Samuel Pepys and the World He Lived In

Prince Rupert, as the cousin of the King, naturally held a prominent position in the State, but he did not gain much credit from the undertakings he was thrust into. His fame as a brilliant, though rash, soldier, was gained during the troubles of his uncle’s reign, and not from anything he did after the Restoration. He was out of place on board ship, although he is said to have displayed immense bravery and much skill in the sea-fight against the Dutch, from August 11th to 13th, 1673. His interest in science and mechanical art appears to have been real, and to him we owe the invention or introduction into England of mezzotinto engraving, and the introduction of

… “that glassy bubble
That finds philosophers such trouble,
Whose least part cracked, the whole does fly,
And wits are cracked to find out why.”

The Prince’s courage was so patent to all that his friends were rather surprised to find that when he was very ill and like to die, “he had no more mind to it than another man;” so they came to the rather lame conclusion that “courage is not what men take it to be—a contempt of death.”[279 - “Diary,” Jan. 15, 1664–65.]

The next great public character was Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, who for the few years before his fall was the greatest man in the kingdom. Public opinion has been much divided as to his merits. In spite of many very evident faults, he certainly exhibited on several occasions a high-minded spirit. He would not consent to do any business with the King’s mistresses, and Burnet says that he “kept a register of all the King’s promises, and of his own, and did all that lay in his power afterwards to get them performed.” His disposition was rather ungracious, and he made many enemies, who attacked him with success when the King was tired of him. Clarendon was very dictatorial with Charles, and sent him such missives as this, “I pray be at Worcester House on Sunday as soon as may be.” On one occasion he fixed eight o’clock in the morning, for Lord Broghill to have an audience with the King, who did not think the arrangement quite fair, and wrote, “You give appointments in a morning to others sooner than you take them yourself, but if my Lord Broghill will come at nine, he shall be welcome.”

On the institution of the Royal Society, Lord Clarendon was appointed visitor for life, but after his death the position was to be held by several high officers, by reason of their offices. Sprat, in his “History of the Royal Society,” specially thanks the Lord Chancellor, Attorney-General, and Solicitor-General, for their assistance in the preparation of the charter; a proof, says Sprat, of the falsehood of the reproach that law is an enemy to learning and civil arts.

One day in July, 1664, Lord Sandwich told Pepys that Lord Clarendon was very displeased with him for being forward in the cutting down of trees in Clarendon Park; so the Diarist sought an interview with the Lord Chancellor in order that he might soothe the great man, and he was successful in his endeavour.[280 - “Diary,” July 14, 1664.]

Clarendon Park, near Salisbury, was crown-land mortgaged by Charles I. for £20,000, and granted by Charles II. to the Duke of Albemarle subject to this mortgage, and with the right to the timber reserved to the Crown. Lord Clarendon bought the place of Albemarle, and his complaint against the Commissioners of the Navy was, that while they had all the royal forests at command, they chose to spoil the beauty of his property. He further affirmed that he had no intention to contest the King’s right, nor to defraud the Crown of timber; but complained that at the very time the Commissioners sent down a person to mark standing timber for felling, there was a large quantity of wood belonging to the Crown lying on the estate unappropriated, which had been “felled divers years” before.[281 - Lister’s “Life of Clarendon,” vol. iii. p. 340.]

Two of Pepys’s patrons—Sir George Downing and Sir William Coventry—are frequently mentioned in the “Diary;” the first almost always with some expression of dislike, and the other invariably in terms of respect. He sometimes describes his whilom master as “a stingy fellow,”[282 - “Diary,” June 28, 1660.] and laughs at his ridiculous pieces of thrift, “and niggardly manner of entertaining his poor neighbours.”[283 - Feb. 27, 1666–67.] At another time he calls him “a perfidious rogue” for betraying former friends;[284 - March 12, 1661–62.] still, he could appreciate Downing’s business capabilities, and when setting down the fact that the Commissioners of the Treasury had chosen Sir G. Downing for their secretary, he added, “I think, in my conscience, they have done a great thing in it, for he is active and a man of business, and values himself upon having of things do well under his hand; so that I am mightily pleased in their choice.”[285 - May 27, 1667.] At this time Pepys had forgotten the constant causes of annoyance which Downing had given him, and he could afford to be magnanimous in acknowledging his enemy’s good qualities. I have already remarked that Sir William Coventry stands out prominently as the only person who is noticed in the “Diary” in terms of unqualified praise. Other men of the time did not equally admire him, so that it is not easy to come to a just estimation of his character.

Poor Pepys was placed in an awkward predicament on one occasion when he was on a visit to Hampton Court, owing to the enmity between Coventry and Lord Sandwich. He was pleased when the latter asked him to come privately to his lodgings, but adds, “Lord! to see in what difficulty I stand, that I dare not walk with Sir W. Coventry for fear my Lord or Sir G. Carteret should see me; nor with either of them, for fear Sir W. Coventry should.”[286 - “Diary,” Jan. 28, 1665–66.]

When Clarendon fell, in 1667, it was thought likely that Coventry would succeed him as virtual prime minister. His quarrel, however, with the Duke of Buckingham put him out of favour with the King and out of office; so that, although he survived until 1686, he never again took a prominent part in political affairs.

Arthur Annesley, afterwards Earl of Anglesey, is called by Pepys “a grave, serious man,”[287 - Dec. 3, 1664.] and “a very notable man,”[288 - July 9, 1667.] but he does not appear to have been a very friendly one. Although he was under obligations to Sir Edward Montagu’s family, he took the opportunity, when the thanks of Parliament were voted to Montagu, to quash the motion which was made to give him a reward.[289 - June 19, 1660.] He was made Treasurer of the Navy in 1667, in succession to Sir George Carteret, and in the following year when he answered the Duke of York’s letter, he bid the Duke call for Pepys’s books,[290 - Sept. 16, 1668.] in hopes that the Clerk of the Acts might get a reprimand. A peace seems afterwards to have subsisted between the two, for in 1672 Lord Anglesey signed himself in a letter to Pepys, “Your affectionate friend and servant.”

Sir Thomas Osborne, subsequently Viscount Dunblane, Earl of Danby, Marquis of Carmarthen, and Duke of Leeds, was appointed joint Treasurer of the Navy, with Sir Thomas Littleton, to succeed Lord Anglesey. This appointment was greatly disliked by the Duke of York and the officers of the navy, who looked upon the two men as spies set to watch them. Pepys calls Osborne a creature of the Duke of Buckingham’s,[291 - “Diary,” Oct. 29, 1668.] and at another time says he is a beggar “having £11 or £12,00 a year, but owes about £10,000.”[292 - Feb. 14, 1668–69.] It is clear that the Diarist did not foresee the great figure Osborne was about to make in the world; a rise somewhat due to his own parts, and much to the favour of the King. When Charles made him Lord High Treasurer, he told him that he ought to take care of himself, for he had but two friends in England. This startled Osborne, until his majesty explained himself by saying that he (the King) was one, and the other was the Treasurer’s merits.[293 - Sir John Williamson’s “Letters” (Camden Society), vol. i. p. 64.]

Joseph Williamson, who rose from a college tutorship to the office of Secretary of State, has a few words of praise given to him in the “Diary.” He was the son of a clergyman, and in early life is said to have acted as secretary to a member of parliament. He graduated at Oxford as a member of Queen’s College, and in December, 1661, was appointed Keeper of the State Paper Office. About the same time he was Latin Secretary to the King, an office the reversion of which had been promised to John Evelyn. In 1666 Williamson undertook the superintendence of the “London Gazette,” and in 1672 obtained the post of Clerk to the Privy Council, on the resignation of Sir Richard Browne, when he was knighted. The King had many years before promised to give the place to Evelyn, but in consideration of the renewal of the lease of Sayes Court, the latter parted with it to Williamson. Honours now came thick upon the new-made knight. He was Plenipotentiary at the Congress of Cologne in 1673 and 1674, and on his return to England was made Principal Secretary of State, a position which he held for four years. He was President of the Royal Society in 1678, and married Catherine Stuart, daughter of George, Lord Aubigny, and widow of Henry O’Brien, Lord Ibracken, eldest son of the Earl of Thomond, in 1682. He died in 1701, and was buried in the Duke of Richmond and Lennox’s vault in Henry VII.’s Chapel, by right of his wife’s connection with the Duke of Lennox.

The widow’s eldest son by her first husband, Donald O’Brien, was lost in the wreck of the “Gloucester” in 1682, and he is mentioned in a letter of Pepys to Hewer, written from Edinburgh on May 8th of that year. The will of the father contains the following very remarkable paragraph:—“I conjure my son Donatus O’Brien, to honour and obey his King in whatever he commands that is not contradictory to the Holy Scripture and Protestant religion, in which I conjure him (upon pain of my curse) not only to continue himself, but to advise his brothers and sisters to do the same; and that he never marry a Papist; and that he take great care if ever God bless him with children (which I trust he will many) to breed them strictly in the Protestant religion. I advise him to cherish the English on his estate, and drive out the Irish, and especially those of them who go under the name of gentlemen.”[294 - See that monument of learning and research, Chester’s “Westminster Abbey Registers,” 1875, p. 194 (note).]

Before passing on to make a final note on some of the celebrated sailors alluded to in the “Diary,” a place must be found for one of the most eccentric women that ever lived—Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle. Pepys writes, “the whole story of this lady is romance, and all she does is romantic.”[295 - “Diary,” April 11, 1667.] Every one who came in contact with her fooled her to the top of her bent. Evelyn likened her to Zenobia, the mother of the Gracchi, Vittoria Colonna, besides a long line of other celebrities, and when she “took the dust” in the park she was followed and crowded upon by coaches all the way she went, so that nobody could come near her.[296 - May 1, 1667.]

Her husband’s play, “The Humourous Lovers,” was, Pepys says, “the most silly thing that ever came upon a stage,”[297 - March 30.] and also “the most ridiculous thing that ever was wrote,”[298 - April 11, 1667.] yet she and the Duke were “mightily pleased with it, and she at the end made her respects to the players from her box, and did give them thanks.”

On the 30th of May, 1667, the Duchess made a visit to one of the meetings of the Royal Society, when various fine experiments were shown for her entertainment. She was loud in her expressions of admiration as she was led out of the room by several noblemen who were among the company present. There had been great debate among the philosophers as to the advisability of inviting the lady, for many believed that the town would be full of ballads on the event. Her footmen were habited in velvet coats, and she herself appeared in antique dress, so that there is no cause for wonder that people came to see her as if she were the Queen of Sheba. Mrs. Evelyn drew a very lively picture of the Duchess in a letter to Dr. Bohun: “I acknowledge, though I remember her some years since, and have not been a stranger to her fame, I was surprised to find so much extravagancy and vanity in any person not confined within four walls.... Her mien surpasses the imagination of poets or the descriptions of romance heroine’s greatness; her gracious bows, seasonable nods, courteous stretching out of her hands, twinkling of her eyes, and various gestures of approbation, show what may be expected from her discourse, which is airy, empty, whimsical, and rambling as her books, aiming at science difficulties, high notions, terminating commonly in nonsense, oaths, and obscenity.” Pepys’s summing up of the Duchess’s character is shorter, but accords well with Mrs. Evelyn’s opinion—he says she was “a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman.”[299 - “Diary,” March 18, 1668.]

In a book written by a man so intimately connected with the navy as Pepys was, it is not surprising that mention should occur pretty frequently of sailors and soldiers who commanded at sea.

In the great victory over the Dutch in 1665, the Earl of Falmouth, Lord Muskerry, and Richard Boyle, second son of the Earl of Burlington, were all killed by one shot, as they were standing on board the “Royal Charles,” close by the Duke of York, into whose face their blood spurted. The Earl appears very frequently in the “Diary” as Sir Charles Berkeley, Lord Berkeley, Lord Fitzharding, and Earl of Falmouth, and he was to have been created a Marquis had he lived. Charles II. shed a flood of tears when he heard of his friend’s death, but Pepys tells us that none but the King wished him alive again.[300 - “Diary,” June 9, 1665.]

Lord Clarendon put in a few bitter words the most thorough condemnation of the man. He said, “few had observed in him any virtue or quality which they did not wish their best friends without.” The various allusions to Lord Falmouth in the “Diary” quite bear out this character, and yet because he was Sir William Coventry’s friend we are told of “his generosity, good nature, desire of public good, and low thoughts of his own wisdom; his employing his interest in the king to do good offices to all people, without any other fault than the freedom he do learn in France of thinking himself obliged to serve his king in his pleasures.”[301 - August 30, 1668.]

A much greater national loss which took place in this engagement was the death of the famous admiral Sir John Lawson. This chief among the “tarpaulins” was well known to Pepys, as he was the vice-admiral under Sir Edward Montagu at the time when Charles II. was brought over by the fleet. He is described as the same plain man as ever after all his successes,[302 - “Diary,” Jan. 12, 1662–63.] yet an enemy called him a false man, and the greatest hypocrite in the world.[303 - Nov. 9, 1663.] When Lawson died, Pepys could not but acknowledge that the nation had a loss, although he was not sorry, because the late admiral had never been a friend to him.[304 - June 25, 1665.] In the great engagement against the Dutch of the 3rd of June, 1665, Opdam’s ship blew up, and a shot from it, or rather a piece of iron, wounded Lawson on the knee, from which he never recovered. The national loss is expressed in one of the “Poems on State Affairs.”[305 - Vol. i. p. 24.]

“Destiny allowed
Him his revenge, to make his death more proud.
A fatal bullet from his side did range,
And battered Lawson; oh, too dear exchange!
He led our fleet that day too short a space,
But lost his knee: since died, in glorious race:
Lawson, whose valour beyond Fate did go,
And still fights Opdam in the lake below.”

In October, 1666, there was a rumour that Sir Jeremy Smith had killed Sir Robert Holmes in a duel, and Pepys was not sorry to hear it, although he soon found that report did not tell true.[306 - “Diary,” Oct. 31, 1666.] Holmes was very unpopular, and Andrew Marvell called him the “cursed beginner of the two Dutch wars;” describing him as “first an Irish livery boy, then a highwayman, now Bashaw of the Isle of Wight,” who had “got in bonds and by rapine £100,000.”[307 - “Seasonable Argument,” 1677.]

Sir Jeremy Smith was befriended by the Duke of Albemarle, when Holmes delivered articles of accusation against him to the King and Cabinet, and he suffered no ill from the vengeance of his enemy, for in 1669 he was appointed a Commissioner of the Navy in place of Sir William Penn. Pepys was able to find an epithet for him, and although he liked him fairly well, he called him “an impertinent fellow.”[308 - “Diary,” May 10, 1669.]

This slight notice of some of the sailors of the Restoration period may well be closed by a relation of the remarkable action of certain seamen at the funeral of Sir Christopher Mings. Mings, like Lawson, was of poor extraction, and, like him, grew up a worthy captain. He was wounded in the face and leg in an engagement with the Dutch, and shortly afterwards died of his wounds. Pepys and Sir William Coventry attended the funeral, and on their going away, “about a dozen able, lusty, proper men came to the coach side with tears in their eyes, and one of them that spoke for the rest begun and said to Sir W. Coventry, ‘We are here a dozen of us that have long known and loved and served our dead commander, Sir Christopher Mings, and have now done the last office of laying him in the ground. We would be glad we had any other to offer after him, and revenge of him. All we have is our lives; if you will please to get His Royal Highness to give us a fireship among us all, here is a dozen of us, out of all which choose you one to be commander, and the rest of us, whoever he is, will serve him; and if possible do that that shall show our memory of our dead commander and our revenge.’” When this speech was finished Coventry was much moved, and Pepys could scarcely refrain from tears.[309 - “Diary,” June 13, 1666.] What became of these worthy men we are not told.

CHAPTER XI.

MANNERS

“The king’s most faithful subjects we,
In’s service are not dull,
We drink to show our loyalty,
And make his coffers full.
Would all his subjects drink like us,
We’d make him richer far,
More powerful and more prosperous
Than all the Eastern monarchs are.”

    Shadwell’s The Woman Captain.

NO passages in the “Diary” are more valuable than those from which we can gather some idea of the manners of the time in which Pepys lived. It is chiefly, in fact, on account of the pictures of the mode of life among the men and women of the middle classes portrayed in those passages that the book has attained its immense popularity. History instructs, while gossip charms, so that for hundreds who desire to learn the chronicle of events, thousands long to hear how their ordinary fellow creatures lived, what they ate, what they wore, and what they did.

Pepys liked good living, and he was careful to set down what he ate, so that we are able to judge of his taste. This is what he calls a “pretty dinner”—“a brace of stewed carps, six roasted chickens and a jowl of salmon hot, for the first course; a tanzy and two neats’ tongues, and cheese the second.”[310 - “Diary,” March 26, 1662.] A good calf’s head boiled with dumplings he thought an excellent dinner,[311 - Nov. 1, 1663.] and he was very proud of a dinner he gave to some friends, which consisted of “fricasee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a side of a lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four lobsters, three tarts, a lamprey pie (a most rare pie), a dish of anchovies, good wine of several sorts and all things mighty noble and to my great content.”[312 - April 4, 1665.] He was very indignant when Sir W. Hickes gave him and his fellows “the meanest dinner (of beef, shoulder and umbles of venison, which he takes away from the keeper of the forest, and a few pigeons, and all in the meanest manner) that ever I did see, to the basest degree.”[313 - Sept. 13, 1665.] Pepys liked all kinds of pies, whether they contained fish or swan, but there was one pie in particular that was filled with such a pleasant variety of good things that he never tasted the like in all his life.[314 - Nov. 14, 1661.] On two several occasions he records his appreciation of a joint which sounds strange to modern ears—viz., boiled haunch of venison.[315 - Sept. 9, 1662; Dec. 28, 1667.] At special seasons he was in the habit of partaking of the diet appropriate to the festival: thus on Shrove Tuesday he ate fritters,[316 - “Diary,” Feb. 26, 1660–61.] and at Christmas mince pies[317 - Dec. 25, 1666.] or plum porridge,[318 - Dec. 25, 1662.] plum pudding not having been at that time invented. The meat taken with these sweets was sometimes the orthodox beef, but it was more often something else, as on Christmas day, 1660, when it consisted of shoulder of mutton and chicken.

Breakfast was not formerly made an ordinary meal, but radishes were frequently taken with the morning draught. On May 2nd, 1660, Pepys had his breakfast of radishes in the Purser’s cabin of the “Naseby,” in accordance with the rule laid down by Muffet in his “Health’s Improvement” (1655), that they “procure appetite and help digestion;” which is still acted upon in Italy.

Ale-houses, mum-houses, and wine-houses abounded in all parts of London, and much money must have been spent in them. The charges seem to have been high, for Pepys relates how on one occasion the officers of the navy met the Commissioners of the Ordnance at the Dolphin Tavern, when the cost of their dinner was 34s. a man.[319 - June 20, 1665.] We are not told how much Sir W. Batten, Sir W. Penn, and Pepys had to pay when they ordered their dinner at the Queen’s Head at Bow, and took their own meat with them from London.[320 - March 14, 1667.]

There is abundant evidence in the “Diary” of the prevalent habits of deep drinking, and Pepys himself evidently often took more than was good for him. Men were very generally unfit for much business after their early dinners; thus Pepys tells of his great speech at the bar of the House of Commons that it lasted so long that many of the members went out to dinner, and when they came back they were half drunk.[321 - “Diary,” March 5, 1667–68.] Sir William Penn told an excellent story which exhibits well the habits of the time. Some gentlemen (?) drinking at a tavern blindfolded the drawer, and told him that the one he caught would pay the reckoning. All, however, managed to escape, and when the master of the house came up to see what was the matter, his man caught hold of him, thinking he was one of the gentlemen, and cried out that he must pay the reckoning.[322 - Oct. 9, 1660. This is one of the additions in Mr. Mynors Bright’s edition.] Various drinks are mentioned in the “Diary,” such as mum (an ale brewed with wheat), buttered ale (a mixture of beer, sugar, cinnamon, and butter), and lamb’s wool (a mixture of ale with sugar, nutmeg, and the pulp of roasted apples), among other doctored liquors. Such stuff as this does not indicate a refined taste, and the same may be said when we find that wine was also made up for vitiated palates. On June 10th, 1663, Pepys goes with three friends to the Half Moon Tavern, and buys some sugar on the way to mix with the wine. We read of Muscadel, and various kinds of sack, as Malago sack, raspberry sack, and sack posset, of Florence wine, and of Navarre wine. Rhine wines must have been popular at this time, if we may judge from the numerous Rhenish wine-houses spread about the town. Amongst Pepys’s papers was found a memorandum on the dangers England might experience in the event of a war with France. Lord Dartmouth proposed that we might ruin the French by forbidding their wines, “but that he considers, will never be observed with all our heat against France. We see that, rather than not drink their wine, we forget our interest against it, and play all the villanies and perjuries in the world to bring it in, because people will drink it, if it be to be had, at any rate.”[323 - Smith’s “Life, Journals, &c., of Pepys,” vol. ii. p. 202.] What Lord Dartmouth thought to be impossible was practically effected by the Methuen treaty in 1703, after the signing of which French wines were driven out of the English market for many years by Spanish wines, and it was long thought patriotic to drink port.

Pepys liked to be in the fashion, and to wear a newly-introduced costume, although he was displeased when Lady Wright talked about the great happiness of “being in the fashion, and in variety of fashions in scorn of others that are not so, as citizens’ wives and country gentlewomen.”[324 - “Diary,” Dec. 3, 1661.] The Diary is full of references to new clothes, and Pepys never seems so happy as when priding himself upon his appearance and describing the beauties of velvet cloaks, silk coats, and gold buttons. In 1663, he found that his expenses had been somewhat too large, and that the increase had chiefly arisen from expenditure on clothes for himself and wife, although, as already remarked, it appears that Mrs. Pepys’s share was only £12, against her husband’s £55.[325 - “Diary,” Oct 31, 1663.] In fact, our Diarist was at one time rather mean in regard to the money he allowed his wife, although afterwards he was more generous, and even gave £80 for a necklace of pearls which he presented to her.

One of the strangest attempts to fix a fashion was made by Charles the Second, who soon, however, tired of his own scheme. In 1661, John Evelyn advocated a particular kind of costume in a little book entitled “Tyrannus, or the Mode.” Whether the King took his idea from this book, or whether it originated in his own mind we cannot tell, but at all events, on the 17th of October, 1666, he declared to the Privy Council his “resolution of setting a fashion for clothes which he will never alter.” Pepys describes the costume in which Charles appeared on the 15th of October in the following words:—“A long cassock close to the body, of black cloth and pinked with white silk under it, and a coat over it, and the legs ruffled with black rib and like a pigeon’s leg, … a very fine and handsome garment.” Several of the courtiers offered heavy bets that Charles would not persist in his resolution of never altering this costume, and they were right, for very shortly afterwards it was abandoned. The object aimed at was to abolish the French fashion, which had caused great expense, but in order to thwart his brother of England’s purpose, the King of France ordered all his footmen to put on the English vests.[326 - “Diary,” Nov. 22, 1666.] This impertinence on the part of Louis XIV., which appears to have given Steele a hint for his story of Brunetta and Phillis in the “Spectator,” caused the discontinuance of the so-called Persian habit at the English Court.

There are occasional allusions in the “Diary” to female dress. Thus, on October 15th, 1666, Lady Carteret tells Pepys that the ladies are about to adopt a new fashion, and “wear short coats above their ancles,” in place of the long trains, which both the gossips thought “mighty graceful.” At another time Pepys was pleased to see “the young, pretty ladies dressed like men, in velvet coats, caps with ribands, and with laced bands, just like men.”[327 - July 27, 1665.] Vizards or black masks appear to have come into general use, or rather were revived by the ladies about 1663. By wearing them women were able to sit out the most licentious play with unblushing face. We read that Pepys and his wife went to the Theatre Royal on June 12th of that year:—“Here I saw my Lord Falconbridge and his Lady, my Lady Mary Cromwell, who looks as well as I have known her, and well clad; but when the House began to fill she put on her vizard, and so kept it on all the play; which of late is become a great fashion among the ladies, which hides their whole face.” After the play Pepys and Mrs. Pepys went off to the Exchange to buy a vizard, so that the latter might appear in the fashion.

The custom of wearing the hat indoors is more than once alluded to in the “Diary,”[328 - Jan. 21, 1660–61.] and on one occasion Pepys was evidently much elated by the circumstance that he was in a position to wear his hat—“Here it was mighty strange to find myself sit here in Committee with my hat on, while Mr. Sherwin stood bare as a clerk, with his hat off to his Lord Ashly and the rest, but I thank God I think myself never a whit the better man for all that.”[329 - “Diary,” Jan. 17, 1664–65.] This practice, which still exists in the House of Commons, was once universal, and in the statutes of the Royal Society the right of addressing the meeting with his hat on was reserved to the president, the other members being expected to uncover on rising to speak. A few years after the above committee meeting, it became the fashion of the young “blades” to wear their hats cocked at the back of their heads.[330 - June 3, 1667.] This obtained the name of the “Monmouth cock,” after the popular Duke of Monmouth, and according to the “Spectator,” it still lingered in the west of England among the country squires as late as 1711. “During our progress through the most western parts of the kingdom, we fancied ourselves in King Charles the Second’s reign, the people having made little variations in their dress since that time. The smartest of the country squires appear still in the Monmouth cock.”[331 - “Spectator,” No. 129.]

Gloves were then, as now, looked upon as an appropriate present to a lady, and Pepys often bought them for this purpose. On October 27th, 1666, he gave away several pairs of jessimy or jessemin gloves, as Autolycus says, “gloves as sweet as damask roses;” and on January 25th, 1668–69, he was vexed when his wife wanted him to buy two or three dozen perfumed gloves for her. Those who did not wear these useful coverings laid themselves open to remark, as we read of Wallington, a little fellow who sang an excellent bass, that he was “a poor fellow, a working goldsmith, that goes without gloves to his hands.”[332 - “Diary,” Sept. 15, 1667.] The use of muffs by men became common after the Restoration, and continued till Horace Walpole’s day, and even later. November, 1662, was a very cold month, and Pepys was glad to wear his wife’s last year’s muff, and to buy her a new one. The long hair worn by the cavaliers was superseded soon after the Restoration by the use of wigs. Pepys went on the 29th of August, 1663, to his barber’s to be trimmed, when he returned a periwig which had been sent for his approval, as he had not quite made up his mind to wear one, and “put it off for a while.” Very soon afterwards, however, he ordered one to be made for him;[333 - Oct. 30, 1663.] and then he had his hair cut off, which went against his inclination. The new wig cost three pounds, and the old hair was used to make another.[334 - Nov. 3, 1663.] This last only cost twenty-one shillings and sixpence to make up, and the peruque-maker promised that the two would last for two years.[335 - Nov. 13, 1663.] The Duke of York very soon followed the fashion set by his subordinate, and put on a wig for the first time on February 15th, 1663–4. These magnificent ornaments, which look so grand in the portraits, were very apt to get out of order, and on one occasion Pepys had to send his wig back to the barber’s to be cleansed of its nits. No wonder he was vexed at having had it sent to him in such a state.[336 - “Diary,” July 18, 1664.] On May 30th, 1668, he came to an agreement with his barber to keep his wigs in good order for twenty shillings a year. It is remarkable that people did not return to the sensible fashion of wearing their own hair after the plague, when there must have been great dread of infection from this source. Pepys bought a wig at Westminster during the sickness, and was long afraid to wear it. He adds, “it is a wonder what will be the fashion after the plague is done, as to periwigs, for nobody will dare to buy any hair, for fear of the infection, that it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague.”[337 - Sept. 3, 1665.]

Before passing on to consider some other customs, a word should be said on the practice of wearing mourning. When the Duke of Gloucester died, it is related that the King wore purple, which was used as royal mourning. At the same time Mrs. Pepys spent £15 on mourning clothes for herself and husband.[338 - Sept. 17, 1660.] We are told how the whole family went into black on the death of the elder Mrs. Pepys,[339 - March 27, 1667.] and we have very full and curious particulars of the funeral of Thomas Pepys. For this occasion Samuel had the soles of his shoes blacked, which seems a rather odd kind of mourning![340 - March 18, 1663–64.]

The engagement between Philip Carteret and Lady Jemimah Montagu gave the Diarist considerable employment, and from the long account he has written on it we gather that he was very proud of such assistance as he was able to give. Carteret was a shy young man, and needed much instruction, as to how he should take the lady’s hand, and what he should do. The whole description is very droll, but too long to quote here. Pepys made the best of the affair, but he evidently thought his protégé a very insipid lover. The wedding took place on July 31st, 1665, the bride and bridegroom being in their old clothes, but Pepys was resplendent in a “new coloured suit and coat trimmed with gold buttons, and gold broad lace round his hands, very rich and fine.” This is the account of what occurred after supper:—“All of us to prayers as usual, and the young bride and bridegroom too; and so after prayers soberly to bed; only I got into the bridegroom’s chamber while he undressed himself, and there was very merry till he was called to the bride’s chamber, and into bed they went. I kissed the bride in bed, and so the curtains drawn with the greatest gravity that could be, and so good night. But the modesty and gravity of this business was so decent that it was to me, indeed, ten times more delightful than if it had been twenty times more merry and jovial.”