An Entrancing Ego: Samuel Pepys

It not only chronicles it, it reckons it, literally, exactly, and often, in money. "Money," observes Tomalin, "is one of the Diary's obsessive themes, how it is made, how borrowed and lent, how spent, how saved, how hidden. . . . When the Diary opens Pepys has hardly £25 to his name; when it ends less than ten years later he has a fortune of £10,000" and counting. He no longer beds down in a corner of Montagu's Whitehall lodgings, or in the spartan quarters he moves to with his young wife. Now he has a well-paid position on the Navy Board, and a house goes with it. He doesn't own it, but it's as good as his, and he'll put his mark on it. He's continually renovating-gilding for the parlor, a new front door, a new staircase, a better coalbin in the cellar; he will even add a third story. Though he complains of the mess he spends days happily supervising the work; "I cannot but be with the workmen to see things done to my mind." The cellar now "doth please me exceedingly, as much as anything that was ever yet done to my house"; he must pray God to keep him from "setting [his] mind too much upon it."3 The house must proclaim him. Over the years he fills it with silver and damask, painting and prints, and books, books, books. (These are still to be seen, along with the unique cases he had made for them, in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College at Cambridge.)

All this comes to him through Montagu, who is now even more aristocratic than he was, created the first Earl of Sandwich as a reward for his role in the recent regime change, as well as viceadmiral of the navy. Even in the Diary Pepys never calls him anything but "My Lord." He knows better than to claim cousinship with his patron and mentor.

Pepys is just right for his new job. Articulate, meticulous, and a very quick study, he makes himself indispensable in short order. He brings unprecedented efficiency to a navy that will soon be fighting the Dutch again. He takes over functions that others let go and invents new ones. He'll stay up late to finish his "colleccion of the prices of Masts for these twelve years to this day, in order to the buying of some of Wood." And then-already the connoisseur-"I bound it up in painted paper." Masts from New England and the Baltic, contracts for timber, canvas, rope, meat and beer for the sailors-all these necessities afforded opportunities for profitable side deals. As My Lord explained to his protégé, it was these rather than the salary (Pepys was making £350 a year) that made a man rich. Plus the presents-plate for his table, jewelry for his wife, gold coins to supplement the ingots in his cellar. . . . As one of the Board's four Principal Officers, Pepys was now a man of influence, and men of influence, then as now, attract a lot of presents.

Yet the sense of marginality still lingers. Tomalin sums it up: "the youngest of the officers . . . , the poorest, the least experienced and one of the few without a title," he can't quite feel at ease in his new status. On an inspection tour with his colleagues, he reports his "great pleasure" at seeing "how I am respected and honoured by all people, and I find that I begin to know how to receive such reverence, which at the beginning I could not tell how to do." He's "much troubled" to find no mention of the Pepyses in a book of England's Worthies, though he's met the author and "had some discourse about my family and armes." Realism, however, breaks in, as it usually does with Pepys: he adds, "But I believe, endeed our family were never considerable." Two years later he can put up a good front; at a convivial dinner, with ladies present, he "roundly, and in many words for an hour together" takes one of his titled colleagues to task in the presence of another "that they might see that I am somebody."