This account of Mrs. Pepys’s parentage has led us away from the early days of Pepys, when, with improvident passion, [he married] his young wife; and we will therefore return to the year 1655. Early marriages were then far from uncommon, and Mrs. Pepys’s beauty was considered as forming a very valid excuse for the improvidence of the match. There seems to be some reason for believing that she was of a dark complexion, for her husband on one occasion was mad with her for dressing herself according to the fashion in fair hair.[18] Sir Edward Montagu, who was Pepys’s first cousin one remove (Samuel’s grandfather and Sir Edward’s mother being brother and sister), gave a helping hand to the imprudent couple, and allowed them to live in his house. The Diarist alludes to this time, when, some years afterwards, he writes of how his wife “used to make coal fires, and wash” his “foul clothes with her own hand,” in their little room at Lord Sandwich’s.[19]
Samuel does not appear to have lived with his father after he had grown up, and as old John Pepys was not a very thriving tradesman, it seems likely that Montagu had previously assisted his young kinsman. Indeed, it was probably under his patronage that Samuel went to the University.
The Diarist seems to have held some official position in the year 1656, because on Thursday, August 7th, a pass was granted “to John Pepys and his man with necessaries for Holland, being on the desire of Mr. Samll. Pepys.”[20] John Pepys had probably long been in the habit of going backwards and forwards to Holland, for Samuel writes (January 24th, 1665–66): “We went through Horslydowne, where I never was since a little boy, that I went to enquire after my father, whom we did give over for lost coming from Holland.” Whether these journeys were undertaken in the way of business, or whether they had any connection with Montagu’s affairs, we cannot now tell. That Samuel acted as a sort of agent for Montagu, we have evidence; and among the Rawlinson Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library is a memorandum of the payment to him on General Montagu’s part for the ransom of the Marquis of Baydez (22nd January, 1656–57).
On March 26th, 1658, he underwent an operation for the stone, a disease that seems to have been inherited. The operation was successfully performed, and ever after he made a practice of celebrating the anniversary of this important event in his life with thanksgiving.
In 1659 he accompanied Sir Edward Montagu in the “Naseby,” when that admiral made his expedition to the Sound; and he was very surprised to learn afterwards how negotiations had been carried on of which at the time he was quite ignorant. This is not the place for a history of the various stages that led to the Restoration, but a passing allusion to one of these may be allowed here, as the particulars are given in the “Diary.” When Sir Edward Montagu left England for the Sound, he said to the Protector Richard, on parting with him, that “he should rejoice more to see him in his grave at his return home, than that he should give way to such things as were then in hatching, and afterwards did ruin him.”[21] Finding the condition of affairs in England hopeless, Montagu took advantage of this expedition to correspond with Charles II.; but he had to be careful and secret, for his fellow-plenipotentiary, Algernon Sidney, who suspected him, was an enemy.[22] Pepys’s remark on finding out what had been going on under his nose was, “I do from this raise an opinion of him, to be one of the most secret men in the world, which I was not so convinced of before.”[23]
On Pepys’s return to England he was employed in the office of Mr., afterwards Sir George, Downing, as a clerk of the Exchequer connected with the pay of the army, and soon afterwards commenced to keep the “Diary” which we now possess.
The account of the incidents of Pepys’s early life must be more or less fragmentary, as they can be obtained merely from occasional allusions; and it is only in the [next chapter], in which we see Pepys in the “Diary,” that we can obtain any full idea of the man as painted by himself. Before passing on to this part of our subject, it will be well to set down a few notes on the “Diary” as a book. The book has thrown such a flood of light upon the history and manners of the middle of the seventeenth century, that we are apt to forget the fact that before the year 1825 the world knew nothing of this man of gossip. Yet so ungrateful are we to our benefactors, that the publication of the “Diary” did an immense injury to the writer’s reputation. Previously he was known as a staid, trustworthy, and conscientious man of business; as a patron of science and literature, and as a President of the Royal Society. Jeremy Collier says, he was “a philosopher of the severest morality.” Since 1825 we have been too apt to forget the excellence of his official life, and to think of him only as a busybody and a quidnunc.
When Pepys’s library was presented to Magdalene College, Cambridge, by his nephew, John Jackson, in 1724, there were, among the other treasures, six small volumes of closely-written MS. in shorthand (upwards of three thousand pages in all), which attracted little or no notice until after the publication of Evelyn’s “Diary.” Then it was that the Hon. and Rev. George Neville, Master of the College, drew them out of their obscurity, and submitted them to his kinsman, the well-known statesman, Lord Grenville, who had as a law student practised shorthand. Lord Grenville deciphered a few of the pages, and drew up an alphabet and list of arbitrary signs. These were handed to John Smith, an undergraduate of St. John’s College, who undertook to decipher the whole. He commenced his labours in the spring of 1819, and completed them in April, 1822—having thus worked for nearly three years, usually for twelve and fourteen hours a day.[24] What was remarkable in all this was, that in the Pepysian library there rested a little volume which contained the account of Charles II.’s escape after the battle of Worcester, taken down in shorthand by Pepys from the King’s dictation, and written out by himself in long-hand. Here, therefore, was the key that would have unlocked the “Diary” quite overlooked. Lord Braybrooke made the statement that the cipher used by Pepys “greatly resembled that known by the name of Rich’s system;” but this was misleading, as the system really adopted was the earlier one of Thomas Shelton. Mr. J. E. Bailey, F.S.A., communicated a very valuable paper, “On the Cipher of Pepys’s Diary,” to the Manchester Literary Club in 1876, in which he gave particulars of the various old systems of shorthand, and expressed the opinion that Pepys made himself familiar with Shelton’s “Tachygraphy”[25] while a student at Cambridge. The earliest edition of Rich’s “Pen’s Dexterity” was published in 1654, while in 1642 Shelton could refer to twenty years’ experience as a shorthand-writer. When the Rev. Mynors Bright was about to decipher the “Diary” afresh, he consulted Shelton’s book, a copy of which, with other works on shorthand, is preserved in the Pepysian Library. Mr. Bright informs us that, “When Pepys wished to keep anything particularly concealed, he wrote his cipher generally in French, sometimes in Latin, or Greek, or Spanish. This gave me a great deal of trouble. Afterwards he changed his plan and put in dummy letters. I was quite puzzled at this, and was nearly giving up in despair the hope of finding out his device, but at last, by rejecting every other letter, I made out the words. It would have been better for Pepys’s credit if these passages could not have been deciphered, as all of them are quite unfit for publication.”
Pepys was a great lover of shorthand, and he was always ready to invent a character, as it was then called, for a friend. He used the art in drafting his public and private letters; and although he was forced to discontinue his “Diary” in 1669, on account of the weakness of his eyesight, he continued its use throughout his life.
We learn from the “Diary” itself some particulars of how it was written. The incidents of each day were dotted down in short, and then the writer shut himself up in his office to fill up all the details. Sometimes he was in arrear: thus we read, on January 1st, 1662–63, “So to my office to set down these two or three days’ journal;” on September 24th, 1665, “Then I in the cabin to writing down my journal for these last seven days to my great content;” and on November 10th, 1665, “Up and entered all my journal since the 28th of October, having every day’s passage well in my head, though it troubles me to remember it.”