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SAMUEL PEPYS AND THE WORLD HE LIVED IN.

CHAPTER I.

PEPYS BEFORE THE DIARY.

“He was a pollard man, without the top (i. e. the reason as the source of ideas, or immediate yet not sensuous truths, having their evidence in themselves; or the imagination or idealizing power, by symbols mediating between the reason and the understanding), but on this account more broadly and luxuriantly branching out from the upper trunk.”—Coleridge’s MS. note in his copy of the “Diary” (Notes and Queries, 1st S. vol. vi. p. 215).

Samuel Pepys was the first of a well-established stock to make a name in the outer world, but since his time the family can boast of having had amongst its members a Court physician, a bishop, and a lord chancellor.

The earliest recorded Pepys was named Thomas, and appears, on the authority of the Court Rolls of the manor of Pelhams, in Cottenham, to have been bailiff of the Abbot of Crowland’s lands in Cambridgeshire, in the early part of the reign of Henry VI.[1] From that time the family flourished, and there seems to be some reason for believing that certain members enriched themselves with the spoils of the abbey lands in the time of Henry VIII.

Before the Diarist became known, one of the most distinguished members of the family was Richard Pepys, created Lord Chief Justice of Ireland by Charles I. When the King was executed, Richard resigned his office; but he enjoyed the favour of Cromwell, and resumed the place. As he did not die until 1678, it is strange that there should be no allusion to him in the “Diary.”

The branch from which Samuel was descended had not much money; and his father, being a younger son, came to London and became a tailor. This descent in the social scale has caused much misapprehension, and his enemies did not forget to taunt him on his connection with tailoring; but it is a well-accredited axiom that trade does not injure gentry. Some remarks of Pepys himself upon his family have been greatly misunderstood. Referring to the non-appearance of any account of the Pepyses in Fuller’s “Worthies,” he writes:—“But I believe, indeed, our family were never considerable.”[2] Dr. Doran paraphrased this into: “Let others say of his family what they might: he, for his own part, did not believe that it was of anything like gentle descent.”[3] This is a pure blunder, for Pepys merely meant that none of the family had made much mark; and he would have been very indignant had any one told him that they were not gentle.

Samuel, the fifth child of John and Margaret Pepys, was born on February 23rd, 1632, either at Brampton, a village near Huntingdon, or in London. There is something to be said in favour of each supposition, but, as the registers of Brampton church do not commence until the year 1654,[4] the question cannot now be definitely settled. We have Pepys’s own authority for the statement that his father and mother were married at Newington, in Surrey, on October 15th, 1626.[5] The register of marriages of St. Mary, Newington, has been searched, but the name of Pepys occurs neither in the years 1625, 1626, nor in 1627,[6] and Mrs. John Pepys’s maiden name is still unknown. In early youth, Samuel went to a school at Huntingdon, as appears by a passage in the “Diary” (March 15th, 1659–60), where he writes: “I met Tom Alcock, one that went to school with me at Huntingdon, but I had not seen him this sixteen years.” He seems to have spent his youth pretty equally between town and country, for on one occasion, when he was walking over the fields to Kingsland, he remembered the time when, as a boy, he lived there, and “used to shoot with my bow and arrow in these fields.”[7] When he left Huntingdon he entered St. Paul’s School, and remained there until he had reached the age of seventeen. In after life, on the occasion of an official visit to Mercers’ Hall, he remembered the time when he was a petitioner for his exhibition.[8] He was a stout Roundhead in his boyish days, and this fact was remarked upon, to his great chagrin, in after years, by his friend and schoolfellow Mr. Christmas. He went to see the execution of Charles I. at Whitehall, and made himself conspicuous by saying on his return that, were he to preach upon the event of the day, he should select as his text the verse: “The memory of the wicked shall rot.” He was in some fear that Mr. Christmas might remember this also, but he was happy to find that that gentleman had left school before the incident occurred.[9] Pepys always took a lively interest in the welfare of his school, to which references are frequently made in the “Diary.”

In 1650, his name occurs as a sizar on the boards of Trinity College, Cambridge; but before going to reside at the University, on March 5, 1650–51,[10] he was entered at Magdalene College, having probably been led to make the change by the greater inducements held out to him by the latter college. Here he was elected into one of Mr. Spendluffe’s scholarships in the following month; and two years later, on October 14, 1653, he was preferred to one on Dr. John Smith’s foundation. His father was at this time described as a citizen of London.

Little is known of Samuel’s academic career, during which he does not appear to have gained much distinction; and remarks in various parts of the “Diary” show that his conduct was not such as became a Puritan. The College books can be brought as a witness against him, for we learn from that source that, on October 21st, 1653, “Peapys and Hind were solemnly admonished ... for having been scandalously over-served with drink the night before.” Still, we must not jump to the conclusion that his time was entirely wasted, for he evidently carried into his busy life a good stock of classical learning. It was while he was at the University that he made the acquaintance of the learned Selden, from whom he borrowed the collection of ballads which formed the basis of the famous Pepysian collection. He relates that, while at Cambridge, he wrote a romance entitled, “Love a Cheate,” which he tore up on the 30th of January, 1663–64. This work of destruction must have been performed with some feelings of regret, for he tells us that he rather liked the tale, and wondered that he had ever been able to write so well. His previous literary performances had consisted in the concocting of some anagrams upon Mrs. Elizabeth Whittle, afterwards the wife of Sir Stephen Fox.[11] It is not recorded at what time Pepys left college, but it must have been either in 1654 or 1655. He was made Master of Arts by proxy, in June, 1660, the grace being passed on the 26th of that month.

On the 1st of December, 1655,[12] when he was still without any settled means of support, Pepys married Elizabeth St. Michel, a beautiful and portionless girl of fifteen. Although there is extant a letter from Balthasar St. Michel to Pepys (dated from Deal, February 8th, 1673–74), in which the history of Mrs. Pepys’s family is set forth, Lord Braybrooke was contented with the information on her monument, and merely added that she was educated in a convent, which in point of fact she was not. The letter alluded to was printed as far back as the year 1841,[13] and yet I cannot find that the history contained in it has ever been used by the biographers of Pepys. What is even more remarkable than Lord Braybrooke’s silence respecting it, is the fact that the Rev. John Smith, who published the letter, overlooked it when he wrote his introduction. Mons. St. Michel was of a good family in Anjou, but having turned Huguenot at the age of twenty-one, when in the German service, his father disinherited him, and he was left penniless. He came over to England in the retinue of Henrietta Maria, on her marriage with Charles I., as one of her Majesty’s gentleman carvers; but the Queen dismissed him on finding out that he was a Protestant, and did not go to mass. Being a handsome man with courtly manners, he gained the affections of the daughter of Sir Francis Kingsmall (lately left a widow by an Irish squire), who married him against the wishes of her family, and, with £1,500 which they raised, the newly-married couple started for France, in the hope of recovering, if possible, some part of the family estates. Unhappily, they were taken prisoners at sea, with all their goods, by the Dunkirkers, and when released they settled at Bideford, in Devonshire. Here, or near by, Elizabeth and Balthasar and the rest of the family were born.

In course of time they all went to France, and the father, in command of a company of foot, assisted at the taking of Dunkirk. He occupied his time with propositions of perpetual motion and other visionary schemes, and consequently brought himself and all dependent upon him to the brink of poverty. While he was away from Paris, some devout Roman Catholics persuaded Madame St. Michel to place her daughter in the nunnery of the Ursulines. The father was enraged at this action, but managed to get Elizabeth out of the nunnery after she had been there twelve days. Thinking that France was a dangerous place to live in, he hurried his family back to England, and shortly afterwards Elizabeth married Pepys. Her father was greatly pleased that she had become the wife of a true Protestant; and she herself said to him, kissing his eyes, “Dear father, though in my tender years I was by my low fortune in this world deluded to popery by the fond dictates thereof, I have now (joined with my riper years, which give me more understanding) a man to my husband too wise, and one too religious in the Protestant religion, to suffer my thoughts to bend that way any more.”

There are several references in the “Diary” to Mrs. Pepys’s father and mother, who seem never to have risen out of the state of poverty into which they had sunk. On May 2, 1662, Mons. St. Michel took out a patent, in concert with Sir John Collidon and Sir Edward Ford,[14] for the purpose of curing smoky chimneys; but this scheme could not have been very successful, as a few months afterwards he was preparing to go to Germany in order to fight against the Turks.[15] Pepys gave him some work to do in 1666, and Mrs. Pepys carried the account-books that he was to rule; but such jobs as these must have given him but a sorry living, and in the following year he again proposed to go abroad. Pepys sent him three jacobuses in gold to help him on his journey.[16] We hear nothing more of either father or mother, with the exception of an allusion to their pleasure at seeing the prosperous state of their daughter[17]—a prosperity in which they certainly did not share.

This account of Mrs. Pepys’s parentage has led us away from the early days of Pepys, when, with improvident passion, he married his young wife; and we will therefore return to the year 1655. Early marriages were then far from uncommon, and Mrs. Pepys’s beauty was considered as forming a very valid excuse for the improvidence of the match. There seems to be some reason for believing that she was of a dark complexion, for her husband on one occasion was mad with her for dressing herself according to the fashion in fair hair.[18] Sir Edward Montagu, who was Pepys’s first cousin one remove (Samuel’s grandfather and Sir Edward’s mother being brother and sister), gave a helping hand to the imprudent couple, and allowed them to live in his house. The Diarist alludes to this time, when, some years afterwards, he writes of how his wife “used to make coal fires, and wash” his “foul clothes with her own hand,” in their little room at Lord Sandwich’s.[19]

Samuel does not appear to have lived with his father after he had grown up, and as old John Pepys was not a very thriving tradesman, it seems likely that Montagu had previously assisted his young kinsman. Indeed, it was probably under his patronage that Samuel went to the University.

The Diarist seems to have held some official position in the year 1656, because on Thursday, August 7th, a pass was granted “to John Pepys and his man with necessaries for Holland, being on the desire of Mr. Samll. Pepys.”[20] John Pepys had probably long been in the habit of going backwards and forwards to Holland, for Samuel writes (January 24th, 1665–66): “We went through Horslydowne, where I never was since a little boy, that I went to enquire after my father, whom we did give over for lost coming from Holland.” Whether these journeys were undertaken in the way of business, or whether they had any connection with Montagu’s affairs, we cannot now tell. That Samuel acted as a sort of agent for Montagu, we have evidence; and among the Rawlinson Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library is a memorandum of the payment to him on General Montagu’s part for the ransom of the Marquis of Baydez (22nd January, 1656–57).

On March 26th, 1658, he underwent an operation for the stone, a disease that seems to have been inherited. The operation was successfully performed, and ever after he made a practice of celebrating the anniversary of this important event in his life with thanksgiving.

In 1659 he accompanied Sir Edward Montagu in the “Naseby,” when that admiral made his expedition to the Sound; and he was very surprised to learn afterwards how negotiations had been carried on of which at the time he was quite ignorant. This is not the place for a history of the various stages that led to the Restoration, but a passing allusion to one of these may be allowed here, as the particulars are given in the “Diary.” When Sir Edward Montagu left England for the Sound, he said to the Protector Richard, on parting with him, that “he should rejoice more to see him in his grave at his return home, than that he should give way to such things as were then in hatching, and afterwards did ruin him.”[21] Finding the condition of affairs in England hopeless, Montagu took advantage of this expedition to correspond with Charles II.; but he had to be careful and secret, for his fellow-plenipotentiary, Algernon Sidney, who suspected him, was an enemy.[22] Pepys’s remark on finding out what had been going on under his nose was, “I do from this raise an opinion of him, to be one of the most secret men in the world, which I was not so convinced of before.”[23]

On Pepys’s return to England he was employed in the office of Mr., afterwards Sir George, Downing, as a clerk of the Exchequer connected with the pay of the army, and soon afterwards commenced to keep the “Diary” which we now possess.

The account of the incidents of Pepys’s early life must be more or less fragmentary, as they can be obtained merely from occasional allusions; and it is only in the next chapter, in which we see Pepys in the “Diary,” that we can obtain any full idea of the man as painted by himself. Before passing on to this part of our subject, it will be well to set down a few notes on the “Diary” as a book. The book has thrown such a flood of light upon the history and manners of the middle of the seventeenth century, that we are apt to forget the fact that before the year 1825 the world knew nothing of this man of gossip. Yet so ungrateful are we to our benefactors, that the publication of the “Diary” did an immense injury to the writer’s reputation. Previously he was known as a staid, trustworthy, and conscientious man of business; as a patron of science and literature, and as a President of the Royal Society. Jeremy Collier says, he was “a philosopher of the severest morality.” Since 1825 we have been too apt to forget the excellence of his official life, and to think of him only as a busybody and a quidnunc.

When Pepys’s library was presented to Magdalene College, Cambridge, by his nephew, John Jackson, in 1724, there were, among the other treasures, six small volumes of closely-written MS. in shorthand (upwards of three thousand pages in all), which attracted little or no notice until after the publication of Evelyn’s “Diary.” Then it was that the Hon. and Rev. George Neville, Master of the College, drew them out of their obscurity, and submitted them to his kinsman, the well-known statesman, Lord Grenville, who had as a law student practised shorthand. Lord Grenville deciphered a few of the pages, and drew up an alphabet and list of arbitrary signs. These were handed to John Smith, an undergraduate of St. John’s College, who undertook to decipher the whole. He commenced his labours in the spring of 1819, and completed them in April, 1822—having thus worked for nearly three years, usually for twelve and fourteen hours a day.[24] What was remarkable in all this was, that in the Pepysian library there rested a little volume which contained the account of Charles II.’s escape after the battle of Worcester, taken down in shorthand by Pepys from the King’s dictation, and written out by himself in long-hand. Here, therefore, was the key that would have unlocked the “Diary” quite overlooked. Lord Braybrooke made the statement that the cipher used by Pepys “greatly resembled that known by the name of Rich’s system;” but this was misleading, as the system really adopted was the earlier one of Thomas Shelton. Mr. J. E. Bailey, F.S.A., communicated a very valuable paper, “On the Cipher of Pepys’s Diary,” to the Manchester Literary Club in 1876, in which he gave particulars of the various old systems of shorthand, and expressed the opinion that Pepys made himself familiar with Shelton’s “Tachygraphy”[25] while a student at Cambridge. The earliest edition of Rich’s “Pen’s Dexterity” was published in 1654, while in 1642 Shelton could refer to twenty years’ experience as a shorthand-writer. When the Rev. Mynors Bright was about to decipher the “Diary” afresh, he consulted Shelton’s book, a copy of which, with other works on shorthand, is preserved in the Pepysian Library. Mr. Bright informs us that, “When Pepys wished to keep anything particularly concealed, he wrote his cipher generally in French, sometimes in Latin, or Greek, or Spanish. This gave me a great deal of trouble. Afterwards he changed his plan and put in dummy letters. I was quite puzzled at this, and was nearly giving up in despair the hope of finding out his device, but at last, by rejecting every other letter, I made out the words. It would have been better for Pepys’s credit if these passages could not have been deciphered, as all of them are quite unfit for publication.”

Pepys was a great lover of shorthand, and he was always ready to invent a character, as it was then called, for a friend. He used the art in drafting his public and private letters; and although he was forced to discontinue his “Diary” in 1669, on account of the weakness of his eyesight, he continued its use throughout his life.

We learn from the “Diary” itself some particulars of how it was written. The incidents of each day were dotted down in short, and then the writer shut himself up in his office to fill up all the details. Sometimes he was in arrear: thus we read, on January 1st, 1662–63, “So to my office to set down these two or three days’ journal;” on September 24th, 1665, “Then I in the cabin to writing down my journal for these last seven days to my great content;” and on November 10th, 1665, “Up and entered all my journal since the 28th of October, having every day’s passage well in my head, though it troubles me to remember it.”

Lord Braybrooke, who first introduced the “Diary” to the public, had no very accurate notions of the duties of an editor; and he treated his manuscript in a very unsatisfactory manner. Large portions were omitted without explanation, and apparently without reason; and although much was added to succeeding editions, still the reader might well say—

“That cruel something unpossess’d

Corrodes and leavens all the rest.”

The third edition, published in 1848, contained a large mass of restored passages, amounting, it is said, to not less than one-fourth of the entire work. Some fresh notes were added to the fourth edition, published in 1854; but no alteration of the text was made beyond “the correction of a few verbal errors and corrupt passages hitherto overlooked.” Subsequent editions have been mere reprints of these. In 1875 appeared the first volume of the Rev. Mynors Bright’s entirely new edition, with about one-third of matter never yet published, all of which was of the true Pepysian flavour. Here was a treat for the lovers of the “Diary” which they little expected.

Having traced the particulars of Pepys’s life to the year 1659, and described the way in which the “Diary” was written, and the means by which it first saw the light, I will now pass on to notice, in the next chapter, the chief personal incidents recorded in the book itself.