Pepys’s office, the centre of his working life, was across the courtyard from his house. In a few steps he was at his desk, and in another few he was home again, and he went to and fro from early morning until midnight and after. There were no fixed working hours for the officers of the Navy Board, although their meetings were held twice weekly at Seething Lane, and they attended the duke of York as lord high admiral in Whitehall once a week on a Monday morning – sometimes they found he had gone hunting instead. Pepys’s duties took him out of the office a great deal, but when he wanted to leave town for any reason, he applied to the duke for permission. Taking time off to enjoy himself in London was his own affair; he took plenty, but sometimes worried about being seen idling in the company of women or at the theatre, by courtiers who might report him to the duke – not that there is any evidence that they ever did.1 Like almost everything connected with the navy, arrangements were informal, flexible, ad hoc and dependent on personal contacts. Pepys is often spoken of as an early civil servant, but there was no civil service as we know it: no career structure, no examinations for entry, no clear path of promotion and no pension system.2 However, if things went wrong, those held responsible were liable to censure or the sack, and sometimes arrest and imprisonment.
The members of the Navy Board were appointed by the king and whoever he chose to listen to. In 1660 Sandwich, as vice-admiral, was one adviser, alongside the duke of York and his secretary, William Coventry. They agreed that the board should consist of four principal officers, as it had done under Charles I – treasurer, comptroller, surveyor and clerk of the acts – and three commissioners, a system that had worked well under the commonwealth. Sir George Carteret, an impeccable royalist whose service at sea had begun under Charles I and who had held Jersey for him, was appointed treasurer. He had official lodgings at Whitehall, a house in Pall Mall, another at Deptford and a country mansion near Windsor, and he was the highest paid, with £2,000 a year and the right to three pence in every pound he handled – this was a remnant of the old way of doing things. He was well disposed to Pepys, and Pepys knew he must cultivate him. The comptrollership went to two still more aged cavaliers, first Sir Robert Slingsby, who died within a year, then Sir John Mennes, whose naval career went back to the 1620s. He had fought at sea with Prince Rupert and no doubt against William Penn; and he was an educated man, a wit and a poet who had published imitations of Chaucer and encouraged Pepys to appreciate The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde.
The surveyor, with particular responsibility for the dockyards and the design, building and repair of ships, was Sir William Batten, a professional who had served on both sides during the civil war. Of the commissioners, Penn, who was given a brief to take an interest in every aspect of the board’s work, also owed his appointment to his years of experience as a naval commander; both men made a useful practical link with the commonwealth regime. Another commissioner, Peter Pett, the master-shipwright at Chatham, had nothing of the cavalier about him and had served Cromwell zealously; but no change of government could unseat him, because the Pett family had a virtual monopoly of shipbuilding in the Thames yards, and he moved smoothly to work for the restored monarchy. In May 1660 he had been summoned on board the Naseby to prepare it for the king, and later in the year he started to build a royal pleasure yacht, the Catherine, greatly admired by Pepys.3
These were the men with whom Pepys chiefly had to work; Lord Berkeley, the third commissioner, was appointed purely as a sign of royal favour; nothing was expected of him. There were further officers working at the more distant dockyards, Harwich and Portsmouth, some with histories of service to the commonwealth.4 Other minor officials left over from commonwealth days contrived to hang on in lesser jobs: Thomas Turner, clerk-general of the Navy Office from 1646, was disappointed in his hope of getting the job that went to Pepys, although he was allowed to remain as purveyor of petty provisions and kept a lodging at Seething Lane. Pepys did not care for him but enjoyed gossiping with his wife.
Each officer of the Navy Board was served by his own two clerks, chosen by himself and usually owing their jobs to personal connections, just as their master did. Pepys was quick to defend his two, Tom Hayter and Will Hewer, against any criticism and to attack inefficiency among the others. The rest of the staff served everyone: two messengers, a doorkeeper, a porter and a couple of watchmen; and there were boatmen ready to take all the board officials up or down river at all times.
Pepys started work with more doubts than zeal as he sorted and made inventories of the papers of the outgoing regime. He began to realize how much technical and procedural knowledge he would need to master if he were to be an effective member of the board. His function, as clerk of the acts, was to act as secretary, keeping minutes and records; and he was not at all certain he wanted the job. He learnt that there was another claimant to it, an old man called Thomas Barlow who had held it under Charles I and needed to be bought out with an annuity. Pepys was tempted by another man who offered him £ 500 for the job and then, as he hesitated, doubled his offer to £ 1,000. Sandwich had to explain to him that it was not the salary that made a man rich, but the ‘opportunities of getting money while he is in the place’.5 He appreciated the point as gold pieces, silver tankards, barrels of oysters and presents for Elizabeth came in. It took him much longer to start to enjoy his work. Only when he saw that he could extend it far beyond his official function and take an active part in policy-making did it become really interesting to him.
During his first eighteen months at the board nobody was doing much beyond paying off ships as they came in from their voyages. By July 1661 the Cromwellian navy no longer existed, and it seemed unnecessary to maintain so large a fleet.6 London was still in a celebratory mood, cheerful enough to overcome a few alarms from religious anti-monarchists who took up arms believing that Christ’s Kingdom was coming and were ferociously put down; and there was the coronation to be attended to in April 1661. Pepys reported on it with all his bravura, from a 4 a.m. climb to perch on the scaffolding in the Abbey to waking in a pool of his own vomit the next morning – another set-piece. There were also the newly opened theatres, which he found irresistible, with their repertoire of Elizabethan and Jacobean masterpieces, their many adaptations from the Spanish and the French, new works by Dryden and D’Avenant, and ambitious scenery. Throughout 1661 he went two or three times a week to either the King’s Company, managed by Thomas Killigrew, wit and courtier, or the Duke’s, under D’Avenant. In January he saw a woman on stage for the first time, and may have thought of his own boyish attempt at Arethusa. In August he was at Hamlet with Thomas Betterton and found it ‘beyond imagination’: Betterton, ‘the best actor in the world’, was taught the part by D’Avenant, who had studied it with Shakespeare himself.7 Other pleasures associated with his new position led to him being too drunk to conduct family prayers with the servants on a Sunday evening.8 After this had happened twice, he was ashamed enough to take a vow at the end of December to avoid plays and wine; and at least partly as a result of this 1662 became the year in which he learnt to love his work. He saw that it gave him the chance to prove his capacity, and he realized that, whatever superiority his fellow officers at the board possessed in rank and experience, in intellect and application he surpassed all but one of them.
This one was William Coventry, the duke’s secretary. Coventry was replacing Pepys’s friend Blackborne, the commonwealth’s secretary to the Admiralty; but he quickly became Pepys’s hero, for his brains, his efficiency and his cool.9 In 1662 he joined the Navy Board, remaining secretary to the duke, and he was also in parliament, where he was an admired speaker. Five years older than Pepys, he was a gentleman born and socially far above him, the son of a high official of Charles I; after Oxford he had fought for the king before retreating into private life, making at least one visit to the Continent to assert his loyalty to Charles II in exile. At the Restoration the royal brothers chose him to head their procession into London. He had a reputation as ‘a wise and witty gentleman’ and also as one ‘void of religion’; and he had political ambitions.10 From the start of his acquaintance with Pepys he liked his intelligence and efficiency and made sure that he had ‘good access’ to the duke.11 He was also amused by his younger colleague and took an interest in his tastes; noticing his taste for gadgets, he presented him with a silver fountain pen. He wrote him personal letters; one of them specified charmingly, ‘This is not an answer to you the office but you as Mr Pepys.’ He listened to him singing. He accepted a spur of the moment invitation to dine at his home after they had been working together.12 On the river one broiling August day, he put the skirt of his own coat over Pepys to protect him from the sun, an oddly intimate and touching gesture. Pepys trusted and relied on him in return. When his clerk Hayter was in trouble for attending a Quaker meeting, he went straight to Coventry, who in turn spoke to the duke of York and brought back his verdict that, so long as Hayter did his work well, his religion did not bother him. Hayter kept his job, and Pepys thought the better of the duke.
Pepys appreciated Coventry’s conversation enough to write some of it down. There was his ‘rule of suspecting every man that proposed anything to him to be a knave, or at least to have some ends of his own in it’. Another maxim was ‘that a man that cannot sit still in his chamber… and he that cannot say no… is not fit for business’ (to which Pepys added, ‘The last of which is a very great fault of mine, which I must amend in’). He believed that Coventry could do more to reform the abuses he found in the shipyards – among them badly made contracts, poor regulation of repairs, the disastrous system of paying seamen by ticket – than the rest of the board put together and wrote to him early in their association, in 1662, urging him to give more time to its work: ‘Would to God you could for a while spare 2 afternoons in a week for general debates.’ Although there is no sign that this happened, the two men discussed office business and public affairs together regularly throughout the years of the Diary. Their private lives remained in strictly separate compartments: Coventry did not meet Elizabeth; and, while Sir William Penn made a toast to Coventry’s nameless mistress, she makes no appearance in the Diary, and he never took a wife.13
Pepys enjoyed Mennes’s literary conversation, his stories and his mimicry, but saw that he was too old to work and useless as comptroller.14 He threw many a ‘dotard’ and ‘old fool’ at him in the Diary, and after two years of his incompetence told Coventry he intended to take over a good part of Sir John’s work, without of course saying anything to him. ‘I thought the Comptroller would not take it ill,’ said Pepys, to which Coventry ‘wittily replied that there was nothing in the world so hateful as a dog in a manger’.15Mennes was past the age of ambition and no doubt happy to have his work taken over by his junior. Other officers were not so acquiescent, and there was a nasty scene when Penn checked Pepys as he began to make out a contract and ‘most basely told me that the Comptroller is to do it’. It was done in the presence of Coventry, and Pepys argued with Penn and lost the argument. The humiliation angered him so much that he wrote down that Penn ‘did it like a base raskall, and so I shall remember him while I live’; and so he did. Pepys had a long memory for both favours and slights.16
All the officers made visits to the shipyards at Deptford, Woolwich, Chatham and Portsmouth, to inspect ships and pay off the seamen as they came in from their voyages. It was work, but there were some trips that combined pleasure with work, as Pepys shows in the Diary. In Chatham he flirted with the pretty daughter of the official in charge of the ropeyard. On another occasion Elizabeth and Creed went with him to Portsmouth, and he allowed Hayter to bring his wife along too, making it into a short holiday; they had their wives shown over a ship, took a walk on the walls of the town and saw the sights, including the room in which the duke of Buckingham had been murdered in 1628.17 For the nearer yards, Pepys could travel up and down the Thames by boat, charging expenses of seven shillings for every visit to Deptford or Woolwich.18 Rather than taking a boat, he very often walked along the south bank of the river, into Redriff (now Rotherhithe), and on through the orchards and meadows to Deptford, Greenwich and even Woolwich. He enjoyed walking, and the river bank and adjacent countryside were so little frequented that he often read a book as he followed the familiar grassy footpaths, breaking off to climb stiles. You can take his route today through housing estates, past grimy churches and scraps of garden and over the foully polluted River Ravensbourne, your imagination struggling to clean up and empty the world as you go. The river was unembanked then, and at low tide a wide beach appeared. There is still a Cherry Garden Pier marking where he bought cherries in the orchards close to the river, and an inn at the water’s edge between Southwark and Rotherhithe on the spot where he often stopped for a drink. The fifteenth-century tower of St Nicholas’s Church also remains at Deptford, where skulls grin over the churchyard gate. The green hill of Greenwich, rising solidly before you as you round the loop of the river, has changed little in three hundred years, and for Pepys this was one of the most familiar views in his working life. He described walking in Greenwich Park in the spring of 1662 with Penn, seeing the young trees newly planted by the King and the steps just made up the hill to the castle, ‘which is very magnificent’ – Wren’s observatory, built in the 1670s, now stands on the site. From the top of the hill he could look back across the loops of the river, crowded with sails, and the miles of green country, back to London’s spires and smoke; whether he walked or took a boat home would depend on the tide.
The board made contracts with suppliers of shipbuilding material – timber, hemp, tar, canvas, resin, nails – and with victuallers, who provided the food and drink served on board. These were primarily the responsibility of Batten as surveyor, but Pepys took to watching closely and critically, and very soon he was making contracts himself. His own account reveals him as too inquisitive, too clever, too ambitious and pretty soon too conscientious not to interest himself in the detail of everything he saw and heard, and shows him embarking on systematic studies of each area of supply and administration. His zeal was altogether admirable and exceptional, and greatly to the benefit of the navy; and it did not take him long to realize that understanding the procedures, as well as benefiting the navy – the king’s good, as he put it – would also allow him to make profits for himself. Indeed he was quickly targeted by suppliers who saw him as a valuable ally. William Warren, the biggest of the timber merchants, with his houses and yards in Essex, Rotherhithe and Wapping, came to him with friendly offers of financial advice, backed by presents indistinguishable from bribes, as Pepys was well aware: for example, a pair of gloves containing forty gold pieces. By such means Warren won a virtual monopoly, beating Batten’s candidate for timber contracts in the process. Pepys claimed he was serving the king’s interest by choosing the best supplier, but he would hardly say otherwise, and he defended himself stoutly when Pett challenged him.19 The duke’s official ‘Instructions’ to the Navy Board urged complete disinterestedness in purchasing goods, but they were not taken too literally by anyone. Pepys and Batten were often at loggerheads, each with his own reasons for backing a particular supplier.20
The sums of money involved were huge, because the navy was the biggest industrial concern and the biggest employer in the country. It spent more than any other department in the state, and even in peacetime needed £400,000 a year to maintain it.21 Tens of thousands of men were on its payroll as officers, sailors, victuallers and slop-suppliers, ‘slops’ being the clothes worn by the common sailors, the red caps, canvas suits and blue shirts; there was no uniform. There were also the shipbuilders, rope-makers, sail-makers, mast-makers and suppliers of everything that went into building and repairing ships. The life of a ship was reckoned at three human generations: it took about eight months to build and was expected to outlast its builders’ children. A mast, on the other hand, lasted for only ten years. England did not produce enough wood, and much of it was shipped in from the Baltic countries; there were running arguments about the quality of the wood supplied. The legacy of the commonwealth in 1660 was a fleet of 157 ships, the largest number ever yet in service in England; one reason for Cromwell’s high reputation at home and abroad had been the size and effectiveness of his navy.22 The safety and prestige of the nation remained deeply involved with its successful running, but, while the duke and the king were eager to maintain its reputation and showed great interest in shipbuilding, they had no proper plan for funding it; and parliament was not inclined to vote money, at least not in peace time. After a year in his job, Pepys observed that ‘the want of money puts… the navy out of order; and yet I do not see that the King takes care to bring in any money’.23 It was to be his refrain throughout his years of service.
He began to dream of the rewards his application would bring him. Lying late in bed with Elizabeth on a Sunday morning in March 1662, he talked of becoming a knight and keeping a coach, once he had saved £2,000 by frugal living.24 At that moment, his whole fortune stood at a quarter of that, £530. He began to do monthly accounts and worked out some strict spending rules for himself, swore to God to observe them and set himself penalties for failure to do so. By now he was confident he would become rich, it was more a matter of how soon.25 As he began to enjoy his work he worked harder. He rose early, usually at four in the summer months; he dined at about noon, either at home or out with friends, then went back to the office and might be still there at midnight. ‘My business is a delight to me,’ he wrote; and it ‘has taken me off from all my former delights’.26 Again, ‘I find that two days’ neglect of business doth give me more discontent in mind than ten times the pleasure thereof can repair again, be it what it will.’27Elizabeth approved of this new sobriety and application. He gave up the Privy Seal job, and by the end of the year heard with satisfaction that the world said he and Mr Coventry ‘do all the business of the office almost; at which I am highly proud’.28
There was sometimes a price to be paid. For instance, in May 1662 he was asked to find and hand over papers relating to Sir Henry Vane, the ablest and most important naval commissioner under the commonwealth, who was being tried for his life. Vane was not a regicide, but an idealist who believed in religious toleration. His ideas were far ahead of his time, and their eccentricity had made him many enemies. In 1660 he refused to submit himself to the king and was perceived as dangerous; parliament and the king both wanted him dead. He defended himself bravely and was condemned on a single piece of evidence, his signature on a Navy Committee letter, written on the day of Charles I’s execution: it was taken as proof that he had not opposed the execution, on the grounds that he would have stayed away from work if he had. It was a slender thread on which to decide a man’s life, and Pepys, whether he knew it or not, must have supplied the fatal letter. He went to see Vane executed on Tower Hill on 14 June, the anniversary of Naseby – this was a royal public relations exercise – and wrote a long account of the condemned man’s courage and dignity in the Diary, as well as a letter to Lord Sandwich, who, like Penn, Batten and Blackborne, had worked with Vane.29 A few days afterwards Pepys dined with the Crews, and they spoke of Vane’s courage as miraculous; another old Treasury clerk he met in the street called him a saint and martyr, and accused Pepys of wickedness: ‘At all which, I know not what to think.’ But he passed on the comments to Sandwich; and, reading about Vane some months later, declared that he had been ‘a very wise man’.30 Vane’s last words, deliberately made inaudible to the crowd by drumbeats from the attending soldiers, have passed into history: ‘It is a bad cause which cannot bear the words of a dying man.’31
Like the well-trained scholar he was, Pepys had embarked on the study of everything he needed to know to carry out his service to the navy, from its early records to its recruiting methods, from the multiplication tables and the use of the slide rule to the best methods of timber measurement, from rope manufacture to victualling and ships’ pursers’ accounts, from sea charts to tide tables, from flag-making to the language of sailors. To learn about shipbuilding he had himself taken round by a shipbuilder, going into every hole and corner of as many vessels as possible. He took lessons in how to draw ships. His programme still inspires awe for its thoroughness, and through it he began to identify with the navy, and to take a personal pride in its history and organization. He was not the sort of man who could have commanded a ship or fought a sea battle; he had been to sea only on his Baltic trip and the crossing to Holland, and in the whole course of his career added only another Channel crossing, a coastal voyage to Scotland and the Tangier expedition, made at the king’s behest. The romance of the navy came to him not through wind, water and tides but through papers, contracts and ledgers, rows of figures and dockyard visits; but it cast its spell over him as strongly as over any of the fighting officers who sailed the oceans. It is one of the reasons that he is revered by naval historians.
His growing feeling that it was his navy, and that he knew best how things should be done, made him impatient with his colleagues, proprietorial and jealous. From very early in the Diary, he expressed his contempt for their professional failings. Only Coventry was entirely exempt from criticism. Batten and Penn came in for perpetual attacks, and we have seen how he insisted on a private office away from them. His jealousy of their experience and status, and his many quarrels with them, drove him to malice, sharpened by his determination to prove his own superiority and to be in control of what happened at the office and in the yards, and to be seen to be in control.32 Mennes might have been a dotard, but he did not threaten Pepys; whereas Penn, friendly and generous as he was in their private dealings, was prepared to take him on and invoke precedents when Pepys exceeded his appointed powers, as he did over the drawing up of contracts in front of Coventry. Pepys never forgot or forgave that. ‘Strange to see how pert Sir W Penn is today, newly come from Portsmouth with his head full of great reports of his service and the state of the ships there. When that is over, he will be just as another man again, or worse. But I wonder whence Mr Coventry should take all this care for him… when I am sure he knows him as well as I do, as to his little service he doth,’ he wrote in the summer of 1664.33 A few months later Pepys attacked Mennes too, for a poor report he had drawn up, speaking to him in front of Batten and his lady: ‘I was in the right, and was the willinger to do so before them, that they might see that I am somebody.’34 Pepys’s absolute determination to impose himself on the men placed above him, but inferior to him in ability, is all in the phrase.
Rude and belittling remarks about Penn and Batten become a tetchy leitmotif, so predictable that rather than convincing they sometimes encourage you to sympathize with the men he is attacking. As Batten is repeatedly accused of corruption in his dealings with timber, hemp and tar merchants, flag-makers and rope-makers, you ask yourself, are these not the very groups of men with whom Pepys himself is engaged in profitable negotiations? Hard as it is to be categoric about the financial details of the contracts made by either Batten or Pepys, it seems likely that both were offered and both accepted the sweeteners that were standard for their time. If Batten was a rogue, then so was Pepys.
Still he called Batten and Penn rogues, accusing them of idleness, avarice, incompetence and hypocrisy, mocked their minor mistakes and gathered impressive quantities of evil gossip about them. Batten’s young second wife was a whore and he was a cuckold.35Penn, for all his active service, was a coward.36 In the real world, Batten, though neither saintly nor brilliant, was hospitable, friendly and capable of sustained hard work, for instance during the Second Dutch War when he was in charge at Harwich; and Penn was clever, competent and brave, going to sea to fight the Dutch again in 1665.37 But Pepys had decided they were his enemies and was not amenable to reason. His hostility and aggression take on particularly dark colours when he describes himself making sexual advances to Penn’s daughter Pegg. To attack the honour of a rival family through a sexual assault on one of its women is a primitive ploy, and it is clear that for Pepys it was a matter of power and humiliation of his enemy rather than attraction – he had described her as unattractive, and even suspected her of having the pox – and that he was more interested in slyly humiliating Penn than in gratifying himself when he fondled Pegg’s breasts or thighs. He also claimed that she was compliant and even enthusiastic (‘fort willing’); it does not absolve him from setting out to defile the daughter of a colleague and neighbour whose hospitality he regularly accepted. He had bouts with her both before and after her marriage to Anthony Lowther, a respectable MP and founding fellow of the Royal Society, where Pepys too was a fellow from 1665. Had he not supplied the information himself, it would be hard to believe; but there it is, set down in his own words, with the same admirable exactitude he would have used in describing the process of rope-making.38
As clerk of the acts, Pepys could hardly fail to acquire rich and powerful friends, and the Diary charts his social and professional rise among ambitious men jostling for positions and property. He was invited to join bodies like the Trinity House, an organization that controlled pilots’ licences and navigation on the Thames, made appointments and ran seamen’s charities, as well as acting as a gentlemen’s club – something between a Freemasons’ Lodge and the Garrick Club – with regular and carefully planned gastronomic dinners for its members, in the course of which much business must have been discussed, all the more effectively for being unofficial. Pepys became a ‘Younger Brother’ in 1662, when Sandwich was master, progressed to ‘Elder Brother’ and rose to be master himself in 1676, and again in 1685. In 1662 he was also appointed to the Tangier Committee, set up by the king to run the new colony brought as a dowry by his Portuguese bride. This was another Sandwich concern: he had made a survey of Tangier for Cromwell and declared it could provide something the English had long wanted: a base for their fleet in the Mediterranean, despite the fact that it was entirely encircled on the land by hostile Muslim tribes. He was there again for the king when the Portuguese handed it over in 1661. A garrison was installed and the building of a huge breakwater, or ‘Mole’, undertaken by English engineers: these were the business of the Tangier Committee.
Pepys became increasingly impatient with the way in which the Tangier accounts were mismanaged by its treasurer, Thomas Povey, a rich man with an interest in foreign trade but little head for figures; and in 1665, by mutual agreement between the two, Pepys took over the treasurership. The appointment was a lucrative one, and there was a private clause to the agreement, which later led to a dispute. Meanwhile Povey, friendly and hospitable, also introduced Pepys into the Royal Society, where he could meet the most intelligent company in the land. This was in 1665 – its president was Lord Brouncker, who had become an active Navy Board commissioner in 1664 and worked closely and on the whole amicably with Pepys. Brouncker was a ship designer, a mathematician with an interest in musical theory and a freethinker.
In October 1665 Pepys put his own name forward to be surveyor-general of victualling for the navy, a post he had invented and to which he was duly appointed in December with the support of Coventry.39 He held it for eighteen months and resigned it at the end of the Second Dutch War, in July 1667; by now he had increased his capital to about £7,000. In 1667 and 1668 Pepys defended the Navy Board in the House of Commons, where it was under attack for mismanagement; it was a culminating point of his career during the Diary years, when he addressed a full House for three hours to the admiration of all who heard him. Later that year he submitted his report on the state of the navy to the duke of York and began to make plans to enter parliament – an idea first suggested to him in 1661.40 Although he did not succeed in being elected until 1673, the year in which he also became first secretary of the Admiralty Commission, the trajectory of his career, briefly indicated here, shows just how astonishing he was in his energy, his ambition and his range of abilities. He had a realistic grasp of what he could hope to achieve, how he could use one job to support another and how he could turn friendship to account. He encouraged and promoted able men, binding them to him and building up a body of loyal followers: for instance, he recommended Richard Gibson of Yarmouth as a local officer for victualling in 1665, then took him on as his chief clerk at Seething Lane; he trusted him to carry his gold out of town during a crisis two years later; he listened attentively to Gibson’s views on the navy and used them in his memoranda to the duke.
Pepys could also be pitiless when he knew he could get away with it. The Diary records his admiration of Povey’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, to which he was invited to sample the fine wines and admire the pictures; it also gives many rude comments on Povey’s intellectual failings. What it does not set out are the details of the private pact Pepys made with Povey when he took over the Tangier treasurer’s job in 1665: the terms, which we know from other papers, were that he would pay Povey four sevenths of all ‘rewards & Considerations’ received through the job within three days of receiving them.41 The treasurership, like Pepys’s clerkship at the Navy Board, brought unofficial offerings from contractors on top of the official salary. For instance, the Diary shows Pepys making £222 of personal profit from his services to Tangier contractors in August 1665; he was given £500 by a Tangier victualler on 30 December in the same year and another £200 on 15 June 1666 – totalling nearly £1,000 in under a year.42 Yet it appears that he passed not a penny on to Povey, who complained, nine years later, that he had received nothing – nothing, that is, except Pepys’s ‘sullen and uncomfortable return, that you have made no other profits, than from the bare salary’. Povey found it impossible to believe this, as well he might, and said so. It was an ‘improbable thing that what afforded in my unskillful hands some measure of honest advantage, should yield nothing, being transferred to yours… which I may believe have seldom had so ill success in other cases’.43Povey wrote again on 23 February 1674 complaining that Pepys had broken their agreement. Pepys put him off again.
Povey persisted with more letters: ‘I do therefore still imagine (a word you are pleased to use in contempt of that ignorance I am kept in) that you cannot but have received some benefit at least, from the gratitude of such as you have had opportunities to oblige, seeing I found the same persons civil.’44 Still Pepys denied making any profits as treasurer, the tone of his letter one of injured innocence and magisterial dignity: ‘Pray therefore let us have no more of this sort of correspondence between us, for as I am one too stubborn ever knowingly to endure being imposed upon, so shall I with much less willingness be ever provoked to violate the known simplicity of my dealings, especially with one from whom I have always owned my having received such civilities as may challenge and shall meet with all expressions of gratitude on this side admitting of a manifest wrong.’45 The ornate prose in which he chooses to tell his lies makes an interesting contrast to the concise language of the Diary.
Pepys was playing a shameful charade, treating Povey as a gull, confident that nothing could be proved. Povey tried writing to Sir Denis Gauden, for many years chief victualler for Tangier, to ask about his accounts with Pepys, and got nowhere with him. But Povey was not an entire fool, and when Pepys told him he had never asked Gauden for anything, he answered that he had never asked him either, because they both knew that Gauden gave without being asked. There the matter remained; Pepys was unbudgeable. In 1685, twenty years after the gentleman’s pact had been drawn up between them, a period during which Povey performed several acts of notable kindness towards Pepys, he was still getting nothing but ‘Contempt, Neglect, or Superficial Evasions, or Obstinate or affected Silence’.46 By then Tangier had been given up, the great Mole knocked back into the sea again and the Moors left in possession.
His formidable way of dealing with officials he found wanting appears on many pages of the Diary. A striking instance is his tersely written account of a row he had with a dilatory assistant to Anthony Ashley Cooper, the commissioner of prizes. The man kept Pepys waiting, couldn’t find the necessary papers and said it was too late in the day. Pepys cowed him by referring to the man’s political past. ‘We then did our business without the order in less then eight minutes.’ You can see why Pepys got where he did. He knew how to insist and how to threaten, scaring the man he was dealing with by telling him he knows that he worked for the commonwealth. Although Ashley Cooper and Pepys himself had both done as much, the threat worked. Pepys expected and got others to go at his pace and with his commitment.47
Yet he had his own times of inefficiency and disorder. After taking over the Tangier treasurership from Povey, he found himself in an alarming muddle with his accounts in October 1665, ‘where I have had occasion to mix my monies, as I have of late done my Tanger treasure upon other occasions, and other monies upon that’.48 He had contrived to mix up his private accounts with the public ones and got into such a state that he was ‘ready to break my head and brains’. ‘I never was in such a confusion in my life, and that in great sums.’ Night after night he sat up to master them and still could not. Under the circumstances it has its funny side, but for Pepys it was humiliating and dismaying. The misery went on for months, made worse by a new anxiety about his eyesight, until the following July, when at last he sorted something out.49
This was an exceptional episode. He was as a rule a superb organizer, able to see the importance of getting the details right, and then looking beyond them to a larger vision. He prided himself on his orderliness and efficient running of his office. He was the first to keep written records of both officers and ships, and you can still admire the tidily ruled and written lists turned out by his clerks. When he wanted to prove a point – say, about the costliness of buying shipbuilding supplies on credit – he could ask one of the clerks to produce the evidence, as Hayter did in the winter of 1668, listing every item bought from the ironmonger, the chandler, the turner, etc. – double-spring locks, single-spring locks, door handles, scuttle hinges, table screws, sail needles, fire shovels, scrapers and much more – and giving for each the price paid first by the king and then by the ordinary merchant; and so showing what might be saved in every £100. It must have been a nightmare to compile, and Pepys gave Hayter full credit, submitting his work to the commissioners with his name upon it.50 Sadly, it did no good. All such efforts were useless as long as the finances of the navy remained subject to the caprices of the king and the suspicions of parliament. All the same, Pepys was right to establish how much money was being wasted and in what fashion. In this as in many other ways he was a link between the efficient administrators of the commonwealth and the future, as he pressed for efficiency in the dockyards and a well-ordered, educated, professional body of officers. No wonder he became the hero of the navy that evolved in the nineteenth century, in which everything was docketed and everyone examined.
The Diary sends a beam of light into the way in which government officers and businessmen worked together, through clubs, through hospitality, through trips that mixed business and pleasure, through well-chosen and discreetly given presents and through cultivating the friendship of those in a position to be helpful in giving contracts or licences. The circumstances were different, but there is something eerily familiar about it too: today’s arms and building contracts, entertainment of clients, quiet words at the club, conferences in luxury hotels, boardroom rivalries and contributions to favourite charities are all in the same tradition. Pepys was, among other things, mapping a recognizably modern world.