After this he remained on good terms with Tom and Jane. He became godfather to their eldest son, Samuel, born in 1673. He saw to Tom’s career, getting him appointed muster-master and navy agent at Deal five years later, in succession to Baity St Michel, so that the job was kept to all intents and purposes in the family.47 When Tom died sadly young in 1681, leaving Jane with two children, she returned to work for Pepys, who was at that point sharing a house with Will Hewer. Whether Pepys was less rampageous in his desires or not, she was by then a middle-aged widow and a mother, and his role was to act as an avuncular figure, full of benevolence and good sense. He did well, arranging for young Sam to be given a place at Christ’s Hospital to study mathematics; and was rewarded by seeing him succeed. Sam was one of the pupils presented to King James at the beginning of 1688, and he grew up to become an officer in the navy, exactly as Pepys must have hoped. Jane remarried, a man called George Penny about whom we know nothing, and was soon widowed again. In 1690 Pepys settled an annuity of £15 a year on her.
Pepys loved Jane as you love someone who becomes a part of your life. His feelings for her were much warmer than anything he felt for his sister Pall, for instance, from the evidence of the Diary; and she appears as one of the most attractive figures in its pages. He shows her as affectionate, emotional, brave, stubborn, humorous, high-spirited, hard working and good at her work; loyal to her mother and brothers and faithful to her employers. Even Elizabeth had difficulty in picking quarrels with her. And he tells us what a hard time he often gave her and how stoutly she put up with his harshness, his unfairness and his general tiresomeness. When the day of Pepys’s funeral came, her son was there to represent her, by then Lieutenant Sam Edwards. He and his mother each received a ring by Pepys’s instructions, and she had an extra five guineas for mourning clothes in addition to the continued annuity ‘Setled on my old and faithfull Servant Jane Penny’ in his will.48 Whatever scoldings, tears, beatings, fumblings in dark corners and other bad behaviour he had handed out to Jane were long forgotten; and in this case time allowed him to redeem himself doubly: by making the end of her life as comfortable as possible and also, though she never knew it, by leaving an admirable portrait of her to posterity.
17. The Secret Scientist
Pepys became a member of the Royal Society in 1665 and went on to become its president in 1684. As president his name appears on the title page of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, linking him for ever with the great English scientist; but although Pepys was acquainted with Newton and had some correspondence with him, his own scientific credentials were almost nonexistent. He has been labelled ‘almost comically an arts man’ by a modern historian of science, and it is true that he was no chemist, physicist or astronomer.1 Yet Pepys was a secret scientist of a kind, if only through his scrutiny of himself, and the candid, dispassionate, regular and detailed record he made of his own physical, moral and psychological state.
He was born at the same time as a generation of outstanding scientists, all of whom were prominent within the Royal Society and personally known to him. As well as Newton (born 1642) there was the chemist Robert Boyle (1627), Christopher Wren (1632), Robert Hooke (1635) and William Petty (1623); also the physician William Croone (1633), and the older mathematicians John Wallis (1616) and William Brouncker (1620). There were many other members who were linguistic scholars, antiquarians and mere gentlemen, with no more understanding of physics and chemistry than Pepys, and like him simply eager to be part of the most distinguished club in the country, where the scientifically gifted members showed experiments and led discussion, and everyone else came along to be diverted and instructed. What Pepys valued most was without doubt the sense of belonging to the group, hearing their exchanges of ideas and theories, and feeling he was at the forefront of progressive thought.
Pepys had what was considered a good education, but it did nothing to encourage him to think scientifically: the word ‘science’ in its modern meaning did not exist. The experimental scientists among his contemporaries all looked for encouragement and training from thinkers and teachers outside the conventional academic system, and set about creating new disciplines and new systems of thought. Boyle studied abroad and with private tutors after leaving Eton. Wren started as a boy making models of the solar system, left Westminster School at fourteen and acted as an assistant to Dr Charles Scarborough, a London lecturer in anatomy, before going to Oxford, where he worked with Boyle; at twenty-five he had a chair in astronomy, not in a university but at Gresham College in the City. Newton, intended for a farmer, and Hooke, intended for the Church, were both also dedicated model-makers as children; they made mechanical toys, Hooke produced a working wooden clock and Newton made dolls’ furniture for the little girls of the village, and a model windmill with a mouse as miller.2 Hooke studied with Boyle after Oxford and Newton did some of his best work away from Cambridge. Petty, with no schooling and no money, contrived to study medicine and chemistry abroad, had a chair in music at Gresham College and one in anatomy at Oxford by the age of twenty-eight, surveyed the whole of Ireland, designed ships and founded the science of political economy. These were not orthodox academic careers; some were facilitated by the civil war and commonwealth.
Wren particularly praised the encouragement given by the City of London in the speech he made on taking up his chair at Gresham College in 1657. The college, standing between Bishopsgate and Broad Street, was endowed in the 1590s by Thomas Gresham, City merchant and adviser to Queen Elizabeth; and he appointed professors who gave public lectures in English as well as Latin. It was in effect the first open university, and it is possible that Pepys went along to a lecture or two there when he was a boy. It established the first chairs of geometry and astronomy in England, and its activities were expanding during the later years of the Cromwells’ protectorate, when Petty and Wren were there. Wren’s speech paid particular tribute to the culture of the City. He praised it as the centre of mechanical arts and trade as well as liberal sciences, ‘in such a Measure, as is hardly to be found in the Academies [i.e., Oxford and Cambridge] themselves’. Its citizens were ‘the Masters of the Sea’, the City itself another ‘Alexandria, the established Residence of Mathematical Arts’, and it was true that the City’s long association with the navy had led to research on navigating instruments and shipbuilding.3
This intellectual liveliness of the City was part of Pepys’s background. He also read Bacon, who placed the study of the natural world above metaphysics, with enthusiasm. So he had heard and read enough to be eager for news of discoveries and inventions. As early as 1656 he attended ‘magnetique experiments’ with Montagu.4 He haunted the shops of instrument-makers in Long Acre, Aldgate and Chancery Lane, men who made microscopes, slide rules, thermometers, telescopes and devices for drawing in perspective; he bought himself a microscope in 1664 and acquired scientific books. He watched private experiments undertaken by his friends Pearse, the surgeon, and Dr Clarke, who administered opium to dogs and dissected them.5 He took himself to one of Dr Scarborough’s dissections of a hanged man at the Surgeons’ Hall and attended his lectures on anatomy.6 He enjoyed conversation with men whose minds travelled along original lines: at the coffee house William Petty stirred his imagination with the suggestion that we cannot know for certain whether or not we are dreaming when we think ourselves awake and waking when we dream.7 Petty was in his view ‘one of the most rational men that ever I heard speak with a tongue, having all his notions the most distinct and clear’.8
The instrument-maker Ralph Greatorex took him to Gresham College in January 1661, where the Royal Society had just been set up. Among the founding members were his past and future bosses, Lords Sandwich and Brouncker and William Coventry; John Evelyn, destined to become a friend; Petty, Hooke and Wren; John Wilkins, whose plan for a universal language caught Pepys’s interest; William Croone, who predicted the benefits of human blood transfusion; and John Wallis, mathematician. A year after this Dr Clarke talked of introducing Pep
ys to the Society, but nothing came of his proposal, and instead Pepys saw his rival, John Creed, introduced as a member in 1663 by Thomas Povey. Pepys records a conversation with Creed about duodecimal arithmetic, and another when Creed described experiments shown by Hooke at the Society.9 Where Creed could go Pepys must follow, and it was again Povey who put up Pepys’s name in 1665. He was elected, unanimously, on 15 February, and joined in a club supper afterwards with such worthies as Dr Goddard, who had been Cromwell’s chief physician and now sold his famous ‘Goddard’s Drops’ to the king: they contained crushed human bones and the flesh of vipers, and were good for lethargy.10 Charles II was the Society’s patron. He had some scientific curiosity and a laboratory of his own; and his protection was believed to be useful against those who might oppose the Society’s activities. From time to time he sent along venison for the Society dinners, but he never chose to attend a meeting, and his interest dwindled with the years.11
The first weeks of Pepys’s membership produced a rare occasion when we know something about him which he does not mention in his Diary. The Society’s archives record that he was asked to question Captain Robert Holmes, returned from the African coast, about the action of some pendulum watches he had carried there for the Society. Holmes was in the Tower, accused of going beyond his orders in attacking the Dutch, and Pepys was reluctant to speak to him because they had clashed when Pepys appointed a master to Holmes’s ship and Holmes sacked him and threatened Pepys with a duel – so Pepys chose to consult with the master of Holmes’s ship, while Holmes was visited by Sir Robert Moray. Different accounts of the action of the pendulum watches came from the two men, and Pepys was then asked to procure the journals of ships’ masters ‘who had been with Major Holmes in Guinea, and differed from him in the relation concerning the pendulum watches’.12 Pepys’s silence in the Diary is puzzling. He may not have understood the point of the experiment with the pendulum watches; or perhaps he felt he was being used as a subordinate and resented the slight.13
In any case, the country was now at war, and in June the plague interrupted the Society’s meetings and scattered the members. Some went abroad. Hooke, Petty and Wilkins retreated to Pepys’s childhood paradise, Durdans, and worked there together on mechanical inventions.14 Plague, fire and war meant there were several disturbed years, and when there were meetings Pepys’s workload made it hard for him to attend. He sometimes managed to join the members afterwards, and in this way he heard of a blood transfusion performed on a dog by Hooke, and discussed it with him. A year later there was a human blood transfusion, after which he met the subject of the operation and found him ‘cracked a little in his head, though he speaks very reasonably and very well’. Surprisingly, the man survived.15 Pepys saw an experiment with an air pump and ‘an abortive child, preserved fresh in spirit of salt’.16
An alertness to scientific matters is felt throughout the Diary. In the summer of 1666 he discussed with Brouncker whether Nature gave each creature teeth suitable to a particular food, or whether teeth adapted to the food available. He listened appreciatively to Hooke’s account of sound being a matter of vibrations. He borrowed telescopes to set up on his roof, staying up till one to look at the moon and Jupiter.17 He mentions a demonstration of refraction, using wax balls in water; and Dr Wilkins’s book on universal language, which he acquired for his own library.18 He also bought, read and reread Hooke’s Micrographia; and acquired works by Boyle and Newton, which he found beyond him, as many of us do.19 His respect for Hooke, a difficult man as well as a brilliant one, is to Pepys’s credit, and Hooke mentions his kindness more than once in his own diary.20
Pepys became a useful member of the Society because he had a just idea of what he could and could not contribute, and remained interested. He paid his subscription regularly and gave extra money when asked; he raised funds and gave advice on how to invest money.21 He served on the council over a period of twenty-seven years, elected for the first time in 1672 and for the last on 30 November 1699. He did not volunteer inappropriate statements at the meetings, unlike Povey, who described how the filing of one of his own slender teeth made it thicken, and offered his recipe for gooseberry wine.22 Pepys said almost nothing at the meetings of the Society, confining his speech to the council meetings. The one time he came close to contributing was when Petty proposed that every member of the council should provide an ‘experimental discourse’ to be given at a public meeting within the year, or else pay a fine of forty shillings. Pepys offered to oblige and repeated his offer at another meeting, but never gave a discourse. This was in 1675, and he had the excuse that he was a busy man; he may also well have lost his nerve at the thought of addressing the best brains in the country.23
Isaac Newton became a member in the mid 1670s, and Christopher Wren was president for two years from 1680, when the Society was running into trouble, with a shrinking membership and many subscriptions in arrears. Pepys, elected president in December 1684, was one of a series of non-scientific presidents chosen for their administrative skills and influence. He got to work at once tidying up the affairs of the Society, ordering that names of all members in arrears with their subscriptions should be left out of the next list of members unless they paid up: sixty were got rid of, including the duke of Buckingham. Pepys insisted on being provided with a written statement of the Society’s cash position. Then, drawing on his own experience of training clerks in the Navy Office, he prepared orders for the Society’s clerks. They must be single and childless, with good English, French and Latin and some mathematics. They might not be members of the Society while they served. They should be paid £50 a year at least. They must keep the minutes in books, not on loose papers, and index the books. Some of the good effects of these rules can be appreciated to this day in the neatly written records of the Society. On the other hand it is a relief to know that a rule was waived to enable Edmund Halley, the great astronomer, to serve ‘notwithstanding his want of the fifth Qualification’ – the one about being unmarried and childless.24
Pepys invited members to come to a council meeting with ideas for making experiments. He ordered that the Society’s books should be searched ‘to see what had been done towards the improvement of navigation’.25 He communicated, via John Evelyn, his own observations on the effects of thunder and lightning on two of the king’s ships in Portsmouth Harbour during a storm in October 1685. He personally presented £50 to the Society, which was used to pay for the plates for a ‘History of Fishes’ it proposed to publish as a commercial venture. He is most famous for having ordered the printing of Newton’s Principia Mathematica for the Society, although he was not present at any of the council meetings at which the matter came up, nor did he order the Society to pay for the printing, which it failed to do. This glory belongs to Edmund Halley, at that time a mere secretary to the Society. The Principia did not actually appear until the summer after the end of Pepys’s presidency, although he undoubtedly approved its publication and took pride in being associated with Newton.26
His interest in the Society was kept up to the end of his life. In 1694 he arranged for his nephew John Jackson to be elected a member.27 In 1699 he encouraged the East India Company to make a donation.28 Later that year his views were still being sought to suggest activities for the Society ‘tending to the advancement of Natural knowledge’.29 And in his last years he was attended by doctors who were fellow members, Hans Sloane and Charles Bernard; they also performed the autopsy on his body in just such a scientific spirit as he would have approved. It is a record that does credit both to the Society and to Pepys.
Yet his greatest achievement could not be known to his contemporaries in the Society. In 1664, the year before he was elected, it had set up a committee to consider how to encourage better use of the English language, Evelyn and Dryden being among its members. Their recommendation was that writers should aim to achieve ‘a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expression; clear senses; a native easinesse, bringing all things as nea
r the Mathematical plainnesse, as they can’.30 It could almost be a description of Pepys’s language as he arrived at it, privately and separately, when he embarked on the Diary. Had they been able to read his Diary, some at least would have marvelled at the achievement of a man observing himself with scientific curiosity, as he voyaged through the strange seas of his own life.
18. Speeches and Stories
On a Sunday afternoon in January 1667 Pepys met his cousin Roger, the lawyer and MP, in the park, and the two men walked along Pall Mall discussing parliamentary matters and the poll tax, for which Roger was a collector in Cambridge. When they reached Whitehall, Roger asked Pepys to take him into the rooms where various members of the court were to be seen, and to point out the beautiful and notorious Lady Castlemaine; and, as they stood gazing at her, her little black servant hurried by on an errand for his mistress. There was a dog in his way. Pepys adopts direct speech in the Diary at this point and writes: ‘“Pox of this dog!” said the boy. “Now,” says he [Roger], blessing himself, “would I whip this child till the blood came if it were my child!” – and I believe he would.’ It is a perfect piece of dialogue, letting us know in a few words that Roger was brought up as a good puritan, and in another four, spoken by the boy, informing us of the style of speech and manners of the court. Pepys’s ear was so good he could have been a better playwright than many whose plays he sat through in the theatre. He knew exactly how to extract and present the dramatic kernel of a situation.1
Another dramatic sketch is made of a row with an official who objects to Pepys’s insistence that he should search for some missing papers after hours: ‘he told me I ought to give people ease at night, and all business to be done by day. I answered him sharply, that I did not make, nor any honest man, any difference between night and day in the King’s business… he answered me short; I told him I knew the time (meaning the Rump’s time) when he did other men’s business with more diligence. He cried, “Nay, say not so,” and stopped his mouth, not one word after.’2 The four words tell us how frightened the man is that his political past will be brought up against him; Pepys has him by the throat, and he does as he is asked.
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self Page 34
