An Entrancing Ego: Samuel Pepys

In 1673, four years after he abandoned the diary that would (after a hundred fifty years) make him famous, Samuel Pepys for the second time had his portrait painted. He could afford to. He was at the height of his career. He was a member of the Royal Society. He'd just been appointed Secretary to the Admiralty Board, working closely with King Charles, who chaired the Board himself and had been watching Pepys since his Restoration to the throne in 1660. Within months he'd be an MP, the Navy's voice in Parliament.

Yet the face that looks out at us from the cover of Claire Tomalin's biography1 is not the "formidable figure" she describes, "sure of himself, known to have the king's ear, with rich friends in the City and clever ones in the Royal Society." There is a line of worry between the strong eyebrows; the mouth is soft rather than firm and not fully closed. Nine years before, when the first portrait was painted, the worry line was already there, and the uncertain mouth. It is a very different face from the faces of the dukes and earls (and sirs-Pepys himself, for all his public service, was never knighted) whose portraits Richard Ollard has assembled2 to illustrate the people with whom his adult life was spent.

Though we know Shakespeare was a glover's son, we tend to think that England awaited the Industrial Revolution for the classes to begin to mix. But Sam Pepys's father was a London tailor, his mother a laundry maid. Still, there were other Pepyses, uncles and cousins of varying degrees of kinship. John the tailor was cousin to Sir Richard Pepys, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland under Cromwell. Talbot, his great-uncle, was chief magistrate of Cambridge under the first Charles. There were doctors and lawyers too. But the most glittering connection, and the most crucial for Sam Pepys, was with Sir Edward Montagu.

Montagu too was a kind of cousin, being the son of Paulina Pepys, Sam's grandfather's sister, who at thirty-seven had unexpectedly made a brilliant marriage to Sir Sidney Montagu, a university graduate and the younger brother of an earl. Sam's uncle Robert Pepys was the Montagus' bailiff, and he had no children. He brought his brother's ten-year-old son from the city to live with him. So Sam's formal education began not in London but at the Huntington Grammar School, conveniently near his uncle's home.

This was a school of some reputation. Oliver Cromwell had gone there; more relevant for Sam, so had his aristocratic cousin. After one or two years of rigorous Latin (that was the grammar in seventeenth-century grammar schools), Sam was ready to return to London and enter the celebrated St. Paul's School, next to the cathedral. Celebrated (Milton had been a pupil), but as Tomalin points out, it "served widely different levels of society, ranging from the sons of baronets and MPs, through country parsons, to booksellers, soap boilers and drapers." It was, in short, just mixed enough to ensure that a clever boy would feel himself an outsider -though, with luck, an outsider with a future.

He had some catching up to do, academic as well as social. He was eighteen when he entered Cambridge, though many boys began university at fourteen. He'd won a scholarship-he couldn't have gone otherwise-but as a sizar, his expenses paid at the weekly rate of one shilling and sixpence, he could hardly expect to keep up with the young lords around him. He was an outsider still.

But though on graduation he had no particular plans, his luck held. Edward Montagu sat on Cromwell's Council of State; he was "one of the makers of the Protectorate and a clear favorite of the Lord Protector." He needed assistants he could trust, and he remembered his well-educated young cousin.

Considering he was a university graduate, Sam didn't expect much. He seemed content with his marginal position, somewhere between servant and family member, in and out of Montagu's Whitehall lodgings and often sleeping there, competent to make small and not so small purchases, solve household problems, act as a secretary, or write his employer what was going on in London while he was away on his country estate.

But Cromwell died, and his son Richard was incompetent. Tomalin quotes a hostile but respectful contemporary: "The old Vulture died, and out of his ashes rose a Titmouse." Montagu, so close to Cromwell, swore loyalty to his son; but as incompetence threatened anarchy and civil war, Charles Stuart, waiting in Holland, began to look better and better. Montagu laid low in the country, kept informed by Pepys of the growing crisis in London. But even Pepys didn't guess what he had in mind.

What he had in mind was to sail to Holland in the Protectorate's greatest ship (hastily redecorated to remove from her prow "the figure of Cromwell treading down six nations"). And he would take Pepys with him, now as his private secretary. From that point on, he told his young cousin, they would rise together. The Diary begins in those turbulent months, and day by day it chronicles that rise.