In 1676 Mary’s brother Daniel got into difficulties. He had gone up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1670, just about the time Pepys first met the Skinner family, taken his degree in 1673 and been awarded a junior fellowship in the autumn of 1674. In the intervening year he found himself a job in London working for the poet Milton, then living in Artillery Row, by Bunhill Fields.1 Daniel was enterprising, clever, charming and something of a chancer: Milton was a great and learned man, but he was still persona non grata to the rulers of the nation. He was also blind, poor and failing in health, and in the last months of his life; he died in November 1674. Daniel made copies of some of the official letters he had written for Cromwell and took them away, together with a manuscript of a theological work, his De Doctrina Christiana. Later, he told Pepys the works were ones ‘Milton left behind him to me’, which may have been true; or he may simply have helped himself.2 If any inkling came to Pepys through Mary of Daniel’s connection with Milton in 1674, he would not have wanted to know, given the poet’s disgraced condition as a radical and republican, and his own dependence on the crown for advancement.
In 1675 Daniel was at Trinity as a junior fellow. He sent his Milton manuscripts to the Dutch publisher, Elsevier, but before the rejection letter arrived he had left Cambridge again, finding the pace of life there too slow. In July 1676 he wrote to Pepys asking him to recommend him for a diplomatic post in Holland – this was in the letter mentioned in the last chapter. It was written in Latin and veered between ornate compliment and intimate allusion to Pepys’s love for Mary, the accusations the Skinner parents had made against him and the breach this had produced between the two families. Although he was at pains to say he did not know whether Pepys was ‘guilty of the charge my parents are so ready to make against you’ or not, it was a bold approach, and Pepys must have been relieved that it came decently obscured in Latin.3 Whatever his private feelings, he responded as Daniel hoped and sent off a reference to the chief English diplomat at Nijmegen, stretching the truth somewhat by saying he himself had been ‘privy to every part of the Gentleman’s education, from his Father’s house through Westminster School to Trinity College in Cambridge’ and praising Daniel’s ‘Sobriety, Parts and Learning’, with particular mention of his fine Latin.4 Daniel was offered a secretarial job at the embassy; but before he could take it up the offer was withdrawn. The secretary of state, Sir Joseph Williamson, well known to Pepys and respected by him, having heard from Daniel himself of his connection with the Milton papers, vetoed his appointment, describing him as ‘a very pretty young man’ but one who must ‘air himself from such infectious commerce’ as friendship with Milton. Daniel’s offer to burn the Milton papers did not mollify Williamson. Warnings against young Skinner and condemnations of Milton and his political ideas circulated for some time.
Before leaving for Holland Daniel had borrowed £10 from Pepys. He wrote again from Rotterdam, this time in English, ‘with tears instead of ink’, apologizing for failing to visit him or return the loan and begging him to intervene with Williamson again; and he explained that although he ‘happen’d to be acquainted with Milton in his lifetime’, he shared none of the poet’s dangerous opinions. He was now stuck, jobless, in Rotterdam: ‘I am here just a person without a soul,’ he wrote, but what he lacked was not so much a soul as a patron. Pepys replied in his most ponderous style, warning him that ‘some time must be suffered to pass before you can reasonably look to have this unfortunate concernment of yours with Mr Milton and his Writings forgotten’. He advised him to stay abroad and study languages. Daniel took his advice and got his father to fund him as far as Paris, where he was confident he could perfect his French in six months; after that he meant to go to Italy. He was not yet out of trouble, because in 1677 the master of Trinity ordered him to return to college and warned him not to seek to publish ‘any Writing mischievous to the Church or State’. Daniel was now regarded as ‘a wild young man’ as well as a clever one. It was not the last time he asked for help from Pepys, who may well have reflected that he was destined to take up with young women with needy brothers. As for Milton’s papers, they were sent back to England, conveyed to Williamson by Daniel’s father and consigned to a cupboard at Whitehall where they lay gathering dust until 1823.5
Daniel’s knowledge of Pepys’s private relations with Mary made it possible for him to ask for help, but it was Pepys’s position as a public figure that made him worth asking. In the mid 1670s he was as well established professionally as a man can be. His letters breathe assurance and dignity. He was on easy terms with the richest men in the City. He could hold his own when he was sniped at by fellow members of parliament, and had become a formidably effective spokesman for the navy in the House. He attended the king regularly at Whitehall, Hampton Court and Windsor, and was often summoned to join him and the duke of York at Newmarket; and, however ordinary or despicable they had seemed to him in the past, he gave them his loyalty. Lord Shaftesbury, their enemy and his, was locked away in the Tower from February 1677, when the king had sent his secretary of state, the same Sir Joseph Williamson who had scuppered Daniel’s diplomatic career, to order him to leave town, and Shaftesbury had refused. Pepys may have been among the crowds who went to hear his unsuccessful appeal against this imprisonment at Westminster Hall in June; he could also have enjoyed a satirical play aimed at him, Sir Popular Wisdom; or, the Politician.
But Shaftesbury was not to be laughed at. His long political career had taught him how to wait, how to manoeuvre and how to organize. In February 1678 he was fifty-seven and could not walk without the help of sticks, but he was as determined as ever to pursue his policies. He humbled himself just enough to be released from the Tower and emerged unrepentant, set on course to save England from ‘Popery and slavery’. His chief aim now was to exclude the Catholic duke of York from the succession to the throne, and in the House of Lords in May he pointed him out in person as the main danger to the country. He had already warned the House (in January 1674) that there were more than 16,000 Catholics in the London area, ready for desperate measures and threatening a massacre. The claim was absurd, but fear and hatred of Catholicism meant that such warnings were taken seriously. Folk memory kept fresh Catholic Queen Mary’s burnings at the stake, the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot, and in France the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and there were still many who believed the fire of 1666 had been started by papists. The kings’s policy of alliance with Catholic France was generally disliked. So was the fact that he had not only a Catholic wife but Catholic mistresses; some of Nell Gwyn’s popularity came from her supposed merry declaration, ‘I am the Protestant whore.’ Shaftesbury may have suspected that Charles was close to being a Catholic himself, although if he was he had no intention of revealing or imposing his faith on anyone else; but his heir, the duke of York, had a Catholic wife who would give him Catholic children. Too many Irish priests were seen at court, too many Catholics had commissions in the army. The combination of arbitrary rule and religious persecution practised by Louis XIV in France showed what Protestants could expect from a Catholic ruler. Shaftesbury’s detestation of such a prospect drove him to action.
A weapon was put into his hands when rumours of a Catholic plot to murder the king and take over the country were started in the summer of 1678. He was not responsible for inventing the Popish Plot, as it became known, or for the grotesque fabrications of Titus Oates and his fellow informers, but he saw at once what he could do with such material and encouraged them for his own purposes. Like the anti-Communist frenzy spirited up by Senator McCarthy in the United States in the 1950s, the Plot caused normally reasonable people to lose their judgement, and before the hysteria wore itself out thirty-five men had been unjustly put to death, many more imprisoned, threatened and falsely accused, and scores of informers paid and feted for their fictions. When Oates addressed the Commons in October 1678, Pepys’s friend Sir Robert Southwell, usually a level-headed man, considered his deposition a ‘loose and tottering fabric which would easily tumble if it stood alone’, yet he decided to believe it because he felt that papists were too much indulged and had become dangerous; two months later the madness had increased to the point that Southwell was as convinced of the reality of the Plot ‘as of my creed’.6
On 2 November Shaftesbury proposed a resolution in the Lords that there was a ‘damnable and hellish plot contrived and carried on by the Popish recusants for the assassination and murdering the King, subverting government and rooting out the Protestant religion’, and that the duke of York must be removed from the king’s presence.7 Two days after this Pepys and all his clerks attended St Margaret’s, Westminster, and took the sacrament together. It was a precaution, meant to show they were good members of the Church of England. But although Pepys was not a Catholic, his political loyalty was to the duke of York, whom he found a supportive master, and if the country was to be divided between the duke’s supporters and Shaftesbury’s, he was unhesitatingly on the side of the duke.
Both Pepys and Shaftesbury had made long political journeys, Shaftesbury from royalist to parliamentarian, back to royalist at the Restoration and now prepared to take on a royal family that had, in his view, become disastrous for the country. Pepys’s journey took him from the boy who exulted at the execution of Charles I to the junior administrator stingingly critical of Charles II during the 1660s, and on to the senior servant of the crown, proud of the trust placed in him by his royal masters in the 1670s. Shaftesbury, an aristocrat, brilliant, subtle and arrogant, became the founder of the Whig Party. Pepys, who had risen from nothing, knew he owed his rise to Charles and James Stuart as much as to his own brainpower; as soon as the label ‘Tory’ was heard in English politics, he applied it to himself: ‘we Tories’, he wrote.8 When Shaftesbury compiled a list of MPs in February 1679, marking his supporters with a w, meaning worthy, and his opponents with a v for vile, Pepys was marked with a v.9
The panic engendered by the Plot led to absurdities as well as cruelties. The queen was accused of encouraging the murder of her husband. The discovery of gunpowder on the premises of a Frenchman living near the palace caused a frenzy until it was noticed that he was the royal fireworks-maker. When a noise of ‘knocking and digging’ in Old Palace Yard put the House into a state of alarm – was this another Gunpowder Plot? – Christopher Wren was called in to investigate and found that the roof was so rotten the building might fall down in the next high wind. Chains were fixed across the streets of the City against a Catholic rising. Small wonder that Pepys, working flat out to ensure the navy was not infiltrated by papists, wrote of ‘the whole government seeming at this day to remain in such a state of distraction and fear, as no history I believe can parallel’.10 One of the Jesuits arrested was Fogarty, surely the same ‘Fogourdy’ whom he remembered as an agreeable visitor to Elizabeth at Seething Lane.11 Because his own resident musician, Morelli, was a Catholic, and Catholics were banned within a thirty-mile radius of London, he asked James Houblon to attempt a rapid conversion; when, predictably enough, that failed, he spirited Morelli away – by the back water gate, according to his butler – sending him to Brentwood in Essex and paying him a small retainer.12
As Morelli left, the attack on Pepys began. Since he had already been accused of Catholicism in the House, he offered an easy target. It is likely that Shaftesbury ordered it and certain that his associates carried it out, revealing themselves as unprincipled thugs in the process. They began with the arrest of one of Pepys’s clerks, Samuel Atkins, accused of being an accessory to the murder of a magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, whose body had been found, strangled and stabbed, on Primrose Hill in mid October: it is one of the most famous murder mysteries in English history, and still unsolved. Godfrey, a Protestant of austere habits, had taken a deposition from Titus Oates in September, and his murder was construed as part of the Catholic Plot. London boiled with rumour and panic. Daggers were sold inscribed ‘pro religione Protestantium’ and ‘Memento Godfrey 12 Oct 78’; they were supposed to be used against the expected Catholic massacre.13 Atkins was arrested on false evidence on 1 November and examined in Newgate Prison on the 6th. He was kept in isolation, sometimes in irons, without pen and paper and allowed no contact with anyone outside; it was an exceptionally bitter winter, and prisoners were lucky if they had fires in their cells. ‘That we have no rack in England, and this is true, and a great blessing surely, but I am told Captain Richardson hath a hole in Newgate which never any man could endure two days without confessing anything laid to his charge,’ wrote a respectable MP.14 But although Atkins was not a favourite clerk of Pepys, he was stubbornly loyal to his master and to the truth. He refused to be intimidated even when Shaftesbury personally threatened him with hanging if he did not ‘make some discovery’.15 The plan was that he should incriminate Pepys indirectly, because Pepys happened to have an unbreakable alibi for the time of Godfrey’s murder – he had been at Newmarket with the king. Meanwhile Pepys was questioned about Atkins in the House; outside it, he busied himself establishing Atkins’s alibi.
The news got about enough for his sister Paulina Jackson to write to him anxiously from Brampton. His answer shows that their relations had improved with the years, because he addresses her as an intelligent person, sends his ‘kind love’ and urges her to write to him weekly. He explains about the ‘manifest contrivance’ against his clerk Atkins, ‘which (though most untrue) cannot be thought to pass in the world at so jealous a time as this without some reflections upon me, as his master, and on that score does occasion me not a little disquiet. But I thank God I have not only my innocence to satisfy myself with, but such an assurance of his also as that I make no question of his being able to aquit himself with advantage to him and infamy to his accusers’.16 At this stage Pepys believed himself unassailable; and indeed his detective work on behalf of Atkins came up with a complete alibi. There were witnesses who had been with him at a drinking party of friends of both sexes aboard the yacht Catherine at the time of Godfrey’s murder, after which Atkins, ‘very much fuddled’, needed to be rowed home. The case against him was destroyed. Atkins had to endure four months in prison, but when the trial came in February 1679 he was acquitted and released. The other three accused, who were equally innocent, were not so lucky. They were hanged.
Atkins’s trial coincided with an election. Castle Rising did not want Pepys, but Harwich, which had him to thank for recent shipbuilding contracts, duly elected him and Anthony Deane, his shipbuilder colleague and friend. This was when Shaftesbury marked his list of members and saw that he had twice as many supporters as opponents elected.17 The king appealed for a ‘healing parliament’ and national unity and, failing to get them, bowed to pressure and sent the duke of York abroad. Although Charles never believed in the Plot, he did not want to lose his crown, and followed the advice of Lord Halifax, ‘that the Plot must be handled as if it were true, whether it were so or not’.18 Innocent people continued to be imprisoned and executed, and James left for Brussels in March.
His departure was bad news for Pepys. Life upstairs at Derby House was upset at the same time, because Mary was ill with attacks of fever that failed to respond to her ordinary doses of Jesuits’ powder, or quinine, regarded with suspicion by some staunch Protestants, because it was brought by the Jesuits from Peru. Pepys was worried enough about her to consult a surgeon he knew in Chatham, who sent bottles of stronger medicine, though still containing quinine. She recovered.19 Daniel was in trouble again too, ordered by the master and seniors of Trinity to ‘come home to the College to clear himself from suspicion of being a papist’ – a change at least from being suspected of republicanism. He complied and, surprisingly, was appointed a major fellow. Then he got himself a passport testifying to his Protestantism and prepared to go on his travels again.20
Shaftesbury’s position looked so strong that the king gave ground, sacked his existing council and revived the old title of lord president of the council for Shaftesbury. At the same time he appointed a new commission for the Admiralty. This meant that Pepys was thrown to the lions, because the new commission was made up of men hostile to him. Almost at once he was attacked in the House, while a parliamentary committee was appointed to inquire yet again into the failings of the navy. On 6 May he wrote to the duke of York, ‘your Highness was pleased to foretell me at your going hence what I was soon after to look for; and it is come to pass. For, whether I will or no, a Papist I must be, because favoured by your Royal Highness.’ He went on to ask the duke to get him named as a commissioner. There was no chance of this, but James wrote to the king at once with the impossible request. He let Pepys see the letter, and, while it did him no good, it bound Pepys to the duke for life.21
Pepys’s opponents had got hold of three men prepared to incriminate him. They were a sorry lot, the first a disgruntled sea captain with a story that Pepys, along with Deane and St Michel, had allowed a privateer they ran as a consortium to prey on English shipping. The second was his ex-butler, John James, who bore a grudge for his dismissal – Morelli had found him in bed with a woman servant – and was ready to swear Pepys was a Catholic and Morelli a Jesuit. The third was a swaggering villain calling himself Colonel John Scott, just arrived in England from the Continent, who accused him of sending Deane to France to supply coastal maps and information about the fleet to the French government, with much circumstantial evidence; and Scott’s paymaster appears to have been the duke of Buckingham, who was doing dirty work for Shaftesbury. With this material the parliamentary committee declared there was a ‘Sea-Plot’ and Pepys was formally accused of ‘Piracy, Popery and Treachery’. The leading spokesman against him was William Harbord, as it happened the brother of Sandwich’s protégé who had died with him at the battle of Sole Bay: ‘Mr Pepys is an ill man, and I will prove him so,’ announced Harbord on 20 May. Pepys rose to defend himself on the spot. You can catch his indignant amazement in the repeated ‘But, Sir!’s that pepper his speech, of which a verbatim version is preserved among his papers: ‘Mr Speaker – It must be a great misfortune to have so many things cast upon me at once, and all by surprise… But, Sir! pray allow me to say this… But, Sir! I don’t expect to be acquitted by any profession of mine here… at a time so dangerous, Sir! that I would with all my heart contribute to my own prosecution… But, Sir! this I am…,’22 He was wasting his words. Later that day he was committed to the sergeant of arms, on the next he resigned as secretary to the Admiralty and as Tangier treasurer, and on the third day he was taken to the Tower. His rooms in Derby House were shut up. If Mary had not already gone, she must now have taken herself to Woodhall. One consolation for Pepys was that his work was given to his old protégé Tom Hayter, who had once been in such trouble for being caught at a Nonconformist meeting: at least he could not be accused of being a papist.
He may have expected the king to rescue him from the Tower as he had done Sir Joseph Williamson, who had been extracted by royal command within hours when he fell foul of parliament; but nothing like this happened to Pepys. He could console himself only with the sound of the familiar bells of All Hallows and St Olave’s and his memories of how, as a young man, he had brought the Sandwich children to see the lions at the Tower, looked out at the fire from one of its high windows, escorted Mrs Knipp and a party of ladies to view the crown jewels and visited Coventry during his detention in 1669. Now it was his turn to receive visitors: James Houblon, John Evelyn and his lawyers. He began to organize his own defence at once. Since he was accused of selling secrets to the French, it occurred to him that his French-speaking brother-in-law could be put to work on his behalf. He applied to the king for permission to send St Michel to Paris, and Baity set off, only too pleased to be crossing the Channel with all expenses paid and taking with him his eldest son, who can’t have been more than eight years old; Pepys sent a steady stream of letters after him, giving detailed instructions for searching out and preparing witnesses against Scott.23
His stay in the Tower was not long. On 20 June he and Deane were moved to the King’s Bench in Southwark, and on 9 July they were released on bail. Pepys had to give £ 10,000 of his own and Houblon and three other City friends put in £5,000 each. Pepys remained a rich man – he kept his coach and continued to employ several clerks – but he had lost his income and he was homeless. Will Hewer now showed the ‘care, kindness and faithfulness of a son’ and invited Pepys to move into his Buckingham Street house, where he gave him a suite of rooms.24 Esther St Michel was already installed there with four small children; Will had also advanced money to Baity, perhaps the only imprudent financial measure of his life. All this says much for his good nature; and Pepys too, at this juncture, was meticulous in keeping Baity informed about the health of his wife and infants, without a single word of impatience at their presence.25
He was out of prison but not free, and still facing the prospect of a trial for capital crimes.26 But the political tide was just beginning to turn. In July Oates’s testimony against the queen’s doctor, whom he accused of planning to poison the king, failed to convict. In August Charles was ill, and the duke of York returned to England to be with him. Recovering, Charles appointed James high commissioner to Scotland. Pepys accompanied him as far as Hatfield on his journey north in October. Hatfield meant a possible visit to Woodhall; he was now on cordial terms with both Skinners and Botelers.27 He also made a trip into Oxfordshire, possibly to consult with Coventry, who had retired to Minster Lovell. Back in court on the first day of the law term, he found his ‘old prosecutor, Harbord’ failed to put in an appearance.28 In October Charles felt strong enough to dismiss Shaftesbury, and parliament too; he ruled without it for a year, while he negotiated for another handout from Louis XIV. Anti-Catholic agitation continued, with the usual autumn street processions featuring Jesuits with bloody daggers, popish bishops, the Pope’s chief physician with Jesuits’ powder and a urinal, and an effigy of the Pope stuffed with live cats, to be burnt at Smithfield. There was punishment for Pepys too, in the form of two savagely satirical pamphlets, also attacking Hewer. Plain Truth or Closet Discourse Betwixt P. and H. accused them both of coining money by selling jobs and licences, cheating seamen and taking bribes, with Hewer doing the dirtier work to allow Pepys to maintain an innocent front. They were given Punch-and-Judy style dialogue:
H. Sir, you know I have never failed hitherto in my management of your affairs…
p. I thank thee, good H. It was strangely our good fortune that we ever met together. (Then they hug and kiss one another.)
Pepys was reminded that he was the son of a poor tailor, mocked for the ostentatious decorations on his coach and barge, and for his friendships with well-to-do women like the Houblon ladies and Lady Mordaunt. In A Hue and Cry after P. and H. humiliating details of his health problems were given. There was also a list of presents he was said to receive from favour-seekers, captains, consuls, carpenters and their wives, and it must be said that some have a familiar ring: pots of anchovies, butts of sherry, barrels of pickled oysters, Parmesan cheeses, hogsheads of claret and fine Spanish mats. Houblon commiserated, Pepys put a brave face on it, and other friends may have smiled; some of the jokes cut uncomfortably close to the truth. Later, he learnt that his ex-butler James had provided information.29
But Pepys was too busy to brood. For six months he kept dictating instructions to ‘Brother Baity’ in Paris, telling him precisely how he must proceed and proving amazingly successful at such long-distance detective work. Baity was sent to men and women of all classes, from ambassadors to servants, in the quest for witnesses against Scott; he had to question and listen, assess the value of what he was told, persuade witnesses to make formal statements before notaries and in some cases agree to travel to England to testify at a trial for which there was as yet no date fixed. He must never offer money, and he must reject Catholic witnesses, because they would not be trusted in England; it meant excluding Monsieur Pelletier, a friend from the Paris trip of 1669, when ‘your poor Sister and we were in France’, as Pepys reminded him.30 St Michel worked enthusiastically, although he spent too much and had to be told he could not afford to hire a private French tutor for his son; nor was he allowed home for a summer break. No one expected to stay in Paris in August, but Baity was made to. Pepys sent out an assistant in September, and Baity was back in England in January 1680. He had helped to establish Scott’s low reputation among the French, his loose, boastful talk and history of fraudulent behaviour, and presently Scott was complaining of Baity ‘tampering with everybody he thought fit for his turn’.31 There could have been no better tribute to his work.
As the evidence to disprove Scott’s stories piled up, and witnesses arrived in England for discussions with Pepys, Scott simply disappeared abroad again. Without him there could be no trial; yet the court did nothing to resolve the situation. Pepys raged: ‘taking in all the circumstances of scandal, expense, trouble and hazard, no innocent man was ever embarrassed as I have been, and remain at this day, from the villainy of one man of no acquaintance with myself nor credit with any honest man that knows him. The thoughts of which, should I give much way to them, would distract me. But God is above all.’32 God was Fate or Fortune, all-powerful and unreadable, and Pepys knew he had to fight his own fight. It meant getting involved with characters he would normally have kept well clear of. John Joyne, an English watch-maker Baity found in Paris and an old friend of Scott now happy to testify against him, arrived early to see Pepys on 27 November and, according to his own account, ‘being very dirty and so observed to be by Mr Pepys went home to shave and shift myself [i.e., change his clothes]’.33 Joyne kept notes of his meetings with both Scott and Pepys in London that autumn that give a vivid picture of all their activities, Scott slouching round London streets and taverns, Pepys decorous in his coach but sometimes reduced to accepting an invitation to eavesdrop on his enemies. Also among Joyne’s notes is a letter to Pepys written on 31 December which begins, ‘I went to Mr Skinner’s Daughter in the Haymarket, I left word with her that I should come again on Wednesday night to see her father,’ and ends, ‘Mr Hewer told me that you were gone out of Town… am now going to Mr Skinner’s.’34 What was Joyne’s connection with the Skinners? His letter suggests that her father was helping Pepys, but, as this is his only surviving reference to them, it remains tantalizing. What it does tell us is that Mary was living in the newly built and fashionable Haymarket, not far from Buckingham Street; and that she remained there while Pepys was away.35
Meanwhile Pepys’s other accuser, the ex-butler John James, was having further thoughts about his evidence; he was dying of tuberculosis and feared for his soul. He approached Pepys in January 1680, coming to Hewer’s house to tell him ‘that he has from the beginning been employed by our Enemies to gather witnesses against us… that he was pressed twenty times by a person of quality to give information against me in Parliament… that he had not much regard to what he said, but was drawned in to say whatever they had a mind he should say… that he did not swear to it, and was not much rewarded… and that he knowed Scott and has enough to stop his mouth’.36 This was promising stuff, but James wanted money to talk more. Pepys knew he must not risk appearing to bribe him, and sent him away. Within days he was back again.
Pepys needed a record of their conversations, and this inspired him to start another diary. It was nothing like the great Diary – it was dictated and written out in longhand, and without set pieces or indiscretions – but still from 27 January until 10 April there is a glimpse of his daily activities again, with even one nostalgic ‘and so to bed’. The first thing it tells is that Pepys’s life was as firmly compartmentalized as it had ever been. There was Buckingham Street, where Will’s widowed mother presided, Elizabeth’s portrait hung on the wall, and Balty’s children flourished.37 There was his circle of well-to-do friends of both sexes, who made a fuss of him in their homes and went with him to the theatre or on the river. He saw an Etherege farce, She Would if She Could, with young Mr Wynne Houblon. He drove Wynne’s mother Sarah – ‘Cousin Houblon and children’ – to Chelsea. He supped with Lady Banks; he escorted Lady Mordaunt and her sister to Vauxhall, and to Putney and Wimbledon by barge. Lady Mordaunt fed him nobly – her lobster pie gets a mention – and he was also a regular dinner guest at the Houblons. The diary shows he was assiduous in his church attendance; and that he visited his stationer in Cornhill and Harford the bookseller. He was at St James’s to greet the duke of York on his return from Scotland, and made his farewells to the duke and the king at court before they left for Newmarket in mid March. He called on Mary’s foster-father, Sir Francis Boteler, between attending Covent Garden Church and driving in the park on 21 March. It also tells us that Mary went to Knightsbridge in March, probably for her health; he visited ‘MS’ in this quiet rural spot where the London road crossed the River Westbourne.38 She does not seem to have been taken to the theatre or to Vauxhall.
The chief theme of this diary is in any case Pepys’s dealings with witnesses, some arrived from France, but principally James the butler. James’s moods fluctuated alarmingly. When he was disposed to talk it was of meetings at the Mitre in Fenchurch Street with Harbord and other grandees, who had given him money. As he grew weaker he became anxious about his burial arrangements. Pepys was anxious too, because he needed to extract a formal confession before James died, and in the presence of an independent witness, that he had lied and taken money for lying. Pepys arranged for a clergyman and reassured him about the funeral, but James resisted being visited by any ‘person of quality’ – meaning the required witness – because he was ashamed of his poverty and the fact that there was only one bed for himself, his sister and mother in their lodgings. At last he agreed to speak. Pepys, amazingly, asked Povey to be the independent witness; and Povey, amazingly, consented, perhaps his pleasure in being involved in so notorious a case outweighed his displeasure with Pepys. On 2 March Povey took a statement from James. Word got out of this development – Pepys saw to that – and Harbord hurried round to try to get James to change his story again. Some blackly farcical hours followed as rival groups crammed into the dying man’s room, on the one hand Pepys, Povey, Hewer and their lawyer, with James’s sister and mother, urging him to stand firm; and on the other Harbord with two justices, two clergymen, two political associates and a clerk, pressing him to sign a paper denying that he had ever been bribed. Harbord then proposed that they should each give two guineas towards his care, ‘and accordingly we did so,’ recorded Pepys, ‘Mr Povey lending each of us two Guinnys’.39 Whether Povey saw any of his guineas again is not part of the story. Harbord knew when he was beaten, and began to talk to Pepys as though the whole episode had been something of a joke; he ‘declared openly that he did not believe me to be a Papist or Popishly inclined, and so did all the Company’.40
Pepys did not forgive him, but the successful outcome with James made him cheerful enough to order his coach for his first drive of the year in Hyde Park; and he picked up a couple of bottles of champagne to take to the Houblons for a celebratory drink. Another sign of good spirits was his summoning of the joiner to help him move his furniture about, ‘shifting my Bedchamber and Study’, an activity he always enjoyed. James died on 20 March. If his conscience troubled him as he lay dying, his explanation for switching sides was simple: ‘Mr Pepys had used him unkindly… [but] Mr Harbord had taken away his allowance.’41 Pepys behaved decently to his womenfolk, inviting them to dinner and paying what they owed in rent; or rather he got Hewer’s clerk to supply them with the money and take a receipt.
Things continued to improve. The king summoned him to Newmarket, which allowed him to visit his father, sister and her family at Brampton on the way; he set off on 29 March and was in London again on 3 April, having called on Morelli on the return journey.42But not until the end of June did Pepys and Deane hear that the attorney-general, unable to muster a single credible witness against them, was giving up on the case. On 1 July Pepys wrote to Mrs Skinner announcing his ‘full discharge from the bondage I have, from one villain’s practice, so long lain under’, and thanking her and her family for their support throughout the year.43
With hindsight it is easy to think that Pepys had never been in danger of his life. But there were certainly those who expected him to lose his head, and there must have been moments when he was afraid. Other innocent men had after all gone to the scaffold. His work on his own defence distracted him from such fears and kept him almost as busy as usual. The result of these labours was never needed in court but remains a testimony to his cool courage under attack, his ability to think through tangled masses of evidence and impose order upon them, and his skill in deploying others to carry out his plans. It was a colossal task. It was also responsible for a colossal book, one that has never been printed and still sits in manuscript in the Pepys Library, leather bound and gilded, in two volumes of 1,338 pages and something like 400,000 words.44 The volumes make up one of the oddities of literature. They contain a collage of documents, letters, journals, verbatim statements and accounts of court proceedings. Some are in foreign languages, with translations provided; most are copies of originals made by Pepys’s clerks.45 Assembled, they bring us face to face with crooks and informers, men and women, victims and decent witnesses, allowing us to hear their words as they spoke them and to follow them on their travels. Colonel Scott, with his boasts, his fights, his swearing, his false names and disguises – now burnt-cork eyebrows, now a milliner’s dress – his selling of non-existent property, his desertion of his American wife, his preying on widows and their children, his composition of vile love poems, his claim to alchemical powers, his travels, his boasting of grand connections and his cowardice in battle, his court-martialling at Nevers and spreading of mischief wherever he travelled, in America, England, Holland and France, swells into a ludicrous but still alarming scoundrel. And however Pepys suffered from Scott’s accusations, he became fascinated by him – just how fascinated appears in the fact that he named the book he made after one of Scott’s fantasies.
Among his extravagant lies, Scott laid claim to the ownership of an estate that he called Mornamont, and in France he was sometimes known as ‘Seigneur d’Ashford et de Mornamont’.46 In the real world there was no Mornamont, just as there was no case against Pepys; but the name, and Scott’s myth-making, appealed to him so much that he enshrined it in his work by naming the whole thing Mornamont – ‘my book of Mornamont’, he called it, or ‘my two volumes of Mornamont’. It was a title fit for a romance, and a reminder that the young Pepys who wrote ‘Love a Cheate’ had not been entirely swallowed up in the administrator. ‘Mornamont’ speaks of things Pepys understood very well, ambition, fantasy and the eternal human ache to get your hands on some money. It has all the raw materials for a novel by Defoe, and it is Pepys’s most surprising legacy.