26. A Journey to be Made

On 29 September 1693, the feast of Michaelmas, Pepys was driven by his coachman out of London and into the country towards the riverside village of Chelsea; they may have been on their way to dine with friends, or simply going to take the air. With him in the coach were some ladies and his nineteen-year-old nephew John, who was sporting a silver-hilted sword. The road ran through meadowland and past isolated farms and a few large villas. When three men on horseback, armed and wearing masks, appeared and put one pistol to the breast of the coachman and another to Pepys, there could be no thought of putting up a fight. The men asked what he had, and he handed over his purse with about £3 in it and the various necessaries he carried with him, his silver ruler, his gold pencil, his magnifying glass and five mathematical instruments. It made an impressive collection, and when he asked to have back one particular instrument he was told that, since he was a gentleman, as his assailant claimed to be also, if he sent to the Rummer Tavern in Charing Cross the following day he should have it. John gave up his sword and hatband. Pepys asked the highwaymen to be civil to the ladies and not to frighten them; and some of the ladies were frightened, but one kept her wits about her: ‘My Lady Pepys saved a Bag of Money that she had about her.’¹ So read the law report from which this story comes, because two of the men were tried for the crime at the Old Bailey in December. The men, Thomas Hoyle and Samuel Gibbons, were found guilty partly through the evidence of a witness who saw their faces as they pulled off their masks, and partly because Hoyle was taken at the Rummer Tavern with Pepys’s pencil in his possession. Pepys gave evidence at the trial but he would not swear they were the men concerned because he had not seen their faces. Both, however, were found guilty of felony and robbery, condemned to death and hanged. The most quick-witted member of the party seems to have been Mary Skinner – Lady Pepys for the occasion – who managed to keep her money safe under her skirts. She was not asked to be a witness, but she was clearly a force to be reckoned with.

Pepys did not learn to like King William any better as the years went by, but a moment came when he consented to act as an adviser to the regime. It was through Evelyn, a good fixer, who suggested to a friend in government that Pepys was the man to be consulted about the project to build a hospital for sick and wounded seamen at Greenwich. Since it was something Pepys had discussed already with James II, he agreed to go to Greenwich again with Christopher Wren in November 1694 to consider what might be done. He was impressed by the ingenuity and splendour of Wren’s proposals, and wrote to Evelyn of ‘an Invalides with us for the sea, suitable in some degree to that of Paris for the land’. Practical as ever, he also pointed out that the scale of the plans meant the building would need parliamentary funding; and he was proved right, because the work suffered many delays through money running out. Clearly he was pleased to be offering advice once more; and the visit to Greenwich must also have sent his mind back to many earlier occasions – a ramble to the top of the hill with Lady Sandwich; a stroll with the king and the duke on a July morning, young Monmouth running and jumping in circles around them; and the winter of the plague, when he had lived in Greenwich lodgings, riotously. Now, thirty years later, the November afternoon closed the scene fittingly; it was the last official outing he was to make.²

Evelyn was feeling his age – he was after all thirteen years older than Pepys – and this year he gave up his Deptford house and moved to Surrey. He still visited London, but occasions for meeting were fewer, and he was not at the council meeting of the Royal Society to which Pepys went soon after his Greenwich visit, to make sure that John Jackson was elected. All went well, and ‘Mr Jackson nephew to Mr Pepys and Mr Bridges son to Lord Chandos were ballotted and approved.’ Among those present were his old rival John Creed, up from Oundle; his old friend Robert Hooke; and a newer one, the widely travelled young doctor, naturalist and collector, Hans Sloane, acting as secretary of the society and just appointed physician in charge at Christ’s Hospital.³

Sloane attended Pepys and Mary professionally, getting Mary to go horseback riding for her ‘dropsy’. Pepys lent the doctor books and borrowed some in return, enjoying his conversation so much that he wrote to him on one occasion ‘almost wishing myself sick, that I might have a pretence to invite you for an hour or two to another [visit] by yourself’.⁴ He and Sloane both did their best to encourage a still younger scholar, Humfrey Wanley, who had been a Coventry draper’s apprentice until his genius for deciphering and dating almost any piece of writing set before him was noticed by the local bishop, who sent him to Oxford. Pepys’s Oxford friends sent him with an introduction in 1695 when Wanley wanted to visit the celebrated Cottonian Library. Pepys arranged this, and showed him his own for good measure.⁵ Wanley became deputy librarian at the Bodleian; soon he was writing to the bookdealer John Bagford asking him to help in the pursuit of acquisitions from ‘any noble spirited and Worthy Gentlemen, who are Masters of any Curiosities which we want, and are or may be willing to part with to our Library… send me word in your next what may be done with Mr Pepys’.⁶ Wanley’s letters to Pepys are flattering, as the manners of the age required from a poor scholar to a potential benefactor, but they suggest real affection too. In one he assured Pepys that his conversation was ‘more nearly akin to what we are taught to hope for in Heaven than that of anybody else I know.’⁷ Wanley was on good terms with Mary and with Jackson too; as a palaeographer in constant quest of manuscripts he envied Jackson his chance to travel in Europe, and drafted a long letter to him with questions and suggestions. He also asked Pepys to support his own application to Oxford for funding to visit libraries on the Continent, and Pepys and Sloane both wrote testimonials for him.⁸ In such ways Pepys kept in touch with the most advanced scholars and scientists, refusing to allow age or illness to close his mind or dull his curiosity.

He also kept up his interest in Christ’s Hospital. The mathematics department was his particular concern, and he was eager to see good results, often asking how the boys fared when they went to sea and sending directives to the staff. When at his request a group of the boys came to his house in 1695 for him to assess their progress, he was disappointed, diagnosed a general slackness in the organization of the school, started a row with the treasurer and wrote to Isaac Newton, no less, asking him to put up the name of a new mathematics master. Newton recommended a young graduate called Sam Newton – not a relation – for his good character and abilities; and after a few months in the job Sam Newton complained to Pepys that the children were being taken out of his hands too young. The school had been set up to educate the boys until they were sent to sea as apprentices at sixteen – but with the proviso ‘or if the Master of Trinity House sees fit earlier’. This was the problem, that they were being hauled off to sea before they had a chance to do any serious study by the master of Trinity House, Sir Matthew Andrews, who was also a governor of the school. Sam Newton laid out the situation in a letter to Pepys:

comes Sir Matthew for a Boy, to be putt out the next week. I told him I had none ready, so he replied if there were none ready he must have one unready because he had promised one to a Sea Capt. and that hee would answer (I think he said excuse) the Boye’s unpreparedness to the Trinity House. It grieves me to my very Soul when I reflect upon such inconsiderate Actions, and that the most famous Mathematics School… should be thus torn in pieces by one man… [Such] proceedings will bring down the Honour & Reputation of the Famous Nursery to the level of an Abcdarian, and every common Tarpaulin who never knew either the usefulness or sweetness of Mathematical learning will run down our poor Children…: and in time this School which was created on purpose to improve our English seamen in Arts & Sciences (part. Navigation) will fall under the lowest degree of contempt.

It was a brave letter, and it ended with a plea to Pepys to ‘find out some Expedient to stop this injurious Career’.⁹

Pepys’s answer shocked Newton, because instead of standing up for the boys’ right to an education he insisted that he must give way to Sir Matthew, ‘not only your Superiour, and so not decently to be contended with by you, but the Person whom you find in a special manner depended on by the House on business of the disposing of the Children’. Pepys had worked with Sir Matthew for years at Trinity House and was simply not prepared to take him on. Newton must apply himself to improving each child ‘in the little time allowed you for it’, he wrote, and give Certificates ‘in the decentest Terms you are able of the several heads of Science wherein you can safely assert the Child’s being instructed’.¹⁰ Here their exchange ends, leaving a dismal picture of boys being sent to sea untutored and too young to protest or escape, rather than receiving the education and care Christ’s Hospital had promised. Some may have preferred life at sea to lessons, and some ran away, but it was not what their families or benefactors expected. Pepys’s capitulation is the sadder because he believed so strongly in the need for education and its importance in raising standards in the navy; had he been younger and more fit, you feel, he would have taken up Newton’s cause.

He was ill in both the spring and the autumn of 1697, and retreated to Will Hewer’s house at Clapham for several weeks in the summer. Clapham was then a mere scattering of village houses round a small church, and the house was one Pepys had visited and admired more than thirty years before.¹¹ The departure of Thomas Gale to the deanery at York in the inaccessible north left him living almost like a monk, he grumbled when he got home to London. Yet at this same time he received a visit from his old college tutor Joseph Hill, now resident in Holland; he came with a daughter who made friends with Mary and proposed to take her back with her for a visit. Whether Mary went to Holland is uncertain. No letters of hers have survived, and none from Pepys to her. We know that she could write, since she took his dictation, but like Elizabeth she was made into a silent woman. There was a courtly letter from Pepys to her foster-sister Julia this year in which he assured Julia that he would never be guilty of neglecting her, but that ‘Indeed Madame the World and I have been strangers a great while’; and he goes on to quote verses on political melancholy, a veiled allusion to his Jacobitism.¹²

The war against France ended in September 1697, and Louis XIV recognized William III as king of England. Then, in January 1698, the last great fire of Pepys’s lifetime reduced the whole of Whitehall Palace to ashes, leaving only the Banqueting House standing. It marked the end of the world in which he had lived and worked, where the royal family, courtiers and officials lived in sets of rooms, some hardly grander than those of college heads, and an intimacy developed among those who knew their way about that made it almost like a village. Now this way of life and all that went with it passed into history. Queen Mary had died in 1694, King William disliked Whitehall, and Wren’s plans for rebuilding were set aside. In the City at least his work was advancing, although neither the dome nor the towers of St Paul’s were finished during Pepys’s lifetime; but he must have admired the transformation of his boyhood territory, where Wren built wharves on both sides of the Fleet River and crowned the new St Bride’s with his most perfect spire. Pepys was given the Freedom of the City in 1699 for his services to Christ’s Hospital, which may have given him his last close look at once familiar streets.¹³

He had a specially designed book desk built for his library and another of the great matching bookcases in 1699; now he had left the service of the navy he had to pay for them out of his own funds. The bookcase was the eighth, and some time before it was installed he had two drawings made of the library in York Buildings.¹⁴ They give a good impression of the arrangement of the furniture and pictures, and they also offer a glimpse into an adjoining room, where a small painting set in a gilt frame and showing the king of France on horseback can just be glimpsed, hung low on the wall above a leaf table with curly legs.¹⁵ The painter was Mary, and here was her mark on the house, and as an artist, for all to admire. After many years in the shadows she had at last become visible, and not only visible – she was mentionable, admired even. Evelyn’s grandson praised her as the mistress of the house, presiding like a Muse or Athene among the guests, in some Latin verses he sent to Pepys complimenting him on his Saturday gatherings. Pepys himself wrote of her making a call on his behalf to invite a friend to visit if he could ‘still afford an hour for Philosophy and a tansey’.¹⁶ Gentlemen sent her their wives’ compliments alongside their own, a significant sign of social acceptance. So respectable did she now appear that a French Protestant pastor, a refugee whom Pepys had assisted to a living in Ireland, invited her to be godmother to his child. Greetings came to her in letters from the good Dr Hickes and from Wanley, who took her position and influence to be such that ‘2 words from You Sir, Madam Skinner, or Mr Jackson’ would help him to a fellowship to which he aspired.¹⁷ Most strikingly of all, when Pepys gave £10 towards repairs to the old building of his college in Cambridge, she also sent her own donation of five guineas. It is marked in the college records as from ‘Madm Pepys’, and it speaks eloquently of her wish to support her companion of so many years in his interests and loyalties.¹⁸

Early in 1698 an official pass was issued for John Jackson, Mary Skinner, Julia Shallcross and another woman friend to travel to France with two servants: a little holiday in which Pepys was not included. Instead he was busy planning a more ambitious project for his nephew, nothing less than a Grand Tour.¹⁹ The Houblons helped him prepare every step, with itineraries, introductions and arrangements to draw money, and Pepys appointed one of his servants, appropriately named Paris, to go with him. He was to travel through France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Portugal, seeing the sights and learning the languages, and reach Rome in time for the celebrations of the new century. Never was a young man sent off with so many instructions; Pepys kept the reins tightly in his hand, and his nephew responded to every twitch. He was to carry out commissions for Pepys, Mary and many others, and to write regularly detailing his experiences. When Pepys told him he must not omit the names of any friends from the greetings at the end of his letters, which he intended to pass round for all of them to see, Jackson did exactly as asked. He was not going to put a foot or a word wrong.

Once he had left, his uncle fell into gloom, and his first letter to Jackson was a lament. Paul Lorrain, he said, was less willing than he had been. ‘I had rather (you know) beare with things not being done at all, or do them myself where I can (which truly now grows too much for me, especially as to copying) than see them done with reluctancy. Nor is this a small difficulty with me, as knowing too well my having no choice towards the solving it, there being no body but he that knows my business and manner of working, and at the same time qualifyd in every respect for doing it. So that the only true and adequate solution to it is, to knock quite off.’ That was not all: ‘add my having ¾ or more of my whole time to spend without anybody near me, to read or write word for me, or know how to fetch me a book out of my library or put it in its place again when done with; and this, as I grow older, growing less supportable’.²⁰ No doubt Lorrain did want freedom to do his own work – he was preparing for ordination – and Pepys, always a demanding master, was made more so by increasing infirmities. Mary was able to step into the breach; many letters after this are in her hand and in her picturesque spelling.

Pepys’s gloom was tied up with the state of his ulcerated kidney. Early in 1700 he wrote of being ‘unable to bear the stone in a coach’, and by March 1700 he was so ill that Lorrain sent a secret letter to Jackson, warning him how bad things were. The wound of the old stone operation had broken open, and three surgical interventions were necessary before it was more or less successfully stitched up. Pepys had the best surgeon in London, Charles Bernard, and the most fashionable doctor too, John Radcliffe. He showed his usual courage, and against the odds he recovered, after three weeks in bed, and characteristically wrote a detailed account of his symptoms and treatment to Jackson.²¹ In May the household moved to Hewer’s Clapham house. It was comfortable and airy, and Evelyn described it as ‘a very noble, and wonderfully well furnished house… the Offices and Gardens exceedingly well accommodated for pleasure and retirement’; but, as another friend, Henry Hyde, understood, Pepys was not a countryman by inclination. ‘I hope your being thus long at Clapham (for I thinke you were never soe long in the countrey before since you knew the world) will make you relish the pleasure of a garden,’ he wrote, not too hopefully.²²

Mary had been tending Pepys, but now she too fell ill again. She thought of taking herself to Paris for a cure – a little rivalry with Jackson perhaps. We know of her plan through Dr John Shadwell, Pepys’s godson, now the English ambassador’s physician in Paris, who kept up a skittish correspondence with Jackson: Mrs Skinner, Shadwell wrote, was thinking of trying the air of Paris ‘for her dropsy’. In his next letter he said the news from Clapham was good, ‘since it brings no account of the motions of your evil genius this way’; and in July he assured Jackson that ‘The Lady at London is at present so indisposed that she has wholly laid aside her thoughts of crossing the sea, so that there’s one exception the less to the place [Paris].’²³ Clearly there was no love lost between Jackson and Mrs Skinner. Pepys meanwhile was pressing Jackson to buy some Spanish leather, a fan and an illuminated book for her, a commission he carried out carefully: pleasing Mary was a necessary part of pleasing his uncle.²⁴

Although the new century started so painfully for Pepys, it still allowed him his moments of grace and eloquence. ‘“What then,” will you say’ – he was writing to Evelyn – ‘“are you a doing?” Why truely, nothing that will bear nameing, and yet am not (I think) idle; for who can, that has so much (of past and to come) to think on as I have? And thinking, I take it, is working.’ And although he had few books at Clapham and missed his library, his thinking reminded him of his scientific interests, and in September he was sprightly enough to set up his own Newtonian experiment in optics, ‘collecting the Rays of light in a dark Room; I having done it to a degree of pleasure and Ease in its Execution as much exceeds what I have ever seen’.²⁵ The summer was unusually warm and sunny, which meant not only that he could collect rays of sunlight indoors but also make expeditions into the country, to Windsor, Hampton Court, Richmond and as far as Epsom – with what pleasure and what memories of his service to two kings, and further back to his childhood visits to Durdans, can be imagined.²⁶

In Buckingham Street Lorrain was recataloguing the library, and Mary was getting the house ready for his return. Pepys was impatient to be back among his books but was persuaded to remain at Clapham until the late autumn. Another thought of the past came to him, and he wrote to Jackson, now in Cadiz, suggesting he should visit ‘my once Royal Mistriss our Queen Dowager’ in Lisbon: Catherine of Braganza had returned to her native country, and Pepys, attached to his memories of a queen he had found modest and innocent, wished to present his ‘profoundest duty’.²⁷ After this came more sorrow, with the death of James Houblon, ‘one of the longest as well as most approved friends till now left mee in the world’; Sarah had died earlier, and James had been ill for months, but Pepys had hardly expected to outlive them both.²⁸ Nor was he well enough to attend the funeral in the City. Even in his grief Pepys worked on one of his great letters, a disquisition on the place of music in education, ‘a science peculiarly productive of a pleasure that no state of life, publick or private, secular or sacred; no difference of age or season; no temper of mind or condition of health, exempt from present anguish, nor, lastly, distinction of quality, renders either improper, untimely, or unentertaining. Witness the universal gusto we see it followed with, wherever to be found.’ No education should be without music, he believed. Here too he looked back and invoked his old master, Edward Montagu, earl of Sandwich, for whom music had been a daily pleasure, right up ‘to that very hour wherein through a sea of blood and fire in the service of his Prince and country, he exchanged it for that of a State of Harmony more unspeakable and full of glory’. Pepys’s own love of music and profound belief in its importance were woven into memories and attachments, and further into his thoughts about a future state of unspeakable Harmony.²⁹

He had signed off the Memoires with a declaration that did not name God but attributed power and mystery to ‘Something above’ and ‘Incomprehensible’, ‘to which alone be Glory’; and it may be in these formulations of unspeakable Harmony and incomprehensible power that we should look for Pepys’s faith. It was certainly no ordinary or conventional one. Once, when asked to provide a reference, he wrote, ‘what his Religion or Creed is I neither know concerning him, nor ever thought worth enquiring after any other man’s; provided his Conversation be sober and honest’.³⁰ And the motto he adopted in the last years of his life was essentially a humanist one, taken from Cicero, meaning ‘the mind is the man’.³¹ His charitable work for French Protestants fleeing persecution was surely inspired more by dislike of intolerance than zeal for their creed. His early scepticism about religion, his anthropological and aesthetic curiosity about other sects, his lack of interest in doctrine, Christ or the Bible, his indifference to regular church attendance allied to a perfect readiness to conform to the rites practised by his fellow citizens when convenient or expected, all suggest that he stood close to William Petty’s broadly based tolerance: happy to follow the conventional religious practice of his society but reserving the right to think for himself.³² He had many friends who made careers in the Church, but religion was not a topic of his correspondence with them, rather books, manuscripts, libraries, history, handwriting, even tales of second sight. Still, as he aged and saw his friends die one by one, there were more references to prayer, faith and the afterlife in his letters, and Evelyn’s gentle piety, often interwoven with classical references, touched and interested him as the two men prepared for what they both imagined as a voyage. ‘Pray remember what o’clock it is with you and me,’ wrote Pepys, and Evelyn replied that ‘an easy, comfortable passage is that which remains for us to beg of God, and for the rest to sit loose to things below’.³³

Sitting loose did not come easily to Pepys. In January 1701 he wrote to his cousin Matthews in Huntingdon about his nephew Sam Jackson, whom he imagined to be still under Matthews’ guidance: ‘And a very unwelcome surprize it is, to understand from you now that ‘tis otherwise; as suspecting his being guilty of something worse on this Occasion, than (for his sake) you have thought fitt to tell me. Which however I shall at present forbear any further Enquiry after.’³⁴

Throughout the first six months of 1701 he was in Buckingham Street, but so unwell that he could not go out of doors. No doubt his legs were too swollen, and it is likely that continence had become a problem. In his wretchedness he wrote to John Jackson asking him to return, knowing that the journey from Spain was likely to be slow, and in June he himself returned to Clapham. In August he wrote a will, leaving Brampton to Samuel and the rest of his fortune to John. Will Hewer, ‘my most approved and most dear friend’, was his executor, and was to have £500. Apart from an annuity to ‘my old and faithful Servant Jane Penny’ – who must be Jane Edwards, remarried and widowed again – that was all. The £28,007.25.11/4d. owed to Pepys by the state, if paid, should be put into land and divided between his nephews (it never was paid). He urged them not to be disappointed with what they got but to remember that it was more than he or they had been born with. A few days later, John arrived back in England.

The circle at Clapham now consisted of Pepys, Will Hewer, John Jackson and Mary. Pepys longed to see Evelyn, preferably in this world, he joked, and before the winter was over; at Christmas he sent greetings from his three companions to all the Evelyns. There was never anything to tell of Hewer, always his quiet and peaceable self and always mindful of Pepys’s comfort. Mary was having her portrait painted, either by Kneller or his brother Zacharias, and, as well as going for sittings, she acted for Pepys, fetching from Fleet Street one of the boxes wrapped in sacking he had deposited at his banker’s in June: ‘Dld back one of them to Mrs Skinner’ entered the clerk in the ledger on 10 December.³⁵ If John Jackson paid a visit to his brother Sam at Huntingdon, as he might well have done after so long an absence abroad, he must have learnt that Sam was married, and without consulting their uncle. Pepys soon heard of the marriage and sent off an angry letter. In April he wrote to Matthews complaining of the young man’s ‘Folly, Undutifulness & Obstinacy’. ‘As to whom, I protest to you, Sir,’ he went on, ‘that when I reflect upon the Perverseness as well as Stupidity legible in what he writes, I think it were best both for you and me, to ridd our hands of him.’³⁶ But he took no further action as yet.

He knew death could not be far off, but resisted it at every step. He was sixty-nine in February 1702, and it was only his body that was failing him; the mind was still the man, the wits were still sharp, and he continued to set himself new tasks that absorbed and satisfied him. One was the commissioning of a portrait of the mathematician John Wallis to present to the University of Oxford. This kept him in close touch with Kneller, with Wallis and the Royal Society, and with scholarly Oxford, which he jokingly called his aunt, Cambridge being his academic mother. And rather than accepting his separation from his books, he now had his entire library moved from York Buildings to Clapham. It was a sign that he did not expect to return to London; it was also a very big operation, although happily he had thought of how they were to be moved from the start and designed the bookcases to be taken apart easily. The cornices were made to lift off, the central sections divided in two and the bases provided with carrying handles. Hewer prepared a large and splendid wainscotted room for their installation. As well as the bookcases and desk, double-sided pictures were set in the panels of the room, the two globes were installed on pulleys, and Pepys’s model ships were displayed in their glass cases.³⁷ He could feel pretty well at home.

He was reading the first part of Clarendon’s history of the ‘Great Rebellion’, newly published by his friend the second earl, with the pleasure that comes from finding the events of your own life transformed into official history; and he wrote to compliment Henry Hyde and to urge him to speed the publication of the further volumes.³⁸ Compliments came to Pepys too, but he could still make fun of flattery. When young Evelyn’s Latin verses proclaimed there was no need to travel to Rome now that its pleasures could be enjoyed in the Pepys household, where Jackson’s loot was on display, Pepys remarked that Evelyn had ‘long since taught him to make all Mr Pepys’s Geese Swans’. And when the orator of Oxford University eulogized him following his gift of the Wallis portrait, he thanked him for raising ‘a new world of glory to me out of nothing’.³⁹

Two kings, both his juniors, his master James II and his enemy William III, died within six months of one another in 1701 and 1702, and Queen Anne was crowned in April. In June William Nicolson, a scholar with a particular interest in libraries, was called to London to be consecrated bishop of Carlisle by the new queen. He had borrowed books from Pepys earlier, and during his short stay in town he made a point of visiting him in Clapham, ‘in the pleasant House of Mr Hewer, formerly Mr Pepys’s Clerk’.⁴⁰Nicolson was a friend of Hickes and of Edmund Gibson, who went to Clapham with him; Evelyn was also there to meet them, and Nicolson wrote a description of the place and the occasion in his diary:

In the House mighty plenty of China-ware and other Indian Goods, vessels of a sort of past[e]; harden’d into a Substance like polish’d Marble. Pictures in full pains of wainscot; wch (by haveing one moveable, painted on both sides) admits of three several Representations of the whole Room. Models of the Royal Sovereign & other Men of War, made by the most famous Master-Builders; very curious and exact, in glass Cases. Mr Pepys’s Library in 9 Classes [?Cases], finely gilded and sash-glass’d; so deep as to carry two Rows… of Books on each footing. A pair of Globes hung up, by pullies. The Books so well order’d that his Footman (after looking the Catalogue) could lay his finger on any of em blindfold. /Misscellanies of paintings, cutts, pamphlets, &c in large & lesser Volumes… A contracted Copy of Verrio’s Draught of King Ja. the II. and the blew-coats at Christ-Church Hospital (wth the Directors and Governours of the place, Lord Mayor & Aldermen &c) suppos’d to be one of the best Representations of the various Habits of the Times, postures, &c, that is an where extant…

Nicolson also admired the ‘Gardens, Walks and Bowling-Green, Ponds, &c answerable to the House’, and the hedges of different heights and woods, bay, yew, holly and hornbeam; and he noted that Evelyn ‘own’d himself the causer of a deal of Luxury in these matters’.⁴¹

In July Mary had to go to Lincolnshire, where her mother was dying. Mary and her sister Frances, Lady Buck, were joint executrices of Mrs Skinner’s will, chosen as the ‘beloved daughters’, and shared the largest part of their mother’s estate; it cannot have amounted to much.⁴² Pepys was soon making inquiries of a legal acquaintance about Mary’s duties and whether one executor could proceed without another.⁴³ Mrs Skinner left him ‘two broad pieces of gold to buy him a ring’, which was more than went to some of her children; her daughter Elizabeth, working as a servant, got £100 on condition she did not marry a certain Thomas Byutt.⁴⁴ Parents found it irresistible to try to control their children after death, and both Mrs Skinner and Pepys used their wills as a means of maintaining their power.

He reached his seventieth birthday in February 1703. By now his bad kidney had reduced his strength to its lowest ebb yet: he was frail, emaciated and in pain. Urinary infections are acutely painful, and there was no effective treatment, where today antibiotics or surgical removal of one kidney might have saved him. Mary was dealing with the household finances, paying out money from her account at Hoare’s. She confided her worries about Pepys to a cousin, Mary Ballard, who wrote to him saying that ‘Madam Skynner’ thought he did not take care of his health as his condition required and offering to prepare for him some of the ‘odd things which I now and then used to make which were not only healthfull but pleasing to your stomack’, such as jelly broth, hartshorn jelly, sego’.⁴⁵The gesture was kindly meant, but he was hardly able to eat. His last-known letter was written on behalf of his brother-in-law, a plea for a pension for St Michel to the commander-in-chief of the Fleet. It was, he said, the only request he had made since retiring from the navy.⁴⁶

In March he sent a message to Dr Hickes, who knew the Clapham household from earlier visits – one in the summer of 1700 – and he agreed to come when Pepys felt he was approaching his end. In April he was told he had no hope of recovery, after which John Jackson composed a careful letter to Hewer, asking him to assure Pepys that his nephew counted on nothing from him: its intentions were probably the opposite of its assertions, and he was in any case sure of Pepys’s affection.⁴⁷ For Pepys, there was just enough time and energy left for a last dramatic stroke. Once he heard he could not recover, he set about a complete revision of his will, dictating two enormous codicils on successive days, 12 and 13 May. In the first he took away the Brampton estates from his nephew Sam, allowing him no more than an annuity of £40 a year. Brampton went to John with the major part of the estate.

He was also given the library in trust, charged with joint responsibility with Hewer for finding the best means for preserving it ‘in one body, undivided unsold and Secure against all manner of deminution damages and embesselments; and finally disposed… for the benefit of posterity’. Two further sets of instructions specified what they were to do. All his books were to go to ‘one of our Universities’, and rather Cambridge than Oxford; to a library, preferably that of Magdalene, with Trinity as a fall-back; and the collection must be kept entire and separate, in a room to be chosen by Jackson in the new building, no one allowed to remove any books except the master, and he only as far as his lodge. He proposed a system of annual visitation by Trinity to check that his instructions were being obeyed in perpetuity, giving them the right to the library if they found any infringement by Magdalene. Everything about his instructions indicates that Pepys had prepared them with the greatest care and must have thought and planned the disposal of his library over a considerable period before it made its last-minute appearance in his will. They are also so idiosyncratic that he may have modelled the conditions on those of another Cambridge college library, that of Matthew Parker at Corpus Christi, which had been similarly protected to good effect.⁴⁸

This was not the only striking last-minute addition. Mary, not so much as mentioned in the earlier will, makes her first appearance in the 12 May codicil. ‘Whereas I hold myself obliged on this occasion to leave behind me the most full and lasting acknowledgment of my esteem respect and gratitude to the Excellent Lady Mrs Mary Skyner for the many important Effects of her Steddy friendship and Assistances during the whole course of my life, within the last thirty three years; I doe give and devise unto the said Mrs Mary Skyner One Annuity or yearly payment of Two hundred pounds of Lawfull money of England for and during the terme of her natural Life.’ That he should want to provide for her and to acknowledge that she had been an intimate part of his life for so long is understandable: but why only at this very last moment? The best explanation may be that he had intended some discreet private arrangement, worked out and agreed with his executor, Will Hewer; and that either he himself realized this was not good enough, or that Will tactfully suggested it would be wiser to put things in writing. Mary’s family and friends may have made representations, but more likely Mary herself inquired and then insisted on her right to be acknowledged and provided for. If she did, you can only admire her spirit in the face of Pepys’s persistent tendency to exclude women from the masculine world of the written word. However it came about, it was a just decision, allowing her some dignity, ensuring her a comfortable independence when she should lose her home with him and informing posterity of the place she had filled at his side.

As the end approached, Pepys began to think of more he could do for Mary. He may have been growing light-headed; she may have been putting on pressure. There is a lot of curious behaviour round deathbeds when there is money in question, as Pepys knew from his favourite playwright Ben Jonson. Another codicil assigned £5,000 of the £28,000 owed him by the government to Mary, and a verbal request, carefully noted down, stated his wish to give £50 of plate each to ‘Mrs Skynner, Mr Hewer, and J.J.’, as well as ‘Pictures and Goods to Mrs Skynner’.⁴⁹ Whatever the final value of the estate that went to John Jackson, it was enough to ensure that he never had to work, although not enough to make Evelyn accept his proposal of marriage to his granddaughter. Family friendship or no, Evelyn turned him down on financial grounds.⁵⁰

On 14 May 1703 Evelyn, himself recovering from a broken leg, called to see Pepys and found him ‘[1] anguishing with small hope of recovery which much affected me’. The weather, he noted, was lovely, fair and temperate, the summer conditions Pepys had always delighted in. The two friends did not meet again, and it was left to John Jackson to give an account of his uncle’s last days.⁵¹ He did well. On Monday, 24 May, Dr Hickes arrived and found Pepys lying on a couch. He prayed by him and then, taking his hand and finding his pulse very weak, told him he should simply say, ‘Come Lord Jesus, Come quickly.’ Pepys, practical to the last, asked him to pray to God to shorten his misery. That evening he fell into convulsions, trembling and breathing with difficulty. At four in the morning he showed more signs of distress, and asked for the curtains and windows to be opened; no doubt Pepys wanted to see the light of dawn and feel the summer air. ‘Whilst lying on the couch he beckoned me to him, – took me by the hand, – the same by Mrs Sk, and speaking to me (as well as he could) said, “Be good friends; I do desire it of you”; in conclusion of which I offered to kiss his cheek; he turned his mouth and pressed my lips with an extraordinary affection. /Dr Hicks coming, Mr Hewer told him; upon which he ordred himselfe to be raised up in his bed, and the Doctor coming-in performed the Office for the Sick, and gave him the Absolution, laying his hand on his head. The Service done, U[ncle] said, “God be gracious to me”; blessed the Dean and all of us, and prayed to God to reward us all, and M.S. then appearing, said, “And thee in particular, my dear child.”’

During the next hours Pepys thanked all his servants and kissed some of them; and as night fell again, ‘M.S. and I stole up to his bed to see him and shook him by the hand, he not discerning who it was. Dr Shadwell coming, was stoln in to feel his pulse, which [was] quite gone. /About 1 on Wednesday morning, Paris crossed the room. U[ncle] called him and ask for me, where I was. “In bed; shall I call him?” “No.” By and by again asked for me. “Shall I call him?” “Yes.” He did so, and I came and found him lying on the bed ratling in the throat and breathing very hard.’ He had taken no nourishment for two days, and he died, according to his own reliable watch, at 3.47. The sun was about to rise in the summer sky.