Ordinary people travelling from London to Huntingdon went with the carrier, who arrived in London every Wednesday and set off homewards again on Thursday from Cripplegate, the northernmost of the City gates. The journey took two days of steady plod with load and passengers, through Kingsland, Enfield, Ware, Puckeridge, Royston and Caxton, little towns of two or three streets each clustered round a church, along the track of the old Roman road that was to become deeply familiar to Pepys.1 Once out of London the road was liable to disappear beneath mud or water, or simply to lose any definition; and outside London the world was very empty, very quiet and very dark at night. All this he already knew, but he liked travelling, he was always curious, and the carrier was not going to get lost. Sam was on his way to visit his uncle Robert and to attend the Tree Grammar School’ in Huntingdon.
In principle it was free only to the sons of burgesses of the town, but it was the school where Edward Montagu had been a pupil a few years before, and since he was also the local landowner he may have got Sam a free place, or even paid for him.2 Edward was now soldiering and on the move, but Sir Sidney had formally given over Hinchingbrooke to the young couple, and Jemima is likely to have been there in charge of the household.3 The house stands just outside Huntingdon, on a high point looking over a vast expanse of idyllic water-meadows bordering the River Ouse and its tributaries. Sam’s uncle Robert was employed as an agent on the Hinchingbrooke estate and lived only a mile from the big house, across the meadows in the village of Brampton. He had prospered enough to acquire some land, which he leased out to small tenant farmers, and he owned a small but solidly built house, two storeys high, with six low-ceilinged rooms. He served in the local militia as Captain Pepys – no doubt recruited by Edward Montagu and loyal to his parliamentary allegiance – and he had a wife but no children of his own. He took to his brother’s boy, strongly enough to decide to make him his heir; and the Brampton house became an important element in Sam’s life.4
Like Hinchingbrooke, it is still standing, still with a large garden and surrounded by open fields.5 A footpath round the back of the garden leads to the church, and to the Bull Inn, both well known to Sam.6 Captain Pepys must have got his nephew on to a horse and riding like a country boy, because when he was a man Sam thought nothing of riding a hired horse from London to Huntingdon in a day. But whether he spent more time at Brampton or at Hinchingbrooke is an open question: great houses maintained large numbers of servants and dependants and easily absorbed an odd boy into the family; and long afterwards, when Sam was married and had his own home, he still behaved as though he belonged to the Montagu family, dropping in uninvited for meals with the other servants and staying overnight whenever he felt like it.
As a boy with a sense of his own worth, whose schooling so far had been meagre, he must have been avid for education; and serious teaching is what you got at a grammar school, all day long, from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon. Two hours were allowed for lunch in the middle of the day, time to walk to Brampton and back, although the Hinchingbrooke kitchens would have been handier. Huntingdon School had a reputation, made under its headmaster Thomas Beard, who had sent his best pupils on to Cambridge, Oliver Cromwell among them. Latin was the chief subject, and the master’s job was to put Latin into the heads of the boys, so forcefully that they could think and write in Latin as easily as in English.7 Very little else was studied except for some Greek by those who did well with their Latin and a bit of basic Hebrew for the exceptional pupil. Mathematics was hardly mentioned, beyond learning the Roman numerals, which took precedence over the Arabic ones, and Pepys had to learn his multiplication tables when he was twenty-nine.
Once past elementary grammar and vocabulary, Latin was taught largely by translating classical texts into English and then back into Latin, the object being to finish as close to the original as you could. It was common for boys to be punished if they failed to talk to one another in Latin, and parents occasionally complained of their sons forgetting how to read English.8 In any case they did not study English writers – no Chaucer, Bacon, Shakespeare, Jonson or Donne. They learnt instead to compose verses, essays and letters in Latin, and became familiar with a list of ancient authors that included Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Terence, Juvenal and Livy. The aim was admirable for anyone who wanted to correspond with foreigners, since Latin was used by all educated Europeans; Milton was appointed ‘Latin secretary’ to Cromwell when he became lord protector, in order to compose diplomatic correspondence for him in that language. Pepys was a good scholar, able to read Latin for pleasure all his life; and that very skill may have helped to leave his English free and uncluttered for the Diary, the language of life as opposed to the elaborately constructed formulations of the classroom and study.
By the time Sam arrived at Huntingdon School Cromwell’s teacher Thomas Beard was no longer in charge, and his successor, Henry Cooke, was not interested in the job. He paid a substitute £10 a year to teach the boys, and it was this nameless and no doubt penniless scholar who gave Sam a good-enough grounding to allow him to go on to St Paul’s School in London, and to do well there.9 How long he was at Huntingdon School we don’t know. It may have been only a year, possibly two, but only one friend from the school puts in an appearance later, Tom Alcock, whom he met again in the spring of 1660, remarking that he had not seen him for sixteen years, i.e., since 1644.10 The headmaster of St Paul’s, John Langley, particularly disliked taking pupils over the age of eleven, on the grounds that the school suffered from boys ‘who have been tossed about from schole to schole until 13 or 14 yeares of age and then come fitted for nothing but knavery and Idlenesse and soe drawe lesser and more towardly children by their example into rudeness and idlenesse’.11 If Langley was serious about this, Sam may have been back in London and attending St Paul’s before he was twelve in February 1645. But not before he had plenty of time to get to know Huntingdon, with its four churches, its ancient bridge over the Ouse, its straggling half-mile of high street and its green surrounding territory.
The other good thing Sam found at Huntingdon was Hinchingbrooke House. Even if any meals he ate there were taken with the servants in the kitchen, the grandeur of the place, with its wide windows and high-ceilinged rooms, must have reminded him of Durdans. And with Jemima Montagu presiding over the place, its appeal would have been even greater. A boy of ten, far from his family and with a precocious susceptibility to women, could play Cherubino to my Lady, a young bride, also separated from her family, with her husband away at the wars, and no baby yet in prospect. If so, it was the beginning of an intimacy that persisted into his adult life, when she always looked on him ‘like one of her own family’, entrusted her children to his care, scolded him, joked with him, borrowed money from him, consulted him and confided in him. And he reciprocated with devoted admiration and respect; for him she was always the model of what a woman should be.
Hinchingbrooke, Brampton and Huntingdon are all remarkably little changed by the passing of the centuries since Pepys knew them. The nuns placed their abbey very well on one of the few areas of high ground above the water-meadows, and when they were evicted the cloister became a courtyard, the chapel a library, the refectory part of a great hall; the chapter-house entrance was simply bricked up, coming to light again only at the end of the twentieth century.12 Two magnificent bay windows were brought from Ramsey Abbey, as well as a triple-arched gatehouse sporting the figure of a Green Man; and another big semicircular two-storey stone bay was added to the façade. The mixture of medieval grey stone and rich Tudor red brick, the jumble of outbuildings, the parade of tall chimneys, the formally planted gardens and trees all added to Hinchingbrooke’s charm. It was ‘old, spacious, irregular, yet not vast or forlorn’.13 The terrace, face to the sun, offered spectacular views over the flat countryside below, and the park sloped down to one of the Ouse’s tributary streams and a series of wide, glinting ponds.
You can still walk from Robert Pepys’s house in Brampton, past Hinchingbrooke and on to Huntingdon and, traffic apart, enjoy most of the sights past which Sam trudged in the 1640s: the Nuns’ Meadows on the left, and on the right the huge expanse of Portholme Meadow, supposed to be the biggest in England; it has lost its windmills and watermill and taken in a railway embankment, but is otherwise very much the same as when it was described as ‘the largest and most flowery spot the sun ever beheld’.14 A dip in the path takes the walker across Alconbury Brook by the Nuns’ Bridge, and up what is still the old lane along the edge of Hinchingbrooke Park and beneath the wall of the terrace, then on past the gatehouse and close to the windows of the house itself. This is about halfway between Brampton and the centre of Huntingdon, and the road continues straight on into what was George Street in the seventeenth century – named for St George – and still bears the same name. Today the town starts with the railway station, a row of nineteenth-century villas and almshouses, and there is a ring road to cross, but after that you are again alongside buildings well known to Pepys: the George Inn on the left, All Saints’ Church on the right, with the market place beyond it, all facing on to the high street ahead. The school building, in his day encased in red brick, now shorn away to reveal its original medieval stone, is on the other side of the high street.15
As a grown man, Pepys’s opinion of life in the country veered between condescension towards the poverty and ignorance of ordinary rural people and occasional bursts of appreciation of the scenery and the quiet life that could be lived there. He wrote about how much he enjoyed a walk in Portholme Meadow with his father in the summer of 1661, and the following year the same meadow inspired him to one of his most lyrical passages: ‘with my father took a melancholy walk to Portholme, seeing the country-maids milking their Cowes there (they being now at grasse) and to see with what mirth they come all home together in pomp with their milk, and sometimes they have musique go before them’.16 The ‘sometimes’ tells you this was not the first time he had watched and listened to the milkmaids; and of course it was not, because he must have seen and heard them often when he was a boy.
But cows and milkmaids were of less moment at Brampton and at Hinchingbrooke in 1644, when the talk would have centred around the war that was being fought, bitterly and confusedly, all over England. News of the military campaigns and the part played in the fighting by the young master of Hinchingbrooke – Sam’s own kin – was eagerly awaited. Montagu, tall and as handsome as his enemy Prince Rupert, and with the same shoulder-length curls, was only eight years older than Sam, and he was galloping about the country risking his life, and often at the side of a still greater local hero. Not only had Hinchingbrooke belonged to Cromwell’s grandfather, half the gentry of Huntingdonshire were Cromwells when Oliver Cromwell was born in the town, and he had been elected its MP in 1628. It did not prevent the town from being politically divided, in the same way the Montagu family was divided. Sir Sidney remained unbudgeably loyal to the king, refused a levy made by parliament and was imprisoned briefly in the Tower; he then remained in retirement in Northamptonshire, no doubt nursing some bitter feelings about his son and his son-in-law Gilbert Pickering, as well as their cousin, the earl of Manchester, who became major-general in charge of all the parliamentary forces in East Anglia in August 1643. Edward found in Cromwell a hero, a friend and perhaps a surrogate father, and so he remained for fifteen years, during which he fought beside him, participated in his government of the country and accepted high appointments from him. A few months before Cromwell’s death he expressed his continuing strong personal attachment to him.17 He also shared Cromwell’s religious faith: it is strongly expressed in his letters during these early years.
Edward was given a commission to raise a regiment in Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely in the autumn of 1643. In the winter he was in Bedford, raising more men and horses. Early in 1644 he went with Manchester to Cambridge to purge the university of senior members suspected of royalist sympathies; eleven of the sixteen heads of the colleges were turned out and replaced by puritan scholars.18 After this came his first experience of battle at the storming of Hillesden House under Cromwell’s leadership in March. The summer of 1644 was spent fighting gloriously in the north. He led his men in hand-to-hand combat in the assault on Lincoln in May, fought in the thick of Marston Moor in July and received the surrender of York on behalf of the earl of Manchester soon afterwards, when he was just nineteen. After this proud moment he was back recruiting again in Huntingdon in the autumn – once the harvest had been brought in – and was at Hinchingbrooke to tell his battle stories and receive the admiration of his household. That September his father died, as far as we know unreconciled.
At this point the earl of Manchester began to have doubts about the cause. Accused by parliament of dragging his feet, he told Cromwell, ‘If we beat the king ninety and nine times, yet he is king still and so will his posterity be after him; but if the king beat us once, we shall all be hanged, and our posterity made slaves.’ To which Cromwell replied, ‘My Lord, if this be so, why did we take up arms at first?’19 Montagu took Cromwell’s side in the argument and joined in public criticism of the earl; and Manchester gave up his command in the spring of 1645, when the New Model Army was being formed. Montagu was made governor of Henley, where he had to put down mutinous, because unpaid, troops, and in the summer he was fighting in the West Country.
Cromwell was now established as a great figure in the eyes of the whole nation, enemies as well as friends. Prince Rupert called him ‘Old Ironsides’, and his soldiers became Ironsides too. When he went recruiting for his New Model Army in the Isle of Ely in June 1645, men flocked to join him. Among their thirty-seven officers, seven had risen from non-gentry families, a signal that the whole social order was open to change.20 Alongside these plain men Montagu fought at Naseby, not fifty miles from Huntingdon, in June 1645; and at Naseby the king’s infantry was effectively destroyed. Five hundred royalist officers were taken among the 5,000 prisoners, most of whom were marched to London and paraded through the streets of the City in front of triumphant crowds. Montagu went on to take part in the storming of Bristol in September, and with his brother-in-law John Pickering received Prince Rupert’s surrender. Sam, with his City background and watching his cousin’s dazzling military successes, could not fail to be a fervent enemy of the king. He may have been back in the City to see the procession of prisoners from Naseby, or if he was still in Huntingdon in August he would have witnessed what happened when the king himself rode into the town after a skirmish, and his men fell to plundering. By then Jemima Montagu was expecting her first child – conceived in May, between battles – and her husband was with Cromwell in the west. The king was welcomed by the mayor – either loyal or obsequious – but his troops proceeded to terrorize the people on whom they were billeted. On being told that four of his soldiers had stolen from a glove-maker, the king ‘caused lots to be cast… and one to be hanged therefore, and, at his departure, gave the town and county thanks for their kind entertainment of him’. This account from a parliamentarian source adds that the soldiers ‘knocked off the irons of all the felons and other prisoners in Huntingdon Gaol’, all of whom at once joined the cavalier army. But it also acknowledges that the county was still divided between royalists and parliamentarians. ‘One providence is observable, that divers of the best affected to the Parliament have escaped with the least loss,’ it says, suggesting that Hinchingbrooke did not suffer badly. Some accounts say Charles lodged there – he had stayed at the house more than once in the past – while others put him at the George Inn, which seems more likely. Jemima Montagu would have received the king with perfect politeness, but he knew her husband was fighting against his forces. And she must have shared in the distress and indignation of the local people at the damage and losses they suffered, her agent Captain Pepys of Brampton among them: the departing cavaliers drove off all the cattle and horses from the fields round Huntingdon for their own use.21
The autumn of 1645 brought Colonel Montagu to London to receive the thanks of parliament for his victory at Bristol. Within a month he had a seat in the House and was appointed to the Army Committee.22 With this his fighting days were over for the time being. In February 1646 he became a father; his first child, a daughter, was given her mother’s name. The war effectively ended in March, although there was mopping up until June, when Oxford was taken, the king fled to the dubious protection of the Scots and the thirteen-year-old duke of York (James) was handed over to parliament and held prisoner in St James’s Palace with his younger brother and sister. In September the earl of Essex, who had led the parliamentary forces in the early stages of the war and held Turnham Green against the cavaliers, died at his house in the Strand. Parliament decreed a splendid funeral, and Sam was taken to see the embalmed body lying in state in Essex House.23
At home with his parents again, Sam was already the best educated member of the family, with a mental world he could hardly share with them. The divide would grow steadily greater. Now his daily walk took him across the Fleet ditch instead of the Alconbury Brook, towards St Paul’s School beside the cathedral. The boys put in a six-day week, with a free afternoon on Thursdays. All 150 of them sat in one room sixty feet long, with high windows on which the words AUT DOCE, AUT DISCE, AUT DISCEDE(‘Either teach, or study, or leave’) were inscribed. They had benches, not desks. At one end sat the high master, John Langley, beneath the bust of John Colet, the school’s founder, and at the other the surmaster, although he spent more time walking about to supervise. There were eight classes, and the pupils were divided by achievement, not age: a boy might be still in the Second Form at thirteen or already in the Seventh at twelve. Since Pepys was still at school in 1650, when he was seventeen, he had clearly made steady, rather than spectacular, progress. Greek was started in the Sixth Form, Hebrew in the Eighth. The day began with Latin prayers and a chapter of the Bible, which, judging from the sparse biblical allusions in the Diary, did not take his fancy. All the boys learnt to speak as well as to write; they had to undergo regular oral examinations and also to deliver their own compositions, in Latin, like so many young Roman orators. It was a good training and made Sam into an effective speaker in adult life, as well as a stern critic of those who were not. They included his cousin Montagu and the future king Charles II, about whose poor public performance he was particularly scathing.24
His fellow pupils came from widely different levels of society, ranging from the sons of baronets and MPs, through country parsons, to booksellers, soap-boilers and drapers; Sam was not the only tailor’s son, and one boy’s father was a humble carrier. Poor boys could win awards for going on to a university, as Sam did in due course. Langley had a particularly good record for getting his pupils into Cambridge; the Cambridge to Oxford ratio was three to one. Cambridge possessed a powerful Calvinist body of teachers, and St Paul’s was the most strongly puritan of the London schools at this time. Approving Calvinist preachers sent their sons to be educated by Langley, who had been persecuted by Laud and got his revenge by testifying against him before the House of Lords Committee in 1644 (Laud was executed on Tower Hill in January 1645). Langley wanted the abolition of bishops, and saw it achieved the next year. The irony of fate, and no doubt the effect of his excellent teaching, meant that several of his pupils went on to become bishops when episcopacy was brought back in the 1660s; but by then Langley was dead too, albeit from natural causes.25
Langley’s reputation as a strongly religious man, a scholar and an antiquarian was backed by ‘a very awful presence and speech that struck a mighty respect and fear into his scholars, which however wore off after they were a little used to him; and the management of himself towards them was such that they both loved and feared him’.26 No doubt he beat his boys, as every schoolmaster was expected to do; Sam grew up quite ready to beat in their turn the children who worked for him, although he sometimes hurt himself more than his intended victim in the process, never acquiring the easy schoolmasterly swish. Langley’s boys became lord mayors, bankers, engineers, academics, booksellers, MPs, administrators – and of course writers. St Paul’s was responsible for the education of two of the great writers of the century, Milton – under an earlier high master, Alexander Gill – and Pepys. The fact that both have been found shocking is in itself a tribute to the quality of the education they got there.27
When Pepys was thirteen a new surmaster, Samuel Cromleholme, arrived. Not yet thirty, he was an enthusiastic book collector who impressed his young namesake with his learning and rose to become high master in his turn. Pepys regarded St Paul’s with pride and affection after he left, presented books to the library, dropped in to see whether they were keeping up the standards of his day and was pleased to have his brother John follow him at the school. Tom had no chance of St Paul’s at all, with his speech problem and slowness; he was set to learn tailoring in their father’s shop, though he showed little talent or enthusiasm for that. The one thing Tom had an aptitude for seems to have been French, which he managed to speak fluently. So did Sam: another mystery, for where did they learn it? Not at school. Good French grammars were printed and sold in London, but Tom at least seems more likely to have picked it up directly. It is possible the Pepyses had a French lodger, since anyone with spare rooms and an uncertain income took in lodgers, as Tom himself did when he was in charge at Salisbury Court later.28
They did have a visitor from America this year, in the shape of cousin Richard Pepys, just returned from Boston. He had left England for religious reasons and returned with the abolition of the hated bishops; his lawyer father was soon to be appointed lord chief justice of Ireland by Cromwell. Another returning American emigrant in 1646 was George Downing, who began by finding work as an army preacher in the regiment of a Colonel Okey, from which he made a rapid rise through Cromwell’s administration. Within a few years he, like Montagu, exerted a crucial influence on Sam Pepys’s life, because when Sam put in for a leaving exhibition at St Paul’s, Downing was chairman of the judges who awarded it to him, and so played a crucial part in helping him to go on to Cambridge to continue his studies.29
*
The sharp pain of the stone was still part of Sam’s life, but he did not let it prevent him from profiting by what St Paul’s had to offer. Boys were expected to work steadily and hard. Pepys took to this regime, and it gave him a lifelong belief in the power of education, as well as a model for his later working practice. In that large, light schoolroom he learnt how to apply himself vigorously to a subject and how to keep orderly notes, two things that helped to make him into the committed and meticulous administrator he became. Still, it is surprising that the school did so well by him, given what was going on all around. Outside, London was in almost continuous turmoil. There must have been days when it was difficult for boys even to make their way to and from St Paul’s, and others when it was impossible not to be distracted by the sights to be seen in the streets. During this period the cathedral itself was partly used as a shopping precinct and sometimes for stabling horses for the army. Twice – in the summer of 1647, when Sam was fourteen and again in November 1648 – the New Model Army marched in and occupied the City. The spectacle of 18,000 troops tramping through the streets and across London Bridge with Cromwell at their head was intended to overawe the citizens and must have drawn admiring schoolboys like a magnet.
There was plenty to look at, and yet more to avoid. Rioting was endemic, and if you did not want to be caught up in it you had to keep out of the way. The London prentices – Tom Pepys became an apprentice in 1648, when he was fourteen – were usually ready to turn out, supported by the watermen and any sailors who happened to be ashore; there were times when they were joined by members of the trained bands, and other times when they were attacked by them. Plenty of ordinary citizens were also ready to swell the numbers of the rioters when feelings rose high enough. Milton might see the City as the mansion house of liberty, but the crowd’s view of what constituted liberty shifted wildly and unpredictably. In July 1647, for instance, a mob from the City kicked in the doors of the House of Commons, terrorized the MPs, held the speaker prisoner and forced a vote inviting the king to London.
There was always a royalist element inside the predominantly anti-royalist City, just as there was always among the puritan majority a group who yearned for a return to the established form of church service, and who deplored the destruction of stained glass and statues and the removal of cherished landmarks like the old stone cross at Charing Cross, taken down in 1647 as an idolatrous object and sadly missed. The Pepys who wrote the Diary had become on the whole hostile to puritanism and necessarily a royalist, but the St Paul’s boy was a puritan and a republican. Religion made bitter divisions: parliament and army struggled against one another, parliament and City, and City and army. Outside London the king was moved about like a piece on a chessboard, alternately threatening and threatened. For the first six months of 1647, after the Scots handed him over to parliament, he was held in Northamptonshire, where Jemima Montagu’s father, John Crew, was one of those responsible for his custody. In June the army sent Cornet Joyce to abduct him into their power, and as a prisoner of the army he again visited Hinchingbrooke, probably still escorted by Crew. It was reported that he was ‘nobly treated’ by his hostess, Mistress Montagu – this was Jemima. She was, as it happens, again three months pregnant, and her husband was away attending parliament in London.30 From Huntingdon the king went on to Hampton Court; and in November he escaped to the Isle of Wight. After this parliament became reluctant to continue their negotiations with him.31
Christmas brought more trouble in the City when the branches of rosemary and bays that were traditional decorations appeared mysteriously in the churches, and a group of apprentices decked a pump in Cornhill with holly and ivy, all in defiance of the puritan ban on seasonal festivities. Troops sent to remove the offending greenery were driven back by angry crowds, and there was deep resentment against soldiers entering private houses to check on Sunday observance as well as to prevent the celebration of Christmas. Then there was the matter of the theatre. The Globe had been pulled down in 1644, but during the winter of 1647/8, some actor-managers, observing that the ordinance forbidding theatrical performances was due to run out on 1 January, got up plays and opened their doors on New Year’s Day. At once the streets were jammed with the carriages of eager theatregoers, all those men and women who had grown up with a tradition of playgoing and were now eager to resume it. Parliament furiously slapped down penalties, ordering the destruction of ‘all stage-galleries, seats and boxes’, the fining of spectators and the public flogging of actors, who were further required to promise to give up their profession for good. But the persecution was never entirely effective. It is impossible to unmake an actor, and a public reared on Shakespeare and Jonson was too enthusiastic to be denied. John Evelyn notes that he saw ‘a Tragie Comedie’ acted in London in February that year. There was also a tradition that the boys of St Paul’s put on plays, although their puritan high master must now have forbidden anything of that kind. Pepys, who had tasted the pleasures of amateur acting and developed a passion for playgoing as soon as he had the chance, either had to pretend indifference or, under Langley’s influence, went through his own phase of sanctimonious disapproval.
Another fracas occurred in the City in the spring, when royalists made bonfires in the streets to celebrate the anniversary of the king’s accession on 31 March, and forced passers-by to stop and drink his health. This was followed by an incident in which puritan intolerance provoked a full-scale royalist riot. On a fine Sunday in April a group of small boys was playing at tip-cat on the open green space of Moorfields. The game was a popular and harmless one, the ‘cat’ nothing more than a sharpened stick to be sent flying; but, because it was Sunday, the lord mayor sent a detachment from the trained bands to stop the sport. A crowd of apprentices decided to defend the children’s freedom to play games. Soon the apprentices were stoning the soldiers and went on to disarm them. By then a crowd several thousand strong had gathered, which proceeded to march along Fleet Street and the Strand, shouting ‘Now for King Charles’. Cromwell was in London, and he ordered out the cavalry and charged the crowd, killing two and injuring more. Very early next morning the apprentices secured the City gates at Ludgate and Newgate and fired shots through the lord mayor’s windows. He prudently took refuge in the Tower, and by 8 a.m. – when Sam should have been at school – the City was in the hands of the rioters. The army then moved round the walls and brought troops in through Moorgate. Some of the rioters were killed, those suspected of being ringleaders were taken to prison, everyone else dispersed. Law-abiding citizens breathed a sigh of relief, and lessons were taken up again at St Paul’s.
George Downing, who was in London at this point and making himself noticed by Cromwell, wrote a good account of ‘the great divisions among us’ – ‘us’ meaning the army, parliament and the puritans – to his uncle in America:
One cryes out, settle church government, punish errours and blasphemyes…; another, remember your often declarations for liberty for tender consciences; one, bring home the King according to the covenant; another, it can’t stand with the preservation of the true religion and liberty, etc., and thus for want of a downright playne understanding of the foundation of this warre… we have been likely often to have been embroyled in a more bloody, and by our quarrellings to give occasion to any third party to devoure all… What the issue will be the Lord only knows, only he seems to be shaking the great ones of the earth.32
Shaken as they were, parliament even considered giving the crown to their fourteen-year-old captive, James, duke of York; but at the end of April he made his escape during a game of hide-and-seek in the park of St James’s Palace. He got away disguised as a girl, with a wig, a cloak and a specially made dress of ‘mixed mohair’ with scarlet under-petticoat, and in this humiliating get-up was whisked aboard a barge bound for Gravesend and so to Holland.33
In May the City churches remained almost empty when thanksgiving services were held for the defeat of royalist risings in Wales, and later in the month there were serious riots when Surrey petitioners marched through town shouting ‘For God and King Charles’. In the fighting outside the House of Commons the demonstrators threw lumps of coal and brickbats, the soldiers fired on them and at least eight were dead by the end of the day.34 After this parliament and the City decided they must get on to better terms, and the army was persuaded to remove its garrison from the Tower and allow the City to install its own militia again.
Outside London similar conflicts were being enacted in 1648. There was a riot about a maypole at Bury St Edmunds. Edward Montagu was held prisoner briefly by a group of royalists while trying to suppress their gatherings in Huntingdonshire; in July he successfully put down others in St Neots.35 This was what is known as the Second Civil War, during which Colchester was besieged and a parliamentary vice-admiral, William Batten, took his ship The Constant Warwick out to join the prince of Wales off Yarmouth and was knighted by him, but was back serving parliament within months: he and Pepys became colleagues twelve years later. Cromwell went north and defeated the invading Scottish army at Preston. In November the English army marched into London again under its commander-in-chief Fairfax, who had written to the lord mayor warning him that he expected to collect £40,000 ‘arrears’ from the City to pay his men. He quartered his troops in the citizens’ houses for a few days, long enough to persuade them of the wisdom of paying up.
Other elements of the army were now preparing to bring the king captive to London; they had decided that his deviousness made him impossible to negotiate with any longer. But he was still the king, and a substantial number of MPs voiced a hope that it might be possible to reopen discussions with him after all. To prevent any such move, a group of republican officers went into the House of Commons, arrested 45 MPs and sent away another 186 whom they judged unlikely to support their plans for getting rid of Charles. This decisive intervention, known as ‘Pride’s Purge’ – a Colonel Thomas Pride took a leading part – happened in December 1648 (those MPs who were permitted to remain became known as the ‘Rump’ parliament). Among the purged MPs were John Crew and Edward Montagu, neither of whom was enthusiastic about putting the king on trial. Montagu took himself quietly back to Hinchingbrooke and family life. In the Lords the earl of Manchester urged that to try the king was in contradiction with fundamental principles of law, and the plan was unanimously rejected. It made no difference but sealed the fate of the House of Lords, abolished shortly afterwards.
Cromwell returned to London, and the stage was set for the trial of the king. A special court was set up, and 135 commissioners were appointed to act as combined jury and judges. No more than 68 ever appeared to carry out their duties. Fairfax, whose name was among them, did not attend, and when the trial began his wife, openly royalist in her sympathies, made her own interventions. This was the true theatrical performance of 1649, for the court was held in Westminster Hall and open to the public. Troops stood on guard inside, but people came in freely through the entrance at the north end of the hall, and there were galleries set up in the corners for ladies and privileged persons. The king was seated in a crimson velvet chair. There he heard himself accused of a ‘wicked design’ to subvert the ancient laws and liberties of the nation, and there he refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the court. He found he was not without supporters. When Fairfax’s name was read out, Lady Fairfax called from the gallery, ‘He has more wit than to be here.’ Later, on hearing the king accused of being a traitor to his country, she shouted that, on the contrary, it was Oliver Cromwell who was the traitor. When her taunting grew too strong, an officer threatened to order his men to shoot into the gallery. She was persuaded to leave, but she had made her point. The soldiers shouted ‘Justice! Justice!’ when the king left the hall, but it was answered by ‘God save the King!’ from many of the civilian spectators.36
We know from Pepys’s own account how strongly republican he was at this point. He was fifteen, and his sympathies were entirely against the king; in this way he was far more radical than his cousin Montagu, who chose to stay away during the trial. Sam may well have got himself into Westminster Hall for a glimpse of the king in his crimson chair; he was certainly present at his execution. Since it happened on a Tuesday – 30 January – either St Paul’s sent the boys home or he made his own decision to go to Whitehall and take the consequences. The Westminster schoolboys were kept locked in for the day to prevent them from attending.37 He must have set off early, because the crowd was dense and there were lines of soldiers posted to prevent disturbances. The king walked across St James’s at ten in the morning, showing a dignity and courage that impressed itself even on his enemies, and entered the Banqueting House, where he said his prayers and from which he emerged through a tall window on to the scaffold just before two in the afternoon. Soldiers were positioned between the scaffold and the crowd to make it difficult for anyone to hear his last words. Philip Henry, an Oxford undergraduate a little older than Pepys, was present and has left a description of the moment when the executioner struck off the royal head: ‘The blow I saw given and can truly say with a sad heart, at the instant whereof, I remember well, there was such a grone by the Thousands then present as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again.’ Henry goes on to describe how two troops of soldiers were set to march in opposite directions between Westminster and Charing Cross in order to disperse the people; but there was no trouble in London that day, and in some respects life continued in its normal course, with the shops open and people going about their business.38 Pepys may even have gone back to school, because he remembers telling his friends there that if he had to preach a sermon on the king, his text would be, ‘The memory of the wicked shall rot.’ It is the only time he imagined himself in the pulpit, and he recalled it a shade nervously when, in 1660, a man he had known at St Paul’s reminded him that he had been ‘a great roundhead’ at school.39 Elsewhere in his Diary he remained studiously non-committal in what he had to say of the execution; for instance, when he witnessed the hanging, drawing and quartering of Thomas Harrison, one of those who had signed the death warrant of the king, he only commented, ‘Thus it was my chance to see the King beheaded at Whitehall and to see the first blood shed in revenge for the blood of the King at Charing cross.’40 The grown man was not going to express a grief he did not feel, or any remorse for the satisfaction he had felt.
The king was dead, but the king was also alive, since his son was immediately proclaimed as Charles II in his exile in Holland, and became the new focus for royalists everywhere. On Jersey George Carteret waved his hat, shouting, ‘Long live King Charles II.’ In England, however, a republic was declared. Monarch, bishops and lords were now all abolished or, as Evelyn put it, ‘Un-king-ship proclaim’d, & his Majesties Statues throwne downe at St Paules Portico, & Exchange’.41 And Evelyn went to Paris to kiss the new king’s hands, and to observe his mistress, Mrs Barlow, ‘browne, beautiful, bold but insipid’ and mother of the martyred king’s grandchild, the infant duke of Monmouth. London became more peaceful for a while, with only the odd incident like the shooting dead of a young trooper thought to be a Leveller in St Paul’s Churchyard, the beheading of a group of royalists outside Westminster Hall and the arrest, imprisonment and ejection from his office of Mayor Reynolds for refusing to proclaim the Act abolishing the kingly office. John Lilburne was also arrested and tried for publishing pamphlets in defiance of the censorship laws. He fought his own case and was acquitted by the jury to rejoicing and more bonfires all over the City. This was in October, and Cromwell was now fighting in Ireland.
Pepys had another year at school, some of it spent negotiating his entrance to the university of Cambridge. Sam was a good bit older than many undergraduates: fourteen was quite usual, but he did not start his Cambridge studies until he was eighteen. There was no question of his father financing him, so he had to find support in other places. It came from some powerful Cromwellians. George Downing’s part in the award of his first exhibition in February 1650 has already been mentioned. Five months after this Pepys’s name was entered at Trinity Hall. This was the college of his great-uncle Talbot Pepys, now recorder, or chief magistrate, of Cambridge and very active in raising taxes for Cromwell’s army.42 Talbot was also Edward Montagu’s uncle. Trinity Hall was a legal college, so there may have been thought of Sam becoming a lawyer. But that plan was given up – he may have disliked the idea, or it may have been too expensive to pursue – and the place at Trinity Hall was not taken up. He was admitted instead, in October, to Magdalene College. As it happened, Magdalene had just lost its master who, summoned to London to take the ‘Engagement’ of loyalty to the commonwealth by the commission for the universities, refused on grounds of conscience. His offer to live quietly was not good enough and he was replaced. The newly appointed master was John Sadler, another successful lawyer in Chancery, a town clerk of London, much favoured by Cromwell, who had already offered him the position of chief justice of Munster, which he turned down. As it happened, Sadler lived in Salisbury Court.43 Montagu’s patronage probably came into it too; his chaplain had a Magdalene connection, and Samuel Morland, who claimed his friendship, had just been appointed to a fellowship there and became Pepys’s tutor. Later, Morland and Downing were both chosen by Cromwell to go on diplomatic missions, and he appointed Colonel Edward Montagu as visitor to both Cambridge and Oxford, although he had attended neither university. The appointment made him responsible for inspecting, supervising and removing abuses from the universities.
Oxford and Cambridge were obvious battlegrounds for the minds of the younger generation, and seen as such by the government. There was talk in parliament of abolishing both universities and setting up alternative ones in other cities – York, London and Durham were all mentioned – and although these ideas were dropped, the purging of the old guard of Oxbridge masters and fellows was vigorously pursued. It was necessary to build up a body of graduates sympathetic to the commonwealth, something that helps to explain why Sam Pepys, with his proclaimed views and politically correct connections, was thought worth helping. In November he was awarded a second leaving exhibition by St Paul’s, and within a month of starting his studies at Cambridge he picked up another scholarship.