Sunday 24 February 1666/67

(Lord’s day). Up, and with [Sir] W. Batten, by coach; he set me down at my Lord Bruncker’s (his feud there not suffering him to ’light himself), and I with my Lord by and by when ready to White Hall, and by and by up to the Duke of York, and there presented our great letter and other papers, and among the rest my report of the victualling, which is good, I think, and will continue my pretence to the place, which I am still afeard Sir W. Coventry’s employment may extinguish. We have discharged ourselves in this letter fully from blame in the bad success of the Navy, if money do not come soon to us, and so my heart is at pretty good rest in this point. Having done here, Sir W. Batten and I home by coach, and though the sermon at our church was begun, yet he would ’light to go home and eat a slice of roast beef off the spit, and did, and then he and I to church in the middle of the sermon. My Lady Pen there saluted me with great content to tell me that her daughter and husband are still in bed, as if the silly woman thought it a great matter of honour, and did, going out of the church, ask me whether we did not make a great show at Court today, with all our favours in our hats. After sermon home, and alone with my wife dined. Among other things my wife told me how ill a report our Mercer hath got by her keeping of company, so that she will not send for her to dine with us or be with us as heretofore; and, what is more strange, tells me that little Mis. Tooker hath got a clap as young as she is, being brought up loosely by her mother … [having been in bed with her mother when her mother hath had a man come into bed and lay with her. – L&M] In the afternoon away to White Hall by water, and took a turn or two in the Park, and then back to White Hall, and there meeting my Lord Arlington, he, by I know not what kindness, offered to carry me along with him to my Lord Treasurer’s, whither, I told him, I was going. I believe he had a mind to discourse of some Navy businesses, but Sir Thomas Clifford coming into the coach to us, we were prevented; which I was sorry for, for I had a mind to begin an acquaintance with him. He speaks well, and hath pretty slight superficial parts, I believe. He, in our going, talked much of the plain habit of the Spaniards; how the King and Lords themselves wear but a cloak of Colchester bayze, and the ladies mantles, in cold weather, of white flannell: and that the endeavours frequently of setting up the manufacture of making these stuffs there have only been prevented by the Inquisition: the English and Dutchmen that have been sent for to work, being taken with a Psalmbook or Testament, and so clapped up, and the house pulled down by the Inquisitors; and the greatest Lord in Spayne dare not say a word against it, if the word Inquisition be but mentioned. At my Lord Treasurer’s ’light and parted with them, they going into Council, and I walked with Captain Cocke, who takes mighty notice of the differences growing in our office between Lord Bruncker and [Sir] W. Batten, and among others also, and I fear it may do us hurt, but I will keep out of them. By and by comes Sir S. Fox, and he and I walked and talked together on many things, but chiefly want of money, and the straits the King brings himself and affairs into for want of it. Captain Cocke did tell me what I must not forget: that the answer of the Dutch, refusing The Hague for a place of treaty, and proposing the Boysse, Bredah, Bergen-op-Zoome, or Mastricht, was seemingly stopped by the Swede’s Embassador (though he did show it to the King, but the King would take no notice of it, nor does not) from being delivered to the King; and he hath wrote to desire them to consider better of it: so that, though we know their refusal of the place, yet they know not that we know it, nor is the King obliged to show his sense of the affront. That the Dutch are in very great straits, so as to be said to be not able to set out their fleete this year. By and by comes Sir Robert Viner and my Lord Mayor to ask the King’s directions about measuring out the streets according to the new Act for building of the City, wherein the King is to be pleased.1 But he says that the way proposed in Parliament, by Colonel Birch, would have been the best, to have chosen some persons in trust, and sold the whole ground, and let it be sold again by them, with preference to the old owner, which would have certainly caused the City to be built where these Trustees pleased; whereas now, great differences will be, and the streets built by fits, and not entire till all differences be decided. This, as he tells it, I think would have been the best way. I enquired about the Frenchman that was said to fire the City, and was hanged for it, by his own confession, that he was hired for it by a Frenchman of Roane, and that he did with a stick reach in a fire-ball in at a window of the house: whereas the master of the house, who is the King’s baker, and his son, and daughter, do all swear there was no such window, and that the fire did not begin thereabouts. Yet the fellow, who, though a mopish besotted fellow, did not speak like a madman, did swear that he did fire it: and did not this like a madman; for, being tried on purpose, and landed with his keeper at the Tower Wharf, he could carry the keeper to the very house. Asking Sir R. Viner what he thought was the cause of the fire, he tells me, that the baker, son, and his daughter, did all swear again and again, that their oven was drawn by ten o’clock at night; that, having occasion to light a candle about twelve, there was not so much fire in the bakehouse as to light a match for a candle, so that they were fain to go into another place to light it; that about two in the morning they felt themselves almost choked with smoke, and rising, did find the fire coming upstairs; so they rose to save themselves; but that, at that time, the bavins were not on fire in the yard. So that they are, as they swear, in absolute ignorance how this fire should come; which is a strange thing, that so horrid an effect should have so mean and uncertain a beginning. By and by called in to the King and Cabinet, and there had a few insipid words about money for Tangier, but to no purpose. Thence away walked to my boat at White Hall, and so home and to supper, and then to talk with W. Hewer about business of the differences at present among the people of our office, and so to my journall and to bed. This night going through bridge by water, my waterman told me how the mistress of the Beare tavern, at the bridge-foot, did lately fling herself into the Thames, and drowned herself; which did trouble me the more, when they tell me it was she that did live at the White Horse tavern in Lumbard Streete, which was a most beautiful woman, as most I have seen. It seems she hath had long melancholy upon her, and hath endeavoured to make away with herself often.

28 Annotations

First Reading

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"little Mis. Tooker hath got a clap, as young as she is; being brought up loosely by her mother -- having been in bed with her mother when her mother hath had a man come into bed and lay with her." (L&M text)

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"at that time, the bavins were not on fire in the yard"

bavin (plural bavins)

1. A bundle of wood, or twigs which may be used in broom making. Southern England term. Also, a fagot bound with only one band.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bav…

Robert Gertz  •  Link

"My Lady Pen there saluted me with great content to tell me that her daughter and husband are still in bed, as if the silly woman thought it a great matter of honour, and did, going out of the church, ask me whether we did not make a great show at Court today, with all our favours in our hats."

This from "Mr. Silver Plate", "Mr. Stone Case".

"After sermon home, and alone with my wife dined. Among other things my wife told me how ill a report our Mercer hath got by her keeping of company, so that she will not send for her to dine with us or be with us as heretofore; and, what is more strange, tells me that little Mis. Tooker hath got a clap as young as she is, being brought up loosely by her mother."

Coincidence these two were once "entertained" by our hero? It would have been quite amusing to see Sam pompously commiserate with Bess on Mercer's "downfall".

Bet the words "clap" and "Tooker" had our boy trembling for a while...

Poor kid, Tooker.

Bradford  •  Link

"He speaks well, and hath pretty slight superficial parts, I believe."

I.e., Sir Thomas Clifford is not as shallow as he seems?

Maurie Beck  •  Link

the English and Dutchmen that have been sent for to work, being taken with a Psalmbook or Testament, and so clapped up, and the house pulled down by the Inquisitors; and the greatest Lord in Spayne dare not say a word against it, if the word Inquisition be but mentioned.

Going to work in Spain at that time was a dangerous as going to the Afghanistan/Pakistan border is now, and for the same reason.

Robert Gertz  •  Link

Wishful thinking as to the Dutch incapacity I fear, Sam.

cum salis grano  •  Link

1667 PEPYS Diary (1879) IV. 250 A cloak of Colchester bayze

1. a. A coarse woollen stuff, having a long nap, now used chiefly for linings, coverings, curtains, etc., in warmer countries for articles of clothing, e.g. shirts, petticoats, ponchos; it was formerly, when made of finer and lighter texture, used as a clothing material in Britain also....

1635 N. R. Camden's Hist. Eliz. I. 101 Those light stuffes which they call Bayes and Sayes. 1667 PEPYS Diary (1879) IV. 250 A cloak of Colchester bayze

1712 ARBUTHNOT John Bull (1755) 9 The price of broad cloath, wool and bayses.

How I "luv me" old white flannel and blue blaizer in the dead of w. Cal cold winter, [50*F]
not how SP envisioned it.

Don McCahill  •  Link

> He speaks well, and hath pretty slight superficial parts, I believe.

This bit confuses me. Any ideas what SP is saying?

Mary  •  Link

Not really.

L&M footnote points out that "his talents were to some extent concealed by the courtliness of his manners" and that he was a good linguist (Latin, French and Spanish are mentioned).

Clarendon apparently had a poor opinion of his knowledge of law and the constitution.

Neither piece of information helps very much in interpreting what it is that Pepys means. Just possibly that he wears his accomplishments lightly, I suppose, but I'm not convinced.

JWB  •  Link

"Biathanatos: A Declaration of that Paradoxe or Thesis that Self-homicicde is not so Naturally Sin that it may never be otherwise." John Donne
http://books.google.com/books?id=…

cape henry  •  Link

"Parts" in this construction refers to the fact that Lord Arlington, in Pepys estimation, did not exhibit many of the usual affectations that many Titles were wont to have.Pepys is saying that Arlington had *some* genuine interest in, and knowledge of, the subjects they were attempting to discuss, and not simply pretending to such knowledge.A "man of parts" generally is an educated, wealthy, mannered, titled, etc. person.Lacking a title himself, Pepys would be esteemed at this point by many "a man of *certain* parts."

cum salis grano  •  Link

OED: Clap 4 entries
clap one,
make a noise /sound using tongue, hand ,bell , the weather etc...
.....c1386 CHAUCER Miller's Prol. 36 The Reve answered and seyde ‘Stynt thi clappe’. ...

no 2.
'twas common condition , one that helped the Puritans to spread their observations of the epicurean class.
clap
Obs. in polite use.

a. Gonorrh{oe}a.
1587 Myrr. Mag., Malin iii, Before they get the Clap.
a1605 MONTGOMERIE Flyting 312 The clape and the canker. 1851

b. With a, and pl.
c1645 HOWELL Lett. (1650) I. 452 Claps at Court.
1663 BUTLER Hud. I. I. 64. Ibid. II. I. 246 Claps and dice. Ibid. II. III. 967.
1681 Trial S. Colledge 72 He [Oates] did confess that he had an old Clap.
1691 WOOD Ath. Oxon. II. 295 A Clap did usher Davenant to his grave.

trans. To infect with clap. Also fig.
1658 OSBORN Jas. I (1673) 514 Atropos clapt him, a Pox on the Drab!
1672-6 WISEMAN Surgery (J.), If the patient hath been clapt.
a1680 BUTLER Rem. (1759) I. 249 [They] had ne'er been clap'd with a poetic Itch.
1683 T. HUNT Def. Charter Lond. 30 His understanding is clapt.

cum salis grano  •  Link

Most interesting Entree:
3 "not my fault, twas him's"
Interesting view on the problems of the day. ticket,fire, Dutch peace.
then the Watery grave.

GrahamT  •  Link

When I was growing up in the north of England in the 1960's, the clap and the pox where still the usual names for gonorrhoea and syphilis respectively. (Easier to say and to spell too.)

Australian Susan  •  Link

[channelling Oscar Wilde] When I grew up in the north of England in the 1960s, I had never heard of clap or pox !

"...my pretence to the place, ..." This does not mean pretending as in fantasy.

Interesting about the Frenchman who swore he had started the fire. Every year when we have bush fires, people claim to have started them. Something drives people to confess to deeds they have not done. And then we have the people who really start fires for the excitement. One has just been jailed here.

"....So that they are, as they swear, in absolute ignorance how this fire should come; which is a strange thing, that so horrid an effect should have so mean and uncertain a beginning....." At least once a year here, someone's house burns down and the fire officers find that it started in the BBQ or outdoor brazier on the deck or patio the family were convinced had burnt out.

Re The infamous Spanish Inquisition. There was much righteous indignation about innocent Bible reading Protestant having a dreadful time from the evil Spaniards, but a lot was propaganda. The people who really suffered in Spain were the Jews or conversos, but no-one in England would have cared much about what was happening to the Jews, except perhaps the few Jews living in England at that time (Cromwell had allowed them to live in England again). Alas, the popular view of Jews was the caricatured Shylock view - portrayed as more distressed by the loss of his ducats than his daughter.

Second Reading

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"our great letter and other papers, and among the rest my report of the victualling, which is good, I think, and will continue my pretence to the place, which I am still afeard Sir W. Coventry’s employment may extinguish."

L&M note Coventry had ceased to be a Navy Commissioner in January. Pepys now feared -- needlessly, as it turned out -- that he would take over the control of the victualing. He became a Treasurer Commissioner in May.

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"He, in our going, talked much of the plain habit of the Spaniards; how the King and Lords themselves wear but a cloak of Colchester bayze,"

L&M note Spain (where Arlington had served as King's Resident in 1658-60) was one of the principal markets for English cloth.

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"I enquired about the Frenchman that was said to fire the City, and was hanged for it, by his own confession, that he was hired for it by a Frenchman of Roane, and that he did with a stick reach in a fire-ball in at a window of the house: whereas the master of the house, who is the King’s baker, and his son, and daughter, do all swear there was no such window, and that the fire did not begin thereabouts."

L&M: Robert Hubert, a London watchmaker and native of Rouen, had been tried at the Middlesex Michaelmas sessions of 1666 and executed on 27 October. The only evidence against him was his own confession, which he later recanted. It does not appear to be true that he was a Catholic, as he alleged. The fact that he was able to identify the site of the baker's house proved nothing, since for a long time it had been on public show. He was in fact mentally disordered and had landed in London from Sweden two days after the fire had started. BM, Add. 27962 R, ff. 480v-482r; HMC, Portland, III. 301-2; State Trials (ed. Howell), vi. 807+; Bell, Fire, pp. 192-4. Pepys kept a print of the inscription put up at the spot in 1681 which recorded the story about Hubert: PL 2972, pp. 74-5. The King's baker was Thomas Farryner.

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"I enquired about the Frenchman that was said to fire the City, and was hanged for it, by his own confession, that he was hired for it by a Frenchman of Rouen, and that he did with a stick reach in a fire-ball in at a window of the house: whereas the master of the house, who is the King’s baker, and his son, and daughter, do all swear there was no such window, and that the fire did not begin thereabouts."

L&M: Robert Hubert, a London watchmaker and native of Rouen, had been tried at the Middlesex Michaelmas sessions of 1666 and executed on 27 October. The only evidence against him was his own confession, which he later recanted. It does not appear to be true that he was a Catholic, as he alleged. The fact that he was able to identify the site of the baker's house proved nothing, since for a long time it had been on public show. He was in fact mentally disordered and had landed in London from Sweden two days after the fire had started. BM, Add. 27962 R, ff. 480v-482r; HMC, Portland, III. 301-2; State Trials (ed. Howell), vi. 807+; Bell, Fire, pp. 192-4. Pepys kept a print of the inscription put up at the spot in 1681 which recorded the story about Hubert: PL 2972, pp. 74-5. The King's baker was Thomas Farryner.

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"Captain Cocke did tell me what I must not forget: that the answer of the Dutch, refusing The Hague for a place of treaty, and proposing the Boysse, Bredah, Bergen-op-Zoome, or Mastricht, was seemingly stopped by the Swede’s Embassador (though he did show it to the King, but the King would take no notice of it, nor does not) from being delivered to the King; and he hath wrote to desire them to consider better of it: so that, though we know their refusal of the place, yet they know not that we know it, nor is the King obliged to show his sense of the affront."

L&M: For the consideration involved in the choice of a place of meeting, see https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/… and https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
For this phase of the negotiations, see see D'Estrades, Lettres etc. (1709), iv, 56--8, 96-7; Arlington Letters to Temple, i. 139; CSPVen. 166-8, pp. 144, 146. The Dutch had (on 14/24 February) declined the English proposal (31 January/10 February) of The Hague, on the ground that it was 'an open place'. (They feared the influence of the Orangists there.) Breda was ultimately chosen:
https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/… and https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
The Swedes acted as mediators; their London ambassador, Coyet, had been a fellow-student of Jan de Witt at Leyden: A. L. Pontalis, De Witt (trans.), i. 280.

Peter Julius Coyet (1618–1667), was a prominent Swedish envoy to England during the time of Oliver Cromwell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet…

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"That the Dutch are in very great straits, so as to be said to be not able to set out their fleete this year."

L&M: This rumour was exaggerated, but they were having difficulties with equipment and recruitment: CSPVen. 1666-8, p. 144.

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"Yet the fellow, who, though a mopish besotted fellow, did not speak like a madman, did swear that he did fire it: and did not this like a madman; for, being tried on purpose, and landed with his keeper "

L&M: The keeper of the prison in which he was lodged (the White Lion Gaol), John Lowman: Bell, Fire, pp. 193-4.

Terry Foreman  •  Link

John Lohman became keeper of the prisons in Southwark when he leased them in 1666. From 1580 onward we know that the [ County of Surrey ] gaol was kept in the house called the White Lion just north of St. George's Church. Stow, in 1598, speaks of "the white Lyon a Gaole so called, for that the same was a common hosterie for the receit of travellers … Like the King's Bench and the White Lion, the Marshalsea was used for the confinement of recusants in the 1580's and of followers of the Earl of Essex in 1601, (but thereafter the majority of prisoners in the Marshalsea were debtors, though it continued to serve as a prison for the Court of Admiralty until its closure in 1842). Although conditions in all the Southwark prisons were bad there are indications that they were worse in the Marshalsea, perhaps because the prisoners were entirely at the mercy of the Knight Marshal or his deputy. Lowman's nephew, who was keeper early in the 18th century, specialized in thumb screws, iron hoods, and other forms of torture to extract the last halfpenny out of his unfortunate captives. https://www.british-history.ac.uk…

Terry Foreman  •  Link

In 1796 there were five prisons in Southwark—the Clink, King's Bench, Borough Compter, White Lion and the Marshalsea. The Marshalsea (1373–1842) was a notorious prison in Southwark (now London), just south of the River Thames. Although it housed a variety of prisoners, including men accused of crimes at sea and political figures charged with sedition, it became known, in particular, for its incarceration of the poorest of London's debtors. Over half the population of England's prisons in the 18th century were in jail because of debt. Run privately for profit, as were all English prisons until the 19th century, the Marshalsea looked like an Oxbridge college and functioned as an extortion racket. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar…

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"my waterman told me how the mistress of the Beare tavern, at the bridge-foot, did lately fling herself into the Thames, and drowned herself; which did trouble me the more, when they tell me it was she that did live at the White Horse tavern in Lumbard Streete, which was a most beautiful woman, as most I have seen."

L&M: Cf. https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/… and https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…
She was said to have committed suicide because of the destruction of the White Horse tavern in the Fire.

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

"... back to White Hall, and there meeting my Lord Arlington, he, by I know not what kindness, offered to carry me along with him to my Lord Treasurer’s, whither, I told him, I was going. I believe he had a mind to discourse of some Navy businesses, but Sir Thomas Clifford coming into the coach to us, we were prevented; which I was sorry for, for I had a mind to begin an acquaintance with him. He speaks well, and hath pretty slight superficial parts, I believe."

I think it is Secretary of State Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington who "speaks well, and hath pretty slight superficial parts", not Clifford.

Pepys should want to be pals with both men, IMHO.

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