Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  PART THREE

  1669–1703

  20. After the Diary

  The Diary ended. Fear, for his eyes silenced Pepys, and the unique process of self-examination and revelation closed down for good. Giving it up was, he wrote, like a form of death, ‘almost as much as to see myself go into my grave’. This was not rhetoric but a serious statement. He was killing off a part of himself, the self created daily in his narrative, a creature more complete than he could ever allow himself to be again, complete as no fictional, dramatic or historical portrait had ever been. The loss for his readers is brutal as they find themselves suddenly stranded, the brilliant, troubling intimacies of the Diary replaced, for those who want to know more of his life, by official papers, parliamentary records, letters and scatterings of notes. A triple line has been drawn under his youth, and nothing he wrote later revived that voice or that person. Once the form he had created was abandoned, he and the world stood in a different relation to one another; and, as well as losing him, we are losing an unequalled record of the events of the time. No one else took up the chronicle of public events, and the 1670s seem a less lively time than the 1660s as a consequence.

  He gave it up because he feared he was going blind. His eyes had started to be painful when he did close work or reading by candlelight as early as 1663 – ‘and so to bed, being weary, sleepy, and my eyes begin to fail me, looking so long by candlelight upon white paper’ – but over the next few years he mentioned the problem very rarely, and it was only from 1667 that it became a frequent complaint.1 By then his eyes were suffering from his years of close work; increasingly they hurt if he read for too long, they reacted badly to bright light, and they felt sore and watered. None of the remedies he tried – spectacles, lotions, eyedrops, pills, purges, the use of a paper roll when reading – did much to help. Modern medical opinion is that he had long sight (hypermetropia), which made reading difficult, and some astigmatism. But he was not going blind, and his eyes deteriorated no further.2 Whether they were helped by giving up the Diary or not, they served him adequately for the rest of his life.

  This piece of good fortune apart, the year that followed the end of the Diary was catastrophic: a few months of grace, then the blows began to fall. In July 1669 his ambition to enter parliament looked as though it would soon be fulfilled when the duke of York recommended him for a parliamentary seat at Aldeburgh. Letters of support went off from Sandwich, Coventry, Povey and other influential men. A small cloud appeared when Pepys’s opponents suggested that he, like his patron the duke, was a Catholic. James was in the process of converting to Catholicism, but this was not known to Pepys, and he expressed amazement at the idea that he should be under suspicion, ‘my education at the University… the whole practice of my life, both past and present, giving testimony of my being no Papist’.3 The cloud did not go away, but grew larger and darker over the next years; but he supposed it was dealt with, and at last he and Elizabeth were free to take the holiday in France for which she had yearned for so many years.

  The duke had given Pepys permission for three or four months’ leave, with the idea that a long break gave a better chance of his eyes recovering. Tom Hayter was to take over his duties at the Navy Office. This should have been a perfectly satisfactory arrangement, but Pepys could not resist suggesting to the king that he might make himself useful on his trip by collecting information on foreign naval affairs. Charles took up his proposal eagerly. It meant the tour began in Holland with a look at the shipyards there, which can hardly have been what Elizabeth had in mind.4 Then Pepys became uneasy at the idea of being away from work for so long and cut the holiday down to two months; like many men, he found office life sustaining.

  They set off in late August. He had applied to John Evelyn for advice on France and received a long letter of kindly, fussy recommendations. Evelyn suggested that they take a ‘chambre garnie’ when they reached Paris, to be found for them by a friend of a friend in the Faubourg St Germain whose name he supplied; this, he explained, was the suburb favoured by Persons of Quality and so most suitable for the Pepyses.5 He went on to compare France with England, mostly to the detriment of the French. The Luxembourg Palace resembled Clarendon House, so much admired by Pepys. Notre-Dame was infinitely inferior to St Paul’s or Westminster Abbey. The Place Royale ‘is our Piazza of Covent Garden’. At the Sorbonne they should attend a ‘public Scholastical Exercise, and love our own Universities the better after it’. Fontainebleau ‘you will not judge comparable to Hampton Court; nor can the French monarch shew such a Castle, Palace, and Church, as our Windsor in all his wide Dominions’. Only the Pont-neuf surpassed its English equivalent and would make them ‘wish ours of London had no more houses upon it’. (The Pont-neuf had none.) ‘By some especial Favour you may be admitted to take a View of the Bastille (which is their Tower).’ He especially recommended climbing to the top of the Tour St Jacques, from which the whole city could be seen, and visiting the Louvre to attend a public audience of King Louis XIV and his queen; and there was a great deal about libraries, galleries, engravers and print shops, botanical gardens, hospitals and excursions out of Paris – far more than they could hope to see in the few weeks at their disposal. Elizabeth may have wanted to show her husband the streets she remembered from her childhood, even perhaps the convent where the nuns had done their best to make her into a good Roman Catholic; and Baity, who was with them for at least part of the trip, may have had his suggestions. But the truth is we have almost no idea what they did apart from shopping for precious stones and embroidery wools for her, and books about Paris for him; Elizabeth also may have sat for Pierre Lombart, famous for his female portraits.6 Paris was prospering, with solid private mansions going up along the Île St Louis, and old churches such as St Sulpice being rebuilt; and Pepys wrote afterwards that it was ‘a voyage full of health and content’.7 They visited Rouen on their return journey, and Elizabeth sent a thank you present of a mirror to the wife of a merchant there as they travelled on to Brussels and so back to England.8

  On the journey home, Elizabeth was taken ill. They reached Seething Lane on 20 October, and she went straight to bed.9 Hollier, who knew her well, was doubtless called, as well as her physician. She was running a fever that did not respond to treatment. As Pepys struggled to understand and deal with this alarming situation, he was also brought bad news from the office. It came in the shape of a formidable list of questions from a parliamentary commission that had been sitting at Brooke House for several months now, looking into alleged abuses in the Navy Office; they wanted prompt and detailed answers, and his fellow officers relied on him to provide them. With all this on his mind, he nevertheless sent a punctilious note to Evelyn, thanking him for his helpful advice on France. It is dated 2 November and said they had been back for ten days, and that his wife had been ‘from the first day of her coming back into London… under a fever so severe as at this hour to render her recovery desperate’. Desperate as her condition was, his tone was stately and his sentences ornate. He went on, ‘Which affliction hath very much unfitted me for those acts of civility and respect which, amongst the first of my friends, I should have paid to yourself, as he to whom singly I owe the much greater part of the satisfaction I have met with in my late voyage. Next to you, I have my acknowledgments to make to Sir Samuel Tuke, to whom (when in condition of doing it) I shall beg your introducing me, for the owning of my obligations to him on the like behalf.’10 This is an admirable piece of politeness towards his distinguished friend, to whom he naturally wrote with the elaborate ceremoniousness used among gentlemen: and so remote from the voice of the Diary that it seems to come from a different man.

  Eight more days went by, days without any proper structure, elastic in their hours and minutes, depending on the arrival of the doctor with his guarded face and careful words; on precious snatches of speech from the patient; on the smallest changes in her breathing; days when the watcher hardly dared to sleep himself and yet grew increasingly exhausted; day
s that must have carried Pepys back to the bedside of his dying brother Tom, and to even earlier sickbeds in which his young brothers and sisters had sweated and strained to keep the flame of life flickering. A fever could snuff out a life in days, as had happened to Cromwell, but at twenty-nine Elizabeth was young and strong and her body fought for her. And while he watched, he had at the back of his mind both his parliamentary agent in Aldeburgh, waiting for him to come and ingratiate himself with the electors, due to vote on 9 November, and the Brooke House commissioners’ accusing questions. On the first he gave up; the second he had to think about, planning rebuttals in his head.

  Elizabeth’s struggle lasted for three weeks. Two desperate remedies for severe illness were to cut off the hair and to put pigeons at the patient’s feet, and both had been used for the queen in 1663. She had recovered, but if they were tried in Elizabeth’s case they did her no good.11 On 9 or 10 November Pepys sent for Daniel Mills, the vicar of St Olave’s, to whose child Elizabeth had stood as godmother in happier days, and he came to give her the sacrament. As far as we know, it was the first time she had received it for many years; her religious loyalties were in any case uncertain. The intense interest Pepys displayed fifteen years later in the king’s deathbed return to the Catholic faith may hark back to Elizabeth’s last hours, when he had to decide what to do. He must have remembered her saying, after the death of his brother Tom, that she intended to die a Catholic, and how she repeated that she was a Catholic at another time of stress, over Deb, in October 1668. Pepys chose to put aside this knowledge, and, although he rather liked Father Fogourdy and rather disliked Mills, he did what convention and prudence dictated.12 By then she was no doubt past making any request or decision for herself.

  We do not know whether her father and mother came face to face with their son-in-law for the first time in years over her deathbed, but it seems possible, and from then on Pepys contributed to their support.13 No doubt Will Hewer came to weep his farewell, and Jane and Tom Edwards; cousin Jane Turner, Mary Mercer and her mother, Tom Hayter and his wife, whom Elizabeth had helped in childbirth, and their old friends and neighbours from Axe Yard, John and Elizabeth Hunt, may be imagined, a trail of mournful figures making their way to the house. Lord Sandwich was in London, which he rarely left these days; he knew the taste of grief himself from the death of his daughter Paulina earlier in the year, and surely dispatched a servant – Robert Ferrer perhaps – for news of his beautiful cousin. Pepys would have sent word of what was happening to Lady Sandwich at Hinchingbrooke, as well as to his father, brother and sister; and, even as Elizabeth lay dying, a new generation was launched at last in Huntingdonshire, where Pall – Mrs John Jackson – was about to give birth to her first child. This was a son and, somewhat surprisingly, she named him Samuel and invited her brother to stand as godfather.14

  Elizabeth died on 10 November and Pepys fixed the funeral for the evening of the 13th at St Olave’s. Night-time was the preferred time for the fashionable, and John Evelyn’s diary tells us that he stayed in town and travelled home the next day after being present ‘the night before at the funeral of Mrs Pepys’. Otherwise there is no account of the ceremony. The church bell would be tolled, the house draped in black and all the family servants given their mourning. Inside the church, faintly lit with candles, Mr Mills read the appointed words for the burial of the dead, and Elizabeth’s comely body was laid under the floor of the chancel. Although there is a note of his brother Tom’s funeral expenses among Pepys’s miscellaneous papers, there is none of Elizabeth’s. At this last he was generous to her memory. He composed a Latin epitaph, praising her knowledge and her beauty and perhaps overpraising her lineage. He also commissioned a memorial bust from a brilliantly inventive and original sculptor, John Bushnell. He had studied in Rome when Bernini was working there and went on to make great Baroque statues of Charles II, Charles I, and Sir Thomas Gresham for the Royal Exchange building, as well as memorials of Albemarle and the poet Abraham Cowley for Westminster Abbey.15 Pepys could not have chosen better, and Bushnell produced a triumphant result. There is no suggestion of heavenly piety or submission to God’s will about his bust of Elizabeth. Instead she is shown as though in mid conversation, slightly smiling, her mouth open and her eyes wide, still intent on the comedy of the world. Somehow he has given her more of a French than an English air; and you ask yourself what you would have to say to this lively young matron who looks as though she might speak sharply at any minute. The bust was set high up on the wall of the church and makes a very striking, speaking, humanist representation to match the portrait in the Diary. When the memorial was put up, the Navy Office gallery in which Pepys and his colleagues sat allowed a much closer view, but that has gone and it is now difficult to appreciate her properly from the floor of the church; but she has weathered the centuries well and survived being taken down when the bombs of the Second World War threatened.16

  There were letters of condolence on the ‘decease of your Deere & vertuous Lady’ to be answered, and for months Pepys sealed his own letters with black sealing wax.17 The surest distraction from grief was work, and there was no shortage of that. Two weeks after the funeral, he had written out his answers to the Brooke House Commission, which he then delivered in person. Even there he was reminded of his loss. It happened that the clerk was his one-time friend Will Symons; they had been married in the same place and within months of one another. Pepys had seen him soon after Will lost his wife, and noted disapprovingly how inappropriate his conversation was for a bereaved man. Now they were both young widowers.

  On Monday, 2 December, Pepys was officially back in his office, and the following Monday he attended the duke of York in Whitehall with the whole board. The next morning he was in Whitehall early to confer with the duke’s secretary.18 On 14 December he signed papers that gave him a power of attorney for Sandwich, on whose behalf he could now demand and receive payments; his old patron remained confident of Pepys’s financial skills.19 His other former employer, Downing, also wrote to him from the Treasury, asking him to help elucidate the claims of Carteret as treasurer of the navy, which ran to more than £500,000, not all of which they believed to have been spent on the war: a delicate situation for Pepys, who was ‘cousin’ to Carteret since his son’s marriage to Jemima Montagu.20

  January and February were fully occupied with almost daily sessions before the Brooke House Commission. Their accusations were essentially parliament’s way of expressing its dissatisfaction with the handling of the Dutch war and disgust at what had happened on the Medway. Corruption and incompetence were their theme, and they accused just about everyone from the treasurer of the navy down to the lowest purser and dockyard worker of one or the other, and often of both. Pepys himself was accused of various wrongful dealings, including private manufacture of flags, which he had indeed gone in for five years before. Coventry warned him over a dinner that he must expect rough handling, and for a few hours he brooded over the idea of giving up his job, in which he was ‘yoked’ with colleagues he knew to be incompetent and required to defend them from blame for failures of which he was all too aware.21 But as soon as he came face to face with the accusers, his natural robustness and combativeness returned, and he launched into powerful, indeed bruising, counter-attacks.

  His private and general defence was that the navy could not be properly run unless it was properly funded, which was true. The defences he put up in particular cases were made with bounding energy and skill in deploying his detailed knowledge of his own archives. He conceded nothing. As Richard Ollard has demonstrated, the daily record kept by Pepys of the two months’ investigation was a public document, dictated to his clerks, and setting out the official defence of the Navy Office, and did not by any means represent his private view of things. For instance, he had a high regard for one of the commissioners, the old Cromwellian Colonel George Thomson, but was obliged to spar with him in public because Thomson was putting the case against the management of the recent war. Pepys
knew perfectly well it had been badly managed, but he was bound to defend the Navy Office; and, in making his case for the defence, he was effectively defending the king and his policy also, which he had deplored in private so often. He carried out his difficult task with admirable skill. He was not required to be sincere.

  His skill did him no harm with the king. Charles sat in on most of the meetings and saw what a well-equipped and loyal champion he had found. A new relationship blossomed. On Pepys’s side the disapproval and scorn for the king expressed in the Diary appear to melt away. They were soon laughing together and supporting one another’s jokes. When Charles remarked that people in the coffee houses were always saying how much things were better done in the navy during the commonwealth, ‘“those pure angelical times” (saith the King)’, Pepys chimed in with ‘those times concerning which people discourse in matters of the Navy as historians do of the primitive times in reference to the church’.22 Pepys’s own view of the commonwealth navy and its officers was almost exactly the one satirized by Charles, but an exchange of jokes with the king was too good an opportunity to be missed. Power and truth make different demands.

  And Pepys was a performer, as he had already proved when he addressed parliament in 1668. Now he delighted in tripping up his opponents and rose almost friskily to a challenge. When Lord Brereton, whom he knew and liked well enough, accused him of dealing in seamen’s tickets and asked, ‘How, Mr Pepys, do you defy the whole world in this matter?’, he answered ‘Yes, that I do defy the whole world and my Lord Brereton in particular if he would be thought one of it.’ You can hear the relish as the words came off his tongue. He could silence everyone with the flow of his eloquence, and was happy to go on for hours. Lord Arlington, having listened to him, felt it wise to recommend plainness and ‘the least show of rhetoric’ when he came to write his speeches down because, although the king was pleased, he was also easily bored.23