Samuel Pepys: a LIfe
Stephen Coote
Hodder & Stoughton £20, pp350
Buy it at BOL
For the past 175 years, the name Samuel Pepys has been synonymous with an activity that none of his contemporaries knew anything about - writing his diary, which was first deciphered and published more than a century after his death. He wrote it in shorthand and partly in code, and so far as we know never shared its contents with anybody, not even his most intimate friends, and certainly not his wife.
Had it not been for his diary, Pepys would be remembered, if he were remembered today at all, as a reforming administrator, a confidential adviser to King Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, (later James II), and to the statesmen that served them. Pepys was, if it is not an oxymoron to say so, a great civil servant, the principal architect of the Royal Navy that was to play such a crucial role in the nation's destiny during the centuries that followed.
According to the scholar J.R. Tanner, Pepys was 'one of the best officials England ever had'. He became a grandee, a Member of Parliament, master of Trinity House, a governor of Christ's Hospital, deputy lieutenant for Huntingdonshire and president of the Royal Society. He was the prime mover in the building of the Royal Naval Hospital in Greenwich. But such achievements, solid and worthwhile though they are, do not normally inspire biographies more than three centuries after the subject's death. It is the diary that makes Pepys a figure of universal and lasting interest.
Pepys's origins were humble. His father was a London tailor, his mother a laundress. He attended St Paul's School, then, as now, among the best in the land (Milton had been a schoolboy there 20 years earlier) and won an exhibition to Cambridge, where he took a degree at Magdalene. Afterwards, he joined the staff of his influential cousin Edward Montagu, one of the most powerful figures in Cromwell's Protectorate, who, by the time of Cromwell's death, had assumed active control of the Navy. It was at this point, when Pepys was 26 years old, a young clerk on the make, that he began to keep a diary. Less than a decade later, he stopped, mistakenly fearing that the strain on his eyesight might result in blindness.
Pepys's diary, therefore, covered fewer than 10 years of his 70-year-long life, but this was to be one of the most eventful decades in English history. Already, as a horrified schoolboy, Pepys had been present at the execution of Charles I. Now, he sailed with the fleet that brought back Charles's son from exile and witnessed the moment when the young Charles II landed at Dover. As the royal barge headed for the shore, one of the spaniels 'shit in the boat, which made us laugh and me to think that a king and all who belong to him are but just as others are'.
He was present, too, at the coronation, having secured a good vantage-point some seven hours before the king arrived. These dramatic scenes were recorded in the diary in calm, clear, masculine prose. A few years later, Pepys stayed in London during the plague, while most of those who had somewhere to go fled to the countryside, and the following year he was able to report at first hand the Great Fire of London.
These terrible events are magnificently described, and they are interspersed with telling social and psychological detail: for example, his joking response to the king, who asked the passing Pepys where his boat was headed, and received the facetious reply, 'to wait on our masters in Westminster'. After this quip, Pepys wondered if he had gone too far.
The diary has achieved a notoriety for what it reveals of Pepys's sex life: seducing vulnerable women and groping young chambermaids. It is perhaps too easy to condemn Pepys, as this biographer does, for being a lecher and a hypocrite.
Pepys was at least honest with himself about what he did. He had married for love a girl of only 15 with no fortune or connections; unluckily, she suffered from a recurrent abscess on her labia, which made intercourse difficult. Pepys soon discovered that he was infertile, perhaps another reason for his promiscuity.
His patron, Montagu, rose to become Earl of Sandwich, and Pepys followed in his wake. He quickly showed the qualities of an efficient bureaucrat. 'My delight is in the neatness of everything, and so cannot be pleased with anything unless it be very neat.' He was supremely methodical and possessed an ability to master an immense amount of detail quickly; he was an excellent speaker and a fluent writer. He became a wealthy man, a leading figure in naval affairs and, as such, he had to answer to a committee of the House of Commons for the unpreparedness of the Navy during the Second Dutch War, when the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway and set Chatham on fire, one of the most humiliating episodes in British naval history.
After the attack, the popular outrage was such that Pepys feared for his life and property. He took to wearing a belt round his waist containing £300 in gold, and sent the rest of his valuables away to the country, among them the volumes of his diary, 'which I value much'.
Why did Pepys keep a diary? There are tantalising hints in this biography. Pepys was making a balance sheet of his world: 'The historian was writing a history of himself... his diary became his means of coming to an understanding of a new way of life.' To modern readers, it may seem odd that such a man should have felt such a compulsion to write so ambitiously and so revealingly.
Unfortunately, Stephen Coote is no writer himself and thus his capacity to help us understand Pepys is limited. His prose is littered with grammatical errors, non sequiturs, false antitheses and words misused. To choose just one example, he seems to think that schadenfreude means a guilty delight in erotica, rather than a malicious pleasure in the misfortune of others.
Just as his style is clumsy, so is his history shaky. The figures in Pepys's life are not so much portrayed as caricatured. This poorly edited biography adds nothing new to the much better one by Richard Ollard issued by the same publishers in 1974.
Far from offering us a new perspective on Pepys, Coote's book makes him less, rather than more understandable. We see Pepys as through a glass, darkly; his character remains an enigma.
