Samuel Pepys was the first of a well-established stock to make a name in the outer world, but since his time the family can boast of having had amongst its members a Court physician, a bishop, and a lord chancellor.
The earliest recorded Pepys was named Thomas, and appears, on the authority of the Court Rolls of the manor of Pelhams, in Cottenham, to have been bailiff of the Abbot of Crowland’s lands in Cambridgeshire, in the early part of the reign of Henry VI.[1] From that time the family flourished, and there seems to be some reason for believing that certain members enriched themselves with the spoils of the abbey lands in the time of Henry VIII.
Before the Diarist became known, one of the most distinguished members of the family was Richard Pepys, created Lord Chief Justice of Ireland by Charles I. When the King was executed, Richard resigned his office; but he enjoyed the favour of Cromwell, and resumed the place. As he did not die until 1678, it is strange that there should be no allusion to him in the “Diary.”
The branch from which Samuel was descended had not much money; and his father, being a younger son, came to London and became a tailor. This descent in the social scale has caused much misapprehension, and his enemies did not forget to taunt him on his connection with tailoring; but it is a well-accredited axiom that trade does not injure gentry. Some remarks of Pepys himself upon his family have been greatly misunderstood. Referring to the non-appearance of any account of the Pepyses in Fuller’s “Worthies,” he writes:—“But I believe, indeed, our family were never considerable.”[2] Dr. Doran paraphrased this into: “Let others say of his family what they might: he, for his own part, did not believe that it was of anything like gentle descent.”[3] This is a pure blunder, for Pepys merely meant that none of the family had made much mark; and he would have been very indignant had any one told him that they were not gentle.
Samuel, the fifth child of John and Margaret Pepys, was born on February 23rd, 1632, either at Brampton, a village near Huntingdon, or in London. There is something to be said in favour of each supposition, but, as the registers of Brampton church do not commence until the year 1654,[4] the question cannot now be definitely settled. We have Pepys’s own authority for the statement that his father and mother were married at Newington, in Surrey, on October 15th, 1626.[5] The register of marriages of St. Mary, Newington, has been searched, but the name of Pepys occurs neither in the years 1625, 1626, nor in 1627,[6] and Mrs. John Pepys’s maiden name is still unknown. In early youth, Samuel went to a school at Huntingdon, as appears by a passage in the “Diary” (March 15th, 1659–60), where he writes: “I met Tom Alcock, one that went to school with me at Huntingdon, but I had not seen him this sixteen years.” He seems to have spent his youth pretty equally between town and country, for on one occasion, when he was walking over the fields to Kingsland, he remembered the time when, as a boy, he lived there, and “used to shoot with my bow and arrow in these fields.”[7] When he left Huntingdon he entered St. Paul’s School, and remained there until he had reached the age of seventeen. In after life, on the occasion of an official visit to Mercers’ Hall, he remembered the time when he was a petitioner for his exhibition.[8] He was a stout Roundhead in his boyish days, and this fact was remarked upon, to his great chagrin, in after years, by his friend and schoolfellow Mr. Christmas. He went to see the execution of Charles I. at Whitehall, and made himself conspicuous by saying on his return that, were he to preach upon the event of the day, he should select as his text the verse: “The memory of the wicked shall rot.” He was in some fear that Mr. Christmas might remember this also, but he was happy to find that that gentleman had left school before the incident occurred.[9] Pepys always took a lively interest in the welfare of his school, to which references are frequently made in the “Diary.”
In 1650, his name occurs as a sizar on the boards of Trinity College, Cambridge; but before going to reside at the University, on March 5, 1650–51,[10] he was entered at Magdalene College, having probably been led to make the change by the greater inducements held out to him by the latter college. Here he was elected into one of Mr. Spendluffe’s scholarships in the following month; and two years later, on October 14, 1653, he was preferred to one on Dr. John Smith’s foundation. His father was at this time described as a citizen of London.
Little is known of Samuel’s academic career, during which he does not appear to have gained much distinction; and remarks in various parts of the “Diary” show that his conduct was not such as became a Puritan. The College books can be brought as a witness against him, for we learn from that source that, on October 21st, 1653, “Peapys and Hind were solemnly admonished ... for having been scandalously over-served with drink the night before.” Still, we must not jump to the conclusion that his time was entirely wasted, for he evidently carried into his busy life a good stock of classical learning. It was while he was at the University that he made the acquaintance of the learned Selden, from whom he borrowed the collection of ballads which formed the basis of the famous Pepysian collection. He relates that, while at Cambridge, he wrote a romance entitled, “Love a Cheate,” which he tore up on the 30th of January, 1663–64. This work of destruction must have been performed with some feelings of regret, for he tells us that he rather liked the tale, and wondered that he had ever been able to write so well. His previous literary performances had consisted in the concocting of some anagrams upon Mrs. Elizabeth Whittle, afterwards the wife of Sir Stephen Fox.[11] It is not recorded at what time Pepys left college, but it must have been either in 1654 or 1655. He was made Master of Arts by proxy, in June, 1660, the grace being passed on the 26th of that month.
On the 1st of December, 1655,[12] when he was still without any settled means of support, Pepys married Elizabeth St. Michel, a beautiful and portionless girl of fifteen. Although there is extant a letter from Balthasar St. Michel to Pepys (dated from Deal, February 8th, 1673–74), in which the history of Mrs. Pepys’s family is set forth, Lord Braybrooke was contented with the information on her monument, and merely added that she was educated in a convent, which in point of fact she was not. The letter alluded to was printed as far back as the year 1841,[13] and yet I cannot find that the history contained in it has ever been used by the biographers of Pepys. What is even more remarkable than Lord Braybrooke’s silence respecting it, is the fact that the Rev. John Smith, who published the letter, overlooked it when he wrote his introduction. Mons. St. Michel was of a good family in Anjou, but having turned Huguenot at the age of twenty-one, when in the German service, his father disinherited him, and he was left penniless. He came over to England in the retinue of Henrietta Maria, on her marriage with Charles I., as one of her Majesty’s gentleman carvers; but the Queen dismissed him on finding out that he was a Protestant, and did not go to mass. Being a handsome man with courtly manners, he gained the affections of the daughter of Sir Francis Kingsmall (lately left a widow by an Irish squire), who married him against the wishes of her family, and, with £1,500 which they raised, the newly-married couple started for France, in the hope of recovering, if possible, some part of the family estates. Unhappily, they were taken prisoners at sea, with all their goods, by the Dunkirkers, and when released they settled at Bideford, in Devonshire. Here, or near by, Elizabeth and Balthasar and the rest of the family were born.
In course of time they all went to France, and the father, in command of a company of foot, assisted at the taking of Dunkirk. He occupied his time with propositions of perpetual motion and other visionary schemes, and consequently brought himself and all dependent upon him to the brink of poverty. While he was away from Paris, some devout Roman Catholics persuaded Madame St. Michel to place her daughter in the nunnery of the Ursulines. The father was enraged at this action, but managed to get Elizabeth out of the nunnery after she had been there twelve days. Thinking that France was a dangerous place to live in, he hurried his family back to England, and shortly afterwards Elizabeth married Pepys. Her father was greatly pleased that she had become the wife of a true Protestant; and she herself said to him, kissing his eyes, “Dear father, though in my tender years I was by my low fortune in this world deluded to popery by the fond dictates thereof, I have now (joined with my riper years, which give me more understanding) a man to my husband too wise, and one too religious in the Protestant religion, to suffer my thoughts to bend that way any more.”
There are several references in the “Diary” to Mrs. Pepys’s father and mother, who seem never to have risen out of the state of poverty into which they had sunk. On May 2, 1662, Mons. St. Michel took out a patent, in concert with Sir John Collidon and Sir Edward Ford,[14] for the purpose of curing smoky chimneys; but this scheme could not have been very successful, as a few months afterwards he was preparing to go to Germany in order to fight against the Turks.[15] Pepys gave him some work to do in 1666, and Mrs. Pepys carried the account-books that he was to rule; but such jobs as these must have given him but a sorry living, and in the following year he again proposed to go abroad. Pepys sent him three jacobuses in gold to help him on his journey.[16] We hear nothing more of either father or mother, with the exception of an allusion to their pleasure at seeing the prosperous state of their daughter[17]—a prosperity in which they certainly did not share.