Turning your back on the old church, and walking up Seething Lane, where Pepys went to live in 1660 and kept his diary for nine years, you come to St. Olave’s Church on the corner of Hart Street, where his pretty young wife was buried. Church manners have vastly changed since Pepys’ day. When a bomb from an avion fell just outside the Verdun Cathedral one Sunday morning, two months before the big attack, no one turned his head except one little acolyte, who couldn’t resist a surreptitious grin at his comrade in the front pew. But listen to Pepys:
6 June, 1666. To our own church, it being the common Fastday, and it was just before sermon; but Lord! how all the people in the church stared upon me to see me whisper (the news of the victory over the Dutch at sea) to Sir John Minnes and my Lady Pen. Anon I saw people stirring and whispering below, and by and by comes up the sexton from my Lady Ford to tell me the news, which I had brought, being now sent into the church by Sir W. Batten in writing, and passed from pew to pew.
The church of St. Olave’s has a proud history. There are records of the parish in Henry I.’s day, and in 1283 of a church dedicated to St. Olaf, an exiled Norwegian. The present building dates from about 1450. It is one of the eight existing churches that escaped the Great Fire.
The mid-Victorian Vandals who filled up the marble crypt, and removed the old galleries and square pews, with their candlesticks, have mercifully left the fine roof intact, and St. Olave’s possesses a number of quaint Elizabethan treasures. On the door there is one of the few remaining sanctuary knockers used by a fugitive from justice if he wanted to claim sanctuary protection: on four of the six bells in the church peal is engraved “Anthony Bartlet made mee 1662.” The crown on the weather vane is supposed to commemorate the visit of Queen Elizabeth in 1554 when she gave silken bell-ropes as a thank-offering for her release from the Tower, and on the front of the organ gallery are the wrought-iron hat-stands with which the clergy of those days emphasised their protest against men wearing their hats in church.
The beautifully wrought iron sword-stands are used to this day when the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs attend an official service at St. Olave’s. The old church has been intimately connected with the navy since the days when the Admiralty lodged in Mark Lane and Crutched Friars, and it is still the parish church of the Master and Brethren of Trinity House, who come humbly on foot, via Catherine Court and Seething Lane, to the annual special service on Trinity Sunday, H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, as Master, making his pilgrimage like the rest.
But for the ordinary visitor who has no part in these ceremonial happenings the great interest of St. Olave’s lies in the memories connected with its greatest parishioner, Samuel Pepys, Esq., Secretary to the Admiralty.
The fame of his Diary has rather obscured Pepys’ well-merited reputation as an admirable and faithful public servant at a time when these qualities were rare. He was living at the Navy Office in Seething Lane in 1666, and it is thanks to his sagacity in ordering all the workmen from the Royal Dockyards to blow up the intervening houses that St. Olave’s, Hart Street, Allhallows Staining, and Allhallows Barking were saved from the Great Fire.
Pepys and his pretty wife are both buried in their parish church of St. Olave’s. Mrs. Pepys died when she was only twenty-nine, and though he had teased the jealousy of “my wife, poor wretch,” Pepys ordered her bust to be carved, not in the usual profile, but with the lovely head turned so that he could see
THE TOWER OF LONDON. BYWARD TOWER