Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  16. Diary, 15 Nov. 1660.

  17. Diary, 3 Sept. 1660, when Pepys again sees him off and recalls the earlier occasion.

  18. Sir d’Arcy Power, Occasional Papers Read by Members at Meetings of the Samuel Pepys Club (1917), vol. I, pp. 78–93: he blames Hollier for dividing an ejaculatory duct. Milo Keynes, ‘Why Samuel Pepys Stopped Writing His Diary: His Dimming Eyesight and Ill-health’, Journal of Medical Biography, vol. v, Feb. 1997, p. 26, suggests a secondary infection or a stricture resulting from damage during the removal of the stone. Keynes dismisses d’Arcy Power’s suggestion that his sexual activity was stimulated by the irritation to which his genito-urinary system was subjected. Keynes is altogether more convincing than Power on the subject.

  19. Diary, 4 July 1664, 13 Aug. 1661.

  20. It may have been during the separation that Pepys went to Fleet Alley. Looking – and only looking – at a pretty prostitute there on 29 July 1664, he recalled earlier visits: ‘there saw what formerly I have been acquainted with, the wickedness of those houses and the forcing a man to present expense’. During the Diary period he avoided prostitutes entirely for fear of infection.

  21. Elizabeth’s birthday was on 23 Oct. 1640: Pepys gave the date and place, which he put down as Somerset, in his memorial inscription to her. When Balthasar married on 3 Dec. 1662, he gave his age as twenty-two. He may have got it wrong, or they may have been twins, or just possibly born within a year of one another, in which case he must have been born in Jan. 1640. He writes that ‘my sister and wee all ware borne’ in Bideford, which suggests other children were born who did not survive.

  22. Balthasar de St Michel to Pepys, 8 Feb. 1674, in The Letters of Samuel Pepys and His Family Circle, ed. H. T. Heath (1955), pp. 25–8, and Diary, 29 Mar. 1667.

  23. Diary, 2 Nov. 1660. Elizabeth sometimes spoke of becoming a Catholic to Pepys; and she and her mother were friendly with a Jesuit called Father Fogourdy in Paris, who visited her in 1664 (6 Feb. and 28 Mar.), which Pepys found disquieting, although he liked the man. Fogourdy’s name comes up during the Popish Plot: see Chapter 22.

  24. Diary, 4 June 1663: ‘I did employ a porter to go, from a person unknown, to tell him that his daughter was come to his lodgings. And I at a distance did observe him; but Lord, what a company of Questions he did ask him; what kind of man I was and God knows what.’

  25. Diary, 22 Nov. 1660. Lady Sandwich (as she then was – at this date Lady Montagu, and always known to Pepys as ‘my Lady’) asked the question, after Elizabeth acted as interpreter between her and her newly acquired French maid, who seems to have raised the subject.

  26. The debates about Naylor are found in The Diary of Thomas Burton, ed. J. T. Rutt (1828), vol. I, p. 154 et seq., and in Charles Firth, The Last Years of the Protectorate (1909), vol. I, pp. 87–102. Gilbert Pickering, Thurloe, Whitelocke and Cromwell were for a more merciful treatment.

  27. A. G. Matthews, Mr Pepys and Nonconformity (1954), p. 36.

  28. Quoted in Granville Penn, Memorials of Sir William Penn (1833), vol. II, p. 159.

  29. Quoted in F. R. Harris, The Life of the First Earl of Sandwich (1912), vol. I, p. 97.

  30. Charles Firth, The Last Years of the Protectorate, vol. I, p. 55.

  31. Pepys in a letter to Edward Montagu, 9 Dec. 1656, writes ‘your Honour may remember present at Sir W.P.’s magnetique experiments’. W.P. suggests William Petty, physician, statistician and founding member of the Royal Society, later a friend of Pepys, although he was not knighted until 1661. Montagu was also a founding member of the Royal Society.

  32. Pepys to Edward Montagu, 8 Jan. 1657, Letters and the Second Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. G. Howarth (1932), pp. 5–6.

  33. Pepys to Edward Montagu, 8 Dec. 1657, Letters and Second Diary of Samuel Pepys, p. 7.

  34. See among many accounts David Masson, The Life of Milton (1859–94), vol. V, p. 148, and Richard Ollard’s Cromwell’s Earl: A Life of Edward Montagu, First Earl of Sandwich (1994), p. 54, with its admirable description of the occasion as ‘a kind of laicized Coronation’.

  35. Pepys to Edward Montagu, 26 Dec. 1657, Letters and Second Diary of Samuel Pepys, p. 11.

  36. Pepys to Edward Montagu, 22 Dec. 1657, Letters and Second Diary of Samuel Pepys, p. 9.

  37. Pepys’s own description, Diary, 26 Mar. 1664, when he writes thanking the Lord God for raising him from his sickness and poverty.

  38. Lithotomia Vesicae (1640), English translation from the Dutch, pp. 49–50.

  39. There were specialist surgeons all over Europe, where the operation had been practised since ancient Egyptian times. In Ralph Josselin’s diary he mentions two men from his Essex village who went to London to be cut for the stone, one in July 1649, the other in Apr. 1665. Both returned cured, and the first of the two lived another thirty-three years. Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683, ed. Alan MacFarlane (1976).

  40. Diary, 30 May 1663, mentions this aunt James and her account of John Pepys seeking prayers for his son.

  41. You can read the prescription, given in Latin by Dr J. M., for ‘Mr Pepes… before he was cut for the stone by Mr Hollyer’ in a notebook kept by a contemporary physician. British Library, Sloane MSS, 1536, fol. 56. G. C. R. Morris suggests in Medical History, vol. 26 (1982), pp. 429–35, that the prescription was written by Dr John Micklethwaite (1612–82), a colleague of Hollier at St Bartholomew’s Hospital.

  42. Lithotomia Vesicae, pp. 81–4.

  43. A contemporary description of the operation was made by John Evelyn, who saw it performed on five patients at the La Charité Hôpital in Paris in May 1650. This is his account of one:

  The sick creature was strip’d to his shirt, & bound armes & thighes to an high Chaire, 2 men holding his shoulders fast down: then the Chirurgion with a crooked Instrument prob’d til he hit on the stone, then without stirring the probe which had a small channell in it, for the Edge of the Lancet to run in, without wounding any other part, he made Incision thro the Scrotum about an Inch in length, then he put in his forefingers to get the stone as neere the orifice of the wound as he could, then with another Instrument like a Cranes neck he pull’d it out with incredible torture to the Patient, especially at his after raking so unmercifully up & downe the bladder with a 3rd Instrument, to find any other Stones that may possibly be left behind: The effusion of blood is greate. Then was the patient carried to bed, & dress’d with a silver pipe accommodated to the orifice for the urine to pass, when the wound is sowed up: The danger is feavor, & Gangreene, some Wounds never closing.

  Surely Evelyn was wrong about the incision being through the scrotum? The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer (1955).

  44. A second prescription, this time by two doctors, Moleyns and Dr G. Joliffe, ‘for Mr Peapes who was cut for the Stone by Mr Hollier March the 26 [1658] and had a very great stone taken this day from him’. British Library, Sloane MSS, 1536, fol. 56V.

  45. See Diary, 27 Feb. 1663, and Pepys’s mention of Dr Jolly (George Joliffe) who had cared for him and answered his questions in 1658.

  46. Pepys preserved his stone and showed it to Evelyn on 10 June 1669. The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer.

  47. He did not order the case until 20 Aug. 1664, when he notes in the Diary that it will cost him twenty-five shillings. See also Diary, 3 May 1667, where he describes taking it to be shown to the earl of Southampton to encourage him to be operated upon, unavailingly; he died two weeks later, unoperated. Also Evelyn’s mention of it in his diary for 10 June 1669.

  48. Diary, 5 Dec. 1660.

  49. Richard Ollard, Cromwell’s Earl, p. 61, for Mazarin quote; Morland was one who testified to Montagu being ‘wholly devoted to old Noll, his country man [i.e., Oliver Cromwell]’, F. R. Harris, The Life of the First Earl of Sandwich, vol. I, p. 137. For Cromwell’s letter to Edward Montagu, dated 2 Oct. 1657, National Maritime Museum, Sandwich Journal, vol. I, X98/065.

  5. A House in Axe Yard

  1. It can be seen clearly in Roque’s map of 1746, which shows it
as starting close to where the Cenotaph now stands. Andrew Davies’s The Map of London from 1746 to the Present Day (1987) is helpful.

  2. A letter from Downing to General Monck in 1654 is dated ‘Axeyard 7ber 30th, 54’, cited in John Beresford, The Godfather of Downing Street: Sir George Downing 1623–1684 (1925), p. 64. For Downing’s mention of Hawley, and his move into another house in Axe Yard, Major Greenleaf’s, in 1658, see the Companion to the Latham and Matthews edition of the Diary, p. 170.

  3. Diary, 18 Feb. 1660, ‘went to my Lord’s lodgings to my turret there, and took away most of my books and sent them home by my maid’.

  4. So Pepys said in a letter of 1 Oct. 1681 to his sister-in-law Esther St Michel, printed in The Letters of Samuel Pepys and His Family Circle, ed. H. T. Heath (1955), ρ. 188, in which he urged economy on her. He claimed they lived on this income ‘for several years’ and added that he still had Elizabeth’s household accounts at the time of writing. Unfortunately they have not survived to the present.

  5. For cake-making, Diary, 6 Jan. 1668; for refusal to kill turkey, Diary, 4 Feb. 1660; for possession of book, Pall accused of stealing hers, 24 Jan. 1660. Female literacy increased steadily during the seventeenth century, from 10 per cent at the start to 55 per cent at the end, according to Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (1987), p. 27.

  6. Since Jane refused to come for less than £3 a year when the Pepyses asked her to return to their service, 26 Mar. 1662 – see Diary – it is unlikely she was paid this much in 1658.

  7. Diary, 18 Feb. 1662, when Pepys wrote that the wind was ‘such as hath not been in memory before, unless at the death of the late Protector’; and 19 Oct. 1663, when he remarked to his wife, ‘I pray God I hear not of the death of any great person, this wind is so high’. Marvell, ‘Poem upon the Death of His Late Highness the Lord Protector’, lines 117–19, 131–2.

  8. For Newton’s response to the storm, see David Masson, The Life of Milton (1859–94), vol. V, p. 358.

  9. Cited in John Beresford, The Godfather of Downing Street, p. 100.

  10. Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy (1989), p. 149. See also Godfrey Davies’s The Restoration of Charles II (1955), pp. 10–11.

  11. See Diary, 28 Nov. 1660, when Pepys describes the disbanding of the regiment, receives his pay of £23.145.gd., and regrets that he won’t be getting any more in this easy fashion.

  12. See Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, p. 332.

  13. Dryden’s presence is disputed by one of his biographers, Charles E. Ward, but accepted by most other authorities, and certainly seems likely.

  14. Evelyn mistakenly gave the date as 22 Nov. 1658, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer (1955).

  15. Information about Cromwell’s funeral from the contemporary account by the Revd John Prestwich, fellow of All Souls, printed as Appendix VII in The Diary of Thomas Burton, ed. J. T. Rutt (1828), vol. II, pp. 516–30. Among those he listed as present were a Mr Ewer, comptroller of the clerks, possibly connected with Will Hewer, as well as Robert Blackborne, secretary to the Admiralty commissioners and Hewer’s uncle; also Francis Willoughby, the Admiralty commissioner whose house in Seething Lane was taken over by Pepys. More information about the ceremonial from Antonia Fraser’s Cromwell, Our Chief of Men (1973), pp. 680–85, and from Godfrey Davies’s The Restoration of Charles II, pp. 40–44.

  16. For the vulture and the titmouse, James Heath’s A Brief Chronicle of the Late Intestine Warr, edition of 1676, cited in F. R. Harris, The Life of the First Earl of Sandwich (1912), vol. I, p. 115.

  17. Pepys’s care for the Montagu children begins with the operation on their eldest daughter, Jemima, in London in the winter of 1659/60, and continues with many other instances. For Lady Montagu’s affectionate behaviour to him, see the first entry about her in the Diary, 12 Oct. 1660, when Pepys, hearing she has arrived in town, immediately calls on her: ‘found her at supper, so she made me sit down all alone with her; and after supper stayed and talked with her – she showing most extraordinary love and kindness’. After this they are numerous.

  18. So he told Pepys: see Diary, 21 June 1660.

  19. The Diary of John Evelyn, 5 May 1659. De Beer (vol. III, p. 229, footnote 2) gives the Cockpit in Drury Lane.

  20. Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, p. 335.

  21. For Captain Country, see Diary, 27 Sept. 1661. The footnote in the Latham and Matthews edition points out that Pepys conferred a sinecure on Country in 1676, as a gunner on the Royal Charles. For Pepys to find him ‘little’ he must have been very short, given his own height.

  22. For Lieutenant Lambert, Diary, 4 Oct. 1660, where Pepys calls the ship by its new name, the Charles.

  23. Morland to Charles, 15 June 1659, cited in F. R. Harris, The Life of the First Earl of Sandwich, vol. I, p. 138.

  24. National Maritime Museum, Sandwich Journal, 47,60ff.

  25. Diary, 15 May 1660: ‘he told me that his conversion to the King’s cause (for so I was saying that I wondered from what time the King could look upon him to be become his friend), from his being in the Sound [i.e., Baltic], when he found what usage he was likely to have from a Comonwealth’.

  26. F. R. Harris, The Life of the First Earl of Sandwich, vol. I, pp. 156–7.

  27. Pepys to Edward Montagu, 20 Oct. 1659, Letters and the Second Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. G. Howarth (1932), pp. 11–12.

  28. Pepys to Edward Montagu, 6 Dec. 1659, Letters and Second Diary of Samuel Pepys, p. 15. All following quotes from Pepys to Montagu in this chapter from this source, spellings modernized.

  29. F. R. Harris, The Life of the First Earl of Sandwich, vol. I, pp. 165–6. Lawson’s proclamation also suggested some radical reforms: no more pressing, abolition of the Excise and pensions for men no longer able to serve.

  6. A Diary

  1. Montaigne was born exactly a century before Pepys, in 1533, and died in 1592. He also suffered from the stone. An English translation of his essays by Florio appeared in 1603, another by Charles Cotton in 1685, and he was greatly admired in England throughout the century. Pepys bought a copy of the Florio translation (‘Montagne’s essays’) in 1668 – see Diary, 18 Mar. 1668 – and later acquired the Cotton version, which remained in his library (Pepys Library 1018–20).

  2. Francis Bacon, ‘Of Travel’, Essays (Everyman ed., 1994), p. 54.

  3. Will Hewer, for example, learnt and used tachygraphy. The diaries themselves are on display at the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The introduction to vol. I of Latham and Matthews’s edition gives a great deal of information about their physical characteristics and about the shorthand, including the fact that Pepys adapted it slightly for his own use.

  4. Diary, 11 Apr. 1660, when he shows it to Lieutenant Lambert at sea; and 9 Mar. 1669, when he tells William Coventry of its existence.

  5. Diary, 5 Feb. 1660.

  6. Diary, 24 Jan. 1664, suggests as much, when he describes ‘entering out of a by-book part of my second Journall book, which hath lay these two years and more unentered’.

  7. Diary, 10 Nov. 1665.

  8. For Downing’s journal, see John Beresford’s The Godfather of Downing Street: Sir George Downing 1623–1684 (1925). Beresford was able to track down only part of it (in a country house in Norfolk); he points out that there was a tradition of diary-keeping in his family, since Downing’s East Anglian grandfather, Adam Winthrop, kept a journal between 1597 and 1622, from which he prints a few entries. The first volume of Montagu’s journal has been published by the Navy Records Society in 1929, edited by R. C. Anderson; the manuscripts of the rest are owned by the present earl of Sandwich.

  9. Nine years later, William Coventry told Pepys he was keeping a journal – see Diary, 9 Mar. 1669 – and Pepys returned the confidence, less than three months before he abandoned his. Coventry’s has not survived.

  10. See William Haller’s The Rise of Puritanism (1938), p. 99.

  11. For diaries mentioned in text, see Bibliography.

  12. ‘A Jou
rnal kept by me, George Carteret, in His Majesty’s ship the Conventive, being bound for the coast of Barbarie, 1638’. See G. R. Balleine, All for the King: The Life Story of Sir George Carteret (1976), p. 15 and notes p. 167, which say the journal had been privately printed in Philadelphia by B. Penrose.

  13. Evelyn’s remarks in his diary, 4 Oct. 1680, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer (1955). For the information about Evelyn senior, I am indebted to Frances Harris, who believes he is likely to have made his entries in the pages of an almanac, as an aide-mémoire in his business affairs. None of his diaries appear to have survived.

  14. The philosopher John Locke, another close contemporary, kept a diary during his travels in France in the late 1670s and 1680s. From what I have seen of it, it was a record of his journeys, the sights he saw and notes about agriculture, manufacturing, tax, religious questions, notably the condition of the Protestant population in France: highly interesting and quite impersonal. See The Life and Letters of John Locke, ed. Lord King (1858).

  15. ‘Samuel Pepys’, Cornhill magazine, July 1881.

  16. Diary, 4 Mar. 1660, for argument with mother, and 14 Dec. 1663 for his objection to Montagu’s swearing ‘Before God’ and other oaths.

  17. For Pepys’s religious attitude, see Chapter 26. Diary, 15 May 1660.

  18. Diary, 2 Oct. 1660.

  19. Wheatley’s 1893 edition makes the sentence on p. 1 ‘My wife… gave me hopes of her being with child, and on the last day of the year [the hope was belied].’ As already noted, Bryant did give the complete text of the opening passage in the first volume of his biography in 1933. But when Edwin Chappell gave the tercentenary lecture that same year at the Clothworkers’ Hall, he felt he could not quote it, explaining satirically that ‘I cannot take the responsibility of corrupting your innocence’. The standard editions of the Diary, including J. P. Kenyon’s abridged version of 1963, remained bowdlerized, and Latham and Matthews’s 1970 edition was the first not to cut Pepys’s opening paragraph.