SOURCE: Introduction to Particular Friends: The Correspondence of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, Boydell Press, 1997, pp. 7-16.

[In the essay that follows, Bédoyère examines the significance of the correspondence between Pepys and John Evelyn as a complement to their better-known diaries.]

The existence of the correspondence of Evelyn and Pepys has been widely known ever since their respective diaries were first transcribed and published in the early nineteenth century. Not only had Evelyn and Pepys recorded many of their personal experiences but they had both enjoyed significant contemporary reputations. Their friendship, and their relationships with others, recorded in the diaries and in the letters, give us an exceptional opportunity to experience something of life at the heart of Restoration England and the remainder of the seventeenth century.

Almost any discussion of Pepys and Evelyn invites a comparison of their origins. This is not the place to embark on detailed biographies but it is worth looking at how they came to be who they were, and the origins of their friendship. Biographers of either man have always looked at this relationship in some degree. It has become almost customary to contrast Pepys's background as the son of a tailor, and his ambition for financial wealth and personal status, with Evelyn's inherited means, his upbringing as a member of the educated gentry, and his instinctive aesthetic tastes and cultivated manners.

ORIGINS

The origins of the Evelyns are now obscure but they were not much clearer to the diarist. He believed that the name came from the French family Ivelin of Eveliniere¹ but this is unproven. The English Evelyns first appeared in written records in 1476 when William Evelyn of Harrow died. His descendants were farmers in Stanmore and Harrow, but through marriage may have obtained other farms in or around Claygate in Surrey. William Evelyn's great-grandson George (1526-1603) was the source of the Evelyn family's subsequent wealth and status. Elizabeth I awarded him the royal monopoly on the manufacture of gunpowder. The lucrative industry required substantial amounts of fuel. This was amply supplied by the woodlands of north-eastern Surrey, and George Evelyn was able to acquire a number of estates on the proceeds. They included Wotton, near Dorking. It was just as well that making gunpowder brought him wealth for his two marriages left him with several sons and daughters to provide for. His youngest son Richard (1589-1640), and the only one by his second wife, was bequeathed the Wotton estate. Richard's second son, the diarist, was born there in 1620.

The Evelyn family wealth was new and its members had few connections with the peerage or other old families of England. Its senior male members served as magistrates or MPs, and as the local squires of their estates. By investing his wealth in land, George Evelyn was one of numerous Elizabethans who sought social elevation by the most traditional of routes. If this stimulated a sense of proprietorial hostility from the old nobility, it made little practical difference to the Evelyns. Their absorption into polite society as members of the gentry was complete by the time the diarist was born. Even so, John Evelyn the virtuoso was a family phenomenon in almost every respect. He declined honours, titles, and even some appointments. But he retained a powerful sense of loyalty to the obligations and duties of kinship. His diary is peppered with news of relatives, however distant. When the Wotton estate passed to Evelyn and his heirs in 1699 his other interests were largely subordinated to securing his grandson's prospects.

Evelyn spent much of his childhood in the care of his indulgent maternal step-grandmother. Thanks to his diary we have some details of his early life whereas with Pepys we are more dependent on circumstantial information or retrospective comments in his own diary. Evelyn frustrated his father's attempts to send him to Eton and declined the opportunity to study law after he had finished his time at Oxford. Crucially, by the end of 1640 both his parents were dead. The combination of unconditional means, and the lack of responsibility enjoyed by a younger son, gave him the opportunity to spend the next few years travelling abroad while his elder brother George took care of the family estate and lands.

Evelyn is best seen as a product of his own personality rather than anything else. Like most of his educated contemporaries he had no sense of intellectual boundaries. His approach was enthusiastic and dedicated, but characteristically haphazard and unfocused. From July to October of 1641 he made the first of three journeys into Europe and seems also to have found this a convenient way to avoid what he called ‘the ill face of things at home’. While Evelyn was thus part of the English Civil-War generation, it was not a period which he experienced at first-hand beyond a brief foray in late 1642 when he attempted to join the Royalist army. He was easily dissuaded and instead left for a second, and more protracted, journey in 1643, not returning until 1647. This not only gave him the opportunity to see the architectural and artistic consequences of the Renaissance, but also brought him into contact with the exiled court of Charles II. In this circle he established many of his most important intellectual and social contacts. He also began to accumulate books on all subjects and this formed the basis of his enormous, and celebrated, library.

Evelyn's archive, despite extensive depredations, shows that he noted on paper everything of interest emulating, probably deliberately, the habits of Pliny the Elder.² He corresponded widely, and his literary output was an important ritual consolidation of his own reading and interests as analysis of his texts has shown.³ This was not unusual but he was relatively prolific even for an age when an ambition to gain knowledge and authority in a wide range of disciplines was realistic. Evelyn was creating himself in his own image as a virtuoso but his literary and intellectual contributions to his age were, in truth, minimal. Had his remarkable private archive and diary not survived he would almost certainly exist in our perception as a peripheral, but productive, eccentric of the most honourable kind. Nonetheless, his contemporaries admired him and respected his company and contributions even if, perhaps, the more creative and able members of his circle were politely aware of his shortcomings, not least of which was his prolix literary style.

Pepys became one of these admirers. Born in 1633, he was a little over twelve years younger than Evelyn. Pepys's family had also once been farmers. His great-grandfather, John Pepys of Cottenham (d. 1589), married an heiress and became wealthy enough to increase his lands in Cambridgeshire. He was thereby able to finance advantageous marriages for his daughters, and careers for his sons. By the seventeenth century there had been landed gentlemen, lawyers, and tradesmen amongst the Pepyses but large families and marriage settlements dispersed the Elizabethan family wealth. As a result John Pepys's grandson, also John (1601-80), father of the diarist and ten other children, was a modest tailor in London. Even if the Pepys family's connections with trade were more thinly-disguised than those of the Evelyns Pepys himself was, however, ready to take advantage of the opportunities which existed in London for men of intellectual and ambitious substance with useful connections.

Of Pepys's childhood we know little but his occasional references, and other documentary information, supply some facts. He was educated in Huntingdon to begin with, a reflection of his family roots but probably because it was considered safer during the Civil War. After the hostilities he was brought back to London to continue his education at St Paul's where he won an Exhibition to Cambridge.

Evelyn's account of his time at Oxford is limited. It seems that apart from establishing friendships, and experimenting with music and debating (which hardly marks him out as exceptional amongst students), this was not a particularly influential phase of his life. We know even less of Pepys's time at university. Family connections may well have lain behind his decision to go to Cambridge. Unlike Evelyn who left Oxford to travel, Pepys was dependent on the patronage of his cousin Edward Mountagu for his subsequent employment. In 1654 Mountagu, at the time sitting on Cromwell's Council of State, gave Pepys a job, later describing him as having been his ‘secretary’. This was a crucial step in Pepys's progression but in 1655 he made what would have been considered an inappropriate marriage, or at any rate one which would bring him little advantage. Evelyn's marriage in 1647 to Mary Browne (then about twelve years old), daughter of Sir Richard Browne, the King's envoy to the French court, was a conventional statement of loyalty to his social equals and betters. It also brought him indirectly the estate of Sayes Court at Deptford. Pepys, in contrast, married the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth St Michel whose father was a Huguenot refugee. She brought him nothing but herself and obligations to her family which Pepys observed throughout the rest of his life, long after her death in 1669.

Mountagu's appointment as General-at-Sea in 1660, and his choice as the man to bring the King home gave Pepys a convenient entrée to the new administration. He was even invited to accompany the fleet to the Hague to fetch Charles. By June 1660, with his cousin and patron ennobled and made Vice-Admiral of the Kingdom, Pepys found himself promoted to Clerk of the Acts for the Navy Board.

In this job Pepys excelled. His responsibilities during the Second Dutch War, which was declared in 1665 (though hostilities and preparations had begun the previous year), brought him into direct association with Evelyn. When they first met is uncertain. Both heard the same church services at Exeter House from at least as early as 1 January 1660. On 23 January 1661 Pepys attended his first meeting of Gresham College, later to become the Royal Society. He does not mention Evelyn, who was certainly present. Instead Pepys admiringly referred to the ‘great company of persons of Honour there.’⁴ That he was instinctively drawn to the society of like-minded men who shared his interests and a fertile, open-minded fascination with all that was new goes without saying. It was appropriate that a man like Pepys be accepted. But it is equally evident that he regarded his presence as a privilege; being welcomed into the company of men such as Evelyn elevated his self-esteem, even if he felt initially humbled.

Pepys's first diary description of Evelyn does not come until 9 September 1665, by which time they had already corresponded. Pepys was impressed by Evelyn's self-discipline, dignity, and integrity, qualities which had encouraged the King to request his service on royal commissions. Evelyn was usually pleased to agree because he had a powerful sense of loyalty to the person and office of the king (though he once declined a request that he serve as a magistrate). By 1665 Evelyn had something of a reputation as a virtuoso, writer, and public servant. His extended treatise on the cultivation of trees, Sylva, and his translation of Fréart's Parallel of the Antient Architecture had both appeared in 1664, and followed a number of earlier works. Like most of his books they exemplify his skill in accumulating information, but show just as clearly that he had a limited capacity to be selective and analytical.

As an experienced member of earlier commissions Evelyn had been appointed a commissioner for the sick and wounded seamen and prisoners of war in late 1664. He maintained a conscientious adherence to the responsibilities of his job. Pepys had the powers to process some of the problems which faced Evelyn but had other preoccupations of his own, one of which was victualling the fleet. His trips on business to see Evelyn included visits to female friends, and he was easily distracted by Evelyn's garden, library, and other interests.

Although they belonged to the same circle Pepys was conscious of their difference in rank. So was Evelyn who omitted Pepys from his diary until 1669, but expressed a desire that they should know each other better in his letter of 3 October 1665. Pepys was already quite certain that Evelyn was someone in command of ‘all manner of learning’ (diary, 27 September 1665).

Pepys came to recognise that Evelyn enjoyed his role. ‘A most excellent person he is, and must be allowed a little for a little conceitedness; but he may well be so, being a man so much above others’, he noted on 5 November 1665. Pepys was gradually replacing his initial admiration with a more genuine affection. With the cessation of his diary on 31 May 1669 we must trace their relationship through Evelyn's occasional, and sparse, accounts of their meetings and their much fuller correspondence. The quality of their mutual affection was expressed by Evelyn when he recorded in May 1703 the passing of Pepys who ‘had ben for neere 40 years, so my particular Friend’.

THE DIARIES

Pepys's diary was kept only from 1 January 1660 to 31 May 1669. Its vitality and lucidity serve to diminish the rest of his life, reflected in the biographies which focus on the diary period. In contrast Evelyn's diary, though it covers almost his whole life, has long been noted for its self-conscious tone and an air of moral contrivance. It is thus of great importance as an historical record but sterile as a portrait. Evelyn was writing for an audience, and on more than one occasion indicates that he expected it to be read. He wrote it in longhand, revising it retrospectively where he felt necessary. Pepys seems to have written solely for himself and this seems, apart from the convenience, to have been why he wrote it in shorthand.

Both diaries create impressions (and the letters show they are only that) of being comprehensive records of the men's lives but in quite different ways. Pepys recorded a great deal of daily detail. Evelyn was much more erratic; he often omitted to make entries for odd days or even weeks. A large proportion of the shorter entries are confined to notes of sermons or names of dinner guests. Much of the first section of Evelyn's diary is taken up with a retrospective account of his travels in Europe, parts of which were written up from published guidebooks. Towards the end of his life he relied increasingly on newspaper accounts of contemporary events, interspersing summaries of these with lengthy accounts of sermons.

The publication of Evelyn's diary in 1818 in a bowdlerised and edited form led to the publication of Pepys's diary. The existence of the latter had been known to scholars for rather longer than Evelyn's which had only come to the attention of non-family members in 1814.⁵ That Pepys had written his in shorthand contributed to it not appearing until 1825 (in an equally bowdlerised form). Once in print though it has always been more popular for obvious reasons. Evelyn's personal standards appealed to the Victorian literary market but despite the publication of a definitive edition in 1955 he has remained in Pepys's shadow ever since 1825.

THE CORRESPONDENCE

One of the reasons so much correspondence survives is that both men sometimes made drafts, and also additional copies in a letter-book. Some letters are (or were) thus represented by several manuscripts which obviously increases the chances of survival. They also kept much of their incoming correspondence. But there are problems with differences between the various versions and these are discussed in the following Note about the Texts.

It is perhaps surprising how little of the information in the letters accords with the diary entries. This is not a question of contradictions but simply because the diarists hardly ever recorded in their diaries business or encounters which are discussed in the letters. As we have seen Evelyn makes no mention of Pepys until 1669 in his diary and therefore their relationship is known only from the correspondence and Pepys's diary references. Even Pepys's far fuller daily accounts, particularly during the Second Dutch War, hardly ever refer to the precise subject matter of the letters. He does not mention a face-to-face meeting with Evelyn until 9 September 1665 but had been corresponding with him since at least 27 April. The contrast between the content of Evelyn's letter of 3 October 1665 and the meeting which followed on 5 October, recorded in Pepys's diary is a further example.⁶ So there is no doubt that the surviving correspondence not only fills out much detail missing from the diaries but also demonstrates that even the most apparently comprehensive diary may be less complete than it seems. However, the two do not make a whole. Robert Hooke's diary survives, and on 23 and 24 May 1678 he records meeting Evelyn and discussing the latter's plans for his ‘Paradise’ of which Pepys is to be patron.⁷ The occasion and arrangements pass without mention in Pepys's and Evelyn's correspondence, and Evelyn's diary.

The opening letters contain harrowing and vivid accounts of the business of the Dutch Wars. Evelyn's letters to Pepys are compelling in their vivid portrayal of a desperate state of affairs and his frustration with an inefficient and parsimonious bureaucracy which left him stranded with sick and crippled men and nowhere to billet them. But as early as 1669 Evelyn was seizing the opportunity to give Pepys detailed advice on contacts and sights in France. They increasingly exchanged information on a variety of subjects with particular emphasis on Pepys's collection of engravings and his projected definitive naval history.

For the most part Pepys's letters are matter-of-fact with occasional exceptions. In old age bladder problems stimulated his curiosity and eventually he found a barley-water cure which he passed on to Evelyn in the poignant letter of 7 August 1700. On 24 December 1701 he tried passionately (but without success) to persuade Evelyn that his grandson should be allowed to travel abroad. A larger number of Evelyn's letters survive and, perhaps as a result, they are more varied. Despite his predilection for using his correspondence to consolidate his own reading, it is in the letters to Pepys that Evelyn emerges as a far more rounded human being than the one in his diary. He veers from frustration at the lot of the prisoners of war in 1665 to bewildered fury at his daughter's elopement in 1685, while on happier occasions he was both chatty and humorous, clearly taking delight in passing on dockyard gossip. Evelyn took considerable trouble over writing his letters. They represented a specific medium of expression for him; in comparison Pepys's letters seem sometimes relatively perfunctory.

HOMES

The bulk of Evelyn's letters were written at Sayes Court in Deptford. These bear either ‘Sayes Court’ (in a variety of abbreviated forms such as ‘S: Court’ and ‘Sa: Co:’) or ‘Deptford’. Sayes Court was a royal manor leased to Evelyn's wife's family. During the Commonwealth, while Evelyn's father-in-law, Sir Richard Browne, was in France it was requisitioned and sold. Evelyn was urged to move in on Browne's behalf which he did during 1652, and at the same time began negotiating to purchase the house and land. He sealed the transaction at the beginning of 1653.⁸ The house presented Evelyn with a number of long-term structural problems but the location and the land, which he developed into his celebrated gardens, were ample compensations. Nonetheless, in the severe winters of the seventeenth century, the route from Deptford to London was often arduous or even impassable so Evelyn took to wintering in central London. These sojourns produce the occasional appearance of Whitehall, Soho Square, or Dover Street on the letter heading. Evelyn's son John had rented a house in Dover Street and Evelyn stayed there once his son had gone to Ireland as a commissioner for the Revenue in 1692.

In 1694 Evelyn gave up Sayes Court to rent-paying tenants (though he occasionally returned there) and moved to the Evelyn family seat at Wotton. His sense of family duty, coupled with what appears to have been a shortage of capital, thanks in part to his son's financial embarrassment, had led him eventually to accept his elder brother George's invitation to go and live there. George's sons were all dead, leaving Evelyn, his son, and grandson, as the only direct male line of descent. But a quarrel over provision for George's grand-daughters caused acrimony. Evelyn was also bored, something which is particularly obvious in his letters to Pepys in the latter years; even so, he took some pleasure in modelling himself on retired Roman senators working their estates in the late Republic. He returned to London whenever he could, taking over the lease in Dover Street following his son's death in early 1699. Old age concentrated his mind on the interests of the Wotton estate and the prospects for his grandson. He died at Dover Street in 1706 with these mostly settled.

Pepys was a little more consistent though he moved more frequently. He had neither the opportunity or inclination to move too far away from London. In the 1660s he wrote to Evelyn from the Navy Office and his home in Seething Lane. The death of Elizabeth Pepys in 1669, following a trip to the Continent, contributed perhaps to his willingness to leave in 1673 when, following a fire at the Navy Office, he moved to Winchester Street. It is at around this time that his housekeeper, Mary Skinner (or Skynner), appears as a regular feature of Pepys's life. There seems no doubt that she became his wife in all but name and, as Richard Ollard has observed, the fact that Pepys did not actually marry her remains a mystery, unless it was out of some kind of abiding respect to the memory of Elizabeth. Evelyn and his wife certainly came to regard Pepys and Mary Skinner as man and wife which, considering Evelyn's sense of propriety, indicates that the relationship must have been otherwise both respectable and decorous. In a letter to Pepys of 15 March 1687 Evelyn refers to a ‘Mrs Pepys’ and this can only be Mary Skinner.

By January 1674 Pepys had moved to the Admiralty's temporary offices in Derby House, a site now marked by New Scotland Yard. In 1679 he moved again, this time to York Buildings by Villiers Street, to live with his former servant Will Hewer. A single letter from Portsmouth was sent in 1683 marking his voyage to Tangier but, oddly, he seems not to have written subsequently to Evelyn from Tangier, or even about the journey. It is difficult to be certain how much they saw each other after 1688. It seems likely that Pepys never visited Evelyn at Wotton. The pleasure which he had taken in the gardens of Sayes Court in the 1660s seems not to have encouraged him to go even there more than very rarely.⁹ He did hold regular Saturday-evening gatherings for his friends, and Evelyn implies he was a regular participant (letter, 7 January 1695) but how often he actually attended is quite unknown. Hewer later moved to Clapham; Pepys followed him in 1700 to recuperate after bouts of serious illness. Evelyn visited him on 23 September 1700 and was impressed by the house, and especially by Pepys's ‘Indys and Chineze Curiositys’. Pepys died at Hewer's house in Clapham in May 1703.

THE DISPERSAL AND PUBLICATION OF THE LETTERS

The discovery that Pepys and Evelyn had corresponded extensively with one another was a source of considerable interest to the early editors of their respective diaries. Unfortunately, the idea that such archives were best kept together was of little concern either to the diarists' descendants or the scholars.

Evelyn's archive was first trawled by the antiquarians William Bray and William Upcott. Upcott's description of the 1814 Evelyn household's use of old letters for making dress patterns¹⁰ makes it fairly clear how some gaps in the surviving correspondence occurred and why there is little chance of filling them. Bray's editions of the diary carried Upcott's transcriptions of some of the letters contained in Evelyn's copy-letter books. The selection, extended for the 1852 and later editions, also included one loaned by the Pepys-Cockerell family, some of the letters at the Bodleian in Oxford (the Rawlinson manuscripts), and letters from Pepys to Evelyn acquired by Upcott from the Evelyn archive. Upcott stated that anything he had from there had been a gift of the diarist's great-great-grandson's widow (his albums were purchased by the Evelyn family at his sale in 1846 and are now at the British Library).

Pepys's library and papers were inherited by his nephew John Jackson. Unlike the library, there was no requirement that the papers all pass eventually to Magdalene College, though some did. The antiquarian and collector Thomas Rawlinson (1681-1725) acquired a substantial quantity, which Richard, Lord Braybrooke, Pepys's first editor, believed may have been left at York Buildings when Pepys moved to Clapham in 1700. Happily, they found their way to the Bodleian after Rawlinson's death with a selection of them being published by R.G. Howarth in 1932. Most of the remaining papers stayed in family hands and became known as the Pepys-Cockerell papers.¹¹ Braybrooke's (principally 1825 and 1854) and Smith's (1841) editions of Pepys's diary carried transcriptions of letters drawn from this source, the Bodleian, and Upcott's albums. They seem to have been allowed to acquire some of the manuscripts, which thereafter disappeared. Some turned up during the work for this book, for example Evelyn's letter of 10 May 1700, now at The New York Public Library.

A previously-unknown group of letters appeared for sale in 1889 (see a Note about the Texts below, pp. 22-23). Corresponding to gaps in the extant Pepys-Cockerell papers (1680-1, and 1685-89) it seems likely that they came from there but as neither Braybrooke nor Smith appear to have known about them it is likely that the Pepys-Cockerell papers had been split up before 1825. Much of what did remain in the family was published by J.R. Tanner in 1926 and 1929. These papers, contained in five volumes, were all sold at Sotheby's on 1 April 1931; apart from one (forming the basis of Tanner 1929), which went to the National Maritime Museum, the rest were bought by a collector, Gabriel Wells, changing hands again at Christie's, London, on 11 June 1980.

Apart from small numbers of letters in private ownership, the only remaining large assemblages of letters are those retained in official records, and at the Pepysian Library. These were largely transcribed, though unreliably, by Clara Marburg and published in 1935. She also made a concerted effort to produce lists of previously-published letters, and of those which she had seen in private collections or advertised in sale catalogues. Unfortunately, she was unable to examine many of them with the result that there are so many duplications, omissions, and errors that the lists are effectively useless.

Of 136 letters identified for this book, 131 are presented here in full, 28 of which have never been published before, even from drafts or copies. The missing five are represented by extracts or descriptions taken from sale catalogues. Every effort was made to locate them but since being sold variously in 1889, 1900, and 1919, they have apparently disappeared. Of the rest, the vast majority have been freshly-transcribed from originals, though it has occasionally been necessary to utilise printed texts, or Pepys's and Evelyn's retained copies.

The efforts of some earlier editors made the whole task much easier for there is no doubt that two or three pairs of eyes are better than one when dealing with some of the damaged, or barely-legible, texts. As a general observation it may be said that Tanner's and Howarth's texts are reliable. Upcott's and Smith's are less so but fall within the better standards of their time. The efforts of Braybrooke and Marburg leave more to be desired. In Braybrooke's case texts were sometimes telescoped or rewritten as convenient, without any indication of what had happened. Marburg seems occasionally to have been the victim of unfamiliarity with the handwriting and terminology of the period, perhaps compounded by limited opportunities for repeated checking against the dispersed manuscripts. The following Note about the Texts expands in much more detail on the problems encountered during the transcriptions, and the treatment of the texts for this book.

Notes

1. Diary, 26 May 1670.

2. Pliny the Younger, Epist., III.5 passim.

3. See Writings of John Evelyn (1995). E, like many of his contemporaries, followed the pattern for study recommended by Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria, X.ii.1ff) that one should model one's own work on that of the greatest authorities.

4. Diaries, 23 January 1661 (see also Latham and Matthews, II, 22, n.1).

5. For Evelyn's diary see de Beer (I, 53-5). For Pepys see Latham and Matthews (I, lxviiiff; especially, lxxiv).

6. See below, p. 38, note 2.

7. Probably an ornamental garden. The Diary of Robert Hooke, ed. H.W. Robinson and W. Adams, London 1935, 359.

8. The process was a complicated one. De Beer provides a useful summary of the sequence of events (II, 537, n.6; and III, 59, n.1).

9. For example 24 July 1691 (E's diary) but the visit is implicit rather than stated.

10. Quoted by de Beer (see above p. 12, note 1).

11. P's nephew John Jackson's daughter, Frances (d. 1769), married John Cockerell (d. 1767), and part of the family thereafter adopted the name Pepys-Cockerell.