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Overview
Pepys never resumed the personal Diary which he abandoned in 1669 fearing he was going blind. He was one of the greatest accidental historians, never intending to record for posterity, but for amusement. This book makes these diaries available to the general reader. These documents enhance the picture of Pepys as a politician and civil servant.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752495323 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 564 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Pepys's Later Diaries
By C.S. Knighton
The History Press
Copyright © 2013 C.S. KnightonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9532-3
CHAPTER 1
The Brooke House Journal 3 January–21 February 1670
The first of the later diaries is a record of proceedings before the Privy Council in the first weeks of 1670, when Pepys defended the management of the Navy during the Second Dutch War. Coming as it does just six months after the closure of the great Diary, it involves issues and personalities familiar to those who have followed Pepys through the 1660s. Indeed it may be said to close one of its principal storylines. The contrast with the personal Diary is therefore all the more striking and possibly disconcerting. It is better to see it as a polished version of one of the many ancillary records which Pepys was already keeping in the Diary years, and from which the Diary itself was in part compiled. While most of these were discarded when they ceased to be of current use, 'Brooke House' was carefully revised, and left en clair as a permanent record.
The Second Dutch War (1665–7) was the first great challenge of Pepys's professional career. When he was brought into the Navy Board as Clerk of the Acts (or secretary) in 1660 he had some experience of public administration but none at all of the workings of the Navy. He was greatly outranked by his colleagues at the Board: Sir George Carteret, the Treasurer; Sir William Batten, the Surveyor; Sir John Mennes, the Comptroller, and Sir William Penn were all past or current flag officers with a wealth of collective expertise. But they were also quite old, and unenthusiastic for the desk work at which Pepys excelled. So by the time the war came, Pepys had been able to make his mark in the naval administration to a much larger degree than his position as Clerk strictly entailed. Equally, of course, his position became the more exposed when things went badly, which after a promising start the war certainly did. The Dutch were beaten at Lowestoft in 1665, but not swept from the sea. They returned to fight two massive engagements in 1666, without a clear victor emerging. In 1667, when the English had decided to settle for peace and had laid up the great ships, the Dutch executed the daring raid on the Medway anchorage which remains the most humiliating episode in the history of the Royal Navy.
Parliament had voted unprecedented sums of money to fight the war, and soon began to complain loudly of the poor return on its investment. The earlier Dutch war, under Cromwell's protectorate, appeared to be much more satisfactory in military and economic terms. Charles II's regime had clearly failed to achieve the same effect. There were some criticisms of the operational command, and of the King himself, but for the most part Parliament suspected the naval administration was inefficient and corrupt, and had somehow withheld the ships, men and supplies necessary for victory. All this was the responsibility of the Navy Board and its subdepartment the Navy Treasury; and as a result the file of accusations would land squarely in Pepys's in-tray.
Pepys first had to face the House of Commons Committee on Miscarriages, which was set up in October 1667. This was something of a blunt instrument, with a wide but imprecise remit. Two of its most prominent concerns did not directly affect Pepys or his Navy Board colleagues: the allegation that the English fleet had failed to pursue the Dutch after Lowestoft, and the criticism of the division of the fleet in the following year. The Medway raid was a different matter, because it raised questions about hardware which the Navy Board supplied – notably the defensive iron chain which had presented so inconsiderable an obstacle to the Dutch. However, it proved possible to focus blame on the resident Navy Commissioner at Chatham, Peter Pett, and the Ordnance Office. Pepys's principal business before the Miscarriages Committee was on the subject of seamen's tickets. These were vouchers issued by the Navy Treasury when ships were discharged and pay was due. The tickets could only be cashed at the Treasury Office in London, and many seamen sold them below value to brokers rather than journey to the office. It fell to Pepys to explain time after time why a credit system was necessary: often there simply was no cash in hand; at other times it might be dangerous to carry large sums to the dockside. There were also accounting complexities, as when seamen transferred from one ship to another without touching land. Pepys's most extensive dissertation on the subject was delivered in a three-hour speech at the bar of the Commons on 5 March 1668. This also marked Pepys's emergence as the public spokesman for the Navy Board, and stimulated his ambitions to enter the Commons chamber in his own right. These aspirations received a further boost after the second stage of the post-war enquiry.
The Brooke House Commission has a separate but parallel history to that of the Miscarriages Committee. In September 1666 the Commons, already worried by the disappearing war chest, appointed a committee to examine the accounts of the Navy, Army and Ordnance. The MPs attempted to give teeth to their enquiry by associating with the Lords, and so acquiring the Upper House's ability to examine witnesses on oath. When this failed they tried another procedural wheeze, the tack, writing proposals for their own judicial enquiry into an existing money bill. The King managed to defuse the ensuing argument for a while with a tactic of his own, proroguing the session. His position was much less confident after the Medway raid, and in October he agreed to an enquiry with the powers of scrutiny for which the Commons had been asking. This body was established by statute, and is therefore designated a commission rather than a committee. Its nine members were, however, chosen by an ad hoc Commons committee, and by the House's own resolve no sitting members were nominated. The Commissioners were themselves paid, and were provided with a staff of three and premises at Brooke House in Holborn. There they set to work to discover how the parliamentary vote for the war had been spent, and by their statutory authority they sent for all relevant accounts and interrogated the accountants. Pepys was an early visitor at their office, and started to keep his own separate records of dealings with them. Their very first demand he thought 'contains more then we shall ever be able to answer while we live'.
So the Commissioners proceeded on their laborious way. As they did, Pepys shadowed them, anticipating their moves and conducting his own evaluation of the naval administration at the Duke of York's request. In October 1669 the Commission finally submitted its report to the King and Parliament, making ten 'Observations' against the accounts of the Navy Treasurer, Carteret, and a further eighteen 'Observations' on administrative procedures of the whole Navy Board. The Commissioners had sent advance copies of their report to the Board at the end of September, but Pepys did not see it until he returned to the Navy Office on 20 October. He had been on leave since August, recovering from the eyestrain and general fatigue which made him abandon the Diary at the end of May. He and his wife had been visiting France and the Netherlands; and although the trip restored Pepys's health, his wife developed a fever and died soon after their return. Despite or perhaps because of this blow, and the additional disappointment of failing in his first attempt to enter Parliament, Pepys immersed himself in responding to the Brooke House report. Within a week he had produced a detailed rebuttal of the eighteen 'Observations', covering fifty pages as now printed. He followed this up immediately after Christmas with a briefer defence of his own conduct, and then sent the King and the Duke of York copies of the longer reply.
Meanwhile the venue for public debate of the Commission report had been crucially shifted. Initially the Lords and Commons each appointed committees, which began by considering the charges against Carteret. Pepys was twice summoned to the Lords, but this was not a very intimidating tribunal; Carteret himself, though manifestly not in control of his books, emerged uncensured. The Commons were less complacent, and voted for the Treasurer's dismissal. At this point the King again prorogued Parliament, and during the recess found a much safer course, summoning the Commissioners to continue their examination of the Navy Officers at special sessions of the Privy Council, chaired by himself. It is these meetings, in January and February 1670, which the Brooke House Journal reports.
Pepys begins with a brief summary of events since his return from France in October 1669, and of his appearances before the Lords' committee. The daily record opens on 3 January with a visit to the Treasury; proceedings in the Council Chamber at Whitehall get under way two days later. At first the matter under discussion is still the accounting of Sir George Carteret, held over from the Commons committee which the new forum had superseded. Still nobody could explain where Parliament's £5 million had gone, and the suspicion lurked that Carteret had siphoned off half a million to support the King's private pleasures. This was not Pepys's battle, but he was ready with an exercise in creative accounting. He argued that 'war expenses' could be backdated beyond the day declared by statute to mark the outbreak of hostilities; and when challenged he claimed as much right to interpret an Act of Parliament as anyone else. This delighted the King, who invited Pepys to publish a refutation of the whole 'other uses' allegation. Pepys never took up the suggestion, but he is keen to demonstrate how from this moment the King warmed to him, and how together they ran the show.
Pepys and his colleagues take a more prominent role from 12 January. The debate over Carteret's accounts has been concluded, and now the Commission opens its 'Observations' on the Navy Board's conduct. The Navy Officers are sworn in and provided with chairs; this was itself an improvement on standing at the bar of the House of Commons. Pepys says nothing more of the practical arrangements, but we may imagine the King and the Privy Councillors seated on one side of a table, with the Brooke House Commissioners facing them from another, and the Navy Officers somewhere in between. Surprisingly, the general public are also admitted. At the next meeting (17 January) Pepys arranges the procedure to his and the King's satisfaction. After the Commissioners have presented each 'Observation', Pepys would read the response he had already prepared as the Board's general answer. The other Navy Officers would then be called upon to speak for their particular responsibilities. But if the journal is anything like a fair record, it appears that Pepys's colleagues were hardly ever required to supplement his answers. The Commissioners are seen to wilt under the barrage of Pepys's relentless statistics, and the Privy Councillors rarely intervene as details of contracts and stores are raked over. One can almost hear the collective groan as Pepys reaches for another file, then continues. It should be kept in mind that the journal, even in its complete form, cannot tell the whole story. After each phase of the debate had opened with an 'Observation' (a few sentences, alleging some misconduct in general terms), the Commission presented specific instances, to which Pepys had to respond in addition to his prepared answer. The 'Observations' and Pepys's formal written answers are extant, but Pepys has not preserved the Commission's supporting evidences or his responses to them.
The journal distils the whole proceedings into a contest between Pepys and two Commissioners: the chairman, Lord Brereton and the chief naval spokesman Col. George Thomson. Brereton was a Cheshire squire who had sat in Richard Cromwell's Parliament and the Convention of 1660 before inheriting an Irish barony. Yet he was also a noted algebraist and a founding Fellow of the Royal Society. As such he commanded respect, but his main qualification for the chairmanship seems to have been distance from the political arena. At one point Pepys hoped to establish a rapport with him on the basis of a shared love of music, but their relationship was progressively dissonant. He had been wary of Col. Thomson from the outset, and rightly so, because the colonel had served in the republican Admiralty, and was well able to make damning comparisons between the current naval administration and that of the 'late times'. Pepys acknowledged his expertise, but put the knife in all the same. None of the other seven Commissioners has more than a walk-on part in Pepys's drama. Lord Halifax, easily the most prominent, had declined to sign the report, and in the whole journal Pepys mentions him only once as present. Pepys and Halifax are so renowned as commentators on their times that it is disappointing there is no exchange between them here.
The Commission directed its attention to three main areas: the making and satisfactory performance of contracts for stores; the Board's own book-keeping; and the payment of seamen by ticket. The first was potentially awkward for Pepys, because at an early stage in his career he received a handsome douceur from a leading timber merchant, Sir William Warren. This led to further deals, including a major contract for Swedish masts which Pepys personally arranged. In doing so he usurped the function of the Surveyor (Batten), who had a family interest in a rival firm of timber-shippers. The other merchants complained they had been given inadequate opportunities to tender, and that they could have supplied the Navy better and more cheaply than Warren had done. None of this had much bearing on why the Dutch fleet had not been sunk, but it suggested wastage of public money by the Navy Office, if not actual peculation. Pepys responded with a rehearsal of the Office's general responsibilities, as laid out by the Duke of York's Instructions of 1662, and by a crisp particularity as to the details of the contract and the dimensions of the merchandise. On the more routine details of administration Pepys was on surer ground; he had after all created much of the archive which the Commissioners had been examining. Again he defended the Office by reference to the Duke's regulations, while pointing out that some of the surveys and stocktaking procedures were impossible in the course of a war. There was still the suggestion that things had been done better under the Commonwealth. In his written submissions Pepys was able to make satisfactory comparisons between the administrative costs of the Second War against the First; in the debate it was left to the King to close out the matter with a sweeping statement of how much more the war had cost the Dutch.
The King entered the discussion on several occasions, sometimes appealed to directly by Pepys, and always supportively. Pepys milks these moments for all they are worth, and no doubt the King did stand by his man. But Charles needed no prompting, and his confident management of the Brooke House proceedings may well have encouraged him to take open government a stage further. In the following month he began to attend ordinary sessions of the House of Lords, and would do so regularly for as long as he summoned parliaments. Pepys's journal captures something of Charles's famously easy public manner. At the same time his presence was intimidating, and the constant reference to the King's charges and the King's business must have been the more potent when the focus of it all was on the other side of the table. At an early stage Brereton discovered there was a limit to what could be said in the King's presence. Pepys, on the other hand, gets away with a wildly risky joke about Charles's failure to father a legitimate heir.
The King features prominently at the climax of Pepys's story. Having once again explained in general terms the need to pay seamen by ticket, Pepys grandly disclaimed personal connection to any particular payment. This was unwise, because Brereton then gleefully exhibited a ticket for £7 10s marked 'paid to Mr Pepys'. It will be seen that Pepys asserted rather than proved his innocence of pocketing this money. The King's endorsement (that Pepys would not have stolen so piffling a sum) was well intended, though oddly suggesting that he would not have been surprised by a larger fraud. The episode says much about the Brooke House proceedings; the more detailed the enquiry became, the more difficult it became to lay any substantial charge against the Navy Board. And even when damning evidence was exhibited, the King could dismiss it with 'a smile and a shake of his head'.
Since Pepys's journal is the only record we have of these proceedings, its authenticity cannot be tested. Pepys makes himself the central character, winning every round in the argument. Clearly it is an artfully constructed piece, worked up after the event from notes made at the time. It is evident from some of the scribal errors that it was written from dictation (probably one clerk reading to another from Pepys's draft). Pepys wanted it for his own reference, but he must also have known that he was creating a document of future historical importance. It is the best view we have of the beginnings of the modern public enquiry.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Pepys's Later Diaries by C.S. Knighton. Copyright © 2013 C.S. Knighton. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,Abbreviations and Symbols,
Chronological Table,
General Introduction,
1 The Brooke House Journal 1670,
2 The King's Bench Journal 1679–80,
3 Proceedings with James and Harris 1680,
4 The Tangier Journal 1683,
5 Diary of the Special Commission 1686,
Diplomatic Notes,