Pepys grew up with death at his elbow. Against the odds, he became a survivor, outliving all his brothers and sisters. In the Diary his responses to death vary from the briskly matter of fact on learning of the passing of his uncle Robert, whom he had known since he was a boy – ‘Sorry in some respect; glad in my expectations in another respect’ – to a mournful meditation on hearing the church bells toll for a dark-eyed girl he knew only from seeing her in church.1 He liked to call her ‘my Morena’ – my Moorish girl – to himself, and he learnt that she was suffering from a wasting illness. When she died he honoured her with a gracefully turned elegy: ‘This night was buried, as I hear by the bells at Barking church, my poor Morena – whose sickness being desperate did kill her poor father; and he being dead for sorrow, she said she could not recover nor desire to live, but from that time doth languish more and more, and so is now dead and buried.’2 Another local girl he observed, ‘crooked’ but not ugly, killed herself by taking poison, saying before she died that she did it ‘because she did not like herself, nor had not liked herself nor anything she did a great while’.3 Pepys had a writer’s response to these stories: their subjects lived in his imagination, and in that private place he allowed himself to be melancholy or appalled by their fates. Yet when his cousin Anthony Joyce was thought to have killed himself, he was chiefly concerned to find out what might happen to the property, which the law assigned to the king if suicide were established.4
As a survivor himself, he was generally more interested in the survivors than the dead. When the earl of Southampton died, Pepys’s first reaction was to describe the porter at the great man’s gate in tears; he felt sorry for him and tipped him on the practical grounds that he was not now likely to pick up many more tips: ‘he hath lost a considerable hope by the death of this Lord, whose house will be no more frequented as before’. Later he reported on the remarkable self-control shown by the earl, and how he had prepared himself to die by ‘closing his own eyes and setting his mouth, and bidding Adieu with the greatest content and freedom in the world’. Southampton had died in the agonies of the stone, so Pepys had particular reason to admire this stoicism; he had nothing to say about his spiritual condition.5 Another case, in which a colleague who was also a courtier died suddenly in the prime of life, led him to look at the court’s response: ‘I find the sober men of the Court troubled for him; and yet not so as to hinder or lessen their mirth, talking, laughing, and eating, drinking and doing everything else, just as if there was no such thing – which is as good an Instance for me hereafter to judge of Death, both as to the unavoydablenesse, suddenness, and little effect of it upon the spirits of others, let a man be never so high or rich or good; but that all die alike, no more matter being made of the death of one then another; and that even to die well, the prise [worth] of it is not considerable in the world.’6 What interested him was not the dead man and his possible after-life, but the reactions of the living and his reputation in this world.
Pepys was not given to repining over the dead himself, but the precariousness of life sometimes caught at his imagination. We have seen how, saying goodbye to his mother in 1660, he was suddenly frightened that he might never see her again, because she was ill with a cold.7 In October 1662 he arrived at Brampton to find father, mother, sister and two brothers Tom and John all assembled, and the thought came to him, ‘So now we are all together, God knows when we shall be so again’: and, as it turned out, they never were.8 When Elizabeth was taken ill after drinking cold beer at an inn one day while they were riding to Brampton on another occasion, he was suddenly terrified: ‘I thought she would have died, and so in great horror (and having a great trial of my true love and passion for her) called the maids and mistress of the house.’ It turned out to be nothing serious, and she was better the next morning, but for a moment he had seen the abyss.9
When his mother was really dying, at Brampton in 1667, he made no attempt to visit her; instead, like Proust with his grandmother, he contented himself by dreaming of her. On the day she died, which was two days before he got the news, he dreamt he was at her bedside and ‘laying my head over hers and crying, she almost dead and dying… but which is strange, methought she had hair on her face, and not the same kind of face as my mother really has; but yet did not consider that, but did weep over her as my mother’. When the news came, he did not go. to Brampton for her funeral or to comfort his father but put his entire household into mourning, proud of cutting a fine figure when he went to church in his black clothes. He must be the first writer to take note of the vanity of the well-dressed mourner in his own person.10 He dreamt of her again, coming to him and asking for a pair of gloves, and in the dream ‘thinking it to be a mistake in our thinking her all this while dead’ – ‘this dream troubled me and I waked’.11
This mixture of tough in practice, tender in imagination, ran through all his dealings with death. His account of the last weeks of his brother Tom is particularly disconcerting in the way it alternates between callousness and sorrow. In the summer of 1663 Tom was ‘a very thriving man’, and the following Christmas he seemed well and cheerful, but ten weeks later he was dead. Tom had taken over their father’s tailoring business in Salisbury Court in 1661, but he was not much interested in the work and let out rooms to supplement his meagre earnings. Pepys made strenuous efforts to find him a wife with a dowry but without success, partly because Tom’s speech impediment worried prospective brides, and also because he lacked any of Pepys’s dynamism. He muddled along, was known as a good fellow, ran up debts and made just enough to send a small allowance to his sister. There is a letter to ‘sister Pal’ in his neat small hand and terrible spelling, dated 16 January 1664, which he signed off in words that suggest he was fond of her and may have had an inkling of what lay in store for him: ‘Your truly Loving Brother till Death’.12 The letter was written a few weeks after Pepys had heard that Tom was unwell, called on him and decided he was ‘not ill’. But from then on, he sank rapidly.
Pepys did nothing for him. He did not send for a doctor or a nurse, and he visited Tom no more than once a week, even though their cousin Jane Turner, who was Tom’s neighbour in Salisbury Court, told Sam that he had less than two months to live. He seems to have refused to believe what he was told, perhaps because he found it too upsetting, and distanced himself from what was happening. He had the excuse of his office work, as always, and just then his troubled relations with Lord Sandwich; still, he found time to walk in the park on Ash Wednesday and to see D’Avenant’s new play, The Unfortunate Lovers. When he did visit Tom on 8 March, he realized he was very ill, but then kept away again until the following Sunday, when other cousins, the Joyces, came to him and suggested he should find a woman to look after his brother. They added that they had heard, through an indiscreet doctor, that Tom had the pox, meaning syphilis. At this Pepys hurried round to Salisbury Court. He found Tom delirious and ‘with the face of a dying man’. By now a neighbour had engaged a nurse. Pepys, dismayed at the trouble he saw looming, whether his brother died or merely continued ill, talked anxiously with Tom’s maidservant, who had stories to tell of his inefficient ways as a businessman and of his disquieting sexual practices – although sitting up at night ‘doing something to himself does not sound very bad. The news that Tom had the pox spread around the family, followed by talk of his being in debt, and Pepys was in an agony of shame on his behalf. When another doctor declared Tom had not got it after all, Pepys was so relieved that he sent for oysters and enjoyed a celebratory dinner; afterwards he himself, together with the doctor, inspected Tom’s by now only intermittently conscious body and found no trace of any shameful disease. The truth was that he was dying of tuberculosis of the lungs, then called a consumption; it was often associated with venereal disease – Pepys talks of one of Batten’s clerks dying of consumption ‘got, as is believed, by the pox’ – but wrongly both in general and in the particular case of poor Tom.13
Pepys did not summon the local clergyman to pray over him or administer the sacrament, but his scepticism was not quite proof against his brother’s deathbed, and, as the end approached, he himself questioned Tom about where he thought he might be going. Tom’s answer, although given in a distracted manner, was a good one, and Pepys wrote it out: ‘Why, whither should I go? there are but two ways. If I go to the bad way, I must give God thanks for it. And if I go the other way, I must give God the more thanks for it; and I hope I have not been so undutiful and unthankful in my life but I hope I shall go that way.’ As Tom’s breath began to rattle in his throat, Pepys’s nerve failed him. He went out until he could be sure Tom was dead, then came back to cry at the sight of the ‘poor wretch, lying with his chops fallen’. After this his efficient self moved into action. He collected all Tom’s papers, took them to Seething Lane, wrote to his father and returned in the darkness to Salisbury Court, where Elizabeth had taken refuge at Jane Turner’s.
She invited them to stay overnight ‘in the little blue chamber. And I lay close to my wife, being full of disorder and grief for my brother, that I could not sleep nor wake with satisfaction.’ It would be hard to better Pepys’s words here. They take us into the room and the bed, where the warm body of Elizabeth is both a comfort and a reminder of the body of his brother, with whom, he must have bedded down many times when they were children – now lying alone and cold not far away.14 This is where the immediacy of the Diary is supreme. If Pepys had written about his brother’s death later, he would have been tempted to smooth and tidy the sequence of events to make it into a more seemly story; improved the number of his visits to Tom, cut out the theatregoing and oyster dinner, called a doctor and nurse earlier rather than relying on neighbours, omitted the rumour of the pox. Instead we get his jumble of reactions: yes, he loves his brother and sorrows for him, but he is also embarrassed by him and resents the interruption of his own activities. In describing Tom’s last hours, he reverses the order of events in the Diary, writing of Tom dead and laid out, then remembering and recording his earlier solemn questioning of his still living brother.
His first thought was to have Tom buried in the churchyard among their brothers and sisters, but he changed his mind and decided to pay the extra to have him put inside the church, close to their mother’s pew. A Shakespearean scene over the crowded vaults followed, the gravedigger telling a shocked Pepys that he would, for sixpence, ‘justle them together but I will make room for him’.15 The mourners, invited to Tom’s house for biscuits and burnt claret, arrived hours late and in larger numbers than expected; and only after they had eaten and drunk did they walk with the coffin to the church. Then Pepys, Elizabeth, Jane Turner and her family went back to one of the lodger’s rooms in Tom’s house and cheered themselves up with oysters again, and cake and cheese, ‘being too merry for so late a sad work’. Writing it up that evening, Pepys confessed that once his brother was dead he felt very little more grief.
But there was further trouble brewing. A few weeks later Pepys heard from an old servant of their father’s, John Noble, that twin daughters had been born to Tom’s maid Margeret, ‘an ugly jade’, of whom one survived. The baby, born as a parish pauper, was named Elizabeth Taylor and attributed to ‘John Taylor’, a fabricated name that at least suggested Tom’s trade. He had acknowledged that the child was his and paid out various small sums of money for her care. He had also planned to get rid of her by handing her over to a beggar woman, until Noble warned him he might be suspected of murder if she should be asked for later and he were unable to trace her. Tom’s next move was to give her to a local man with a lump sum of £5; this only led to the man being sent to prison for bringing a pauper child into the parish. The wretched baby was handed about further, and, when Tom died, Noble turned to Pepys and his father for money. Pepys declared there was no proof at all that Elizabeth Taylor was Tom’s child, although he referred privately to ‘my brother’s bastard’ and indicated he might do something for her; and the midwife testified that Tom had confessed to being the father and told her he had got the child on Bonfire Night, 5 November, a statement so ingenuous it sounds like the truth.
Tom’s daughter was the only grandchild the Pepys family had yet produced. There was plenty of room for a little girl at Seething Lane or at Brampton, and either of the two childless young women, Elizabeth and Pall, might have been willing to supervise her care. Nothing of the sort happened – the idea that the little girl was his niece seems not to have occurred to Pepys – and her disappearance from the Diary suggests she was dead before the end of 1664. Would Pepys have been more interested in his brother’s child if she had been a boy? Perhaps the taint of bastardy would still have been more important than the blood link; bastards were more readily accepted in the higher social circles than at Pepys’s level. Yet his absolute rejection of Tom’s offspring is faintly surprising, at a time when he had pretty well given up hope of ever having a child of his own.16
The next year, 1665, was, as everyone knows, the year of the great plague in London. Pepys had heard rumours of its approach; it was in Amsterdam in 1664. Plague was in any case endemic in London, and severe outbreaks were expected every few decades: 1592, 1603, 1625, 1636 had all been bad years. In 1625,40,000 Londoners died, and a look at the parish registers shows deaths attributed to plague in almost every year of the century up to 1665. The rich could not count on being spared, but they usually left London when the plague was virulent; and since it was carried by a particular flea and fleas proliferated in town, getting away was certainly the best move. This is what the court and almost everyone else who could afford to do so, including many doctors and clergymen, did. The poor were the expected victims, squashed into their low-ceilinged, unaired rooms, their meagre, piled-up lodgings, narrow courtyards, alleys and streets. For most of them it was impossible to give up their occupations and move away. The plague was thought to be contagious, but no one knew how it actually arose or spread, which meant that none of the measures taken to control it, such as marking with a red cross and locking up houses where someone was known to be infected, were effective. In 1665 those who went to fight the Dutch at sea were preserved because the plague never reached the fleet: for once the sailors had a clear advantage over landsmen. For Pepys, who did not leave town until the end of August, the spaciousness and good condition of his house told in his favour. He may even have had a natural immunity. Some people’s blood is unattractive to fleas, and he observed when he shared a bed with a friend in Portsmouth in 1662 that ‘all the fleas came to him and not to me’. What seemed a trivial piece of good luck at the time may have had a much greater significance.17
The severity of the 1665 plague did not become apparent until June, and during the first five months, when it was no more than a threat, life in the Pepys family continued as usual. Towards the end of 1664 he noted with satisfaction the good state of his household consisting of Elizabeth, her new companion Mercer, three maids and Tom Edwards, who had been with them for six months. Mary Mercer was the daughter of a neighbouring widow who took in lodgers, among them Will Hewer, and it was Will who had recommended Mercer to the Pepyses; she was a merry, pretty seventeen-year-old, a good singer too, and Pepys was charmed by her.18 ‘And a pretty and loving quiet family I have as any man in England,’ he wrote in his Diary.19 This was not entirely true, since he had just blacked Elizabeth’s eye during a quarrel about her failure to control her servants properly; and she had attempted to bite and scratch back. Throughout the Christmas period Pepys and Elizabeth were running separate lives, not least because she felt unable to go out with her black eye. She stayed in bed during the day and rose to play cards and games with her servants at night, without Pepys. On New Year’s Eve he kissed her in the kitchen, and on New Year’s Day 1665 they celebrated together, but the next day he went out looking for other women. He had recently started a carefully planned affair with the wife of a Deptford ship’s carpenter, William Bagwell. The name Bagwell seems too good to be true, but it is there in the Deptford registers; and when Mrs Bagwell offered herself to Pepys, she was acting under her husband’s instructions. Pepys expresses no feelings for Mrs Bagwell and never gives her first name. He sometimes reproached himself for his own ‘folly’, but he enjoyed the sexual thrill of having her, sharpened perhaps by her reluctance. The story is a shameful one of a woman used by two bullies: her husband, hoping for promotion, and Pepys, who was to arrange it. Pepys did not present it in quite those terms, but it is clearly how it was. He shows it was furtive and squalid, and he even makes us see the funny side of his own behaviour, but it can’t have been funny, or fun, for Mrs Bagwell.
All through January he was like a tom cat. He laid siege to his barber’s pretty servant, Jane Welsh; he hung about and kissed Sarah, the girl at the Swan Inn; he had Betty Martin, at this point seven months pregnant, afterwards reproaching her for her impudence; and he visited Mrs Bagwell, and was struck by her protestations that she loved her husband. He made a vow to ‘laisser aller les femmes’, but within days broke it; and he remained on bad terms with Elizabeth. Two of their maids left, one accusing Elizabeth of favouring Tom Edwards and quarrelling with everyone else in the house.20 Pepys made another vow to leave women alone, and this time kept it until it ran out on 15 May. His working life during these months was arduous enough for several men, and he was busy at the office, often till late at night, and in the yards, as another war with the Dutch became imminent. Men had to be prevented from leaving their ships and more men pressed – 30,000 were needed to make up the necessary crews; merchant ships had to be hired to supplement the naval force, and the entire fleet prepared for battle. He was also struggling to sort out the accounts for Tangier, which he took over in February. By the end of March the duke of York and Lord Sandwich were both at sea, and Pepys was dealing with the problem of financing the fleet.
The plague did not deter his mother from coming up from Brampton to stay in May, and she enjoyed herself so much in town, shopping with Elizabeth, going out on the river and revisiting old haunts in Islington, that he had difficulty in persuading her to leave atthe end of June, when the city suddenly and spectacularly emptied itself. She ‘had a mind to stay a little longer’, she said.21 On 5 July Pepys moved his family to Woolwich. The king and court went first to Hampton Court, then to Salisbury and from there to Oxford. For the rest of the year Pepys travelled up and down the Thames even more than usual, visiting his wife when he could, but effectively leading a bachelor life, which may have contributed to his unusually high spirits.
Because the most notable fact about Pepys’s plague year is that to him it was one of the happiest of his life. It was also among the busiest. He worked long hours, profited by every opportunity to make money, and quadrupled his fortune. He sought and was given two appointments that extended his power and earning capacity, treasurer to the Tangier Committee and surveyor-general of victualling for the navy. This was the year of his election to the Royal Society; he attended some lectures and acquired his own 12-foot telescope.22 He continued his sexual rampages. He enjoyed a series of experiences that filled him with excitement and delight, from the wedding of the Sandwichs’ daughter Jemima, which he helped Lady Sandwich organize in the absence of her Lord at sea, to the autumn evenings when he was living in lodgings at Greenwich, made music with friends and composed his own best-known song. There was a period during the same autumn when he found the energy to keep two diaries, the second entirely concerned with his negotiations to buy prize goods from the trading ships captured by Lord Sandwich from the Dutch. The year was so packed with events that the plague was largely relegated to the background in the Diary as Pepys pursued his activities with triumphant energy. When the death figures were at their worst, he wrote that ‘everything else hath conspired to my happiness and pleasure, more for these last three months then in all my life before in so little time’. A few weeks later, ‘I do end this month with the greatest content, and may say that these last three months, for joy, health and profit, have been much the greatest that ever I received in all my life.’23 And at the end of the year he summed up 1665 with the words: ‘I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague-time.’ The parallel is obvious with men and women at war or under bombardment who have found themselves living on an adrenalin high that gives extra intensity to every experience; so Pepys, while something like a sixth of the population of London died around him, experienced months of euphoria, revelling in his own success and pleasures.
Jemima Montagu’s wedding was a high point, giving him the chance to be in control of a social event, to adopt the role of mentor to the young couple and to serve Lady Sandwich. His part in the wedding preparations brought him a pleasure so intense that the terrors of the plague receded into the background of his consciousness. He was in on the arrangements from the start. Lord Sandwich, briefly returned from one naval engagement and about to go to sea again, charged him at the end of June with proposing a match between Jemima and the eldest son of Sir George Carteret. It was a task very much to Pepys’s taste, to be entrusted with an intimate affair between two noble families, acting for one and courteously received by the head of the other, who also happened to be his superior at the Navy Board. A good career move, clearly, but something much more: it put him in the know and virtually in charge. And indeed, hardly were the financial arrangements agreed and royal approval gained for the match than Sandwich departed suddenly with the fleet, leaving Pepys to take over. At this stage Jemima had not even met Philip Carteret; it was not a matter of concern to either of the fathers. Later, Sir George told Pepys that he would not have let his son have Lady Jem if he had been a debauch, as so many of the young men at court were, and Lady Sandwich expressed a mother’s anxiety to Pepys as to whether her daughter would like the match.24 But by then everything was settled.
The Carterets were living at the treasurer’s house in Deptford because of the plague, and Lady Sandwich came to stay with them from Tonbridge, where she had been taking the waters, which, rather than doing her good, had made her ill. She was forty that summer; Pepys was in and out of the Carterets’ house, sitting in her room to talk everything over, ‘she lying prettily in her bed’, still unwell.25 Lady Jemima was sent to her aunt’s house, Dagenham in Essex, across the river; the marriage was to be celebrated there, not at Hinchingbrooke. Pepys met the 24-year-old bridegroom and found him modest and intelligent but awkward in his manner; he said he liked his first sight of Jemima – Pepys elicited this by eager questioning – but he did nothing to show it. Pepys felt moved to give him a little instruction in how to take a lady’s hand and lead her about the room, then the couple were left on their own for an hour in the gallery, and later in the garden. The weather was sweltering. Both appeared serious and shy. What they had in common as well as their rank was a physical disability, she her crooked neck, which had not been quite cured, he a limp, something their parents may have considered when they planned the match. Pepys was told she must be seen again by the doctor who had tried to straighten her neck before the wedding and that she needed new clothes, so he busied himself with these matters. He also questioned her on her reaction to her future husband and was pleased when she blushed, hid her face and said she could readily obey her parents’ wishes. Lady Carteret sent her jewels, beautiful bedding and presents of all kinds, ‘as if they would buy the young lady’, he wrote, ‘which makes my Lady and me out of our wits almost, to see the kindness she treats us all with’.26 Pepys shows himself responding as one with Lady Sandwich: he is taking all the roles, as father, brother, teacher and indispensable cousin.
During the last days before the wedding, he continued to work at the office at Seething Lane, to visit the king and duke at Hampton Court and Greenwich to keep them informed; and to walk the city streets and the river banks much as usual. He advised his Joyce cousins to leave London for Brampton, ‘using all the vehemence and Rhetoric I could’, but they were unwilling to abandon their shop; and he heard that his old clerking friend Robin Shaw was a plague victim. Yet on this same day he declared he had enjoyed four days of ‘as great content and honour and pleasure to me as ever I hope to live or desire or think anybody else can live’.27 He caught up with his accounts, assisted by Will, and with his journal; and he travelled tirelessly between Seething Lane, Deptford and Dagenham, with a few quick forays to Woolwich to see Elizabeth. Once again, his energy appears more godlike than human. Twice he and the Carterets were held up by the tide in crossing the Thames with the ferry; they had to sleep in their coach on the Isle of Dogs one night, and on the day of the wedding itself, 31 July, they were again delayed and missed the ceremony. Sir George charmed him by remaining ‘so light, so fond, so merry, so boyish’ throughout; the practical Lady Carteret supplied Pepys with a bottle of plague water, one of the many concoctions made up by physicians to ward off the disease.28
In the confusion over the day and time of the wedding, the bride and groom did not put on their finery and wore ordinary clothes. Pepys, resplendent in a new silk suit with gold buttons and broad gold lace, thought Jemima looked sad and sober, and the day passed quietly, with dinner, cards, supper and prayers, but after this Pepys made a merry visit to the bridegroom as he undressed in his room, and then kissed the bride in bed and saw the curtains drawn. ‘The modesty and gravity of this business was so decent, that it was to me, indeed, ten times more delightful than if it had been twenty times more merry and Joviall,’ he wrote. Both in his Diary and in a letter to Lord Sandwich he expanded on the great joy and satisfaction afforded by the whole process; ‘thus end we this month… after the greatest glut of content that ever I had’ – adding, ‘Only, under some difficulty because of the plague’, as though it were a minor inconvenience.
He was now called ‘Cousin’ by the Carterets, and, in the absence of Lord Sandwich or any of his sons, Pepys became the chief male representative of his family.29 It was a sort of apotheosis. In the days before the wedding his feelings had been stirred so deeply that he was driven to thank God for having arranged the whole thing: ‘For methinks if a man could but reflect upon this, and think that all these things are ordered by God Almighty to make me contented, and even this very marriage now on foot is one of the things intended to find me content in my life and matter of mirth, methinks it should make one mightily more satisfied in the world than he is.’30 Neither the language nor the ideas are quite clear, but the general sense is unmistakable: Pepys was pleased with his destiny.
The marriage was made in spite of the plague, but the young couple did not have many years together. They settled in Bedfordshire at Hawnes, a large house with a deer park, purchased for them by Sir George Carteret. Three sons were born to them, and the birth of the third proved fatal to Jemima. She died in November 1671, aged twenty-five. Philip survived her by only a few months. After her death he took up the naval career he had abandoned when he married, only to be killed fighting the Dutch alongside his father-in-law Lord Sandwich the following May. The redeeming part of the story is that Sir George and Lady Carteret moved to Hawnes to care for their orphaned grandsons and raised all three successfully.31
*
After the wedding, Pepys’s habits of hard work and careful planning continued as usual. He put all his papers in order and rewrote his will, acknowledging that he might become a victim himself. He chewed tobacco against the plague and worried in case wig-makers might be using the hair of victims. He had a moment of ‘extraordinary fear’ in July when he heard that Will Hewer had come in to work with a headache and gone to lie down on Pepys’s bed. Pepys set his people very smartly to get him out of the house, although, he instructed them, ‘without discouraging him’.32 Will got over his headache. Early in August Pepys himself suggested the Navy Office should move from London to Greenwich, asking Coventry for the king’s permission, although he volunteered to ‘trust God Almighty and stay in town’ himself.33 Orders came for the move on 16 August, and, after making his gallant remark to Coventry on 25 August, ‘You, Sir, took your turn at the sword; I must not therefore grudge to take mine at the pestilence’, Pepys in fact immediately left town.34 Yet he sometimes behaved as though he were invulnerable. He was driven by curiosity, making a quite unnecessary visit to the plague pits in Moorfields, for instance, because he wanted to see a burial there; and even after the removal of the office he continued to go into London to look after his private business or fetch things he wanted from Seething Lane.35 He did not keep away from Westminster, though he knew it was badly affected, until he learnt of the death of ‘poor Will that used to sell us ale at the Hall-door – his wife and children dead, all I think in a day’.36 At the end of August he walked through the City to visit a goldsmith and remarked that the people he passed were ‘walking like people that had taken leave of the world’ – one of the few phrases in the Diary that gives a suggestion of the eeriness of the scene.37
When the fathers of both Will Hewer and Tom Edwards died of the plague in one week in September, Pepys kept the young men busy working at Greenwich; it was probably the best way to treat them. He showed a fatherly concern for Tom, sharing a lunch of bread and cheese in the office with him when the other clerks went home for their dinner, and taking him on a trip to Gravesend and back on the office yacht. He believed it was better for everyone if he himself ‘put off the thoughts of sadness as much as I can; and the rather to keep my wife in good heart, and family also’.38 Keeping your spirits up was thought to be a way of fighting off infection. On the day Elizabeth told him she feared her father was ill, and he answered that he thought it was the plague, because Mr de St Michel’s house was shut up, he also got the news of Lord Sandwich capturing the Dutch trading ships and celebrated with colleagues and friends, Lord Brouncker and his mistress Mrs Williams, Sir John Mennes, Captain Cocke and John Evelyn, all in ‘an extasy of joy’, telling one another funny stories that ‘did make us all die almost with laughing’. To die of laughter was the best alternative to thoughts of dying any other way, and ‘in this humour we sat till about 10 at night; and so my Lord and his mistress home, and we to bed – it being one of the times of my life wherein I was the fullest of true sense of joy’.39 He could not pretend to be much troubled about Elizabeth’s father. In any case, old St Michel recovered from his illness.
Pepys knew he had earned the right to be proud of his courage in remaining at his post in town as long as he did. He made as much clear in a letter to Lady Carteret in which he spelt out some of his experiences in a very different tone from anything in the Diary:
I having stayed in the city till above 7400 died in one week, and of them above 6000 of the plague, and little noise heard day nor night but tolling of bells; till I could walk Lombard Street and not meet twenty persons from one end to the other, and not fifty upon the Exchange; till whole families (ten and twelve together) have been swept away; till my very physican, Dr Burnet, who undertook to secure me against any infection… died himself of the plague; till the nights (though much lengthened) are grown too short to conceal the burials of those that died the day before, people thereby constrained to borrow daylight for that service; lastly, till I could find neither meat nor drink safe, the butcheries being everywhere visited, my brewer’s house shut up, and my baker with his whole family dead of the plague. Yet, Madam, through God’s blessing and the good humours begot in my attendance upon our late Amours [he means the recent wedding] your poor servant is in a perfect state of health.40
Again, the suggestion is that his good spirits have contributed to his immunity.
Pepys’s journal of the plague year is above all an account of one man’s capacity to detach himself from disaster and rise above the horrors. Plague takes its place alongside, but never in front of, office work, naval battles and their consequences, Jemima Montagu’s wedding, family quarrels, music-making, sexual conquests and all the private interests and obsessions that made part of his daily life, more minutely chronicled than ever. Every month offers surprises and insights, some political, some personal, that are quite unconnected with the plague, and noted in detail and at length. For instance, at a council meeting to raise funds for the war, in April, the earl of Southampton, then in charge of the Treasury, asked, ‘Why will people not lend their money? Why will they not trust the King as well as Oliver? Why do our prizes come to nothing, that yielded so much heretofore?’ – questions no one present was able to answer.41 In November he was faced with rioting seamen, unpaid and starving, breaking the windows of his Greenwich office and threatening more violence. He took the view that ‘only money and a rope’ could deal with them, but chiefly money; and in December he complained that the office had not received so much as a farthing for the men’s payment for two months.42
There were other lighter moments. In June, for no fathomable reason, he adopted a fanciful vocabulary to describe an assignation, choosing to call the young woman ‘fairest flower’ and ‘the rose’. He takes ‘fairest flower’ to Tothill Fields in a coach for the air, and when it is dark they go in ‘to eat a cake, and there did do as much as was safe with my flower’. It is his only venture into the language of romance, altogether different from his usual foreign phrases, and he never repeated it; you wonder if it harked back to the novel he wrote at Cambridge.43 In September he had a business meeting near Ewell in Surrey, at Nonsuch Palace, semi-derelict and with a ruined garden, which he observed with pleasure; and in this romantic place, while conducting his financial dealings, he spoke to a little girl and heard her sing. Her singing impressed him so much that he decided he would offer her employment when he next needed a girl in his household; and, more than a year later, he remembered her and did so.44
One more episode from the plague year concerns Pepys’s old friend from his clerking days, Peter Luellin, who had visited him aboard the Naseby in 1660. They had written to one another, agreed how their lives would be improved if they only had private incomes and spent evenings swapping stories over drinks. After a spell in Ireland, where he failed to make his fortune, Luellin was back in England in 1663, working for a timber merchant called Edward Dering. What made him useful to Dering was his friendship with Pepys, who was in a position to give contracts to timber merchants, and soon Luellin was offering Pepys £200 a year for his good offices and fifty gold pieces for taking immediate goods. Pepys explained he was not to be bribed, but was prepared to accept an ‘acknowledgment’ of his services.45 He repeated this more formally: ‘I told him that I would not sell my liberty to any man. If he would give me anything by another’s hand, I would endeavour to deserve it, but I will never give him himself thanks for it, nor acknowledge the receiving of any… I did also tell him that neither this nor anything should make me to do anything that should not be for the King’s service besides.’46 It is Pepys’s central statement of his position on accepting presents from interested parties, and he reverted to it when he was challenged on this point in 1670.
For now, he took a £50 bill of exchange from Dering, ‘the best New Year’s gift I ever had’, cashed for him by Luellin, to whom Pepys gave £2 for his trouble. After this Luellin was a frequent caller at Seething Lane, dining and taking Elizabeth to the theatre, even setting off a twinge of Pepys’s jealousy.47 But Luellin’s target was always Pepys. The Diary sets out Pepys’s moral juggling, now hoping for money from Dering, now complaining that Luellin is trying to force him to take some. Luellin continued to visit Pepys in Greenwich when the Navy Office moved there, bringing more proposals from Dering, and Pepys accepted twenty gold pieces, ‘yet really and sincerely against my will’.48 Luellin was becoming an embarrassment to him, and Pepys wrote him off as a lightweight, too keen on his pleasures to do well in business. A few weeks later Dering told Pepys that Luellin had died of the plague in St Martin’s Lane, ‘which much surprised me’. This was all the epitaph he got from his old friend. Pepys had moved on.
He was less eager to return to Seething Lane at the end of the year, when the danger had abated, than Elizabeth, who went home first with Mary Mercer and their maids, and had to make a special trip to Greenwich to urge Pepys to follow suit. When he did get back in January 1666, he was frightened by the sight of the churchyard at St Olave’s, in which the graves were piled high; more than three hundred burials had taken place during the previous six months. A covering of snow in February made it look less ghastly, but he discussed spreading lime over it with a local merchant. Their clergyman, Mr Mills, also crept back to his parish in February – first to go and last to return, jeered Pepys – and delivered a sermon blaming the plague on the sins of the nation, which Will Hewer took down in shorthand.49 Everyone kept a nervous eye on the plague figures; people were still dying, and the fear that it might increase when the hot weather started again could not be dismissed. ‘If the plague continues among us another year, the Lord knows what will become of us,’ wrote Pepys.50 Another 2,000 Londoners died in 1666; the theatres were not reopened until November, and there was no public thanksgiving for the end of the plague until then. We know that the last recorded case was in 1679, at Rotherhithe; but neither Pepys nor anyone else could possibly know that the plague was making its final appearance and would never return to England.51