Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  The most unlikely thing at the heart of his long, complex and worldly life is the secret masterpiece. Nobody knew, and nobody could have imagined, that a young man in his twenties and thirties, building his career and pursuing his pleasures with unbounded appetite, should have found the energy and commitment to create a new literary form, and that it should become a work of genius. The Diary carries him to the highest point, alongside Milton, Bunyan, Chaucer, Dickens and Proust, although he was unlike them in that he does not seem to have started out with conscious dedication. Rather it grew within him. He felt its demands and was enlisted in its cause. So he came to render a whole society and at the same time to present himself as a hero of an altogether new kind. And as he did so he forged a language – vigorous, precise, enchanting – in which to do what had not been done before, revealing discoveries as curious in their way as any of those of his scientific and philosophical colleagues, discoveries of the complex relations between the inner and outer worlds of a man. The achievement is astounding, but there is no show or pretension; and when you turn over the last page of the Diary you know you have been in the company of both the most ordinary and the most extraordinary writer you will ever meet.

  Notes

  Prologue

  1. Diary, 13 Nov. 1662, where Pepys says he intends to burn it unread ‘before her face’, but does not actually describe doing so.

  2. J. R. Tanner, Samuel Pepys and the Royal Navy, lectures published in 1920. Tanner lived from 1860 to 1931 and devoted much of his life to researching and writing about Pepys.

  3. See Chapter 25.

  4. Diary, 3 Nov. 1661, a Sunday that he spent reading and trying ‘to make a Song in the prayse of a Liberall genius (as I take my own to be) to all studies and pleasures’. The ‘Song’ may have been a poem, ‘but it not proving to my mind, I did reject it and so proceeded not in it’.

  5. The 1680 fragments of diary, written in longhand, are found in the manuscript of ‘Mornamont’, held in the Pepys Library and never printed; see Chapter 22. The Tangier Diary, written in shorthand and first printed in a bad version, should be read in Edwin Chappell’s edition of 1935, published by the Navy Records Society; see Chapter 23.

  6. Robert Louis Stevenson in his essay ‘Samuel Pepys’, first printed in the Cornhill for July 1881, p. 36.

  Part One: 1633–1660

  1. The Elected Son

  1. Diary, 17 Mar. 1664. The house lay ‘neere the churchyard door’, and when in 1663 Pepys’s brother Tom rebuilt part of the top floor he had permission to ‘lay and frame his timber in the churchyard’. Diary, 21 July 1663, and note in Latham and Matthews.

  2. The Thames came up a good bit higher before embankment in the nineteenth century, not much below today’s Tudor Street. Salisbury Court was a house belonging to the Bishop of Salisbury in the sixteenth century, which then passed into secular hands and was from 1568 until the 1590s the residence of the French ambassador. East of it was another large dwelling, Dorset House. Both had gardens on the slope towards the river, and the name ‘Salisbury Court’ transferred itself to the whole complex of large and small houses around the open area. Information from John Bossy.

  3. There are ruins of a Roman villa under the church.

  4. There were another 100,000 in the larger area of London. The figures are taken from an estimate of 1631 made in connection with the corn supply and given by G. N. Clark in The Later Stuarts (1934), p. 40, footnote. Clark says ‘most modern historians adopt the estimate of three quarters of a million, or about one seventh of the population of England and Wales’; he is referring to 1660.

  5. The information about the contents of the house is taken from an inventory made when Tom Pepys took over the tailoring business from his father in 1661 printed in The Letters of Samuel Pepys and His Family Circle, ed. H. T. Heath (1955) PP. 13–15. The family possessions may have changed, increased or decreased, but since there had been no major events in the family beyond the deaths of children and the marriage of Samuel, and no change in the status of the Pepys parents, I think it fair to assume there had not been too much change in their goods and chattels either. Trundle (or truckle) beds were made to be pushed under the high beds when not in use. The ‘little chamber, three storeys high’ is mentioned in the Diary, 21 June 1660, when several members of the Pepys family were forced to sleep together in it, the house being overcrowded with lodgers.

  6. The bass viol is also known as the viola da gamba and looks something like a cello. It was the most important of the viols, and the English were considered the best players of it in the seventeenth century. It fell out of favour at the end of the eighteenth century. The virginals was the earliest form of harpsichord, usually an oblong box that was placed on a table. It was popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when much music was composed for it by leading English composers such as Gibbons and Byrd. It was thought especially suitable for young women.

  7. The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke 1605–1675, ed. Ruth Spalding (1989), p. 74. The masque, called Cœlum Britannicum, was performed on the night of Candlemas, 2 Feb. 1634 (dated 1633 old style, the new year beginning at the end of Mar.). See also Ruth Spalding’s The Improbable Puritan: A Life of Bulstrode Whitelocke (1975). Thomas Carew’s text and a description of the masque are printed in his complete works, ed. J. W. Ebsworth (1893).

  8. The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, ed. Ruth Spalding, p. 76. I have modernized spelling.

  9. Robert Hooke observed such a cloud from the Banstead Downs and recorded it in his diary for 28 Sept. 1676, The Diary of Robert Hooke 1672–1680, eds. H. W. Robinson and W. Adams (1935). See also John Evelyn’s Fumifugium of 1661, in which he describes the atmosphere of London and its effect on inhabitants.

  10. Browne, Religio Medici (1642), Part II, Section 9.

  11. Dates are a nightmare in this period, because the ‘new year’ was on 25 Mar. (‘Lady Day’, or the Feast of the Annunciation). It means that the period from 1 Jan. to 25 Mar. is usually, although not always, dated as the previous year. Pepys is not entirely consistent in his own Diary, sometimes writing ‘January at other times ‘January 1665/6’, which is the form he favours in his letters. Bulstrode Whitelocke, on the other hand, sticks to the old year’s date until the end of Mar. Pepys’s godparents are not known.

  12. See Kenneth H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (1968), p. 142. The young Anthony Ashley Cooper lived as an orphan with his guardian, Sir Daniel Norton, who was in London during the law terms, from 1631, when he was ten, until he was fourteen.

  13. See The Life of Milton by Edward Phillips, his nephew (1694), printed as an appendix to William Godwin’s Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton, including Various Particulars of the Literary and Political History of Their Times (1815). ‘[In 1640] he took him a lodging in St Brides church-yard, at the house of one Russel, a taylor, where he first undertook the education and instruction of his sister’s two sons’ (p. 362 in Godwin).

  14. John Brinsley’s Ludus Literarius of 1612, a dialogue (in English despite the title) between two schoolmasters, makes this sensible suggestion.

  15. For the backyard sports, Diary, 25 Dec. 1663; for the Temple Hall visit, Diary, 1 Jan. 1668; for ‘beating the bounds’, Diary, 25 Mar. 1661.

  16. Taken from a 1619 reprint of The Schoole of Vertue, printed ‘next to the Globe’ and sold ‘at the sign of the Bull, by St Paul’s Churchyard’. It was first published in 1577 and went on being reprinted until 1626.

  17. Pepys noted the birth dates of all his brothers and sisters at the end of his Diary for 1664, but not the dates of their deaths. These are to be found in the parish records of St Bride’s, held at the Guildhall.

  18. Tom’s speech impediment was bad enough to deter a possible bride when he came to look for one.

  19. Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MSS, A 185, fols. 206–13, 7 Nov. 1677.

  20. In the Diary Pepys revisits Kingsland on 25 Apr. 1664 and recalls ‘my nurse’s house, Goody Lawrence, where my broth
er Tom and I was kept when young’. He says his mother’s unmarried sister, Ellen Kite, was living in a Mrs Herbert’s house at Newington Green near by. He also says he was boarded at Hackney – still close to Kingsland – as ‘a little child’. On 12 May 1667, however, he recalls being boarded at Kingsland and shooting with his bow and arrow in the fields. There seem to have been fields all the way between Kingsland, a mere roadside hamlet, and Hackney, which was more of a village. Perhaps he was sent to one or another family in that direction for several summers.

  21. Diary, 27 Mar. 1664. Pepys saw Twelfth Night twice, in Sept. 1661 and Jan. 1663, but failed to enjoy it on either occasion and thought it ‘a silly play’, in spite of Sir Toby Belch and his cakes and ale.

  22. See Diary for 11 Mar. 1668, and Pepys’s wish to avoid speaking to Colonel Cocke, ‘formerly a very great man and my father’s customer whom I have carried clothes to’.

  23. Coke said this to Bulstrode Whitelocke’s father in 1615: see Ruth Spalding, The Improbable Puritan, citingJames Whitelocke’s memoir, p. 29.

  24. Diary, 30 May 1668.

  25. The two Diary entries are for 1 Sept. 1662 and 26 July 1663. Evelyn listed the gardens of Durdans among the English ones he most admired in a letter to Sir Thomas Browne, 28 Jan. 1658. Information about house and garden from John Harris’s article on Durdans in Country Life, 8 Sept. 1983, in which he discusses Jacob Knyff’s 1673 view of the house Pepys visited, which was pulled down in the 1680s and replaced by an entirely classical house. Note also Pepys’s remark on 3 Dec. 1668 about the greatness of John Pepys of Ashtead in the world; and that his daughter Jane, who became Mrs John Turner, named one of her daughters Theophila (after Lady Theophila Coke) – she was usually known as ‘The’ to Pepys. The Berkeleys came to Durdans in the mid 1630s and added the new Hall in 1639. Their own children died at birth, which may have prompted their interest in a visiting child.

  26. Diary, 25 July 1663. John Pepys of Norfolk and then Ashtead (1576–1652) was third cousin once removed of Sam Pepys’s father. He married Anne Walpole of Houghton in 1610, both regarded with great warmth by the Cokes, she for particular kindness to the women of the family during illness. Their son was named Edward, no doubt for Coke. For their daughter Jane, see Chapters 4 and 16 below. In 1642 Robert Coke was imprisoned in the Tower as a royalist, and John Pepys and his family moved back to London, where he was also imprisoned for four months for his failure to contribute money demanded for the war chest. Lady Theophila visited her husband in the Tower until her death from smallpox in 1643. Sir Robert returned to Surrey on his release and died there in 1653, bequeathing the books in the library at Durdans – 300 folios and many smaller books – to the City clergy at Sion College, ‘whom the iniquity of the time had stripped of everything but (what could not be taken from them) their Religion, Loialty & Learning’. Information partly from unpublished paper by F. L. Clark in Bryant archives, Liddle Hart Centre, King’s College, London.

  27. Robert Pepys was Sam’s uncle, his father’s eldest brother, who seems to have inherited what little land there was in the family. Robert and John Pepys’s father was Thomas Pepys, an elder brother of Paulina (Lady Montagu). See Family Tree.

  28. See F. R. Harris, The Life of the First Earl of Sandwich (1912), vol. I, p. 19.

  29. Richard Baxter in The Holy Commonwealth (1659), ref. from Christopher Hill’s The Century of Revolution 1603–1714 (1974), p. 110.

  30. Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, The True Historical Narrative of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1888), vol. III, p. 264.

  31. Maurice Ashley, The English Civil War (1980), p. 50. Ashley suggests on p. 51 that these armed men were better-off citizens, merchants and shopkeepers, organized by City members of parliament.

  32. C. V. Wedgwood, The King’s Peace (1983), p. 422. You can see women in the crowd watching the execution of Strafford in Hollar’s engraving of the scene.

  33. 33. See Diary, 18 Mar. 1664, where Pepys arranges to have his brother Tom buried inside St Bride’s and ‘as near as I can to my mother’s pew’. But see too 4 Mar. 1660, when Pepys and his mother ‘talked very high about Religion, I in defence of the Religion I was born in’, i.e., the established Church of England.

  34. David Masson, The Life of Milton (1859–94), vol. III, p. 147.

  35. Quotation from Ruth Spalding, The Improbable Puritan, pp. 82–3.

  36. See Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, p. 167.

  37. Information about the building of the defences of London in 1642 and 1643 mostly from N. G. Brett-James, The Growth of Stuart London (1935), who quotes Bulstrode Whitelocke’s Memorials of the English Affairs (‘it was also wonderful to see how the women and children and vast numbers would come to work digging and carrying of earth to make the new fortifications’), p. 268; and report of Venetian ambassador, p. 270; and from Samuel Butler’s Hudibras – he recorded that the women, ‘From ladies down to oyster-wenches/Labour’d like pioneers in trenches’; and from other contemporary reports such as the newssheet Perfect Diurnal for May 1643 and William Lithgow’s Present Surveigh of London and England’s Estate &c., also of 1643. John Evelyn inspected the ‘so much celebrated line of communication’ in Dec. 1642. The defences were largely razed in 1647, partly because they took up so much land.

  38. State papers listed reasons for fortifying the City: ‘There is terrible news that Rupert will sack it, and so a complete and sufficient dike and earthern wall and bulwarks must be made which will render ample recompsense for trouble. The fortifications will discourage foes and encourage friends to come and inhabit by multitude, whereby London will grow famous and rich even in time of War…’ Cited in N. G. Brett-James, The Growth of Stuart London, p. 273.

  39. See Diary, 26 July 1663. The name of Heale appears on the map of the manor of Ashtead made in 1638, on two small holdings not far from John Pepys’s land. Information from F. L. Clark’s unpublished paper.

  40. John Pepys travelled to Holland again much later, in 1656, when Cromwell was protector, Montagu a high official with Sam working for him; on this occasion Sam applied for the pass for his father. On 7 Aug. it was granted to ‘John Pepys and his man with necessaries for Holland, being on the desire of Mr Samll Pepys’. H. B. Wheatley, Samuel Pepys and the World He Lived In (1880), p. 9, giving as source Entry-Book No. 105 of the protector’s Council of State, p. 327; also footnote to Diary, 24 Jan. 1666, Latham and Matthews edition, which gives source as Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1656–7, p. 582.

  For Dutch engineers advising on fortifications, N. G. Brett-James, The Growth of Stuart London, p. 274. Montagu took minutes at a meeting of the East Anglian Association at Bury St Edmunds, 9 Feb. 1643, raised support in Huntingdon and was made a deputy-lieutenant by parliament in June. Clarendon said ‘he was so far wrought upon by the caresses of Cromwell that, out of pure affection for him, he was persuaded to take command in the army’.

  41. Letter of the Venetian ambassador, 15 May 1643.

  42. On the 1625 outbreak, Nehemiah Wallington, Historical Notices of Events Occurring Chiefly in the Reign of Charles I, ed. Rosamond Webb (1869), vol. I, p. xvii.

  2. A Schoolboy’s War: Huntingdon and St Paul’s

  1. Pepys mentions ‘Beard’ as the carrier in a letter to Montagu, 22 Oct. 1659, ‘Old Beard’ on 14 Mar. 1660 and ‘Bird the carrier’ in 1661, when his mother travelled with him on 3 Jan., and both his parents and his sister Pall on 5 Sept. By then Pepys himself either rode or took a coach.

  2. Montagu’s involvement is my guess. The only evidence that Pepys attended the school is in his remark in the Diary, 15 Mar. 1660, when he meets Tom Alcock, ‘one that went to school with me at Huntington, but I have not seen him this sixteen years’. This is good evidence, and seems to establish that he was there in 1644 (although Pepys is not always reliable in his recollection of dates). Pepys mentions ‘my shee-cousin Alcock’ in a letter of 5 Dec. 1657 to Montagu. Elizabeth Pepys, sister of Paulina Montagu, another great-aunt of Sam, married a Henry Al
cock. For information about the Free Grammar School, see Philip G. M. Dickinson’s History of Huntingdon Grammar School (1965).

  3. A note in Sir Sidney’s hand in vol. III of the Sandwich Papers at the National Maritime Museum records that he ‘gave up house-keeping to my Son Edward’ in 1643. He moved to Barnwell in Northamptonshire.

  4. The conjecture that Sam lodged with his uncle is supported by the fact that he became his heir, which suggests approval at least. Robert Pepys appears to have been employed as a bailiff by the Montagus and was described as ‘of Hinchingbrooke’ in a bond signed by Sidney Montagu in 1630. In the same year Robert married a widow, Anne Trice, at All Saints’, Huntingdon, and moved to the house at Brampton. (Information from the Companion to the Latham and Matthews edition of the Diary.) He was probably born in the mid 1590s. His two stepsons were some years older than Sam.

  5. The house belongs to the Pepys Association. It is a private residence, but permission to view it may be obtained. It has doubled in size, with an eighteenth-century addition behind the original Tudor house. The windows have been enlarged, and the staircase moved from where it probably was in Pepys’s day, next to the central chimney stack.

  6. It is now called the Black Bull. In Pepys’s time the alternative drinking place was Goody Gorrum’s ale house, which has disappeared.

  7. Pepys mentions Thomas Taylor, Diary, 10 Oct. 1667. He was master at Huntingdon for nearly forty years, from 1641 to 1679.

  8. The parents’ complaint is mentioned in John Brinsley’s Ludus Literarius, a dialogue between two schoolmasters published in 1612.