Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  He may have expected the king to rescue him from the Tower as he had done Sir Joseph Williamson, who had been extracted by royal command within hours when he fell foul of parliament; but nothing like this happened to Pepys. He could console himself only with the sound of the familiar bells of All Hallows and St Olave’s and his memories of how, as a young man, he had brought the Sandwich children to see the lions at the Tower, looked out at the fire from one of its high windows, escorted Mrs Knipp and a party of ladies to view the crown jewels and visited Coventry during his detention in 1669. Now it was his turn to receive visitors: James Houblon, John Evelyn and his lawyers. He began to organize his own defence at once. Since he was accused of selling secrets to the French, it occurred to him that his French-speaking brother-in-law could be put to work on his behalf. He applied to the king for permission to send St Michel to Paris, and Baity set off, only too pleased to be crossing the Channel with all expenses paid and taking with him his eldest son, who can’t have been more than eight years old; Pepys sent a steady stream of letters after him, giving detailed instructions for searching out and preparing witnesses against Scott.23

  His stay in the Tower was not long. On 20 June he and Deane were moved to the King’s Bench in Southwark, and on 9 July they were released on bail. Pepys had to give £ 10,000 of his own and Houblon and three other City friends put in £5,000 each. Pepys remained a rich man – he kept his coach and continued to employ several clerks – but he had lost his income and he was homeless. Will Hewer now showed the ‘care, kindness and faithfulness of a son’ and invited Pepys to move into his Buckingham Street house, where he gave him a suite of rooms.24 Esther St Michel was already installed there with four small children; Will had also advanced money to Baity, perhaps the only imprudent financial measure of his life. All this says much for his good nature; and Pepys too, at this juncture, was meticulous in keeping Baity informed about the health of his wife and infants, without a single word of impatience at their presence.25

  He was out of prison but not free, and still facing the prospect of a trial for capital crimes.26 But the political tide was just beginning to turn. In July Oates’s testimony against the queen’s doctor, whom he accused of planning to poison the king, failed to convict. In August Charles was ill, and the duke of York returned to England to be with him. Recovering, Charles appointed James high commissioner to Scotland. Pepys accompanied him as far as Hatfield on his journey north in October. Hatfield meant a possible visit to Woodhall; he was now on cordial terms with both Skinners and Botelers.27 He also made a trip into Oxfordshire, possibly to consult with Coventry, who had retired to Minster Lovell. Back in court on the first day of the law term, he found his ‘old prosecutor, Harbord’ failed to put in an appearance.28 In October Charles felt strong enough to dismiss Shaftesbury, and parliament too; he ruled without it for a year, while he negotiated for another handout from Louis XIV. Anti-Catholic agitation continued, with the usual autumn street processions featuring Jesuits with bloody daggers, popish bishops, the Pope’s chief physician with Jesuits’ powder and a urinal, and an effigy of the Pope stuffed with live cats, to be burnt at Smithfield. There was punishment for Pepys too, in the form of two savagely satirical pamphlets, also attacking Hewer. Plain Truth or Closet Discourse Betwixt P. and H. accused them both of coining money by selling jobs and licences, cheating seamen and taking bribes, with Hewer doing the dirtier work to allow Pepys to maintain an innocent front. They were given Punch-and-Judy style dialogue:

  H. Sir, you know I have never failed hitherto in my management of your affairs…

  p. I thank thee, good H. It was strangely our good fortune that we ever met together. (Then they hug and kiss one another.)

  Pepys was reminded that he was the son of a poor tailor, mocked for the ostentatious decorations on his coach and barge, and for his friendships with well-to-do women like the Houblon ladies and Lady Mordaunt. In A Hue and Cry after P. and H. humiliating details of his health problems were given. There was also a list of presents he was said to receive from favour-seekers, captains, consuls, carpenters and their wives, and it must be said that some have a familiar ring: pots of anchovies, butts of sherry, barrels of pickled oysters, Parmesan cheeses, hogsheads of claret and fine Spanish mats. Houblon commiserated, Pepys put a brave face on it, and other friends may have smiled; some of the jokes cut uncomfortably close to the truth. Later, he learnt that his ex-butler James had provided information.29

  But Pepys was too busy to brood. For six months he kept dictating instructions to ‘Brother Baity’ in Paris, telling him precisely how he must proceed and proving amazingly successful at such long-distance detective work. Baity was sent to men and women of all classes, from ambassadors to servants, in the quest for witnesses against Scott; he had to question and listen, assess the value of what he was told, persuade witnesses to make formal statements before notaries and in some cases agree to travel to England to testify at a trial for which there was as yet no date fixed. He must never offer money, and he must reject Catholic witnesses, because they would not be trusted in England; it meant excluding Monsieur Pelletier, a friend from the Paris trip of 1669, when ‘your poor Sister and we were in France’, as Pepys reminded him.30 St Michel worked enthusiastically, although he spent too much and had to be told he could not afford to hire a private French tutor for his son; nor was he allowed home for a summer break. No one expected to stay in Paris in August, but Baity was made to. Pepys sent out an assistant in September, and Baity was back in England in January 1680. He had helped to establish Scott’s low reputation among the French, his loose, boastful talk and history of fraudulent behaviour, and presently Scott was complaining of Baity ‘tampering with everybody he thought fit for his turn’.31 There could have been no better tribute to his work.

  As the evidence to disprove Scott’s stories piled up, and witnesses arrived in England for discussions with Pepys, Scott simply disappeared abroad again. Without him there could be no trial; yet the court did nothing to resolve the situation. Pepys raged: ‘taking in all the circumstances of scandal, expense, trouble and hazard, no innocent man was ever embarrassed as I have been, and remain at this day, from the villainy of one man of no acquaintance with myself nor credit with any honest man that knows him. The thoughts of which, should I give much way to them, would distract me. But God is above all.’32 God was Fate or Fortune, all-powerful and unreadable, and Pepys knew he had to fight his own fight. It meant getting involved with characters he would normally have kept well clear of. John Joyne, an English watch-maker Baity found in Paris and an old friend of Scott now happy to testify against him, arrived early to see Pepys on 27 November and, according to his own account, ‘being very dirty and so observed to be by Mr Pepys went home to shave and shift myself [i.e., change his clothes]’.33 Joyne kept notes of his meetings with both Scott and Pepys in London that autumn that give a vivid picture of all their activities, Scott slouching round London streets and taverns, Pepys decorous in his coach but sometimes reduced to accepting an invitation to eavesdrop on his enemies. Also among Joyne’s notes is a letter to Pepys written on 31 December which begins, ‘I went to Mr Skinner’s Daughter in the Haymarket, I left word with her that I should come again on Wednesday night to see her father,’ and ends, ‘Mr Hewer told me that you were gone out of Town… am now going to Mr Skinner’s.’34 What was Joyne’s connection with the Skinners? His letter suggests that her father was helping Pepys, but, as this is his only surviving reference to them, it remains tantalizing. What it does tell us is that Mary was living in the newly built and fashionable Haymarket, not far from Buckingham Street; and that she remained there while Pepys was away.35

  Meanwhile Pepys’s other accuser, the ex-butler John James, was having further thoughts about his evidence; he was dying of tuberculosis and feared for his soul. He approached Pepys in January 1680, coming to Hewer’s house to tell him ‘that he has from the beginning been employed by our Enemies to gather witnesses against us… that he was pressed twenty t
imes by a person of quality to give information against me in Parliament… that he had not much regard to what he said, but was drawned in to say whatever they had a mind he should say… that he did not swear to it, and was not much rewarded… and that he knowed Scott and has enough to stop his mouth’.36 This was promising stuff, but James wanted money to talk more. Pepys knew he must not risk appearing to bribe him, and sent him away. Within days he was back again.

  Pepys needed a record of their conversations, and this inspired him to start another diary. It was nothing like the great Diary – it was dictated and written out in longhand, and without set pieces or indiscretions – but still from 27 January until 10 April there is a glimpse of his daily activities again, with even one nostalgic ‘and so to bed’. The first thing it tells is that Pepys’s life was as firmly compartmentalized as it had ever been. There was Buckingham Street, where Will’s widowed mother presided, Elizabeth’s portrait hung on the wall, and Balty’s children flourished.37 There was his circle of well-to-do friends of both sexes, who made a fuss of him in their homes and went with him to the theatre or on the river. He saw an Etherege farce, She Would if She Could, with young Mr Wynne Houblon. He drove Wynne’s mother Sarah – ‘Cousin Houblon and children’ – to Chelsea. He supped with Lady Banks; he escorted Lady Mordaunt and her sister to Vauxhall, and to Putney and Wimbledon by barge. Lady Mordaunt fed him nobly – her lobster pie gets a mention – and he was also a regular dinner guest at the Houblons. The diary shows he was assiduous in his church attendance; and that he visited his stationer in Cornhill and Harford the bookseller. He was at St James’s to greet the duke of York on his return from Scotland, and made his farewells to the duke and the king at court before they left for Newmarket in mid March. He called on Mary’s foster-father, Sir Francis Boteler, between attending Covent Garden Church and driving in the park on 21 March. It also tells us that Mary went to Knightsbridge in March, probably for her health; he visited ‘MS’ in this quiet rural spot where the London road crossed the River Westbourne.38 She does not seem to have been taken to the theatre or to Vauxhall.

  The chief theme of this diary is in any case Pepys’s dealings with witnesses, some arrived from France, but principally James the butler. James’s moods fluctuated alarmingly. When he was disposed to talk it was of meetings at the Mitre in Fenchurch Street with Harbord and other grandees, who had given him money. As he grew weaker he became anxious about his burial arrangements. Pepys was anxious too, because he needed to extract a formal confession before James died, and in the presence of an independent witness, that he had lied and taken money for lying. Pepys arranged for a clergyman and reassured him about the funeral, but James resisted being visited by any ‘person of quality’ – meaning the required witness – because he was ashamed of his poverty and the fact that there was only one bed for himself, his sister and mother in their lodgings. At last he agreed to speak. Pepys, amazingly, asked Povey to be the independent witness; and Povey, amazingly, consented, perhaps his pleasure in being involved in so notorious a case outweighed his displeasure with Pepys. On 2 March Povey took a statement from James. Word got out of this development – Pepys saw to that – and Harbord hurried round to try to get James to change his story again. Some blackly farcical hours followed as rival groups crammed into the dying man’s room, on the one hand Pepys, Povey, Hewer and their lawyer, with James’s sister and mother, urging him to stand firm; and on the other Harbord with two justices, two clergymen, two political associates and a clerk, pressing him to sign a paper denying that he had ever been bribed. Harbord then proposed that they should each give two guineas towards his care, ‘and accordingly we did so,’ recorded Pepys, ‘Mr Povey lending each of us two Guinnys’.39 Whether Povey saw any of his guineas again is not part of the story. Harbord knew when he was beaten, and began to talk to Pepys as though the whole episode had been something of a joke; he ‘declared openly that he did not believe me to be a Papist or Popishly inclined, and so did all the Company’.40

  Pepys did not forgive him, but the successful outcome with James made him cheerful enough to order his coach for his first drive of the year in Hyde Park; and he picked up a couple of bottles of champagne to take to the Houblons for a celebratory drink. Another sign of good spirits was his summoning of the joiner to help him move his furniture about, ‘shifting my Bedchamber and Study’, an activity he always enjoyed. James died on 20 March. If his conscience troubled him as he lay dying, his explanation for switching sides was simple: ‘Mr Pepys had used him unkindly… [but] Mr Harbord had taken away his allowance.’41 Pepys behaved decently to his womenfolk, inviting them to dinner and paying what they owed in rent; or rather he got Hewer’s clerk to supply them with the money and take a receipt.

  Things continued to improve. The king summoned him to Newmarket, which allowed him to visit his father, sister and her family at Brampton on the way; he set off on 29 March and was in London again on 3 April, having called on Morelli on the return journey.42But not until the end of June did Pepys and Deane hear that the attorney-general, unable to muster a single credible witness against them, was giving up on the case. On 1 July Pepys wrote to Mrs Skinner announcing his ‘full discharge from the bondage I have, from one villain’s practice, so long lain under’, and thanking her and her family for their support throughout the year.43

  With hindsight it is easy to think that Pepys had never been in danger of his life. But there were certainly those who expected him to lose his head, and there must have been moments when he was afraid. Other innocent men had after all gone to the scaffold. His work on his own defence distracted him from such fears and kept him almost as busy as usual. The result of these labours was never needed in court but remains a testimony to his cool courage under attack, his ability to think through tangled masses of evidence and impose order upon them, and his skill in deploying others to carry out his plans. It was a colossal task. It was also responsible for a colossal book, one that has never been printed and still sits in manuscript in the Pepys Library, leather bound and gilded, in two volumes of 1,338 pages and something like 400,000 words.44 The volumes make up one of the oddities of literature. They contain a collage of documents, letters, journals, verbatim statements and accounts of court proceedings. Some are in foreign languages, with translations provided; most are copies of originals made by Pepys’s clerks.45 Assembled, they bring us face to face with crooks and informers, men and women, victims and decent witnesses, allowing us to hear their words as they spoke them and to follow them on their travels. Colonel Scott, with his boasts, his fights, his swearing, his false names and disguises – now burnt-cork eyebrows, now a milliner’s dress – his selling of non-existent property, his desertion of his American wife, his preying on widows and their children, his composition of vile love poems, his claim to alchemical powers, his travels, his boasting of grand connections and his cowardice in battle, his court-martialling at Nevers and spreading of mischief wherever he travelled, in America, England, Holland and France, swells into a ludicrous but still alarming scoundrel. And however Pepys suffered from Scott’s accusations, he became fascinated by him – just how fascinated appears in the fact that he named the book he made after one of Scott’s fantasies.

  Among his extravagant lies, Scott laid claim to the ownership of an estate that he called Mornamont, and in France he was sometimes known as ‘Seigneur d’Ashford et de Mornamont’.46 In the real world there was no Mornamont, just as there was no case against Pepys; but the name, and Scott’s myth-making, appealed to him so much that he enshrined it in his work by naming the whole thing Mornamont – ‘my book of Mornamont’, he called it, or ‘my two volumes of Mornamont’. It was a title fit for a romance, and a reminder that the young Pepys who wrote ‘Love a Cheate’ had not been entirely swallowed up in the administrator. ‘Mornamont’ speaks of things Pepys understood very well, ambition, fantasy and the eternal human ache to get your hands on some money. It has all the raw materials for a novel by Defoe, and it is Pepys’s most surp
rising legacy.

  23. Travels for the Stuarts

  In June 1680 Pepys was out of danger but he was also still out of work. Whatever personal favour the king showed him, he did not offer him a job. When the royal summons to Newmarket came that September, Pepys went determined at least to put in a claim to arrears of payment owing to him. Charles had other ideas and asked him to take down his account of his escape after the battle of Worcester in 1651. Pepys, flattered, did so, using his shorthand. He did not get his arrears. A touch of his old sharpness about the king appeared in a letter to James Houblon from Newmarket, saying there was ‘nothing now in motion but dogs, hawks, and horses; so that all matters look as they were left to God Almighty to look after, and much more happy it might have been for us all had they been long ago so’.1