PART THREE
The Diary ended. Fear, for his eyes silenced Pepys, and the unique process of self-examination and revelation closed down for good. Giving it up was, he wrote, like a form of death, ‘almost as much as to see myself go into my grave’. This was not rhetoric but a serious statement. He was killing off a part of himself, the self created daily in his narrative, a creature more complete than he could ever allow himself to be again, complete as no fictional, dramatic or historical portrait had ever been. The loss for his readers is brutal as they find themselves suddenly stranded, the brilliant, troubling intimacies of the Diary replaced, for those who want to know more of his life, by official papers, parliamentary records, letters and scatterings of notes. A triple line has been drawn under his youth, and nothing he wrote later revived that voice or that person. Once the form he had created was abandoned, he and the world stood in a different relation to one another; and, as well as losing him, we are losing an unequalled record of the events of the time. No one else took up the chronicle of public events, and the 1670s seem a less lively time than the 1660s as a consequence.
He gave it up because he feared he was going blind. His eyes had started to be painful when he did close work or reading by candlelight as early as 1663 – ‘and so to bed, being weary, sleepy, and my eyes begin to fail me, looking so long by candlelight upon white paper’ – but over the next few years he mentioned the problem very rarely, and it was only from 1667 that it became a frequent complaint.1 By then his eyes were suffering from his years of close work; increasingly they hurt if he read for too long, they reacted badly to bright light, and they felt sore and watered. None of the remedies he tried – spectacles, lotions, eyedrops, pills, purges, the use of a paper roll when reading – did much to help. Modern medical opinion is that he had long sight (hypermetropia), which made reading difficult, and some astigmatism. But he was not going blind, and his eyes deteriorated no further.2 Whether they were helped by giving up the Diary or not, they served him adequately for the rest of his life.
This piece of good fortune apart, the year that followed the end of the Diary was catastrophic: a few months of grace, then the blows began to fall. In July 1669 his ambition to enter parliament looked as though it would soon be fulfilled when the duke of York recommended him for a parliamentary seat at Aldeburgh. Letters of support went off from Sandwich, Coventry, Povey and other influential men. A small cloud appeared when Pepys’s opponents suggested that he, like his patron the duke, was a Catholic. James was in the process of converting to Catholicism, but this was not known to Pepys, and he expressed amazement at the idea that he should be under suspicion, ‘my education at the University… the whole practice of my life, both past and present, giving testimony of my being no Papist’.3 The cloud did not go away, but grew larger and darker over the next years; but he supposed it was dealt with, and at last he and Elizabeth were free to take the holiday in France for which she had yearned for so many years.
The duke had given Pepys permission for three or four months’ leave, with the idea that a long break gave a better chance of his eyes recovering. Tom Hayter was to take over his duties at the Navy Office. This should have been a perfectly satisfactory arrangement, but Pepys could not resist suggesting to the king that he might make himself useful on his trip by collecting information on foreign naval affairs. Charles took up his proposal eagerly. It meant the tour began in Holland with a look at the shipyards there, which can hardly have been what Elizabeth had in mind.4 Then Pepys became uneasy at the idea of being away from work for so long and cut the holiday down to two months; like many men, he found office life sustaining.
They set off in late August. He had applied to John Evelyn for advice on France and received a long letter of kindly, fussy recommendations. Evelyn suggested that they take a ‘chambre garnie’ when they reached Paris, to be found for them by a friend of a friend in the Faubourg St Germain whose name he supplied; this, he explained, was the suburb favoured by Persons of Quality and so most suitable for the Pepyses.5 He went on to compare France with England, mostly to the detriment of the French. The Luxembourg Palace resembled Clarendon House, so much admired by Pepys. Notre-Dame was infinitely inferior to St Paul’s or Westminster Abbey. The Place Royale ‘is our Piazza of Covent Garden’. At the Sorbonne they should attend a ‘public Scholastical Exercise, and love our own Universities the better after it’. Fontainebleau ‘you will not judge comparable to Hampton Court; nor can the French monarch shew such a Castle, Palace, and Church, as our Windsor in all his wide Dominions’. Only the Pont-neuf surpassed its English equivalent and would make them ‘wish ours of London had no more houses upon it’. (The Pont-neuf had none.) ‘By some especial Favour you may be admitted to take a View of the Bastille (which is their Tower).’ He especially recommended climbing to the top of the Tour St Jacques, from which the whole city could be seen, and visiting the Louvre to attend a public audience of King Louis XIV and his queen; and there was a great deal about libraries, galleries, engravers and print shops, botanical gardens, hospitals and excursions out of Paris – far more than they could hope to see in the few weeks at their disposal. Elizabeth may have wanted to show her husband the streets she remembered from her childhood, even perhaps the convent where the nuns had done their best to make her into a good Roman Catholic; and Baity, who was with them for at least part of the trip, may have had his suggestions. But the truth is we have almost no idea what they did apart from shopping for precious stones and embroidery wools for her, and books about Paris for him; Elizabeth also may have sat for Pierre Lombart, famous for his female portraits.6 Paris was prospering, with solid private mansions going up along the Île St Louis, and old churches such as St Sulpice being rebuilt; and Pepys wrote afterwards that it was ‘a voyage full of health and content’.7 They visited Rouen on their return journey, and Elizabeth sent a thank you present of a mirror to the wife of a merchant there as they travelled on to Brussels and so back to England.8
On the journey home, Elizabeth was taken ill. They reached Seething Lane on 20 October, and she went straight to bed.9 Hollier, who knew her well, was doubtless called, as well as her physician. She was running a fever that did not respond to treatment. As Pepys struggled to understand and deal with this alarming situation, he was also brought bad news from the office. It came in the shape of a formidable list of questions from a parliamentary commission that had been sitting at Brooke House for several months now, looking into alleged abuses in the Navy Office; they wanted prompt and detailed answers, and his fellow officers relied on him to provide them. With all this on his mind, he nevertheless sent a punctilious note to Evelyn, thanking him for his helpful advice on France. It is dated 2 November and said they had been back for ten days, and that his wife had been ‘from the first day of her coming back into London… under a fever so severe as at this hour to render her recovery desperate’. Desperate as her condition was, his tone was stately and his sentences ornate. He went on, ‘Which affliction hath very much unfitted me for those acts of civility and respect which, amongst the first of my friends, I should have paid to yourself, as he to whom singly I owe the much greater part of the satisfaction I have met with in my late voyage. Next to you, I have my acknowledgments to make to Sir Samuel Tuke, to whom (when in condition of doing it) I shall beg your introducing me, for the owning of my obligations to him on the like behalf.’10This is an admirable piece of politeness towards his distinguished friend, to whom he naturally wrote with the elaborate ceremoniousness used among gentlemen: and so remote from the voice of the Diary that it seems to come from a different man.
Eight more days went by, days without any proper structure, elastic in their hours and minutes, depending on the arrival of the doctor with his guarded face and careful words; on precious snatches of speech from the patient; on the smallest changes in her breathing; days when the watcher hardly dared to sleep himself and yet grew increasingly exhausted; days that must have carried Pepys back to the bedside of his dying brother Tom, and to even earlier sickbeds in which his young brothers and sisters had sweated and strained to keep the flame of life flickering. A fever could snuff out a life in days, as had happened to Cromwell, but at twenty-nine Elizabeth was young and strong and her body fought for her. And while he watched, he had at the back of his mind both his parliamentary agent in Aldeburgh, waiting for him to come and ingratiate himself with the electors, due to vote on 9 November, and the Brooke House commissioners’ accusing questions. On the first he gave up; the second he had to think about, planning rebuttals in his head.
Elizabeth’s struggle lasted for three weeks. Two desperate remedies for severe illness were to cut off the hair and to put pigeons at the patient’s feet, and both had been used for the queen in 1663. She had recovered, but if they were tried in Elizabeth’s case they did her no good.11 On 9 or 10 November Pepys sent for Daniel Mills, the vicar of St Olave’s, to whose child Elizabeth had stood as godmother in happier days, and he came to give her the sacrament. As far as we know, it was the first time she had received it for many years; her religious loyalties were in any case uncertain. The intense interest Pepys displayed fifteen years later in the king’s deathbed return to the Catholic faith may hark back to Elizabeth’s last hours, when he had to decide what to do. He must have remembered her saying, after the death of his brother Tom, that she intended to die a Catholic, and how she repeated that she was a Catholic at another time of stress, over Deb, in October 1668. Pepys chose to put aside this knowledge, and, although he rather liked Father Fogourdy and rather disliked Mills, he did what convention and prudence dictated.12 By then she was no doubt past making any request or decision for herself.
We do not know whether her father and mother came face to face with their son-in-law for the first time in years over her deathbed, but it seems possible, and from then on Pepys contributed to their support.13 No doubt Will Hewer came to weep his farewell, and Jane and Tom Edwards; cousin Jane Turner, Mary Mercer and her mother, Tom Hayter and his wife, whom Elizabeth had helped in childbirth, and their old friends and neighbours from Axe Yard, John and Elizabeth Hunt, may be imagined, a trail of mournful figures making their way to the house. Lord Sandwich was in London, which he rarely left these days; he knew the taste of grief himself from the death of his daughter Paulina earlier in the year, and surely dispatched a servant – Robert Ferrer perhaps – for news of his beautiful cousin. Pepys would have sent word of what was happening to Lady Sandwich at Hinchingbrooke, as well as to his father, brother and sister; and, even as Elizabeth lay dying, a new generation was launched at last in Huntingdonshire, where Pall – Mrs John Jackson – was about to give birth to her first child. This was a son and, somewhat surprisingly, she named him Samuel and invited her brother to stand as godfather.14
Elizabeth died on 10 November and Pepys fixed the funeral for the evening of the 13th at St Olave’s. Night-time was the preferred time for the fashionable, and John Evelyn’s diary tells us that he stayed in town and travelled home the next day after being present ‘the night before at the funeral of Mrs Pepys’. Otherwise there is no account of the ceremony. The church bell would be tolled, the house draped in black and all the family servants given their mourning. Inside the church, faintly lit with candles, Mr Mills read the appointed words for the burial of the dead, and Elizabeth’s comely body was laid under the floor of the chancel. Although there is a note of his brother Tom’s funeral expenses among Pepys’s miscellaneous papers, there is none of Elizabeth’s. At this last he was generous to her memory. He composed a Latin epitaph, praising her knowledge and her beauty and perhaps overpraising her lineage. He also commissioned a memorial bust from a brilliantly inventive and original sculptor, John Bushnell. He had studied in Rome when Bernini was working there and went on to make great Baroque statues of Charles II, Charles I, and Sir Thomas Gresham for the Royal Exchange building, as well as memorials of Albemarle and the poet Abraham Cowley for Westminster Abbey.15Pepys could not have chosen better, and Bushnell produced a triumphant result. There is no suggestion of heavenly piety or submission to God’s will about his bust of Elizabeth. Instead she is shown as though in mid conversation, slightly smiling, her mouth open and her eyes wide, still intent on the comedy of the world. Somehow he has given her more of a French than an English air; and you ask yourself what you would have to say to this lively young matron who looks as though she might speak sharply at any minute. The bust was set high up on the wall of the church and makes a very striking, speaking, humanist representation to match the portrait in the Diary. When the memorial was put up, the Navy Office gallery in which Pepys and his colleagues sat allowed a much closer view, but that has gone and it is now difficult to appreciate her properly from the floor of the church; but she has weathered the centuries well and survived being taken down when the bombs of the Second World War threatened.16
There were letters of condolence on the ‘decease of your Deere & vertuous Lady’ to be answered, and for months Pepys sealed his own letters with black sealing wax.17 The surest distraction from grief was work, and there was no shortage of that. Two weeks after the funeral, he had written out his answers to the Brooke House Commission, which he then delivered in person. Even there he was reminded of his loss. It happened that the clerk was his one-time friend Will Symons; they had been married in the same place and within months of one another. Pepys had seen him soon after Will lost his wife, and noted disapprovingly how inappropriate his conversation was for a bereaved man. Now they were both young widowers.
On Monday, 2 December, Pepys was officially back in his office, and the following Monday he attended the duke of York in Whitehall with the whole board. The next morning he was in Whitehall early to confer with the duke’s secretary.18 On 14 December he signed papers that gave him a power of attorney for Sandwich, on whose behalf he could now demand and receive payments; his old patron remained confident of Pepys’s financial skills.19 His other former employer, Downing, also wrote to him from the Treasury, asking him to help elucidate the claims of Carteret as treasurer of the navy, which ran to more than £500,000, not all of which they believed to have been spent on the war: a delicate situation for Pepys, who was ‘cousin’ to Carteret since his son’s marriage to Jemima Montagu.20
January and February were fully occupied with almost daily sessions before the Brooke House Commission. Their accusations were essentially parliament’s way of expressing its dissatisfaction with the handling of the Dutch war and disgust at what had happened on the Medway. Corruption and incompetence were their theme, and they accused just about everyone from the treasurer of the navy down to the lowest purser and dockyard worker of one or the other, and often of both. Pepys himself was accused of various wrongful dealings, including private manufacture of flags, which he had indeed gone in for five years before. Coventry warned him over a dinner that he must expect rough handling, and for a few hours he brooded over the idea of giving up his job, in which he was ‘yoked’ with colleagues he knew to be incompetent and required to defend them from blame for failures of which he was all too aware.21 But as soon as he came face to face with the accusers, his natural robustness and combativeness returned, and he launched into powerful, indeed bruising, counter-attacks.
His private and general defence was that the navy could not be properly run unless it was properly funded, which was true. The defences he put up in particular cases were made with bounding energy and skill in deploying his detailed knowledge of his own archives. He conceded nothing. As Richard Ollard has demonstrated, the daily record kept by Pepys of the two months’ investigation was a public document, dictated to his clerks, and setting out the official defence of the Navy Office, and did not by any means represent his private view of things. For instance, he had a high regard for one of the commissioners, the old Cromwellian Colonel George Thomson, but was obliged to spar with him in public because Thomson was putting the case against the management of the recent war. Pepys knew perfectly well it had been badly managed, but he was bound to defend the Navy Office; and, in making his case for the defence, he was effectively defending the king and his policy also, which he had deplored in private so often. He carried out his difficult task with admirable skill. He was not required to be sincere.
His skill did him no harm with the king. Charles sat in on most of the meetings and saw what a well-equipped and loyal champion he had found. A new relationship blossomed. On Pepys’s side the disapproval and scorn for the king expressed in the Diary appear to melt away. They were soon laughing together and supporting one another’s jokes. When Charles remarked that people in the coffee houses were always saying how much things were better done in the navy during the commonwealth, ‘“those pure angelical times” (saith the King)’, Pepys chimed in with ‘those times concerning which people discourse in matters of the Navy as historians do of the primitive times in reference to the church’.22 Pepys’s own view of the commonwealth navy and its officers was almost exactly the one satirized by Charles, but an exchange of jokes with the king was too good an opportunity to be missed. Power and truth make different demands.
And Pepys was a performer, as he had already proved when he addressed parliament in 1668. Now he delighted in tripping up his opponents and rose almost friskily to a challenge. When Lord Brereton, whom he knew and liked well enough, accused him of dealing in seamen’s tickets and asked, ‘How, Mr Pepys, do you defy the whole world in this matter?’, he answered ‘Yes, that I do defy the whole world and my Lord Brereton in particular if he would be thought one of it.’ You can hear the relish as the words came off his tongue. He could silence everyone with the flow of his eloquence, and was happy to go on for hours. Lord Arlington, having listened to him, felt it wise to recommend plainness and ‘the least show of rhetoric’ when he came to write his speeches down because, although the king was pleased, he was also easily bored.23
The oddest performance of the whole affair was Pepys’s letter to the commissioners in which he laid out his own defence. It began in a perhaps justifiable display of self-righteousness and self-congratulation and ended in bare-faced lies. His diligence during the plague, his frequent Sunday work and late hours, often until midnight, the greatness of the burden that he had shouldered and the damage to his eyes were all listed. What he said was undeniable, although it might have come better from someone else; but no one else could have been called as a witness in the tricky matter of corrupt dealings. Pepys claimed he had never asked for any fee, gratuity or reward, and that anything offered to him was accepted only if he believed the affair was to the advantage of His Majesty; he insisted that he was owed £400 in expenses – a fine counter-attack – and roundly asserted that his ten years of service had not bettered his estate by so much as one thousand pounds.24 Even Bryant, for whom Pepys could do little wrong, called this last statement a ‘daring lie’.25 He must have felt so secure in his accounting methods – and in Hewer’s support – that he could defy all questions. Referring obliquely to his Diary, he also boasted that he was ‘able upon oath’ to give an account of his daily employment during his entire time of working for the Navy Office; here too he was confident he could keep his documents to himself.26
By the end of the Brooke House sittings, which lasted for two months, everyone must have felt that, whatever criticisms might be levelled against Pepys, he was a good man to have on your side. He ended his own report by declaring that ‘the whole business of these Observations ended, with a profession of all satisfaction on his Majesty’s part in reference to every particular’.27 Of his fellow officials at the Navy Board during the war, Batten was dead and Penn close to death – he died in September 1670. Coventry and Carteret had left the board in 1667, Pett had been pushed out, and Sir John Mennes was not held responsible for anything – he died in February 1671. Only Brouncker and Pepys remained of the old guard to take the blame. Neither lost his job. Pepys’s retirement to the country could be postponed.
So, for the time being, were his hopes of entering parliament. He had lost the by-election at Aldeburgh, not surprisingly, given that he had been unable to visit the town. Now he returned to the routine of the office and the comfort of working with his chosen clerks, Hewer, Hayter, Gibson and Edwards. Will was the most intimate, trusted like a second self; with Tom he could make music as well as keep the shipping lists up to date; Hayter had been solidly with him from the start, and Gibson too was a man of his own age who knew the history of the commonwealth navy from his own experience, and besides could quote John Donne.28 They made an orderly, hard-working, intelligent and loyal team, the nearest thing to a family of sons and brothers. It was his real brother John who was a problem, kicking his heels at the Jacksons’ in Huntingdonshire. When Pepys heard in March of a clerkship going at Trinity House, the seamen’s foundation, he urged John to come to London at once, and on the same day wrote to the duke of York, to Sandwich, to Evelyn’s father-in-law Sir Richard Browne and to other worthies, asking them to support John Pepys for the post. He described John to them as a sober and diligent scholar whom he had long intended for such a position and coached personally with it in view; never mind that the truth was that he had been on poor terms with John, who was unemployed at twenty-nine and had never had a job.29 Pepys’s mighty effort on his behalf was successful, and John moved to the Trinity House in Water Lane. He worked there unobtrusively under his brother’s directions; his tobacco and wine bills have survived, as well as evidence that he sent gifts to old Mr Pepys and to Pall and her son – a little boy’s hat, some oysters, claret, a bottle of spirits and boxes of sweetmeats.30 Only a year before Pepys had launched a furious memorandum complaining of the way clerks were appointed, ‘chosen for the sake of acquaintance, kindred, or some other ground in which their present qualifications bore no part.’ He had forgotten his own start and failed to foresee his brother’s.31
The pattern of his life re-established itself. The minute books of the Navy Board show meetings starting at 8 a.m. every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. There were the usual contracts to be dealt with and visits to be made to Deptford, Woolwich and Chatham, though perhaps he went less often on foot now that he had his own coach, and was less inclined to walk through the fields between Rotherhithe and Deptford with a book to read. In May 1670 he prepared a summary of the financial state of the navy to present to the king. He calculated that £900,000 were needed to pay off last year’s debts and to repair and supply the ships and dockyards.32 In June he wrote a much fuller paper ‘for my own satisfaction’, showing how much more money was needed for the navy than the £200,000 projected for its maintenance this year: his estimate of the real cost was over twice that sum.33 Nothing like this was found. The king could never be trusted to follow a straight path, and he was busy with more thrilling projects. That same May he sent Sandwich to fetch his sister Henriette, wife of the brother of Louis XIV, from Dunkirk and went to meet her at Dover. She came with a secret treaty by which France offered Charles £150,000 to declare himself a Catholic and provoke a war with Holland when Louis was ready; there was to be more money – £225,000 a year – while the war lasted. Charles did not make any public declaration of his Catholic faith, but he was set on course for confrontations with parliament, and for a third Dutch war.
The tragedy of Pepys’s career is that it was spent serving masters, first Charles and then James, who wanted to build up their personal power and defeat parliament. For twenty-eight years they replayed the struggles of the 1640s, and took their French cousin, the absolute monarch Louis XIV, as a model; and in the long run they were bound to lose. By temperament and upbringing a parliamentarian, Pepys found himself trapped on the wrong side, professionally bound to kings whose ambition was doomed and patronage poisoned.
The Diary tells us enough about Pepys’s sensibility to suggest how, at Elizabeth’s death, he must have suffered, wept, recalled her beauty and his love for her, and reproached himself for his failings and bad behaviour. It also tells us that he was quick to recover from grief, and too interested in the world and his role in it to turn away from his busy life, so much of which had in any case been led apart from her. While she was alive, his entertainments had been the theatre, shopping and making improvements to the house; the Royal Society meetings; walks and excursions on the river; reading and music, whether listening or making it himself: he had written in the Diary on a cheerless day that ‘music is the thing of the world that I love most, and all the pleasure almost that I can now take’, and this remained true for him through good and bad times.34 There was also dining with friends and inviting them to the house, gossiping and pursuing women. None of these activities required the presence of a wife, and he was fully capable of ordering his own household, with some assistance at first no doubt from Mrs Edwards, his ‘little old Jane’, and then from a housekeeper.
The only entertainment he is known to have attended in January 1670 was the hanging of the highwayman Claude Duval at Tyburn, a very popular event; if he felt up to that, you have to hope he found better distraction in the theatre. That spring, Dryden made Nell Gwyn get up from her stage deathbed for a witty ending to his play Tyrannic Love.‘Hold! are you mad? you damned, confounded dog!’ she scolded the stage hands preparing to carry her offstage. ‘I am to rise, and speak the epilogue.’ She went on to offer to haunt the beds of the men in the audience: ‘And faith you’ll be in a sweet kind of taking/When I surprise you between sleep and waking.’ Perhaps Pepys dreamt of Nelly, as he had dreamt of other ladies who took the king’s fancy. Waking, a determined man might have traced Deb, but a remorseful one, remembering Elizabeth’s rage, was likely to have felt such a search would border on sacrilege; besides which, Deb herself could have other ideas even if he did succeed in finding her. There were still Betty Martin, her sister Doll and Mrs Bagwell to minister to one sort of itch, and Knipp for a glamorous fumble, and there is no reason to think he gave up their company. He may even have kept up his hopes of Betty Michell, with her baby and her cross husband in the spirit shop by the river. He also found, with impressive speed, a new mistress, young and an undoubted lady; her story will have to wait for another chapter.
Pepys was an intensely sociable being, and he had friends for every occasion, the Pearses for gossip and good company; the Crews for serious conversation; the Hunts for talk of old times; Anthony Deane, the shipbuilder, when he was in London, for shop; Povey, a fool maybe, but good-hearted, rich, another gossip and a generous host. The playwright and poet Thomas Shadwell and his actress wife became close enough friends to ask him to be godfather to their son John.35 Brouncker was a colleague with whom he shared other interests than work, notably the Royal Society, of which Brouncker was a long-serving president; and Coventry was happy to talk politics with him. His cousin Barbara, daughter of Roger Pepys, married Dr Thomas Gale in 1674, bringing him a new friend both learned and convivial. Gale was a scholar of distinction and high master of St Paul’s School; and the youngest Gale boy became another godson to Pepys. The City bankers such as Sir Robert Vyner and Edward Backwell were well disposed to Pepys, who had nearly £7,000 on deposit with Backwell in 1671; and the hugely wealthy Sir John Banks of the East India Company, ennobled by the king for lending him money in 1661 and a steady supplier of loans to the navy, found Pepys a congenial companion. Creed, an irritant throughout the Diary, had leapt ahead with his marriage and was preparing to leave London to live as a country gentleman in Oundle, where he fathered eleven children and became high sheriff of Northamptonshire.36
The best of Pepys’s friends in the City were the Houblon clan, French Protestants who had brought their business skills to London from Lille in the 1590s, fleeing religious persecution. The older James Houblon was well established as a merchant by the time of the civil war and gave his support to the parliamentarians, to whom he supplied horses and arms, and probably money too. He reared seven sons, of whom five became merchants. Their trading and shipping business covered the world, and the origins of their friendship with Pepys lay in business connections, since a member of the Navy Board had obvious uses for merchants who depended on their ships getting about freely. So they cultivated him; he expected to benefit financially, and he did. The second James Houblon became his particular friend. Pepys dined with him in 1665 – a masculine dinner, although he was taken afterwards into another room to hear Mrs Houblon sing – and the Diary records a ‘present’ of £200 to Pepys in 1666, for licensing two voyages at a difficult time for shipping.37 They talked business and politics from time to time in the late 1660s. Five of the brothers supped with Pepys together on one occasion, on another he dined with them at a tavern without Elizabeth, and when James Houblon called he left his wife waiting outside in the carriage with a companion.38 So it was only after Elizabeth’s death that the relationship developed into an intimate family one. The younger James and his English wife Sarah were of an age with Pepys and had been married in 1658; and they welcomed him warmly into their home, a fine large house, formerly the Spanish ambassador’s, in Great Winchester Street, close to London Wall and between Moorgate and Bishopsgate. There the business was conducted and the four children brought up, and there they also entertained in splendid style. Evelyn described James Houblon as living ‘en prince’ when he dined with him, and Pepys, after another dinner, said none of the food or wine came from anywhere nearer than Persia, China and the Cape of Good Hope.39 Sarah appears from her portraits to have been a beauty, dark eyed and dark haired, dressed and bejewelled as sumptuously as a court lady.40
Many of Pepys’s friends in the post-Diary years were rich, and the Houblons were among the richest; and, while money spoke to Pepys, his friendship with them developed into something true and deep, involving the women of the family as well as the men. They found Pepys delightful, and he reciprocated. In December 1670 he wrote sending a ‘hand kiss’ to Madam, telling them to expect a Christmas visit and hoping they would make a return one to him.41 After this there were theatre trips and outings to Chelsea; Pepys and Sarah took to singing together, and in later years they all shared a holiday cottage at Parson’s Green. He called them ‘cousin’ and took an avuncular interest in the next generation, ‘my sweet W[ynne]’ and ‘little Jemmy’.42 Sarah told him that the children of the family were born with the instinct to wish him well, and Pepys lavished on them the affection he might have given his own children, had there been any.43 They had fun together, and exchanged intimate letters; Pepys sent a ‘merry, roguish, mysterious letter to S. H.’ – presumably Sarah – on his way to Tangier in 1683, and his letters to James are affectionate and witty.44 Because the Houblons had never known him young, poor, a servant, one who sat half tongue-tied and envying the talk of gallants in the theatre, he could be at ease with them and confident as the man of the world he had become; and they satisfied a yearning in him to be part of another, ideal family, a new version of the once idealized Montagus.
He may well have kept in touch with his various poor cousins, but almost nothing more is heard of them. In their place more recently discovered family connections appear on the scene.45 They were Lady Mordaunt and her sister Mrs Steward, cousins by marriage through Jane Turner’s husband – the Ashtead connection again – and they lived elegantly in Portugal Row, on the south side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Betty Mordaunt, twice widowed, still young, lively and sociable and with her own income, was happy to have Pepys as an escort to the theatre and a dinner guest; a little light, risk-free flirting took place.46 They were a far cry from Pepys’s Joyce cousins, also sisters, who had caused him trouble in the past. These two new-found connections were presentable enough to be introduced into the circle of John Evelyn, with whom Pepys dined for the first time early in 1671; and the growing friendship with Evelyn, gentleman-scholar and courtier, was another sign of his rising status in society.
He watched his finances as carefully as he had always done. In June 1670 he made a note that he was charging 6 per cent on the £100 he had lent Lady Sandwich two years earlier and the same on the £500 lent to Lord Sandwich; he did not consider waiving his interest.47 When the king, in one of his most unscrupulous acts, put a stop on the Exchequer in January 1672, which meant that no one who had lent money to the government could withdraw it, many of his subjects were ruined, and the big bankers put into severe difficulties, among them Pepys’s banker Backwell; but Pepys himself was unscathed. He had moved his savings elsewhere and converted his credit with Backwell to an overdraft, almost certainly because he had advance warning of the Stop.48
With a keen eye out for chances of promotion he gave dinners for important people. Ashley Cooper, soon to be lord chancellor and earl of Shaftesbury, with whom he had dined in 1667, made at least one social visit to Seething Lane at this time.49 Pepys reacted speedily when he heard of a chance of advancement. As Sir John Mennes lay dying in February 1671, he sent off a letter to the duke of York stressing the importance of appointing a man of proven ability to succeed him in charge of the Navy Board. It was not the first time he had made the point, and he was careful to disclaim any ambition to be given the job himself, but he was positioning himself. Sir Thomas Allen would be appointed this time, but next time, who knows?50
Another letter about promotion went off the following year when England was at war with the Dutch, in alliance with the French as the king had promised. The war was unpopular in England, and Lord Sandwich himself declared that he neither understood the reason for it nor approved of it. All the same, as vice-admiral he went to sea in the spring of 1672, with the duke of York in command of the fleet again. Sandwich was in a melancholy state of mind. He told friends he expected to die, and in so doing retrieve his reputation. He still resented the accusations of greed and cowardice that had been made against him in 1665, and may have felt his commonwealth past was not entirely forgotten or forgiven.51 When the Dutch fleet was known to be threatening the east coast in May, he advised caution and sensed that the duke suspected him of cowardice.
If so, the duke was wrong. Sandwich dined gloomily with a younger officer on the evening of Whit Monday, 27 May, and early the next morning, when news came that the Dutch were approaching, he had his valet tie back his long hair arid dress him in his full regalia as a knight of the Garter, with jewelled collar and star on breast, a black plumed hat on his head. After this ceremonious preparation, he commanded his flagship, the Royal James, so that it bore the brunt of the battle fought off the Suffolk coast, in Sole Bay, on 28 May. He was the first to engage the Dutch. The fighting was savage on both sides; Sandwich destroyed several enemy ships, but by nine in the morning his own hull was badly damaged by shot and many hundreds of his crew were dead or wounded. Still he drove off fireships and the Groot Hollandia when it came alongside, tangling the rigging of the two ships so that they had to cut themselves free. Then, in the dense smoke of the battle, another fireship set the Royal James ablaze. With most of his men and officers dead, and no help forthcoming from any other English vessel, Sandwich knew he could not save his ship.
There have been many conflicting accounts of what happened. Captain Richard Haddock tried to persuade Sandwich to leave his ship and failed; wounded himself, he slipped through a porthole and swam until he was picked up by an English boat. He was almost the only officer to survive; Sandwich’s son-in-law, Philip Carteret, did not. A few of the men got away in ‘the jolly-boat’. Some reported that Lord Sandwich was dead on board. Another said his body had been seen in the water but not moving. There was a suspicion that the men who got away in the boat had abandoned him, and the Dutch alleged that he was smothered in the boat by the crew jumping on him. Yet another story was that he ‘did endeavour to save himself by swimming, and perished in the attempt’. The sea was ‘as calm as a milk-bowl’ under a bright sun, and people watching from the coast had a clear view of the ship as she burnt all through the afternoon. By six she was reduced to embers. Sandwich’s fate, the subject of many rumours, remained unknown for twelve days.52
During this anxious period, Pepys heard that the duke of York’s secretary, Matthew Wren, had been wounded in the battle, and he wrote to Coventry asking him to support his application to take over Wren’s job. In terms of career, Pepys was right to seize the moment, and Coventry was the man he felt he could rely on. If Pepys hesitated at all out of respect and grief for his old Lord, lost somewhere at sea, and well aware that Sandwich regarded Coventry as his enemy, his hesitation was shortlived. He delivered his letter to Coventry in person on 3 June, spent the evening with him, got his promise to speak for him and went home happy. Early next morning a note arrived from Coventry withdrawing his support on the grounds that his nephew Henry Savile wanted the job. Both Coventry and Pepys knew that his abilities were greater than Savile’s, but Pepys was not part of the charmed circle of the aristocracy, and even Coventry was not prepared to back him against one of his own family. Savile got the job: it was a cruel lesson.
Sandwich’s body was found in the sea off Harwich on 10 June, by sailors dragging for lost anchors. He was still wearing his Garter ribbon, jewel and star. Lady Sandwich was given the news at Hinchingbrooke. After this Pepys spent five days with the fleet, an unusual move for him, which he may have combined with a visit to Hinchingbrooke to pay her his respects. He did not forget to do his bit for his own family, pressing the duke to make Balty’s position at Deal permanent.53
The king ordered a state funeral for Sandwich, and on 3 July his embalmed body was borne along the Thames at the head of a procession of barges draped in black and carrying most of the leading men of the state – women did not attend such occasions. The guns fired from the Tower and Whitehall, and drums and trumpets added their solemn noise. From Westminster stairs the mourners followed the body on foot into the abbey, to be buried in Henry VII’s chapel, where Albemarle already lay: so the two men chiefly responsible for restoring Charles to his throne were placed beside one another. Pepys had charge of one of the great banners displaying the dead man’s arms, carried alongside the coffin and then laid over his resting place.54
Sandwich was only forty-six. Pepys was thirty-nine; it no longer seemed such a gap as it had been when he was a poor boy and his cousin a statesman and soldier. While there had been no total breach between the two men, they had been on cooler terms with the passing of the years. Gratitude can grow irksome, and there were reasons for resentment on both sides. Sandwich did not mention Pepys in his will, and Pepys may have felt liberated as well as bereaved. Yet he owed Sandwich too much, and their lives had been too closely linked, for him not to feel the shock of the loss of the man who had dominated his youth and given him his chance in life. Sandwich bequeathed the Manor of Brampton to his Lady, which suggests she felt an attachment to the place; but as dowager she had to leave Hinchingbrooke, which had been her home for nearly thirty years. Since she had lost her two eldest daughters, she took herself to live close to her third daughter, Anne, who had just married Sir Richard Edgcumbe and gone to live on his estate on the River Tamar, in Cornwall.55 It is unlikely she and Pepys met again. In his will, Sandwich spoke of her as ‘my dear and loving wife (to whom I cannot express kindness enough)’, spelling out at the end his love and respect for the patience, innocence and loyalty of the woman he had married when they were both seventeen.56 She was no Lucy Hutchinson or Anne Fanshawe, and never thought of putting down any account of her life – her few letters show she was barely literate – so that hers remains a sadly untold story.57 Bred in a family of the puritan gentry, bride of one of the youngest officers in the parliamentarian army, she had known Charles I, Cromwell and Charles II, presided over a great country house, borne ten children and conducted herself with exemplary discretion throughout civil wars and many changes of government; supported her husband through danger and long periods of separation, as well as ennoblement and favour at a court that had nothing to offer a woman of her breeding and character. She lived only two years after her husband’s death. The warmth of Pepys’s admiration and his unwavering affection for her in the Diary make up a rare tribute, and, although her name appears no more among his papers, he took the trouble to visit her daughter Anne in Cornwall, where Lady Sandwich had ended her days, as he sailed for Tangier in 1683. Whether he stood beside her grave then or not, he cannot have failed to think of her.58
There were two more deaths in Pepys’s family circle in 1672. In August his father-in-law, Alexandre de St Michel, died in Deal, where he and his wife were living with their son. It made little difference to Pepys, who continued to be the chief support of all the remaining St Michels, including another nephew and godson, ‘Litell Samuell’. In September uncle Wight, who had once hoped to impregnate Elizabeth on Pepys’s behalf, also died, leaving no living children and no will. Some good came of this to Pepys’s father, who was able to make a successful claim on part of the estate.
A further break with the past came in January 1673. The Navy Board minute book for 30 January gives its own account: ‘Yesterday between 3 and 4 a Clock in the morning happened in my Lord Brouncker’s lodging at the Navy Office in Seething Lane an unhappy fire, which in six hours time Laid in ashes the said office, with Severall of the houses about it.’59 Abigail Williams, Lord Brouncker’s mistress, was credited with starting the blaze in her closet. Pepys had time to save his books, including the six volumes of his Diary, otherwise very little. His house and more than twenty others round about were entirely destroyed as well as the offices. The nightmares he had suffered after the great fire had come true, and the house into which he had put so much of himself and that enshrined the memory of his years with Elizabeth was gone as though it had never been. Financially, he lost only the contents, since it belonged to the crown, and the crown was obliged to rehouse him; but for a man who set so much store by the choice and placing of his possessions, and who cared about the shape and meaning of life, it must have acted as an after-shock to the loss of his wife. His goods, his clothes, his pictures, his living habits and arrangements and all the rest of his physical connections with the past were gone.