Pepys wooed the woman who was to be his wife with passion. Thirteen years after his wooing, he relived what he had felt during that time in a moment of intense, recaptured emotion. It came to him as he listened to music in the theatre. The music, he wrote in his Diary, was ‘so sweet… that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife’. Memory and music had merged into one another. ‘It ravished me’ and ‘wrapped up my soul’ and ‘I remained all night transported so as I could not believe that ever any music hath that real command over the soul of a man as this did upon me’.1 The music that brought about this magical effect was played, improbably perhaps to some modern ears, on recorders, and, although he does not say so, it accompanied the appearance of Nell Gwyn, as she made a carefully stage-managed descent from the flies to the stage, bearing a basket of fruit and flowers and playing the part of a winged angel. In Pepys’s collection of prints there is one of Nell Gwyn wearing little more than a pair of wings, and, though she would have worn rather more on the stage, there was no hiding the fact that she was the most celebrated erotic icon of the London theatre.2 The angel in Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr, the play Pepys was attending, comes on disguised as a boy during the first four acts and appears in heavenly form only in the last; and it could be that her provokingly desirable appearance, as well as the music, was responsible for plunging Pepys into the past in this Proustian way, and reheating the memory of his old love and longing for the body of his Elizabeth.
The sickness of love and the sickness of the stone were the two preoccupations of his early twenties. To speak of love as a mixture of sweetness and sickness as he did is a striking conceit; clearly for him, at twenty-two, it had been an overpowering experience. So much so that it led him to fly in the face of what every intelligent clerk about town knew: that marriage was meant to be a step on the social ladder, and that a bride should bring some money and a worthwhile family alliance; it should not simply be a matter of running passionately after a woman with your nose in her smock. Pepys lost his good sense in his desire for Elizabeth. Nothing is known of how they met, whether in a bookshop or any other sort of shop, or through a friend; he may simply have got into conversation with her in the street. She was pretty enough to catch the eye, with her bright, definite face surrounded by curls, prominent eyes and expressive mouth; and she was a lively talker in two languages, which may have been what first caught the fancy of a man who loved to practise his own skills as a linguist. In the year he met her he bought himself a French Nouveau Testament.3 Being foreign marked her off from other young women. She had lived in Paris, her father was French, and both her parents could boast of a higher social Standing than Pepys himself. Alexandre le Marchant de St Michel came of a noble family in the Anjou, and her English mother also had grandly connected, landowning parents. All this sounded impressive, although in fact they were virtually destitute and friendless when Pepys met her.
Never mind that. He wanted Elizabeth for herself. The pain of his illness, and the question mark it set over his future, can only have sharpened his determination to possess her as soon as he could. If life was to give him no more than this, then at least he would have had her. Whether his wooing was an honourable one from the start or not, it became so. He persuaded himself that he could support a bride on his scant earnings, take her to live in the Montagu lodgings in Whitehall and put everything else out of his mind. He did not discuss his marital intentions with his employer or, it would seem, in any serious manner with her family or his own. There was no question on either side of a marriage settlement.
Elizabeth was fourteen, the same age as his sister Pall, but the two girls were as unlike as it was possible to be and notably failed to become friends, then or at any later time. Pall was only just literate and, according to her brother, far from lovely, ‘full of Freckles and not handsome in face’, whereas Elizabeth was vivacious as well as attractive, took trouble with her appearance and her clothes, and had acquired some education and polish in spite of her parents’ difficulties – she was a reader as well as a talker.4 Sam took trouble with his love letters; although none survive, the words of a young Cambridge contemporary wooing his future wife suggest the style of the times: Endeared Sweetheart, When I was last with you there fell into my Bosom such a spark of Love that nothing will quench it but Yourself. The Nature of this Love, is, I hope sincere, the measure of it great, and as far as I know my own Heart it is right and genuine. The very bare probability of success ravished my Heart with Joy… I hope the Lord has given You in part your father’s Spirit, and has made You all glorious within, he has beautified your Body, very pleasant are You to me. You are in my Heart to live and die in waiting on You; and I extremely please Myself in loving You, and I like my Affections the better because they tell me they are only placed upon You… sweet Mrs Betty as I have given my Heart to You, You ought in return to give me Yours, and You cannot in Equity deny it me.
Whether or not Pepys wrote love letters as frank and delightful as this one, Elizabeth found him an eloquent and persuasive lover, and she was ready to be wooed and won.5
They were married at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on 1 December 1655. Religious ceremonies had been declared invalid since August 1653, but churches were still used for the civil ceremonies that replaced them, and this one was presided over by a senior administrative figure, Richard Sherwyn, secretary to the Treasury commissioners and justice of the peace for Westminster.6 The notice of the civil ceremony on 1 December reads ‘Samuel Peps of this parish gent and Elizabeth March-ant De Snt. Michell, of Martin’s in the ffields Spinster. Published October 15th, 22, 29 And were married by Richard Sherwyn Esq. one of Justices of the Peace of the Cittie and lyberties of Westm. December 1st Ri. Sherwyn.’ But the Westminster ceremony was entirely eclipsed in the minds of the bride and groom by what they always remembered as their proper wedding, which took place on 10 October. This was the anniversary they celebrated with merriment and, when it came to the tenth year, with dancing.7 What they recalled was their wedding night,meaning the consummation, and the obvious explanation is that they went through a private – and unrecorded – religious ceremony on that day, which allowed Pepys to bed his so much desired bride. This was for them the real thing.
It was also two weeks before her fifteenth birthday, which fell on 23 October. If this makes Elizabeth a child bride in our eyes, child brides were common enough; marriage was legal for girls at the age of twelve. The gentle and civilized John Evelyn, for instance, married his wife (in 1647) when he was twenty-six and she was twelve; and although he did not begin to cohabit with her until she was fourteen, she had a miscarriage at fifteen and her first full-term child two years later.8 Pepys bought a ring from a goldsmith near the new Exchange in the Strand – so perhaps the wedding took place in this part of town – and Elizabeth wore a petticoat adorned with gold lace.9 Bride and groom both showed what he called ‘bridal respect’ and ‘kindness’ towards one another.10Afterwards they celebrated at a tavern in Old Fish Street in the City, not necessarily with family, because weddings were rarely large affairs, and the families may not have been inclined to rejoice much, the Pepyses regretting Sam’s romantic folly, the St Michels regarding a poor clerk as an unsatisfactory match for the daughter of a noble French house.11 And after the meal the poor clerk must have taken her back to his servant’s room in the attics of Whitehall. Arthur Bryant wrote of this moment, ‘And perhaps, than what was theirs at that moment, life offers nothing better’; but his tender view is hardly borne out by what happened next.12
Since neither the St Michels nor the Pepyses were in a position to help the young couple, they were left to get on with their life as best they could. Things did not go well for them. The living was not easy, with one room not really their own and up a great many stairs, which Pepys sometimes referred to as his ‘turret’. They had almost no money, his health was poor, she was adolescent, with her head full of the French romances she enjoyed reading. It was not that she was impractical or idle: ‘How she used to make coal fires, and wash my foul clothes with her own hand for me, poor wretch! in my little room,’ he remembered later.13 But she could also weep, scold and storm, and her periods were monthly dramas that needed help and comfort he had no idea how to give. She was a virgin when they married, and he may have been just about one too, given how nervous he was of catching diseases from loose-living girls. No doubt he had engaged in much fumbling, but neither knew much about sex, and he was desperate for it. He needed help and comfort too, for his own agonies and embarrassments. The symptoms of the stone grew worse all the time, and by now he was probably suffering some pain and difficulty in urinating, and tenderness in those parts; while she, by dreadful coincidence, developed what he called boils on ‘the lip of her chose’.14 She was suffering from a condition well known to modern doctors but untreatable then, in which the glands at the entrance to the vagina become blocked and a cyst is formed, producing abscesses that are not only painful but also make sexual intercourse virtually impossible at times.15 He was in no way to blame, but she may have suspected he was. It would be hard to imagine a worse recipe for a honeymoon.
The Montagus knew nothing about the extra presence among the servants in the Whitehall lodgings. Pepys seems to have kept Elizabeth out of their way very efficiently, because it was not until November 1660 that his cousin took notice of her for the first time.16In any case Montagu had many important things on his mind, and Jemima was about to give birth again at Hinchingbrooke. In October 1655 he was appointed an Admiralty commissioner, and in December she presented him with twin sons. One was loyally named Oliver, the other given the family name of John. No sooner were they baptized than the great Oliver directed Montagu’s career in a new direction, appointing him general-at-sea and joint commander, with Blake, of the English battle fleet. This was in January 1656, and he prepared to set sail for the Mediterranean almost at once, with instructions to seek a permanent station there for the English. As a complete novice at sea, he took navigation manuals and models of rigged ships to study in his cabin aboard his flagship, theNaseby. Pepys saw him off from Lambeth when he embarked.17
Then Pepys returned to his discontented bride. The basic trouble must have been their medical problems, but whatever else started them quarrelling – her disappointment in the daily reality of marriage, his disappointment in her response to his attempts at love-making, his jealousy when she smiled too sunnily at his cheerful and doubtless flirtatious friends, or hers when he stayed out late – both had tempers that flared up into violent rows. Had she become pregnant, they would have faced serious practical difficulties, but she would at least have been absorbed in preparing for the child. Only there was no sign of pregnancy. Pepys’s failure to father children has always been attributed to the effects of the surgery he underwent in 1658, so it is worth pointing out that none were forthcoming in the three preceding years.18 Love in a turret was not what either of them had imagined or hoped, and she was wretched. She simmered with resentment and complained to sympathetic friends; and then one day she simply walked out and did not come back. The message to her husband was as clear as could be. He had failed.
Pepys was not accustomed to failure – he was the success of the family, the boy who did well and won scholarships – and the separation from Elizabeth, which lasted for many months, was terrible to him. He felt it as a wound, an insult, an affront to his dignity as man and lover. Afterwards, he took care to destroy all the letters relating to this episode and hated any mention of it.19 Years later he would still brood unforgivingly if something reminded him of what she had done; while she used it as a weapon against him, knowing she could wound merely by mentioning it. It had been her grand gesture, and became her way of holding her own in the battle of their marriage, with the implied threat of a repeat performance. The humiliation in front of his friends and family was cruel, and the loss of his bedmate, so ardently wooed, almost too much to bear. Like Milton, he had married in a glow of expectation, only to be forced back into miserable chastity.20
Classically, an injured wife goes home to her parents, and this may be what Elizabeth did, to begin with at any rate. Not much was to be expected of them beyond affection, since they notably lacked any grasp of the practical side of life. Her father was a quixotic figure full of ingenious schemes – perpetual-motion machines and smoke-free chimneys – and her brother Balthasar had been reared to give himself the airs of a gentleman, with no resources to back them. The father’s story filters down to us through Balthasar’s not entirely reliable pen, which described him as ‘a Gentleman, Extreamely well-bread’, born a Catholic and converted to the Protestant faith. The conversion came about in his youth, while he was fighting as a professional soldier in Germany, and it allegedly lost him his inheritance in France. He next got himself a position in the suite of Princess Henrietta Maria as gentleman carver – a superior attendant at table in the formal court life of the day – when she travelled to England in 1625 to become Charles I’s queen. This job he lost after a dispute with one of the queen’s friars turned into a fight. Silence then, until he appeared in Ireland in 1639, and there won the hand of Dorothea, thirty-year-old widow of a gentleman of Cork and daughter of Sir Francis Kingsmill. The marriage was not approved by her family, and things went downhill for the couple from the start. Balthasar and Elizabeth were apparently both born in 1640, in Devon, where their mother had inherited land.21 But this and everything else they possessed was lost in various unlucky episodes. They wandered from England to France, from Flanders to Germany; sometimes he served as a soldier, once he was imprisoned. He claimed to have fought under Cromwell in Ireland, from where his wife fled to Flanders without him, having first pawned whatever they had to finance her flight – so running away from husbands was something Elizabeth learnt from her mother.
In 1652 Madame de St Michel was alone in Paris with her two children. She was persuaded to hand them over to Catholic friends, who placed Elizabeth in an Ursuline convent and Balthasar as page to the papal nuncio, a recollection that provoked him to a flash of wit: with such a start, he told Pepys, he might have ended up as either a cardinal or a catamite. The children were rescued by their indignant father, who carried the whole family off to London; this was shortly before Elizabeth met Pepys.22 The timing of Balthasar’s story is vague and the accuracy doubtful, since he wrote it down with the specific intention of proving that his sister was a staunch Protestant, whereas it is clear from Pepys’s own account that the Catholic faith never lost its hold on her: when, for instance, he bought a mass book for himself in 1660 and sat up late reading it, it gave ‘great pleasure to my wife to hear that that she long ago was so well acquainted with’.23 The circumstances of her upbringing suggest why she was in some ways mature for her age, and also restless and flighty. She seems to have moved on from her parents to stay with friends called Palmer, whose name crops up when Pepys mentioned what he always called his ‘differences’ with her. Palmer was a lawyer and may have pointed out to her the difficulties of the situation of a separated wife, and encouraged a reconciliation.
The St Michel parents present another puzzle in Pepys’s life. During the whole period of the Diary he never once visited them or received them in his house. Elizabeth went to see them and took them gifts, money and old clothes, and even small jobs to do for Pepys, but he went to almost farcical lengths to avoid speaking to her father: once, for instance, when he saw him in Westminster Hall after dropping Elizabeth, he sent a porter with an anonymous message across the Hall to St Michel, remaining at a safe distance to observe his baffled response.24 Elizabeth was equally resistant to their coming face to face. Family arrangements are often puzzling to outsiders, and this is more bizarre than most. Perhaps the St Michels failed to encourage her to return to Pepys when she left him, and he furiously resented the fact. Perhaps he took a vow not to forgive them, since taking vows was a habit of his, and this became one of the vows he kept. Later, when questioned by Jemima Montagu about ‘how I did treate my wife’s father and mother’, he gave her ‘a good account’, but did not elaborate further – understandably, given the actual situation.25
During this barely documented and unhappy period of Sam’s life we must assume he went on living in the Whitehall attics and attending to whatever instructions he received from his cousin and patron, General Montagu. His orders from aboard the Naseby to ‘my Servant Samuell Pepys at my Lodginges in Whitehalle’ were short and sharp: ‘You are upon sight hereoff…’ and ‘Hereoff you are not to faile’; and Pepys’s letters were formal and respectful, as was to be expected, addressing his employer as ‘your Honour’, ‘my honoured maister’ and ‘My Lord’. And, whatever his personal troubles, he kept a keen eye on public events and was ready to report discreetly on the struggle between the army republicans, who distrusted Cromwell, and those who wanted to give him greater power, of whom Montagu was one. Another of Cromwell’s keenest supporters was George Downing, now a well-established diplomat, MP and highly placed figure at the Exchequer; and about this time Pepys found himself his second and more official job as one of Downing’s clerks. The improvement in his income must have been very welcome as a way of impressing Elizabeth.
Downing saw that Pepys was talented, but Pepys, though always respectful of Downing’s intellectual powers, never liked him. You can understand why. An example of his brutality came in the winter of 1656, when the case of James Naylor, a Quaker accused of blasphemy, was brought before the House. It excited Downing particularly. Pronouncing that ‘We are God’s executioners, and ought to be tender of his honour,’ he urged that if Naylor escaped the death penalty, he should at least be pilloried, whipped – in the event he received 310 strokes – and branded, and his tongue bored through with a hot iron for good measure. ‘You ought to do something with that tongue that has bored through God. You ought to bore his tongue through,’ insisted the religious Downing.26 Sir Gilbert Pickering proposed that hard labour and imprisonment would be enough punishment, and Cromwell himself attempted to intervene, but the savage sentences were carried out, while Naylor expressed forgiveness of his tormentors, and the crowd who watched him branded and bored stood bare-headed and silent in sympathy. Downing’s combination of bigotry and cruelty was far removed from Pepys’s tolerance and what has been called his ‘miscellaneous religious enjoyment’.27
His other employer was back in England in the autumn. Montagu had justified Cromwell’s confidence in him and brought with him treasure captured from the Spanish fleet on its return from South America. Although it had actually been taken by another commander, the poet Edmund Waller greeted the new general-at-sea’s homecoming with the spoils of battle in an elegant couplet:
With these returns victorious MONTAGU
With laurels in his hand, and half Peru.28
The cargoes of the captured Spanish ships were thought to be worth £600,000 – one estimate put it at a million – and the money was desperately needed to pay for the war with Spain. Montagu wrote piously to Cromwell’s secretary of state, John Thurloe, ascribing the triumph to God: ‘Blessed be his name who hath looked upon the low condition of the nation, and hath turned the reproaches of wicked men with shame upon their own faces… Indeed, my heart is very much warmed with the apprehension of the singular providence of God in bringing this about’.29 But the singular providence of God did not prevent the treasure from being plundered on its way to London, and by the time it arrived to be counted half of it had disappeared. ‘A private captain, they say, hath got to his own share £60,000, and many private mariners £10,000 a man; and this is so universal amongst the seamen and taken in the heat of fight, that it is not possible to get it again, or any part of it.’ This was Thurloe’s account, and, while it may have exaggerated the figures, it acknowledged the real problem, which was the assumption by both officers and men that they were entitled to help themselves to a large part of what they had risked their lives for – the more so since most of them were owed many months of pay.30Montagu was personally blameless; it was his first experience of the troubles associated with prizes (ships seized at sea carrying valuable cargoes) that were to plague him later. For the present, in spite of the disappointment, he was thanked in parliament, and there was a day of official thanksgiving on 5 November. He remained long enough in London to attend some scientific meetings where there was also political talk, with Pepys at his side.31 Then he went home to Hinchingbrooke, leaving Pepys to sort out practical problems connected with prize goods.
Pepys’s letters to his master, the earliest of his writings to survive, offer cool glimpses of what was happening in London without venturing opinions of his own. He wrote about the debate over whether Cromwell should be succeeded by an elected ruler or one of his own family; he described rehearsals of a song with Latin words, specially written in Cromwell’s honour, giving the fatuous text without comment. A thumbnail sketch of the behaviour of Mr Feake, a preacher from the extreme religious sect of the Fifth Monarchists, newly released from prison, describes Feake preaching from a window, being silenced by order of the lord mayor and responding by saying he knows neither why he was imprisoned nor why released, and further, that ‘the Spirit which warranted him to speake was above Mr Protectors command, and therefore much more Mr Mayors’.32 There is just enough satirical edge in Pepys’s account to suggest he is more impressed by Feake’s wit than by the heavy hand of authority. More comedy inspired by religious differences came in a later letter, which tells how Cromwell, on being shown some ‘popish vestments’ confiscated from Jesuits, got his gentlemen to dress up in them, ‘causing abundance of mirth’.33
The whole year of 1657, so privately wretched for Pepys, was crammed with public events. In January Downing, speaking in the House, urged the crown on Cromwell. In March Montagu was in London to bear the sword of state when Cromwell gave an audience to parliament in the Banqueting House. Over the next months Cromwell was repeatedly urged to take the title of ‘King’ and repeatedly declined on grounds of conscience. He described kingship as ‘a mere feather in a man’s hat’; in the end he went close to taking the feather. In a ceremony in Westminster Hall in late June, with the coronation stone in place beneath the royal chair of Scotland, he put on a robe of purple lined with ermine and a sword of state, and swore the new lord protector’s oath of office, sceptre in hand. He took the title of ‘Highness’ for himself and his wife, and his sons became lords. There was a great deal of velvet and gold, there were prayers and shouts, trumpets and hurrahs. Montagu was at Cromwell’s side and accompanied him in the coach that drove him through the crowds to Whitehall.34 No doubt all the clerks of Whitehall and Westminster were in the streets for the occasion. Montagu’s ascent continued. Cromwell appointed him to his new Advisory Council. In August Admiral Blake died and was given a hero’s burial in the Abbey; it left Montagu as sole general-at-sea. At the end of the year he was offered, and accepted, one of Cromwell’s new peerages. He was now Baron Montagu.
Pepys’s lowly work continued meanwhile. He busied himself with dispatching goods, running errands to Lady Montagu’s family, the Crews, in Lincoln’s Inn and the management of servants in the Whitehall household. In December he was in trouble about a maid who had left to be married, without asking permission, to a fellow she had met at a cookhouse. Pepys, who had also omitted to ask permission for his marriage, defended himself from any complicity in her behaviour and claimed that he was never out at night himself except on Sundays, after dining at his father’s house. When immediate forgiveness was not forthcoming, he abased himself: ‘The losse of your Honours good word I am too sure will prove as much my undoing, as hitherto it hath beene my best friend.’35 He did not lose his position, but the gap between the situations of the two cousins remained wide and sometimes humiliating.
One trouble improved before the end of the year, while another got worse. A bare mention of his housekeeping expenses in a December letter indicates that things were at least partly patched up between him and Elizabeth: ‘my selfe and my wife’ were spending four shillings a week on their food.36 He had at least come clean to his employer about being married. But he was hardly able to enjoy Elizabeth’s return, since the pain produced by the stone had become too bad to endure. The bitter cold of that winter aggravated it, and he took the decision to seek a surgeon. He saw it as his only hope of escaping from ‘a condition of constant and dangerous and most painful sickness and low condition and poverty’.37
Surgery was not an easy choice. It was known to be a hideously unpleasant procedure and a gamble besides. ‘In this great and dangerous Operation, life and death doe so wrastle together, that no man can tell which will have the victory,’ warned one treatise for surgeons, and patients were recommended to make their peace with God before undergoing it.38 Yet, in spite of the risk, the operation was always in demand, because of the ‘scarce credible’ pain caused by the stone.39 Pepys chose as his surgeon Thomas Hollier of St Thomas’s and Bart’s, a staunch Cromwellian who had been operating for thirty years and had besides stitched up the wounds of many commonwealth fighters. The operation was not to take place in what was called the ‘cutting ward’ of the hospital, however. Pepys was to be a private patient and was happy enough to find himself an ideal arrangement. His cousin Jane, née Pepys and now Turner, his friend since the boyhood visits to her father at Ashtead, offered to nurse him in her house in Salisbury Court. Her husband was a successful lawyer, she had one or two small children, and she was an active, cheerful and generous woman. Unhesitatingly she put herself and her house at his disposal. Her offer meant he would be near his anxious parents. Pepys’s father went about mobilizing as many members of the family as he could to pray for Sam during his ordeal; the prayers of one maternal aunt, a ‘poor, religious, well-meaning, good humble soul’, ‘did do me good among the many good souls that did by my father’s desires pray for me when I was cut of the stone, and which God did hear’.40 No doubt Elizabeth prayed too; at least one hopes so.
Patients were advised to have the operation in the spring. Both cold and heat were considered unfavourable, and the surgeon hoped to have bright sunlight to help him to see what he was doing. Pepys duly settled on the end of March. The preparations took some time. The sick person was advised to cultivate a calm frame of mind and to avoid anger or sadness; he should feel confidence in the surgeon, even affection (all this modern-sounding advice comes from contemporary manuals). And surgeons were encouraged to give their patients an honest account of what they were to undergo. Wine was not allowed during the preparatory weeks, only sweet drinks made from almond, cucumber and melon, and a diet of fresh meat, chicken, pigeon, eggs, butter, barley and water-gruel. In the days before the operation Pepys would have been given warm baths – possibly an unprecedented experience – and kept in a warm bed. His belly would be rubbed with unguents, he would be bled in the arm and given gentle purges, until the final day, when he was left in peace and simply served with a good meal.
The operation was performed in the patient’s bedroom. On the day of the surgery a lightly boiled egg was recommended, and a talk with a religious adviser. For Sam, whether he ate the egg or spoke with a clergyman, the day was 26 March. He had a last bath, was dried, told to take a turn or two about the room and offered a specially prescribed drink made of liquorice, marshmallow, cinnamon, milk, rosewater and the whites of fifteen eggs – six ounces to be swallowed with an ounce of syrup of althea and other herbs, a large dose for a nervous man to swallow.41 After this he was asked to position himself on a table, possibly covered with a straw-filled bag into which he could be settled while the process of binding him up began. Some surgeons thought it wise to say a few reassuring words at this point, because the binding was terrifying to many patients. They were trussed like chickens, their legs up, a web of long linen strips wound round legs, neck and arms that was intended to hold them still and keep their limbs out of the surgeon’s way. The instructions for the binding alone take up several pages of one manual; and when it was done the patient was further bound to the table. He was shaved around his privy parts, and a number of strong men were positioned to hold him fast: ‘two whereof may hold him by the knees, and feet, and two by the Arme-holes, and hands… The hands are also sometimes tyed to the knees, with a particular rowler, or the knees by themselves, by the help of a pulley fastened into the table.’42 Meanwhile the surgeon lubricated his instruments with warm water and oil or milk of almonds: the catheter, the probe, the itinerarium, the specular, the pincers, small hooks and so forth; he also had powder to stop bleeding, sponges and cordial waters to hand. There were no anaesthetics, and alcohol was certainly not allowed to a patient undergoing surgery to the bladder.
The surgeon got to work. First he inserted a thin silver instrument, the itinerarium, through the penis into the bladder to help position the stone. Then he made the incision, about three inches long and a finger’s breadth from the line running between scrotum and anus, and into the neck of the bladder, or just below it. The patient’s face was sponged as the incision was made. The stone was sought, found and grasped with pincers; the more speedily it could be got out the better. Once out, the wound was not stitched – it was thought best to let it drain and cicatrize itself – but simply washed and covered with a dressing, or even kept open at first with a small roll of soft cloth known as a tent, dipped in egg white. A plaster of egg yolk, rose vinegar and anointing oils was then applied.43
Pepys, no doubt by now fainting with shock and pain, was unbound and moved to his warmed bed. A cold syrup of lemon juice, radishes and marshmallow was ready for him to drink.44 The first dressing was left for twelve hours, and the thighs were kept tied to help the wound heal naturally. There was no question of getting out of bed for a week. Broth, cinnamon water and soothing drinks were given during the first day of recovery, and when he felt like something more an austere vegetable diet of succory (chicory), endive and spinach was recommended. There was further anointing of his belly with oils; oil of earthworms was held in readiness against possible convulsions, and a purge given if necessary, but only after two weeks. Fever, insomnia and pain were all to be expected, and above all, you would think, acute anxiety. Was the bladder healing? How soon might he expect it to function normally again? If he moved, would he tear the just healing wound open? Had the surgeon missed the prostate, something the manual worried about? Pepys was the type of patient who is likely to have read it for himself. We know that he sought information and anatomical explanations from the doctors who attended him, as he recalled when he saw a corpse dissected at the Surgeons’ Hall in 1663, and took a particular interest in the bladder and kidneys.45
Recovery, for those who did not succumb to secondary infection, was expected to take thirty to forty days. Pepys made it in thirty-five. It was a triumph. By his own account he was himself again by 1 May: exactly two years later he wrote in his Diary for 1 May 1660: ‘This day I do count myself to have had full two years of perfect cure for the stone.’ Hollier could be proud of his work, especially considering the size of Pepys’s stone, described as ‘very great’ by his medical colleagues; it was as big as a tennis ball, according to Evelyn, who saw it later. Real tennis, the only kind then played, uses very slightly smaller balls than modern lawn tennis, but still with a diameter of about 2¼inches; the stone must have been exceedingly awkward to get hold of and extract through a three-inch incision.46 Fortunately Hollier was at the height of his powers as a lithotomist; that year alone he operated successfully on thirty patients. The following year, 1659, was not so good; his first four died, presumably because his instruments had picked up some infectious matter that no warm water or milk of almonds could clear.
Pepys’s joy was great, and he declared his intention of celebrating the anniversary of the operation with a dinner for the rest of his life, a plan that proved over-ambitious, but showed how seriously he felt that without the operation he could have expected nothing but sickness and poverty. He also preserved the stone carefully and, when he could afford it, had a special ‘Stone-case’ made for it, costing twenty-five shillings, in which he displayed it to others who might be considering the operation.47 His mother, who suffered from the same trouble, although less severely, was lucky enough to void a stone spontaneously two years later; she disposed of hers by tossing it into the fireplace.48 Nothing marks the difference in their characters more clearly: the tough old woman, incurious, sluttish even, and her neat, purposeful son, intent on understanding, mastering, classifying and teaching. For Sam, with his curiosity and optimism, his stone was something to be investigated, treated, boxed, labelled and shown to anyone interested, and doubtless to some who were not.
He came out of his ordeal with a revival of confidence and energy, and set about putting his life on a new footing. He had kept his two jobs, and both his employers were in high favour, which promised well for his own future. They were also out of town, conveniently enough, while he was recovering and re-establishing himself. Downing was in the Hague as Cromwell’s ambassador and part of his intelligence service, and Montagu was at sea, blockading Dunkirk in alliance with the French. While there Montagu invited Cardinal Mazarin to a magnificent banquet aboard the Naseby and gave him a tour of the ship. Mazarin was delighted and impressed not only by the ship but also by the young English general, and in particular by his personal devotion to Cromwell; he described him as ‘un des gentilhommes du monde le plus franc et mieux intentionné et le plus attaché à la personne de M. le Protecteur’. His attachment was well known; it was also mutual. Cromwell signed himself to Montagu, ‘your very affectionate friend Oliver P’.49 Cromwell’s power had never seemed stronger or more stable. The latest royalist conspiracies had been put down and punished, and his name was respected and feared all over Europe. Pepys knew he was serving men close to the very centre of this power. He saw old acquaintances from Cambridge improving their situations in its orbit. One of them, John Dryden, arrived in town and was found some clerking to do for his cousin Pickering, lord chamberlain to Cromwell’s household. Another was Pepys’s one-time tutor, Samuel Morland, who got himself a place in the intelligence service. Pepys himself needed to shake off the condition of a living-in servant and find a house of his own; and this he set about doing.