Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  22. Plots

  In 1676 Mary’s brother Daniel got into difficulties. He had gone up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1670, just about the time Pepys first met the Skinner family, taken his degree in 1673 and been awarded a junior fellowship in the autumn of 1674. In the intervening year he found himself a job in London working for the poet Milton, then living in Artillery Row, by Bunhill Fields.1 Daniel was enterprising, clever, charming and something of a chancer: Milton was a great and learned man, but he was still persona non grata to the rulers of the nation. He was also blind, poor and failing in health, and in the last months of his life; he died in November 1674. Daniel made copies of some of the official letters he had written for Cromwell and took them away, together with a manuscript of a theological work, his De Doctrina Christiana. Later, he told Pepys the works were ones ‘Milton left behind him to me’, which may have been true; or he may simply have helped himself.2 If any inkling came to Pepys through Mary of Daniel’s connection with Milton in 1674, he would not have wanted to know, given the poet’s disgraced condition as a radical and republican, and his own dependence on the crown for advancement.

  In 1675 Daniel was at Trinity as a junior fellow. He sent his Milton manuscripts to the Dutch publisher, Elsevier, but before the rejection letter arrived he had left Cambridge again, finding the pace of life there too slow. In July 1676 he wrote to Pepys asking him to recommend him for a diplomatic post in Holland – this was in the letter mentioned in the last chapter. It was written in Latin and veered between ornate compliment and intimate allusion to Pepys’s love for Mary, the accusations the Skinner parents had made against him and the breach this had produced between the two families. Although he was at pains to say he did not know whether Pepys was ‘guilty of the charge my parents are so ready to make against you’ or not, it was a bold approach, and Pepys must have been relieved that it came decently obscured in Latin.3 Whatever his private feelings, he responded as Daniel hoped and sent off a reference to the chief English diplomat at Nijmegen, stretching the truth somewhat by saying he himself had been ‘privy to every part of the Gentleman’s education, from his Father’s house through Westminster School to Trinity College in Cambridge’ and praising Daniel’s ‘Sobriety, Parts and Learning’, with particular mention of his fine Latin.4 Daniel was offered a secretarial job at the embassy; but before he could take it up the offer was withdrawn. The secretary of state, Sir Joseph Williamson, well known to Pepys and respected by him, having heard from Daniel himself of his connection with the Milton papers, vetoed his appointment, describing him as ‘a very pretty young man’ but one who must ‘air himself from such infectious commerce’ as friendship with Milton. Daniel’s offer to burn the Milton papers did not mollify Williamson. Warnings against young Skinner and condemnations of Milton and his political ideas circulated for some time.

  Before leaving for Holland Daniel had borrowed £10 from Pepys. He wrote again from Rotterdam, this time in English, ‘with tears instead of ink’, apologizing for failing to visit him or return the loan and begging him to intervene with Williamson again; and he explained that although he ‘happen’d to be acquainted with Milton in his lifetime’, he shared none of the poet’s dangerous opinions. He was now stuck, jobless, in Rotterdam: ‘I am here just a person without a soul,’ he wrote, but what he lacked was not so much a soul as a patron. Pepys replied in his most ponderous style, warning him that ‘some time must be suffered to pass before you can reasonably look to have this unfortunate concernment of yours with Mr Milton and his Writings forgotten’. He advised him to stay abroad and study languages. Daniel took his advice and got his father to fund him as far as Paris, where he was confident he could perfect his French in six months; after that he meant to go to Italy. He was not yet out of trouble, because in 1677 the master of Trinity ordered him to return to college and warned him not to seek to publish ‘any Writing mischievous to the Church or State’. Daniel was now regarded as ‘a wild young man’ as well as a clever one. It was not the last time he asked for help from Pepys, who may well have reflected that he was destined to take up with young women with needy brothers. As for Milton’s papers, they were sent back to England, conveyed to Williamson by Daniel’s father and consigned to a cupboard at Whitehall where they lay gathering dust until 1823.5

  Daniel’s knowledge of Pepys’s private relations with Mary made it possible for him to ask for help, but it was Pepys’s position as a public figure that made him worth asking. In the mid 1670s he was as well established professionally as a man can be. His letters breathe assurance and dignity. He was on easy terms with the richest men in the City. He could hold his own when he was sniped at by fellow members of parliament, and had become a formidably effective spokesman for the navy in the House. He attended the king regularly at Whitehall, Hampton Court and Windsor, and was often summoned to join him and the duke of York at Newmarket; and, however ordinary or despicable they had seemed to him in the past, he gave them his loyalty. Lord Shaftesbury, their enemy and his, was locked away in the Tower from February 1677, when the king had sent his secretary of state, the same Sir Joseph Williamson who had scuppered Daniel’s diplomatic career, to order him to leave town, and Shaftesbury had refused. Pepys may have been among the crowds who went to hear his unsuccessful appeal against this imprisonment at Westminster Hall in June; he could also have enjoyed a satirical play aimed at him, Sir Popular Wisdom; or, the Politician.

  But Shaftesbury was not to be laughed at. His long political career had taught him how to wait, how to manoeuvre and how to organize. In February 1678 he was fifty-seven and could not walk without the help of sticks, but he was as determined as ever to pursue his policies. He humbled himself just enough to be released from the Tower and emerged unrepentant, set on course to save England from ‘Popery and slavery’. His chief aim now was to exclude the Catholic duke of York from the succession to the throne, and in the House of Lords in May he pointed him out in person as the main danger to the country. He had already warned the House (in January 1674) that there were more than 16,000 Catholics in the London area, ready for desperate measures and threatening a massacre. The claim was absurd, but fear and hatred of Catholicism meant that such warnings were taken seriously. Folk memory kept fresh Catholic Queen Mary’s burnings at the stake, the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot, and in France the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and there were still many who believed the fire of 1666 had been started by papists. The kings’s policy of alliance with Catholic France was generally disliked. So was the fact that he had not only a Catholic wife but Catholic mistresses; some of Nell Gwyn’s popularity came from her supposed merry declaration, ‘I am the Protestant whore.’ Shaftesbury may have suspected that Charles was close to being a Catholic himself, although if he was he had no intention of revealing or imposing his faith on anyone else; but his heir, the duke of York, had a Catholic wife who would give him Catholic children. Too many Irish priests were seen at court, too many Catholics had commissions in the army. The combination of arbitrary rule and religious persecution practised by Louis XIV in France showed what Protestants could expect from a Catholic ruler. Shaftesbury’s detestation of such a prospect drove him to action.

  A weapon was put into his hands when rumours of a Catholic plot to murder the king and take over the country were started in the summer of 1678. He was not responsible for inventing the Popish Plot, as it became known, or for the grotesque fabrications of Titus Oates and his fellow informers, but he saw at once what he could do with such material and encouraged them for his own purposes. Like the anti-Communist frenzy spirited up by Senator McCarthy in the United States in the 1950s, the Plot caused normally reasonable people to lose their judgement, and before the hysteria wore itself out thirty-five men had been unjustly put to death, many more imprisoned, threatened and falsely accused, and scores of informers paid and feted for their fictions. When Oates addressed the Commons in October 1678, Pepys’s friend Sir Robert Southwell, usually a level-headed man, considered his depos
ition a ‘loose and tottering fabric which would easily tumble if it stood alone’, yet he decided to believe it because he felt that papists were too much indulged and had become dangerous; two months later the madness had increased to the point that Southwell was as convinced of the reality of the Plot ‘as of my creed’.6

  On 2 November Shaftesbury proposed a resolution in the Lords that there was a ‘damnable and hellish plot contrived and carried on by the Popish recusants for the assassination and murdering the King, subverting government and rooting out the Protestant religion’, and that the duke of York must be removed from the king’s presence.7 Two days after this Pepys and all his clerks attended St Margaret’s, Westminster, and took the sacrament together. It was a precaution, meant to show they were good members of the Church of England. But although Pepys was not a Catholic, his political loyalty was to the duke of York, whom he found a supportive master, and if the country was to be divided between the duke’s supporters and Shaftesbury’s, he was unhesitatingly on the side of the duke.

  Both Pepys and Shaftesbury had made long political journeys, Shaftesbury from royalist to parliamentarian, back to royalist at the Restoration and now prepared to take on a royal family that had, in his view, become disastrous for the country. Pepys’s journey took him from the boy who exulted at the execution of Charles I to the junior administrator stingingly critical of Charles II during the 1660s, and on to the senior servant of the crown, proud of the trust placed in him by his royal masters in the 1670s. Shaftesbury, an aristocrat, brilliant, subtle and arrogant, became the founder of the Whig Party. Pepys, who had risen from nothing, knew he owed his rise to Charles and James Stuart as much as to his own brainpower; as soon as the label ‘Tory’ was heard in English politics, he applied it to himself: ‘we Tories’, he wrote.8 When Shaftesbury compiled a list of MPs in February 1679, marking his supporters with a w, meaning worthy, and his opponents with a v for vile, Pepys was marked with a v.9

  The panic engendered by the Plot led to absurdities as well as cruelties. The queen was accused of encouraging the murder of her husband. The discovery of gunpowder on the premises of a Frenchman living near the palace caused a frenzy until it was noticed that he was the royal fireworks-maker. When a noise of ‘knocking and digging’ in Old Palace Yard put the House into a state of alarm – was this another Gunpowder Plot? – Christopher Wren was called in to investigate and found that the roof was so rotten the building might fall down in the next high wind. Chains were fixed across the streets of the City against a Catholic rising. Small wonder that Pepys, working flat out to ensure the navy was not infiltrated by papists, wrote of ‘the whole government seeming at this day to remain in such a state of distraction and fear, as no history I believe can parallel’.10 One of the Jesuits arrested was Fogarty, surely the same ‘Fogourdy’ whom he remembered as an agreeable visitor to Elizabeth at Seething Lane.11 Because his own resident musician, Morelli, was a Catholic, and Catholics were banned within a thirty-mile radius of London, he asked James Houblon to attempt a rapid conversion; when, predictably enough, that failed, he spirited Morelli away – by the back water gate, according to his butler – sending him to Brentwood in Essex and paying him a small retainer.12

  As Morelli left, the attack on Pepys began. Since he had already been accused of Catholicism in the House, he offered an easy target. It is likely that Shaftesbury ordered it and certain that his associates carried it out, revealing themselves as unprincipled thugs in the process. They began with the arrest of one of Pepys’s clerks, Samuel Atkins, accused of being an accessory to the murder of a magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, whose body had been found, strangled and stabbed, on Primrose Hill in mid October: it is one of the most famous murder mysteries in English history, and still unsolved. Godfrey, a Protestant of austere habits, had taken a deposition from Titus Oates in September, and his murder was construed as part of the Catholic Plot. London boiled with rumour and panic. Daggers were sold inscribed ‘pro religione Protestantium’ and ‘Memento Godfrey 12 Oct 78’; they were supposed to be used against the expected Catholic massacre.13 Atkins was arrested on false evidence on 1 November and examined in Newgate Prison on the 6th. He was kept in isolation, sometimes in irons, without pen and paper and allowed no contact with anyone outside; it was an exceptionally bitter winter, and prisoners were lucky if they had fires in their cells. ‘That we have no rack in England, and this is true, and a great blessing surely, but I am told Captain Richardson hath a hole in Newgate which never any man could endure two days without confessing anything laid to his charge,’ wrote a respectable MP.14 But although Atkins was not a favourite clerk of Pepys, he was stubbornly loyal to his master and to the truth. He refused to be intimidated even when Shaftesbury personally threatened him with hanging if he did not ‘make some discovery’.15 The plan was that he should incriminate Pepys indirectly, because Pepys happened to have an unbreakable alibi for the time of Godfrey’s murder – he had been at Newmarket with the king. Meanwhile Pepys was questioned about Atkins in the House; outside it, he busied himself establishing Atkins’s alibi.

  The news got about enough for his sister Paulina Jackson to write to him anxiously from Brampton. His answer shows that their relations had improved with the years, because he addresses her as an intelligent person, sends his ‘kind love’ and urges her to write to him weekly. He explains about the ‘manifest contrivance’ against his clerk Atkins, ‘which (though most untrue) cannot be thought to pass in the world at so jealous a time as this without some reflections upon me, as his master, and on that score does occasion me not a little disquiet. But I thank God I have not only my innocence to satisfy myself with, but such an assurance of his also as that I make no question of his being able to aquit himself with advantage to him and infamy to his accusers’.16 At this stage Pepys believed himself unassailable; and indeed his detective work on behalf of Atkins came up with a complete alibi. There were witnesses who had been with him at a drinking party of friends of both sexes aboard the yacht Catherine at the time of Godfrey’s murder, after which Atkins, ‘very much fuddled’, needed to be rowed home. The case against him was destroyed. Atkins had to endure four months in prison, but when the trial came in February 1679 he was acquitted and released. The other three accused, who were equally innocent, were not so lucky. They were hanged.

  Atkins’s trial coincided with an election. Castle Rising did not want Pepys, but Harwich, which had him to thank for recent shipbuilding contracts, duly elected him and Anthony Deane, his shipbuilder colleague and friend. This was when Shaftesbury marked his list of members and saw that he had twice as many supporters as opponents elected.17 The king appealed for a ‘healing parliament’ and national unity and, failing to get them, bowed to pressure and sent the duke of York abroad. Although Charles never believed in the Plot, he did not want to lose his crown, and followed the advice of Lord Halifax, ‘that the Plot must be handled as if it were true, whether it were so or not’.18 Innocent people continued to be imprisoned and executed, and James left for Brussels in March.

  His departure was bad news for Pepys. Life upstairs at Derby House was upset at the same time, because Mary was ill with attacks of fever that failed to respond to her ordinary doses of Jesuits’ powder, or quinine, regarded with suspicion by some staunch Protestants, because it was brought by the Jesuits from Peru. Pepys was worried enough about her to consult a surgeon he knew in Chatham, who sent bottles of stronger medicine, though still containing quinine. She recovered.19 Daniel was in trouble again too, ordered by the master and seniors of Trinity to ‘come home to the College to clear himself from suspicion of being a papist’ – a change at least from being suspected of republicanism. He complied and, surprisingly, was appointed a major fellow. Then he got himself a passport testifying to his Protestantism and prepared to go on his travels again.20

  Shaftesbury’s position looked so strong that the king gave ground, sacked his existing council and revived the old title of lord president of the council for Shaftesb
ury. At the same time he appointed a new commission for the Admiralty. This meant that Pepys was thrown to the lions, because the new commission was made up of men hostile to him. Almost at once he was attacked in the House, while a parliamentary committee was appointed to inquire yet again into the failings of the navy. On 6 May he wrote to the duke of York, ‘your Highness was pleased to foretell me at your going hence what I was soon after to look for; and it is come to pass. For, whether I will or no, a Papist I must be, because favoured by your Royal Highness.’ He went on to ask the duke to get him named as a commissioner. There was no chance of this, but James wrote to the king at once with the impossible request. He let Pepys see the letter, and, while it did him no good, it bound Pepys to the duke for life.21

  Pepys’s opponents had got hold of three men prepared to incriminate him. They were a sorry lot, the first a disgruntled sea captain with a story that Pepys, along with Deane and St Michel, had allowed a privateer they ran as a consortium to prey on English shipping. The second was his ex-butler, John James, who bore a grudge for his dismissal – Morelli had found him in bed with a woman servant – and was ready to swear Pepys was a Catholic and Morelli a Jesuit. The third was a swaggering villain calling himself Colonel John Scott, just arrived in England from the Continent, who accused him of sending Deane to France to supply coastal maps and information about the fleet to the French government, with much circumstantial evidence; and Scott’s paymaster appears to have been the duke of Buckingham, who was doing dirty work for Shaftesbury. With this material the parliamentary committee declared there was a ‘Sea-Plot’ and Pepys was formally accused of ‘Piracy, Popery and Treachery’. The leading spokesman against him was William Harbord, as it happened the brother of Sandwich’s protégé who had died with him at the battle of Sole Bay: ‘Mr Pepys is an ill man, and I will prove him so,’ announced Harbord on 20 May. Pepys rose to defend himself on the spot. You can catch his indignant amazement in the repeated ‘But, Sir!’s that pepper his speech, of which a verbatim version is preserved among his papers: ‘Mr Speaker – It must be a great misfortune to have so many things cast upon me at once, and all by surprise… But, Sir! pray allow me to say this… But, Sir! I don’t expect to be acquitted by any profession of mine here… at a time so dangerous, Sir! that I would with all my heart contribute to my own prosecution… But, Sir! this I am…,’22 He was wasting his words. Later that day he was committed to the sergeant of arms, on the next he resigned as secretary to the Admiralty and as Tangier treasurer, and on the third day he was taken to the Tower. His rooms in Derby House were shut up. If Mary had not already gone, she must now have taken herself to Woodhall. One consolation for Pepys was that his work was given to his old protégé Tom Hayter, who had once been in such trouble for being caught at a Nonconformist meeting: at least he could not be accused of being a papist.