He was in London at the beginning of April 1684 to find everything changed. The Stuart whirligig was bringing in its revenges again, and its rewards too, and the king had resolved at last not only to rid himself of the Admiralty commissioners Pepys despised but to create a new position for him, restoring him to his official life. His five years in limbo were over. He was in effect given ministerial powers, as secretary for the affairs of the Admiralty of England, and in May he was back at Derby House as though he had never left, signing orders, sending for reports from the yards, reprimanding officers for slackness, drunkenness or failure to keep proper records and accounts, and finding jobs for the deserving. His salary came to £2,000 a year, with the usual extra payments for passes and appointments; on top of that he had nearly £1,000 due to him for the Tangier trip. The duke of York was now working closely with the king again; Pepys conferred with his royal masters at least once a week, and resumed his visits of inspection to the yards at Deptford, Chatham and Portsmouth. He expected to find signs of neglect and did: toadstools ‘as big as my fists’, he wrote, were growing in the unaired holds of some of the ships he had caused to be built five years before. He began to prepare one of his reports on the state of the navy and the ‘disorders and distresses’ into which it had fallen.1
The king’s enemies were being punished vigorously. He had decided to abolish the ancient charters of city and trade corporations, known strongholds of Whig opposition. Even – and especially – the City of London, so proud of its power and independence, was to lose its charter. Pepys was called on to demonstrate his Tory loyalty by rewriting the charter of the Trinity House, on whose board he had served for many years; and, when he was appointed to its mastership by royal command, he felt obliged to take immediate steps to remove ‘dissenters from the Church’ and any suspected of disaffection to the government from its membership. It was not the action of the old tolerant Pepys, but times had changed.2
His new eminence attracted other honours. In December 1684 he was elected president of the Royal Society. He may have been chosen, like Joseph Williamson before him, for his influence and administrative skills, but he was also friendly with many of the scholars and scientists who met at Gresham College. In the same month he became president he was engaged with an ex-president, Christopher Wren, in putting up a gilded statue of the king’s grandfather, James I, at the Royal Exchange, commissioned by the Clothworkers’ Company and carved by Grinling Gibbons. Pepys’s own face, in the Godfrey Kneller portrait painted for the Royal Society in 1684, shows the same fleshy lips and nose as in earlier portraits, but the eyes more knowing: this is a man who has seen a great deal and has few illusions about the world, pleased as he is with his position.
Behind the triumphant public foreground his domestic life was also changing discreetly. He arrived back from Spain to find that Mary’s father had died and that her foster-mother Dame Elizabeth Boteler was also on her deathbed at Woodhall. She died in April, leaving Mary enough to make her financially independent, but deprived of one she loved and relied on.3 At the same time Lord Brouncker, Pepys’s old Navy Board colleague and friend, died, and Pepys was executor to his will, which left his entire estate to his ‘beloved friend’, Abigail Williams. Pepys had always disliked and disapproved of her (‘doxy’, ‘whore’, ‘prating, vain, idle woman’), and even prevented Elizabeth from calling on her.4 Yet here he was faced with a striking example of a mistress allowed her dignity, fully acknowledged and made secure by her aristocratic lover, a man he respected. Whether or not this caused him to reflect that Mary had now been his mistress for fourteen years, and to take stock of their situation, by the following year she seems to have moved into Buckingham Street, and from this point Pepys and ‘Madam Skinner’ presided over a single household in something like a dignified partnership. Tactful Evelyn was soon referring to him as ‘so long the Master of a Familie, the Husband of so excellent a Lady’.5Mary was never an intellectual companion, and he complained bitterly of boredom and loneliness when he did not see his men friends; they, however, found her an agreeable hostess. And he enjoyed teaching her and encouraging her artistic interests, as he had encouraged Elizabeth’s. Among his notes is a list of educational visits to be made with her, including one to show her Gresham College. Others are to see processes such as enamelling, copper and gold work, wire-making, ribbon and stocking weaving, gilding and founding of letters used for printing. Evelyn refers to her adorning a cabinet that he compares to those at Versailles in its beauty: Evelyn was a flatterer – he goes on to suggest there is no need to go to France for one who can see Mrs Skinner’s cabinet – but it shows she took her artistic work seriously.6
Her installation may have been partly responsible for Will Hewer giving up his lease on the Buckingham Street house and moving out. He acquired another in the neighbourhood and took Jane Edwards to be his housekeeper there, while his mother settled in his country house in Clapham.7 In the summer before he moved there was nearly another fire disaster, with more panicky packing up of books, papers and household goods, and No. 12 was saved only at the last minute when troops were brought in to blow up its neighbour. In spite of this, Pepys asked permission to transfer the Admiralty Office from Derby House to Buckingham Street. So high was he in favour that it was granted, in what must be the only instance of a civil servant being allowed the privilege of bringing his place of work into his home. The office went with them when he and Mary moved three years later into a larger house at the end of the street, facing directly on to the river and with a strip of garden in front, planted with trees.8
In January 1685 Pepys presented the king with his paper on the state of the navy. Charles did not read it because on 1 February he had a stroke. He lingered for a few days while his doctors tried their remedies, painful and distressing ones that he bore gallantly, and Dr Ken – now a bishop – offered him the sacrament according to the Church of England. This he refused, and his current French mistress, helped by the duke of York, smuggled in a priest to allow him to make his peace with the Catholic Church. It was a shifty arrangement, but he accepted it, and so he died in his mother’s faith. Charles was laid in his grave with little ceremony for fear of disturbances. Pepys soon heard a rumour of the Catholic deathbed. He was bold enough to question the new king, James II, and had it confirmed by him. He passed the information on to trusted friends, and Evelyn’s opinion was that James’s open Catholicism was preferable to Charles’s concealment.9 It was not a view shared by the nation.
Having worked devotedly with James when he was duke of York Pepys could count on a continuation of royal favour. He walked prominently in the coronation procession, and was returned to parliament in the first election following it, for Harwich; Hewer also became an MP, as did Mary’s foster-father, Sir Francis Boteler. Pepys was invited to become deputy-lieutenant for Huntingdonshire. He had James’s support for his plan for a special commission to restore the navy to efficiency, and he had every reason to expect to be in charge of naval affairs until he chose to retire in a glow of success and splendour, ten years or more in the future. This did not happen for one reason only: whereas his agenda was the navy, the king’s was the restoration of the Catholic faith in England. It brought disaster to both of them in rather less than four years.
The character of James II has not found much favour with posterity. His childhood began in the impersonal splendour that was the lot of royal babies, and became uncertain and frightening as the civil war started when he was nine; at thirteen he was handed over to the parliamentary forces and imprisoned in London, and two years later he escaped in disguise. The happiest years of his life were almost certainly those in which he was a professional soldier, serving with the French and then the Spaniards, and distinguishing himself by his bravery and dash. He showed the same energy and courage when he was given the chance to fight at sea after the Restoration. Otherwise the way of life at his brother’s court was enough to undermine any but the strongest character: lechery, intrigue, gambling, hunting and horse-racing. James did not resist the temptations on offer. He was not stupid, but his view of the world was narrow, as so easily happens with royalty, and he was without subtlety in his dealings with people. Like Pepys, he kept some sort of diary; unfortunately it did not survive, and the biography based on it and published in the nineteenth century is essentially political, self-justifying and without self-awareness or original insights.10 Whereas Charles had learnt to charm and prevaricate, James expected immediate compliance with his wishes; when he was opposed he became more rigid, and when the opposition threatened to succeed he was thrown into panic. His decision to become a Catholic seems to have been a quest for something serious and stable in his life; it was unfortunate that it was combined with the belief that he was entitled to absolute power when he became king.
Pepys liked and trusted his new master, but he had no intention of converting to Catholicism himself, as his friend Dryden and some others did. He trod carefully. He contributed to funds to help Huguenot refugees driven out of France by Louis XIV’s Catholic persecution; but when Dr John Peachell, master of Magdalene and vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, wrote to tell him he feared he was going to lose his position for opposing the king in the granting of a degree to a Benedictine monk, there is no record of Pepys’s reply, and more than a year elapsed before he tried to help Peachell, who was indeed dismissed.11 Pepys naturally kept quiet when James talked about miracles enacted in Spain, which rested on the cheat Pepys himself had discovered; but he could not resist telling Evelyn the whole story.12 He was often at court, and sometimes privately satirical about aspects of what went on there: ‘Tonight we have had a mighty Music-Entertainment at court, for the welcoming home of the King and Queene. Wherein the frequent Returns of the Words Arms, Beauty, Triumph, Love, Progeny, Peace, Dominion, Glory &c had apparently cost our Poet-Prophet more paine to find Rhimes than Reasons.’13
James made greater demands on him than Charles. Notes by clerks for the summer of 1686 show Pepys attending Hampton Court or Windsor seven times in June and seven in July, four times in August and five in September; the following summer it was worse, ten times in June, thirteen in July, and a summons to accompany a royal progress in the West Country in August.14 However tiring, it was the price for being allowed to push through his programme of naval reform, and James agreed to all Pepys’s suggestions, allowing him to appoint his own special commissioners and to fix the rules for serving officers. Pepys set out to change the system of payments in the yards under which he had suffered so much in the 1660s, so that everything would be settled on the nail, clearly accounted for, with no accumulation of debts on which interest must be paid. Hewer was made responsible for this, and did as well as could be hoped, although many of the problems remained. Pepys called a conference of shipbuilders, put Anthony Deane in charge, and made plans to repair the yards as well as the ships, build two new frigates a year and improve the supply system. In this he was notably successful. Sir John Berry, a friend from Tangier and Cadiz, advised on discipline at sea, and the king put out a proclamation intended to end ‘Good Voyages’ and all the corruption and uncertainty that went with them; officers were to be compensated for giving up this source of income by increased allowances. It was an excellent reform in principle but it did not actually happen, because the new allowances were never paid, and ‘Good Voyages’ continued as before.15 A striking omission from Pepys’s reform programme was his failure to address himself to the worst abuse of all, the pressing of men: it was something he had defended in the past and which he saw no way of bringing to an end, and it remained a blot on the navy until 1815.16 His insistence on the importance of discipline, planning and the keeping of proper written records at sea and in the yards did, however, produce permanent benefits.
The name of the fourth special commissioner appointed to reform the navy comes as a surprise. It was ‘Mr St Michel’. Finding Baity recommended by Pepys to the king for his vigour of mind, zeal and readiness to give his ‘whole time to this Your Service, without liableness to Avocation from other Business or Pleasure’ makes you wonder for a moment if this can be the same St Michel to whom Pepys so often preached financial prudence and diligence. But Baity was still Elizabeth’s brother, and Pepys still felt he must look after him. It was not what a hard-headed administrator would have done, as he knew very well, but he went so far as to get him installed in what had been the Treasurer’s House at Deptford.17 This was the high point of Balty’s career, and at the end of 1686 Pepys urged him to take responsibility for his own future, warning him that he himself had lost strength and was suffering from a new kidney stone and an ulcer.18 Esther was expecting her seventh child at this point, and she died giving birth in February; Baity, left with so many children, showed no sign of giving up his dependence on Pepys. It was not in his nature to plan or save.
Paulina still lived at Brampton, where Pepys’s deputy-lieutenant-ship of the county must have taken him from time to time. Judging that Sam, her elder son, was ‘heavy and backward in his learning’, he sent him to sea at fifteen. The Huntingdon schoolmaster gave better hopes of the younger, and eighteen months after Sam’s departure, in June 1686, John Jackson was entered as a pensioner at Magdalene. Well aware of what was expected of him, the thirteen-year-old sent off his first Latin letter to his uncle from his old college, and worked hard for his degree.19 Jane’s son Sam Edwards turned out to be another good boy, not surprisingly given his parentage, and in January 1688 Pepys saw him presented to the king and the lord mayor with the other boys of the mathematics department. Another figure from the past, John Creed, wrote to remind Pepys of their ‘long and very singular friendship’: he called him cousin, regretted that he himself was still only a Younger Brother of Trinity House, and made it clear he thought he should be made an Elder Brother – what are old friends for? But Pepys was no more disposed to like him than he had been before and did not oblige.20
Then there were the deaths of friends. William Coventry, the man he had most respected in public life, with his dry wit, sharp mind and occasional tenderness, died at fifty-eight; he was quite withdrawn from politics and the world, but sharp in mind as ever.21Betty Martin, who had cheered Pepys with her appetite for pleasure, departed in the same year. So did the flirtatious Lady Mordaunt, who had cheered him in a different fashion through some difficult years. His pretty Cambridge cousin Barbara, daughter of Roger Pepys and wife of Dr Gale, high master of St Paul’s School, died at forty, leaving a large family.22
Two weeks after a Royal Society dinner in November 1687, at which Pepys must have spoken with the formidable William Petty, he too died, at his house in Piccadilly. He had been intellectually active to the last, recommending a university for London, a new bridge at Lambeth and the embankment of the river from Lambeth to Rotherhithe.23 He believed women should be properly educated and made sure his daughter was: ‘one day Arithmetick and Accountantship will adorn a young woman better than a suit of ribbands’.24 He thought the state should support illegitimate children.25 He proposed decimal coinage and a national health system. He suggested punishing thieves by labour rather than imprisonment. He scorned a peerage –’I had rather be a copper farthing of intrinsic value, than a brass half crown’ – and at the end of his life was advising William Penn the younger how to run his colony.26 Pepys had eleven of Petty’s books in his library, and not long before his death asked him to write an essay for him, a ‘Dialogue on Liberty of Conscience’, in which Petty was a passionate believer; he obliged, and Pepys kept the essay among his papers. Petty wrote in his will that he was content to die ‘in the profession of that faith, and in the practice of such worship, as I find established by the Law of my country, not being able to believe what I myself please, nor to worship God better than by doing as I would be done unto’.27
Such views were unusual. Most people in England were thoroughly opposed to liberty of conscience, particularly now they saw their king celebrating mass in public, ignoring the Test Act and putting Catholic officers into the corporations, the army and the navy. His appointment of the Catholic Sir Roger Strickland as commander of the fleet in the Narrow Seas was deeply resented by officers and seamen. He went so far as to sack some high officials who refused to convert, among them his brothers-in-law, Henry and Lawrence Hyde, earls of Clarendon and Rochester respectively, now among Pepys’s friends; both were turned out of their government jobs. He began to build up a standing army. He intimidated certain judges and corrupted others. He dismissed his parliament and ruled without it; and he interfered in the universities. A crisis was reached in the spring of 1688 when he ordered his new ‘Declaration of Indulgence’, which allowed complete freedom of worship, to be read in all the churches in the country. On the face of it this looked like a fair promise of tolerance for all, but this was not how it was interpreted. Seven bishops refused and were imprisoned in the Tower, among them Pepys’s friend from the Tangier trip, Bishop Ken. Pepys was present when they were brought to be questioned by the king and Judge Jeffreys, and was called as a witness at their trial in Westminster Hall in June. He managed to say nothing that could help either side; here, as with the navy, he had to tread a most delicate path. The jury was in any case going to find the bishops not guilty, and when it did so the bonfires were lit in the streets, an effigy of the Pope was burnt in front of St James’s Palace, money was thrown to the crowds by various noblemen, and the soldiers camped on Hounslow Heath – supposedly there to enforce the king’s will – cheered the verdict.
Pepys had seen London boil up regularly throughout his life – in the forties, the fifties, the sixties and the seventies – and now it was boiling again. What made the whole country turn against James was the birth of a son; there were allegations, quite unfounded but widely believed, that the baby was an impostor, smuggled into the queen’s delivery room in a warming pan. This coincided with the trial of the bishops, and since the little prince had two Catholic parents and would be brought up a Catholic and take the throne as one, he proved the last straw. A group of politicians was already in touch with William of Orange, husband of James’s Protestant daughter Mary, and the people were ready and eager to attack ‘Jesuits’, ‘papists’ and Irishmen. Admiral Herbert, whom Pepys had so detested in Tangier, travelled in disguise to Holland carrying a formal invitation to William from leading statesmen and peers to come and take the throne of England; and Herbert, popular as ever among seamen, offered his services to the Dutch fleet to bring him over.28
When news came that the Prince of Orange was indeed fitting up his fleet, Pepys went to Chatham to see to the defences and the manning of the ships. He found things in good order technically; the morale of officers and men was less certain. The king appeared calm, as though determined not to take the threat seriously; he had turned down an offer of help from Louis XIV, and when he began to think he might need it after all the French were busy with their own concerns and no ships were available. At the end of September William put out an address to the officers and seamen of the English fleet, naming Herbert as his man, warning them of james’s intended destruction of their religion and liberties, and promising favour to ‘all who deserve well of Us and of the Nation’.29This did make James remove his Catholic commander-in-chief at sea, Strickland, and replace him with Dartmouth, another close friend but a Protestant and so less obnoxious to the men. Pepys drafted the king’s instructions on 1 October, requiring him ‘to use his utmost endeavours with the Fleet to prevent the Fleet of War expected from Holland from approaching or making any Descent [i.e., landing]’.30 In October Pepys punctiliously closed his special commission at the end of its two years’ work and prepared to support Dartmouth as best he could. Both men were in agonizingly difficult positions, their personal loyalty to James demanding that they support him against his son-in-law, while London, the country and the navy were clearly turning to Protestant William as their saviour.
The king, realizing at last that he had to appease the angry nation, promised an election, restored the City’s charter and privileges and the heads of colleges he had sacked. By now William’s fleet was about to set sail. It was driven back by a storm. Dartmouth was off Harwich with the English fleet; Pepys suggested he should sail towards the Dutch coast to inspect the damage inflicted by the storm. Dartmouth declined. Pepys’s intelligence led him and the king to expect the Dutch to attempt to land in the north-east of England, but, when on 1 November the Dutch embarked again, an east wind sent them along the south coast. The brightly decorated fleet, 200 troop transports escorted by 49 fighting ships, sailed as blithely as though on a pleasure cruise. The country’s loyalties were so completely reversed that they were not perceived as a threatening enemy, and the sea battles of the Dutch wars, even the attack on the Medway, were forgotten. With the wind against him, Dartmouth was unable to get his ships out; in any case his captains were reluctant. On the day William landed at Torbay, the English fleet reached Beachy Head and was again becalmed. It was clear they were not going to attack the Dutch. William came ashore peacefully, bringing with him the biggest army that had ever landed in England.
He proceeded adroitly, announcing nothing, asking James only for a free election. James reviewed his troops at Colchester and then set off for Salisbury, first arranging that his infant son should be taken to Portsmouth and conveyed to France; Dartmouth refused to hand over the prince to a foreign power, and the baby was returned to London. At Salisbury James’s senior officers, led by John Churchill, began to desert him for William. Pepys’s friend Sheeres, still loyal and in command of the dwindling artillery, wrote to Dartmouth to say that the king was almost deserted: ‘The King is very ill… I am at my wits’ end, and you will forgive me, my good Lord, while you know what an aching heart I have for you.’31 In various parts of the country there were risings in favour of William, and only two military encounters took place between his soldiers and James’s, both insignificant.
Strong as Pepys’s personal loyalty to James was, he had to think of his own position, and at this stage his behaviour was not quite that of a hero. On 17 November he accompanied James, who was on his way to Salisbury, as far as Windsor, and presented him with an IOU for a sum agreed by Charles II in March 1679, plus further sums due to him as treasurer for Tangier. The king signed, a striking testimonial at such a moment to his friendship for Pepys, and perhaps his view of what was going to happen.32 As the situation deteriorated for him, Pepys struggled to keep afloat, uncertain what he should do. The letter he sent off to the mayor and Corporation of his constituency at Harwich shows him straining to adopt an acceptable position, loyal to James, but also loyal to the Church of England and prepared for the revolution: ‘not but that I do still firmly hope (as Cloudy as things do at this day look) that God Almighty has it yet in his Gracious purpose to support the King and his Government, and strongly protect the Church of England… but that hope not being entirely void of some apprehension that things may possibly end otherwise’.33
His apprehension was justified. When the king reached London again he found his second daughter, Princess Anne, had fled and put herself under the protection of his opponents. A modern historian has suggested that James suffered a nervous breakdown at this stage, brought on by stress and memories of his boyhood and the fate of his father; certainly from now on there is no sign of the brave young soldier he had been. His behaviour became confused and he was plainly frightened.34 He agreed to William’s terms to remove Catholics from all offices and assign revenues to support the invading forces until an election could be called; he then disbanded his own army without paying it. Pepys signed his orders for the use of a yacht to carry the queen and prince to France, and on 12 December James took flight himself. He was captured by fishermen and held humiliatingly at Faversham while London erupted into riots, and he wrote to William asking to be rescued. A rescue party was sent, and on his return to London the volatile crowds cheered him – the mobile vulgus, or the mob, as it was beginning to be known.35 William was now at Windsor, where he received assurances that the English fleet would submit to him, as he informed Herbert in a note: assurances that can have come only from Dartmouth.36 The next day William held a council and his troops reached London. James was invited to go to Ham House, on the Thames between Richmond and Hampton Court, but chose to take flight again, to the general relief, and this time it was made sure that he should reach France without hindrance. His flight was not announced for several days, during which London was without any controlling force; a group of peers met and offered to keep order until William arrived in town. On 18 December he was in Whitehall. Pepys was summoned to him the following day. He was not deprived of his office, although his friends expected him to be.
On the same day Hewer wrote to him to say, ‘You may rest assured that I am wholly yours, and that you shall never want the utmost of my constant, faithful, and personal service; the utmost I can do being inconsiderable to what your kindness and favour to me has and does oblige me to. And therefore as all I have proceeded from you; so all I have and am, is and shall be at your service.’ Pepys inscribed it with the words ‘a letter of great tenderness at a time of difficulty’, and kept it carefully. It is the nearest thing to a love letter among his papers.37
He continued to work throughout the Christmas season, sending William’s orders to the fleet on Christmas day itself and attending him again on 12 January, two days after the formal dismissal of Dartmouth. This meant that Pepys had to appear alongside the hated Admiral Herbert to receive instructions for preparing naval defences against any intervention by the French. He gritted his teeth and did so. By now he had decided to stand again in the parliamentary election due to be fought in February. On New Year’s Day he wrote again to the mayor of Harwich to sound him out: ‘upon so great a Revolution as we are now under, it may very well be that the Corporation may at this Conjuncture think of some Person that may be more useful for them’.38 He was right to be cautious, but he went ahead, and the old stories were brought out against him. A friend wrote to tell him that a Captain Hugh Ridley of the Antelope had declared at a coffee house in Harwich ‘that Pepys was a Papist and went to Mass and he had several times observed you at the King and Queen’s chapel’. The last part was probably true. There were also cries of ‘No Tower men, no men out of the Tower’. He can’t have been surprised to lose the election.39 On 13 February William, who had negotiated firmly for the crown and nothing less, was declared king alongside Queen Mary, with the succession to her sister Anne.
The overwhelming majority of the nation, including high government officials, welcomed the new regime with relief. But there were a few, including the archbishop of Canterbury, who considered themselves bound by their earlier oaths of allegiance to James and refused to take a new one. They were known as nonjurors, and among this small band was Pepys. A week after the proclamation of the new monarchs he resigned his secretaryship. The changes he saw coming in the Navy Office were one reason. There was also his personal loyalty to James, which now became more important to him than any principle involved – for Pepys was a parliamentarian and no believer in absolute monarchy. But where Joseph Williamson was able to move coolly from court supporter under Charles and James to privy councillor under William and continue his career as a diplomat, Pepys could not bring himself to make the necessary adjustments. Memories of the accommodations of 1660 surely made their contribution. He was not going to turn his coat again. Hewer resigned his position alongside him; so did Deane and Pearse; and St Michel lost his. The new secretary to the Admiralty wrote requiring Pepys to hand over his official papers and furniture, and, since his house had been used as a government office, he was also required to vacate it. He dug in his heels at this point and made so many difficulties that the Admiralty gave up and decided in April that it would be easier to set up their offices somewhere else. Pepys remained at the end of Buckingham Street with his household, his books, his pictures, his papers and his view over the Thames, paying his own rent, stubborn and, for the first time in his life, a hero.