Pepys at Church

ST. OLAVE’S Church, having escaped the Great Fire, still stands as it stood in Pepys’s day, between London Bridge and Tower Hill, where Seething Lane runs into Hart Street and Crutched Friars. The church tower suggests those storied steeples which Sir Christopher Wren liked so much, and which the Puritans of New England, in memory of their old home, set so handsomely upon their meeting houses. A picture of the interior shows a long narrow building, with galleries and high-backed pews and a tall ‘ three-decker ’ in the middle. Pepys’s pew seems to have been in the gallery. ‘To church,’ he says, ‘to consult about our gallery.’ There were several rows of seats in it, and the matter of precedence as between the Pepyses and the Battens caused some solicitude. Once the servants sat below and the family behind, to Pepys’s vexation, who liked it not that the serving people should be placed so on equality with their master and mistress. The pew was ‘covered all over with rosemary and baize.’

There sat Pepys in his ‘new shag gown, trimmed with gold buttons and twist, with a new hat, and silk tops for my legs,’ and his pretty wife beside him in her ‘black silk gown, which is now laced all over with black lace, as the fashion is’: the male much more gorgeous than the female, according to the style of birds and butterflies, and according to the complaints of Pepys over his deficits, which have ‘chiefly arisen from my layings-out in clothes for myself and wife, viz., for her about £l2 and for myself £55, or thereabouts.’

Pepys’s diary begins on Sunday, that being the first day of the year 1660. On that day, he put on his ‘suit with great skirts,’ and went to Mr. Gunning’s chapel at Exeter House. By an interesting coincidence, Pepys’s eminent autobiographical contemporary, John Evelyn, attended the same service. Each of the gentlemen recorded the text in his journal. To which Pepys added: ‘Dined at home in the garret, where my wife dressed the remains of a turkey, and in the doing of it burned her hand. I staid at home the whole afternoon looking over my accounts.’ At that time, as he says, he was ‘esteemed rich, but indeed very poor.’

This is the first of several hundred Sunday entries, from the January of 1660 to the May of 1669, when Pepys’s eyes gave out. During these ten years, the Stuarts were restored and the Presbyterians ejected, and the Great Plague of 1665 was followed by the Great Fire of 1666, and by the Dutch Invasion of 1667. Pepys was with the fleet, and indeed upon the ship, which brought Charles back. He remained in London, or in a near suburb, during the whole season of the plague. He helped to stop the progress of the fire. And he was clerk of the Acts in the Navy Office while the Dutch were burning the English shipping in the Medway and the Thames.

During this interesting time, he attended church with much regularity, noting with shrewd adjectives the value of the sermon, noting also with satisfaction the clothes which his increasing prosperity permitted him to wear, and in the afternoon, with his wife, casting up his accounts.

It was like Pepys to go on that Sunday to hear Gunning preach. The Restoration was plainly at hand, and the preacher represented the religious side of it. A few weeks later, he went ‘in the afternoon to Mr. Herring, where a poor, lazy sermon. This day,’ he adds, ‘I began to put buckles to my shoes.’ Mr. Herring was a Presbyterian minister. Pepys wished to hear what he had to say on his part.

The diary helps us to understand the amazing ease with which the nation passed out of the Middle Ages into the Reformation under Edward, back again into the Roman Church with Mary, and out again with Elizabeth; into Puritanism with Cromwell, and out of Puritanism with Charles the Second. A great number of his countrymen, like Pepys, had no very strong convictions concerning these differences.

He was, indeed, a Protestant, and the meanest thing which his wife could think of to say to him at the height of their most serious quarrel was that she had become a Roman Catholic. He was much worried about it, and much relieved when he found her on a following Sunday making ready to go to the parish church as usual. ‘Up, and with my wife to church; which pleases me mightily, I being full of fear that she would never go to church again, after that she had declared to me that she was a Roman Catholick. But though I do verily believe she fears God, and is truly and sincerely righteous, yet I do see that she is not so strict a Catholick as not to go to church with me, which pleases me mightily.’ Yet he himself went occasionally to mass, though mostly out of curiosity; and in his later years he was imprisoned for a time in the Tower on suspicion that he was a papist.

Pepys was an adherent, and, though he partook of the sacrament but rarely, a communicant, of the Church of England. All his political interests, and, for the most part, his tastes and such convictions as he had, were on that side. But he listened with appreciation to Presbyterian preaching. ‘This,’he says, ‘being the last Sunday that the Presbyterians are to preach unless they read the new Common Prayer, and renounce the Covenant, I had a mind to hear Dr. Bates’s farewell sermon, and walked to St. Dunstan’s, where, it not being seven o’clock yet, the doors were not yet open; and so I walked an hour in the Temple Garden, reading my vows, which it is a great content to me to see how I am a changed man in all respects for the better since I took them, which the God of Heaven continue to me, and make me thankful for.’ At eight o’clock, the church was crowded, and so again at one. Pepys set down in his diary the last words of the preacher. ‘You know,’he said, ‘that it is not my manner to speak anything in the pulpit that is extraneous to my text and business; yet this I shall say, that it is not my opinion, fashion or humour that keeps me from complying with what is required of us, but something which, after much prayer, discourse and study, yet remains unappeased, and commands me herein.’ On a later occasion, meeting ‘several poor creatures carried by, by constables, for being at a conventicle,’ he wrote: ‘They go like lambs, without any resistance. I would to God they would either conform, or be more wise and not be catched.’ He does not care much which.

Pepys in his youth had seen King Charles beheaded. Afterwards he saw the first notable tragedy of the Restoration. ‘ I went out to Charing Cross to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there were great shouts of joy.' Pepys himself seems not to have joined in these rejoicings. He looked on at the execution of the King, and then of the leader of the rebels, without any strong emotion.

So it was regarding the social and moral reaction of his age. ‘The Restoration brought Charles to Whitehall, and in an instant,’says Green in his history, ‘the whole face of England was changed. All that was noblest and best in Puritanism was whirled away with its pettiness and its tyranny in the current of the nation’s hate. Religion had been turned into a system of social and political oppression, and it fell with their fall. Godliness became a by-word of scorn; sobriety in dress, in speech, in manners, was flouted as a mark of the detested Puritanism. . . . Dueling and raking became the mark of a fine gentleman; and grave divines winked at the follies of “honest fellows” who fought, gambled, swore, drank, and ended a day of debauchery by a night in the gutter. Life among men of fashion vibrated between frivolity and excess.’

Of all this there is evidence enough in Pepys’s diary, but it is in no way a description of Pepys’s own life.

He drank, indeed, more than was good for him, but he attended to business with unfailing faithfulness. He gave Mrs. Pepys occasional cause for jealousy, but in the main they lived together peacefully and happily, in sincere and constant affection. And even Pepys’s lapses are curiously associated with religion. One time in a February, ‘ Mr. Mills,’ he says, ‘made an excellent sermon against drunkenesse, that ever I heard in my life.’ But early in March, ‘by coach to the Tower, to Sir John Robinson’s to dinner, where great cheer. After dinner, to drink all the afternoon. Towards night the ladies went away; then we set to it again till it was very late.’ Another time he writes: ‘What at dinner and supper, I drink, I know not how, of my own accord, so much wine that I was even almost foxed, and my head aked all night: so home, and to bed without prayers, which I never yet did, since I came to the house, of a Sunday night; I being now so out of order that I durst not read prayers, for fear of being perceived by my servants in what case I was.’

Pepys is drunk, but he is at the same time a man whose decent custom it is to assemble his family for prayers every Sunday night. This is his rule. Once, indeed, he says, ‘To bed without prayers, it being very cold, and to-morrow washing day.’ But the exceptions are few. Moreover the excesses of drinking are followed by devout vows to God never to do so again. And when his wife is jealous with good reason, and is crying night and day, and Pepys too in his penitence is crying, he declares in his journal that he is praying every morning on his knees to be delivered from temptation.

Here, then, is a servant of the corrupt court of Charles, and not a Puritan, who dances and drinks and goes to plays, and is eagerly intent on getting his full share of the pleasure of life, who nevertheless is a pretty decent person. He is given over neither to frivolity nor to excess. He tastes of both, but puts the golden cups aside and goes along about his honest business. It is characteristic of him that though he liked to hear and tell the scandals of the court, he was offended at them. He was distressed to see ‘princes in places where order and discipline should be.’ ‘I am ashamed,’ he says, ‘to see my lord so grossly play the fool, to the flinging off of all honour.’ When a mimic at a dinner prays through his nose a Puritan prayer and preaches a bit of a Puritan sermon, Pepys is displeased, though the performance pleases an archbishop. He could be merry enough upon occasion, but it is characteristic of him that he says after a wedding, ‘There was pulling off Mrs. Bride’s and Mr. Bridegroom’s ribbons, and a great deal of fooling among them that I and my wife did not like.’ And after another wedding, ‘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.’

That is, Pepys is a representative of the great majority of his contemporaries in England. Romanism, Puritanism, Anglicanism, go and come and do not very seriously affect the people, because, like Pepys, they are not deeply interested. They are contented to let the enthusiastic contend about these matters, and to accept the outcome. Sobriety and sensuality chase each other on and off the stage of public life, like Death and the Devil in the moralities, but meanwhile the decent nation, like Pepys, lives its respectable and even religious life. The conspicuous folk do thus and so, and seem to represent the age for good or bad, but they are no more representative than the Roman Cæsars, or the Roman Popes who followed them.

St. Olave’s became Pepys’s parish church by reason of his connection with the Naval Office, which was just across the street. His position was that of a permanent under-secretary, which means that he was practically the manager of the English navy, so far as the Duke of York permitted; and he lived in one of the official residences. ‘ For myself,’ he says, ‘chance without merit brought me in’; but, he adds, ‘ diligence only keeps me so.’ The chance was his favor with his kinsman, Sir Edward Montagu, commander of the fleet which brought the King from Holland, who took Pepys with him as his secretary. Thus on a Sunday, in the Channel, he heard the preacher pray for King Charles; and on another Sunday, ‘to the quarter-deck, at which the tailors and painters were at work, cutting out some pieces of yellow cloth into the fashion of a crown and C. R. and put it upon a fine sheet, and that into the flag, instead of the States arms, which after dinner was finished and set up.’

Gradually, under the new order of things, the Common Prayer comes back. On the first Sunday in July, 1660: ‘This morning came home my fine camlet cloak, with gold buttons, and silk suit, which cost me much money, which I pray God make me able to pay for. In the afternoon to the Abbey, where a good sermon by a stranger, but no Common Prayer yet.’ On the next Sunday to Whitehall Chapel. ‘Here I heard very good musique, the first time that I ever remember to have heard the organs and the singing men in surplices in my life.’ In the beginning of November, at St. Olave’s, ‘Mr. Mills did begin to nibble at the Common Prayer, by saying “Glory be to the Father, etc.” after he had read the two psalms; but the people had been so little used to it that they could not tell what to answer.’ A year later, ‘I to church,’ he says, ‘and this day the parson has got one to read with a surplice on. I suppose himself will take it up hereafter, for a cunning fellow he is as any of his coate.’ And, sure enough, on the last Sunday of that month, ‘Put on my new scallop, which is very fine. To church and there saw the first time Mr. Mills in a surplice; but it seemed absurd for him to pull it over his ears in the reading-pew after he had done, before all the church, to go up to the pulpit, to preach without it.’

Thus events moved toward the Black Bartholomew of 1662, when the Presbyterian ministers, to the number of eighteen hundred, were ejected. Neither Pepys nor Evelyn perceived the significance of that act of violence. Most churchmen rejoiced that the triumphs of the Commonwealth were thus turned into ignominious defeat, and most Presbyterians were busy reckoning their losses and planning how to meet the hardships of the immediate future. But on that day the Church of England ceased to be the church of the English people. It had thrust half of the nation out of doors. It had compelled the competition of Dissent. And, at the same time, thus calling into being the strong competition of Dissent, it had changed the appeal of religion, from that day forward, from the voice of Authority to the voice of Reason. It is curiously significant that in the midst of that very week Evelyn says, ‘I was admitted and then sworn one of the Council of the Royal Society ’; of which society Pepys was afterwards president. For this was an association of men of science, committed to the principle that truth is to be ascertained, not by the word of tradition, but by observation and investigation, by the exercise of reason.

Meanwhile, Pepys was going quietly to church, as if nothing had happened. The diary shows that the pulpit of St. Olave’s was open to a long succession of visiting preachers. ‘A most tedious, unreasonable and impertinent sermon by an Irish doctor. His text was “Scatter them, O Lord, that delight in war.” Sir W. Batten and I very angry with the parson.’ Naturally, such doctrine was unpopular at the Navy Office. ‘At church in the morning. A stranger preached a good honest and painful sermon.’ ‘At church, where a stranger preached like a fool.’ Mr. Mills’s choice of preachers seems to have been calculated to make his parishioners content with their own minister.

The regularity of Pepys’s attendance at church diminishes a little as the responsibilities of his office increase upon him. Many Sundays find him at his public accounts, or in anxious consultations over affairs of state. He was ever a hard worker. ‘Up betimes,’ he says he is on many days; or ‘up very betimes,’ meaning four o’clock in the morning. An honest government official, under a king who spends upon ‘ my Lady Castlemaine ’ and other disreputable persons the money which ought to have been used to pay the sailors, has a hard life. ‘To church,’ he says, ‘where I have not been a good while.’ ‘Up and to church, where I have not been these many weeks.’ ‘Up, and I put on my best cloth black suit and my velvet cloak, and with my wife in her best suit to church, where we have not been these nine or ten weeks.’

There is no indication of any loss of interest in religion; neither is there any sign, on the other hand, of any distress of conscience. It is interesting to see how Pepys comes out under the grave shadow of the Commonwealth, with its strong emphasis on the Fourth Commandment, and of a Sunday walks in the fields, or takes a boat on the river, or teaches his wife addition, subtraction, and multiplication, and hopes to get on to division, or talks with his tailor, or reads indifferently Richard Hooker or Ben Jonson, or arranges his growing collection of books, or works at his desk. As a rule, he goes to church in the morning, and often again in the afternoon; and on Sunday evening he takes pleasure in singing psalms; and the day ends with the reading of family prayers. He buys a Bible concordance, of which, he says, he hopes to make much use. Regularly he reads his vows, and is glad when he finds that he is amending his faults. He thanks God devoutly for the mercies and blessings of his life. But all this is as natural and as unconventional as his delight in music.

Pepys cared much for music. He was interested in anthems. He liked to sing. He composed a little, and was mighty pleased, as he says, to hear his songs sung. He comes home one night from the play of The Virgin Martyr, and writes in his diary: ‘That which did please me beyond anything in the whole world was the wind-musick when the angel comes down, which was so sweet that it ravished me, and, indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife: that neither then, nor all the evening going home, and at home, I was able to think of anything, but remained all night transported, so that I could not believe that ever any musick hath that real command over the soul of a man as did this upon me.’ He never speaks in this rapture of religion, though he did stand in the aisle during the whole of a long sermon, listening with delight.

At the same time, religion seems to have been a very genuine part of his life. The freedom with which he stayed away from church indicates that when he went, as he did week after week, it was because he liked it. He went oftener than his wife. He had enough religion to keep him, for the most part, decent and honest in a society wherein his social superiors set him examples of dissolute and dishonest living. He seems, indeed, to be thinking more of his velvet cloak, and his ‘flowered taby vest, very rich,’ and of the buckles on his shoes, than of his prayers; but these are easier than prayers to write about, even in a confidential journal.

Of course, Pepys’s diary is very difcrent from Cotton Mather’s, and even from Judge Sewell’s; but so, for that matter, are our own, if we keep any. The analogy with music states it best.

Pepys felt no more obligation to go to church than to go to concerts. It was not an affair of obligation. He cared much for both, and availed himself of the one privilege as of the other, when he could.

Then came the Plague.

It was on a Wednesday of the June of 1665, and ‘the hottest day,’ says Pepys, ‘that ever I felt in my life,’ that it first came into plain sight. He and his wife had been on the river that day, very merrily, and had walked an hour or two in the Spring Garden with great pleasure, and ‘spending,’ as he says characteristically, ‘but 6d till nine at night.’ But ‘much against my will,’ he adds, ‘I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and “Lord have mercy upon us” writ there; which was a sad sight to me, being the first of that kind that, to my remembrance, I ever saw.’ He bought some ‘roll-tobacco’ to ‘smell and chaw, which took away the apprehension.’ But this was only the beginning of the tremendous calamity.

Pepys got his wife away to Woolwich, but he himself remained in London, or near by, attending to the king’s business. Business goes on, and life goes on, after a fashion. But the bell is always ringing. ‘The sickness is got into our parish this week, and is got, indeed, everywhere; so that I begin to think of setting things in order, which I pray God to enable me to do, both as to soul and body.’ The services now are mostly funerals. ‘It was a sad noise to hear our bell ring so often to-day, either for deaths or burials; I think five or six times.’ And presently, on a Lord’s Day, ‘Lord, what a sad time it is to see no boats upon the river; and the grass grows all up and down White Hall Court, and nobody but poor wretches in the streets.’ Still, on another Lord’s Day, ‘Up, and put on my colored suit very fine, and my new periwigg, bought a good while since, but durst not wear, because the plague was in Westminster when I bought it, and it is a wonder what will be the fashion, after the plague is done, in periwiggs, for nobody will dare to buy any hair, for fear of the infection.’

Plague or no plague, the fashions are as certain to continue as the changing seasons. The state business continues also. ‘All the people were at church,’ says Pepys, ‘and the office quiet, so I did much business.’ And social life continues. ‘To church this morning, and there saw a wedding in the church, which I have not seen many a day; and the young people so merry one with another! and strange to sec what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and woman gazing and smiling at them.’

At the end of January, 1666, Pepys says: ‘This is the first time I have been in the church since I left London for the plague, and it frightened me indeed to go through the church more than I thought it could have done, to see so many graves lie so high upon the churchyards, where the people have been buried of the plague. I was much troubled at it, and do not think to go through it again a good while.’ But presently, ‘My wife and I for the first time at church since the plague, and now only because of Mr. Mills his coming home to preach his first sermon; expecting a great excuse for his leaving the parish before anybody went, and now staying till we are all come home; but he made but a very poor and short excuse, and a bad sermon. It was a frost and had snowed last night, which covered the graves in the churchyard, so I was the less afraid for going through.’

And after the Plague, the Fire.

On Sunday, the 2d of September, 1666, ‘some of our maids sitting up late last night to get things ready against our feast to-day, Jane called us up about three in the morning to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City.’ The sight, however, did not much alarm the family, ‘so went to bed again, and to sleep.’ But in the morning it is plain that there is ‘an infinite great fire,’ and that night it had increased, ‘in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the city, in a most horrid, malicious, bloody flame.’ ‘It; made me weep to see it. The churches, houses and all on fire and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruine.’ So, on the Sunday following, ’I to church, where our parson made a melancholy but good sermon; and many and most in the church cried, specially the women.’ And on the last Sunday of that month, ‘Up, and to church, where I have not been a good while; and there the church infinitely thronged with strangers, since the fire came into our parish; but not one handsome face among them, as if, indeed, there was a curse, as Bishop Fuller heretofore said, upon our parish.’

Even the Fire, though he dreamed of it every night, did not destroy the good spirits of the Clerk of the Acts. One Sunday, he says, ‘My taylor’s man brings my vest home, and coat to wear with it, and I like myself mightily in it, and so does my wife,’ On a Christmas Day, Mrs. Pepys sleeps long, ‘having sat up till four this morning, seeing her maids make mince-pies.

I to church where our parson Mills made a good sermon. Then home, and dined well, on some good ribs of beef roasted, and plenty of good wine of our own, and my heart full of true joy; and thanks to God Almighty for the goodness of my condition at this day.’

Once he goes to Hackney Church, ‘chiefly,’as he says, ‘to see the young ladies of the schools, whereof there is great store, and very pretty.’ And on another Sunday, ‘After dinner I did go by water alone to Westminster to the parish church, and there did entertain myself with my perspective glass up and down the church, by which I had great pleasure of seeing and gazing at a great many very fine women; and what with that, and sleeping, I passed away the time till the sermon was done.’ And again, on a Sunday afternoon, to the same church, ‘thinking to see Betty Michell; and did stay an hour in the crowd, thinking by the end of a nose that I saw, that it had been her; but at last the head was turned towards me, and it was her mother, which vexed me.’

Alongside of these merry notes, however, are much more serious comments. Mr. Gifford preached on the text, ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and its righteousness, and all things shall be added unto you.’ Pepys says: ‘A very excellent and persuasive, good and moral sermon. He showed, like a wise man, that righteousness is a surer moral way of being rich than sin and villainy.’ Mr. Stillingfleet preached at Whitehall Chapel. ‘He did make a most plain, honest, good, grave sermon, in the most unconcerned, and yet easy and substantial manner, that ever I heard in my life.’ ‘To my great joy,’ he says again, ‘I find Mr. Frampton in the pulpit; and I think the best sermon, for goodness and oratory, that ever I heard in my life. The truth is, he preaches the most like an apostle that ever I heard man; and it was much the best time that ever I spent in my life at church.’ The text was from Ecclesiastes: ‘But if a man live many years, and rejoice in them all, yet let him remember the years of darkness, for they shall be many. All that cometh is vanity.’

It seems a strange text for the applause of Pepys, rejoicing as he was in the midst of his years. It is to be hoped that the preacher mitigated somewhat the pessimism of the Scripture, and emphasized the vanity of the present rather than the vanity of the future. Probably what impressed Pepys was the setting forth of the seriousness of life. Back of all the frank confidences of the diary, there is a sufficient disclosure of a serious mind. The Pepys who dons the camlet cloak, and who wonders what the people think when for the first time he wears a periwig to church, and who inspects the congregation with a perspective glass during the sermon, looking at the pretty women, was at the same time, ‘the right hand of the navy,’ a man of large and important duties, ‘ infinitely busy,’ as he says, and burdened with responsibility. The difference between him and his most dignified and substantial neighbors was not apparent at the time. ‘He was a philosopher,’ said Jeremy Collier, ‘of the severest morality.’ Indeed, the principal difference is that other men are judged by their public manners, but Pepys by all his private thoughts.

When Pepys came to his last, illness, in the seventy-first year of his life, and the thirty-fourth after the conclusion of his diary, he was attended by the nonjuring Dean of Worcester. The Dean said: ‘The greatness of his behaviour, in his long and sharp tryall before his death, was in every respect answerable to his great life; and I believe no man ever went out of this world with greater contempt, of it, or a more lively faith in everything that was revealed of the world to come.’ He added; ‘I never attended any sick and dying person that dyed with so much Christian greatnesses of mind, and I doubt not but he is now a very blessed spirit.’ ‘ He was universally beloved,’ says Evelyn, ‘hospitable, generous, learned in many things, skilled in music, a very great cherisher of learned men of whom he had the conversation.’

Thus did the church and the world praise him. No doubt, he joined honestly enough in the words of the church service: ‘We have left undone those things which we ought, to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.’ But the prayer in which these words occur is called, very properly, a ‘General Confession.’