“Thence to my Lord Sandwich, who though he has been
abroad again two or three days is falling ill again, and is let blood this
morning, though I hope it is only a great cold that he has got. It was a great
trouble to me (and I had great apprehensions of it) that my Lord desired me to
go to Westminster Hall, to the Parliament- house door, about business; and to
Sir Wm. Wheeler, which I told him I would do, but durst not go for fear of
being taken by these rogues; but was forced to go to White Hall and take boat,
and so land below the Tower at the Iron-gate; and so the back way over Little
Tower Hill; and with my cloak over my face, took one of the watermen along with
me, and staid behind a wall in the New-buildings behind our garden, while he
went to see whether any body stood within the Merchants' Gate, under which we
pass to go into our garden, and there standing but a little dirty boy before
the gate, did make me quake and sweat to think he might be a Trepan. But there
was nobody, and so I got safe into the garden, and coming to open my office
door, something behind it fell in the opening, which made me start. So that God
knows in what a sad condition I should be in if I were truly in the condition
that many a poor man is for debt: and therefore ought to bless God that I have
no such reall reason, and to endeavour to keep myself, by my good deportment
and good husbandry, out of any such condition.”—Samuel Pepys, diary entry February 23, 1663
Samuel Pepys, a naval bureaucrat and perhaps the greatest
diarist in English letters, was born on this date in 1633 in Salisbury Court
off Fleet Street, the fifth in a line of 11 children born to a London tailor
and the sister of a Whitechapel butcher. The surname, by the way, is pronounced
“peeps”—a rather apt description, come to think of it, of what he gives us of
life in his country in the mid-17th century, a period of regime
change, turbulence, disaster and the fear these all bred.
Pepys’ accounts of the London fire and the plague
that also devastated the city have become primary sources for historians of
major cataclysms of that time, and his daily descriptions of playgoing and his
marital misadventures have filled in the details of social life in his time.
But I thought, with this post, to see how he would view events on a day with
more personal meaning for him: his birthday.
The whole entry for this day is double in length, at
least, what I’ve quoted here. But this portion does give a good sense of the
juxtaposition of high and low in Pepys’ world. As the right-hand man of Lord
Sandwich (cousin Edward Montagu), head of naval administration, he’s sent
at the behest of his mentor (taken sick, and experiencing the
treatment-worse-than-the-disease of bloodletting with leeches), on one of those
inevitable political-bureaucratic errands that public servants inevitably
handle.
As I read the passage, I called to mind my own trip
to London late last month, and especially around the Tower of London and
Parliament. Those areas are now thronged with tourists, but it was a different
atmosphere in Pepys’ time. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan
(published only 13 years before Pepys’ 30th birthday) famously
described the life of man in a state of war as “solitary, nasty, brutish and
short.” Less than 15 years after a regicide ended England’s Civil War, Pepys
encountered shadows of that state in the figures he encounters on his
errand.
Already worried about “these rogues,” this high
minister is afraid he’s bumped into a “Trepan.” The word might sound a bit unfamiliar to us, but
its context is treacherous. The Oxford
English Dictionary, it turns out, defines it as “A person who entraps or
decoys others into actions or positions which may be to his advantage and to
their ruin or loss.” The sinister aspect of this term might come from something
sharp that a hoodlum might hold in the pocket, such as a surgical instrument in
the form of a crown-saw, used for cutting out small pieces of bone.
Pepys quit making his diary entries only six years
later, when he feared encroaching blindness. It turned out that his fears on
this score were as overblown as the ones he felt concerning the “rogues” that
he was sure were accosting him on his 30th birthday. He ended up
dying when he was 70. Posterity honors him not for the phantoms he thought he
saw, but for the gritty, amusing vignettes he did witness. Biographer Claire
Tomalin has called him “The Unequalled Self,” and many have found little reason
to argue the point.
(Portrait of
Samuel Pepys by Johann Closterman)
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