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Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

Page 56

by Claire Tomalin


  22. Pepys to Coventry, 4 Nov. 1665, Further Conespondence of Samuel Pepys, ed. J. R. Tanner, pp. 74–6, and Diary, 4 Nov. 1665.

  23. Letter of 29 Dec. 1665, Lord Sandwich to Manchester and Clarendon, cited in F. R. Harris, Life of the First Earl of Sandwich (1912), vol. II, p. 29, who also reports that Sandwich sued for pardon before Christmas. Bodleian Library, Carte MSS, 75, fol. 422, and 34, fol. 514.

  24. Diary, 29 Jan. 1666.

  25. Diary, 7 Oct. 1666. Pepys wrote on 8 Sept. 1667 that he had not written to Lord Sandwich at all since he left for Spain in Feb. 1666.

  26. Diary, with Daniel’s account, 4 June 1666.

  27. Diary, 7 June 1666. Also worth noting, Pepys refused a loan requested by the Sandwichs’ son, Lord Hinchingbrooke, 17 June 1667, ‘to teach him the necessity of being a good husband [i.e., manager of his own affairs] and keeping money or credit by him’.

  28. Diary, 13 June 1666.

  29. Pepys says in the Diary that Christopher Myngs was the son of a shoemaker, as indeed he was. The new DNB entry by C. S. Knighton also states that his mother was a hoyman’s daughter, but that both parents were from landowning families, and suggests that his political radicalism may have inclined him to stress or exaggerate the simpler aspect of his origins. He left money and land to his children; but if Pepys was partly misinformed, it makes little difference to his musing on Myngs’s fate.

  30. Diary, 23 July 1666. I am indebted to Richard Luckett, Pepys librarian, for telling me that they are the first-known purpose-built bookcases in England. Pepys had them made by Thomas Simpson, a master-joiner at Woolwich and Deptford dockyards, and they are constructed to take to bits for easy carriage. These first two and the further cases he had made may be seen in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

  31. Pepys mentions these details in Diary, 16 June 1666 – the dead man was Sir William Berkeley, the captured one Sir George Ayscue.

  32. For the party, Diary, 14 Aug. 1666. For the news of Holmes’s ‘bonfire’, Diary, 15 Aug., though it had taken place on 9–10 August.

  33. Diary, 19 Oct. 1666; see also Pepys to duke of York, 17 Nov. 1666, Further Correspondence of Samuel Pepys, ed. J. R. Tanner, p. 147.

  34. Pepys to William Penn, 19 Oct. 1666, Further Correspondence of Samuel Pepys, ed. J. R. Tanner, p. 144.

  35. Navy Board to duke of York, 17 Nov. 1666, Further Correspondence of Samuel Pepys, ed. J. R. Tanner, pp. 146–54.

  36. Diary, 15, 21, 31 Oct., 14 Nov., 14, 31 Dec. 1666.

  37. For Pepys’s speech before king, Diary, 14 Mar. 1667 and Further Correspondence of Samuel Pepys, ed. J. R. Tanner, p. 162. For Coventry and the king, Diary, 4 Apr. 1667.

  38. For Carteret, Diary, 9 May 1667. For Evelyn, Diary, 3 June 1667.

  39. 11 June 1667, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer (1955).

  40. Diary, 11 June 1667.

  41. This was Sarah Giles, daughter of his mother’s sister.

  42. They remained in Paris for some months only and were back in England, living with Baity and his wife at Deptford, by the summer of 1668, when Pepys records Elizabeth visiting them there.

  43. Diary, 13 June 1667.

  44. The ‘Navy White Book’, kept partly in shorthand and partly written by Gibson, Hayter and Hewer, from the run-up to the war in 1664 until 1669, when it was the subject of investigation, was edited by Robert Latham, transcribed by William Matthews and published by the Navy Records Society in Samuel Pepys and the Second Dutch War (1995).

  45. Diary, 6 June 1666.

  46. For example, Diary, 20 May 1661, ‘But though I am much against too much spending, yet I do think it best to enjoy some degree of pleasure, now that we have health, money and opportunities, rather than to leave pleasures to old age or poverty, when we cannot have them so properly.’

  47. There is a copy of the fourth edition of 1688 in the Pepys Library.

  48. From Andrew Marvell’s The Last Instructions to a Painter, published 4 Sept. 1667, line 765, after description of Medway disaster.

  49. Diary, 16 Sept. 1667.

  50. Diary, 8 Dec. 1667, 10 Sept. 1667.

  51. See Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy (1989), for attempts to scapegoat Coventry. The duke of York told him he resented his attitude on 30 Aug. 1667 and Coventry left on 2 Sept.

  52. Diary, 2 Sept. 1667. Later he was eager to have the job, see pp. 294–5 below.

  53. Diary, 22 Oct. 1667; 31 Jan. 1668, etc.

  54. Diary, 5, 6 Mar. 1668, etc.

  13. Marriage

  1. Diary, 6 Nov. 1660.

  2. Diary, 3, 4 Feb. 1665.

  3. Diary, 29 Sept. 1664.

  4. Diary, 15 June 1662, 19 Dec. 1661.

  5. ‘Cunning’ has not the modern derogatory sense, but conveys something more like cleverness here: Diary, 28 Feb. 1665.

  6. Diary, 3 Nov., and following days, 1663.

  7. Diary, 5 May 1665.

  8. See Lionel Cust’s ‘Notes on Some Distinctive Features in Pepys’s Portraits’ (1911), printed in Occasional Papers Read by Members at Meetings of the Pepys Club (1917), vol. I, p. 38, where he writes about the ‘monstrous haycock of the periwig’ and goes on ‘a vast deal of the characteristic form of a man lies in the shape of his head, in the placing of his ear, and in the way in which his head is poised on his neck. All this disappeared under a periwig, and nothing of the upper part of a man differentiated him from his fellows except the actual features of his face.’

  9. Diary, 24 Oct. 1662.

  10. Diary, 9 Dec. 1663.

  11. Diary, 5 Mar. 1667.

  12. Diary, 1 Nov. 1666.

  13. Diary, 28 Mar. 1664, where he calls it a morning-gown. Perhaps both of them knew John Donne’s poem ‘To his mistress, going to bed’, with its line ‘my kingdom, safeliest when by one man manned’, although she called it her kingdom. Pepys acquired a copy of Donne’s poems in 1669.

  14. Diary, 11 Apr. 1669.

  15. Pepys’s father wrote to him about this, and about Elizabeth agreeing to travel back to London in the same coach as the officer, a man called Coleman, Diary, 24 June 1667. She invited him to a lunch party after the journey, but he failed to turn up.

  16. Diary, 13 Feb. 1663, the year Pepys decided against Valentines on grounds of expense. For Valentines, see Chapter 16, note 8.

  17. Diary, 31 Mar., 26 Apr., 1 May 1669.

  18. Diary, 12 July 1667.

  19. Diary, 1 Sept. 1663, 9 Oct. 1667.

  20. Diary, 12 Jan. 1668.

  21. Diary, 10 Sept. 1666.

  22. Diary, 17 June 1668.

  23. Diary, 8 Feb. 1660.

  24. Diary, 13 Jan. 1660.

  25. Diary, 31 Jan. 1660. The idealized Alcidiane’s story, a pseudo-historical romance, was told – in five volumes – in French, by an academician, Marin Le Roy de Gomberville (1600–1674). It is hard going.

  26. Diary, 15 Mar. 1660.

  27. Diary, 22 Dec. 1663.

  28. See Diary for 16 Jan. 1664 for the encounter under the chair, and 16 Feb. 1667 for the encounter that leaves Pepys ‘defessus’.

  29. Diary, 16 Jan. 1664. This is the first time that he goes into French for such an episode, and interestingly he used it both for the sexual part and for the expression of remorse.

  30. Diary, 7 Feb. 1669.

  31. Diary, 31 Oct. 1660.

  32. Diary, 12, 16, 17 Nov. 1663.

  33. Diary, 24 Oct. 1663.

  34. Diary, 2 Aug. 1667.

  35. Diary, 23 Sept. 1661.

  36. Pepys thinks he may have no child, Diary, 23 Jan. 1662; called a tumbler, 22 Mar. 1662 (note that the OED gives the sexual meaning of ‘tumbler’ as ‘impotent’, which Pepys would surely have resented). Elizabeth thinks herself with child, 6 Nov. 1663.

  37. For uncle Wight, 21, 22 Feb., 11,15 May.

  38. Diary, 26 July 1664.

  39. For Elizabeth thinking herself pregnant, 22, 27 Sept. 1664.

  40. Diary, 6 July 1667.

  41. Diary, 25 July 1667.

  42. Diary, 19 Sept. 16
67.

  43. Diary, 29 July 1668, etc.

  44. Diary, 1 Jan. 1663.

  45. Diary, 16 Oct. 1663.

  46. Diary, 1 July 1663, for the Sedley episode and Pepys’s private response to hearing Mennes and Batten’s account and their remark that ‘buggery is now almost grown as common among our gallants as in Italy, and the very pages begin to complain of their masters for it’.

  47. Twenty years later he was better informed: see p. 334 below.

  48. Diary, 1 Apr. 1667.

  49. For Sedley in the theatre, Diary, 4 Oct. 1664.

  50. Diary, 3oJune 1667. Pepys was visiting the Medway with Creed in the aftermath of the Dutch attack.

  51. Diary, 23 Nov. 1665, 4 Jan., 7 June 1666. The age of ‘Mrs Tooker’ is not given, but Pepys calls her a child. He seems to have just about stopped short of complete sexual intercourse with her, although only just. In Feb. 1667 Elizabeth told Pepys that the girl was said to have gonorrhoea, blaming it on her mother having her in bed with her when a man came to her, and in Mar. she said she had syphilis. No doubt she intended to warn him off. Pepys continued to find her attractive, ‘grown a little woman’, and kissed and fondled her. She dined with the Pepyses in Apr., and after this disappeared from the scene.

  52. Diary, 19 June 1666.

  53. See chapter on Jane Birch and Diary, 16 Sept. 1668. Nell Payne was much handled by Pepys in the summer of 1667 and dismissed by Elizabeth 5 Aug. 1667 for being a gossip and gadding abroad. When Pepys saw her on 4 Mar. 1669 she cried for joy, and he still had ‘a month’s mind’ to her, and thought he might go back for a bout with her another time.

  54. Betty Lane and her sister Doll, Mrs Bagwell and possibly Diana Crisp, given his ‘nulla puella negat’.

  55. Diary, 16 Oct. 1665.

  56. Diary, 1 Feb. 1667, ‘Je besa also her venter and cons and saw the poyle thereof

  57. Diary, 18 Aug. 1667. At St Dunstan’s Church ‘stood by a pretty, modest maid, whom I did labour to take by the hand and body; but she would not, but got further and further from me, and at last I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again; which seeing, I did forbear’.

  58. For episode when he forces Betty Michell to touch him in coach, Diary, 27 Jan., and 5, 11 Feb. 1667. For fantasies about Frances Stewart and Queen Catherine, Diary, 13, 15 July 1663.

  59. Diary, 13 July 1663, 8 Feb. 1664.

  60. Diary, 16 Dec. 1665.

  61. Diary, 23 Mar. 1666.

  62. Diary, 12 Sept. 1666.

  63. Diary, 2 Dec. 1666.

  64. Diary, 23 Dec. 1666.

  65. Diary, 11 Feb. 1667.

  14. The King

  1. Diary, 10 Sept. 1665. Pepys had nothing about letter kissing in the Diary for 1660.

  2. Charles addressed him by name for the first time 17 Apr. 1665, and Carteret reported his appreciation of Pepys’s abilities, Diary, 6 Nov. 1665.

  3. Diary, 23 May 1660. He also reported his early rising habits, 15 Aug. 1660.

  4. Peter Lely had in fact made his name under Cromwell and painted him and Edward Montagu. He simply changed his vein to become the supreme portraitist of the beauties at Charles II’s court.

  5. Diary, 7 Sept. 1662.

  6. Diary, 15 Nov. 1666.

  7. Diary, 16 June 1660.

  8. Diary, 13 Apr. 1661.

  9. Diary, 24 Nov. 1662.

  10. Diary, 15 May 1662.

  11. For the swearing, etc., Diary, 31 Aug. 1661. For the failure to settle bills, 15 May, 30 Nov. 1662.

  12. Diary, 22 Apr. 1667.

  13. Diary, 1 Feb. 1663.

  14. Diary, 15 May 1663.

  15. Diary, 4 July 1663.

  16. Diary, 19 Aug. 1661, 2 Nov. 1663.

  17. Pepys to duke of York, 17 May 1669, historical account of Navy Office duties cited in Further Correspondence of Samuel Pepys 1662–1679, ed. J. R. Tanner (1929), p. 232.

  18. Diary, 27 July 1663.

  19. Diary, 5 Apr. 1664.

  20. Diary, 26 July 1665.

  21. Gilbert Burnet, A History of My Own Time (1818), vol. I, p. 168. Burnet was for a few years chaplain to Charles II and a hostile witness.

  22. Diary, 2 Sept. 1666.

  23. Diary, 19 Oct. 1666; Pepys to duke of York, 17 Nov. 1666, Further Correspondence of Samuel Pepys, ed. J. R. Tanner, p. 147.

  24. Diary, 15, 21, 31 Oct., 14 Nov., 14, 31 Dec. 1666.

  25. Diary, 9 May (for Carteret), and 3 June (for Evelyn) 1667.

  26. Diary, 21 June 1667, Pepys reporting Hugh Cholmley.

  27. Diary, 12 July 1667, for both Cholmley’s and Pepys’s views.

  28. Diary, 29 July 1667.

  29. Diary, 27 July, 8, 9 Aug. 1667.

  30. Diary, 4 Sept. 1667.

  31. Diary, 25 Sept. 1667.

  32. Diary, 23 Sept. 1667.

  33. Diary, 28 Oct. 1667.

  34. Diary, 8 Dec. 1667.

  35. Diary, 16 Mar. 1669.

  36. Diary, 28 Apr. 1669.

  37. Diary, 2 Jan. 1668.

  38. Sir Robert Howard, an established playwright and a friend of Buckingham, was the author of the rest of the play, a comedy with a standard plot, apart from Sir Cautious’s desk. See article in the TLS, 28 Sept. 1973, p. 1,105, by Arthur H. Scouten and Robert D. Hume.

  39. Charles II to Henriette, 7 Mar. 1669, letter cited in article in previous note.

  40. Diary, 9 Mar. 1669. Pepys forgot that he had told a naval lieutenant about his Diary, 11 Apr. 1660. Coventry’s diary has not been discovered.

  41. Diary, 30 Mar. 1669.

  42. Diary, 30 Mar. 1669.

  43. Diary, 3–20 Mar. 1669, covers Coventry’s arrest, imprisonment and release.

  15. The Fire

  1. Diary, 28 Feb. 1667.

  2. Diary, 11 Nov. 1667.

  3. Diary, 26 Sept. 1666, for booksellers’ losses and Cromleholme’s, and 5 Oct. 1666.

  4. Diary, 5 Nov. 1666.

  5. Diary, 23 Sept. 1667. ‘The examinations endeed are very plain’ was all he wrote – the duke was, after all, his boss, and he had seen him working against the fire.

  6. Diary, 21 May 1668.

  7. Information from Nikolaus Pevsner, Buildings of England, London 1: City of London (1998), p. 322. The inscription was removed in 1685 when James II became king and put back in 1689. It was removed again in 1830.

  16. Three Janes

  1. Diary, 24, 28 July, 18 Aug., 3, 11, 18, 19 Sept. 1664.

  2. Diary, 26 Jan. 1665.

  3. Diary, 6 Apr. 1665.

  4. Diary, 18 Apr. 1666.

  5. Diary, 21 May 1662.

  6. John Turner is mentioned as being in London in Nov. and Dec. 1661, when Pepys consults him for a legal opinion, and is briefly back in town in the spring and autumn of 1662; again early in 1665 when he is Lenten reader for the Middle Temple feasts, and in the spring of 1669 – Pepys’s tribute to his character is made 27 Jan. 1669.

  7. Diary, 27 Jan. –18 Mar. 1664.

  8. The play-reading was 22 Apr. 1664, but the Diary disappointingly says ‘part of a good play’ without specifying which. For the Twelfth Night party, Diary, 6 Jan. 1669. During the seventeenth century it was customary to choose your Valentine from among your family, friends and neighbours, and a man who was chosen was obliged to give a present to the lady who chose him.

  9. Diary, 3 Feb. 1665. Pepys gives ‘leg’ in the singular, and perhaps one leg was less improper than two would have been. For the Valentine gifts, Diary, 15 Feb. 1669.

  10. Jane Turner’s sister was Elizabeth Dyke, her cousin Joyce Norton, from the Norfolk branch of the family, both of whom appear as a sort of chorus accompanying Jane at dinners and outings with Sam.

  11. ‘The’ was obviously named for Lady Theophila Coke of Durdans: see note 25 to Chapter 1.

  12. For rude letter to Elizabeth, 18 Oct. 1660 (‘The’ can’t have been more than eight or nine at this point); for chafing about coronation, 25 Mar. 1661; for harpsichord, 22, 26 Feb., 31 Mar. 1661; for Valentine, 3 Mar. 1663.r />
  13. Diary, 16 Mar. 1664.

  14. For wine, Diary, 17 June 1663; for brother’s funeral, 17, 23 Dec. 1663; for horses, 21 Apr. 1669; for visit to Povey, 11 Aug. 1663.

  15. Diary, 11 Aug. 1663.

  16. Diary, 22 Feb. 1661, and for her illness, Diary, 14, 24 Nov., 5, 18, 23 Dec. 1661, 16 Feb. 1662 when Pepys attends service with special sermon at St Bride’s on her recovery and escorts her home.

  17. Diary, 3 Feb., 3 Mar. 1665.

  18. Diary, 30 Nov. 1666.

  19. Diary, 11 Dec. 1666.

  20. Nothing more is known of Jane Turner except that all her four children married well and she predeceased her husband, in 1686 according to Wheatley’s note; he died in 1689. Readers of the Diary have to distinguish carefully between her and Pepys’s gossipy Navy Office neighbour, another Mrs Turner (Elizabeth), who also had a daughter called Betty. He sometimes calls Jane ‘my cousin Turner’, sometimes ‘Mrs Turner’, sometimes ‘Madam Turner’. Neither Wheat-ley’s nor Latham’s index is entirely reliable on the Turners.

  21. Diary, 26 Aug. 1661.

  22. Diary, 11 Jan. 1664. For Jane acting as Hewer’s housekeeper, see Arthur Bryant, Samuel Pepys: The Saviour of the Navy (1938), p. 228.

  23. For Jane carrying books, Diary, 18 Feb. 1660; for dining with Pepys parents, 4 Mar., for knitting, 10 Mar., and for early rising for washing, 12 Mar. 1660. For her illness, 29 June, 2 July 1660. For move and house washing, 17 July, and more washing of house, 11 Sept. For hair-combing, 14 Aug. For sleeping in their bedroom, 29 Aug. For Pepys beating her, 1 Dec; for sitting by his bed, 12 Dec; for turkey cooking, 23 Dec, and for running about in her smock, 27 Dec 1660.

  24. Diary, 18 Apr. 1662.

  25. Diary, 28 Sept. 1662. Old Mr Pepys said he did not want to have Wayneman back, 11 June 1663.

  26. Diary, 1, 6 Aug. 1662.

  27. Diary, 14 Sept. 1662.

  28. Diary, 5 Nov. 1662.

  29. Diary, 8 Jan., 2 Feb. 1663.

  30. Diary, 28 July 1663.

  31. Diary, 14 Nov. 1663.

  32. Diary, 29 Mar. 1666.

  33. Diary, 20 Sept. 1667. It was an early performance of a comedy by Dry den’s brother-in-law, James Howard.

  34. Diary, 20 Sept., 21 Oct. 1666.

  35. Diary, 7 July 1667.

  36. Diary, 11 Feb. 1668.

 

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