Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  9. Information from Philip G. M. Dickinson’s History of Huntingdon Grammar School. Cooke was appointed in 1625 by his predecessor, Dr Thomas Beard, who had taught Cromwell. So Cooke must have taught Edward Montagu before retreating from the job in 1639. He remained the official headmaster until 1655 and was succeeded by the Revd Francis Bernard, who belonged to a family Pepys knew well. Sir Robert Bernard, mentioned in the Diary in 1661, was a lawyer and the son-in-law of a Cromwell-appointed peer, Oliver St John. William Bernard, one of his sons, was a grocer in London whom Pepys entertained to dinner and who returned the invitation, serving an excellent pie. Francis may have been another. There were still Bernards living in the house in which Cromwell was born as late as 1897.

  10. Diary, 15 Mar. 1660.

  11. Quoted in Michael McDonnell’s privately printed History of St Paul’s School (1959), p. 224. Langley made the comment at the end of his high mastership, in the 1650s, so it may not have applied in Pepys’s time.

  12. The house has changed, of course. Edward Montagu himself made improvements in the 1660s; a fire in 1830 led to a great deal of rebuilding; and in 1970 the Sandwich family sold it and it became Huntingdon Comprehensive School. Since then much more of the early structure has been uncovered, revealing features of the original abbey and some of Richard Cromwell’s work.

  13. Horace Walpole’s later description, cited in Latham and Matthews’s Companion, p. 186.

  14. This was William Camden’s description in his Britannia (1607).

  15. The school buildings were probably more extensive than what is now known as the school, currently a small museum dedicated to Cromwell.

  16. Diary, 14 July 1661, 13 Oct. 1662.

  17. Cardinal Mazarin, after dining with Montagu aboard the Naseby in the spring of 1658, described him as ‘un des gentilhommes du monde le plus franc et mieux intentionné et le plus attaché à la personne de M. le Protecteur’. Richard Ollard, Cromwell’s Earl: A Life of Edward Montagu, First Earl of Sandwich (1994), p. 61.

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

  19. Much quoted exchange, here taken from Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War 1642–1649 (1893), vol. II, p. 59.

  20. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, vol. II, p. 196.

  21. There are many authorities for Charles I’s occupation of Huntingdon, 24 Aug. 1645. He is reputed to have made the George Inn his HQ, and there is a letter from him dated ‘Huntingdon 25th August’. Gardiner mentions the episode. I quote from the parliamentarian Nehemiah Wallington’s account in his contemporary Historical Notices of Events Occurring Chiefly in the Reign of Charles I, ed. Rosamond Webb (1869), vol. II, pp. 267–70. Richard Symonds’s The Diary of Marches Kept by the Royal Army During the Great Civil War, ed. C. E. Long (1859), gives an eyewitness account – he says the king moved on to Woburn on Tuesday – and Alfred Kingston’s East Anglia and the Great Civil War (1897), p. 196, gives a contemporary letter about the exchange of prisoners.

  22. F. R. Harris, The Life of the First Earl of Sandwich, vol. I, pp. 71–2.

  23. Diary, 24 Jan. 1669: Pepys recalls how he ‘saw my old Lord lie in state when he was dead’. Essex was fifty-five; he made a better end than his father, the first earl, who had died at thirty-five on the scaffold, for treachery towards Queen Elizabeth.

  24. See Chapter 14, and especially Diary, 27 July 1663, when Charles II addressed parliament formally: ‘the King, sitting in his throne with his speech writ in a paper which he held in his lap and scarce looked off of it, I thought, all the time he made his speech to them’.

  25. Michael McDonnell, History of St Paul’s School, pp. 223–4.

  26. Michael McDonnell, History of St Paul’s School, p. 205.

  27. The school’s anti-royalist tradition appears in Gill, who was arrested and imprisoned in 1628 for attacking the royal favourite, the duke of Buckingham, and ‘the old fool and the young one’, meaning James and Charles. He was sentenced to two years in prison and to have his ears cut off, this last part being remitted.

  28. When Tom was delirious on his deathbed, he spoke in French: ‘A great deal of French, very plain and good,’ wrote Sam of Tom’s ramblings, of which he gives an example, ‘quand un homme boit quand il n’a point d’inclination à boire il ne lui fait jamais de bien.’ I can’t think of a more plausible explanation than a French lodger in the Pepys household when they were children, from whom the boys picked up the language together; Tom must have become fluent for his French to emerge as it did when he was dying.

  29. See Diary, 22 Jan. 1661, when Pepys visits the Mercers’ Great Hall: ‘It pleased me much now to come in this condition to this place, where I was once a peticioner for my exhibicion in Pauls school. And also where Sir G. Downing (my late master) was chaireman, and so but equally concerned with me.’

  30. F. R. Harris, The Life of the First Earl of Sandwich, vol. I, pp. 73–4, citing Sir Thomas Herbert (Harleian MSS, 7396), and M. Noble’s Memoirs of the Protectoral House of Cromwell (1787), vol. I, p. 44, footnote: ‘K. Cha. I… on his way from Holmby was very magnificently and dutifully entertained there by lady Mountagu…’

  31. Information about London in this chapter from many sources including Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, and David Masson, The Life of Milton (1859–94).

  32. George Downing in Islington to Winthrop, 8 Mar. 1648, cited in John Beres-ford, The Godfather of Downing Street: Sir George Downing 1623–1684 (1925), pp. 49–51.

  33. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, vol. IV, pp. 99–101.

  34. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, vol. IV, p. 129.

  35. F. R. Harris, The Life of the First Earl of Sandwich, vol. I, p. 75.

  36. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, vol. IV, p. 299.

  37. According to Locke, then a schoolboy of seventeen at Westminster: information from Conrad Russell’s The Crisis of Parliaments (1971), p. 383.

  38. The Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry, MA, of Broad Oak, Flintshire 1631–1696, ed. M. H. Lee (1882), p. 12. Henry became a Nonconformist preacher and suffered much as a result under Charles II’s legislation against Nonconformity.

  39. Diary, 1 Nov. 1660.

  40. Diary, 13 Oct. 1660.

  41. The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer (1955), 30 May 1649,

  42. Talbot Pepys is on record as having been one of the commission that raised taxes to support the parliamentary army in 1643, 1645, 1648 and again in 1657 (for the war against Spain). See Charles Henry Cooper, Annals of Cambridge (1842–53), vol. III, pp. 354, 384, 420, 466.

  43. Ε. K. Purnell, Magdalene College (1904), p. 115.

  3. Cambridge and Clerking

  1. Sept. 1654, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer (1955).

  2. Pepys accepted a description of himself as ‘a low, squat man’: Pepys Library, Mornamont MSS, p. 41, ‘I asked him what was that Pepys, he said he was a low squat man.’ See also his own statement (Diary, 4 Jan. 1669) that he could stand under the arms of ‘the great woman’ of 6( 5(, which would make him about 5( 1(. (Evelyn said she was 6( 10( but I’m inclined to trust Pepys here.) It must be remembered that the general height of the population was lower – for instance, William III was described as tall at 5( 6(. The many portraits of Pepys, although they were all made later in life, give a consistent picture of his facial features – see also L. Cust, ‘Notes on Some Distinctive Features in Pepys’s Portraits’, Occasional Papers Read by Members at Meetings of the Samuel Pepys Club (1917), vol. I, pp. 38–9.

  3. These figures are in Samuel Morland’s accounts for his time as a sizar in 1644. They are taken from p. 122 of Ε. K. Purnell, Magdalene College (1904).

  4. Charles Henry Cooper, Annals of Cambridge (1842–53), vol. III, p. 366. Scobell’s ordinance of Nov. 1643 ordered the heads of the colleges to remove all images and pictures in the chapels, but nothing was done until William Dowsing a
rrived in Dec. and set to work. He kept a record of his destruction.

  5. J. Ε. B. Mayor (ed.), Cambridge under Queen Anne (1911), p. 245.

  6. See Diary, 7 Oct. 1667, when Pepys stays at an inn in Bishop’s Stortford with all his family and finds the landlady is his old friend Mrs Aynsworth. Her version of ‘Full Forty Times Over’ must have been lewder than the one printed as ‘A Song’ in Wit and Drollery, Jovial Poems Never before Printed, ed. John Phillips (1656), although you can imagine how it might be made ruder:

  Full forty times over, I have strived to win

  Full forty times over neglected have been,

  But it’s forty to one, but I’ll tempt her again:

  For he’s a dull lover,

  That so will give over

  Seeing thus runs the sport,

  And assault her but often you’ll carry the fort.

  There’s a breach ready made, which still open hath bin,

  And thousands of thoughts to betray it within,

  If you once come to storme her, you’re sure to get in,

  Then stand not off coldly,

  But venter on boldly

  With weapon in hand,

  If you do but approach her, she’s not able to stand,

  With weapon in hand

  If you do charge her, but home she’s not able to stand. &c – three more stanzas

  7. See Diary, 30 Jan. 1664.

  8. Diary, 25 June, 7 and 11 Nov. 1660 for references to Elizabeth Whittle; there are many more to her husband Stephen. He became the grandfather of Charles James Fox, but she was not his grandmother, as Arthur Bryant states; this was Fox’s second wife, Christian.

  9. In the 1650s Sir Ralph Verney complained about girls learning Latin and shorthand: ‘the difficulty of the first may keep her from that Vice, for so I esteem it in a woman; but the easiness of the other may be a prejudice to her; for the pride of taking Sermon notes, hath made multitudes of women most unfortunate… Had St Paul lived in our Times I am most confident he would have fixed a Shame upon our women for writing (as well as for their speaking) in the Church.’ Ralph Verney to Dr Denton, n.d. but 1650s, cited in Memoirs of the Verney Family during the Civil War, eds. Lady Frances Parthenope and Lady Margaret M. Verney (1892), vol. III, p. 72. Tachygraphy is rich in symbols relating to biblical names and religious terms.

  10. See William Matthews’s essay in the introduction in vol. I of the Latham and Matthews edition of the Diary, pp. xlviii–liv.

  11. This is what Samuel Morland did in 1644: see p. 121 of Ε. K. Purnell, Magdalene College, citing his own account.

  12. Oliver Heywood was up immediately before Pepys. He named the divines whose works he enjoyed as Perkins, Bolton, Preston, Sibbes, and the titles given in the text are from their works. See J. B. Mullinger, Cambridge in the Seventeenth Century (1867), p. 181.

  13. W. T. Costello, The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge (1958), gives a good account of the curriculum, with many examples drawn from commonplace books, etc.

  14. Dryden was a very distant connection of Pepys, because his mother was a Pickering, cousin to Gilbert Pickering, Edward Montagu’s brother-in-law.

  15. Diary, 8 Oct. 1667, and note by Latham on the Saunders family; and Diary, 26 June 1662.

  16. Pepys to Dr Arthur Charlett, 5 Nov. 1700, Private Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers of Samuel Pepys 1679–1703, ed. J. R. Tanner (1926), vol. II, p. 109. He calls music ‘a science peculiarly productive of… pleasure… Witness the universal gusto we see it followed with… by all whose leisure and purse can bear it’ and suggests its teaching could be simplified ‘were the doctrine of it brought within the simplicity, perspicuity, and certainty common to all the other parts of mathematick knowledge’.

  17. See Diary, 25 May 1668.

  18. This was in Oct. 1645. Sir Henry Vane and Gilbert Pickering served on this body with him. See Charles Henry Cooper, Annals of Cambridge, vol. III, p. 398.

  19. Cromwell’s letter is given in Charles Henry Cooper, Annals of Cambridge, vol. III, p. 452.

  20. Charles Henry Cooper, Annals of Cambridge, vol. III, p. 461. All three were also to act as visitors to Eton, Winchester, Westminster and Merchant Taylors’ schools.

  21. Diary, 30 Mar. 1662, which was Easter Sunday, records that he did not take the sacrament, ‘which I blame myself that I have hitherto neglected all my life, but once or twice at Cambridge’.

  22. Sawyer became a barrister and rose to be attorney-general in 1681. Pepys heard him pleading a case 26 Nov. 1666 (Diary).

  23. David Masson, The Life of Milton (1859–94), vol. IV, p. 602.

  24. Charles Firth, The Last Years of the Protectorate (1909), vol. II, pp. 133–5.

  25. King Street was narrow and ‘better inhabited than built, the Houses being generally built after the old way, with Timber and Plaister, and the street somewhat narrow’, according to John Stow, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster… And the Survey and History Brought Down from the Year 1 633 to the Present Time by John Strype (1720), Book VI, p. 63.

  26. Pepys uses the words ‘Our old house for clubbing’ in Diary, 26 July 1660, when he revisits Wood’s in Pall Mall with his old friends. On 5 July 1665, during the plague, he walks to Whitehall round the locked-up park and observes ‘a house shut up this day in the Pell Mell, where heretofore in Cromwells time we young men used to keep our weekly clubs’.

  27. Diary and note for 23 Aug. 1660.

  28. Edward Phillips went on to become tutor to John Evelyn’s son. His brother John Phillips was also publishing work that Milton would not have approved; he edited in 1656 Wit and Drollery, Jovial Poems Never before Printed, a collection including work by Pepys’s future colleague Sir John Mennes as well as Suckling, D’Avenant and one poem by Donne, ‘Love’s Progress’. John Phillips dedicated the book ‘To the truly noble Edward Pepes, Esq.’. This must be the lawyer son of John Pepys of Ashtead and Salisbury Court, born in 1617 and admitted to the Middle Temple 1636, and evidently rich enough to be a patron. Edward Pepys was of course known to Samuel Pepys, who attended his funeral in 1663.

  29. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate (1897), vol. III, pp. 318, 325.

  4. Love and Pain

  1. Diary, 27 Feb. 1668.

  2. For most of the play the angel appears as a page-boy, ‘Angelo’, sustaining his Christian mistress in the face of persecution by the Romans. The descent from heaven in Act V was the invention of the Restoration stage manager, the text simply requiring the angel to enter with a basket of fruit and flowers, though sporting ‘a pair of glorious wings’. Massinger and Dekker’s The Virgin Martyr was first published in 1622, reissued in 1631, 1651 and 1661. J. Harold Wilson in Notes & Queries for 21 Feb. 1948 points out that Pepys first saw the play in Feb. 1661, and that after seeing it for a second time in February 1668 – this was when he was so transported by the music – he went again on 6 May. On 7 May he did not attend the performance but went backstage after it ended and met Nell Gwyn ‘in her boy’s clothes, mighty pretty’, as well as Knipp, the actress he was trying to seduce, and was impressed by the confident talk of the actresses.

  3. A note by H. M. Nixon, in vol. VI of the Catalogue of the Pepys Library (1984) states that a 1647 edition of the Nouveau Testament inscribed ‘S. Pepys 1654’ is now in the Pierpont Morgan Library. It adds that it was given to Mary Skinner later.

  4. See Diary, 31 May 1666, for Pepys’s mostly unflattering description of Pall’s physical appearance. He does allow that she is ‘a pretty good-bodied woman and not over-thicke’, although by this time Pall was in her mid twenties.

  5. Pepys destroyed some of his love letters during the quarrel of Jan. 1663, the others presumably after the death of Elizabeth. The letter quoted is from the mid 1650s and is by his contemporary Oliver Heywood, who was already ordained when he wrote; it is not surprising that Heywood won his ‘Mrs Betty’. Like Pepys, he lost her early. From the Autobiography 1630–1702 of the Revd Oliver Heyw
ood (1937), vol. I, pp. 131–2.

  6. For Act of 24 Aug. 1653 on civil marriage ceremonies, see Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate (1897), vol. II, p. 292.

  7. He noted the anniversary in the Diary in 1661, 1664, 1665 and 1666. He also put on the monument to Elizabeth that she died in the fifteenth year of marriage. She died on 10 Nov. 1669, so if they counted the marriage from Oct. 1655, she had been married for fourteen years, and was indeed just into the fifteenth year of the marriage; whereas if they counted from Dec., she had been married only thirteen years and eleven months, and was still in the fourteenth year.

  8. Legally, men were allowed to marry at eighteen and women at twelve. An attempt to raise the age to fourteen in 1689 failed. David Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II and William III (1955), pp. 75–6.

  9. See Diary, 3 Sept. 1660.

  10. Diary, 10 Feb. 1664, for the gold lace, and 5 July 1663 for the bridal respect.

  11. Diary, 6 Aug. 1666.

  12. Arthur Bryant, Samuel Pepys: The Man in the Making (1933), Ρ· 28. The inversion is so curious that it is tempting to think it is Bryant’s way of expressing emotion.

  13. Diary, 25 Feb. 1667.

  14. Diary, 2 Aug. 1660, ‘my wife not very well of her old pain in the lip of her chose, which she had when we were first married’.

  15. Accounts of the sufferings of those with bladder stones are found in medical manuals of the time and make unpleasant reading. See notes on surgery below. Elizabeth probably was suffering from Bartholin’s abscess or cyst, a relatively common condition treated today with antibiotics and, if necessary, surgery; in the seventeenth century there was no effective treatment, and the condition tended to recur, as it clearly did in Elizabeth’s case. Although it was not caused by venereal infection but by bacteria living on the skin, Elizabeth may have suspected her husband of infecting her. It does not begin until puberty because it is the action of the glands that produces it, and in Elizabeth’s case puberty probably coincided more or less with her marriage. I am indebted to Patrick French for the medical information. Her condition continued to cause trouble, for example when Pepys refers to ‘her old pain’, Diary, 29 Oct. 1660, which prevented sexual intercourse for two weeks. By the autumn of 1663 she had an abscess three inches deep (‘a pain in the place which she used to have swellings in; and that that troubles me is that we fear that it is my matter that I give her that causes it, it never coming but after my having been with her’, Diary, 24 Oct. 1663) and their surgeon, Hollier, considered operating; but she was so upset by this suggestion that he settled for a fomentation.