There are many Janes in the Diary, and three of them are distinctive characters, brought to life in Pepys’s scattered comments. Of these the slightest is Jane Welsh – worth noticing for her cussedness and his curious obsession with her. She caught his eye at Jervas’s, his barber and wig-maker, another establishment in New Palace Yard; and he first mentions her in July 1664 as a ‘pretty innocent girl’ who has been in service there for some time. Elizabeth was in the country, and he invited Jane to an ale house, ‘sported’ with her briefly and felt encouraged to pursue her. For six months after this her name comes up regularly. First he hoped Jervas would send her to Seething Lane to deliver his newly cleaned wig but was disappointed. Further attempts to get her to talk to him in the shop got nowhere. When he managed to suggest a meeting outside the shop, she told him that her master and mistress did not allow her out without them, adding that they were trying to find her a husband. Pepys decided he would like to find her one himself, because she was such a good-natured, attractive girl; he saw no inconsistency between this and chasing her himself. At last she agreed to meet him, on a Sunday when the Jervases were due to be away; the appointed place was outside Westminster Abbey, but when the day came she failed to turn up. He kicked his heels from three in the afternoon to six o’clock, and the next Sunday he waited again, and again she did not come. When he called at the shop she was cool, and for the rest of the year she remained unresponsive.1 The effect of this marked indifference to his attentions was that by 9 December, when she again refused to have a drink with him at the Trumpet in King Street, he had developed ‘grand envie envers elle [desire for her], avec vrai amour et passion’.
So far this was a straightforward Pepys pursuit. But in the new year Mr and Mrs Jervas told him they were worried about Jane because she now told them she had promised herself to a penniless fiddler and would not consider any other husband; and when Pepys volunteered to give her some good advice they were grateful. Several more of his attempts to meet her failed. Then, out of the blue, she suddenly turned up at his office one morning of her own accord, wanting to talk to him and announcing she had left her job with the Jervases for her violin-playing sweetheart. Without pausing to ask himself why she had come to tell him this, Pepys took her to a house in the fields on the south bank and gave her good advice just as he had promised the Jervases he would: she should return to them and to her job, and forget the fiddler. At the same time the opportunity for seduction was too good to miss. She let him launch himself on her, enjoyably enough for him, but she stopped him when he tried to go further than she thought right and ‘would not laisser me faire l’autre thing, though I did what I pouvais to have got her à me laisser’. Letting him go as far as she did was perhaps the price she had decided to pay for his attention, because she needed someone to talk to; and perhaps she liked him well enough for his patient pursuit over many months. But chiefly she wanted him to know that she was going to marry the fiddler, and why. She said it was because she ‘believed it was her fortune to have this man, though she did believe it would be to her ruin’.2
This is what fixes Jane Welsh in the mind: her oddity, her stubborn insistence on doing something she believed to be against her own interests but for which she was destined; and her need to explain this to someone who would listen and just possibly understand. Pepys, even in the grip of his carnal desires, had the grace to grasp that she wanted to give an account of her sense of her own fate; and foolish, even self-destructive as he thought her, he took the trouble to write down her explanation.
His portrait of Jane Welsh goes little further. Weeks later the Jervases told Pepys that Jane was ‘undone’, just as she had predicted she would be. She had been sleeping with her fiddler, they said, and now found out that he had a wife and child; and she was therefore leaving London for Ireland – why is not explained, but she may have had family there.3 This was almost but not quite the last word on her. Leaving when she did she had the good luck to miss the plague, and a year later, in April 1666, she was back in London safe and sound. Pepys caught sight of her near Westminster jetty and carried her off for a drink across the river again, this time not to the fields but to Lambeth. Under questioning she confessed that her lover had been married, and claimed she had not slept with him; but Pepys’s interest had waned and he was not curious enough to ask her anything more about her current circumstances. ‘There I left her, sin hazer alguna cosa con ella,’ was all he had to say. No longer in pursuit of her, he went on to treat some other young women to prawns and lobsters in Fish Street and finished the evening happily feeling Mary Mercer’s breasts at home.4 Jane Welsh, who for a few months had danced in his imagination, unpredictable and exasperating, disappeared back into an unchronicled life. From what he has told us she had a good chance of holding her own in the rough and tumble of London: she was good-looking, she was tough, and her fate was better than she had expected, since she had survived not only her false fiddler but also the plague.
Jane Turner – ‘Madam Turner’ as Pepys sometimes called her – is a much more substantial case. She comes out of the Diary as the strongest character among the Pepys clan after Sam himself. They had known one another from his infancy and her childhood, because her father John Pepys was third cousin to his father and owned a large house in Salisbury Court; it may indeed have been part of the reason why his father set up his tailoring business there in the first place. These were the affluent cousins who took Pepys as a boy to Ashtead and Durdans, and Jane was the youngest of their three children, ten years or so older than Sam and plainly fond of him and interested in his progress long before he became a successful man. She was always well supplied with money. She married her lawyer husband John Turner, a York-shireman, around 1650: ten years older than her, he was educated at Cambridge, at the Middle Temple in 1634, kept his head down during the civil war and became recorder of York in 1662. He wished to live in his native Yorkshire but she preferred London; and, although she bore him four children, she was able to defy his wishes over considerable periods of time because she had inherited her father’s house in Salisbury Court. The ownership of this house was the crucial factor in her independence. When Turner bought an estate in the north, she preferred to be parted from him and even from some of her children; for instance in 1662 the Diary tells us that her two sons (‘very plain boys’) had spent the last three years in Yorkshire in the care of their father.5 He appears in Pepys’s pages only when he is consulted for a legal opinion and is described as ‘a worthy, sober, serious man’ – rather too sober, it appears, for Mrs Turner.6
Careless as she seems to have been of her sons, to her cousin Sam she showed affection and generosity. She was the one who volunteered to look after him when he had the operation for the stone, a kindness that must have totally disrupted her household for two months. Six years later, when his brother Tom was dying, she again showed concern beyond the call of duty, sending notes to Sam urging him to visit Tom, sitting with him and dealing with doctors, giving a bed to the Pepyses on the night of his death and taking part in the funeral.7 Like Pepys, she enjoyed being busy and in charge of arrangements. He expressed his gratitude for her care during his operation by planning the annual ‘stone feast’ at which she was always to be the guest of honour. Like many such plans, this one lapsed: in 1660 he was away, and after 1666 there were other reasons – plague, pressure of work, his mother’s imminent death, Jane’s absence – to prevent it. There were, however, other parties and outings the cousins enjoyed together; and she was sometimes flirtatious. They went to Greenwich and Hyde parks, they indulged in a play-reading, and in 1669 he gave a great Twelfth Night dinner for her, after which she chose him as her Valentine.8 One day when he called as she was dressing by the fire she showed him her legs, of which she was proud. He duly admired them, without being stirred or tempted by the sight: she was too safely an elder sister figure. Still, when he came to choose her Valentine gift he bought her, as well as gloves and garters, some fashionable green silk stockings in delicate allusion to those fine legs.9
She assembled her own London household around her at Salisbury Court, which included her widowed sister and cousin Joyce Norton as well as her team of servants; and there were usually other women friends in attendance.10 The next formidable member of the family was her daughter Theophila, known as ‘The’ and, unlike her brothers, always kept with her.11 ‘The’ makes her first appearance in the Diary on 1 January 1660, supping with Pepys’s father; she was a precocious, indulged and confident child and something of a brat. At nine she was ordering her own harpsichord and refusing to give Pepys a lesson on it when he asked her (although he could play several string and wind instruments, he never mastered a keyboard). When Elizabeth sent her a gift of doves, ‘The’distinguished herself by writing her a rude letter, complaining that they had come in an inadequate cage; she grumbled about not having a good place for the coronation; and she forced herself on Pepys as his Valentine.12 She did offer to play her harpsichord to him to console him after the death of his brother Tom, after which he wrote that ‘the Musique did not please me neither’.13 Her mother trusted her with commissions, and at the age of ten she was sent to ask Pepys to find their serving man John a place at sea; in her teens she was capable of escorting her two brothers and little sister Betty from Yorkshire to London and installing them in their schools in Putney. Mother and daughter made a remarkably strong-minded pair.
Jane was also close to another Pepys cousin, Roger, the Cambridge MP, and interested herself in his children and his marriages. You can see in the course of the Diary how she and Roger appreciated Sam’s steady social rise as he made money and acquired power and influence – he was becoming one of them. And he enjoyed demonstrating that he was no longer among the poor Pepyses. In 1663 he was able to send her a present of wine and venison; when her brother died he was helpful about the funeral arrangements; and by 1669 he could lend her his own carriage horses. He showed off his grand new friends to her, taking her to Povey’s house to see his perspective paintings and ‘volary’ (birdcage).14 The benefits went both ways, her wealth and connections helpful to him; he wrote after one outing with her, ‘I think it is not amisse to preserve, though it cost me a little, such a friend as Mrs Turner’.15 He also knew he could count on her affection. When he had failed to call on her for six months while establishing himself at Seething Lane, he remarked that she was a good woman and ‘could not be angry with me’; yet he was genuinely fond of her and worried about her when she was ill.16
When, however, her husband came to town to organize some Middle Temple dinners and expected Pepys to help with the food through his navy victualling office, he let him down and failed even to attend any of the dinners. She accused him of growing proud.17She scolded him again in November 1666 when, after a long exile to Yorkshire during the period of the plague and the fire, she came south to look at the spot where her house had stood, now nothing but ashes. ‘She was mighty angry with me, that in all this time I never writ to her; which I do think and take to myself as a fault, and which I have promised to mend,’ wrote Pepys. The loss of her house and all its contents was a disaster that meant she could no longer insist on living in London. Pepys soothed her with a ‘noble and costly dinner’ and listened to her complaints about the dullness of Yorkshire: ‘She is quite weary of the country, but cannot get her husband to let her live here any more, which troubles her mightily… We sat long; and after much talk of the plenty of her country in Fish, but in nothing also that is pleasing, we broke up with great kindness.’18 A few days later she told him she was forced to leave London again: ‘She is returning into the North to her children, where, I perceive, her husband hath clearly got the mastery of her, and she is likely to spend her days there, which for her sake I am a little sorry for, though for his it is but fit she should live where he hath a mind.’19 A husband’s right to control his wife was not something Pepys would argue against. In fact within months ‘The’ brought the younger children to school in London, and in 1668 Madam Turner herself was back in high spirits; Betty, her second daughter, promised to be a beauty, and they were all as merry as ever in lodgings. There were theatre parties, dinners, suppers, music and visits to Mulberry Gardens. One night they danced until two at Seething Lane and slept there afterwards, all fifteen of the party, which included Roger Pepys and his wife and daughters. To accommodate them all Pepys and Elizabeth moved into the maids’ bedroom, the maids slept in the coachman’s bed and the coachman with the boy in his settle-bed. This high point of cousinly hospitality and pleasure comes almost at the end of the Diary, which gives a last glimpse of ‘my cousin Turner and The and joyce in their riding clothes’ preparing to travel north again.
They must have been in London again in subsequent years. ‘The’ married a Devon baronet and became Lady Harris in 1673; but there are no further signs of them among Pepys’s papers, and, if he kept his promise to write to Jane, none of their correspondence has survived. A pity, because she would be worth knowing through her own words as well as his. She was a fine example of a woman whose natural liveliness and independence were given rein by her father’s legacy of a house. To her husband it may have been a nuisance, but to her it was an act of wisdom. John Pepys of Ashtead knew that economics determine social arrangements, and gave his daughter the means to live her life as she pleased.20
*
One of ‘The’ Turner’s last appearances in the Diary was as bridesmaid to the Pepyses’ maid, Jane Birch, when she married Pepys’s clerk Tom Edwards. Jane Birch is the most important of the Janes and the only one whose story can be taken from before the start of the Diary to the end of Pepys’s life. Within the Diary she appears on the first page already well established at Axe Yard at fifteen; at the end as a married woman and set to remain a family friend; and in the years between he tells us a great deal about her character and still more of what she had to put up with. Pepys once called her ‘harmless’, a word he also applied to Lady Sandwich, no doubt contrasting in his mind the natures of these two women with the more dangerous and unpredictable temperaments of his wife and his sister.21 Will Hewer, another peaceable character, also had a high opinion of Jane. During one of her absences he was overheard telling the other servants how good she was and how the Pepyses would never have a better maid; and in later years he employed her himself.22 Harmless as she may have been, she also kept on good terms with Pepys because, like Will, she learnt to resist his bullying.
Much of her story is given in asides, and sometimes she is not even named, just indicated as the girl, or the wench, and you have to work out if this is Jane, and the right Jane; all the same she emerges as one of the most interesting of the women who engaged his attention in the Diary. From our point of view she was also a representative of a vast and little documented group. Being a household servant was the commonest occupation by far for girls and women in the seventeenth century; there were very few other ways of earning anything – which is why Pepys took his own sister as a servant. But while every household had its maids, little information has come down to us about the detail of their lives. Through Pepys’s account of Jane and her fellow maids a good deal can be gleaned. In his household, for instance, the maids slept sometimes in garrets, sometimes in cold weather by the kitchen fire and sometimes in other rooms, including his and Elizabeth’s bedroom, which one girl found disconcerting, though Jane did not. They were recruited through friends and paid between £2 and £4 a year in addition to their board and lodging; and they appear to have had no formal holidays. They might be given cast-off clothes and taken on outings; and living close to their employers as they did, they generally knew everything that was going on in the family. The system was hierarchical and intimate at the same time, and the gap between maid and employer was an elastic one, which meant Jane was part slavey and part hairdresser, masseuse, secretary, even daughter. Not only might she sleep in her employers’ bedroom, she also sometimes shared a bed with her mistress or sat beside the bed darning while her master was settling to sleep.
Perhaps because she was his first servant, Pepys did not take her for granted. From the start he was interested enough in her to note down some of the things he saw her doing, such as knitting stockings, possibly for herself, possibly for him. And he noticed too when she got up at two in the morning to start on the washing. He liked her well enough to take her along to Sunday dinner at his parents’ house, and he trusted her with his books: she was given the job of carrying the ones he had left in his turret room in Whitehall Palace to his house in Axe Yard. Just before they moved to Seething Lane, she fell ill – the only time we hear of such a thing – and spent two days in bed with a bad leg. ‘We cannot tell what to do for want of her,’ he wrote despondently, but he worked it out and took on a second servant to help, a boy. Pepys and Elizabeth made the move to their new house by coach, overtaking the carts carrying their goods, and presumably Jane and the boy, in the Strand. On arrival she at once started washing the house while Elizabeth went to bed. Pepys writes of sporting with her and the boy in the kitchen while they combed his hair, his bedtime ritual: a little horseplay and some jokes. A few weeks later, when Jane was sleeping in their bedroom with them, the new boy was in trouble for stealing, and she fancied she heard a noise downstairs. Elizabeth was frightened that the boy was planning mischief – Pepys says she shook with fear – and it was intrepid Jane who went down to investigate, lit a candle, locked the door fast and reassured her employers. The boy was sacked, and Jane saw her chance and brought her younger brother Wayneman into the household in his place. She set about teaching him his duties: putting Pepys to bed, folding his clothes, presumably, as well as the hair-combing and making sure the chamber pot was in place.
December 1660 was a month of intimacies: on the 1st Pepys, finding the house untidy, let his anger rip and beat her with a broom until she cried ‘extremely’. This upset him – can he have supposed she would take it as another bit of sporting? – and he felt obliged to appease her (his word) before he went out. Not long afterwards he describes the delightfully peaceful scene in which, while Elizabeth was away with friends, he lay in bed reading himself to sleep while Jane sat companionably beside him darning his breeches. Two days before Christmas she and Elizabeth struggled together to get a great turkey on to the spit; and after Christmas Pepys was ill in the night (‘I think with eating and drinking too much’), called up Jane to bring a basin and recovered fast enough to be charmed by the innocent way she ran up and down in her night smock, presumably showing a good deal of arm and leg.23
Jane was not timid and she knew how to stand up for herself. When Pepys’s or Elizabeth’s treatment became too much for her, she either gave in her notice or refused to submit to their scoldings and drove them to dismiss her; then she insisted on taking the dismissal they clearly hoped to renegotiate. She wept when she left, but she went. Pepys too was reduced to the brink of tears on these occasions. She left for the first time after she had served the Pepyses for three years, two in Axe Yard, one at Seething Lane. This was in 1661, and she gave as her reason that her mother needed her in the country. Wayneman was now working for the Pepyses and he would remain in London. We are not told what part of the country they came from, but it must have been reasonably close, given that she and her two brothers all came to work in London, and her toings and froings. One possibility is that she was a Buckinghamshire girl recommended to Pepys by his fatherly friend at the Exchequer, Robert Bowyer, who had a house in Buckinghamshire where Elizabeth stayed with Jane in 1660.
When Jane decided to take herself home to her mother in 1661, Pepys said she had grown lazy, spoilt by having Pall to share the work with her, but he was still upset at losing her. It was especially annoying because he had just decided to get rid of Pall and send her to live in the country with their parents. Pall hated the idea of leaving London but was made to go; and, fortunately for the Pepyses, Jane enjoyed country life with her mother no more than Pall did with hers, and in the spring of 1662 she was back working for them again. In her absence Wayneman had got into trouble and been beaten for having gunpowder for Guy Fawkes’ night in his pocket. When Pepys took him down to the cellar to beat him again shortly after Jane’s return, she interceded for him, and Pepys called off the punishment. Later he felt obliged to explain to her that he was doing it for the boy’s good.24 Jane was tactful enough to accept this, but she was not happy about it. Wayneman got deeper into the Pepyses’ bad books for misbehaving at Brampton when he was there with Elizabeth in August and September. She accused him of behaviour ‘not fit to name’, and old Mr Pepys complained too, saying he would not have him in the house again, so he must have done something pretty bad.25 This was the summer when Ferrer and Lord Sandwich paid attention to Elizabeth, which may have preoccupied her so much that she allowed Wayneman to run wild. It was a complicated season for everyone.
Jane remained at Seething Lane with Pepys, helping to deal with the chaos caused by his building works there. The roof had to come off before the new storey could be added, and heavy rain made the whole process into a nightmare; fortunately the Penns were away for several weeks, and Pepys and Jane were able to move into their house while the worst part of work was carried out. Pepys speaks of her ‘lying among my goods’ at the Penns at the end of August. The Diary also says he is hoping for ‘a bout’ with her but is held back by his fears that she would prove honest and tell Elizabeth if he suggested such a thing. Then he wrote, ‘I can hardly keep myself from having a mind to my wench, but I hope I shall not fall to such a shame to myself.’26 Nothing happened, or at least nothing more appears from the text, which suggests that Pepys controlled himself; but Jane was no fool, and at eighteen she is likely to have been aware of her employer’s interest.
Some time after Penn’s return in September he told Pepys that Jane had attacked one of the carpenters working on the building site, cutting off his long moustache, a Delilah-like gesture that was probably self-defence. Girls in her situation needed to work out their strategies. The carpenter said his wife, when she saw the damage, assumed he had been ‘among some of his wenches’.27 After this there was another episode in which Lady Batten complained that Jane had insolently mimicked her way of calling her maid. Pepys felt he must ‘school’ her; but Jane knew he disliked Lady Batten and answered him ‘so humbly and drolly about it, that though I seemed angry, I was much pleased with her’.28 Then her combative spirit went too far even for him. At Christmas he scolded her for speaking saucily to Elizabeth and said she was growing proud and negligent. When he beat Wayneman again, for lying, in January 1663, she showed her anger, and at this Pepys told her to leave. She packed up her things to go. He ‘could hardly forbear weeping’, and she did cry, ‘saying it was not her fault that she went away. And indeed, it is hard to say what it is but only her not desiring to stay, that she doth now go.’29 She had effectively turned the tables on him.
With his sister gone, Wayneman grew wilder. He wanted to leave too, although his brother William urged him not to; but, when the boy saw Pepys preparing to beat him for not writing out his lesson in his copy-book, he ran away. No one knew where he had gone until Pepys saw him playing on Tower Hill several days later; he must have been living in the streets, and in his best suit too. Pepys sent the Seething Lane porter to fetch him, made him change into his old suit and sacked him on the spot. Jane and William Birch came round together to beg Pepys either to take him back or to send him to sea as a ship’s boy. Pepys did neither. He took the whole episode seriously and was upset enough to describe his exchange with Jane in some detail: ‘though I could yet be glad to do anything for her sake to the boy; but receive him again I will not nor give him anything. She would have me send him to sea; which if I could I would do, but there is no ships going out. The poor girl cried all the time she was with me and could not go from me, staying about two hours with me till 10 or 11 o’clock at night, expecting that she might obtain something of me; but receive him I will not. So the poor girl was fain to go away, crying and saying little.’30 Pepys’s language becomes almost biblical in this emotional passage with its short words, its repetitions (‘the poor girl’) and emphatic inversion (‘receive him I will not’), also repeated; and its use of ‘fain’ in the sense of accepting the lesser of two evils – in this case, to depart unsatisfied rather than remaining to no purpose. He is trying to convince himself, and underneath the fine language he has doubts about what he is doing, punishing Jane, who is blameless and whom he loves, as well as Wayneman, who has disappointed him. Wayneman’s next employer found him uncontrollable too and prepared to ship him off to Barbados as an indentured servant. Pepys was again applied to and asked to get a release for him, but he refused, ‘Out of love to the boy; for I doubt to keep him here were to bring him to the gallows’.31 He had decided Wayneman was past any help or discipline he could give him, and the boy disappeared into the harsh life of the plantations, only a small step up from slavery. After this Jane kept away from Seething Lane for more than two years.
It was Elizabeth who then sought her out in the spring of 1666, hoping to persuade her to return. Pepys almost babbled with delight in the Diary when she succeeded in weaning her away from her current employer. ‘This day my poor Jane, my little old Jane, came to us again, to my wife’s and my great content.’32 By now he had known her for almost seven years. He had quite forgotten the pride, cheek and ingratitude he had accused her of, and become certain that she had ‘all the marks and qualities of a good and loving and honest servant’. They decided to promote her to cook, which meant her wages would have gone up to about £4 a year. She had reached the age of twenty-one and done very well, rising from maid-of-all-work to this superior position in the household; there were now three other maids kept, as well as Tom Edwards from the Chapel Royal choir, who made music with Pepys, did some work as a clerk and lent a hand generally about the place. There were besides frequent visits from her old friend Will Hewer; and she was in high enough favour to be taken for outings on the river in a Navy Office boat on a Sunday afternoon, with Mrs Pepys and her waiting-woman Mary Mercer, and to walk on the lawns of Barn Elms on the Surrey bank. Some distinctions of rank were kept: for instance, she was never taken to the theatre by Pepys, although Elizabeth took her once, ‘to show her the play’, a new comedy called All Mistaken; or, The Mad Couple.33
It was Jane who, working late at night preparing a dinner party for the next day, roused Pepys at three in the morning on 2 September 1666 to tell him she saw a great fire in the City. She kept an eye on it while she continued with her cooking. And although she agreed to go to Woolwich with Elizabeth as the City blazed, she also, with characteristic enterprise, brought herself back of her own accord before Pepys fetched her mistress, and worked hard and late with him putting his books back on his shelves. She and Tom Edwards also helped him lug his iron chests out of the cellar and back into his closet in October.34 Tom was a year younger than Jane and they became friends, living in the household together and sharing chores. Jane had no luck with her brothers – Wayneman was lost to her and in 1667 William died young, leaving a wife and two children – and she needed comfort. Pepys sympathized with her sorrow and gave her twenty shillings and wine for her brother’s burial; but it was Tom who filled the emptiness left by their loss. At some point in 1667 the two of them agreed that they would marry when they could afford to. That summer Elizabeth gave Jane one of her lace neckerchieves, and Pepys thought she looked ‘a very graceful servant’ wearing it when he met them beside the Thames near Rotherhithe one afternoon; it was more formal praise than usual.35 At this point he knew nothing of her engagement to Tom; they told Elizabeth first, and were so discreet in their behaviour that Pepys was unaware of it until she passed on the news in February 1668. Then he called Tom a rogue, because the story was that he had first wooed Jane, then slighted her, saying he was worried about displeasing Pepys. Tom understood how important it was to Pepys to be the dominant male in the household, and that his own position was a lowly one. All the same, Pepys wrote, ‘I think the business will go on; which, for my love to her because she is in love with him, I am pleased with.’ He took the view that Jane might have done better but decided he would give her £50, ‘and do them all the good I can in my way’.36
The engagement did not proceed smoothly. In the summer Jane threw a hysterical fit, brought on by jealousy, it seemed. She had to be held down by five men for a good half hour. After this impressive display both Pepyses and Will Hewer questioned the lovers, and Pepys concluded that Tom had gone cold on the marriage project. He thought he would have to get rid of them both from his household; but his mind was on ‘other greater things’, and the whole matter was allowed to lapse.37 Or at least lapse in one way. A few weeks later, as he was dressing, Pepys ‘did begin para tocar the breasts of my maid Jane, which ella did give way to more then usual heretofore, so as I have a design to try more what I can bring it to’.38 The way he puts this makes it clear that he has done as much before, and on a number of occasions, behaviour too unremarkable, it now appears, to be regularly mentioned in the Diary. Having a go at the household maids was, it seems, a standard activity; Pepys mentions trying it with Susan, the ‘little girl’, among others, and Tom Pepys, we remember, got his maid with child.39 The scientist and architect Robert Hooke, secretary to the Royal Society and well known to Pepys, kept a diary in the 1670s, much briefer but in some respects as frank as Pepys’s, which reveals that he regarded the young female inmates of his house as his natural prey; he expected to, and did, have sexual relations with several of his maids, and later also with his niece, who came to him as a schoolgirl and progressed to be his housekeeper. Hooke was a man with poor health and an unpleasing physical appearance, but that hardly explains away his domestic habits. Here are two contemporary records kept by very different men, both distinguished intellectually, both of whom persistently harassed the young women of their households. It is unlikely they were the only two.40 It is also likely that Tom Edwards’s hesitations were connected with anxieties about the relations between Pepys and Jane.
Elizabeth Pepys began to accuse her husband of being false to her with Jane. She alleged that Jane colluded by getting up late so that Pepys could watch her dress and allowing him into her room to do what he wanted – to be ‘naught with her’, a phrase indicating sexual misbehaviour. Jane must leave, she said. When Jane was summoned to their joint presence, she agreed to go at Easter but on condition that Tom could go with her.41 A solution was slowly being reached, since now Pepys told Tom he would not keep him on after Jane left but would ‘do well’ by him. He kept his word and found him other work for the Navy Board.42
Elizabeth forgot her jealous rage at once and entered enthusiastically into the arrangements for the wedding of ‘Our young people’, as they now became. She helped to get the licence, and the day was fixed for 26 March 1669, brushing aside the fact that it was in the middle of Lent and also the anniversary of Pepys’s stone operation. She arranged for bridesmaids and bridesmen; two were Pepys cousins, ‘The’ Turner and Talbot, Roger’s son, and another was Will Hewer; and she offered them a wedding dinner at the King’s Head in Islington after the service and the use of the blue room for their wedding night. The blue room was one of the best bed-chambers in the house, in which she had spent ten days putting up the hangings herself and later had in upholsterers to make it more comfortable and complete the effect.43 But while Elizabeth was busy with her plans for the festivities, Pepys sulked. Rather than presiding benevolently over preparations, he showed how much he resented what was happening, and how much he detested seeing his Jane handed over to another man. His feelings were so strong that he decided to take a trip to Chatham, arranging it so that he set off just before the ceremony, ‘that I might be out of the way at the wedding and be at a little liberty myself for a day or two, to find a little pleasure and give my eyes a little ease’.44 The pain in his eyes was a real anxiety, although he might have rested them at home. He preferred to stay away for four days, sightseeing in Kent and flirting with his old acquaintance Rebecca Allen, daughter of a Chatham official and now married. Pepys remembered dancing with her in 1661, before her marriage, and he now pressed his attentions on her again. Noticing that her hand was moist when he pulled off her glove and that her manners were ‘mighty free’, he concluded he could have anything he wanted of her if only time allowed. He also called her names in the Diary: ‘ella is a whore, that is certain, but a very brave and comely one’.45 This was Pepys at his angry and aggressive worst. Gradually he calmed down. He thought of Tom and Jane being put to bed on their wedding night, and also of his stone anniversary, left uncelebrated; and stayed away from home until everything was over. Then his good humour reasserted itself, and when he did return and was told how enjoyable the festivities had been, said he was glad and went with Elizabeth to pay the bill at the King’s Head. He joked – at least you hope it was a joke – about how smug Tom and Jane both looked. Two days later they moved out into their own lodgings. That night Pepys cheered himself up in bed with a little fantasizing about the new maid, Jane’s replacement.
This is almost the last of Jane in the Diary, which ends in May 1669. There are a few cheerful entries in April, when he took the newlyweds to a fashionable dining place, the Cock in Bow Street, and again noted his intention of giving them a wedding present, £40 for Tom, £20 for Jane from him and another £20 from Elizabeth. No doubt he carried out his promise. His other present may look symbolic to modern eyes, but to Pepys it must have been purely practical: he gave Tom a sword, with an old belt of his own to hang it on.46
After this he remained on good terms with Tom and Jane. He became godfather to their eldest son, Samuel, born in 1673. He saw to Tom’s career, getting him appointed muster-master and navy agent at Deal five years later, in succession to Baity St Michel, so that the job was kept to all intents and purposes in the family.47 When Tom died sadly young in 1681, leaving Jane with two children, she returned to work for Pepys, who was at that point sharing a house with Will Hewer. Whether Pepys was less rampageous in his desires or not, she was by then a middle-aged widow and a mother, and his role was to act as an avuncular figure, full of benevolence and good sense. He did well, arranging for young Sam to be given a place at Christ’s Hospital to study mathematics; and was rewarded by seeing him succeed. Sam was one of the pupils presented to King James at the beginning of 1688, and he grew up to become an officer in the navy, exactly as Pepys must have hoped. Jane remarried, a man called George Penny about whom we know nothing, and was soon widowed again. In 1690 Pepys settled an annuity of £15 a year on her.
Pepys loved Jane as you love someone who becomes a part of your life. His feelings for her were much warmer than anything he felt for his sister Pall, for instance, from the evidence of the Diary; and she appears as one of the most attractive figures in its pages. He shows her as affectionate, emotional, brave, stubborn, humorous, high-spirited, hard working and good at her work; loyal to her mother and brothers and faithful to her employers. Even Elizabeth had difficulty in picking quarrels with her. And he tells us what a hard time he often gave her and how stoutly she put up with his harshness, his unfairness and his general tiresomeness. When the day of Pepys’s funeral came, her son was there to represent her, by then Lieutenant Sam Edwards. He and his mother each received a ring by Pepys’s instructions, and she had an extra five guineas for mourning clothes in addition to the continued annuity ‘Setled on my old and faithfull Servant Jane Penny’ in his will.48 Whatever scoldings, tears, beatings, fumblings in dark corners and other bad behaviour he had handed out to Jane were long forgotten; and in this case time allowed him to redeem himself doubly: by making the end of her life as comfortable as possible and also, though she never knew it, by leaving an admirable portrait of her to posterity.