hear by him that he had newly sent su maid to my house to see for her mistress. This doth much perplex me, and I did go presently home (Betty whispering me, behind the tergo [back] do her mari, that if I would say that we did come home by water, ella could make up la cosa well satis [enough]. And there in a sweat did walk in the entry antes my door, thinking what I should say to my femme; and as God would have it, while I was in this case (the worst in reference a my femme that ever I was in in my life), a little woman comes stumbling to the entry-steps in the dark; whom asking whom she was, she enquired for my house; so knowing her voice and telling her su dona [her mistress] is come home, she went away. But Lord, in what a trouble was I when she was gone, to recollect whether this was not the second time of her coming; but at last concluding that she had not been here before, I did bless myself in my good fortune in getting home before her, and do verily believe she had loitered some time by the way, which was my great good fortune; and so I in a-door and there find all well. So, my heart full of joy, I to the office a little and then home.65

  Pepys wrote up the episode twenty-four hours later, after a busy day, morning at the office, afternoon attendance at a recital of Italian songs and a long talk with Thomas Killigrew about the state of the theatre. During
those hours his imagination worked on the material, and the chronicler became the writer, so that his adventure with Betty has a fast-moving plot and dramatic asides: ‘now comes our trouble’, ‘Betty whispering me’, ‘the worst in reference a my femme that ever I was in’. The foreign phrases are transparent as the narrator’s emotions shift from pleasure at being taken for the father of Betty’s child, to a complicit thrill at her whispering behind her husband’s back, to his moment of terror at the idea of being found out at his own house, to the near-miraculous reprieve when he meets the old woman. As in a comedy, all ends joyfully – at least for the time being. Pepys the man has provided Pepys the writer with his material, and he knows exactly how to handle it.

  Elizabeth never found out. A week later Betty told him she did not like ‘touching’, and he resolved to ‘mind my business more’, although he still loved her – ‘I aime her de todo mi corazon’ [‘I love her with all my heart’]. Betty’s baby was born, a daughter, named after Elizabeth, who assisted the midwife and stood as godmother. Both Pepyses attended the christening, although he turned up his nose at the poor company. In the summer the baby died, and the Michells came and sat with the Pepyses in their garden to mourn the child. Betty became pregnant for a second time. Pepys did not get hold of her hand again, but he still yearned after her from time to time, even though he fell in love with another girl. Once he saw her in church and commented on how her looks had deteriorated, but on the last page of the diary he called at the Michells and found her with her mother, her husband being away: ‘And here yo did besar ella, but have not opportunity parar hazer mas with her as I would have offered if yo had had it.’ What he expressed in his Diary was what many – perhaps most – men feel at some time in their lives, when success is within their grasp and their energies are running high: that they would like to possess every pretty girl in the world, or at least to make love to every girl who catches their eye as she passes by in the street.

  But Betty Michell, unpossessed, disappears into the darkness of unrecorded history, with her fading childish beauty, her dressing box, her sullen husband in his spirit shop beside the Thames and her second baby girl, whose fate we shall never know; having freed herself of uncle Pepys and sublimely unaware of the literary honour bestowed on her by him.

  As to why he set down his own behaviour in all its shameful detail: no doubt it was partly to prolong the enjoyment, where there was enjoyment, and to give himself the chance to revisit it, with an extra gloss added by the exotic language. But also, and perhaps chiefly, for the reason that he was more interested in observing and recording his own actions than in presenting an immaculate or even favourable image of himself. So we have the spectacle of someone carefully noting down what any one of us would hide, from ourselves if we could and certainly from posterity. Lecher and liar as he knew himself to be, Pepys was a sceptic and a humanist as well; he was not confessing his sins here but setting down the facts of his experience as a man living in a complex environment. Only when you have taken in the least attractive bits of his behaviour in the Diary can you fully appreciate what a triumph of humanism it represents.

  He is of course the hero of his narrative, painting himself in the brightest colours and finest details. In the background Elizabeth is a fainter, simpler figure, and voiceless since none of her letters survive. Robert Louis Stevenson, who found Pepys irresistible, called her vulgar, and twentieth-century feminist attempts to give her a voice have been unconvincing. Her failure to get on with any of her companions does not speak in her favour, although Lady Sandwich’s affection for her does. She could be generous to her servants, joining in Christmas parties and celebrations below stairs with them; and she would go to help other women in childbirth. The deepest bond in her life may well have been with her brother, Baity; it was reciprocal, and each is shown looking out for the other in the pages of the Diary. She persistently and successfully urged Pepys to help him; decades after her death he still took her wishes to heart. She had a lot to put up with in being married to Pepys, but on balance more to enjoy than not. She did not give up easily when she wanted something, and she held her own in argument. Wives of greatly energetic men can be cowed by them, as Catherine Dickens was. Not so Elizabeth. She never sank into inertia or depression, and she refused the role of victim. By the last page of the Diary the reader has lived through high drama, witnessing a tremendous power struggle between husband and wife, closely matched and fought to a bitter and surprising finish. We shall come to that later.

  14. The King

  In September 1665, when Lord Sandwich brought in the prize ships he had taken from the Dutch, he was offered a ‘handsome supper’ by Sir John Mennes at Woolwich, together with Lord Brouncker, Pepys, Evelyn and a few more friends. It was a convivial gathering, and one of the stories told by Sandwich was about Pepys. He described how overjoyed he had been, back in May 1660, at the sight of a letter from the king, then still in Holland. The royal letter had come to them at sea, and Sandwich told the party that Pepys had kissed it, adding that ‘whatever he was’, Pepys had always loved the king. Sandwich was harking back to his own Cromwellian past, still held against him, and at the same time giving Pepys a testimonial. At this Lord Brouncker announced that ‘he could not forbear kissing me before my Lord, professing his finding occasion every day more and more to love me’. They were all drinking freely, and perhaps Pepys was being teased by Lord Brouncker. But Pepys did not take it as teasing, and, when Captain Cocke mentioned the incident later, he thought it might turn out to be ‘of good use to me’.1

  Pepys’s position at the Navy Board meant he owed direct duty and loyalty to the king, and the mass of his naval papers that survive in the shape of rolls, minute books, letters and memoranda all bear witness to his zeal in the royal service. His official letters are full of ‘the King’s service’, ‘the King’s yards’, ‘the King’s security’ and ‘the King’s ships’. From 1665 he was known by name to Charles, who came to appreciate him as a useful officer and an outstanding speaker on naval affairs; and in due course he rose so high in royal favour that he was appointed secretary to the Admiralty in 1673.2 The king thought well of Pepys. Pepys’s real response to the king, in spite of Lord Sandwich’s testimony and Lord Brouncker’s kiss, was something different.

  In 1660 he had gone with the tide of national enthusiasm for the Restoration. Everyone felt Charles’s charm then, and Pepys was no exception, the more so since he received rich rewards through Sandwich’s role in the king’s return. Pepys was genuinely moved by the tale of his suffering as a youth, his poverty, courage and adventures after Worcester, and impressed by his energy – ‘very active and stirring’ – and easy, open manner.3 The pageantry of the Restoration pleased him, as did the coronation, with its processions through the streets, its triumphal arches and gorgeous costumes, its ceremonial and feasting. Pepys responded to everything that was picturesque. He was not going to complain that the court was peopled by beautiful women who paraded glittering clothes, feathered hats and jewels, providing a rich source of gossip and enriching his dreams. The king’s patronage of theatre, painting and music was unequivocally welcomed, and the Diary is full of the pleasures offered by the revival of church music, the reopening of the theatres and visits to the studios of painters where court beauties were being immortalized.4

  The soap opera aspect of royal family life also appealed to him. He quivered with pleasure and excitement at being taken into Somerset House to observe the king and his new queen, Catherine, paying a visit to the queen mother, Henrietta Maria, in 1662, ‘such a sight as I could never almost have happened to see with so much ease and leisure’. He reported a snatch of royal conversation. The king told the queen mother that the queen was with child. The queen answered ‘You lie’ – the first English words Pepys heard her speak – and the king teased her, saying he would teach her to say ‘Confess and be hanged’. Pretty witty for a king, and Pepys went away very contented at having seen and heard this ‘greatest rarity’.5 He rem
ained a curious spectator at other royal rituals, public dinners and the queen’s birthday ball, which he watched from the loft above.6 And his friend Pearse, surgeon to the duke of York and privy to every love affair, abortion, duel and case of pox at court, took the part of the tabloid press of today and fed him with scandalous tales, rather too many of which Pepys wrote out in the Diary.

  None of this meant he set aside his sceptical intelligence. When he first went to court with Sandwich, he noted ‘Court attendance infinite tedious’.7 After seeing the king gravely laying hands on the sick who came to the Banqueting House to be healed by the royal touch, he wrote down his unhesitating opinion that it was a foolish activity.8 Visiting the Tower with a royal group, he commented on ‘the poor discourse and frothy that the King’s companions… had with him’.9 The arrival of the new queen prompted Pepys to point out that the people were not overjoyed but rather ‘much discontented at the pride and luxury of the court, and running in debt’.10 It was not long before he was shocked by what he heard of the swearing, drinking and whoring at court, and still more appalled by the extravagance and expectation of unlimited credit that prevailed there. Everyone spent, nobody paid.11 Pepys set down the story of the king’s stationery supplier to demonstrate what this meant to those who served and supplied him. Seven years after taking the throne, Charles went into his council meeting one morning and found no paper on his table. When he complained, he was told that the man who provided it ‘was but a poor man, and was out 4 or £500 for it… and that he cannot provide it any longer without money, having not received a penny since the King’s coming in’.12 Pepys added, ‘Many such Mementos the King doth nowadays meet.’ No amount of hardship endured in his youth, no amount of present charm, could justify such treatment of his subjects.