Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  During the next hours Pepys thanked all his servants and kissed some of them; and as night fell again, ‘M.S. and I stole up to his bed to see him and shook him by the hand, he not discerning who it was. Dr Shadwell coming, was stoln in to feel his pulse, which [was] quite gone. /About 1 on Wednesday morning, Paris crossed the room. U[ncle] called him and ask for me, where I was. “In bed; shall I call him?” “No.” By and by again asked for me. “Shall I call him?” “Yes.” He did so, and I came and found him lying on the bed ratling in the throat and breathing very hard.’ He had taken no nourishment for two days, and he died, according to his own reliable watch, at 3.47. The sun was about to rise in the summer sky.

  1. A distant view of St Paul’s and the City from rural Islington, where Pepys’s father took his children for outings, with ‘cakes and ale’ at the King’s Head. Hollar’s etching of 1665 shows what was left of the civil war fortifications.

  2. The Thames was the main thoroughfare for Londoners, and the many water stairs on the banks acted rather like bus stops. At Milford Stairs there was a public convenience, mentioned by Pepys on 30 May 1661. This Hollar drawing is from the 1640s.

  3. Pepys encountered a world of high culture and luxury for the first time when he was taken as a child to Durdans in Surrey by his uncle John, who served the Coke family. Here Sir Robert and Lady Theophila Coke presided over a fine house with a library and elegantly laid-out gardens; they newly built, in classical style, a long gallery as an addition to the Jacobean mansion. One of their pleasures was to put on plays, and they took to little Sam Pepys so well that he was invited to act a leading part, as the Princess Arethusa in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster; or, Love Lies a-Bleeding

  4. With the civil war came the destruction by puritan zealots of stained glass, statues and crosses, the banning of Sunday sports and the closing of all theatres.

  5, 6, 7. The great house of Hinchingbrooke outside Huntingdon, home of Edward Montagu, keen supporter of Cromwell. His mother had been a Pepys, and he married Jemima Crew, from a puritan family, at the outbreak of the civil war, when both were seventeen. He took Lincoln, stormed Bristol, and fought at Marston Moor and Naseby.

  8. The modest house at Brampton, near Hinchingbrooke, belonging to Pepys’s uncle Robert, bailiff to the Montagus. Pepys came here early in the civil war to attend the Free Grammar School at Huntingdon. Both Hinchingbrooke and this house are still standing.

  9. Thousands in the City had petitioned for the impeachment of Charles Is chief adviser, Strafford. Hollar shows the scene at Tower Hill on 12 May 1641, as men and women crowded into every inch of space to witness the execution of the man they hated.

  10. A powerful and dignified print of Cromwell from Pepys’s own collection, in which he placed the Cromwells among the Royal Families of England

  11. The execution of Charles I outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, on Tuesday, 30 January 1649. Fifteen-year-old Pepys played truant from St Paul’s School to be there, and expressed his approval by telling his friends that, if he were to preach about it, he would take as his text ‘The memory of the wicked shall rot.’

  12. Hollar’s 1644 view of New Palace Yard from the river end shows, left, Westminster Hall, right, the Clock Tower, and behind it the Gatehouse. St Stephen’s Chapel, where the House of Commons met, is out of sight behind the Hall. As well as being the political heart of the country, Palace Yard was a shopping centre and general meeting place.

  13, 14, 15. Samuel Morland, painted by Lely in 1659 (left), was Pepys’s tutor at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He and George Downing (right) were powerful figures during the commonwealth, acting as foreign envoys and intelligence experts. Downing noticed Pepys early and set him to make ciphers. Both Morland and Downing also became double agents, timing their switch to the Stuarts so well that they were rewarded with knighthoods. Morland went on to work as an engineer, inventing a calculating machine and water pumps, while Downing applied his abilities at the Treasury: Downing Street is named after him. The print below shows Magdalene in 1690, after the construction of the building at the back, in which the Pepys Library is housed

  16. Pepys’s neatly written list of household items made while he was a servant to the Montagu family in the late 1650s, lodged in a turret room in one of the Whitehall gatehouses. He notes that some of the plate ‘was taken out by my lady at her going into the country Sept. 1658’.

  17. Frontispiece of a book of ‘à la mode Pastimes’, jokes, proverbs – ‘He that hath a Woman by the waste, hath a wet Eel by the tail’ – and advice to young men like Pepys and his ‘clubbing’ friends on how to succeed with girls, compiled by Edward Phillips, Milton’s nephew, during the 1650s. ‘Dorothy this Ring is thine/And now thy bouncing body’s mine,’ reads one rhyme. Poor as Pepys was, he wooed and married his bouncing fourteen-year-old bride in 1655.

  18. Engraving from 1683 English edition of Tolet’s surgical text, showing a patient bound and held in preparation for the removal of a bladder stone, the operation Pepys underwent in 1658.

  19, 20. Elizabeth and Samuel Pepys were painted by John Hayls in 1666; she was twenty-five, he thirty-three. Pepys complained of almost breaking his neck ‘looking over my shoulder to make the posture’ for his portrait. He had Elizabeth’s hand and his music repainted, but the final results delighted him, and both pictures were hung in his house at the Navy Office in Seething Lane.

  The portraits remained in the possession of Pepys’s nephew’s family until Elizabeth’s was cut into strips some time around 1830 by a Scotch nurse shocked at the immodesty of the dress. Fortunately it had been engraved for the first edition of the Diary.

  21. The first page of Pepys’s Diary as he wrote it, showing the mixture of shorthand and longhand and the beautifully clear shaping and spacing. He put ‘1659/60’ because the new year did not start until Lady Day, 25 March, according to the calendar then in use.

  22. Will Hewer, nephew of a high commonwealth official dismissed in 1660, came to work for Pepys as a boy of seventeen. After a stormy start in which Pepys beat him, turned him out of the house and made Elizabeth give back a diamond locket he gave her, Hewer became a key member of the family and, as the years went by, Pepys’s closest associate and friend.

  23. There is no portrait of Jane Birch, the Pepyses’ maid, whose life was interwoven with theirs from 1658 onwards. I have chosen this drawing from Charles Beale’s 1670 sketchbook to stand in for Jane: it shows Susan Gill, a maid in his parents’ London household. With her sweet face, short hair, simple clothes and broom, she rests on a kitchen chair, representing the great silent army of girls who cleaned, washed, scrubbed, swept, chopped, cooked, fetched water, emptied slops, carried coals and tended their masters and mistresses from early morning to late at night. She was paid £ 3 a year.

  24, 25. Pepys decided to hate the brave Sir William Penn (above), his colleague at the Navy Office, jealous of his seniority and scornful of his intellectual powers. Thomas Povey of the Tangier Committee (below) suffered still worse: Pepys repaid his generosity by cheating him of money due to him.

  26. Pepys’s admired boss, William Coventry, secretary to the duke of York and navy commissioner, whose words of wisdom Pepys often noted in his Diary. A lifelong royalist who worked hard for Charles II, he warned Pepys that ‘he that serves a Prince must expect and be contented to stand all fortunes and be provided to retreat’. So it happened: Coventry lost faith in the king’s capacity to rule well, the king grew bored by the advice he offered, Coventry fell from favour and after a spell in the Tower retired from public life.

  27. Charles II receiving the mapmaker Ogilby in Whitehall Palace with his queen, the duke and duchess of York, Prince Rupert and the duke’s daughters, princesses Anne and Mary, beside him, about 1675. The picture was published in 1682, when the political whirligigs had put Pepys out of a job. The king found him another soon after this.

  28. St Olave’s, Hart Street, where the Navy Office went to church, shown here about 1670; it had been spared by the
fire. Here Pepys buried his wife and his brother, and arranged to be buried himself.

  29. The most familiar of landscapes to Pepys, the view from Greenwich hill, showing the Queen’s House astride the main road, John Webb’s 1660s block, and behind them the ship-laden Thames winding its way from London past the Deptford shipyards and Rotherhithe

  30. Panoramic painting of the Great Fire of 1666 by an unknown Dutch artist. London Bridge appears on the left, St Paul’s is haloed by flames in the centre, and the Tower is on the right. In the foreground crowds trying to save what goods they can are shown gathered on the river bank. Pepys watched the fire from a boat on the river on the first day, and observed how hot the air was, full of smoke and ‘showers of Firedrops’ blown by the strong east wind. There was also tremendous noise from the cracking of houses and roaring of the flames. ‘It made me weep to see it,’ he wrote, but he remained intent on recording the spectacle.

  31. When Elizabeth died suddenly at the age of twenty-nine, Pepys commissioned a memorial bust from the sculptor John Bushnell. Pepys judged well. Bushnell had studied in Rome and observed Bernini, who believed portrait busts should show the subject animated, as though in conversation; and this is how Elizabeth was treated, with striking results. The bust was placed high up on the wall of St Olave’s and can be seen there today. A copy in the National Portrait Gallery allows a closer look but is not always on display.

  32, 33· Edward Montagu (below) as earl of Sandwich, splendid in his Garter robes and looking every inch the great servant of the Stuarts he became: privy councillor, naval commander, ambassador to Spain. The countess, her features regularized by the painter into an approximation of a court beauty, remained unchanged in character, the same ‘excellent, good, discreet lady that ever she was’, as Pepys wrote. She complained neither of her husband’s infidelity nor his long enforced absences when she was left short of money to maintain Hinchingbrooke and bring up their ten children.

  Montagu died nobly and unnecessarily at sea in 1672, fighting the Dutch off the Suffolk coast at Southwold. The widowed countess left Hinchingbrooke and survived him by only two years.

  34, 35 James Houblon was the son of a Huguenot refugee who settled in the City and raised his seven sons to successful business careers. His mercantile interests led him to cultivate Pepys at the Navy Office in 1665, and after Elizabeth’s death he and his English wife, Sarah, welcomed Pepys into their family circle. They gave princely dinners, and Pepys records dropping in on them with two bottles of champagne on one occasion. He and Sarah had musical tastes in common, they went to the theatre together, and shared a summer villa at Parson’s Green. When Pepys was in the Tower in 1679, Houblon stood £5,000 bail for him, repeating the gesture in 1690. Houblon was knighted in 1691 and sat on the board of the newly founded Bank of England in 1694. Although he was a Whig and Pepys called himself a Tory, their friendship transcended such labels.

  36. A copy of this portrait is in the Witt Library. It is described as ‘Mrs Pepys’ and attributed to Kneller, but it does not look like the work of Kneller, is clearly not Elizabeth Pepys, and the original has disappeared since it surfaced among Pepysian material in 1931. Might it be the young Mary Skinner, known on occasion as Mrs Pepys? She was painted by Kneller, although this could not be the portrait he made in the 1690s – hair and dress suggest the 1670s.

  37, 38. Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, brilliant and subtle founder of the Whig party, persecuted Pepys because he was a loyal servant of James, duke of York and lord high admiral. To Shaftesbury, the duke’s Roman Catholic faith made him ineligible to be king; and Shaftesbury suspected Pepys of being a Catholic. In fact Pepys cared little about religion. What bound him to James (below) was that James defended, promoted and relied on him. Pepys survived Shaftesbury’s attacks as well as Shaftesbury himself, who died in exile in 1683. Yet James, who succeeded to the throne in 1685, lasted only three years as king before he too was driven into exile by Shaftesbury’s political heirs. Pepys lost his position under the new regime and remained hostile to it.

  39, 40, 41, 42· Pepys cultivated the company of learned men, among them John Evelyn (top left), diarist, maker of gardens and town planner, and William Petty (top right), anatomist, economist, social theorist and free thinker. Pepys corresponded with Isaac Newton (bottom left) and sought his advice; and he accompanied Christopher Wren (bottom right) to Greenwich to consider the planning of the Royal Naval Hospital. Robert Hooke, experimental scientist and architect, was another friend who should be here, but there is no portrait in existence.

  43, 44· Two contemporary views of Pepys’s airy library as he arranged it on an upper floor of his Buckingham Street house facing the river. It shows seven of his bookcases, portraits and a map. A later inventory mentions ‘The miniature K: of France on horseback by Mr Skyner’, just seen hanging outside the open door. I believe ‘Mr Skyner’ is Mary Skinner, whom we know to have been an artist.

  45. The IOU letter presented by Pepys to James II and signed by James on 17 November 1688, acknowledging Pepys’s ‘just pretentions’ to money owed to him by the Treasury, with the docket and tracing of the watermark.

  46. Lines from Pepys’s account with Hoare’s Bank. This entry notes that he deposited two boxes ‘Rapt up in Sacking’ on 23 June 1701 and that Mrs Skinner collected one of them on 10 December 1701.

  47· The pert face of Pepys’s nephew John Jackson, son of his unloved sister Pall and her bumpkin husband. John became his uncle’s favourite, was sent to Pepys’s college, Magdalene, at thirteen, taken into Pepys’s London household, introduced into the Royal Society and dispatched on the Grand Tour that Pepys had longed in vain to make himself. He pleased his uncle and became his principal heir, but remained undistinguished; only his account of Pepys’s last hours rises to its subject

  48. Pepys as an old man in the 1690s, by Closterman. Neither political misfortunes nor failing health kept him from intellectual interests or from keeping up old friendships and making new ones. His library was his passion and was moved with him to his last home, Will Hewer’s country house in Clapham, where, sustained by the love of Hewer, Mary Skinner and John Jackson, he died in 1703.

  49. Profile of Pepys carved on a small ivory medallion in 1688 by Jean Cavalier, a Huguenot artist, signed and dated on the back. It remained in the Pepys Cockerell family until 1931

  50. The first page of John Smith’s transcription of the Diary, begun in the spring of 1819. The task took him three years and fills fifty-four notebooks. He had no key to the shorthand and was paid a flat £200. He made a good job of it, but his work was handed over to Lord Braybrooke, who cut about three quarters and rewrote a good deal. Not until 1970 was an edition printed with the first page as Pepys wrote it and John Smith transcribed it.

  Epilogue

  Later on the day of his death, John Shadwell, Hans Sloane and the surgeon Charles Bernard performed an autopsy on the body of their friend. Shadwell and Sloane were fellow members of the Royal Society, and they were following Jackson’s wishes, ‘for our own satisfaction as well as public good’, he explained to Evelyn. Pepys himself would undoubtedly have approved, both because he valued scientific research and because he believed his case to be of interest. What they found makes his stoicism over the last years the more impressive. The left kidney contained seven irregular stones joined in a mass adhering to his back, the surrounding areas including the gut much inflamed, septic and mortified, the bladder gangrenous and the old wound from the stone operation broken open again. The lungs were full of black spots and foam, the guts discoloured, flaccid, empty and inflamed; but the heart and the right kidney were sound. Jackson sent his own account of their report to Evelyn.1