Pepys won’t stop singing and it’s getting on everyone’s nerves
Also he watches some wrestling. Adam's Notes for June 21, 2024
Pepys Show, June 1661
“I went home and put on my gray cloth suit and faced white coat, made of one of my wife’s pettycoates, the first time I have had it on”
June 1661 starts with Samuel Pepys getting a big opportunity, as his patron, Sir Edward Montagu, 1st Earl of Sandwich, begins briefing Pepys on the operations of the King’s Wardrobe, a department of the Royal Household concerned with the king’s personal clothes, treasure, armour, furniture, household items, etc. The wardrobe has its own storehouse and it’s normally run by Montagu and another guy, but Montagu needs someone trained to run the place in his absence. Pepys even uses the opportunity to pitch (he literally uses the term pitch, and here I always thought pitching in that sense was just modern advertising jargon) on the idea of an office in the Wardrobe for his father, Montagu seems amenable to the idea, but I don’t think anything ever comes of it.
Montagu needs Pepys to fill in because he’ll be going overseas, but we don’t find out why until the tenth, when he tells Pepys privately that the King, “had made him Embassador in the bringing over the Queen,” and afterward he’s going to Algiers to put the fleet in order there. The British navy has a big mole (ie pier) there which broke down back in February and sank a lot of ships. The mole and the colony at English Tangier are overseen by the Tangier Committee, which Pepys will be appointed to next year. English Tangier is a boondoggle for the English, costing them a lot of money and throwing the navy into disarray with no real upside, but they won’t quit Morocco until 1684.
Pepys confesses, “the sad condition of this office (ie the navy) for want of money; how men are not able to serve us more without some money; and that now the credit of the office is brought so low, that none will sell us any thing without our personal security given for the same.” But it’s not all bad: Pepys gets his first five gun salute while on the Thames on June 13.
Related to the business of the Wardrobe is the business of the cloth: Montagu tasks Pepys with acquiring 300L in fine cloth, “to give in Barbary, as presents among the Turks,” and Pepys involves his father, a successful tailor, in this mission. Still, borrowing money and finding the cloth and arranging for it to be shipped eats up a lot of Pepys’ month. Towards the middle of the calendar the entries start thinning out, and you get the sense that this is because Pepys is also overseeing the renovations to his house, and this too eats a lot of time. The work concludes on the 20th with an entry of a single sentence: “At home the greatest part of the day to see my workmen make an end, which this night they did to my great content.”
But that’s not to say Pepys isn’t having any fun. Remember last month when he wanted to hire a guy to teach him to whistle like a bird, but nothing actually came of it? Well now he’s actually started taking singing lessons, hiring Mr. Theodore Goodgroome (“recommended by Mr. Mage”), who on the 25th teaches him to sing La cruda la bella. Pepys quickly gains some confidence, writing on the 28th, “At home all the morning practising to sing, which is now my great trade.” And on the 30th he catches himself humming, writing, “Hence I to Graye’s Inn Walk, all alone, and with great pleasure seeing the fine ladies walk there. Myself humming to myself (which now-a-days is my constant practice since I begun to learn to sing) the trillo, and found by use that it do come upon me.” I can’t help but imagine him annoying the shit out of everyone he meets with his singing. Still, it’s nice to see that his puritan upbringing has been put aside. Later, in 1663, his wife will start taking dancing lessons, but Pepys will quickly grow jealous of her tutor and it will set off a small drama in their lives.
Tobacco, still relatively new to England, is mentioned in the journal for the first time on June 8, when Pepys and Mr. Creed go, “to the tobacco shop under Temple Bar gate, and there went up to the top of the house and there sat drinking Lambeth ale a good while.” And on the 29th he mentions, “Mr. Chetwind by chewing of tobacco is become very fat and sallow, whereas he was consumptive.”
Pepys also takes in a wrestling event, writing on the 28th, “Sir W. Pen and I in his coach went to Moorefields, and there walked, and stood and saw the wrestling, which I never saw so much of before, between the north and west countrymen.”
There’s sickness in the family. Pepys keeps Midsummer Day, June 24, as a holiday, but ends up sending for a doctor to “come to see my wife, whose soare belly is now grown dangerous as she thinks.” Also Pepys’ Uncle Robert is dying, but this isn’t as sad as it might seem: Pepys asks his father to ask his uncle about selling some of his land, which Pepys will pay off over time. The deal is left unfinished, but Pepys will end up inheriting his uncle’s house in the countryside at Brampton when Uncle Robert dies early in July. Pepys moves his parents into the house—it’s too far outside of London for Pepys himself to live there, but he does visit on occasion. The house, by the way, is still standing today.
Pepys ends the month on an ambiguous note:
“The weather now very fair and pleasant, but very hot. My father gone to Brampton to see my uncle Robert, not knowing whether to find him dead or alive. Myself lately under a great expense of money upon myself in clothes and other things, but I hope to make it up this summer by my having to do in getting things ready to send with the next fleet to the Queen.
“Myself in good health, but mighty apt to take cold, so that this hot weather I am fain to wear a cloth before my belly.”
Best meals
June 1: “From Deptford we walked to Redriffe, calling at the half-way house, and there come into a room where there was infinite of new cakes placed that are made against Whitsuntide, and there we were very merry.”
June 2: “and going home I found Greatorex (whom I expected today at dinner) come to see me, and so he and I in my chamber drinking of wine and eating of anchovies an hour or two, discoursing of many things in mathematics, and among others he showed me how it comes to pass the strength that levers have, and he showed me that what is got as to matter of strength is lost by them as to matter of time.”
June 5: “After dinner to the office, where we sat and did business, and Sir W. Pen and I went home with Sir R. Slingsby to bowls in his ally, and there had good sport, and afterwards went in and drank and talked. So home Sir William and I, and it being very hot weather I took my flageolette and played upon the leads in the garden, where Sir W. Pen came out in his shirt into his leads, and there we staid talking and singing, and drinking great drafts of claret, and eating botargo and bread and butter till 12 at night, it being moonshine; and so to bed, very near fuddled.”
Thank you for reading!
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Just drinking wine, eating anchovies, and talking about levers...you can't ask for more than that
Pepys is always great fun to read about. Really enjoyed this post.