Samuel Pepys and the World He Lived In

The deputy-governors were no better than their superiors. Of Colonel Fitzgerald, Pepys writes, on October 20th, 1664, he is “a man of no honour nor presence, nor little honesty, and endeavours to raise the Irish and suppress the English interest there, and offend every body.” Certainly, when he sees him on August 7th, 1668, he is pleased with him and his discourse. Pepys’s opinion of Colonel Norwood we have already seen; but none of the governors rose to the height of villany exhibited by Colonel Kirke, whose name is condemned to everlasting infamy in the pages of Macaulay.

The further history of Tangier, previous to its final destruction, can be put into a few words. In January, 1668–69, Lord Sandwich proposed that a paymaster should be appointed at Tangier, and suggested Sir Charles Harbord for the post; but the Duke of York said that nothing could be done without Pepys’s consent, in case the arrangement should injure him in his office of treasurer. Our Diarist was much pleased at this instance of the kindness of the Duke, and of the whole committee towards him.104

Henry Sheres, who accompanied Lord Sandwich to Spain, and afterwards became a great friend of Pepys, was paid £100, on January 18th, 1668–69, for drawing a plate of the Tangier fortifications. In the same year (1669), the great engraver, Hollar, was sent to Tangier by the King to take views of the town and fortifications. Some of these he afterwards engraved, and the original drawings are in the British Museum.

In 1673 a new commission was appointed, and Pepys and Povey were among the commissioners.105 Two years afterwards the vessel in which Henry Teonge was chaplain anchored in Tangier Bay; and in the “Diary” which he left behind him he gives a description of the town as it appeared to him. The mole was not then finished, and he found the old high walls much decayed in places. He mentions “a pitiful palizado, not so good as an old park pale (for you may anywhere almost thrust it down with your foot);” but in this palisade were twelve forts, well supplied with good guns.

In 1680, Tangier was besieged by the Emperor of Morocco, and Charles II. applied to Parliament for money, so that the place might be properly defended. The House of Commons expressed their dislike of the management of the garrison, which they suspected to be a nursery for a Popish army. Sir William Jones said: “Tangier may be of great importance to trade, but I am afraid hath not been so managed as to be any security to the Protestant religion;” and William Harbord, M.P. for Thetford, added: “When we are assured we shall have a good Protestant governor and garrison in Tangier, I shall heartily give my vote for money for it.”106

A most unworthy action was at this time perpetrated by the Government. Not having the support of Parliament, they were unable to defend the place with an adequate force; and they chose the one man in England whose brilliant career rivals those of the grand worthies of Elizabeth’s reign to fight a losing game.

The Earl of Ossory, son of the Duke of Ormond, was appointed Governor and General of the Forces; but, before he could embark, he fell ill from brooding over the treatment he had received, and soon after died. Lord Sunderland said in council that “Tangier must necessarily be lost; but that it was fit Lord Ossory should be sent, that they might give some account of it to the world.”

The Earl left his wife at their daughter’s house, and came up to London. Here he made a confidant of John Evelyn, who records in his “Diary” his opinion of the transaction. It was not only “an hazardous adventure, but, in most men’s opinion, an impossibility, seeing there was not to be above 3 or 400 horse, and 4000 foot for the garrison and all, both to defend the town, form a camp, repulse the enemy, and fortify what ground they should get in. This touch’d my Lord deeply that he should be so little consider’d as to put him on a business in which he should probably not only lose his reputation, but be charged with all the miscarriages and ill success.”107 It was on this man that Ormond pronounced the beautiful eulogy, “I would not exchange my dead son for any living son in Christendom!”

In August, 1683, Lord Dartmouth was constituted Captain-General of his Majesty’s Forces in Africa, and Governor of Tangier, being sent with a fleet of about twenty sail to demolish and blow up the works, destroy the harbour, and bring home the garrison; but his instructions were secret. Pepys received the King’s command to accompany Lord Dartmouth, but without being informed of the object of the expedition. In a letter to Evelyn, Pepys tells him, “What our work is I am not solicitous to learn nor forward to make griefs at, it being handled by our masters as a secret.” When they get to sea, Lord Dartmouth tells Pepys the object of the voyage, which the latter says he never suspected, having written the contrary to Mr. Houblon.108 On September 17th they landed at Tangier, having been about a month on their voyage. All the doings on board ship, and the business transacted on shore, are related with all Pepys’s vivid power of description in his “Tangier Journal.” The writer, however, has become more sedate, and only once “the old man” appears, when he remarks on the pleasure he had in “again seeing fine Mrs. Kirke,”109 the wife of the Governor. We are told that “the tyranny and vice of Kirke is stupendous,”110 and the “Journal” is full of the various instances of his enormities. Macaulay, however, with that power of characterization which he so eminently possessed, has compressed them all into his picture of the leader of “Kirke’s lambs.”

Pepys was now for the first time in the town with the government of which he had been so long connected, and he was astonished at its uselessness. Day by day he finds out new disadvantages; and he says that the King was kept in ignorance of them, in order that successive governors might reap the benefits of their position. He complains that even Mr. Sheres was silent for his own profit, as he might have made known the evils of the place ten years before.111

In a letter to Mr. Houblon, he gives his opinion that “at no time there needed any more than the walking once round it by daylight to convince any man (no better-sighted than I) of the impossibility of our ever making it, under our circumstances of government, either tenable by, or useful to, the crown of England.” He adds: “Therefore it seems to me a matter much more unaccountable how the King was led to the reception, and, afterwards, to so long and chargeable a maintaining, than, at this day, to the deserting and extinguishing it.”112

On the other side Mr. Charles Russell wrote to Pepys from Cadiz, deprecating the destruction of Tangier, and pointing out the advantages of possessing it.113 Sheres also showed Pepys a paper containing the ordinary objections made against the mole, “improved the most he could, to justify the King’s destroying it,” and added that he could answer them all.114

When the work of destruction was begun, it was found that the masonry had been so well constructed that it formed a protection as strong as solid rock. The mining was undertaken piecemeal, and it took six months to blow up the whole structure. The rubbish of the mole and the walls was thrown into the harbour, so as to choke it up completely. Still the ruined mole stands, and on one side the accumulated sand has formed a dangerous reef.

On the 5th of March, 1683–84, Lord Dartmouth and Pepys sailed out of Tangier Bay, and abandoned the place to the Moors. Shortly afterwards the Emperor of Morocco (Muly Ismael) wrote to Captain Cloudesley Shovel: “God be praised! you have quitted Tangier, and left it to us to whom it did belong. From henceforward we shall manure it, for it is the best part of our dominions. As for the captives, you may do with them as you please, heaving them into the sea, or destroying them otherways.” To which Shovel replied: “If they are to be disowned because they are poor, the Lord help them! Your Majesty tells us we may throw them overboard if we please. All this we very well know; but we are Christians, and they bear the form of men, which is reason enough for us not to do it. As to Tangier, our master kept it twenty-one years; and, in spite of all your force, he could, if he had pleased, have continued it to the world’s end; for he levelled your walls, filled up your harbour, and demolished your houses, in the face of your Alcade and his army; and when he had done, he left your barren country without the loss of a man, for your own people to starve in.”115

According to Pepys’s account Tangier was a sink of corruption, and England was well rid of the encumbrance. He describes the inhabitants as given up to all kinds of vice, “swearing, cursing and drinking,” the women being as bad as the men; and he says that a certain captain belonging to the Ordnance told him that “he was quite ashamed of what he had heard in their houses; worse a thousand times than in the worst place in London he was ever in.” Dr. Balaam, a former Recorder, had so poor an opinion of the people of the place, that he left his estate to a servant, with the caution that if he married a woman of Tangier, or one that ever had been there, he should lose it all.116

Yet Tangier was positively outdone in iniquity by Bombay, which Sir John Wyborne calls “a cursed place.”117 These were the two acquisitions so highly rated when Charles II. married the Infanta of Portugal.

In spite of all disadvantages, one of the greatest being that ships of any size are forced to lie out far from shore, Tangier is still a place of some importance as the port of North Morocco. The description of the town given by Sir Joseph Hooker118 answers in most particulars to that written by Teonge two centuries before. It stands on the western side of a shallow bay, on rocky ground that rises steeply from the shore, and the cubical blocks of whitewashed masonry, with scarcely an opening to represent a window, which rise one above the other on the steep slope of a recess in the hills, give the place a singular appearance from the sea. On the summit of the hill is a massive gaunt castle of forbidding aspect, and the zigzag walls which encompass the city on all sides are pierced by three gates which are closed at nightfall.

CHAPTER V.

PEPYS’S BOOKS AND COLLECTIONS

“A snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.”Winter’s Tale, act iv. sc. iii.

PEPYS desired that his name might go down to posterity, but he could little have foreseen the fame that it has attained in the nineteenth century. The mode he took to keep it alive was the bequeathment of his library and collections to a time-honoured foundation; and there is every reason to believe that he would have strongly objected to the publication of his “Diary.” Now that that book has been published, we all see the full-length figure of the man; but his character might also have been read in the Pepysian library at Magdalene College, Cambridge; and this latter exhibition of him has been much longer before the public. Comparatively little interest was, however, taken in it until after the appearance of the deciphered “Diary,” when his name at once sprang into fame.

The library was left, in the first instance, to the Diarist’s nephew, John Jackson, but with a special proviso that it should on no account be dispersed. Pepys refers in his memorandum to “the infinite pains and time and cost employed in my collecting and reducing the same to the state it now is” in. He is particularly solicitous “for its unalterable preservation and perpetual security against the ordinary fate of such collections, falling into the hands of an incompetent heir and thereby being sold, dissipated or imbezzled.” Jackson was allowed a certain latitude in the disposal of the collections after his death. They were to be placed at one of the Universities, but Cambridge was to be preferred to Oxford. A private college was to be chosen rather than the Public Library, and of colleges Trinity or Magdalene were to be given the preference over the others. Of these two colleges (on the boards of each of which Pepys’s name had been entered), Magdalene, at which he received his education, was to have the preference. The college which did not receive the gift was appointed visitor, and if at the annual inspection any breach of covenant occurred, the library became forfeited to it.

A fair room was to be provided for the library, and no other books were to be added, save those which Jackson might add in distinct presses. The whole was to be called “Bibliotheca Pepysiana,” and the sole power and custody over it was to be vested in the master of the college for the time being.119

Magdalene College was founded by Lord Chancellor Audley, who vested for ever the right of nominating to the mastership in the possessors of Audley End. At the time that Pepys was a student the buildings were far from extensive, and consisted of the first court alone. The foundation of the second court was laid in 1677, and Pepys’s “Correspondence” contains a letter from Dr. Hezekiah Burton, asking for the contribution already promised towards the new buildings; and another from John Maulyverer in 1679, thanking for money lent for the same purpose, and referring to a bond. A fellow-collegian of Pepys was John Peachell, afterwards Vicar of Stanwick, Prebendary of Carlisle, and Master of the College in 1679. He does not appear to have been altogether an estimable man, for in 1677 (May 3) Pepys felt half ashamed to be seen in his company because of his red nose; and according to Lord Dartmouth’s manuscript notes on Bishop Burnet’s “History of his own Time,” there was cause for this rubicundity, as Archbishop Sancroft rebuked him for setting an ill example in the University by drunkenness and other loose behaviour. Dr. Peachell had his good points, however, for in 1687 he was suspended from his mastership and deprived of his vice-chancellorship for refusing to admit Alban Francis, a Benedictine monk, to the degree of Master of Arts without taking the prescribed oaths. It appears from a letter to Pepys that he greatly feared the Earl of Suffolk, who was then owner of Audley End, would be content to have him removed in order to obtain the privilege of nominating a successor, but he was fortunate in being restored to his office in the following year.

Pepys never forgot a friend, and a month before this restoration he induced Lord Dartmouth, on his appointment to the command of the fleet, to ask Peachell to be his chaplain, with authority over all the other chaplains. In 1690 the Master of Magdalene died of starvation brought about by a four days’ fast which he prescribed himself as a penance after the archbishop’s admonition; and when he afterwards tried to eat he could not.

The master at the period of Pepys’s death was Dr. Quadring, and in the college chest are two letters written by Jackson to him to inform him of the will of the deceased respecting the library. It was not, however, until 1724, on the death of Jackson, that the three thousand volumes of which the library consisted were, with the original bookcases, removed to the college, and deposited in the new buildings which Pepys had assisted to build. The old inscription, “Bibliotheca Pepysiana,” which was set up at the time, is still to be seen on the front in the second courtyard.

The library is of the greatest interest, and a mere enumeration of some of the treasures contained in it is enough to whet the appetite of the least ardent among the lovers of old books. To mention first the manuscripts:—there are the various papers collected by Pepys for his proposed “Navalia;” a “vast treasure of papers” lent by Evelyn, but never returned to their owner; seventeen letters from Henry VIII. to Anne Boleyn, copied at Rome from the originals in the Vatican, 1682; a collection of papers relating to Charles II.’s escape from Worcester; a journal of the proceedings of the Duke of Monmouth in his invading of England, with the progress and issue of the rebellion attending it, kept by Mr. Edward Dummer, then serving the train of artillery employed by his Majesty for the suppression of the same; and a Survey (made by order of the Admiralty) of buildings and encroachments on the River of Thames, from London Bridge to Cuckold’s Point, 1684–1687. The Maitland MS., which contains an excellent collection of Scottish poetry, and is named after Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington, Lord Privy Seal and Judge in the Court of Session (b. 1496, d. 1586), who formed it, is also worthy of special mention. How the two volumes of which it consists came into Pepys’s possession is not recorded. Selections from them were printed by Pinkerton in 1786.

Among the choice articles that should have some notice, however inadequate, are the pocket-book constantly used by Sir Francis Drake, and that of James II., described as follows by Pepys himself:—“My Royal master K. James ye 2d. Pocket Book of Rates and Memorandums during ye whole time of his serving at ye Seas as Lord High Admiral of England, vizt., from May, 1663, to his laying down his commission, May, 1673.” Another great curiosity is the original “Libro de Cargos as to Provisions and Munic̃ons of the Proveedor of the Spanish Armada, 1588,” with a hole right through, for the purpose of hanging it up in the ship.

Besides all the papers on naval affairs in the Pepysian Library, there is a series of fifty volumes of Pepys’s manuscripts in the Rawlinson Collection in the Bodleian Library. How these papers came into the possession of Rawlinson is not known.

What gives a special interest to the Library is the fact that it still remains in exactly the same condition as Pepys left it, the books being in the original cases, arranged in the order which he had fixed. There are several entries in the “Diary” relating to the arrangement and cataloguing of the books; thus on December 17th, 1666, we read:—“Spent the evening in fitting my books, to have the number set upon each, in order to my having an alphabet of my whole, which will be of great ease to me.” He employs his brother John to write out the catalogue “perfectly alphabeticall,”120 but he afterwards finishes it off with his own hand.121 He was very particular as to the books he admitted into his catalogue, so when he bought in the Strand “an idle rogueish French book, ‘L’escholle des filles,’” he resolved, as soon as he had read it, to burn it, “that it might not stand in the list of books nor among them, to disgrace them if it should be found.”122 He had, at a later time, a similar feeling with regard to Lord Rochester’s poems, and in a letter dated Nov. 2, 1680, he directs Hewer to leave the volume in a drawer, as it is written in a style which he thought unfitted it for mixing with his other books. He adds that as the author (who had just died) was past writing any more poems so bad in one sense, he despaired of any man surviving “to write so good in another.”123 When I was looking over the Library I made a point of seeing whether this book had found a place at last on the shelves, and I discovered it there; but with sad hypocrisy it stood in false colours, for the lettering on the back was “Rochester’s Life.”

The books were numbered consecutively throughout the Library, and, therefore, when re-arranged, they needed to be all renumbered. All hands were pressed into this service; and we read that on the 15th of February, 1667–68, Pepys himself, his wife, and Deb Willett, were busy until near midnight “titleing” the books for the year, and setting them in order. They all tired their backs, but the work was satisfactory, though, on the whole, not quite so much so as the previous year’s job had been.

On account of this constant changing, each book contains several numbers, sometimes as many as six; and the last, which is the one by which the books are still found, is in red ink.

The books are arranged in eleven curious old mahogany bookcases, which are mentioned in the “Diary,” under date August 24th, 1666, and which gave the Diarist so much pleasure, when they were sent home quite new by Mr. Sympson, the joiner and cabinet-maker. The presses are handsomely carved, and have handles fixed at each end; the doors are formed of little panes of glass; and, in the lower divisions, the glass windows are made to lift up. The books are all arranged in double rows; but, by the ingenious plan of placing small books in front of large ones, the letterings of all can be seen. Some have tickets on the outside, and this practice is mentioned in the “Diary,” where we read: “To my chamber, and there to ticket a good part of my books, in order to the numbering of them for my easy finding them to read as I have occasion.”124

The word “arranged” has been several times used in this chapter; but it must not be understood as implying any kind of classification, for the books are merely placed in order of size. This arrangement, however, has been very carefully attended to; and, in one instance, some short volumes have been raised to the required height by the help of wooden stilts, gilt in front.

The classification was to be found in the catalogues; and, as Pepys increased in substance, he employed experts to do this work for him. One of these was Paul Lorrain, the author of several tracts and sermons, who was employed in copying manuscripts, and making catalogues of books and prints. A letter from this man, written on October 12th, 1700, to explain the nature of the work he then had in hand, is printed in the correspondence of Pepys.

There are numerous entries in the “Diary” relating to the binding of certain books; and a single glance at the Library as it now exists would show any one experienced in the matter that Pepys paid great attention to this most important point in the proper preservation of a library. As early as May 15th, 1660, he showed this taste by buying three books solely on account of the binding; and on January 18th, 1664–65, he went to his bookseller to give directions for the new binding of a great many of his old books, in order that his whole studyful should be uniform. Nearly all the books are bound in calf, although some are in morocco and some in vellum.

Pepys came to the resolution in the year 1667 that he would not have any more books than his cases would hold; so when, on the 2nd of February, 1667–68, he found that the number of books had much increased since the previous year, he was forced to weed out several inferior ones to make room for better. He had previously written: “Whereas, before, my delight was in multitude of books, and spending money in that, and buying alway of other things, now that I am become a better husband, and have left off buying, now my delight is in the neatness of everything.”125 This plan he continued to practise throughout his life, generally to the improvement of the character of his library, but not always so.

When I was allowed the privilege of looking through the Library, I came upon a list of books headed “Deleta, 1700.” The entries in this list are most curious. To each title is added a note, such as these: “Ejected as a duplicate,” “Removed to a juster place,” “To give way to the same reprinted,” “To give way to a fairer edition.”

As the “Diary” is full of notices of books purchased, I felt interested to know which of them had been weeded out after they had been bought, and which had been thought worthy to remain on to the end.

The following is the result of these inquiries in a few instances, chosen from the poets:—On the 8th of July, 1664, Pepys went to his bookseller about some books; from his shop he went on to the binder, to give directions as to the binding of his “Chaucer;” “and thence to the clasp-makers, to have it clasped and bossed.” Reposing in a quiet corner of the Pepysian Library is Speght’s edition of 1602, which is the identical copy referred to, and here, therefore, we have an example of the books that remained. It is in a plain calf cover, unlettered, “full neat enough,” with brass clasp and bosses.

This evident attempt to do honour to the memory of

“That renownmed PoetDan Chaucer, well of English undefyled,On Fame’s eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled,”

is an incident of the more interest, in that Chaucer is almost the only great poet that Pepys was able to appreciate. Sir John Minnes, the wit, taught him to love England’s grand old singer. These two men were constantly brought together in the fulfilment of business duties, and Pepys writes “among other things Sir J. Minnes brought many fine expressions of Chaucer, which he doats on mightily.” To this he adds as his own opinion, “and without doubt he is a very fine poet.”126