Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  Charles’s openly displayed adultery, though good for gossip, also seemed to Pepys ‘a poor thing for a Prince to do’. What he objected to was not so much the fact of the adultery as the absence of any decent discretion – a king should at least appear to set an example – and he spoke so freely to Creed on the subject in 1663 that he became anxious afterwards and wondered whether he could count on Creed’s silence – a whiff of the fear always lurking in a state with an absolute ruler.13 Soon after this Lady Sandwich’s father, Lord Crew, talked even more indiscreetly to Pepys about the behaviour of the king, his refusal to attend to matters of state, his enslavement to Lady Castle-maine, his readiness to be swayed by favourites and neglect of the chancellor’s advice, his hatred of ‘the very sight or thought of business’.14 Pepys wrote down Crew’s words and pondered them. No one of his generation could fail to make mental comparisons between Cromwell and Charles, both as private men and as leaders. When Pepys attended a parade of the King’s Guards in Hyde Park not long after his talk with Crew, he responded to the magnificence of the show with words that verged on the treasonable: ‘methought all these gay men are not the soldiers that must do the King’s business, it being such as these that lost the old King all he had and were beat by the most ordinary fellows that could be’.15

  The word ‘ordinary’ is used here in praise of the parliamentary army. It crops up more than once in relation to the king with a very different significance: ‘seemed a very ordinary man to one that had not known him’, ‘talking methought but ordinary talk’.16 Pepys is weighing the monarchy’s exalted status against its reality, much as the generation before him had weighed Charles I and found him wanting. Nothing stirred Pepys to any enthusiasm for the old king. In 1669 he prepared a document for the duke of York on the history of the Navy Board in which he showed his view of the politics of Charles I by referring to ‘the rupture between his late Majesty and Parliament’. The duke asked Pepys to strike out the words he had written and substitute ‘the beginning of the late Rebellion’, because any suggestion that the dispute had been between two equally valid forces was not politically acceptable to him.17

  Pepys’s first seriously rude comment on Charles II’s capacity was written down shortly after the parade in the park, in July 1663; always eager for first-hand experience, he managed to squeeze himself illicitly into the House of Lords to hear the king’s speech. He described Charles sitting on his throne and giving a dismal reading from a piece of paper in his lap from which he scarcely raised his eyes. ‘His speech was very plain, nothing at all of spirit in it, nor spoke with any; but rather on the contrary, imperfectly, repeating many times his words, though he read all – which I was sorry to see, it having not been hard for him to have got all the speech without booke.’18 Pepys’s scorn was that of a man who had himself learnt to memorize and speak in public, and he was profoundly shocked that Charles could not be bothered to put on a proper performance in front of the assembled lords. His criticism was repeated the following year, when he again smuggled himself into the House for the king’s speech: ‘he speaks the worst that ever I heard man in my life – worse then if he read it all, and he had it in writing in his hand’.19

  Yet Charles was beginning to appreciate Pepys. The Diary shows that on 17 April 1665, at Whitehall, he called him by his name for the first time and engaged in conversation with him about ships; naval architecture was a subject on which Charles was very well informed. Whatever Pepys’s opinion of him, this was an important step forward, and he decided that from now on he would prepare himself to be questioned and be ready with good answers. There were more informal exchanges about navy business during the next weeks, and in July Charles summoned him to Greenwich, where he and the duke of York were spending the day. The plague had driven them from London, and they came by barge from Hampton Court, with only a few attendants and the young duke of Monmouth jumping about at their side, to see the progress of the new palace being built in Greenwich Park and to inspect a ship under construction in the yard. Pepys was there to answer their questions and felt he put on a good performance; he was therefore mortified when he was not invited to dine with the royal party. But in the afternoon he joined them aboard their barge and sailed with them to Woolwich and back, sitting close enough all the way to observe the royal brothers and listen to their conversation. That evening he wrote an account of the impression they made on him: ‘God forgive me, though I adore them with all the duty possible, yet the more a man considers and observes them, the less he finds of difference between them and other men, though (blessed be God) they are both princes of great nobleness and spirits.’20 The ‘adore’ demonstrates the required reverence towards royalty; it was not a word Pepys brought out often, and here it is used as an emollient, softening his real point, which is that both king and duke strike him as pretty commonplace. Even buttressed with two invocations of God’s name and praise for their nobleness and spirits – the duke had indeed just returned from fighting the Dutch at sea – his remark is not that of a devoted courtier.

  In Pepys’s eyes Charles threw away his advantages by not taking his kingly role seriously enough. Instead of hard work, dignity and glory he settled into a life devoted to amusement and pleasure: women, horse-racing, sports, drinking, theatregoing, sailing. He took little interest in travelling around his kingdom, no doubt thinking he had done enough of that in his youth. He was clever, but even his much mentioned interest in science was not seriously pursued. He was amiable, polite, fickle; rarely showing displeasure directly, quickly bored. He had favourites but, in the words of Bishop Burnet, who knew him well, had ‘a very ill opinion both of men and women; and did not think there was either sincerity or chastity in the world out of principle, but that some had either the one or the other out of humour or vanity. He thought that nobody served him out of love: and so he was quits with all the world, and loved others as little as he thought they loved him.’21

  Pepys’s account of the great fire of London is discussed in another chapter. The most striking thing about his approach to the king then was that he unhesitatingly took it on himself to inform him of what was happening and at the same time to give him direct advice – you might say instructions – as to what he should do: ‘that unless his Majesty did command houses to be pulled down, nothing could stop the fire’.22 This must have impressed Charles, especially as it turned out to be the only good advice he got. In the months following the fire, Pepys piled on criticism of his ineffectiveness in the conduct of the war. During the autumn of 1666 and early months of 1667 the Navy Board warned that they could not execute their orders to send out ships without funds, but their pleas produced no results, and ships were laid up one after another.23 Pepys set down his ‘grief that the King doth not look after his business himself, and thereby will be undone’. He recorded the remarks of colleagues on ‘The viciousness of the Court. The contempt the King brings himself into thereby.’ John Evelyn was struggling to organize care for the sick, the wounded and prisoners, and he too was driven to deplore Charles’s inattention to affairs of state. In his end-of-year summary for 1666 Pepys characterized the court as ‘sad, vicious, negligent’, and the 1667 Diary carried a litany of reported complaints and warnings to the king.24 In March Pepys made a speech before him, telling him that his failure to fund the navy would lead to disaster. In May Carteret told Pepys that 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 compared Charles unfavourably with Cromwell.25

  The Medway disaster followed. Pepys was informed that ‘the night the Dutch burned our ships, the King did sup with my Lady Castlemayne at the Duchess of Monmouth, and there were all mad in hunting of a poor moth’.26 His informant, the first engineer of the Tangier breakwater, Hugh Cholmley, pursued the subject of Charles’s inadequacy, suggesting that he had ‘not brains, or at least care and forecast enough’ to rule as the king of France did. Pepys added hi
s own view, ‘strange how he and everybody doth nowadays reflect upon Oliver and commend him. [sic] so brave things he did and made all the neighbour princes fear him; while here a prince, come in with all the love and prayers and good liking of his people… hath lost all so soon, that it is a miracle what way a man could devise to lose so much in so little time’.27 He thought of going to hear the king’s speech in parliament again, but ‘upon second thoughts did not think it would be worth the crowd’. He went even further in his disapproval and actually took to avoiding the king, ‘whom I have not had any desire to see since the Dutch came upon the coast first to Sheerness, for shame that I should see him, or he me methinks, after such a dishonour’.28

  Carteret, once so strong in defence of his royal master, now reproached him directly for his behaviour and repeated to Pepys what he had said to Charles of ‘the necessity of having at least a show of religion in the government, and sobriety; and that it was that that did set up and keep up Oliver, though he was the greatest rogue in the world’.29 The point about the show of religion was the same as Pepys’s about his adulteries: the King might believe or not, might have mistresses or not, but a ruler must offer a good example. Pepys grew still more withering, writing of the king’s conduct in his council chamber: ‘All I observed there is the silliness of the King, playing with his dog all the while, or his codpiece, and not minding the business, and what he said was mighty weak’.30 Another council meeting, at which Pepys presented a paper, provoked him to ‘I could easily discern that none of them understood the business; and the King at last ended it with saying lazily, “Why,” says he, “after all this discourse, I now come to understand it; and that is, that there can nothing be done in this more then is possible” (which was so silly as I never heard), “and therefore,” says he, “I would have these gentlemen to do as much as is possible to hasten the Treasurer’s accounts; and that is all.” And so we broke up; and I confess I went away ashamed to see how slightly things are advised upon there.’31 There was more to come about ‘a short, silly speech’ by the king, his ‘short, weak answers’, his ‘sorry discourse’ and his ‘idle conversation’, as well as the ‘maudlin pickle’ he got into when drunk.32

  Coventry, like Carteret, lost all faith in the king’s capacity to rule properly in 1667. When Pepys tried out a polite formulation to him, expressing sympathy for Charles’s difficulties with his finances and with parliament – that it was ‘a sorry thing, to be a poor King and have others to come to correct the faults of his own servants, and that that was it that brought us all into this condition’ – Coventry burst out with a passionate expression of disgust at Charles’s behaviour. ‘He answered that he would never be a poor King, and then the other would mend of itself; “No,” says he, “I would eat bread and drink water first, and this day discharge all that idle company about me and walk only with two footmen; and this I have told the King – and this must do it at last.”’33 In another conversation with Pepys, Coventry said frankly that ‘serving a prince that minds not his business is most unhappy for them that serve him well’. Coventry was the man Pepys most respected, and he was openly giving him his poor opinion of the king.34

  Charles did two things to please Pepys during this period: he granted him a small prize ship in October 1667 and praised him for his speech to parliament in 1668; but neither made any difference to Pepys’s private opinion of him. He continued to comment on his ‘silly discourse’, his devotion to pleasure, his ‘short and weak’ responses and his shifty ways. In March 1669 Pepys had Evelyn to dine, who spoke ‘openly to me his thoughts of the times and our approaching ruin, and all by the folly of the King’.35 In April Pepys heard rumours of an impending agreement with the French that would give the king money that would release him from dependence on parliament, and wrote ‘this is a thing that will make the Parliament and Kingdom mad, and will turn to our ruin – for this money the King shall wanton away his time in pleasures and think nothing of the main till it be too late’.36 No such agreement was entered into openly, but Pepys’s information was good, because Charles’s secret treaty with Louis XIV, made in 1670, was what he described, and French money became his weapon against parliament for the rest of his reign.

  The last part of the Diary tells the story of how Coventry, for years the loyal friend and adviser of the royal brothers, lost favour and was dismissed from all his public appointments through a Byzantine court intrigue. At the end of the Dutch war Coventry advised Charles to rid himself of his ageing chancellor, Clarendon, whom he thought too set in his ways and becoming a liability. Coventry had in mind an honourable retirement for the man who had been chiefly responsible for Charles’s return to the throne, but parliament was calling for Clarendon’s blood, and Lady Castlemaine hated him because he did not conceal his disdain for her. In any case Charles was tired of being told what to do. He went further than Coventry intended, and, when Clarendon was threatened with impeachment by parliament, the king sent him into exile. It was an act of shameful ingratitude. There was now a cooling between Coventry and the duke of York, whose duchess was Clarendon’s daughter; and Coventry left his position as secretary to the duke. He told Pepys it was at his own wish, and he remained a privy councillor and a member of the Treasury Commission.

  Coventry could be a little heavy-handed in advising the king, as Pepys tells us, reporting a scene in which Coventry suggested some small economy to the king, who said it was a matter of indifference to him; to which Coventry responded, ‘I see your Majesty do not remember the old English proverb, “He that will not stoop for a pin, will never be worth a pound.”’37 This tone, precise and preacherly, was exactly the wrong one to adopt with Charles. He had wittier advisers to turn to, among them his boyhood friend, George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, ambitious, unreliable but fascinating to men and women alike: it was said that every head turned when he walked by. Buckingham decided to tease Coventry, and for that purpose wrote an additional scene for a new comedy about to be played. It was called The Country Gentlemen and featured, among other characters, Mistress Finicall Fart, a landlady, and Sir Cautious Trouble-all, a high government official; Buckingham’s scene poked fun at Sir Cautious demonstrating the desk at which he worked, a specially made round one with a passage into a central hole in which he could enclose himself and so easily turn round to look at his many papers. It was well known that Coventry had such a desk and was proud of it; he had in fact demonstrated it to Pepys. In Buckingham’s scene Sir Cautious became a figure of ridicule, whizzing round on his revolving stool like a clown as he turned busily from one set of papers to the next.38

  Coventry’s sense of humour did not extend to putting up with Buckingham’s satire. He was so angry when he heard of the play that he complained to the king, who asked to see the text. He was given a copy from which the key scene had been removed. Coventry then told Killigrew, the theatre manager, that he would have the nose of any actor who appeared in it slit; he also sent a challenge to Buckingham. Buckingham, who had recently engaged in a duel with the husband of his mistress that led to the man’s death, was anxious to avoid another bloody encounter and leaked the news of the challenge to the king. At the next council meeting Coventry was arrested and sent to the Tower, on the grounds that a challenge to a fellow member of the Privy Council constituted a felony because it might result in his death – a long-forgotten statute of Henry VII being invoked for this unusual step.

  The news of Coventry’s arrest ‘did strike me to the heart’, wrote Pepys. He hurried to the Tower and visited him regularly during his detention. He was not the only one – on one day there were sixty coaches lined up at the Tower. The patent injustice of his punishment was obvious. But the king departed nonchalantly for Newmarket and wrote to his sister, ‘I am not sorry that Sir Will. Coventry has given me this good occasion… to turne him out of the Councill. I do intend to turn him out of the Tresury. The truth of it is, he has been a troublesome man in both places, and I am well rid of him.’39 Coventry had to sue for pardon
before he released him.

  As Pepys was sitting with him in the Tower one day he saw that he was writing a journal, and Coventry told him he kept one regularly. Pepys returned the confidence, ‘and he is the only man that I ever told it to I think, that I have kept it most strictly these eight or ten years; and I am sorry almost that I told it him – it being not necessary, nor may be convenient to have it known’.40 He might well have worried, given what he had written about over the years; but Coventry was not a man to intrude on or betray a friend. He had, however, become a dangerous friend, in Pepys’s view; after his release from the Tower, but before he had been allowed into the royal presence again, Pepys became afraid of being seen with him in public; and when Coventry proposed a stroll in St James’s Park, as of old, Pepys made an excuse and left. He had to think of his own position, and Coventry was no longer someone to be seen with.41 Pepys might protest to himself in his own Diary, ‘to serve him, I should I think stick at nothing’, but he was not prepared to take any risks.