While most of us have heard of Samuel Pepys and his famous diaries, rather few of us have read them, including me. But a while ago I picked up an abridged audio-book version on cassette and listened to it over the holidays while doing jobs in the kitchen.
And of course it’s fantastic stuff. We get not only fascinating historical information, with eyewitness accounts of great events of the 1660s, such as the coronation of Charles II, the Great Fire of London, the plague, and so on, but intriguing insight into the character of a man with many great qualities and an equal number of human failings. I shall have to get the unabridged text in print.
Pepys was, apart from being a gifted administrator (the “first bureaucrat”), ambitious, obsessively acquisitive, a hedonist, a very wily operator, and had a fatal weakness for pretty women (i.e. he couldn’t keep his hands to himself or his zizi in his culottes, which got him into constant trouble).
With a list of such qualities, is it any surprise to discover that he was also an enthusiastic whistle player? (Actually he played the flageolet, but were he alive today I’m quite sure he would have a whistle collection to rival Jessie’s.) It seems he took delight in playing anywhere, at any time of day, and loved a good session with song, tunes and good food and drink. Was also very keen for his wife to learn to play. Here are just a few quotes from the Gutenberg project etext version of the diaries:
Thence we went to the Green Dragon, on Lambeth Hill, both the Mr. Pinkney’s, Smith, Harrison, Morrice, that sang the bass, Sheply and I, and there we sang of all sorts of things, and I ventured with good success upon things at first sight, and after that I played on my flageolet, and staid there till nine o’clock, very merry and drawn on with one song after another till it came to be so late.
Drank my morning draft at Harper’s, and was told there that the soldiers were all quiet upon promise of pay. Thence to St. James’s Park, and walked there to my place for my flageolet and then played a little, it being a most pleasant morning and sunshine. Back to Whitehall, where in the guard-chamber I saw about thirty or forty 'prentices of the City, who were taken at twelve o’clock last night and brought prisoners hither.
Thence Swan and I to a drinking-house near Temple Bar, where while he wrote I played on my flageolet till a dish of poached eggs was got ready for us, which we eat, and so by coach home.
Mr. Blayton and I took horse and straight to Saffron Walden, where at the White Hart, we set up our horses, and took the master of the house to shew us Audley End House, who took us on foot through the park, and so to the house, where the housekeeper shewed us all the house, in which the stateliness of the ceilings, chimney-pieces, and form of the whole was exceedingly worth seeing. He took us into the cellar, where we drank most admirable drink, a health to the King. Here I played on my flageolette, there being an excellent echo.
Then home with my workmen all the afternoon, at night into the garden to play on my flageolette, it being moonshine, where I staid a good while, and so home and to bed.
So home Sir William and I, and it being very hot weather I took my flageolette and played upon the leads in the garden, where Sir W. Pen came out in his shirt into his leads, and there we staid talking and singing, and drinking great drafts of claret, and eating botargo and bread and butter till 12 at night, it being moonshine; and so to bed, very near fuddled.
… and so I past my time walking up and down, and among other places, to one Drumbleby, a maker of flageolets, the best in towne. He not within, my design to bespeak a pair of flageolets of the same tune, ordered him to come to me in a day or two, and so I back to the cabinet-maker’s and there staid.
Up, and there comes to me Drumbleby with a flageolet, made to suit with my former and brings me one Greeting, a master, to teach my wife. I agree by the whole with him to teach her to take out any lesson of herself for £4.
… and so to my house, and with my wife to practice on the flageolet a little, and with great pleasure I see she can readily hit her notes, but only want of practice makes her she cannot go through a whole tune readily. So to supper and to bed.
So home and to set down in writing the state of the account, and then to supper, and my wife to her flageolet, wherein she did make out a tune so prettily of herself, that I was infinitely pleased beyond whatever I expected from her, and so to bed.
Up and comes the flageolet master, and brings me two new great Ivory pipes which cost me 32s…