The career of the old tailor’s son was a remarkable one. He left a yet quiet home, and a not yet jealous wife, to attend Sir Edward Montague upon his expedition to the Sound, in March, 1658.
On his return from this expedition he became a clerk in the Army Pay Office, and commenced keeping his incomparable Diary,—the record of his profitable toil, his immoderate vanity, and his little rogueries. As secretary to the two “generals” of the fleet, he was on board the flag-ship which brought back Charles II., and which bestowed on England a gift for which the Church is annually thankful. In 1660 he was promoted to the office of Clerk of the Acts of the Navy; and if to the scenes of his labour, like Charles Lamb at the South Sea Office, he repaired very late in the morning, but compensated for that by retiring very early in the afternoon, it must be also confessed that he accomplished much useful work in a short time, and achieved objects for which his superiors got all the honour.
In the time of a disastrous war, this tailor’s son continued to exercise hope and energy when all around him was despair. Samuel Pepys then stood amid desponding officials, like the great Guise amid the sullen French officers in Italy ere victory had consented to sit upon their helms. In the time of the Plague too, the little man (he was as tall as Epaminondas) ungrudgingly took his turn of the pestilence as others had done of the sword; and when nine-tenths of the healthy but craven people had fled from town, he remained at his office and daily stood face to face with grimmest death.
He held temporarily the appointment of Treasurer to the Commissioners for the Affairs of Tangier, and also that of Surveyor-General of the Victualling Department. He had been passively engaged during the Great Plague; he was actively and usefully so during the Great Fire; and when the Officers of the Navy Board were summoned to answer before Parliament for the enterprise of De Ruyter against Chatham in 1668, his bold eloquence procured an acquittal for himself and colleagues. He occupied a seat in Parliament, where he, at different times, represented Castle Rising and Harwich; and when excess of toil induced him to undertake a tour through Holland and France, he devoted much of his time to making collections respecting the affairs of the navies of those countries. Pepys was a widower, when his powerful enemies, envying the greatness achieved by a tailor’s son, twice endeavoured unsuccessfully to bring him into grievous trouble on the alleged ground of his being a Papist. The accusation did him no disservice in the eyes of Charles, who appointed him Secretary for the Affairs of the Navy; which appointment he retained from 1673 until the constitution of the Admiralty was changed in 1680. Three years after, he accompanied Lord Dartmouth on the expedition for demolishing Tangier; and shortly after his return was appointed Secretary of the Admiralty, with a salary of £500 per annum,—an appointment which he retained till the period of the accession of William and Mary, when he suffered temporary imprisonment in the Tower, and subsequent brief captivity in the Gatehouse, on the charge of being attached to the royal family of the Stuarts, and especially to the ex-King James II., at whose coronation he had served as one of the Barons of the Cinque Ports. In his dignified retirement at Clapham he led a life of some luxury and considerable usefulness. Christ’s Hospital reckons him among its benefactors, and the Royal Society among its honoured Presidents. He died in 1703, leaving behind him more books than money-bags; but yet, as he bade his heirs remember, “more than what either myself or they were born to.” He best deserves to live in our grateful memories as the renovator of the navy of England. James II. long got for this the credit that was due to the gay yet efficient secretary; but we now know that to a tailor’s son is due the merit of once more raising the naval bulwarks of Britain to be a defence for those at home, and a terror to her assailants. When the Company of Clothworkers drink “the memory of Samuel Pepys” out of the splendid cup which he conferred on that Company in honour of his father’s calling, let them never forget why that memory especially deserves to be honoured. When the elder Pepys refused to bind his son to his own vocation, he was unconsciously helping his country to achieve future naval victories. Of such a man then the profession may be proud; and we will now proceed to collect from the son’s diary some evidences as to how tailors lived, moved, and had their being some two centuries agone.
The first glimpse we have of Pepys and his father is pleasant enough. On the 26th January, 1659-60, he writes:—“Home from my office to my Lord’s lodgings, where my wife had got ready a very fine dinner, viz. a dish of marrow-bones, a leg of mutton, a loin of veal, a dish of fowl, three pullets, and a dozen of larks all in a dish; a great tart, a neat’s tongue, a dish of anchovies, a dish of prawns, and cheese. My company was my father, my uncle Fenner, his two sons, Mr. Pierse, and all their wives, and my brother Tom.” The old man was still a tailor in the City, when his son, on the 12th of the following February, records:—“Walking with Mr. Kirton’s apprentice during evening church, and looking for a tavern to drink at, but not finding any we durst not knock: to my father’s,”—whom he found rejoicing that “the boys had last night broke Barebones’ windows.” Pepys was not ashamed of the old tailor, but, a fortnight later, took him with him “to Mr. Weddrington, at Christ’s College, who received me very civilly, and caused my brother to be admitted.” And indeed the old tailor saw very good company at home. In June, 1660, while yet in business, Pepys and his wife, on repairing thither, found “Sir Thomas Honeywood and his family were come of a sudden, and so we forced to be altogether in a little chamber, three stories high.” The old tailor moreover was a match-maker, in his way, for in August we find him “propounding Mr. John Pickering for Sir Thomas Honeywood’s daughter;” a propounding that was certainly made by one of the most singular of agents that ever undertook the business of the old firm of Cupid, Hymen, and Co. The father too appears to have been employed by the son; the latter got him to make “a black cloth coat out of a short cloak, to walk up and down in,” when London was in mourning, in September, for the Duke of Gloucester; and in October we find him again patronizing the paternal establishment, where he calls on a Sunday “to change my long black cloak for a short one (long cloaks being now quite out), but, he being gone to church, I could not get one.” When the old house was broken up, Pepys consented to take his sister from off the now ex-tailor’s hands. “I told him plainly,” he says, “that my mind was to take her not as a sister, but as a servant, which she promised me that she would, and with many thanks did weep for joy,” though it may have been for something else. Pepys was more generous to the old man himself. “My father,” he writes in December of this year, “did offer me six pieces of gold in lieu of six pounds that he borrowed of me the other day, but it went against me to take of him, and therefore did not.” He seems to have occasionally had a joyous dinner or two out of his ancient sire to compensate for the sacrifice. The death of Uncle Robert in the following year made a sort of country gentleman of our tailor, who needed the advancement, for the son, on balancing his father’s affairs as a tradesman, found £45 due to him, with debts to the same amount, and the balance of zero showing all that he possessed of his own in the world; and yet the good old workman had sent his sons to college, and that may account for his poverty. In his retirement the elder Pepys exercised his taste on alterations of his house at Brampton,—changes which his son speaks of as being “very handsome:” in other respects he was like great men in their retirement, and amused himself by writing letters, which appear to have been real “letters of news:” having his crosses however, as country gentlemen will have, and those chiefly from legal disputes touching his inheritance, which happily came, nevertheless, to a favourable conclusion. Pepys the junior warned Pepys senior against the sin of extravagance, and that with such unction that both counsellor and counselled and domestic listeners were melted to tears. The end of the advice thus given was that the sartorius emeritus should keep the expenses of himself and family “within the compass of £50 a year,”—no very princely income, it must be confessed, and one that ought to have saved them from the subsequent reproach of the official son, or rather of his lady wife, touching “the ill, improvident, disquiet, and sluttish manner that my father, and mother, and Poll do live in the country, which troubles me mightily, and I must seek to remedy it.” The remedy adopted to restore gentility to the hearth of the old tailor was one of some singularity. “All the morning,” says Pepys, under the date of September 4, 1664, “all the morning looking over my old wardrobe, and laying by things for my brother John and my father, by which I shall leave myself very bare of clothes, but yet as much as I need, and the rest could but spoil in the keeping.” Magnificent benevolence! But the old man doubtless looked modish in the son’s cast-off suit, and the influence it had on the locality is perhaps seen in the subsequent offer of marriage made to “Poll,” the tailor’s daughter, by one who had “seven score and odd pounds land per annum in possession, and expects £1000 in money upon the death of an old aunt.” This expectation was, I suppose, never realized, for “old aunts” are proverbially immortal, or given to cheat, after tormenting, their heirs, when they do condescend to pay the long-standing debt of nature. The wooer had however some positive advantages, for he possessed neither father, mother, sister, nor brother; and the value of such a man cannot be too strongly impressed upon speculating young ladies. To balance these advantages he had the slight drawback of being “a drunken, ill-favoured, ill-bred country fellow.” On the strength of a prospect of increased gentility, the elder Pepys, now half-blind and parcel-deaf, rode up to town on horseback, and saw the glories of the city, and had his picture taken, to hang in the dining-room of his illustrious son, who enthusiastically records of him that he loved that son, “and hath ever done so, and is at this day one of the most careful and innocent men in the world.” Pepys sent him back on a new horse, and with £20 for the general use of the family. “It rejoiceth my heart,” says the journalist, “that I am in a condition to do anything to comfort him,—he is such innocent company.” The old house of business in Fleet-street perished in the Great Fire; and up rode the ancient occupier of it on his new horse, to view the spot where he had long toiled and which he could no longer recognize. The journey was too much for the man of fine feeling, and he returned home only to wrestle with long illness; but we find him again in town in the following year, where, with his son and daughter-in-law, he dined at no less a table than “Sir W. Pen’s, which they invited us to out of respect to my father, as a stranger, though I know them as false as the devil himself.” By which remark we may see that society, two centuries ago, was not better than it is now, which must be a vast comfort to all who make the reflection. As Pepys records of his father that he was the simplest of men, we may fairly wonder that in the year of troubles, present and expectant, 1667, he entrusted the old gentleman and his own wife with the mission of privately burying his gold. “My father’s method made me mad,” says the son. “My father and my wife did it on Sunday, when they were gone to church, in open daylight, in the midst of the garden, where, for aught they knew, many eyes might see them.” But Pepys found remedy for this exquisite process; and he afterwards spent some happy hours in the low-roofed cottage at Brampton, wherein the secretary expected to pass his own days of retirement, and therefore loved to adorn it and to see it growing in prettiness.
Finally, the honest old tailor made a will, in which he wrote himself “Gentⁿ,” as though he were too modest to make the assertion in the full dignity of the complete word. And in this will, which could not have been drawn up by a lawyer, for it is easily understood and leaves no openings for legal objections, he bequeaths the lands and goods to which he succeeded at Brampton, to his son “Samuel Pepys, Esqʳᵉ.” He left seven pounds to the poor; ten pounds to each of his two grandsons; his largest silver tankard to Pauline,—an appropriate legacy, for “Pall” married the toper; a gold seal-ring to his son John; and if anything remained over and above these bequests, he left the same to be divided among his three children, amicably. He left no debts; and on that score, the honest old tailor of Brampton may rank before many a baron, who neither paid his tailor’s bills when living, nor left wherewith to honestly discharge them, after his decease.
If there was one thing Pepys loved best, next to good wine and good company, it was the stage. Let us see if we cannot find him a brother among the actors.
RICHARD RYAN, THE THEATRICAL TAILOR.
“Honest man;