PART ONE
He was born in London, above the shop, just off Fleet Street, in Salisbury Court, where his father John Pepys ran a tailoring business, one of many serving the lawyers living in the area. The house backed on to the parish church of St Bride’s, where all the babies of the family were christened and two were already buried in the churchyard; when he was a man, Pepys still kept the thought in his mind of ‘my young brothers and sisters’ laid in the ground outside the house of his youth.1 Salisbury Court was an open space surrounded by a mixture of small houses like John Pepys’s and large ones, once the abodes of bishops and ambassadors, with gardens; it was entered through narrow lanes, one from Fleet Street opposite Shoe Lane, another in the south-west corner leading into Water Lane and so down to the Thames and river steps fifty yards below.2 The south-facing slope above the river was a good place to live; people had been settled here since Roman times, and when Pepys was born in 1633 a Christian church had stood on the spot for at least five hundred years.3 A block to the east was the Fleet River, with the pink brick crenellated walls of Bridewell rising beside it; it had been built as a palace by King Henry VIII and deteriorated into a prison for vagrants, homeless children and street women, known to the locals as ‘Bridewell Birds’. A footbridge spanned the Fleet between Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill, and from St Bride’s you could look across its deep valley – much deeper then than it is today – with houses crammed up both sides in a maze of courts and alleys, to old St Paul’s rising on its hill above the City.
This was the western edge of the City, and Pepys’s first playground. The City was proud of being the most populous in the world; it had something like 130,000 inhabitants, and in the whole country there were only about five million.4 If you went west from Salisbury Court along Fleet Street, you came to the gardens of the Temple lawyers, with their groves of trees, formal beds and walks, and further west along the Strand you were out of the City, on the way to Whitehall and Westminster. To the east was the only bridge – London Bridge, almost as old as St Bride’s Church, with its nineteen arches and its spikes on which traitors’ heads were stuck – and then the Tower. The river, without embankments, was very wide, with a sloping shore at low tide, a place for children to explore; and the great houses of the aristocracy were strung along the riverside, each with its own Watergate. The best way to get about fast in London was by boat.
The Pepys house centred round the shop and cutting room, with their shelves, stools and drawers, cutting board and looking-glass. At the back the kitchen opened into a yard, and in the cellar were the washing tubs and coal hole, with a lock-up into which troublesome children or maids might be put for punishment. The stairs to the living quarters went up at the back. Timber-framed, tall and narrow, with a jetty sticking out over the street at the front, set tight against its neighbours, with a garret under the steeply pitched roof: this was the pattern of ordinary London houses. On the first floor the parlour doubled as dining room. Above there were two bedrooms, each with a small closet or study opening off it, and high beds with red or purple curtains. In one of these Pepys was born and spent his first weeks. Older children, maids and apprentices slept on the third floor – Pepys mentions ‘the little chamber, three storeys high’ – or in the garret, or in trundle beds, kept in most of the rooms, including the shop and the parlour; sometimes they bedded down in the kitchen for warmth.5
In one of the bedrooms was a virginals, the neat, box-like harpsichord of the period. John Pepys was musical: he played the bass viol, and his eldest daughter, six-year-old Mary, could have started at the keyboard by the time Sam was born. Singing and musical instruments – viol, violin, lute, virginals, flageolet (a recorder of sorts) – were an essential part of family life, and music became the child’s passion.6 Music was not only in the family but literally in the air for many months during the first year of Sam’s life. It came from one of the large houses in Salisbury Court, in which a young and ambitious lawyer, Bulstrode Whitelocke, was preparing a masque to be performed before King Charles and his queen. Whitelocke and Edward Hyde, together representing the Middle Temple, had joined with members of the other three Inns of Court in a plan to celebrate Candlemas in a great masque to be produced before the Court at Whitehall, and Whitelocke, who had some skill as a composer, was in charge of the music. He assembled a large group of singers, including some from the Queen’s Chapel, and ‘caused them all to meet in practise at his house in Salisbury Court where he… had sometimes 40 lutes, besides other instruments and voices, in consort together’. The noise must have been terrific. On the day of the performance, 2 February 1634, three weeks before Pepys’s first birthday, the masquers, in costumes of silver, crimson and blue, some riding plumed horses draped in cloth of silver, some carrying flaming torches, processed along Holborn and Chancery Lane, through Temple Bar to Charing Cross and so to the Banqueting House. Inigo Jones was the designer, and the poet Thomas Carew wrote the words.7 The event was such a success that Queen Henrietta Maria asked for a repeat performance at the Merchant Taylors’ Hall in the City. This was done, and gave ‘great contentment to their Majesties and no less to the Citizens, especially the younger sort of them’.8 It may be too much to imagine the infant Pepys held up to enjoy the festivities among the many Londoners agog at the sound of the music and the brilliant show of the young lawyers; but music, theatre, celebration, processions, ritual and fine clothes delighted him throughout his life.
A tailor’s family was likely to be well dressed. There was a looking-glass upstairs, in which the children could look at themselves in imitation of the customers below and make themselves fine with scraps of cloth. But clothes, fine or plain, were hard to keep clean in London. Every household burnt coal brought from Newcastle by sea in its fireplaces and cooking ranges. So did the brewers and dyers, the brick-makers up the Tottenham Court Road, the ubiquitous soap and salt boilers. The smoke from their chimneys made the air dark, covering every surface with sooty grime. There were days when a cloud of smoke half a mile high and twenty miles wide could be seen over the city from the Epsom Downs. Londoners spat black.9 Wall hangings, pictures and clothes turned yellow and brown like leaves in autumn, and winter undervests, sewn on for the season against the cold, were the colour of mud by the time spring arrived. Hair was expected to look after itself; John Evelyn made a special note in his diary in August 1653 that he was going to experiment with an ‘annual hair wash’. But every house, every family enjoyed its own smell, to which father, mother, children, apprentices, maids and pets all contributed, a rich brew of hair, bodies, sweat and other emissions, bedclothes, cooking, whatever food was lying about, whatever dirty linen had been piled up for the monthly wash, whatever chamber pots were waiting to be emptied into yard or street. Home meant the familiar reek which everyone breathed. The smell of the house might strike a new maid as alien, but she would quickly become part of the atmosphere herself. When Pepys wrote of his ‘family’, meaning not blood relations but everyone who lived in his household – the Latin word familia has this sense – we understand that, as a group sharing the same rooms, they also comfortably shared the same smell.
His mother was a connoisseur of dirty linen, having worked as a washmaid in a grand household before her marriage. It was not a bad preparation for eleven children in fourteen years; the babies followed one another so fast that she was always either nursing or expecting one, and each made its contribution to the monthly washing day. Samuel was her fifth, hardly more than a year after John. Paulina and Esther, who preceded him, were both dead before he was born, but by the time he was five there would be four more, Thomas, Sarah, Jacob and Robert, of whom only Tom would live to grow up. God’s system was inefficient and depressing. A doctor writing in 1636 regretted that humans did not reproduce like trees, without the ‘trivial and vulgar way of coition’.10 This was Sir Thomas Browne. He might have added a further expression of regret at the wearing out of so much health and happiness, but he failed to, and instead overcame his distaste at the triviality of the act often enough to father twelve children on his wife. Pepys’s mother must have been always busy, tired, distracted or grieving for the deaths of his brothers and sisters when he was a child: soon worn out, physically and emotionally.
Pepys’s birthday was on 23 February and his baptism by the vicar of St Bride’s, James Palmer, is recorded on 3 March 1632/3, ‘Samuell sonn to John Peapis wyef Margaret’.11 The same year, in October, the queen gave birth across town at St James’s Palace to her second son, James. After his christening, he was given the title of duke of York. He had a staff of officials paid to rock his cradle; and, unthinkable as it would have seemed then, he was destined to become one of Sam Pepys’s close associates. Another boy who grew up to influence Sam’s life, Anthony Ashley Cooper, was also living off Fleet Street, in Three Cranes Court, from 1631 to 1635.12 Sam’s brother Tom was born in the summer of 1634, making a trio of little Pepys boys, John, Sam and Tom, and a sister Sarah the following summer. Other tailoring families in the district produced playmates. There were the Cumberlands, also in Salisbury Court, with three boys, Richard and his younger brothers William and John; Richard would go to school with Pepys later, and to college, and become a bishop. Another tailor, Russell, in St Bride’s Churchyard, was landlord to a bachelor scholar, poet and schoolmaster, John Milton, who had his eight-year-old nephew Johnny living with him when Pepys was six. Here was an outstanding and conveniently placed teacher; but there is no sign that the tailor’s sons took any lessons with him.13
Who did teach the little Pepys children? The learned and leisured John Evelyn coached his eldest son into reading and writing at the age of two, but John Pepys, who had left his native Cambridgeshire for London at fourteen to be apprenticed, was only just literate himself, and if his wife could write at all she left no trace of it. Manuals for parents of the period recommended they should start their children’s education at home by playing with them at mealtimes or when sitting by the fire before they started school; but John and Margaret Pepys were unlikely readers of manuals.14 The household must have been in a perpetual scramble between babies and apprentices, and what energy there was to spare was for music-making. Sam put nothing on record about early lessons. Instead he recalled boys’ games in the backyard; being carried by one of his father’s workers into one of the Temple Halls, to see the law students gambling with dice at Christmas; and street activities such as ‘beating the bounds’, when the children of the parish went in procession, carrying broomsticks and shepherded by the constable and churchwarden, had water poured over them from the windows of their neighbours and were playfully beaten before being rewarded with bread and cheese and a drink – the whole ancient ritual intended to fix the limits of their own parish in their memories.15
Contemporary books of manners for children give some idea of what was expected of them at home. There was advice on how to set the table for family dinner, with trenchers (wooden plates), napkins, salt and bread; glasses should be placed well away from the edge of the table to avoid knocking them off. Children should not crumble their bread into ‘mammocks’ but cut it up properly; salt was taken with the knife, and they should not overload their spoons with ‘pottage’, which might spill on the cloth. A polite child would volunteer to remove and fold up the cloth after the meal, and bring a jug of water, basin and towel for parents to wash their hands.16 Since there was no dining room in the Pepys household, only a folding table in the parlour, meals can rarely have risen to such elegance; but it was something to which Sam paid attention later in life, when he could hardly bring himself to eat food served by a woman with greasy hands, and was sharp with his wife about the presentation of dinner in his own house. Children were also told to keep their clothes in decent order at all times:
Let not thy privy members be
Layd open to be view’d
It is most shamefull and abhord,
Detestable and rude.
Four adjectives seem a lot for one small privy member, but children had to be given a sense of its sinfulness.
When he was six, in 1639, his closest brother, seven-year-old John, fell ill and died.17 Two years later a second John was born, never much liked by Sam, perhaps because he missed the first so much; but he had a strong sense of duty towards his siblings. He was now top of the hierarchy, as the eldest boy in the family. Tom, who was closest to him, was not clever; he learnt to write but not much better than his father, and he struggled with a speech impediment; Sam was always protective towards him.18 Mary, at twelve, was almost grown up, one of the solid loving presences in his world; but Mary failed to grow up. When she was thirteen, at Christmas 1640, a year after John’s death, she sickened and died. The next year Sarah, who had reached five, followed her to the grave; so did the family maid Barbara. Sam was left with only Tom, besides the two new babies, Paulina, or Pall the second, born in October 1640, just before Mary’s death, and John the second.
Sam must have wondered when his turn was coming, the more so since his own health was not good. Looking back from middle age, he wrote that he could not remember any period of his early life without pain. He meant the pain of the stone in his kidneys. The condition was so bad that he often passed blood – as he put it, made ‘bloody water upon any extraordinary motion’.19 The ebullient Pepys of the Diary sorts oddly with the pain-racked childhood. It seems to have taught him physical stoicism – there were no painkillers – and given him his determination to seize and enjoy everything he could while life lasted. You see it again later, in his elated response to the plague year when, with death all around, he grabbed at whatever there was to enjoy. Andrew Marvell’s lines about lovers tearing their
… Pleasures with rough strife,
Thorough the Iron gates of Life
fit this Pepys, with his greed for life’s pleasures sharpened by pain and fear.
His mother suffered from the stone too; whether this made her more or less anxious, more or less sympathetic to him, we don’t know, but he was sent away from time to time, with Tom to keep him company, for the good of their health, into the fresh air outside London. An aunt Ellen, his mother’s sister, was working in Newington Green as a servant, and a nurse was found for the boys in the nearby hamlet of Kingsland, surrounded by open fields. He remembered her as Goody Lawrence, and she did well by him, for he was boarded out with her for several summers. Again, he remembered the physical activities, the pleasure of playing with his bow and arrows in the fields around Hackney.20 Other memories were of his father taking the family for jaunts to the King’s Head in rural Islington, where they were served with ‘cakes and ale’.21
Cakes and ale might keep pain at bay for half an hour. The other thing he noticed about his body was that it seemed hotter than other people’s. He claimed quite seriously that it was usually only just below fever point. Whether he was right about this or not, he felt it was something that marked him out. Families may elect one of their children on whom their hopes are placed, traditionally the eldest son; or one of the children may elect himself, sometimes against the odds. Charles Dickens, who saw his parents prefer his sister while they consigned him to the blacking factory, elected himself in this way, worked with superhuman energy to prove his claim and rose to greatness, as well as taking over lifelong responsibility for his parents and siblings. The John Pepyses, like the John Dickenses, had little standing in the world; one of the childhood memories of which Sam was ashamed was of being sent round to deliver clothes to his father’s high and mighty customers. It may have felt like a mini-version of the blacking factory to a boy eager to achieve something, and knowing himself capable.22 Luckily for him, his abilities were noticed. John Pepys had relatives who were in a position to give a helping hand to this obstinately surviving and clever son.
Among these relatives was cousin John Pepys from Norfolk, prosperous and affable, with a wife and three children of his own, a house in Salisbury Court and another large country place at Ashtead in Surrey. This other John Pepys had done very well indeed. He had served the greatest lawyer and legal writer of the age, Sir Edward Coke, as confidential secretary and man of business. In his time Coke defied King James I and Charles I, was imprisoned in the Tower and had his papers seized by the crown; he was a hero to those who believed in common law and a strong parliament for his insistence that ‘the King is under God and the law’.23 At Coke’s death in 1634 John Pepys of Norfolk was one of his executors, and he went on to work for Coke’s son Robert. Sir Robert Coke was the husband of Lady Theophila Berkeley, and they lived splendidly in a country house belonging to her family, Durdans, near Epsom. It was at Durdans that Sam Pepys, carried off to Surrey by John Pepys and his wife Anne, was co-opted by the Cokes to play a part in a private production of Beaumont and Fletcher’s romantic comedy Philaster, or Love Lies α-Bleeding. He was asked to take a leading role, as Arethusa. The daughter of a usurper, Arethusa is loved by the rightful heir, Philaster, but her father intends her for another. Philaster places his page Bellario in her service – but Bellario is really a woman, and after many turns of plot she is left single while Philaster and Arethusa marry. The play was a wonderful concoction of love, fine words, confusion and cross-dressing. ‘What a ridiculous thing it would have been for me to have acted a beautiful woman,’ wrote Pepys in 1668.24 But what an adventure for a small boy – he can’t have been more than nine – to find himself singled out, made much of, invited to show off in a star part in a great house. He learnt his part so well that he could still remember almost every word twenty-five years later.
Durdans impressed itself on him and set him a standard, with its formal gardens, its fountain and statues, its terraces and bosky wood rising towards the Downs, its long gallery, newly built by the Cokes in classical style as an addition to the Jacobean mansion, its comfortable and charming rooms that included a fine, well-stocked library: a place to remember, ‘where I have been very merry when I was a little boy’ and again, ‘where I have seen so much mirth’.25 As well as delighting in gardens and architecture, Lady Theophila read French, Italian, Latin and Greek; she had been educated with Princess Elizabeth and a bridesmaid at her wedding to Frederick, king of Bohemia. Durdans introduced Sam into a world of splendour and civilized enjoyment. It gave him confidence too, to be chosen, first by his Pepys uncle and then by Sir Robert and Lady Theophila, for his charm and his talents. He could read and master a part, he felt he was full of promise; he saw for the first time that he might aspire to something more than the cutting room in Salisbury Court. He made several visits to Surrey before everybody’s lives – and Philaster too – were disrupted by the outbreak of the civil war in 1642; and he always remembered Ashtead as ‘my old place of pleasure’.26
The other cousins who were to play a crucial part in shaping his life were based in East Anglia. Sam’s Cambridgeshire grandfather had a sister, Paulina Pepys, who was orphaned young and married late, at thirty-seven – late but splendidly. Considering that she was then already middle aged, with a fortune of no more than £200, her marriage to Sir Sidney Montagu, distinguished younger son of an aristocratic and gifted family, suggests she was an outstanding woman and had wisely waited for the right husband. He was educated at Cambridge and the Middle Temple and had served as an MP in the time of Queen Elizabeth; one brother was an earl, another a bishop. Paulina’s marriage in 1618 made her cousin to a score of grandees. Her glory was acknowledged in Salisbury Court, where two of Sam’s sisters were named for her. A daughter and a son were born to the Montagus, but at three the boy, playing beside the moat, fell into the water and was drowned. His grieving parents had to take consolation in the birth of a third and last child, another boy, Edward, in 1625. With little Edward they moved to Hinchingbrooke, a great house outside Huntingdon.
Hinchingbrooke had been an abbey until King Henry evicted the holy ladies and sold it to Sir Richard Cromwell; the Cromwells rebuilt it, and James I stayed there more than once and even considered buying it for himself. Sir Sidney paid £3,000 for it, and there Edward grew up, knowing the estate would be his one day, and went to the grammar school along the road in Huntingdon where their neighbour Oliver Cromwell had been a pupil. A cousin of his mother lived in his own modest farmhouse at Brampton, two miles from Hinchingbrooke, and worked as a bailiff for the Montagus. He was Robert Pepys, elder brother of Sam’s father, and this was the family connection that in due course brought Sam to the grammar school at Huntingdon, to lodge at Brampton and to be welcome at Hinchingbrooke, not as an equal to be sure, but as a cousin who could be useful and might deserve some help on his way.27
Edward Montagu was put down for the Middle Temple when he was ten and Sam was three. But nothing went according to plan. His mother, Paulina, died when he was twelve. His father withdrew into melancholy, and by the time he was seventeen the country was at war. Instead of becoming a law student, Edward found himself in command of a regiment. Sir Sidney would not turn against the King, but Edward was a passionate parliamentarian, like his sister’s husband, Sir Gilbert Pickering; both were admirers and personal friends of Cromwell. In the excitement and impending danger of war Edward fell in love and decided to marry. He and his bride were both seventeen. Jemima was the daughter of a rich Northamptonshire MP and parliamentarian, John Crew, and the womanly virtues admired in her father’s family can be judged from the names of her grandmother and aunts, Temperance, Patience, Prudence and Silence.28 Jemima’s personal virtues included a warm heart, good humour and a straightforward disposition, some of which can be made out in an early miniature of her, which shows a tip-tilted nose and open, friendly face. She and Edward were married at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on 7 November 1642. Five days later King Charles’s nephew, Prince Rupert, sacked Brentford and the people of London braced themselves to defend Turnham Green, Westminster and the City against the forces of the King. Edward Montagu’s career was set on course as a fighting man.
Pepys’s early life has to be explained in terms of families but it has also to be set against the political turmoil of the years leading up to the civil war. As a London boy, he saw in the streets the effects of debates he could not yet understand, played out with passion, cruelty, violence and reversals of fortune to equal anything in the theatre. ‘The war was begun in our streets before the King or the Parliament had any armies,’ wrote one wise observer, and Sam had the chance to see this in action, the propaganda fixed on the City walls, the rioting apprentices and sailors, attacks on suspected Roman Catholics, crowds surging to welcome their heroes and threaten their enemies, or assembling to watch the executions of detested figures.29
In November 1640, for example, when he was seven, two men without ears rode into London at Charing Cross with branches of rosemary in their hands, escorted by crowds, ‘every man on horseback or on foot having bays and rosemary in their hats and hands, and the people on either side of the street strewing the way as they passed with herbs and such other greens as the season afforded, and expressing great joy for their return’.30 This extraordinary piece of street drama was for William Prynne and Henry Burton, a lawyer and a preacher, whose ears had been cut off publicly in Palace Yard, Westminster, four years earlier, before another large and sympathetic crowd. They had been punished – Prynne was also branded and sentenced to life imprisonment – for offending the king and Archbishop Laud. Now they were released by the power of the House of Commons. A week later there was a second triumphal return, with trumpets playing at the windows for Dr Bastwick, their fellow martyr to freedom of conscience and speech. Early the next year the king’s two most hated servants, Laud and the earl of Strafford, were taken to the Tower. City mobs agitated for Strafford’s execution, collected signatures demanding his death and posted up in the street the names of those MPs who opposed it. Shops were shut while a large and well-organized group of armed citizens accompanied the MPs who went to the king to urge him to sign the Bill of Attainder that would allow Strafford to be beheaded.31 The crowd that watched the execution in May 1641 included many soberly dressed women; there was more enthusiasm for this than for the wedding of two royal children, nine-year-old Princess Mary to the twelve-year-old Prince of Orange, which had taken place a few days before the execution.32
The two passions fuelling parliament and people were religious fervour and the fear that the king, egged on by his Catholic wife, was aiming to become an absolute ruler. The religious rollercoaster of the previous century, when successive Tudor monarchs first overthrew the Catholic Church, set up Protestantism, restored Catholicism and then settled into uneasy compromise under Elizabeth, had left a legacy of fierce hatred of the Catholics and a burgeoning of Protestant sects. The movement came to be called puritanism, and the puritans, disliking the established Church with its bishops and tithes that bore harshly on the poor, became the allies of the political opponents of the king. Margaret Pepys, like a great many of her neighbours, seems to have veered towards puritanism, although she still attended St Bride’s church and had her own pew.33 Her boys grew accustomed to hearing puritan preachers in the street. In 1640 a local leather-seller called Praisegod Barebones set up his Baptist congregation right outside, in Fleet Street. Baptist ministers saw no need for church buildings, supported themselves by working at other jobs and welcomed women as preachers; and more Baptist congregations were begun in other parts of town.34 The City apprentices who gathered in Westminster in the winter of 1641 shouted ‘No Bishops’; there was some fighting, and in the days after Christmas the same boys blocked the river stairs to prevent the bishops newly appointed by the king from taking their seats in the House of Lords, and went on to attack them in their coaches. When the bishops protested, parliament found grounds for impeaching them and sent them to prison, at which the apprentices rang the City churchbells joyfully and made bonfires in the streets. The king then moved to impeach his chief enemies in parliament.
Pepys was quite old enough to be on the streets when on 4 January 1642 the king pursued the five MPs he was trying to arrest from the House of Commons into the City. He was mobbed by huge numbers of tradesmen, apprentices and seamen, all shouting ‘privilege of Parliament, privilege of Parliament’ – a difficult mouthful for a mob, but they made it sound frightening. Although the king was not harmed, he was thoroughly scared. This was a spectacular moment in English history, and a week later Charles left London with his family. He was not seen there again until his execution in Whitehall, seven years later, when an approving Pepys was by his own account standing in the crowd.
On the day after the king left, the five MPs he had threatened made a triumphal journey on the Thames from the City to Westminster, escorted by a flotilla of beribboned boats loaded with cheering and waving Londoners, while citizen soldiers marched along the Strand with drums and flags to meet them as they came ashore. These soldiers, known as the trained bands, were ordinary townsmen organized into fighting groups, their effectiveness depending more on enthusiasm than discipline. The next big street show was the execution in late January of two Catholic priests in front of an approving crowd. In March parliament began to raise its own army, and in May the City’s regiments were reviewed on Finsbury Fields in front of the assembled MPs. In June Londoners were asked for money by parliament and they responded generously, even though times were hard for tradesmen in the absence of the court. John Pepys’s lawyer customers had fewer clients and less to spend; and the prospect of civil war promised worse to come, as their one-time neighbour, lawyer Whitelocke, now in parliament, warned, saying the country was ‘at the pit’s brink, ready to plunge ourselves into an ocean of troubles and miseries… What the issue of it will be no man alive can tell. Probably few of us now here may live to see the end of it.’35 In July the royalist Mayor Gurney was impeached in parliament and sent to the Tower, where he remained almost until his death five years later. A puritan was appointed as mayor in his place. Milton called the City ‘the mansion house of liberty’, and as such it had to prepare to defend itself against the gathering forces of the king, who raised his standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642.
This was the official start of the civil war. It was brought about essentially by the king’s refusal to accept the limitations parliament was determined to set upon his power, and by parliament’s refusal to accept his supremacy. The war split the nation, dividing families, cities, counties and social classes as well as the great bodies and institutions, the navy, the universities, the legal and medical professions; and the religious rift between those who held to the established Church of England and those who rejected it sharpened the bitterness of the fight. Within seven years the country would rid itself of king, lords and bishops; and though these reforms were reversed, it was never again ruled for any length of time without the cooperation of the elected House of Commons. From the English revolution came much of the inspiration for both the American and the French revolutions of the next century. The intellectual revolution that accompanied the war was as important as the war itself, so that ‘it is difficult for us to conceive how men thought before it was made’.36 Both the political and intellectual aspects of the revolution were to have a profound effect upon Pepys.
Meanwhile parliament ordered the digging of trenches and building of ramparts and forts to close all the main roads into London. Islington, the fields round St Pancras Church, Mile End, Rotherhithe and Wapping were the sites of some of the twenty-four forts. A huge workforce was needed. It was found among the people of the City and the suburbs, women and children included; Sam and Tom Pepys may well have taken part. When announcements were made in the churches, citizens turned out with ‘baskets, spades and such like instruments, for digging of trenches and casting up of breast-works from one fort to another’. More than 20,000 people were said to have worked on the defences, a sixth of the population. They were directed by sailors and officers of the trained bands, and their effectiveness was observed with surprise and respect by the Venetian ambassador among others. John Evelyn, a supporter of the king, also came to view the ‘so much celebrated line of communication’.37 The work was in full swing in the autumn of 1642, the season of Edward Montagu’s marriage to Jemima Crew in Westminster and of Prince Rupert’s sacking of Brentford, which inspired John Milton to write his sonnet ‘When the assault was intended to the city’. It was addressed to the expected royalist invaders, ‘Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms’, and suggested they would be well advised to spare a poet.
Milton’s plea proved unnecessary. The royalists were kept from London. They were tired after a long march, and short of supplies, and their nerve failed. The earl of Essex, with 24,000 of the trained bands, held Turnham Green for parliament. The London troops had good supplies, including the baskets of food brought to them by their wives and sweethearts. The success of the London trained bands was decisive, and the royalists never threatened the capital again. But the fear remained that Rupert would return and sack the City, and the work on the defences continued until the following summer of 1643.38
These were the first ten years of Pepys’s life. They brought him bodily pain and the loss of his dearest playmates. Flesh, he learnt, was vulnerable as well as shameful, but also capable of taking intense pleasure: in music, in running about the streets, in playing with bows and arrows, in country trips and in cakes and ale. Child of a washmaid and a tailor, he found himself the exceptional, elected son and as such was given glimpses of a way of life other than the constricted one in the house off Fleet Street. This other life was luxurious, artistic and seductive. At Durdans he not only took part in acting, he delighted in the gardens and walked in the woods with a woman who gave him his ‘first sentiments of love and pleasure in a woman’s company, discourse and taking her by the hand’. Her name was Mrs Hely, and the impression she made on him was so strong that he remembered and wrote it down when he was thirty.39 So the private Samuel Pepys began to develop and yearn.
At the same time he was a London boy through and through, eyes alert for every detail of a street scene that offered constant excitement, and quick-witted enough to be sent on awkward errands about town. For instance, while he was still a ‘little boy’, his mother dispatched him for word of his father, who had gone to Holland and left them without news. He had to go a long way, across the river to Horsley-down in Bermondsey, to get information out of the men at St Saviour’s Dock where the ships came in. Whatever his father was doing abroad, he turned up again safely and went on quietly with his tailoring. He may have been trying to do some business, although the tailoring trade seems an unlikely reason for travelling in wartime; and it may also be that Edward Montagu, already one of Cromwell’s lieutenants, used his cousin as a courier to the Dutch, since Dutch engineers were brought over early in 1643 to advise on the London fortifications.40 And maybe it was at this time that Montagu first noticed Sam, and thought of doing something for him.
The London defences were still being worked on in the summer of 1643. In May the Venetian ambassador reported, ‘The forts round the city are now completed and admirably designed. They are now beginning the connecting lines. As they wish to complete them speedily and the circuit is most vast, they have gone through the city with drums beating and flags flying, to enlist the men and women volunteers for the work. Although they only give them their bare food, without any pay, there has been an enormous rush of people even of some rank, who believe they are serving God by assisting in the pious work, as they deem it.’41 But with summer also came the plague. There was nothing new about this, it had been making irregular appearances for years: there had been a very bad outbreak in 1625, when one City father noted that ‘three score children died out of one alley’, and there were lesser ones in 1630, 1636 and 1642.42 Fear of the plague would have been a good reason for sending Sam and Tom out of town to Kingsland and Hackney, and may now have contributed to the decision to send Sam away again. This time it was neither to Hackney nor to Surrey, but to somewhere quite strange to him, sixty miles north-east of London: into the misty fens of Huntingdonshire.