Whatever Pepys’s private feelings when he passed the protector’s head in Westminster Hall, and whatever his fears that there might be another political ‘turn’, he did not let himself forget that he owed his advance to the new regime that had put it there. In January 1661 he was in a ‘handsome and thriving condition’ and well settled at Seething Lane.1 For Pepys, the new house was the outward sign of his progress; it became almost the emblem of himself. Even though it was not his own freehold, he was from the start obsessed with altering, decorating and improving the place. If he was not rebuilding the staircase he was enlarging a window, adding an extra storey, putting in a new chimney piece, inserting a door where no door had been before or smartening up the cellar. It was rarely free of workmen in all the time he lived in it; the Diary is crammed with references to joiners, plasterers, painters and upholsterers, and the decorations grew more sumptuous from year to year. Even in the first months he refloored, redecorated and installed gilded leather hangings in the dining room. ‘I pray God keep me from setting my mind too much upon it,’ he wrote of his feeling for his precious house, but such prayers were formalities, and nothing was going to wean him from his passion.2 For the next twelve years Seething Lane was the centre of his life. It was to be not just clean, orderly and comfortable but elegantly laid out as to staircases and entrance hall, luxuriously decorated, with displays of pictures and maps; with silver and damask in the dining room, books for both husband and wife arranged on well-built shelves and rooms arranged for entertaining – dinners and card parties – as well as for music-making and quiet private study.
Of course, like every house at that time, it smelt of bodies and hair not often washed, of the frequently overflowing ‘house of office’ underneath the building, either his own or the neighbours’, which needed emptying regularly; and of the chamber pots that had to be carried up and down and were, not surprisingly, sometimes spilt, a cause of merriment to Elizabeth as she cleared up the mess.3 But it bore no resemblance either to the house in which he had grown up or to the narrow farm house at Brampton. There may have been memories of rooms at Durdans and Hinchingbrooke in his head, and he was inspired above all by his sense of himself as a man of ‘liberal genius’ – that is, one temperamentally attached to gentlemanly pursuits and studies.4 He might be working on figures, contracts and estimates across the courtyard at the Navy Board, or tramping along the river to Deptford to inspect the shipyards; he might not have the elegant appearance or bearing of an aristocrat; but his inner self was that of an aesthete and an artist, and the house represented his aspiration to live by higher cultural values.
Within months of moving in he doubled the size of his household; they were now a family of six. This must have been a relief to Jane, who had helped them single-handedly through the move from Axe Yard. She persuaded Pepys to take her younger brother Wayneman on as his boy servant, after he had made a brief trial of another and sacked him. Wayneman was between ten and twelve years old, and she had to teach him his duties, how to put his master to bed, tidying away his clothes and fetching nightgown and cap, and how to comb his hair, the bedtime procedure Pepys enjoyed so much and sometimes made an occasion for horseplay: Jane may have been relieved to delegate this too. Pepys thought him a nice-looking boy and was pleased to find he could just about read, and might be taught to do better; he liked teaching as well as having his hair combed.5 Wayneman was provided with a livery, and sometimes called ‘young Pepys’ by the neighbours.6 As for a child of their own: a room was set aside hopefully to become the nursery.7
Pall was also offered a place in the household. She was still living at Salisbury Court with her parents, and, to make sure she had no illusions about the position they expected her to occupy with them, she was told bluntly that she was to come, ‘not as a sister in any respect but as a servant’. The tears she shed, Pepys decided, were brought on by her joy at the prospect of working for them; and perhaps she did expect to have more fun with Elizabeth and Jane than with her mother, and accepted that a brother who had risen to such heights of success might be entitled to forget to be civil to his own sister.8 She arrived early in January 1661 and, to emphasize what had already been said, was forbidden to sit down at table with her brother and sister-in-law on her first day in the house.9
The third new member of the family came to them through Pepys’s friendship with Blackborne. The Diary is studded with references to drinks, meals and other meetings between the two men, as Black-borne, intent on salvaging something from the wreck of his past career, put his knowledge, contacts and advice at Pepys’s disposal; in exchange he got his sister’s young son William Hewer a job with Pepys, in the combined roles of personal servant and clerk. It was a master stroke for a man faced with the end of the regime in which he had flourished, to get his nephew into the organization from which he himself had been ejected – a Darwinian coup, ensuring that his family genes retained their influence. And Will Hewer succeeded beyond any dream Blackborne can have had. Pepys noted his arrival at the house in Seething Lane but omitted any account of how he came to employ him other than that he was Blackborne’s nephew.10
Will, the son of Thomas Hewer, a stationer, was an unfledged, fair-haired boy of seventeen, and Pepys felt free to bully him and box his ears, sometimes reducing him to tears.11 But he learnt to defend himself and to argue back. Over the next few years he even managed to misbehave with some style. He stayed out late. He became too friendly with the maids, corrupting them, according to Pepys, although it seems to have meant little more than discussing their employer with them behind his back. He got drunk. He refused to go to church. He wore his hat in the house and flung his cloak dramatically over his shoulder in the street ‘like a Ruffian’.12 He said he would not be treated like a slave.13 In short, he did his best to become the son Pepys failed to beget. He was only ten years younger than his master, but you would hardly guess that from Pepys’s treatment of him. Pepys complained of Will’s behaviour to his uncle Blackborne more than once, and the point was even reached when he angrily turned him out of the house – though not out of his clerkship – and told him he must live in lodgings. Will was much too good at his work to be sacked, and Pepys defended him when he was attacked by others. In January 1662, for instance, there was a complaint from the highest official of the Navy Board that Will was telling office business to his parliamentarian uncle, Blackborne, described as ‘a rogue’, and Pepys was advised to sack him. Though troubled, Pepys did no such thing. He simply had a cautionary word with Will, who took the warning and presumably became more discreet in visiting his uncle Blackborne. Nothing more was heard of the matter.14
The arrival of this clever, good-natured young man enriched the emotional possibilities within the household. He was only two years younger than Elizabeth, and if he took on the role of son to Pepys, he also seems to have given his heart to her. It was an innocent passion as such things go, and also a definitive one. When some years later Pepys tried to persuade him to marry Pall, Will made it clear that this was out of the question, adding that he had no intention of marrying anyone. He never went back on this resolve. At Christmas 1667 he offered Elizabeth a diamond locket, which she kept for some weeks before showing it to her husband, who insisted on her returning it: since Will was earning only £30 a year, and the locket was worth £40, he had obviously already learnt how to profit from his position in the office. Pepys had no objection to that, but suffered from twinges of jealousy over his friendship with Elizabeth; she often invited Will to escort her when she went out or to keep her company at home when her perpetually busy husband was absent.15
But at the beginning, in the summer of 1660 when Will arrived, he was nothing more than a bright, shy boy, ready to make himself useful. He read Latin with his master, learnt to use his shorthand when Pepys asked him to; and he could soon turn out accounts every bit as neatly and nimbly. Another thing they had in common was a name that defeated almost everyone who tried to write it down. Will Hewer’s appeared in variations ranging exotically through Ewre, Ewere and Eure to Hewers, Hewest, Yewers and Youar, though he seems to have stuck to ‘Hewer’ himself, as Pepys did to Pepys, although he appeared as Pepies, Paypes, Pepes, Peeps, Peppiss, Peipes, Peepys, Pypss and more.16 Hewer’s intellectual and business abilities, his even temper, his central position in the household as friend to both husband and wife and the way he withstood Pepys’s bullying made him not only a surrogate son but, as the years went by, his closest friend.
The lease of the house in Axe Yard (‘my poor little house’) was got rid of in the autumn of 1660, although not before Pepys had taken advantage of its emptiness to entertain two different young women there: his old friend Betty Lane, with whom he was ‘exceeding free’ and she ‘not unfree to take it’; and Diana, daughter of Mrs Crisp, his neighbour in the Yard. He had suspected Diana of being not as good as she should be over drinks at her mother’s house one evening, when her brother Laud was leaving to serve Lord Sandwich; when Pepys got her alone he found her surprisingly compliant, and for the first time resorted to a foreign language in the Diary to record his success: ‘nulla puella negat’, he wrote in Latin, meaning ‘the girl refused nothing’.17 He salved his conscience towards Elizabeth by taking her out and buying her a pearl necklace costing £4.10s. the following day. This was a variant on his system of moral accounting, in which he made vows – to abstain from drink or theatregoing, for instance – and paid money into the poor box to atone for each broken vow; by spending money on his wife he compensated for his infidelity.
He had now become, in addition to his other offices, a justice of the peace, his rising path crossing with that of Richard Sherwyn, the JP who had presided over his wedding five years before: Sherwyn was then secretary to the Treasury commissioners and a valued colleague of Downing; now he was out, reduced to finding what work he could as a humble clerk.18 Pepys’s new status was full of these surprises. He found himself receiving a five-gun salute when he escorted Lord Sandwich to his ship. He was invited to dine by the lord mayor. He was able to escort his wife into the presence room at court to observe the queen mother at close quarters: ‘a very little plain old woman and nothing more’ is what he saw.19 Men who would not have deigned to speak to him a year ago now came cap in hand, as he noted with relish, and sea captains were so deferential that he had to learn ‘how to receive so much reverence, which at the begining I could not tell how to do’.20 It took time for him to believe in himself as a gentleman; on the death of his uncle Robert in the summer of 1661 he exaggerated the value of his Brampton inheritance to his colleagues at the Navy Office, because he felt he must try to impress them.21
He was the youngest of the officers there, the poorest, the least experienced and one of the few without a title. The two he got to know first, because they were also his new neighbours in Seething Lane, Sir William Batten and Sir William Penn, were naval commanders of long service with distinguished fighting records; the Pepyses gave their first dinner party for them in January 1661. Penn had taken Jamaica for the English, and Batten, a man of sixty, had been surveyor of the navy under Charles I and knew everything there was to know about the naval yards where ships were built. To a junior colleague who had been to sea only twice and had no knowledge of ships, they were potentially alarming figures. Both were West Country men who had gone to sea as boys; Batten had trained Penn, who was a generation younger, not yet forty. Both had served the commonwealth and made good money, and Penn had acquired estates in Ireland. Both owned fine country houses at Walthamstow. Penn had risen to vice-admiral under Cromwell. Blackborne told Pepys that Penn had put on a ‘pretence of sanctity’ in order to get promotion; but puritan piety had been required when he was young and was standard at the time, as Sandwich’s history bore witness.22 Penn had fought against the Dutch alongside Blake and Monck, and pursued Prince Rupert furiously in the Mediterranean. In 1652 he claimed he had not set foot on land for a whole year; but he was not just brawn and bluster, for he had drawn up a code of naval tactics for Cromwell and served as a commissioner on his Navy Board. He had also had some inconclusive contact with the exiled Charles and been briefly imprisoned by Cromwell; yet he had accepted a knighthood from Richard Cromwell. With Monck’s support he made another approach to Charles, which explained his favourable reception and second knighthood in 1660, and his reappointment as a commissioner to the new Navy Board.
In short, like the majority of his fellow countrymen, he had changed and adapted with time and circumstance. Batten too had gone over to Charles for a while in the early 1650s – he had received his knighthood from him then – and then thought better of it; and finally both men had contrived to be on the right side at the right time. When Pepys, drinking at the Dolphin with them, listened to them ‘betwitt’ and reproach one another with their behaviour under the commonwealth, he said he felt ashamed to hear them; but there must have been a lot of this sort of talk going on, and Pepys’s remark seems oddly inappropriate given his own patrons’ history.23 Batten bought some commonwealth ships’ carvings and coats of arms that were being sold off, some to be made into garden ornaments, others to burn on the night of Charles II’s coronation, which suggests he didn’t take these things too seriously.24 He had been reappointed surveyor to the board, and Pepys observed that he lived like a prince with his young second wife in their Walthamstow house. Penn’s half-Dutch wife came from their Irish estates to join him in London; Pepys described her as ‘an old Dutchwoman’. They had a daughter Pegg, and two sons, the elder, William, at Oxford, just getting into trouble for his Nonconformity: he became a Quaker, to his father’s initial fury, and was the future founder of Pennsylvania.25 Pepys was snobbish about both families, which he had no right to be; his only claim to superiority was his university education, but it allowed him to look down his nose at them for not being gentlemen. The truth was they were exactly the sort of naval officers he came to approve of, ‘tarpaulins’ who had worked their way up from boyhood and knew all the ropes, as opposed to the gentlemen officers who expected to be given commands without knowing anything of the discipline of the sea. Penn in particular was an energetic and intelligent man, and soon drew up a new version of his code of tactics that became standard, put out as ‘The Duke of York’s Sailing and Fighting Instructions’. ‘Vieux Pen’, as the duke called him in 1665 when he was forty-three, went to sea against the Dutch again, although ill with gout, was appointed ‘Captain of the Fleet’ and fought bravely.26
The two Sir Williams were sociable and hospitable neighbours, entertaining Pepys and Elizabeth with meals, theatre expeditions and visits to Walthamstow. Pepys was intrigued by the black domestic servants each of them owned, Mingo and Jack, slaves from the African trade; it was fashionable for officers to own one, and Sandwich had also acquired a little Turk and a Negro boy for his family.27 Batten invited the Pepyses to celebrate his election to parliament at Rochester with an outing and a festive dinner, and his third wedding anniversary with some fancy pies; on another occasion Penn invited them to his eighteenth wedding anniversary, at which eighteen mince pies were served. The three men arranged to watch the pre-coronation procession together. There were occasional fallings out of the kind neighbours have – Lady Batten felt that Mrs Pepys did not show her all the respect she should – but there was a great deal of conviviality and cooperation too. Pepys and Batten collaborated on having new top floors for their houses constructed in the shipyards at Deptford. Pepys joined in bawdy songs with Penn, but he also listened carefully when he talked of ‘things and persons that I did not understand’ during the commonwealth.28 At first he shared an office with them, but in 1662 he insisted on a private office for himself, leaving the two Sir Williams to share.
While Pepys was head of the family at Seething Lane, he remained a member of another family in which he felt almost equally at home, but where the role he had to play was quite different. When ‘my Lady’, countess of Sandwich, arrived in town in October 1660, he naturally called on her at once. He found her alone at supper in the Whitehall lodgings, and she pressed him to sit down with her and to stay on afterwards, ‘she showing me most extraordinary love and kindness’ and talking to him about his uncle Robert at Brampton, known to her for many years at Hinchingbrooke.29 She was now thirty-five and mother of eight children, all alive and well including the twin boys – a rare record of success at that date. Her life had been distinguished by courage and discretion, since she had been more often than not in charge of her husband’s house and estate in his absence, and supported him through difficult and dangerous times year in, year out. Entering the new and transformed London society for the first time as a countess and preparing to appear at court, she may have been a little nervous of what she would find and what was expected of her, not least by her husband. And indeed nothing in her life till then had prepared her for the court of the new king, with its pursuit of pleasure, its nights spent in gambling, its showy, competitive beauties; her beauty lay in a gentle face, thoughtful eyes and a tranquil mind. Pepys, whom she had known for years, could still be talked to in the old way; they could gossip, and she could trust him.
Two days after her talk with Pepys she invited him to bring Elizabeth to supper with her, Lord Sandwich being absent at the chancellor’s; and, on Sandwich’s going to sea a few days after that, Pepys became a regular visitor at the Whitehall lodgings. He had after all lived there and knew all the servants as well as the children; and although no longer exactly a servant himself, something of the role remained, and he made himself generally obliging and useful. When a French maid arrived, Elizabeth went along to interpret, because Lady Sandwich knew no French, a language not much studied in puritan families during the civil war and commonwealth period. Pepys noted that it was on this occasion, in November 1660, that Lord Sandwich, for the first time ever, took notice of Elizabeth ‘as my wife’. For five years she had been invisible; now suddenly he could see her.30
Lady Sandwich did nothing to discourage Pepys from considering himself as one of the family, and he felt free to turn up for meals either at Whitehall or at the Wardrobe, where she moved in May 1661, whenever he felt like it. Sometimes he ate with the servants, sometimes with my Lady and sometimes, when he was there, with my Lord. For instance, Pepys noted the excellent quality of the food when he dropped in casually with Creed in May 1661 and ‘we, with the rest of the servants in the Hall, sat down and eat of the best cold meats that ever I eat on in all my life’.31 A week later he enjoyed a venison pasty for dinner with Lord Sandwich and all the officers of the Wardrobe. He also noted how the food deteriorated once Sandwich went to sea again in June and his wife economized: ‘went and dined with my Lady; who now my Lord is gone, is come to her poor housekeeping again’.32
The Diary provides a marvellously detailed study of this near-feudal arrangement prevailing in the middle of the seventeenth century and of its slow shift into more modern attitudes. In 1660 Pepys still took his membership of the Sandwich household absolutely for granted; for years he had eaten and slept among the Sandwich servants whenever he chose to, and he still indulged in casual sexual familiarities with the housekeeper Sarah. He also knew that he owed duty, deference and practical assistance to Lady Sandwich, especially in the absence of her husband; both of them enjoyed his attentiveness to her. For instance, in January 1661 he promised to accompany her to Chatham to show her over the ships, my Lord having been much too busy to do so and now gone to sea. As the agreed time approached, Pepys had to spend three nights at Deptford inspecting the yard and forgot his promise. He arrived home from Deptford to be told that she had already set off by coach, expecting to meet him in Rochester; and, tired as he was, he at once put on his boots, hired a horse and a guide, and covered the thirty miles to Rochester in a speedy four hours.33 There he found ‘my Lady and her daughter Jem and Mrs Browne and five servants, all at a loss not finding me here’, but ‘at my coming she was overjoyed’.34Pepys liked to emphasize her expressions of affection in the Diary, but there is no reason to doubt she made them.
She had planned to make her visit incognito, but, unsurprisingly, the captain of the Charles recognized her, and there was a cheerful supper party. Pepys shared a bed with her page and breakfasted with her. The whole group was then taken by barge, first to the biggest ship in the fleet, the Royal Sovereign, built before the war, in 1637; it had six lanterns in the stern, and everyone managed to squeeze into one of them. Then on to the Charles, on which Pepys had sailed to Holland when it was the Naseby; he was delighted to revisit ‘the ship that I begun my good fortune in’, and she to hear him describe how everything was arranged for her Lord when he was aboard. Another breakfast was served, and there were gun salutes; then Pepys, always the eager teacher, insisted on showing her a small ship, so that she might appreciate the difference. He carried out his role to perfection, handing out tips and escorting her back to her coach. The weather turned so bad on the return journey to London that they were forced to spend the night at a Dartford inn, where, over dinner, Pepys and Lady Sandwich amicably argued the rights and wrongs of primogeniture. Afterwards he went off with the captains, looking for a pretty girl they had heard about who played a guitar; but they failed to find her. In the morning they all went back separately to London in the rain. She was in early pregnancy; he went straight to consult his doctor about the ‘decay of my memory’ that had made him forget his appointment with her, for which Hollier advised him to cut down his drinking.35 The trip had turned out an undoubted success, a little interlude of pleasure for them both; and there were to be more.
She sometimes gave him advice, telling him he should be more generous to Elizabeth, of whom she became particularly fond. She was not narrow-minded but ready to chat and joke, and enjoyed gossiping about the scandals at court, especially the king’s mistress Lady Castlemaine – admired by Pepys – and what would happen to her when he married. Pepys was especially helpful to her in the eleven months in which Sandwich was away at sea fetching the new queen from Portugal, during which Lady Sandwich gave birth to her daughter Catherine in London. The Diary records seventy-five visits to her over this period. ‘Shows my wife and me the greatest favour in the world,’ he writes; ‘my Lady very merry and very handsome methought’; ‘an hour or two’s talk with my Lady with great pleasure’; ‘stayed talking with my Lady all the afternoon, till late at night’; ‘stayed all the afternoon with my Lady alone, talking’; ‘an hour to two’s talk in Divinity with my Lady’. After this particular talk, Elizabeth arrived, and they were ‘very merry; and my Lady very fond, as she always is, of my wife’.36 In common with all mothers, Lady Sandwich was especially grateful for his attentions to her children. He took the older girls to the theatre, to Islington to eat cheesecake and to Bartholomew Fair; and the younger children to see the lions in the menagerie at the Tower. He and Elizabeth offered to have the three little boys, Oliver, John and Charles, to stay, and they came to Seething Lane in August when Lady Sandwich was about to give birth. After the birth, her friend Mrs Crisp told her she would get the king to be godfather to the baby Catherine, which embarrassed her so much, she told Pepys, ‘that she sweat in the very telling of it’. No sweat was needed, as the king did not become godfather.37
She invited both Pepyses to go with her to Hampton Court and showed them over the palace. He took the children to see the king’s yacht, the Catherine, and later escorted her aboard it. This was the occasion of her first visit to Seething Lane, and she allowed him to lead her through the courtyard by the hand for everyone in the office to see, in her fine clothes and with her page holding up her train. After this they took a boat to Greenwich and walked to the top of the hill together – a considerable feat in a dress with a train – then returned on the water, ‘she being much pleased with the ramble – in every perticular of it. So we supped with her and then walked home.’38
Pepys’s attachment to ‘my Lady’ was a little like Will Hewer’s to Elizabeth, a devotion to a woman who could safely be admired, even adored, because she was sexually inaccessible. For Pepys, she existed on a different level from the generality of her sex, and he never had a bad or seriously disrespectful word to say about her. When she made an unannounced visit to his house, and he, hurrying over from the office to greet her because Elizabeth was out, found her sitting on a chamber pot in his dining room, she blushed and he talked hastily to cover his embarrassment; but they both had enough aplomb to go on to discuss a debate in the House of Commons about a Dutch war before she made her dignified departure. The episode is surprising; she was in advanced pregnancy, with her last child, and it is her only other recorded appearance at Seething Lane. It clearly shook him somewhat: ‘mightily taken with her dear visit’ is what he wrote in the Diary.39 His visits to her had few constraints. He saw her when she had just given birth and was also recovering from measles; the measles worried him so much that when he called and found the children and my Lord had fled the house he thought she might be dead: ‘it will be a sad hour to that family should she miscarry’.40 He stood by her bedside on another occasion when she was ill; he admired her sangfroid as she waited for news of her husband after a sea battle, ‘in the best temper, neither confident nor troubled with fear, that I ever did see in my life’.41 He helped her to organize her daughter Jem’s wedding in the absence of Lord Sandwich and listened sympathetically to her fears that Jem might not like the match arranged for her. He lent her money, albeit reluctantly: even Lady Sandwich could not make him free with his money, and he charged her 6 per cent.42 He admired her unworldliness, which made her so different from himself and which he called her innocence. To him she was ‘My best Lady Sandwich’, in the phrase that discreetly singles out those who are especially loved.43
Despite all this, time and circumstance changed their friendship. The quasi-feudal household ceased to attract him once he had established himself as a powerful and successful man in his own right, and he did not like it to be known that he had formerly been a servant. Once or twice she reproached him for not visiting her, and once she pressed him to come to Hinchingbrooke. She was much less in London after 1665, and Pepys was increasingly busy and preoccupied with war, work, the fire, his eye trouble and other worries. He managed to visit her briefly at Hinchingbrooke in the autumn of 1667, when they had long talks and she told him she looked on him ‘like one of her own family and interest’.44 He also wrote to her from time to time but may not have expected or got answers; writing was not her best accomplishment, as the few surviving letters to her husband show. This one went to him in Spain in the summer of 1668: ‘I weare in great straiths for money… and can get none from Mr More, and therfor am forsed to borow of my cosen Pepys, a 100 pound, which I doubt will not serve till you com. I pray God send us a happy and spedy meeting, if it be his wille. Hinchbrok much want your selfe although it now is plesent.’45 Her marriage suffered strains as well as long separations, but to Pepys she remained always ‘the same most excellent, good, discreet lady that ever she was’.46
*
Pepys was not enthusiastic about many of his blood relations. Like most people, he preferred the ones who did well in life. His favourite London cousin was Jane Pepys, later Turner, whose parents had taken him to Surrey as a child, who had made a good marriage and continued her parents’ kindness when she offered her house to him for his operation. He also got on well with the son of his Cambridge great-uncle Talbot, Roger Pepys, the lawyer. After this, there was a first cousin, Charles Pepys, who became a master-joiner at Chatham and referred to himself as ‘your honnor’s poor kinsman’ when writing to him in later life; Pepys kept up a kindly distant interest in him.47 Uncle Wight, his father’s half-brother, a London fishmonger and general merchant who did well and lost all his children, had an obvious claim on Pepys’s attention; his remarkable attempt to unite the two families is told in Chapter 13.
He found his mother’s family more of a trial. Her nieces, Mary and Kate Fenner, married brothers, William and Anthony Joyce, sons of a rich tallow chandler but ‘dull company and impertinent’ in Pepys’s view.48 They called on him more often than he liked and took their cousinship seriously, commenting freely on family matters; for instance they laughed at the idea that Pepys might be knighted by the king when he came ashore in 1660; and they hurried round to tell Pepys that his brother Tom had the pox – falsely, as it turned out.49 Neither of their own marriages was happy, but they enjoyed suggesting wives for Tom and husbands for Pall. In the course of the Diary, Pepys had to help William when he got into trouble for trying to arrest a peeress for debt, and to lend money to Anthony after his house was burnt in the great fire; and when Anthony tried to drown himself in a fit of depression, dying shortly afterwards, Pepys helped his widow Kate to secure the estate. Even with these troublesome cousins, although he grumbled, he had too strong a sense of the obligations of blood not to do his duty.
He showed less kindness to his own sister Pall than to many of his cousins. The attempt to make her into an extra servant at Seething Lane was not a success, and by the summer of 1661 he had decided to be rid of her. Following uncle Robert’s death, the Pepys parents were moving to Brampton, leaving the Salisbury Court house and the tailoring business to Tom. Sam’s plan was to send Pall to live with them in Huntingdonshire; he did not expect her to welcome the idea. First he informed his father; then he set up a great scene in which both men declared they wanted nothing to do with Pall; and only when they had ‘brought down her high spirit’ – a phrase reeking of a sour and bullying morality – did they relent and say she might at any rate go to Brampton. Poor Pall had lived in London all her life and hated the idea of the country, but a few days later she was put into the slow carrier’s wagon with her mother and went into exile in floods of tears.50
Her future was a worry to him. ‘God knows… what will become of her, for I have not anything yet to spare her, and she grows now old and must be disposed of one way or another’ – this in 1663, when she was twenty-three.51 He set aside £500 as a dowry and over the next years made several attempts to find her a husband, all of which failed. As we have seen, in 1667 he offered her to Will Hewer, who explained politely that he planned to remain a bachelor.52 He then tried to interest his school and college friend Richard Cumberland, with no more success; he was on his way to a bishop’s throne. In the end she may have found her own husband, since he was a Huntingdonshire lad, John Jackson, ‘a plain young man, handsome enough for her; one of no education nor discourse, but of few words… I shall have no pleasure nor content in him, as if he had been a man of breeding’, wrote Pepys when he met him.53 Neither he nor Elizabeth attended the wedding, which took place at Brampton on 27 February 1668. Pepys merely noted the news of it a few days later and wrote to congratulate his father, not Jackson or Pall herself.54 The Jacksons settled down to farm at Ellington, not far from Brampton, and old Mr Pepys went to live with them; and when Pepys visited he observed that she had grown comelier, ‘but a mighty pert woman she is, and I think proud, he keeping her mighty handsome, and they say mighty fond’.55 The three mightys showed he was not going to warm to his sister even as a bride enjoying her brief season of dignity and joy. It did not occur to him for a moment that pert Pall and her ill-bred husband were going to produce a son who would win his love, accept his guidance, act out his dreams, serve his projects and contribute largely to his own family happiness.