REVIEW OF BOOKS
A. L. Rowse on Pepys, the complete gentleman
It is always entrancing to read about Pepys such zest and gaiety, so many interests, such intellectual vivacity, such pure and impure enjoyment of life! And it is a double pleasure to anyone who has to read so many history-books, indifferently written, to enjoy so beautifully proportioned and executed a book as this. An artist himself with the added advantage of a naval background Mr 011ard' appreciates Pepys for the artist he was. Not only in the writing of his Diary but in so many other respects: music, his greatest passion, connoisseurship, book and print collecting, the desire for order in his accounts and files, the Navy Office and the Navy itself. Mr 011ard sums up: "the artist in Pepys lies at the root of his nature. A passion for perception and a passion for imposing order on everything he perceived runs through and through his life. He was an aesthete" and Mr 011ard quotes Pater. It is a surprising conjunction, but justified: In this biography Mr 011ard gets the proportions of Pepys's life right there is no undue emphasis on the Diary, wonderful as that work is. Indeed a suggestive comparison rises to mind from Stendhal's tribute to Cellini's Autobiography: "c'est le livre qu'il faut lire avant tout si Ion veut deviner le caractere italien." What more English than Pepys's Diary, in its robustness and naive directness, its complacency and contentment, its honesty and occasional hypocrisies?
However, the Diary occupied less than a decade of Pepys's early life, and the main theme of this book is, rightly, his place in history, the prodigious work he accomplished for the Navy though he touched Restoration life (and lives) at so many points besides. He got his leg up through his relationship to the Cromwellian Montagu on the threshold of the Restoration, in which, along with Monk, Montagu played a significant and secret rdle through his position in the Navy. (What is the point of spelling him Mountagu, by the way? Silly: the family spells itself Montagu.) The Admiral took young Pepys with him to bring Charles II back: "those happy days aboard the Naseby breathe in the Diary the freshness of the season, the sharp tang of the sea air, above all the delight of being alive that makes Pepys, like Falstaff, a favourite in every age. They also introduce us to a number of the principal characters in his life."
The Naseby was rebaptised the Royal Charles and what characters bloomed and burgeoned all round Pepys! Restoration people were not afraid to appear somewhat larger than life. There was the Admiral himself, so secret a man that Pepys was rather shocked when he found that he didn't believe anything at all, Pepys himself having a Puritan background which gave a sharper edge to his amorous
"6 Nays. A Biography Richard 011ard (Hodder and Stoughton 0.95)
proclivities. Then there was the Duke of York, who ruined himself as king by believing far too much. I never knew that Sir Samuel Morland, the ingenious engineer who appealed to Charles II for his mechanical contrivances and raised the water from the Thames for Windsor Castle, had been a double agent in Thurloe's secret service. There is the ambivalence of the age in that from the shocking streaker, the poet-earl Rochester, the brutal and boorish Colonel Kirke, to the saintly Ken whose company Pepys enjoyed on the journey to Tangier, and the very respectable Evelyn, who seems to have been unaware of the predatory element in his religious feelings for Margaret Godolphin. The rich contradictoriness of it all is summed up in the strange character of Charles II, so intelligent and so casual, often quite irresponsible. Coventry, an honest and cultivated aristocrat, told Pepys that "the serving a Prince that minds not his own business is most unhappy for them that serve him well." Pepys appreciated that Charles knew as much about naval matters as any expert, and yet would allow things to go wrong by making appointments and giving commissions which, "through a lazy pretence to good nature, favoured the incompetent and the fashionable." The brilliant Halifax summed him up: "of a man who was so capable of choosing, he chose as seldom as any man that ever lived."
Of course Charles was, and had to be, a politician; but the encouragement of personal and party favourites put a premium on
factiousness, indiscipline and inefficiencY. Apparently "the Stuart brothers liked it that way." Mr 011ard puts it down to the shallowness of Charles II's nature. He would have gained something here from Christopher Falkus's understanding of it, in his perceptive biography the appalling background the boY had had in the Civil War, the killing of ills father, the dispersal of the family (only his. family spoke to his heart), the shifts amp!, humiliations of exile, the sheer idiocies ot politics and politicians. No more disabuse' man, ever lived than Charles II; he reminds Me 0' that other Bourbon, Louis XV, clever as anything, and hopelessly disillusioned. There followed, as a consequence, the avoidable disasters of the Second Dutch war, with the Dutch in the Medway, etcetera. "Why did the First Dutch war, fought a dozen years earlier, result in a resounding victory and the Second, in spite of unparalleled Parliamentary votes of money, in defeat?" The answer was, Oliver Cromwell no one more capable ot ruling ever rose to a throne. No wonder an ea Royalist's son prompted Pepys to note, "it is strange how he and everybody do nowadays reflect upon Oliver and commend him, whet brave things he did and made all the neighbour princes fear him." There is no real defence for the divagations and twists of Charles II 's foreign policy not to face up squarely to dangers when they first declare themselves (cf. 1933) always increases them and makes them harder to deal with in the end.
I supposed it is natural that royal persons should be disillusioned, confronted
as they perpetually are by sheer human silliness, It was left to solid middle-class types like Pepys to work hard all their lives to staunch the leaks and repair the damage. Both Charles, who knew a good man when he saw one, and James, who rarely could tell, gave Pepys their confidence and what a good thing he made out of it, for himself as well as the Navy! Mr 011ard sums up that his greatest single achievement was the professionalising of the naval officer. All his life Pepys worked to that end, acquainting himself with everything that could be of use by the way. Before he was half-way through his career "the plain fact was Without him."imrhewas no doing anything in the Navy Gradually the whole field of naval administration came within his grasp. He certainly had genius as an administrator as well as that of a diarist, and the two are related. Mr 011ard says of his Secretaryship of the Admiralty: -tact, mastery of detail, energy, promptitude, all the virtues of a great manager are much in evidence, But beyond and behind this scintillating display of executive talent was a searching, .generalising, codifying intelligence: the omnivorous reader, the Fellow of the Royal Society, the historian and the aesthete." As an administrator Pepys had marvellous opportunities. England was going up in the World then, the oceans were opening before her; and his career lay on those beckoning frontiers between individual enterprise (and indiscipline) and the regularisation of the service which was to achieve such great things up to our own day. It is one of the ironies of history that the navy Pepys created under the aegis of James, Duke of York which helped to defeat Louis XIV's ascendancy in Europe also played a part in overthrowing James as king in 1688.
The most touching sentence in this book relates to Pepys's private life, and his wife whom we know so well from the Diary: "perhaps the bust of Elizabeth, her head turned in laughter towards the Navy Office pew in St Olave's, offers the best comment on his decision not to marry again." "Smiling" would be better, and actually truer as one looks up at her there, having survived worse than the Dutch in the Medway, the blitz on London. Mr 011ard is a gifted writer. Perhaps he would now complement this boon of a biography with one of Pepys's great friend, John Evelyn?
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