Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (57 page)

He was particular about his clothes. He ordered a coat of velvet, what he called a ‘close-kneed coloured suit’ with stockings of the same colour together with belt and a new gilt-handled sword, as well as a black cloth suit with white lining. In the autumn of 1663 he bought a new shag-gown, trimmed with gold buttons, and two periwigs. He then decided that the wig-maker should cut off his hair and make another periwig with it, and ‘after I had caused all my maids to look upon it and they conclude it to become me’. Soon after he also purchased a black cloth suit trimmed with scarlet ribbon as well as a cloak lined with velvet. ‘Clothes’, he wrote, ‘is a great matter.’ He went into the street ‘a little to show forsooth my new suit’. A poor fellow was one ‘that goes without gloves for his hands’.

It was a society of spectacle and display, in which all the leading characters were also actors. In his bright costume and new wig he might promenade with his wife in certain select neighbourhoods, such as Gray’s Inn, followed by ‘a woman carrying our things’. It was quite usual to stop and enquire of a ‘common’ person if he or she were ready to fetch this or to deliver that for a small fee. Servants could be severely treated, even in the relatively peaceful household of the Pepyses; Pepys sometimes beat his boy until his wrist hurt and Elizabeth was obliged ‘to beat our little girl; and then we shut her down into the cellar, and there she lay all night’.

His adventures with women are well enough known. When he was observed kissing a woman in the window of a winehouse, someone in the street called out, ‘Sir, why do you kiss the gentlewoman so?’ and threw a stone towards the window. He decided to join the congregation of St Dionis Backchurch after he had noticed that a ‘very great store of fine women there is in this church’. He was always ogling and touching. One young lady, in the congregation of another church, took some pins out of her pocket to prick him if he molested her. He wrote in code about his sexual encounters; ‘mi cosa naked’, for example, was ‘my bare penis’. He ‘had his way’ and ‘got it’, as he said, on many occasions. Yet he could be less demanding. ‘I got into the coach where Mrs Knipp was, and got her upon my knee (the coach being full) and played with her breasts and sung.’

Violence in the streets was not uncommon. During one altercation ‘I did give him a good cuff or two on the chops; and seeing him not oppose me, I did give him another’. The constable and his watch were there to prevent mischief or riot; they once found Pepys’s backyard door open ‘and so came in to see what the matter was’.

Pepys often ‘fell to cards’. Cards, and gaming in general, were the delight of the age; gambling was endemic in all classes of the society, and lotteries were used as a method of public finance. On one afternoon he paid 18 pence to join a ‘coffee club’ of the Rota that met in the Turk’s Head Tavern in Gerrard Street; coffee-houses had come to London eight years before, and had immediately become a success among the merchants and lawyers of London. Yet the merchants and lawyers were not alone. Roger L’Estrange complained that ‘every carman and porter is now a statesman, and indeed the coffee-houses are good for nothing else’. No regard was given to ‘degrees or order’ but in the coffee-house, according to Samuel Butler, the author of
Hudibras
, ‘gentleman, mechanic, lord and scoundrel mix’.

In a city dominated by conversation and speculation, by news and gossip, they were the single most important venue of public recreation and of public information. London was characterized by its coffee-houses, and it became common to address letters to a citizen ‘at the Grecian’ or ‘at the Rainbow’. Macaulay said that they almost became a political institution. Yet they were not wholly concerned with ‘news piping hot’. On one visit Pepys ‘sat long in good discourse with some gentlemen concerning the Roman empire’. At the end of 1664 he stepped into a coffee-house to taste the new drink of ‘Jocolatte’, ‘very good’.

And then ‘after dinner we had a pretty good singing and one, Hazard, sung alone after the old fashion’; music and song were everywhere. There were ‘song rounds’. While he waited for a lawyer, ‘I sat in his study singing’. Before he retired to his bed, he often played the lute. In one of the rooms of a coffee-house he heard a variety of Italian and Spanish songs as well as a canon for two voices on the words ‘
domine salvum fac regem’
. When he came for recreation to Epsom Wells he observed some townsmen, met by chance, singing together in company. Pepys and his young male servant were accustomed to sing psalms and motets together. During the time of the plague he hired a boat that already had a passenger, so that ‘he and I sung together the way down’.

Like many of his contemporaries he seemed to have an open mind about the vagaries of faith and devotion. On one Sunday, ‘I went out and looked into several churches’; if he liked the sermon he might stay until the end, but there were times when he slept through the oration. When the inventor Sir Samuel Morland and his wife entered a church with two footmen in livery the congregation took ‘much notice of them’, especially on ‘going into their coach after sermon with great gazeing’. He observed also ‘that I see religion, be it what it will, is but a humour … and so the esteem of it passeth as other things do’. There was always room for superstition, however. He carried a hare’s foot as a charm against illness, but a companion noticed that it did not have the proper ‘join’ in it. No sooner did he touch his friend’s charm than ‘my belly begin to be loose and to break wind’.

In pursuit of his duties at the Navy Office it was a matter of routine to accept gifts from various claimants to office or privileges. On one occasion he was offered in turn a rapier, a vessel of wine, a gown, and a silver hatband, in return for ‘a courtesy’. His master, Mountagu, told him that ‘in the meantime I will do you all the good jobs I can’ for making money. He was eager to make a profit from the hiring of some ships for service in Tangiers; he received a share of the proceeds ‘which I did not demand but did silently consent to it’. When he was handed a packet containing money, he emptied out a piece of gold and some pieces of silver, all the time averting his eyes so ‘that I might say I saw no money in the paper if ever I should be questioned about it’. Commerce of every kind was the essence of the state, and Pepys was keen to acquire a good wife for his brother ‘worth two hundred pounds in ready money’. He noted that at court all was ‘lust and gain’.

He had some interesting encounters. He recorded how one gentleman had served eight different governments in one year, 1659, ‘and he did name them all, and then failed unhappily in the ninth, viz that of the king’s coming in’. He was beside the king when a Quaker woman delivered a petition to him; Charles argued with her, ‘she replying still with these words, “O King!” and “thou’d” him all along’. He conversed with an experimenter, John Spong, who told him ‘that by his microscope of his own making he doth discover that the wings of a moth is made just as the feathers of the wing of a bird’. While he and Spong were talking, several sectarians were arrested for attending a service at a conventicle. Pepys added that ‘they go like lambs, without any resistance’. It was common for men and women to weep in this period, whether out of joy or sorrow.

This was an age of much observation and experiment. An acquaintance brought to his house one evening a 12-foot glass, through which they endeavoured to see the moon, Saturn and Jupiter. He met Robert Hooke in the street by chance, and the experimenter told him that he could estimate the number of strokes a fly made with its wings ‘by the note that it answers to in music during their flying’. Pepys had previously attended a lecture by Hooke on the art of felt-making. While travelling by boat from Rotherhithe to Gravesend, he read Robert Boyle’s
Hydrostatical Paradoxes
.

He noticed ‘a fine rarity: of fishes kept in a glass of water’. When he purchased a watch he found it so marvellous that he kept it in his hand ‘seeing what a-clock it is 100 times’. He visited the country house of a goldsmith, Sir Robert Viner, where ‘he showed me a black boy that he had that died of a consumption; and being dead, he caused him to be dried in an oven, and lies there entire in a box’. Black servants, slaves brought back from West Africa, had become very fashionable.

On Thanksgiving Day, 14 August 1666, in celebration of a recent sea victory over the Dutch, family and friends were very merry ‘flinging our fireworks and burning one another and the people over the way’. They then began ‘smutting one another with candle-grease and soot, till most of us were like devils’. They drank, and danced, and dressed up. One man put on the clothes of the serving boy and danced a jig; Elizabeth Pepys and her female friends put on periwigs. Pepys sometimes observed that, where there was no company, there was little pleasure.

Some phrases are redolent of the period. ‘He talked hog-high.’ ‘I am with child that…’ or ‘I am in pain for…’ meant I am anxious and impatient to be told something or for an imminent event. Someone’s antics ‘would make a dog laugh’. ‘I did laugh till I was ready to burst.’ ‘As she brews, let her bake.’

As he was writing, one winter night, a watchman came by with his bell under the window and cried out, ‘Past one of the clock, and a cold, frosty, windy morning.’ And so to bed.

39

And not dead yet?

The early hopes for Charles’s reign had now faded. It had become clear enough that he was a very poor match for Oliver Cromwell, and the erstwhile cavaliers were bitterly hostile to a corrupt court and a mismanaged government; the revenues were misused while the king himself was at the gambling table with what John Evelyn described as ‘vast heaps of gold squandered away in a vain and profuse manner’. The great questions of state and of religion were left unsettled in an atmosphere of squabbling, cynicism, corruption and faction-fighting; the only thing that the king’s ministers shared was mutual hatred. The king did not have the patience or the intellect to formulate clear lines of policy or enunciate the ideas that might sustain them. He was reticent and secretive, ever intent upon concealing his opinions on men or on measures. Clarendon wrote to the duke of Ormonde in 1662 that ‘the worst is, the king is as discomposed as ever, and looks as little after his business, which breaks my heart, and makes me and other of your friends weary of our lives’.

Yet Clarendon himself, the most loyal and substantial figure of the regime, was also under attack. In the autumn of 1662 it emerged that he had been the prime agent in the sale of Dunkirk to the French; it had been captured by Cromwell’s men from the Spanish, but the one continental possession in English hands was now to be delivered to the nation’s old enemy. There were good reasons for the sale; the port was costly to maintain and was in no way essential to the national interest, but its surrender (so it was called) was considered to be an act of betrayal. Clarendon was accused of accepting French bribes, and the great mansion he was then building in London was dubbed ‘Dunkirk House’. The merchants in particular feared that Dunkirk would be used as a base for privateers intent upon seizing their ships; when the mobs of London grew restless at the news of the sale, the gates of the city were shut and double guards posted in various sensitive locations.

At the close of the year the king attempted to heal the religious divisions of the nation by making a ‘declaration of indulgence’ in which he expressed his regret at his failure to introduce ‘a liberty for tender consciences’; he proposed to ask parliament to give him the power to dispense some of his subjects from the Act of Uniformity and to begin removing penal legislation directed at those Roman Catholics ‘as shall live peaceably, modestly and without scandal’. It is the clearest possible evidence that he believed parliament had gone too far in imposing Anglican orthodoxy upon the realm. For this, he may also have blamed Clarendon. The lord chancellor was at the time crippled with gout and forced to keep to his house; he was in no position to object.

Yet the king’s appeal was ignored. When the fourth session of the ‘Cavalier Parliament’ assembled in February 1663, the Commons refused to ratify the declaration. The king therefore was obliged to drop the matter and retire from a possible confrontation. It was in truth a significant failure, since he had proved himself unable to sustain the power of his royal prerogative in religious issues. In the spring of 1663 a new Militia Act was passed that reformed the local militia and placed them under the control of the lords-lieutenant of each county; they were given adequate funds, and were thus able to recruit more men for their service. It was reported that the measure was necessary to combat the continual threat of conspiracy and sedition, but it was feared by some that the king might use the troops for other purposes.

The navy rather than the army, however, was the priority. When parliament resumed once more in the spring of 1664 one of its first measures was a declaration or ‘trade resolution’ against the Dutch, complaining that ‘the subjects of the United Provinces’ had invaded the king’s rights in India, Africa and elsewhere by attacking English merchants and had committed ‘damages, affronts and injuries’ closer to home. It was believed that the Dutch wished to establish a trade monopoly throughout the known world, which was as dangerous as the ‘universal monarchy’ sought by Louis XIV.

The republic was therefore seen as a threat to English ships and to English commerce, but of course its very existence as a republic could be interpreted as an essential menace to the kingdom of England. The religion of the enemy was Calvinist in temper, and it was feared that the Dutch would support the cause of their co-religionists in England; they could thereby sow dissension against the king and the national faith. The ‘trade resolution’ was an aspect of the Anglican royalism asserted both by Lords and Commons. The fervour of the Commons, in particular, was matched by their actions. They agreed to raise the unprecedented sum of £2.5 million to assist the king in his prosecution of hostilities.