Why can't the King command the rain?
Pepys Show: July 1662
Up by five o’clock, and after my journall put in order, to my office about my business, which I am resolved to follow, for every day I see what ground I get by it.
Samuel Pepys was all business in July 1662. Well, 80% business and 20% home renos, let’s say. He’s spending time at the ropeyard to test rope and hemp, he’s “among the tarr-men” to instruct himself on the nature and prices of tar, he’s broaching “the business of our being abused about flags” even though he doesn’t really care that much—but it seems the old ones were better. He even hears about the abuses of the Chest at Chatham, a pension fund run out of an actual chest set up in 1590 to pay for disabled sailors, possibly the world’s first occupational pension—his buddy Mr. Lewis says it “hath ever been abused” and Pepys is resolved to sort it out.
“I after dinner about my business to the Rope-yard, and there staid till night, repeating several trialls of the strength, wayte, waste, and other things of hemp, by which I have furnished myself enough to finish my intended business of stating the goodness of all sorts of hemp.”
Hell, Pepys is even learning math. He has Mr. Cooper, a one-eyed mate on the Royal Charles, stop by teach him basic arithmetic, something not universally taught to children in those days, and so Pepys begins studying the multiplication table. He’s hard at it from the fourth until the eleventh, by which point he figures he has it mastered.
He’s also gossiping, complaining of Sir William Batten’s corruption. Batten, as a reminder, is Pepys’ colleague in the navy, who trained up Sir William Penn. Batten’s a generation older than Pepys and Pen, and the three of them live with their families in government accommodations at Seething Lane.
Pepys really has it out for Sir William Penn (founder of the English presence in Jamaica, father of William Penn the Younger, the Quaker founder of the colonial Province of Pennsylvania). On the fifth, Pepys complains:
and by and by we sat and did business all the morning, and at noon had Sir W. Pen, who I hate with all my heart for his base treacherous tricks, but yet I think it not policy to declare it yet, and his son William, to my house to dinner, … I having some venison given me a day or two ago, and so I had a shoulder roasted, another baked, and the umbles baked in a pie, and all very well done. We were merry as I could be in that company, and the more because I would not seem otherwise to Sir W. Pen, he being within a day or two to go for Ireland.
He sounds like that tweet about the guy who hates Miss Piggy. And to think they used to be such good friends. After dinner, Mr. Creed tries to persuade Pepys to go with him to the theatre, and Pepys wants to go but he’s sworn an oath to lay off drinking and theatre-going until late September.
Penn stops by to see Pepys before leaving for Ireland (he’s governor of Kinason or something). Penn knows something is up with Pepys, because in their shared garden, he did “commit the care of his building to me, and offered all his services to me in all matters of mine. I did, God forgive me! promise him all my service and love.” But Pepys just can’t stand the guy anymore, commenting, “though the rogue knows he deserves none from me, nor do I intend to show him any; but as he dissembles with me, so must I with him.”
The thing is, Pepys is going to have to take Penn up on that offer of his services. Both Pepys and Batten are adding an extra storey to their houses, and the renovations are proving to be a very dirty, dusty business. On the sixteenth, Pepys wakes to find his ceilings ruined from the night’s rain. By the nineteenth the house is such a mess that Pepys’s wife Elizabeth begins talking about going to spend the summer in Brampton with Pepys’s parents—Pepys wanted to send her there a while back so he could have fun on a business trip, but now he isn’t sure. And then it starts raining so bad that Pepys has no choice but to move out of his house and take up residence in Sir William Penn’s house, now vacant.
Per Pepys on the twentieth:
But that which troubles me most is that it has rained all this morning so furiously that I fear my house is all over water, and with that expectation I rose and went into my house and find that it is as wet as the open street, and that there is not one dry-footing above nor below in my house. So I fitted myself for dirt, and removed all my books to the office and all day putting up and restoring things, it raining all day long as hard within doors as without. At last to dinner, we had a calf’s head and bacon at my chamber at Sir W. Pen’s, and there I and my wife concluded to have her go and her two maids and the boy, and so there shall be none but Will and I left at home, and so the house will be freer, for it is impossible to have anybody come into my house while it is in this condition, and with this resolution all the afternoon we were putting up things in the further cellar against next week for them to be gone… And so to Sir W. Pen’s to my chamber again, being all in dirt and foul, and in fear of having catched cold today with dabbling in the water.
But what has vexed me to-day was that by carrying the key to Sir W. Pen’s last night, it could not in the midst of all my hurry to carry away my books and things, be found, and at last they found it in the fire that we made last night. So to bed.
The mess of his house makes Pepys pettish and annoyed on the twenty-third, when his brother Tom forgets that he was supposed to secure a cab to take Elizabeth and the servants out to Brampton—it means Elizabeth is going to miss the annual Brampton Feast. Pepys’ house is all wet, and to get his things he has to keep going back and forth from his place to Sir Penn’s on the leads (think balcony or roof deck). Worse still, there’s a rumour that his patron Lord Sandwich has been lost at sea, failing to make the crossing to France—though that turns out not to be true.
Sir Batten visits Pepys at his office on the twenty-fifth, hoping to clear the air. Pepys’s gossip has got back to him, and then some, and of course Batten has noticed Pepys’s hostility to himself and Sir Penn. Pepys admits he complained to Penn of Batten privately receiving merchants at his house to sign navy contracts, but says he wasn’t making accusations, he just wanted to know what was happening. But he says Penn has played the knave with him, reporting the exchange in a bad light. Furthermore, Pepys denies that he complained about Batten taking his wife on last month’s business trip to Portsmouth.
Finally, they agree to remain friends after Batten expresses a desire that “the difference between our wives might not make a difference between us.” But Pepys just has that petty, gossipy side to him and he can’t get rid of it. Batten is the surveyor of the navy, on the thirty-first they both show up to Billingsgate for inspections, and Pepys complains that Batten was going about his survey, “but so poorly and unlike a survey of the Navy, that I am ashamed of it, and so is Mr. Coventry.” This from a guy who’s been taking a crash course on hemp and tar over the last thirty days, whereas Batten began his life on a whaling ship before joining the navy and fighting on both sides of the English Civil War.
In terms of politics, Pepys is hearing a lot of gossip about Lady Castlemaine, the King’s mistress, whose fate might be uncertain now that the Queen is back and settled. On the sixth, Pepys hears from Lady Sandwich, “much trouble, that my Lady Castlemaine is still as great with the King, and that the King comes as often to her as ever he did, at which, God forgive me, I am well pleased.” On the sixteenth, he hears that Lady Castlemaine has had a falling out with her husband, and has taken all her things and moved to Richmond with her brother. Pepys thinks it’s just a trick to obtain some independence, so the King can visit her as he pleases. Pepys is conflicted on the morality of this, writing “strange it is how for her beauty I am willing to construe all this to the best and to pity her wherein it is to her hurt, though I know well enough she is a whore.”
On the twenty-sixth, he gets some gossip from one of Lady Sandwich’s housekeepers, who explains that the falling out between Castlemaine and her husband was over the baptism of their son—he had a Catholic priest do it, and then she, “had it again christened by a minister… with a proviso, that it had not already been christened. … He is gone discontented into France, they say, to enter a monastery; and now she is coming back again to her house in Kingstreet.” But it doesn’t end there. King Charles II tried to get her appointed to the Queen’s retinue, so that he could be closer to her, but the Queen, of course, won’t put up with it and vetoed it. Now Charles has promised to put her aside, but Pepys doesn’t think he can “fling her off.”
One last curiosity worth noting: Pepys travels home by water on the nineteenth, but it rains so hard he has to put into shore and wait for it to pass. There he sees the King passing in his barge and remarks in his diary, “methought it lessened my esteem of a king, that he should not be able to command the rain.” Such an odd thought, maybe a joke? Very reminiscent of the entry for May 25, 1660, one of the first times Pepys lays eyes on King Charles after Charles’ return from exile, and one of the King’s dogs shits in the boat, “which made us laugh, and me think that a King and all that belong to him are but just as others are.”
Bauble of the month: Captain Ferrers attempts to sell five or six “Portugall rings… like a ring made of a coco-nutt with a stone done in it.” Pepys wants to buy one but Ferrers “did offer and would give it me.”
More Pepys posts
January 1662: No more drinking, no more theatre
February 1662: Dancing mania, Valentine’s, arquebus headshot
March 1662: A leather submarine?
April 1662: Sneaking around on his wife
May 1662: Lustful nuns and a grim reminder
June 1662: Pirates, a scam, maggots, and voyeurism
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bauble of the month
The Real Househusbands of London