Monday 5 October 1663

Up with pain, and with Sir J. Minnes by coach to the Temple, and then I to my brother’s, and up and down on business, and so to the New Exchange, and there met Creed, and he and I walked two or three hours, talking of many businesses, especially about Tangier, and my Lord Tiviot’s bringing in of high accounts, and yet if they were higher are like to pass without exception, and then of my Lord Sandwich sending a messenger to know whether the King intends to come to Newmarket, as is talked, that he may be ready to entertain him at Hinchingbroke.

Thence home and dined, and my wife all day putting up her hangings in her closett, which she do very prettily herself with her own hand, to my great content. So I to the office till night, about several businesses, and then went and sat an hour or two with Sir W. Pen, talking very largely of Sir J. Minnes’s simplicity and unsteadiness, and of Sir W. Batten’s suspicious dealings, wherein I was open, and he sufficiently, so that I do not care for his telling of tales, for he said as much, but whether that were so or no I said nothing but what is my certain knowledge and belief concerning him. Thence home to bed in great pain.


23 Annotations

First Reading

Rex Gordon  •  Link

The King at Newmarket

From 1666 on, say L&M, Charles regularly attended the Newmarket horse racing meets (spring and autumn), established about this time. He also hunted there.

(Living in the United States, five or six hours lagging the UK, I usually don't have the chance to post the first annotation!)

TerryF  •  Link

"Up with pain...."

Now begins "My great fitt of the Collique" a notation later inserted in the margin of yesterday's Diary entry, as Mary noted. http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1…

(Rex, congratulations on being the first today!! Actually, we in the US have the advantage, since each day's entry's supposed to be posted at the end of Pepys's evening, at 11 PM GMT = 7 PM ET in the US; but this one was several hours late, as Phil has had a week more busy than usual.)

Pedro  •  Link

The King to visit the Headquarters of Racing.

The Rowley Mile at Newmarket is named after the nickname of King Charles II, Old Rowley. Old Rowley was his favourite horse, and many say the horse was a good stud.

For a panoramic view of the present Rowley Mile see…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/suffolk/360/…

(Well done Rex, you are King for the day!)

Patricia  •  Link

Though in great pain, Sam put in a busy day, including two or three hours of walking. Not one to coddle himself. Though if Collique means, as I suspect, constipation, then the walking could only do him good.

Wim van der Meij  •  Link

Bess is having a good time at work in the house. Maybe being a maid or a companion short is suiting her.
Here (in Holland) we have a saying: 'A woman's hand and a horse's tooth should never be idle'.

Roger Arbor  •  Link

Collique? Sounds to me like 'stone' trouble. Poor chap, great pain indeed.

language hat  •  Link

"Sounds to me like ‘stone’ trouble."

I think Sam is very well placed to know exactly what stone trouble feels like! If he said it was collique, I'll take his word for it.

jeannine  •  Link

"and then of my Lord Sandwich sending a messenger to know whether the King intends to come to Newmarket, as is talked, that he may be ready to entertain him at Hinchingbroke."

I can't imagine the preparation for having the King "drop by". I am sure that it would entail him arriving with all of his "groupies" of the day, which could be quite a crowd. In Carteret's biography it details Charles' time in exile in Jersey under Carteret's care. The entourage that accompanied Charles was overwhelming and the pomp and pagentry that gets dumped on the host to the King is mind boggling, so I can imagine that even a simple 'dinner" could involve untold preparation, let alone the stress!

in aqua  •  Link

"...The Rowley Mile at Newmarket is named after the nickname of King Charles ..." I always 'tort' Six Mile Bottom be Charles' hide away.

Joe  •  Link

"my wife all day putting up her hangings in her closett, which she do very prettily herself with her own hand, to my great content"

Wim--I think I agree. We tend to say that if you want to get something done right, you should do it yourself. Pepys doesn't mention _her_ "great content," though.

in aqua  •  Link

Samuell knows when to leave it and not meddle..

in aqua  •  Link

'bin ther and done that' and be 'bludy' 'orrible, needs Morphine to forget, thankful it not available. Colic [collic, collique] LL colicus pertaining to colic, GR Kolon, i.e. acute abdominal pain. Popular term for babies stomache ache.
Sometimes the pain be a predessor to appendicitis, then peritonitis.
Lucky for Sam it not be this. If were a rupture, then the bell dothe toll for thee.
http://www.appendixinfo.com/dtcf/

Patricia  •  Link

Re old sayings, i.e. ‘A woman’s hand and a horse’s tooth should never be idle’, etc.
A wise woman once told me this: Never let a man know you can do a thing, or you'll be doing it yourself from then on. (She said this in reference to cleaning out stove pipes.)

A. De Araujo  •  Link

"collique"
Could be intestinal or renal;since he is having pain on urination and the pain has been going on for a while, methinks it could very well be "stones".

Robert Gertz  •  Link

"...sat an hour or two with Sir W. Pen, talking very largely of Sir J. Minnes’s simplicity and unsteadiness, and of Sir W. Batten’s suspicious dealings."

So? Invest in Holland? One can only hope things aren't going any better at the Hague.

Second Reading

Terry Foreman  •  Link

The entries for 6-11 October constitute one of the best-documented attacks of flatulence in history. Flatulence was fashionable then, as now, as an explanation of symptoms which it has nothing to do with. Burton gave over 50 remedies to 'expel or 'resolve' wind or 'flatuous melancholy': Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), by Robert Burton, Memb. II, Subsect. ii. Symptoms of windy Hypochondriacal Melancholy. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/… Pepys was particularly subject to it, and in 1677, when he wrote a survey of his health he put it second only to his eye-trouble. 'From the furthermost of my memory backward,' he then wrote, '(both before I [was] cutt [of] the stone and since) to this day I have been Subject upon all Cold, especially taken in my feet on an empty Stomach to have the same paines in my Bowels and Bladder and stoppage of Urine, and almost in the same degree as what the stone itselfe gave me. And this soe certaine, and orderly, that I never have a fitt thereof but I can assigne the time and occasion of it, as alsoe of its Cure, Namely; Soe Soone (and not before) as I can break wind behind in a plentifull degree....The preventions which I use...are the keeping of my feet warme, and my Stomach full. (Per L&M footnote)

Terry Foreman  •  Link

language hat on 6 Oct 2006

"Sounds to me like ‘stone’ trouble."

I think Sam is very well placed to know exactly what stone trouble feels like! If he said it was collique, I'll take his word for it.
___
language hat, however well placed Sam was "to know exactly what stone trouble feels like" when he suffered from it (before 1657), apparently at some point he ceased to discriminate that from other disorders, as the L&M footnote just above this post shows.

http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1…

Terry Foreman  •  Link

Correction, Pepys's lithotomy (stone removal) was 26 March 1658.

Terry Foreman  •  Link

" the King intends to come to Newmarket"

The King attended the races there from 1666 onwards (L&M note).

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

Hinchingbrooke is about 34 miles from Newmarket today ... who knows what route they would have to take back then. Quite a daily ride to see some horse racing.

As I'll post next, King James' and King Charles' palaces had been wrecked after the Civil War, so Charles II would need to stay off site for a while during reconstruction.

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

http://www.olivercromwell.org/new…

A perpetual round of gaiety continued during the reign of King Charles, who spent as much time as he could in Newmarket. The king would ride around the surrounding countryside boasting that he never enjoyed such good health as he did in Newmarket.

But this was interrupted by the civil war, and with the downfall of the monarchy, Newmarket underwent a serious decline.

The fratricidal conflict which engulfed England in 1642 began in Newmarket, in the royal palace in early March when King Charles had a confrontation with a parliamentary deputation demanding he surrender control of the armed forces. ‘By God not for an hour’, he angrily retorted. ‘You have asked such of me that was never asked of a King!’

The die was cast. During the ensuing confrontation Newmarket took the royal side, In 1642 some of the townsfolk tried to raise troops for the king, while six years later, at the height of the second civil war, there was an abortive rising which saw serious fighting in the market place.

Then in June 1647 King Charles was seized at Holdenby House and brought prisoner to Newmarket. Here he found the entire New Model Army massed, and surrounded by this ring of steel, he was kept under house arrest in his own palace for nearly a fortnight. However, his stay was not altogether unpleasant, for he was permitted to go riding in his coach on Newmarket Heath. And many people, including gentry, flocked to see the king, especially when he ‘was at Dinner or Supper’ in the Presence Chamber which reverberated with their prayers for his safety.

To no avail, for King Charles execution spelt the doom of the royal palace in Newmarket. As is evident from a 1649 survey, it fell into disrepair and was sold off in 1650 to a consortium of 7 men including the regicide Col. John Okey, who pulled down most of the buildings in an orgy of vandalism.

By the end of the Interregnum the Jacobean palace was a shadow of its former self: the Prince’s Lodgings had been razed. Parts of the palace still standing (the brew house and stables) were dilapidated. Only the garden ‘was not much altered’. Newmarket’s link with the monarchy seemed broken forever.

‘When the King enjoys his own again!’ How Newmarket must have reveled in the first fine, careless rapture of Restoration England! ...

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

"So I to the office till night, about several businesses, and then went and sat an hour or two with Sir W. Pen, talking very largely of Sir J. Minnes’s simplicity and unsteadiness, and of Sir W. Batten’s suspicious dealings, wherein I was open, and he sufficiently, so that I do not care for his telling of tales, for he said as much, but whether that were so or no I said nothing but what is my certain knowledge and belief concerning him. "

Every annotation I have read of Pepys' relationship with Penn is that he really disliked him. Yet every couple of days he religiously visits the man, and here he is gossiping his way through another couple of hours,

My reading is that Pepys gives Penn an opening on Batten's business dealings, and Penn agreed "sufficiently" but for different reasons which information Pepys did not like. Since Pepys didn't know the details enough to judge, he refrained from saying anything further which he didn't know to be a fact.

Go to bed, Pepys. You're in pain, and sitting there playing politics and private eye isn't helping.

Log in to post an annotation.

If you don't have an account, then register here.