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An Entrancing Ego: Samuel Pepys
Hudson Review, The, Summer 2004 by Park, Clara Claiborne
That crisis passed. Pepys got thirty new ships out of Parliament, even put through his plan for competitive examinations. Soon, however, he would pay for his closeness to the Stuarts. In 1679, he was formally accused of "Piracy, Popery and Treachery"-of sending an emissary to France to convey naval information to the government of Louis XIV. he was imprisoned in the Tower.
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He was released after a month, on £20,000 bail, high then, almost inconceivable in today's money. (Good friends in the City helped out.) The accusations were shown to be false, the case collapsed, but for the next five years Pepys was out of a job. Should he write his memoirs? A history of the Dutch wars? But in 1684 the king, now ruling without Parliament, brought him back to the Admiralty at £2000 a year. He was a big man again, "signing orders, sending for reports from the [ship]yards, reprimanding officers for slackness, drunkenness or failure to keep proper records and accounts, and finding jobs for the deserving"-especially those who cotild pay.
He drew up a comprehensive report, but the king was dead before he could read it. He died in the Church of his mother, having refused the Anglican sacrament. James had helped smuggle in a priest, and Charles II converted on his deathbed. The succession, however, was peaceful, and good news for Pepys. He walked in James's coronation procession. James supported his plans for the navy. Pepys "had every reason to expect to be in charge of naval affairs until he chose to retire in a glow of success and splendour, ten years or so in the future."
It didn't happen. Far from soft-pedaling his Catholicism, James II celebrated mass in public, appointed Catholics to important positions, fired officials who wouldn't convert. In 1688 he put on trial seven Anglican bishops who refused to obey him and sent them to the Tower. The last straw was the birth of a boy-in years to come to be "The Old Pretender," but never, never King James the Third. Once again the Stuart yen for absolutism had brought England to the brink of civil war.
But James had daughters by his first marriage, Mary and Anne, and they were Protestant. Mary, the eldest, was married to the Dutch Protestant prince, William of Orange. To general approval, William and Mary were invited over to claim the throne. James fled to France, and England was saved for Protestantism.
And now Pepys did the unexpected. he resigned his Admiralty office, though William had not sacked him. he was one of the few to refuse to take the oath of allegiance to the new sovereigns. He himself was no Catholic, but he had worked with James for a quarter century on navy matters, where James was at his best. Pepys had switched loyalties once, in 1660; at fifty-nine, he would not switch again. Tomalin calls him a hero for this, and perhaps he was. he forfeited his pension. he was suspect as a Jacobite. Twice in the first year of William's reign he was imprisoned and cleared. But his public career was over.
Perhaps he was ready for retirement. If not inner resources, he had outer ones. he was still rich. he continued to entertain and visit his many loyal friends, among them the fellow diarist John Evelyn. He kept up with the Royal Society. Once the receiver of patronage, he was now a patron; Evelyn describes him as "a very great cherisher of learned men." His additions to his library required an eighth bookcase. He wrote up his thoughts on the navy. He planned out for his nephew the Grand Tour he was now too ailing to take himself. Aging, of course, wasn't easy; the stone came back, and his health had never been good. he might complain of time spent "without anybody near me, to read and write word for me, or know how to fetch me a book out of my library or put it in its place again when done with." But his resilience stood him in good stead, and the habit of industry. At sixty-eight he wrote Evelyn that he was doing "nothing that will bear nameing," yet "am not (I think) idle; for who can, that has so much (of past and to come) to think on as I have? And thinking, I take it, is working." The letter goes on to describe a scientific experiment, "collecting the Rays of light in a dark Room; having done it to a degree of pleasure and ease in its Execution as much exceeds what I have ever seen."
