Men of the world
Clive Aslet finds that a new book comparing the lives of two great men of the 17th century illuminates both
Samuel PEPYS and John Evelyn: their diaries are the lens through which we see, sometimes in fantastic detail, the intimacies of 17th-century life. This book takes them as its theme —not singly, but together. It examines their similarities, contrasts and shared experiences of life as well as the points at which their paths crossed. I wasn’t sure it would work: although novel, the double-headed approach sounded contrived.
however, I was soon convinced by it. Margaret Willes is an elegant and perceptive writer and, by making each diarist a foil to the other, the reader gains a new perspective on the two men, as well as a feast of 17th-century gossip. Both Pepys and Evelyn have been well served by biographers in recent years; juxtaposing one with the other refreshes the interest in each.
Pepys was only a tailor’s son— although with grand connections—but he was the better educated, having been to huntingdon School and St Paul’s before Oxford.
Evelyn, whose grandfather had made a fortune from gunpowder, grew up in easier circumstances, but did not take to formal education. Instead, during the turbulent 1640s, he travelled on the Continent, which, in their early years, gave him the greater savoir faire. however, his social graces don’t endear him to the reader. Contemporaries may have found him stuck up—‘a most excellent person,’ as Pepys wrote after an early meeting who ‘must be allowed a little for a little conceitedness’. he improved on acquaintance. ‘The more I know him, the more I love him,’ he wrote later. They became friends.
Both men married girls to whom they were strongly attracted. For a cautious man, determined to rise in the world, Pepys’s choice of Elizabeth de St Michel, from an impoverished huguenot family, was out of character: she not only came with no dowry, but her feckless brother, Barty, was to plague Pepys for the rest of his life. She was 15 and beautiful, but, alas, labial ulcers meant that physical relations with her husband were agonising.
Evelyn’s bride, Mary, the daughter of Sir Richard Browne, English Resident (effectively ambassador) in Paris, was only 12 when they wed in 1647—Evelyn wanted somebody he could shape. Consummation did not take place immediately and, during the interim, Evelyn sent his child bride a picture of himself as a melancholy lover holding not Mary’s miniature (as the artist Robert Walker originally intended), but a skull.
later, his relations with women friends outside marriage were literary, gallant and platonic. Pepys idolised women of superior social status, while exploiting the vulnerability of those beneath him.
as the title reminds us, both Pepys and Evelyn were ‘curious’ about the world around them. They conversed with scientists through their membership of the Royal Society, they commissioned paintings and furniture, they bought silk and other luxuries from distant countries, as well as books. Evelyn was the greater gardener, Pepys the more ebullient musician—although they shared those tastes, too.
although Pepys’s account of the Great Fire is famous, Evelyn was also there, submitting a detailed plan of how the City could be rebuilt to Charles II, two days after Sir Christopher Wren. as Secretary to the admiralty, naval affairs were Pepys’s turf—onto which Evelyn strayed as prime mover behind the Seamen’s hospital at Greenwich.
Both men had a knack of positioning themselves at the centre of events, in a city that, at the time, was little bigger than a market town. If Evelyn refused to witness the execution of Charles I, he did let his deptford mansion to Peter the Great—whose entourage trashed it. They went to the same places, knew the same people. Their diaries have become standard sources for scholars of Stuart England. This exercise in compare and contrast illuminates both.