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First published in Great Britain in 2020 by TLS Books
Copyright © Max Hastings 2020
Text from The Diary of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys,
edition originally published in 1893, is in the public domain
Introduction copyright © Max Hastings 2020
Cover illustration © Steve Estvanik/Shutterstock
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Contents
Cover
About the TLS
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
About this Book
About the Author
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Also from TLS Books
About the Publisher
Introduction
By Max Hastings
One summer’s day long ago, a government bureaucrat recorded a resolution to set his worldly affairs in order, ‘the season growing so sickly, that it is much to be feared how a man can ’scape having a share in it – for which the good Lord God bless me, or be fitted to receive it’. This officer of the Crown was, of course, Samuel Pepys, and the year was 1665. Bubonic plague raged, killing thousands a week in London with a population of less than 400,000. Pepys’s great diary lays bare the terrors, horrors and the abyss of ignorance which prevailed almost four centuries ago. But these are matched today under the menace of the coronavirus. Only the rates of mortality, God be thanked – the words the diarist himself would have used – have so far been vastly lower in our own era.
The plague was just one among a procession of disasters and upheavals of Pepys’s time that he recorded in his diary, interwoven with the minutiae of his daily life, between January 1, 1660 and May 31, 1669. He then abandoned the chronicle, which was already over a million words in length, believing that penning it each evening by candlelight was fatally weakening his eyesight. The portrait that he painted of Britain, and more especially of London, is one of the most important historical narratives ever compiled. He details court intrigue, his own role as a key manager of the Royal Navy in the Dutch Wars, the Fire of London and, of course, the plague. Moreover, thanks to the diary we know more about the life and thoughts of its author than those of any other human being until the twentieth century. If he was not a great man, he achieved a great thing.
Born in 1633 in Salisbury Court, off Fleet Street, Pepys was a tailor’s son whose brains, industry and unexpectedly influential connections enabled him to study at St. Paul’s School, and then at Magdalene College, Cambridge. As a teenager he witnessed the execution of King Charles I in 1649, then got his start in government service under the Commonwealth. On October 10, 1655, he married the fourteen-year-old Elisabeth de St. Michel, a descendant of French Huguenot immigrants. Their subsequent relationship was fractious and childless – the latter much to Pepys’s sorrow. His almost obsessively priapic enthusiasms never ceased to include Elisabeth, but also included a long succession of chance encounters and steady relationships, one with the wife of a man who pimped her in pursuit of government custom; another with his wife’s paid companion Deb, whom he loved to distraction.
As a young man Pepys suffered agonies from bladder stones, so great that on March 26, 1658 he bore the mortal risk and terrible pain of having them surgically removed. Every year thereafter, he celebrated and recorded the anniversary of this event, which transformed his health for the better, though bladder problems recurred in his later life. Following the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660, Pepys prospered as a protégé of the Earl of Sandwich. In 1665, the year of this selection from the diary, he rose to become Surveyor of Victuals for the Navy and Secretary of the Tangier Committee, an important body which managed Britain’s short-lived North African colony. In his diary he also wrote constantly about his finances: increasing his own income was a perennial obsession, as it is for most of mankind. Although only mildly corrupt by the standards of government servants of his time, he contrived to become a modestly wealthy man. He noted the irony that 1665, a terrible year for many British people, was an unprecedentedly profitable one for himself.
And so to the devastating outbreak of disease in London, for which Pepys provides the most vivid account. Plagues carried by rat-borne fleas struck European cities every decade or two: those of 1592, 1603, 1625 and 1636 had been notably bad; 1625’s had killed 40,000 Londoners. From the outset, however, 1665 promised worse. The diary recorded the plague’s presence in Amsterdam, then on April 30 comes the first mention of its arrival in London: ‘Great fears of the sickeness here in the City, its being said that two or three houses are already shut up’. The next mention is on May 28, as a footnote to an account of a love intrigue. The seventeen-year-old Lord Rochester had eloped with Elizabeth Malet, a teenage heiress. Pepys’s patroness, Lady Sandwich, was much interested, because she wanted her own son to marry Malet. The diarist wrote: ‘My poor Lady, who is afeared of the sickness and resolved to be gone to the country, is forced to stay in town a day or two or three, to see the event of it’.
Here was an important social clue about plagues: they fell most heavily upon the poor, who had no means of escape from their crowded, filthy city hovels. The rich, by contrast, fled to country estates, as indeed they do to this day. In 1665 the King and Court decamped first to Hampton Court, then to Oxford. Sessions of parliament were postponed, theatres – which Pepys adored – stayed closed until November 1666. The fashion for wigs suffered a temporary eclipse, because of fears that they were made from the hair of plague victims. Pepys lamented the near-disappearance of passage boats from the Thames, because so many watermen were dead. Grass grew among the cobbles in Whitehall, for lack of workmen to remove it.
One notable stay-behind in the City was the great financier Sir Martin Noell, who died on September 28. Ten days later, Pepys reported that Noell’s widow was dead with grief, ‘but it seems that nobody can make anything of his estate, whether he be dead worth anything or no, having dealt in so many things, public and private, as nobody can understand whereabouts his estate is – which is the fate of these great dealers in everything’. The diarist’s tone is sententious, but also vividly twenty-first-century – think hedge-fund managers.
Pepys described a grim walk to the Tower: ‘Lord, how empty the streets are, and melancholy, so many poor sick people, full of sores, and so many sad stories overheard as I walk, everybody talking of this dead, and that man sick, and so many in this place, and so many in that. And they tell me that in Westminster there is never a physician. And but one apothecary left, all being dead’. Pepys’s own man, Dr. Burnett, perished, after performing an autopsy on a plague victim.
In August, Pepys dispatched his wife and her household to rural sanctuary in Woolwich, locking up their spacious house in Seething Lane. He also persuaded the King that the Navy Office should move to Greenwich. Yet he himself continued to travel often into London, and to take extraordinary risks, such as visiting the plague burial pits in Moorfields, to satisfy his consuming curiosity. He worked on for a time at the office in Seething Lane, telling a colleague, an old Cavalier who decamped to Greenwich: ‘you, Sir, took your turn at the sword. I must not therefore grudge to take mine at the pestilence’. Why did he himself not succumb, as he often feared must happen? There has been speculation that he had fluke immunity: Claire Tomalin, in her splendid biography, notes that certain people lack appeal to fleas. Pepys described how, when he shared a bed with a friend in Portsmouth in 1662, ‘all the fleas came to him and not to me’. He was nonetheless deeply alarmed one July day, when his servant Will Hewer lay down on his bed, ‘ill of the head-ache, which put me in extraordinary fear, and I studied all I could to get him out of the house, and set my people’ – meaning the other servants – ‘to do it without discouraging him’.
Word-of-mouth carried most tidings; rumour raged. After Pepys disappeared from London for a time, to visit the fleet on official business, he returned to write: ‘I hear by everybody how much my poor Lord of Sandwich was concerned for me during my silence awhile, lest I had been dead of the plague in this sickly time’. In another entry he recorded: ‘I was in great trouble all this day for my boy Tom, who went to Greenwich yesterday by my order and came not home till tonight – for fear of the plague. But he did come tonight’. Among quack remedies, he chewed tobacco and was given by his friend Lady Carteret a bottle of ‘Plague Water’, probably made with herbs, though he does not record whether he drank it. On September 6, he watched fires burning in the street, ‘as it is through the whole City, by the Lord Mayor’s order’. The City had appointed physicians to advise on palliatives: woodsmoke was their first suggestion.
It is unsurprising that the Lord Mayor was desperate: in the last week of August more than 6,000 deaths were attributed to plague, and Pepys remarked that this was probably an under-estimate, ‘partly from the poor that cannot be taken notice of through the greatness of the number, and partly from the Quakers and others that will not have any [church] bell ring for them … It troubled me to pass by Come Farme, where about 21 people have died of the plague – and three or four days since I saw a dead corpse in a Coffin lie in the close unburied – and a watch is constantly kept there, night and days, to keep the people in’ – here was an early, brutal lockdown, such was harshly enforced upon overwhelmingly poor families – ‘the plague making us cruel as dogs one to another’.
Despite this great catalogue of woe, which persisted until the year’s end, part of the fascination of Pepys’s account is that his spasms of fear and dismay are interspersed with far lengthier passages about his happiness. He was rising fast in the public service, and continued to indulge his passions for buying clothes, books, even a twelve-foot telescope. He wrote deploring the mass burials, but concluded that entry ‘and so to bed, mighty merry’. Passionately gregarious, he continued to revel in his evenings of music, to carouse in taverns, and of course to dally with every woman who would give him countenance. ‘At noon to dinner with my Lord Bruncker, where Sir W. Batten and his wife come by invitation, and very merry we are – only that the discourse of the likelihood of an increase in of the plague this week make us a little sad. But then again, the thought of the late prizes [ships taken from the Dutch, by which Pepys profited] makes us glad’.
In September, he wrote ‘I do end this month with the greatest content, and may say that these last three months, for joy, health, and profit, have been much the greatest that ever I received in all my life in any twelve months almost in my life, having nothing upon me but the consideration of the sickliness of the season during this great plague to mortify me. For all which the Lord God be praised!’. At least 70,000 Londoners had died, more than one in six of the capital’s inhabitants, yet on New Year’s Eve Pepys was still celebrating his prosperity. His wife was back in Seething Lane, and ‘to our great joy the town fills apace, and shops begin to be open again’.
It is important to recall that the plague was only one among a procession of nigh-apocalyptic experiences that Pepys’s generation lived through: the Civil War, Charles I’s execution, the transition from Commonwealth to renewed kingship. Scarcely had Londoners recovered their spirits from the plague when the 1666 Great Fire devastated the city. In the following year, a Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway, its cannon audible at Court, harrowing and humiliating the Royal Navy. Through all these desperate events, Pepys and many of his fellow-countrymen contrived successful lives. His diary is sometimes mocked for its confessions of cupidity and debauchery. Yet absolute frankness about his own feelings, desires and weaknesses is foremost among the qualities that makes this a great work. The Diary is, above all, a monument to courage, the triumph of the human spirit.
After 1665, Pepys continued to prosper, though he suffered his share of sorrows, tragedies and setbacks. His wife Elisabeth died in November 1669, shortly after they had paid a tourist visit to France and the Low Countries. He was promoted to Secretary of the Admiralty Commission in 1673, and elected MP for Castle Rising in Norfolk. Three years later, he became Master of Trinity House and in 1684 President of the Royal Society. He nonetheless suffered severe political harassment from people who thought that this fussy, pushy government functionary had become too big for his boots. In 1679, charges were brought against him, fabricated probably by Lord Shaftesbury, that he was a papist who had leaked naval intelligence to France. These obliged him to resign the Secretaryship of the Admiralty until he was cleared. Though restored to favour and to his post in 1684, following the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and ascent to the throne of William and Mary four years later, he was twice imprisoned for some weeks, on suspicion of Jacobitism. Although never convicted, he retired from public life, aged fifty-seven, and ended his life deep in the countryside at Clapham. At his death in 1703, he was buried alongside his wife in St. Olave’s Church in the City.
Pepys bequeathed his superb library of more than 3,000 volumes, including the diary, to his old Cambridge college in their original bookcases. They arrived at Magdalene, where they still repose, accompanied by instructions that the books should be ‘strictly reviewed and where found requiring it, more nicely adjusted’. The six diary manuscripts had been kept in shorthand, a system known as tachygraphy, interspersed with fragments of French, Latin, Italian, Spanish and occasional profanities. At some point in his later life, Pepys made fair copies, and had his loose-leaf notes bound into six volumes. Several bowdlerized versions were published in the nineteenth century, the first by a clergyman who expended three years on decrypting the seventeenth-century shorthand without noticing that the diarist had provided a key, which lay not far down the shelf, in the Pepys Library. The existence of this makes it plain that, while the author wished to conceal his record from his contemporaries, he hoped that it would be read by future generations.
Every edition until the late-twentieth-century omitted the most explicit passages, detailing the diarist’s sexual adventurism. Only in the 1970s was a definitive edition, brilliantly edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, published in nine volumes with a Companion and Index, one of the great academic publishing achievements of modern times. Latham wrote that Pepys’s descriptions of great events ‘achieve their effect by being something more than superlative reporting; they are written with compassion. As always with Pepys it is people, not literary effect, that matter’. The other famous diarist of that period was John Evelyn – the two men knew each other quite well – but the latter seems a dull dog by comparison with the almost hyperactive tailor’s son.
Modern readers will be attracted to Pepys’s narrative of 1665 chiefly by its account of the impact of the Plague. Yet this volume offers boundless other insights and joys, because its author was a man of such parts. In his professional life, he was an exceptionally able and industrious administrator. He has been hailed by maritime historians as one of the architects of the Royal Navy. Meanwhile, he possessed cultural interests that ranged across every aspect of human endeavour. He was curious about everything, pursuing a relationship with the great Isaac Newton, building his remarkable library, studying the lute, viol, violin, flageolet and recorder.
Many have paid homage to Pepys’s unique work, which is among my own favourite bedside books. His avowed vulnerability, conceit, lust, hope, ambition, jealousy, pettiness; surges of passion, happiness, cruelty, misery; mirror those experienced by almost all mankind. Above all, perhaps, as a lesson for our own times, the diarist’s accustomed bedfellow was fear: of mortal disease, poverty, unemployment, revolution, invasion, natural disaster. The Plague of 1665 cannot be compared in scale to the Covid-19 outbreak of 2020, because the former killed a vastly higher proportion of its victims, and a far greater percentage of the population of London, and indeed every European city that it struck. Conversely, it was not a worldwide scourge, as is today’s virus: the peoples of the seventeenth century did not voyage as we do; indeed, remoteness spared many English rural communities from infection. All the same, the perils faced by all mankind for centuries are reflected in his pages, which also serve to remind us how privileged has been the condition of our own recent generations, by comparison with those which has gone before. Pepys’s account of his life and age is not that of a man for all seasons, but instead that of a man for all centuries.
MAX HASTINGS, May 2020
JANUARY 1665
1st (Lord’s day). Lay long in bed, having been busy late last night, then up and to my office, where upon ordering my accounts and papers with respect to my understanding my last year’s gains and expense, which I find very great, as I have already set down yesterday. Now this day I am dividing my expense, to see what my clothes and every particular has stood me in: I mean all the branches of my expense. At noon a good venison pasty and a turkey to ourselves without anybody so much as invited by us, a thing unusual for so small a family of my condition: but we did it and were very merry. After dinner to my office again, where very late alone upon my accounts, but have not brought them to order yet; and very intricate I find it, notwithstanding my care all the year to keep things in as good method as any man can do. Past 11 o’clock home to supper and to bed.
2nd. Up, and it being a most fine, hard frost I walked a good way toward White-hall; and then being overtaken with Sir W. Penn’s coach, went into it, and with him thither, and there did our usual business with the Duke. Thence, being forced to pay a great deal of money away in boxes (that is, basins at White-hall), I to my barber’s, Gervas, and there had a little opportunity of speaking with my Jane alone, and did give her something, and of herself she did tell me a place where I might come to her on Sunday next, which I will not fail, but to see how modestly and harmlessly she brought it out was very pretty. Thence to the Swan, and there did sport a good while with Herbert’s young kinswoman without hurt, though they being abroad, the old people. Then to the Hall, and there agreed with Mrs. Martin, and to her lodgings which she has now taken to lie in, in Bow Street, pitiful poor things, yet she thinks them pretty, and so they are for her condition I believe good enough. Here I did ‘ce que je voudrais avec’ her most freely; and it having cost 2s in wine and cake upon her, I away, sick of her impudence, and by coach to my Lord Bruncker’s, by appointment, in the Piazza, in Covent-Guarding; where I occasioned much mirth with a ballad I brought with me, made from the seamen at sea to their ladies in town; saying Sir W. Penn, Sir G. Ascue, and Sir J. Lawson made them. Here a most noble French dinner and banquet, the best I have seen this many a day and good discourse. Thence to my bookseller’s and at his binder’s saw Hooke’s book of the Microscope,
[“Micrographia: or some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by Magnifying Glasses. London, 1665,” a very remarkable work with elaborate plates, some of which have been used for lecture illustrations almost to our own day. On November 23rd, 1664, the President of the Royal Society was “desired to sign a licence for printing of Mr. Hooke’s microscopical book.” At this time the book was mostly printed, but it was delayed, much to Hooke’s disgust, by the examination of several Fellows of the Society. In spite of this examination the council were anxious that the author should make it clear that he alone was responsible for any theory put forward, and they gave him notice to that effect. Hooke made this clear in his dedication (see Birch’s “History,” vol. i., pp. 490–491)]