The King: O, prisca fides! What can these be? Rochester: The love of wine and women.
The King: God bless your majesty!" new. Hhomeboy on Sun 6 Apr 2003, ...
One of the better exchanges between Rochester and The King:
"Rochester:Were I in your Majesty's place I would not govern at all.
The King: How then?
Rochester: I would send for my good Lord Rochester and command him to govern.
The King: But the singular modesty of that nobleman-
Rochester: He would certainly conform himself to your Majesty's bright example. How gloriously would the two grand social virtues flourish under his auspices!
The King: O, prisca fides! What can these be?
Rochester: The love of wine and women.
The King: God bless your majesty!"
The Family Motto is: "PRISCA FIDES" this translates to "Ancient Trust" and can
be traced to John Glassford Tobacco Lord. ...
I've Seen Fire, I've Seen Plague
SAMUEL PEPYS
The Unequalled Self.
By Claire Tomalin.
Illustrated. 470 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $30.
Who remembers Samuel Pepys anymore? Of all the dead white males who used to throng the anthologies and the English lit syllabus, Pepys (1633-1703) is now among the deadest, relegated to footnotes and to trivia questions about the correct pronunciation of his name. (It rhymes with cheeps.) In today's literary climate, there are lots of reasons for benching Pepys -- he was a political chameleon, nasty to the servants, and a serial groper and philanderer -- but the most compelling may be that he's such an anomaly. He comes out of nowhere -- writing only for himself, in a form of his own invention -- and he doesn't lead anywhere either. By the time his work was discovered, a century later, he was a curiosity but not an ''influence.'' Yet the decline in Pepys's reputation only makes Claire Tomalin's engaging new biography all the more remarkable: she not only brings him back to vibrant life, but makes a powerful case that he's more central, more ''relevant,'' than we ever imagined.
Pepys had two great accomplishments. He was the creator, in effect, of the modern British Navy, and to this day naval historians so revere him that they regard the other Pepys, the literary one, as an embarrassment and a distraction. He was also a compulsive diarist. Starting on New Year's Day in 1660 (when he was 26), he faithfully wrote down, in a shorthand code, a day-by-day account of everything he saw, felt or heard for the next nine years. The completed diary fills six 282-page notebooks; it's the longest, most personal account we have of life in the 17th century, and also an invaluable eyewitness account of some of the most seismic events in English history: the Restoration (Pepys was in the boat that went to fetch Charles II from the Netherlands), the plague of 1665, the Great Fire the following year and the Dutch raids the year after that. Bracketing the diary are the years of the Civil War and the Protectorate (Pepys as a schoolboy watched the king's execution) and, later, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, during which Pepys, who remained a staunch Jacobite, was briefly imprisoned on suspicion of treason. Few literary figures have lived through more interesting, or more treacherous, times.
Pepys, as Tomalin points out, was hardly the first person to write a diary, but most earlier diaries were written for a specific purpose -- usually religious (as an aid to spiritual bookkeeping) or to record travel and sightseeing. It's not really clear what prompted Pepys to begin his diary, unless it was just a vague intimation that he was living on the eve of great events, but the diary quickly became its own purpose and justification. Pepys kept track of everything: his assignations, his finances, his business deals, his conversations with the king (and erotic dreams about the queen), his hangovers, his bowel movements and ejaculations, his fears and hopes and imaginings, his frequent tiffs with his wife.
Borrowing a phrase from Robert Louis Stevenson (who read the diary after it was decoded and published in close to a full version in 1879), Tomalin subtitles her book ''The Unequalled Self,'' and suggests that over the course of the diary we can watch the evolution of something like a modern version of selfhood. This is certainly true in the sense that Pepys held nothing back, but he's also the least reflective and self-conscious diarist imaginable. We get none of the soul-searching, the self-examination -- the sense of a personality under construction -- that turns up, say, in Boswell's journals, just a generation or two later. There's something almost childlike in Pepys's essential self-delight and in his undifferentiated avidity for experience.
Nor is Pepys a particularly great prose stylist, certainly not by 17th-century standards, which prized cleverness and ornament. The diary contains numerous set pieces -- such as the descriptions of the coronation of Charles II (where Pepys got so drunk he passed out and woke up in his own ''spew''), of the fire and the plague -- which he clearly took some time and trouble over. But there are great stretches that are written in, well, diaryese: up early and to work . . . away to My Lord So-and-So's . . . dine with Sir Such-and-Such . . . conversation with Mr. Somebody or other . . . was mighty merry . . . and so on, until at the end of a long day he closes with his trademark phrase ''and so to bed.'' Except for Tomalin and the Pepys professionals, it's safe to say, few people recently have read all six volumes straight through. (If you want to try, they're on the Internet, as part of the Gutenberg project; there is also a convenient abridgment, edited by Robert Latham.) For a long time, the sexy bits were expurgated, and most of them turn out to have been written in a kind of code-within-the-code, a pidgin of French, Latin and Spanish that today reads like the fevered jottings of a horny and nerdy high schooler. (Pepys was raised as a Puritan, we need to remember.) Here he is on Nov. 16, 1667, talking about riding with a servant girl in a coach, and how after great effort he succeeded in making her ''tener mi cosa in her mano while mi mano was sobra su pectus, and so did hazer with great delight.'' Elsewhere he is always trying to ''toca'' someone's ''jupes'' or thighs, or else attempting to ''poner'' his ''main'' someplace it doesn't belong, as on the awful day when his wife found him feeling up her maid. ''I was at a wonderful loss upon it,'' Pepys wrote, ''and the girl also.''
But the seeming artlessness, and even occasional crudeness, of the diaries turn out to be their greatest strength. Pepys was not a brilliant thinker, or even an especially good shaper of experience, but he was a superb noticer, and picked up on things that others overlooked -- the king's dog, for example, relieving himself in the bottom of the Royal Barge; or the pigeons, during the Great Fire, who were ''loath to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies till they were some of them burned their wings, and fell down.'' In short, he was a great reporter, at a time when reporting as we know it hadn't really been invented, and his writing, direct and unmediated, has the virtue of instant credibility. Reading Pepys we intuitively sense that we're getting the genuine version, a true feeling for what life really was like back then.
Tomalin's last book was a biography of Jane Austen, about whom we know next to nothing. Here she has the opposite problem -- Pepys's is one of the best documented lives ever -- and she has solved it by adopting, for the most part, a thematic rather than a chronological approach, with individual chapters devoted to his marriage, his work, his relationship with the king, his career in Parliament, his membership in the Royal Society and so on. This results in occasional repetition, and requires a couple of awkward flashbacks or leaps forward; some of Tomalin's summarizing, moreover, comes at the expense of actual quotation. You don't always hear as much of Pepys himself as you would like, especially on two of his favorite subjects, music and the theater.
On the other hand, Tomalin is a brilliant summarist, with a Pepys-like gift of her own for evoking the sights, sounds and smells of 17th-century London, and she has performed an invaluable service by so patiently and carefully sifting through mounds of documentation in order to bring us back the good stuff. She has restored to us the whole Pepys, not just the young man who wrote the diary, and we can now follow the full trajectory of his life, including the many political scrapes the shrewd older bureaucrat had to dodge. (He had made a lifelong enemy of the Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, who never tired of trying to smear him.) Tomalin also reveals that after the death of his wife, Pepys carried on a 33-year affair with a younger woman named Mary Skinner; though semi-secret, the relationship proved in many ways more satisfying and less fraught than his marriage. (Surprisingly, for someone who slept around so much, Pepys never fathered any children, possibly because of a horrific kidney-stone operation he underwent as a young man.)
In Tomalin's telling, Pepys turns out to be the first modern success story: a poor but talented and ambitious young man who, by dint of luck, connections and hard work, rises to the top of his profession. He becomes, in Tom Wolfe's phrase, a ''Master of the Universe'' -and takes both pride and immense and infectious delight in all the perks that come with that exalted state: the money, the apartment, the clothes, the meals, the girlfriends, the rich and important connections.
Pepys's father was a barely literate tailor, his mother a laundress, and it's doubtful that he would have got on at all in life were it not for the intervention of a wealthy cousin, Edward Montagu (later the Earl of Sandwich), who saw to it that he got an education and eventually a job as clerk in Cromwell's government. Montagu was an ardent Puritan and republican, one of Cromwell's right-hand advisers, but as the Rump Parliament fell apart after Cromwell's death, he secretly and expeditiously began negotiations with the exiled Prince Charles. When the moment was right, he changed his stripes and became a royalist. Most of England eagerly did the same, including Montagu's 26-year-old protégé; it was a moment, Tomalin suggests, comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war.
Montagu was given a peerage and appointed Master of the King's Wardrobe; he got Pepys an appointment with the Navy Board. This was the single luckiest stroke of Pepys's life, and it was the making of him. The navy at that time was the biggest industry and the biggest employer in all of England, and Pepys proved to be brilliant at his job, the first naval administrator to keep accurate and useful records and to codify standards and procedures. He was, even in today's terms, a workaholic; by 17th-century standards he was a marvel of energy and efficiency. Most of his peers worked to live; Pepys lived to work, and the diary is full of accounts of early rising and long hours, of getting up in the middle of the night to rush back to the office. The job came with a house, a good salary and, just as important, an opportunity not for bribes, exactly (though he accepted those too), but for ''considerations.'' Pepys was shrewd with a pound, and soon became well off.
Some of his money he spent on himself, on clothes and wigs. (He was one of the first Englishmen to adopt the French custom of wearing a peruke, which explains why in his surviving portraits he always has on an enormous and weighty-looking hairpiece.) He poured even more money into home improvements; his house, on Seething Lane, was usually filled with joiners, plasterers, painters, upholsterers and floor-layers, all of whose comings and goings are faithfully noted in the diary. As he got on in the world, Pepys took up dancing, and even hired a private teacher (who flirted so shamelessly with Mrs. Pepys that it drove him mad with jealously). He gave lavish dinner parties and was a regular at court, where the king joked with him and called him by name. In his spare time he called on his reliable old flames Betty Lane and Mrs. Bagwell, the wife of a ship's carpenter, and also tried his luck with any serving girl or housemaid who came within range.
And all the while he was writing it down. Most of us, at one time or another, have imagined ourselves as actors in the drama (or sitcom) of our own lives. Pepys had the nerve to cast himself as the central player in an epic -+the story not only of his life but of his times -- and it's a story that fascinated him every bit as much as it fascinates us. He abandoned the diary when he was 36 because he was worried about his eyesight. He twice made a stab at starting up again, but these later diaries have none of the energy of the original. ''Something essential was missing,'' Tomalin writes, ''some grit that had caused him to produce his pearl.'' Or it may be that by then he had arrived, and there was nothing left to prove. Being one of the most important men in London wasn't just a thrilling part to play -- it was who he had become.
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