PART TWO
Pepys’s luck was that both his employers, Edward Montagu and George Downing, each of whom had made his career through Cromwell’s army and government departments, negotiated their tricky changes of coat with perfect finesse. The Diary tells us that throughout January 1660 ‘Mr Downing, master of my office’, staunch official of the commonwealth and servant of the Rump, was in his Westminster house. He kept Pepys busy, and not only on Exchequer business. Downing liked to entertain lavishly at a local French restaurant, and Pepys was sent out with dinner invitations to his friends and important contacts among the parliamentary leaders; one was Arthur Haslerig, who had been Downing’s colleague since they served together in the army in the 1640s. Pepys was on call at all hours: mealtimes, late at night and early in the morning, when he took instructions standing by his master’s bed. He was also set to making ciphers, which Downing needed in preparation for his return to the Hague as the government’s envoy. Pepys obliged – he was good at ciphers – but when Downing flatteringly asked him if he would like to accompany him back to Holland, he did not take up the offer; he had the excuse of his obligations to Montagu, and Downing did not press him. He was civil to Pepys on leaving and offered to do him any service that lay in his power; and Pepys, a shade nervous of this formidable boss, suddenly thought a parting present might be in order. He sent a porter to fetch his own fur hat, but the hat was brought too late. This was at the end of January. Downing left without giving a sign that he had anything in mind but the continuation of his diplomatic service to the existing government of England. Known to the exiled royalists as ‘the fearful gentleman’, he was particularly loathed for having persuaded the Dutch to drive Charles out of Holland. They hoped either to assassinate or to hang him.1
To Pepys’s considerable surprise, the next time he saw Downing, on 22 May, he had become Sir George, his knighthood conferred by Charles himself. With his inside knowledge of the commonwealth’s intelligence network, Downing had been trading his secrets for a royal pardon since March – no doubt using Pepys’s ciphers – and by May he had given away enough to be rewarded with the knighthood.2 His was a spectacularly successful conversion. Having come from puritan America to preach and fight for the commonwealth, he had served in its parliament, acted as Cromwell’s envoy in Europe, and been at the heart of the financial and diplomatic affairs of the republic. By 1660 he may have had enough of near-anarchy in England; he was also clear in his mind that he cared more for power and money than for any principle, and saw that he could sell his abilities to whoever was in a position to bid for them.
Montagu’s position was different, in that he had been negotiating with the royalists since the summer, although Pepys was equally in the dark about his intentions. Lying low at Hinchingbrooke throughout January and February, he relied on him for regular accounts of public events and gossip circulating in London, but gave away nothing in return. Pepys’s ignorance left him free to indulge his own political curiosity. In the early pages of the Diary he shows himself exploring ideological currents. In mid January he joined a republican club, the Rota, and went along to hear political theory discussed by a group of serious radicals. The founder, James Harrington, had published a book, Oceana, proposing a republic with a rotating senate, property limitations and a much extended franchise; another strikingly original member of the club was William Petty, physician, social planner, scientist and economist, who went on to become a founder member of the Royal Society and a good friend of Pepys. Cyriack Skinner, Milton’s pupil and friend, attended meetings, as did the one-time Leveller John Wildman and John Aubrey, at this date an enthusiastic republican; and there were other assorted politicians, City merchants, MPs and journalists who came to debate.3 They met at the Turk’s Head Coffee House in New Palace Yard to discuss current issues and political theory, taking a vote on topics such as how effectively ancient Rome had been governed. What made their meetings significant, and heady, was that they demonstrated a belief that discussion and argument were the best way of finding solutions to political problems. Pepys was intrigued and impressed; but the club did not last for more than a few weeks after he joined its sessions. Outside it, he observed that public opinion veered and shifted from day to day.
‘Strange, the difference of men’s talk,’ he wrote, almost with a shrug, as the news of General Monck marching south, General Fairfax laying down his arms in Yorkshire and General Lambert attempting to block Monck reached London. Later, he said he had discussed the exiled king’s prospects with friends, and even drunk a covert cup to him in mid February at Harper’s; if so, he was too cautious to put it in his Diary at the time. The Rota fizzled out in February, and most of its members gave up theorizing, or at least kept their heads down. Not quite far enough down in the case of Harrington, who was considered dangerous after the Restoration, arrested and imprisoned; but, though his health was destroyed in prison, his book survived, and Pepys did not forget him.4
The political uncertainty affected everyone’s lives in London during the early months of 1660. Several of Pepys’s friends among the clerks of the council lost their jobs in January, victims of power struggles at higher levels. The Diary, with its tumbling stream of information, is a reminder that the moods and demands of daily life easily blot out politics. Lack of cash was a more pressing problem for Pepys than any possible change of regime. He found himself so short of money in January that he had to borrow from Downing’s office to pay his rent, and was then forced to repay the loan by borrowing again from an obliging steward in the household of Lady Montagu’s father, John Crew. Pepys and his friend Peter Luellin agreed over a drink how much pleasanter their lives would be if only they owned estates and commanded private incomes. Instead, Pepys was kept busy visiting the Montagus’ eldest child, fourteen-year-oldjemima, under treatment at the house of a surgeon who had promised to straighten her crooked neck, and escorting her younger brother Ned to his boarding school at Twickenham. Their father might or might not be planning the overthrow of the state, but the children’s needs must still be seen to. Lady Montagu kept him supplied from Hinchingbrooke at Christmas.
The Montagus’ Whitehall lodgings were still subject to dispute: Pepys had to negotiate with Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, who had his eye on them. When Ashley Cooper gracefully gave way, Pepys was entrusted with the keys and felt free to throw a dinner party of his own there to impress his parents and friends. Elizabeth cooked, his brother Tom came, and his new friend James Pearse, who had been Montagu’s surgeon aboard the Naseby, brought his wife, noted for her beauty. After the guests had left, and Pepys had put in some work on Downing’s ciphers, he and Elizabeth sat luxuriating in the heat thrown out by the great log in the palace fireplace. It made a fine contrast to their meagre fires in Axe Yard.
There were other evenings when he stayed at home, knocking nails into the wall for hats and cloaks, or reading the poet Francis Quarles, whose Emblems offered delicious dialogues between Eve and the Serpent, and the Flesh and the Spirit. There was a difficult day when Elizabeth’s scissors and Jane’s book were both missing after a visit from his sister Pall, and Pepys had to go to Salisbury Court to speak sharply to her. Pall was set to be a troublesome presence, and another was Elizabeth’s brother, Balthasar, who enters the Diary bringing a present of a pretty black dog and goes away without asking for anything in return – uncharacteristically, as Pepys’s note implies. On that same day Pepys was at Salisbury Court again and heard that his brother John had won an exhibition from St Paul’s, but that he had also angered their uncle Robert at Brampton. This was regrettable, since uncle Robert had an estate to leave and must be kept in good humour. Pepys and his father went downstairs to the kitchen to talk undisturbed about the prospects of uncle Robert’s will.
Neither Pepys’s days nor his weeks had a regular pattern. He carried out business for Downing and Montagu as they required it, and took his meals at home or out as it pleased him on the spur of the moment. Elizabeth would have been wasting her time had she tried to plan meals in advance. He might breakfast with friends at Harper’s, where cold goose and turkey pie were on offer, dine out in the middle of the day with a friend met by chance – and Westminster and Whitehall were small enough to make such meetings more likely than not – and stay out in the evening too, enjoying pot venison and ale till midnight with Will Symons, Peter Luellin and his friend Jeremiah Mount, who had his own bachelor room in the palace.
These easy-going ways were interrupted on 2 February when Pepys had his first sight of Monck’s troops in the Strand. His immediate response was to take his small stock of cash to be hidden at Montagu’s Whitehall lodgings. From there, peering out of an upstairs window, he saw foot soldiers bawling for a free parliament and money, and threatening a confrontation with some cavalry; when the dispute resolved itself, Pepys took his money home again. The next morning he was out playing his pipe in St James’s Park in the sunshine and spent a good deal of the day agreeably with his Cambridge cousin Roger Pepys, son of Talbot; Roger was a good-humoured barrister about to celebrate his third marriage. A few days later the sight of soldiers treating Quakers roughly upset Sam again; he disliked religious intolerance and hated persecution. He had to go round to reassure Lady Jem, who was frightened by the arrival of the troops in London and still under doctor’s treatment. But what he mostly did was to walk the streets, eyes missing nothing, ears alert as he threaded his way east, west and east again, sometimes alone, more often with a friend, from Westminster and Whitehall to Charing Cross, from Somerset House to London Bridge, from St James’s to Fleet Street, from Gray’s Inn to St Paul’s, from the Temple to Aldgate, from Lincoln’s Inn Fields back to Whitehall. He knew the territory as well as an animal knows its runs.
The first set-piece of the Diary comes on 11 February with his account of the rejoicing in the City when Monck made his decisive move against the Rump parliament and humiliated Haslerig and its leaders by insisting that it was unrepresentative and that a free election must be called. Pepys gives several pages to a running description of his own long day from noon, when he went into Westminster Hall, heard that a letter from Monck had been delivered to parliament and saw the faces of the men in the Hall outside changed with joy. An angry Haslerig was plucked by the arm by a Quaker as he left and told, ‘Thou must fall.’ After this Pepys tells how he walked dinnerless with his friend James Chetwynd towards the City, and with some difficulty found a pullet ready-roasted at Temple Bar; how they went to Chetwynd’s law office, where Pepys sang some cheerful songs; on then to the Guildhall, and there, after much standing about and drinking, saw with his own eyes Monck greeted with a great cry of ‘God bless your Excellence’; and how the people pressed drink and money on Monck’s soldiers, and Pepys stopped at the Star Tavern to write a hurried letter to Montagu; and how the church bells began to ring all over the City. By ten o’clock that night he could count thirty-one bonfires from the spot in the Strand where he stood. ‘Indeed, it was past imagination, both the greatness and the suddenness of it.’ And when he got home at last and found John Hunt sitting with Elizabeth, he took her out again to show her the fires.
You can’t read these pages without being moved as Pepys becomes one with the crowd and its excitement and relief at Monck’s determination to break the political deadlock, and at the same time impressed by his capacity to watch, listen and take in everything. The entry may look as though it wrote itself, but the effects are worked with skill, the rhythm of the long unpunctuated sentences leading you through the streets, their momentum occasionally broken by natural pauses to drink, observe or talk. The three pieces of direct speech that do punctuate the passage raise the sense of immediacy, the warning to Haslerig, the greeting to Monck and the ‘God bless them’s of the people to the soldiers. Pepys is lucky enough, or skilful enough, to find Monck’s secretary Lock; he takes him to a tavern, extracts the substance of Monck’s letter to parliament directly from him and writes down its six points. This is businesslike stuff, but he also lets us feel how his own awareness of the importance of the day through which he is living expands and permeates everything as the hours go by: ‘But the common joy that was everywhere to be seen!’ he exclaims, as Bow bells start to ring. He has the good reporter’s gift for being in the right place at the right moment, and the structure and rhythm of his sentences show how well he has mastered his medium.
After this he sent off volleys of letters, many to Hinchingbrooke and one to Downing in Holland. The excitement in London gave no guarantees about the future, and he still committed himself to no direct expression of opinion in his Diary. On 20 February he mentions reading what he described as a well-written pamphlet in praise of the old form of monarchy. Later in the same day he went with Will Symons to the Rota Club and got the impression it would not meet any more; if it did, Pepys did not attend again. Visiting his parents in Salisbury Court, he noticed that the republican Praisegod Barebones had his windows broken in Fleet Street – again, he writes. John Crew urged Pepys to send for his master from Hinchingbrooke, since he was now assured of government employment again, and two days later, on Pepys’s twenty-seventh birthday, Montagu was indeed elected to the Council of State. Pepys decided to ride with his brother John, just starting his Cambridge studies, and to go on to Hinchingbrooke. But his communications were bad. He hired a horse and set off, only to learn in Cambridge that Montagu was already on his way to London.5
At Magdalene, Pepys observed that the fellows of his old college spoke in new voices: they had abandoned the puritan twang he remembered from his undergraduate days. The change amused him, and he joined in their toasts to the king and the royal family, still made strictly in the privacy of their rooms. Then he hurried back to London. He was not yet in Montagu’s confidence. On 2 March he observed that ‘Great is talk of a single person [as ruler], and that it would now be Charles [Stuart], George [Monck], or Richard [Cromwell] again.’ On the same day, Whitelocke’s diary entry is ‘Monck & Montagu voted to be Generals at Sea, both fit for the intended design.’6 Montagu was replacing Lawson as commander of the fleet, a crucial appointment at this juncture, but he was still uncertain about Monck’s ultimate intentions. On 5 March Pepys committed himself to ‘Great hopes of the King’s coming again’.
At last, on 6 March, Montagu opened his mind to Pepys and asked him, with exquisite politeness, if he could, ‘without too much inconvenience’, go to sea with him as his secretary, since he was going to need someone he could trust. He told him he believed the king would be restored and laid great stress on the affection of the people and the City – ‘at which I was full glad’. There were still republicans and adherents of Richard Cromwell about, and Montagu stressed that the king would have to carry himself ‘very soberly and well’ if he were to succeed, but for the first time, Pepys wrote, people felt free to drink the king’s health openly. And since this was good enough for ‘my Lord’, he would happily go with him to sea.
He had been to sea only once, on his dash to the Baltic the previous year. Then Montagu had a secretary called John Creed. Now Creed lost his job to Pepys. There was nothing wrong with Creed’s abilities, only his politics and religion. He was known as a committed puritan, while his elder brother Richard was an important commonwealth official who had been clerk to the Admiralty Committee from 1653 and deputy-treasurer to the fleet from 1657, and served both under Montagu and under Major-General Harrison, zealot and regicide. Richard Creed, ordered to leave London in March, refused to do so and was imprisoned in the Tower for several months.7 So the name of Creed would have been a liability to Montagu, while Pepys’s discretion, personal loyalty and open-mindedness recommended him. John Creed’s ambitions turned out to be stronger than his convictions, and he adapted to the changing circumstances with impressive speed, although he was not quite quick enough to keep his job as secretary. He did, however, manage to remain in Montagu’s service, and he and Pepys maintained from then on an awkward relationship, part rivals, part friends. Pepys frequently expressed his dislike of Creed’s meanness and deviousness in the Diary, and even plotted to do him out of his job again; yet the two of them spent many hours and days together over the coming years, swapping stories and advice, sometimes collaborating, and pacing one another with beady eyes up the career ladder.8 Some of Pepys’s mockery of Creed is patently unfair – for instance, when they took a Sunday drink in a tavern together, a year after the Restoration, Pepys’s gibe was ‘Mr Creed, who twelve months ago might have been got to hang himself almost, as soon as to go to a drinking-house on a Sunday’.9The change in Creed was of course part of the general change that affected everyone, including their master Montagu and Pepys himself. But although Creed tried hard, it took him time to lose the smell of his past, and five years later he was still talked of as ‘a fanatic and a false fellow’.10
Almost the first advice Pepys got when his promotion was known was from a sea captain telling him how to fiddle his expenses by listing five or six non-existent servants when he went on board and claiming pay for them all. It made an interesting introduction to the workings of the navy.11 When he went to the Admiralty offices he met anxious officials who had served the commonwealth for many years. Robert Blackborne, a man of influence as secretary both to the naval commissioners and to the customs, expressed his fear that the king would come in and ‘all good men and good things’ be discouraged; he did not expect to keep either of his positions.12 There was nothing Pepys could say to this. He had become overnight a person with the power to hire or fire, and found himself courted by men who hoped for jobs and offered presents – wine, a rapier, a silver hatband, a gown for his wife. On top of this dream-like change of circumstances he also heard that his uncle Robert had just declared he was making him his heir. One day in the not too distant future he would come into his own country estate at Brampton. It was exactly the good fortune he and Luellin had wished for a few weeks before.
With the news of uncle Robert’s will fresh in his mind, he sat down to write his own before setting off to sea. Everything was to go to Elizabeth except his books, which were bequeathed to John, although any books in French were to be hers. During his absence he arranged for her to go to the Bowyer family in Buckinghamshire. He wrote to inform Downing he was going to sea and suggested a substitute to take over his work. After this he spent a sleepless night worrying about the change in his circumstances and made a vow to give up drinking for a week. Meanwhile the Rump dissolved itself, elections were called, ‘and now they begin to talk loud of the King’.13 Monck began a purge of army officers and gave Montagu his support by moving troops out of Huntingdon, with the idea of pleasing the townspeople before the election.
Pepys took a short, melancholy leave of his parents, expressing the fear that he might never see his mother again; she had nothing worse than a cold, but he was in a heightened state of emotion. His leave-taking of his friends among the clerks was longer and jollier, and on 23 March he took a barge at the Tower and boarded the Swiftsure with a group of Montagu’s servants and his own clerk and boy to serve him, the first he ever employed. There was a gun salute for Montagu, and a busy time began. Pepys had to compile lists of ships and men and write out orders and letters to the council and abroad. Soon a personal letter came to him from Blackborne, addressed as he had never been addressed before, to Samuel Pepys, Esquire, ‘Of which, God knows, I was not a little proud’. A few days later the astute writer appeared in person and surprised Pepys further by commending Charles Stuart as ‘a sober man’ whom he would be happy to serve. Sobriety was evidently the quality new royalists most wanted to see in the king: Montagu had said he would need it, Blackborne claimed it for him, and when Pepys saw Charles for the first time a few weeks later he also described him as ‘a very sober man’.14
From this point two stories are being told in the Diary. One is a breezy account of shipboard life, in which Pepys enjoyed his snug cabin, set out to learn sea terms, walked on the deck to keep sickness at bay as they put out to sea and bravely dealt with rain blowing in and soaking his berth. He was always prepared to make the best of things. He made music with Montagu’s clerk Will Howe, consumed pickled oysters and radishes and, leaning out of a porthole, appreciated the sight of some handsome women aboard a passing East Indiaman through a friendly lieutenant’s telescope – there were no women aboard his ship. He relished the drama of rattling guns and dense clouds of smoke that enveloped the whole fleet when they exchanged salutes with the three coastal forts of Walmer, Deal and Sandown. He played ninepins on deck; and he argued pleasurably with the ship’s chaplain, who, unlike Pepys, believed in extempore prayers. He explored below decks to see the ‘massy timbers’ and the storerooms where wine and provisions were kept. The insides of fighting ships were painted red, and the sailors lived among the powder magazines and stores, slinging their hammocks between decks less than a man’s height deep and inured to the stink made up of the bilge in the hold, their own sweat and the supplies of living chickens and meat that started the voyage fresh but was soon high: beef and pork were what seamen expected to eat. The officers were fed more delicately in their finely panelled quarters; Montagu had his own fireplace, a surprising arrangement in a wooden ship. Officers paid visits from one ship to another, dining one another and drinking well, and Montagu encouraged music-making, joining in himself on occasion, one evening with a rude song against the Rump.
The other story that emerges from the Diary is the political one. From the Swiftsure Montagu and his party transferred to the Naseby, his former and much loved flagship, with the figure of Cromwell treading down six nations on its prow. He could hardly go to greet the king from a ship so decorated, and carpenters were summoned to start transforming its appearance. In London Blackborne busied himself arranging for new flags of acceptably royalist design to be rushed to the fleet.15 The ship’s decorations were not the only problem. Montagu started going through the list of his senior officers, getting rid of radicals and religious zealots, and dispatching others to far-off destinations to keep them out of the way. Most must have been personally known to him from the days when they fought together. It was a delicate and painful business, and he was nervous. He told Pepys he had doubts about even his own flag-captain’s loyalty. A gun salute that blew out many of the windows of his ship as he joined Lawson’s squadron at Tilbury may have increased his anxiety: was it enthusiastic greeting or warning? As it turned out, Lawson had decided to make his accommodation with the new regime, and his submission sent a useful message to all the other officers. Blackborne’s eagerness to serve Montagu reinforced Lawson’s signal to the captains who had been his friends for years that, if they hoped to go on working, they too had better change their coats.
Everything was moving in Montagu’s direction. Word arrived that he was elected to parliament for Weymouth, with both Dover and Cambridge also eager to have him as their MP. After this came the most important news, from London, where the newly elected parliament received a ‘Declaration’ from Charles in Breda. It was drawn up by his chief adviser, Edward Hyde, a subtle diplomat, and promised a free and general pardon to all who within forty days claimed it and asserted their loyalty – the only exceptions to be those parliament chose to exempt. Liberty of conscience was also promised; parliament was to decide what should happen to sequestered royalist estates; and Monck’s troops and the navy would have their arrears paid. Hyde’s master stroke was to leave all contentious matters to be settled by parliament – later. Charles himself asserted his devotion to the Protestant faith and asked for divine blessings on parliament. On receiving the Declaration, parliament voted £ 50,000 for the king. This was on 1 May, and the news reached Montagu, and Pepys, the next day in a letter from Thurloe.16 Hearing that Londoners were drinking the king’s health on their knees in the streets, Pepys remarked that this was a little too much – in the privacy of his Diary. The same kneeling was going on in Deal, and maypoles, prohibited for so long, were being raised, topped with the royal flag.
Montagu instructed Pepys to read out Charles’s Declaration to the assembled officers and to follow it with the loyal response he had carefully written out for them. And although Pepys felt that ‘many in their hearts were against it’, they agreed to it formally; they were not going to make trouble now.17 As for the seamen, they had no reservations at all and shouted ‘God bless King Charles’ with genuine joy when Pepys spoke to them, no doubt throwing their caps in the air as they did so. Everyone had become a royalist. The state’s arms were to be removed from every ship, painters sent for from Dover to replace them with the king’s.
Visitors came and went ceaselessly in small boats, admirals and Admiralty commissioners, rejoicing royalists and nervous grandees eager to prove their perfect enthusiasm for the return of Charles Stuart. ‘General Penn’, the formidable sea captain who had fought alongside Blake and against Prince Rupert, lately appointed an Admiralty commissioner by Monck, came to dine with Montagu on his way to Holland and the king. Lord St John, a neighbour of the Montagus in Huntingdonshire, one-time lord chief justice and ennobled by Cromwell, arrived seeking a passage to Flushing, eager to justify himself to Charles. A triumphant Penn returned with a knighthood, but St John got the thumbs-down and crept back reduced to plain Mr St John, his career finished, to retire to the country and later into exile.
Ashley Cooper, who had been in correspondence with Charles since March, made the crossing and said enough to be pardoned and made a privy councillor, and soon a peer. Pepys’s old tutor Samuel Morland took himself to Breda and got his knighthood on 20 May.18 Lesser men schemed to get on board just as eagerly, one of them Pepys’s brother-in-law, Balthasar, who came with a bold request to be taken on as a ‘reformado’ (it meant serving at sea without a formal commission, but allowed the status of an officer). Since Baity was a wholly inexperienced twenty-year-old, this was awkward, and, although Montagu was civil to him at dinner and promised to put in a word for him, he was sent back to London with nothing more than a small loan from Pepys and letters to Elizabeth. Peter Luellin also turned up for a week, supped with Pepys in ‘the great cabin below’ and shared his breakfast oysters; and John Creed appeared, made himself useful and remained.
On 10 May Montagu’s eldest son, Ned, came aboard, and on the same day a message from Monck arrived, urging Montagu to fetch the king at once rather than hang about waiting for instructions from parliament. It would do him no harm with the king, and if it made him some enemies too, they were of no account. Montagu took the advice, and sailed on the 12th, leaving strict orders with the ships he left off the English coast to bring over no one but his cousin, his wife’s cousin and his brother-in-law. The importance of associating his own family with the great enterprise was something he kept steadily in mind. He had already written to the king asking him to look favourably on his father-in-law, John Crew, fearful that his political and religious affiliations would tell against him.19
Pepys was responsible for procuring the ‘rich barge’ that would be used to bring Charles ashore, and the professional musicians, trumpeters and fiddlers who joined the already crowded ship. The painters were still at work, and tailors were cutting out crowns and stitching flags, as well as preparing gold and silver embroidered clothes for Montagu to wear when he met the king. They anchored at Scheveningen, the port for the Hague, on 14 May. Letters were sent to inform Charles of Montagu’s arrival, carried ashore by his nephew Edward Pickering, who accompanied an official delivering a trunk containing £10,000 for the king from parliament. Pickering told Pepys that they found Charles and his attendants dressed in cheap and shabby clothes, and that when he saw the money he became ‘so joyful, that he called the Princess Royal and Duke of York to look upon it as it lay in the Portmanteau before it was taken out’. The scene tells everything about the conditions of his exile and explains a good deal of his conduct afterwards.
Over the next ten days Pepys made sightseeing trips ashore, days of intense experience in which he absorbed architecture and pictures, shopped for presents – small baskets for Elizabeth and Mrs Pearse, books for himself – lost and found young Ned, gawped like everyone at the king and assorted members of the royal family and at a gout-stricken Hyde receiving visitors from his bed, who spoke ‘very merrily’ to Pepys and Ned. Pepys contrived to kiss one fashionably dressed Dutchwoman in a coach and failed to make headway with another in a guest house where, by Dutch custom, men and women shared bedrooms; although, he wrote frankly, ‘I had a month’s mind to her’.20 There were other adventures, singing with a musical friend from Cambridge at the Princess Dowager’s country house, ‘a haven of pleasure in a strange country’, where there was an echo to increase the enjoyment; and a visit to a village famous for its thirteenth-century countess, who had given birth to 365 children at one delivery.21 Pepys was a determined tourist, and he was not going to miss anything on offer if he could help it.
Back on board, he heard more news from London. The new speaker of the House had proposed that all who had held arms against Charles I should be excluded from pardon. This was an absurdity, given that half the nation had opposed him. The speaker was reproved, but the House went on to exclude from pardon all who had taken any part in the king’s trial. It ordered the seizure of their estates, the closure of ports to prevent their escape and their arrest. Montagu knew that his brother-in-law Gilbert Pickering was one of those named, but there was nothing he could do at present. Pepys saw that the court party at the Hague was ‘growing high’, the clergymen among them sure of the restoration of all the Church lands; there was now nothing ‘to hinder them and the king from doing what they have a mind’. It was a shrewd account of the situation, since Charles was being restored without any formal conditions or limitations on his power.
For Charles, men such as Montagu, who had held arms against his father and him for years, had redeemed themselves by their change of heart and the help they were giving him now. Pepys asked Montagu in his cabin when he had been converted to the king’s cause and was told it was in the summer of 1659, in the Baltic, when he realized what sort of treatment he was likely to get from the commonwealth. He did not add that this was also when he was approached by Charles’s envoys with promises of great rewards if he would change his allegiance.22 Now, after so many months of danger and caution, the time had come for his rewards; and during the next days and weeks King Charles, with a proper sense of obligation to the man who had delivered the fleet to him, conferred these. He received an earldom, lands with a value of £4,000 a year and the Order of the Garter; he was also made a privy councillor, a Treasury commissioner, master of the Wardrobe and vice-admiral of the navy, under the new lord high admiral, who was to be the king’s brother James, duke of York.
Much of this was announced when the king came on board, on the same day that he formally renamed the ships. The Naseby became the Royal Charles, the Richard became the James, and the Dunbar became the Henry, named for the king’s youngest brother. Walking on the deck of his new Royal Charles, Charles told stories of his escape from England after the battle of Worcester. Pepys, standing within earshot, was moved by his account of the hardship he had endured and wrote down a summary immediately afterwards.23
Before the royal party left the ship at Dover, Pepys managed to get a word with the duke of York, who told him his name was already known and promised future favour. Then the royal party swept on to the shore. Montagu was ‘almost transported with joy’ at the perfect success of all his arrangements, while Pepys, casting himself in a favourite role as the plain man, expressed his pleasure at the behaviour of the king’s pet dog ‘which shit in the boat, which made us laugh and me think that a King and all that belong to him are but just as others are’.24
Pepys heard from Elizabeth, who had returned to London, that some cousins were suggesting he might be knighted by the king; he brushed aside the idea. ‘We must have a little patience and we will rise together,’ Montagu told him, following this elegant forecast with a more down-to-earth, ‘In the meantime I will do you all the good Jobbs I can.’25 It was his way of making clear to Pepys that he had proved himself efficient, intelligent, discreet and loyal in his duties, and would be rewarded.
He arrived back in London on 9 June. Things were in such turmoil that he did not return to Axe Yard for nearly two weeks, camping out instead at his parents’ house. ‘At my father’s found my wife’ was all he had time to write about their reunion, on Whitsunday, as he hurried round town for Montagu in the hot weather. Blackborne was assiduous in his attendance, Creed was much in evidence also, and Pepys managed a couple of meetings with his old friends from clerking days. Baity irritated him by asking him again to find him ‘a place for a gentleman that may not stain his family’ – when, as Pepys complained, ‘God help him, he wants bread.’26 There were more important matters to attend to. Montagu was hesitating over his choice of titles and visiting the new Admiralty offices installed at Whitehall Palace by the duke of York. ‘Court attendance infinite tedious,’ noted Pepys after accompanying him there one evening. Another was spent at Montagu’s elbow, looking over his list of captains and marking more of those he intended to put out of naval service as politically unreliable.
They were not the only ones for whom the times were difficult. Montagu’s sister, Elizabeth Pickering, ‘desired my assistance with my Lord, and did give me, wrapped up in paper, £5 in silver’: her husband was in danger – perhaps already in custody – and she was reduced to this humiliating procedure to reach her brother.27 Montagu did help, and Sir Gilbert Pickering became one of the very few who had sat at the trial of Charles I who escaped a death penalty, saved by his brother-in-law and £5 for Pepys.28 Some were contriving to escape abroad, some were in hiding, others gave themselves up, trusting to a pardon. Haslerig was already in the Tower; so was Thomas Harrison, who had fought at Marston Moor and Naseby alongside Montagu.29
Another of his old colleagues, Bulstrode Whitelocke, spent the month of June suing for mercy – not a heroic story but an instructive one. First his wife went to the MP and lawyer William Prynne, once an ally and the hero of the parliamentarians, who treated her ‘more like a kitchin wench than a gentlewoman’. Then he approached Monck and was dismissed brutally. Next he was dunned for £500 by a peer who told him he would make sure he was excluded from the general pardon if he did not pay up. He paid and then, at the cost of £250 to the man who arranged it, had an interview with the king, to whom he kneeled for pardon. Two years’ income from his estates were said to be the royal price. Finally, to his former friend Edward Hyde, now lord chancellor, he paid another £250, plus (he noted carefully) £32.18s.8d. in legal fees for an official pardon, written out and sealed. His life was effectively saved by money, helped along by his willingness to accept humiliation. It was not the end of his troubles, but he felt able take up his legal practice once more.30
Montagu, appointed master of the Wardrobe, a government department responsible for all the furniture, liveries and robes required by the court, took Pepys along to inspect the building that came with the job. It stood at Blackfriars, near Puddle Dock – where Queen Victoria Street is today, close to the church of St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe – and they learnt that for the past eleven years, since 1649, it had been run by a charitable body in the City as an orphanage and training school for needy children. A group of the children now came to Montagu, dressed in their tawny-coloured uniforms, to sing to him and present him with a petition in which they asked not to be turned out. But turned out they were. ‘My Lord did bid me give them five pieces of gold at his going away,’ wrote Pepys, and that was that.31
By the end of the month, Montagu was able to tell Pepys that he had secured him the job of clerk of the acts with the Navy Board, at a salary of £ 350 a year. And if Pepys had little idea what was involved in terms of work and was not even sure whether he wanted to keep the job or trade it in, he began to find out at once that it was worth more than the salary, as offers of money came in from people hoping to profit from his good fortune. He resigned his clerkship at the Exchequer, calling Downing a ‘stingy fellow’ in the process. The new position came to him solely through family patronage, making it an appointment of exactly the sort Pepys himself objected to later; as Gerald Aylmer, historian of the seventeenth-century civil service, has written, ‘on one view the Restoration delayed serious administrative reforms for 150 years’.32
A house came with the Navy Board job, and the story of how Pepys moved into his house, like so much that was happening all around, is both entertaining and shameful. The Navy Office houses were in Seething Lane, just west of Tower Hill, in a very large, rambling building divided into five substantial residences and office accommodation, with a courtyard and a communal garden stretching north-west to the edge of Tower Hill. There was an entry gate, shut at night by the resident porter, making it an early gated community.33 Pepys liked the place so much when he went to take a look on 4 July that he began to worry in case he was not allotted a house as promised, but excluded, or ‘shuffled out’. He was back with two of his new bosses two days later to take possession of the office, and he spent the next day there making an inventory of papers. Some of the officers of the departing regime were naturally still about, and his new clerk, Tom Hayter, was in fact one of the existing clerks. A week after Pepys’s first visit, he was annoyed to see a ‘busy fellow’ arrive, apparently to select the best house for Lord Berkeley, one of the new commissioners. Pepys reacted swiftly. He hurried home to Axe Yard, collected a pair of sheets and invited Hayter to accompany him back to Seething Lane, where he knocked at the door of the house he wanted. It was inhabited by Major Francis Willoughby, a commissioner since 1653 and a friend of Blackborne; Willoughby had visited the Naseby in April, as Pepys had noted in his Diary. Perhaps this made him less abashed at announcing that he wanted to spend the night in Willoughby’s house. Willoughby courteously agreed, Pepys enjoyed a good night’s sleep, and two days later asserted his right to the house. He received permission to start on some alterations and showed Elizabeth over ‘my house’ – a breathless sequence that leaves you impressed by his determination and effectiveness, if not by his sensitivity.
Few could allow themselves sensitive feelings in the great changeover. On the same day he observed that Major-General Whalley’s house was now the property of Madam Palmer – Barbara Villiers – already established as the king’s mistress. Houses and jobs were changing hands, and it was better to be moving in than out. And on the 17th, after a day’s delay caused by rain, he moved with his family into Seething Lane, just thirteen days after first seeing the house. He expressed a little disappointment when Major Willoughby sent for his own things nine days later. Not surprisingly, Willoughby chose to return to New England, from where he, like Downing, had come to serve the republic.34
In July Pepys recorded his patron’s entry into the House of Lords. He was too tactful to recall that Montagu had been there before, as a baron, among Cromwell’s lords. His reinstallation was as the earl of Sandwich, with the further titles of Viscount Hinchingbrooke and Baron Montagu of St Neots. From then on he was known as Lord Sandwich, and will now become Sandwich in this book. Titles make confusion for us, but the new name must have been welcome not only for the honour but also for drawing a distinct line under one life as he embarked on another. He was thirty-five in July, halfway through the span allotted by the Bible, and it made a good moment to leave behind the young man he had been, pious parliamentarian, fellow officer, friend, neighbour and servant of the Cromwells. Enter instead the courtier, soon to be dispatched to fetch the queen mother, Henrietta Maria, from France, for a ceremonial visit to the country from which he had helped to drive her out. His son, little Ned, became Lord Hinchingbrooke, and a year later he and his brother Sidney would both be sent to France to receive the polished education that their father considered appropriate. Their mother was now countess of Sandwich; she remained in the country with the younger children through all the turmoil of the king’s return and did not see her husband until he joined her for a fortnight in August. Meanwhile he received the thanks of the Commons, who decreed that his service in bringing over the king should be recorded in their journal, ‘there to remain for your Honour so long as this World endures’.35 Pepys knew he owed every part of his good fortune to Lord Sandwich and rejoiced with him. How could he do otherwise? The world had turned over, and he had come out on top. The nation showed its joy at the restoration of the king with such a show of unanimity that Charles himself joked that ‘it was his own fault that he had been abroad so long, for he saw nobody that did not protest he had ever wished for his return’ – and Pepys rejoiced with the nation, and with his personal triumph.36
Sandwich secured him a second job, at the Privy Seal, where all petitioners to the crown went to have their documents signed, usually for a fee; Pepys had only to go in when he could, sign petitions and collect his fees. The money was useful, but it was tedious, and kept him busier than he liked to be. He complained that he had no time left to read newspapers or keep up with public affairs: ‘For this month or two, it is not imaginable how busy my head hath been.’37 He could not ride the crest of the wave all the time. Balty kept clamouring for a share in the good fortune, and even Pepys’s father pestered him for a job at the Wardrobe, with such persistence that he took to avoiding him. Pepys also had his moments of doubt about it all. In early August he was reluctant to give up the lease of his house in Axe Yard, ‘for fear of a turn’. He meant, in case of the overthrow of the monarchy and a return to a republic. He had seen enough turns in his lifetime to be able to imagine another easily enough.
Sandwich necessarily remained the most important figure in his life, and the two men were in almost daily contact when he was in town. They were brought together by public business, Navy Board meetings, the Privy Seal Office and a new task of receiving the oaths of allegiance to the crown, required from every naval employee. Pepys also continued his old work of preparing ‘my Lord’s’ accounts and running his errands. And he respectfully noted many of Sandwich’s dinner engagements: with the king at the Tower, with Chancellor Hyde, about to become the earl of Clarendon, in Kensington with this lord or that, or at a supper with General Monck and the royal family. He kept watch on Sandwich’s health too, giving even a slight cold three mentions in the Diary. He noted when Sandwich sent him half a buck from Hinchingbrooke, ‘smelling a little strong’, it was true, but Pepys passed it on to his mother. All the while their intimacy grew, as they sometimes walked and talked in the Whitehall gardens, or attended the Whitehall chapel together. Churchgoing was expected, but Sandwich continued to declare himself without faith. In July he called himself a ‘Stoick and a Sceptic’, in October Pepys wrote, ‘I perceive my Lord is grown a man very indifferent in all matters of Religion’, and two weeks later Sandwich again asserted his perfect scepticism.38 The earl’s disavowal of the faith of his youth was understandable, since for him and his former party religion had failed. The people had turned against their puritan zeal, except for those who had tried to make it into a political instrument, and that had failed too. Sandwich began to remember that his father had been favoured by royalty – James I made him a knight of the Bath – and told Pepys it was his sense of gratitude for that royal favour that had brought him back to obedience to the present king.39 It was a neat piece of justification.
This new Sandwich began to utter the kind of opinions aristocrats were expected to deliver and to make jokes like a man of the world. He thought sermons should be replaced in the churches by homilies that admonished the people to political obedience; no doubt he could recall many stirring sermons from his youth, given by radical puritans like Hugh Peters, now under arrest.40 The king asked Sandwich to bring his sister, Princess Mary, over from Holland – Pepys was impressed by the royal hug of farewell as he set off – and when he got back he invited Pepys to dine with him alone to discuss his great expenses and need for more money, adding, however, that ‘he believed he might have anything that he would ask of the King’.41 A few days later he again entertained Pepys, this time on a Sunday, with stories of the duke of York getting Chancellor Hyde’s daughter Anne with child after falsely promising her marriage. Pepys was riveted by the juicy gossip, relayed in French to keep it from the servants, but he was also somewhat disconcerted by this new aspect of my Lord’s talk and put it down to his indifference to religion. Manfully, he wrote down Sandwich’s version of a saying of his father’s, that a man who gets a wench with child ‘and marries her afterward it is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap it upon his head’.42
The robustness of Sandwich’s conversation must have been partly a distraction from the painful aspects of his new position. The trials of those held responsible for the execution of Charles I were due in October, and he was required to sit on the bench, because these were show trials in which loyalty to the new regime must be displayed. It was a frightful situation for him, considering that some of the so-called regicides had been his friends and all of them his colleagues. The day before the trials began, Sandwich took to his bed, feeling unwell. He also sent for his wife; her loyal and undemanding presence would be a comfort. Then he took his place on the bench. Ashley Cooper, who had done his best to protect former colleagues, was in the same situation.
Others who faced the imminent prospect of their old comrades being hanged, drawn and quartered took to drink. Blackborne uncharacteristically sat drinking healths one after another with Creed and Pepys at the Rhenish winehouse in King Street on the day some of the sentences were passed. Pepys himself went on 13 October to see the first execution, that of Thomas Harrison, who behaved with flawless courage. He had protested at his trial that he had been kept closely confined for six months and not allowed any counsel. ‘If I had been minded to run away I might have had many opportunities,’ he said, truthfully, for he had chosen to give himself up. ‘But being so clear in the thing, I durst not turn my back nor step a foot out of the way by reason I had been engaged in the service of so glorious and great a God.’43 He had begun his army career under the earl of Essex and fought at all the great battles; now, sustained by his faith, he endured the procedure of being first hanged and then cut down, still alive, and chopped to pieces. When executions are public, crowds gather to see them, drawn mostly by the deep ghoulish streak that exists in all of us. For some there was also the wish to witness and learn from another man’s courage at the end. Pepys, in one of his most famous formulations, wrote that Major-General Harrison looked ‘as cheerfully as any man could do in that condition’. Coolly impersonal, even perky, the remark may seem, but it was not just perkiness; Pepys had been under the knife and at risk of death himself, and he had a proper respect for courage. He added, distancing himself from the behaviour of the people, that they gave great shouts of joy when the head and heart were shown, and he went straight on to report respectfully Harrison’s, and Mrs Harrison’s, declared trust in the judgement of Christ.
Pepys did not devote the rest of his day to higher thoughts any more than one of us, turning from famine or child murder on television, remains sombre an hour later. Other ideas supervene, we even try to cheer ourselves up, as Pepys did. He collected two friends from Whitehall and took them to a tavern for oysters. Then he went home and lost his temper with Elizabeth for leaving things lying about, and kicked and broke the little basket he had brought her from the Hague. After this he withdrew and put up shelves in his study. The flat account of what he did is more powerful than any attempt to moralize or lament.
There were more days on the bench for Sandwich, and more executions. He sent for Pepys on the evening of that of Cromwell’s brother-in-law John Jones and ‘seemed to be in a melancholy humour’.44 His servant Will Howe put this down to large losses at cards, enough to upset a man no doubt, but there were more painful reasons. A few days later his spirits bounced up again to an almost manic high as he boasted to Pepys over dinner about how he would have a French cook and a master of his horse, and put his lady and child into black patches, the latest fashion fad, which Pepys found particularly surprising. ‘But he is become a perfect Courtier,’ he wrote in the Diary afterwards.45 Lady Sandwich was present at the dinner, and made the mistake of saying she would like to marry their daughter Jem to a good merchant, unleashing a scornful comment from her husband, who told her he would rather see Jem with a pedlar’s pack at her back than let her marry a common citizen. The countess had displayed the values of the puritan household in which she was reared and was being told unceremoniously to adjust to her new rank and the new society that had supplied it. Pepys went home thoughtfully, noticing on the way the limbs of some of the dead men set on Aldersgate, ‘which was a sad sight to see; and a bloody week this and the last have been’.46 In November he read a book justifying the trials, which calmed some of his feelings about them.47
The navy treasurer, Sir George Carteret, who had known Charles for many years, assured Pepys that he was so compassionate that, left to himself, he would acquit all the regicides, and it is true that he had no liking for the executions – of the twenty-nine condemned that autumn, only ten were put to death. But many languished to slow deaths in prison, prices were put on the heads of some who escaped abroad – £300 for Ludlow, for instance – and there were more victims to come.48 The king took no pleasure in cruelty, but he did not flinch from killing his enemies. This was made clear when a tiny group of about fifty Nonconformist rebels invoking ‘the heads upon the gates’, i.e., the executed regicides, and expecting King Jesus to arrive, rose up in London the following January: fourteen were executed, and their heads set up on London Bridge. And Pepys was horrified when he learnt that the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw were to be dug up and hanged on a gallows on the anniversary of Charles I’s execution. In the Diary he called Cromwell ‘Oliver’, as he had been known in the days of his protectorship, and deplored ‘that a man of so great courage as he was should have that dishonour’ – adding carefully, as if in fear of an eye over his shoulder, ‘though otherwise he might deserve it enough’.49 Sandwich was away, escorting Henrietta Maria back to France, when the ghastly exhumation took place, and Pepys kept away from it, but Elizabeth was among the thousands who went to watch the show. For sixpence you got a good close look at the body of Cromwell in his coffin. His head was cut off and set up on a pole at the south end of Westminster Hall, next to the houses of parliament and the most important public meeting place in London, where Pepys inevitably saw it in the course of his work within a few days. Every man, woman and child was bound to see it sooner or later; because there it remained, as a warning against rebellion and republicanism, throughout the twenty-five years of Charles II’s reign.50 Pepys kept his own counsel, but it is worth remarking that when, towards the end of his life, he put together a collection of prints showing the royal families of England, he included Cromwell among them – not one but several portraits, all representing him as a great ruler – and Richard Cromwell too, as well as the arms of the commonwealth.
Sir George Downing displayed his change of heart and mind with particular dedication. In January 1662, when he was again acting as English envoy in the Hague, he got news that three old commonwealth associates who had escaped abroad at the Restoration were in Germany and might be lured to Delft. They were Sir John Barkstead, one of Cromwell’s major-generals; Miles Corbet, a lawyer of manifest integrity; and John Okey, in whose regiment Downing had served as chaplain when he first came to England. All three were implicated in the trial and execution of Charles I. Downing bribed a Dutchman whom they believed to be their friend to lay a trap for them and wrote his own cool description of their capture. He went himself with some armed men to the house where they were lodging, knocked and rushed in as the door was opened. The three were sitting
by a fyere side with a pipe of tobacco and a cup of beere, immediately they started to have gott out at a back Doore but it was too late, the Roome was in a moment fulle. They made many excuses, the one to have gott liberty to have fetcht his coate and another to goe to privy but all in vayne. Corbet did not lodge in that house but had that night supped with Barkstead and… had we come a moment later hee had beene gone,… but fynding himself thus seized on, his body fell to purging upwards and downwards in the very roome afer a most strange manner.51
After some difficulties with the Dutch, Downing had his victims shipped to London, where they were held in the Tower, tried and sentenced to the usual penalty for traitors. They said they had sought only to serve God and their country, and on the scaffold Okey forgave his former chaplain ‘that did pursue me to the very death’. Downing was rewarded with a baronetcy.
There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of the nation wanted to see Charles II on the throne. They had had enough of fighting, they had never approved the execution of the king, they resented the puritan suppression of Christmas and Mayday festivals, dancing, the theatre and children’s games on Sunday. Men like Sandwich and Ashley Cooper, who had admired and supported Cromwell, were appalled by the disorder that followed his death and by the power of the military commanders. They came to believe that the restoration of the Stuarts was the best course, and they helped to bring it about as peacefully and as honourably as possible; and they also did very well out of the settlement that was reached. But there was a price to pay, in the betrayal of friends and principles; and although Charles gave them a warm welcome and heaped rewards on them, they carried the mark of men who had changed their loyalties, and were never allowed to forget it. In the next decades this would bring Sandwich to tragedy and lead Ashley Cooper into a fierce struggle against Charles; and in both these episodes Pepys would find himself involved.