Evelyn immediately wrote his tribute to his ‘particular friend’ of forty years.
This day dyed Mr. Sam: Pepys, a very worthy, Industrious & curious person, none in England exceeding him in the Knowledge of the Navy, in which he had passed thro all the most Considerable Offices, Clerk of the Acts, & Secretary to the Admiralty, all which he performed with greate Integrity: when K: James the 2d went out of England he layed down his Office, & would serve no more: But withdrawing himselfe from all publique Affairs, lived at Clapham with his partner (formerly his Clerk) Mr Hewer, in a very noble House & sweete place, where he injoyed the fruit of his labours in greate prosperity, was universally beloved, Hospitable, Generous, Learned in many things, skill’d in Musick, a very greate Cherisher of Learned men…
The funeral was held on 4 June, at St Olave’s and at nine o’clock at night, as decreed by Pepys, who chose to be buried in a vault below Elizabeth’s monument. The coffin was brought from Clapham ‘in a very honourable and solemn manner’.2 Dr Hickes took the service. There is no mention of music, although it is hard to imagine Pepys going to the grave without any. The long list of those Pepys wished to have mourning rings included friends from Cambridge, Oxford and the Royal Society, from the Admiralty, the Navy Office and the established Church, including the archbishop of Canterbury; not all were present. Political divisions were laid aside, since four of the pall-bearers were nonjurors and two were Whigs. The nonjurors were three close friends, the earl of Clarendon, Anthony Deane and Charles Hatton, and they were joined by the earl of Feversham, known as a personal friend and supporter of James II. Feversham was perhaps standing in for Evelyn, whom Pepys had wanted but who felt unable to be there – he was, after all, eighty-three. The other two were Sir Thomas Littleton and James Vernon, both connected with Mary Skinner and surely chosen for that reason. Littleton was a family friend of the Botelers and Vernon connected by marriage, his wife the sister of Sir William Buck, husband of Mary’s sister Frances.3 Since women were not expected to attend funerals, Mary was not present, but she could feel she was represented.
Jane Penny, ‘little old Jane’, who was given five guineas for her mourning as well as her ring, would have been represented by her son Lieutenant Edwards, unless he were at sea. Roger Pepys from Cambridgeshire was the only Pepys to have a ring; his Gale grandson, Pepys’s godson, had another. Others in the family were both Jackson nephews and John Matthews, the cousin who had raised them; St Michel and his daughter Mary; and the current earl of Sandwich and his brother John, both known to Pepys from their childhood. There were rings for various other godchildren, clerks, servants and professional advisers, for Will Hewer and many of his family, for Henry Sheeres, for the two sons of James Houblon. William Penn the younger was another, and Dr Thomas Smith, the nonjuring keeper of the Cottonian Library.
After the funeral Dr Hickes wrote of Pepys that ‘The greatness of his behaviour, in his long and sharp tryall before his death, was in every respect answerable to his great life; and I believe no man ever went out of this world with greater contempt of it, or more lively faith in every thing that was revealed of the world to come… I never attended any sick or dying person that dyed with so much Christian greatnesse of mind, or a more lively sense of immortality, or so much fortitude and patience.’4 It is a deserved tribute to Pepys’s courage and testifies to his readiness to receive the Christian rites gratefully at the end; but it is hard to believe that he felt even a moment’s contempt for the world in which he had gloried, and to whose future inhabitants he left his greatest legacy.
John Jackson remained at Clapham with Will Hewer, continuing work on the library, adding books and compiling a new catalogue with Lorrain. It was valued at £4,000. Three months after Pepys’s death he wrote to the master of Magdalene to say that he and his fellow executor intended to carry out Pepys’s scheme for its final disposal to the college. The following summer he visited Cambridge and chose two central rooms in the new building at Magdalene for its reception. He was not put off by the fact that all the books in the existing college library were entirely overgrown with mould; or perhaps he was not shown them.5 During 1705 the catalogue was completed, the last bookcases installed, and the whole of Pepys’s collection, including his model ships, portraits and some of his furniture, put on display at Clapham.
Mary returned to Westminster to live in lodgings. She kept a portrait of Pepys on her wall, and many mementoes of her life with him, and she had a diamond heart mourning ring made for herself. Her rooms were furnished with two well-filled bookcases, a great Indian screen of six leaves and an Indian cabinet, a good deal of plate and a number of other pictures, including her own portrait, which she described as being by Godfrey Kneller; she also owned a gold Tompion watch.6 She remained close to her foster-sister Julia, and it is likely that she visited her at Woodhall from time to time. She also took an interest in the children of her sister Frances, Lady Buck; and her relations with John Jackson seem to have become more friendly. When he married Hewer’s cousin Anne and started a family, she became godmother to their daughter Paulina. But she survived Pepys by only twelve years, dying in her early sixties in 1715; Jackson was her executor and she bequeathed almost everything Pepys had left her to him and his family.7 To Julia Shallcross she left her silver gilt perfume bottles; her bookcases and books went to her nephew Charles Buck, and her ‘new clothes’ to his sisters. A few pictures and the residue of her estate went to her nephew Daniel Skinner, probably Corbet’s son, and his daughter. Her wish to be buried close to her foster-mother Elizabeth Boteler in St Etheldreda’s, the Hatfield church, was carried out; she left the substantial sum of £300 for her funeral, and the burial register for 18 October 1715 has her name, ‘Mrs Mary Skinner, of St Martin’s in the Fields, London’.8 A few weeks after her death Will Hewer also died; his memorial is in Clapham Church.9
Apart from carrying out Pepys’s instructions Jackson did nothing more with his life beyond marrying and begetting children. In July 1724, following his death, the library of 3,000 leather-bound books was transferred from Clapham to Cambridge with their cases.10 The removal was paid for by Lord Anglesey, son of Pepys’s one-time colleague; it cost £23 to pack everything up and move it from Clapham to London, and another £18 to take it on to Cambridge.11 Anglesey also provided enough to pay the library keeper ‘£10 per annum for ever’. Neither the Magdalene librarian, Samuel Hadderton, nor anyone else there knew that among the books to be unpacked in the new library was the Diary, its six volumes clad in the same brown leather bindings as the other books. Their presence was, however, clearly indicated in Jackson and Lorrain’s catalogue, which also listed Pepys’s collection of shorthand primers, among them Shelton’s Tachy-graphy, the system he had used. Four years after the books were installed, in May 1728, a Peter Leycester visited the library and noticed in the catalogue a book on shorthand, in which he was interested, ‘but the gentleman who showed us the library being a stranger, and unacquainted with the method of the catalogue, we could not find it’. Still, in searching for the shorthand book they found five (not the six you would expect) volumes written in shorthand, ‘being a journal of Mr Pepys; I did not know the method, but they were writ very plain, and the proper names in common characters… I had not time, and was loath to be troublesome to the library keeper, otherwise I could have deciphered some of the journal.’ Leycester wrote to his friend John Byrom, who was also interested in shorthand, and who was in Cambridge at various times over the next two decades; but he did not follow up the information about the Diary.
Elsewhere there was interest in Pepys, although not in his Diary. A mountain of papers had been acquired from his estate by a collector called Richard Rawlinson, and in 1749 he asked Thomas Bowdler for information about the man; Bowdler got most things wrong, confidently asserting that Pepys was the son of a clergyman, and a considerable landowner. When Rawlinson died in 1755 he left the papers to the Bodleian Library in Oxford; in 1778 another haul of papers, taken from the Sandwich family by Thoma
s Carte, were also deposited in the Bodleian. A few forays were made into Magdalene, for Pepys’s ballad collection – Percy’s Reliques appeared in 1765 – and for his account of Charles II’s escape after Worcester, published in 1766. In 1805 the first lord of the Admiralty, Sir Charles Middleton, wrote of Pepys as ‘a man of extraordinary knowledge in all that related to the business [of the navy], of great talents, and the most indefatigable industry’.12 But he was hardly a household name.
In 1812 a Scottish historian, David Macpherson, included a few words from the Diary to illustrate the growth of the tea trade in Europe – Pepys had his first cup of tea and recorded the fact on 25 September 1660, writing the words ‘Cupp’ and ‘Tee’ in longhand. No one knows how Macpherson came on the reference, but his book, History of the European Commerce with India, was noticed in the Quarterly Review. The following year a very young Master, the 24-year-old Revd and Hon. George Neville, was appointed to Magdalene by the hereditary visitor of the college, who happened to be his father. The Master’s uncle, Thomas Grenville, was a remarkable man, friend of Charles James Fox, a first lord of the Admiralty and a trustee of the British Museum, to which he bequeathed his personal collection of 20,000 books; and it is likely that he encouraged his nephew to have the Pepys Diary looked at. The publication of John Evelyn’s diaries in 1818 acted as a spur, and Thomas Grenville – breaking Pepys’s condition that no book should be removed further than the Master’s lodge – took the first volume to his brother, Lord Grenville, who knew some shorthand. He failed to realize that it was written in a known system, but declared that it could be easily and quickly transcribed and should certainly be published.
What followed was tragi-comedy. The Master found an undergraduate prepared to take on the task. John Smith was twenty, the son of a schoolmaster and desperately poor as a result of an unwise marriage in his teens; he was already the father of a child. So he was glad to have the task and kept at it for three years, sometimes working more than twelve hours a day, from the spring of 1819 until 6 April 1822, when he completed his transcription of Pepys’s 3,102 pages on to 9,325 of his own, filling 54 fat notebooks with his flowing, legible hand, covering the right-hand pages only. He carried out the entire task without knowing that the key to the shorthand was in the library. He made a few misreadings, but left out very little, only a few sexually frank passages, usually noted on the left-hand page as ‘Obj.’ – ‘objectionable’ – although occasionally omitted without comment. For ‘bloody’ he wrote ‘b….y’ and for ‘yard’ (penis) ‘yd’. Notably, he transcribed the opening page exactly as Pepys wrote it. For this labour of three years he was paid a flat £200.
Smith’s transcript was handed to yet another member of the Master’s family, Richard Neville (shortly to inherit a title and become Lord Braybrooke), who became its official editor. Braybrooke bowdlerized, cut the transcript by three quarters and rewrote substantial amounts in his own words, producing what its modern editor, Robert Latham, has called a travesty of the original. He did, however, employ assistants who collected hundreds of letters to and from Pepys, to print alongside the Diary.13 His acknowledgement to Smith was short and cool, merely saying that he was not personally acquainted with him but that he appeared to have performed his task with diligence and fidelity. Smith remained aggrieved for the rest of his life. He saw a rich aristocrat taking all the credit while his essential work was glossed over. In 1842 the Master of Magdalene told a visitor to the library that the transcription had taken ‘about a twelvemonth’. Smith meanwhile scraped a meagre living as a curate in Norfolk, paid £100 a year by the ‘rich Pluralist’ whose work he did. His wife was an invalid and he said he was kept out of the debtors’ prison only by the help of friends; and it took many pleas to the lord chancellor’s office before he was given his own parish at Baldock in Hertfordshire, with £130 a year, in 1832.14
John Murray, publisher of Byron and Jane Austen, turned the Diary down, but Henry Colburn published Braybrooke’s edition – two thirds Diary, one third letters – in two large volumes with engravings at six guineas in the summer of 1825.15 There was great interest. The Times hailed it, and Jeffrey called it ‘a treasure box of new detail’ in the Edinburgh Review. Walter Scott found Evelyn superior to Pepys because of his higher social standing and moral tone; Pepys’s Diary was more various and amusing, but ‘inferior in its tone of sentiment and feeling’. ‘Early necessity had made Pepys laborious, studious and careful’, he wrote, but his ‘natural propensities were those of a man of pleasure’. Scott was critical of Braybrooke for inaccuracies in editing and expressed a wish for the complete text to be published.16 There was no question of that, although there were two reprints in 1828. Sydney Smith told Lady Holland it was nonsense, and Thomas Cree-vey, a diarist himself, much preferred Pepys’s collection of prints to the Diary, which he pronounced ‘almost trash compared to the other contents of the library’.17 More significantly, Macaulay enthused, saying he felt he knew every inch of Whitehall from the diaries – ‘I go in at Hans Holbein’s gate and come out through the matted gallery’ – and he used Pepys as a source for his History of England.
In 1833 Granville Penn, a descendant of Admiral Sir William Penn, published a memoir of his ancestor in which he attacked Pepys as the son of a low-born tailor for traducing him. You can hardly blame him. In 1841 John Smith published his transcription of the Tangier Diary and some more Pepys letters together with a brief biography. In 1842 Magdalene was visited by a scholar, Frederic Madden, who questioned the Master, the Hon. G. Neville Grenville, about the so-called ‘objectionable passages’, which he supposed could be read in John Smith’s transcript. Neville Grenville told him that the transcript was in his possession and added with sublime hauteur ‘that only two persons had applied to him for permission to read it, and these were George the Fourth and Lady Holland! Both applications he had refused.’18
Meanwhile the library itself was moved, first into a dining room in the Master’s lodge, then into the new lodge, and then back to another room in college.19 An expanded edition of the Diary appeared from 1848 to 1849, from which Braybrooke cut any acknowledgement to Smith. This too sold out, and a still fuller edition appeared in 1854. John Smith died in 1870, without publishing the ‘History of the Diary’ he said he had written. Then in the 1870s, after Braybrooke’s death, an invalid fellow of Magdalene, Mynors Bright, made a new transcription of the Diary from the original. Again John Murray turned down the chance to publish, and it went to a firm called Bickers & Son, who published four fifths of the text in six volumes between 1875 and 1879.20 It was a small printing and provoked some hostile criticism for its inclusion of details considered unsuitable for publication, but also the most perceptive essay ever written on the Diary, from Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson disagreed with the prevailing view that Pepys had not intended his Diary to be seen one day and insisted that on the contrary he meant it to survive – ‘Pepys was not such an ass, but he must have perceived, as he went on, the extraordinary nature of the work he was producing.’ He spoke of his romantic passion for his own past, and compared him with Rousseau and Hazlitt; and he called him ‘an unparalleled figure in the annals of mankind’ for three reasons. First, that he was ‘known to his contemporaries in a halo of almost historical pomp, and to his remote descendants with an indecent familiarity’; secondly for his honesty about himself; and thirdly for his ability to place himself before us with ‘such a fullness and such an intimacy of detail as might be envied by a genius like Montaigne’.21
Further printings of the Braybrooke version appeared, and Henry Wheatley, who published the first general book about Pepys in 1880, Samuel Pepys and the World He Lived In, edited and published an extended eight-volume edition using Bright’s transcription between 1893 and 1896. It was agreed, by Leslie Stephen among others, that some passages were too indecent ever to appear; and although there were many more reprints and selections, it was only in 1976, when the final volume of William Matthews’s new transcription of the Diary – the
third to be made – appeared in print, that it was published in its entirety as Pepys had written it three hundred years earlier, and as he left it to the world.22
Pepys’s life was a drama from start to end. It had its ordeals by sickness, passion, fire, bereavement, imprisonment, false accusation and revolution, and it was played out against the most disturbed years in England’s history, a period as intellectually thrilling as it was dangerous and bloody. From his republican boyhood he kept a belief in a meritocratic system, and did much to promote it within the navy; yet the young Pepys who rejoiced at the execution of Charles I became the Tory and Jacobite who would not turn against James II when the whole country, navy included, rejected him. The sorriest aspect of his career is that it attached him to kings he could not respect but to whom he felt he must give personal loyalty. But he had too much energy to let tragedy be the mode of his life for long; and he was too much of an individualist, with a sense of his own destiny to pursue. He knew how to deal with bad luck, just as he knew how to seize the good luck when it came his way. He was brave in taking risks – the stone operation could have killed him – and rose gloriously to challenges such as his great speech in the House, his battle with the Brooke House Commission and his defence against the accusation of treason. He was a good and well-liked master to his clerks. He had the gift of making friends with the many outstanding men he encountered, winning their love and respect by his charm, his curiosity and mental agility, his conversation and hospitality. Men of state, shipbuilders, engineers, merchants, scholars, physicians and writers all cheered his later years. Women he did not see as friends, even when he loved them. Both Elizabeth and Mary had to fight his crushing egotism with whatever weapons they could find. Lady Sandwich was an exception to this rule, his cousin Jane Turner another, and his maid Jane Birch, although she also had to put up a fight to keep her status. That he had no children of his own was a sadness he dealt with, characteristically, by providing himself with surrogate sons; and Fate played a sly trick by making his despised sister Pall the mother of his beloved nephew John Jackson.
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self Page 50
