Feb. 25, Portsmouth. (Name missing) to Williamson. (...) Mons. De La Roche with his consort has gone for the coast of France, but met with Sir Thos. Allin's squadron of 5 frigates. Some guns fired, and they have lain this hour muzzled together [State Papers No. 77, https://play.google.com/books/rea…]
Uh-oh.
Wait a minute. Weren't Allen's instructions, dated just two days ago, to do nothing if De La Roche "is gone eastward, or to the coast of France"?
Our spy at the Savoy reports that Williamson will put this dispatch almost verbatim in the next Gazette (No. 238, of 24 Feb.), only adding that the engagement took place "off the Horse". We're unsure where that is, if it's a place. However we're also told, quite interestingly, that three items down the page will appear one official notice, rather unusual and in the extra-large typeface reserved for what Whitehall wants you not to miss, on how a book "lately published" contains "indecent expressions, and reflections upon the Most Christian King", Louis the Great; and on how "it must be acknowledged that the said Expressions and Reflections unhappily escaped the view of the Peruser, and that nothing of that Nature ought to be justified".
We are walking on eggs there, aren't we. We asked our bookseller, but he said someone just bought his entire stock of anti-French books. He offered us L'Escholle des Filles instead, but that's just not the same.
"the practice heretofore, for all foreign nations, at enmity one with another, to forbear any acts of hostility to one another, in the presence of any of the King of England’s ships"
Very cute. Better send a telex to every other ship captain in the world, or the potential for misunderstandings and incidents will be high. In the real world, bilateral peace treaties allow up to a year of additional hostilities until there has been a chance to give everyone the memo. Expect a brisk trade in bootleg English flags, too.
Why, you ask, is Louis (it's "the Most Christian", "the Sun King", "Louis the Great", or maybe "the Dear Leader" to you) poking the sleeping dog? Because it's a sleeping dog, and while he will cajole the docile ones, he'll render those who give him trouble into sausage meat. Louis has just had a very hot war against England in the Americas, where he trashed Nevis and St. Christopher, and just this week he was handed back Cayenne and L'Acadie. He is winning (for now, OK) in Flanders, in the France Comté, in Luxembourg, is poking at Poland, commands one of Europe's largest armies if not the largest, and -- never, ever forget this -- anything Louis does is God's will. God right now wants to secure French borders and to expand them to wherever a claim can be discerned, and Louis has never felt so good about himself.
Louis' views of England in his mémoires for 1667-68 (searchable, in French only we're afraid, at https://books.google.fr/books?id=…) range from neutral to disparaging. He wants to keep Charles neutral mainly to remain free on other fronts but considers him feeble, corrupt and easily bullied. See, at page 192, how he will, years later, boast of having brilliantly shoehorned Charles into signing the Treaty of Breda, without even using the bribe set aside for this, "for the English, not daring to put their fleet to sea out of fear that I would join to the Dutch my own, that I kept all ready, were so maltreated in their own ports that they were forced to consent shamefully to the conditions they had previously refused". And at page 275, he gloats of having filched some of Charles' own gendarmes, along with a number of other good soldiers, because they were Catholics, and falling over themselves to rally France's glorious cause.
Just give it, say, ten years, and you'll see. Louis will turn against everybody. God's will is something to have on your side.
February 18: John Bulstrode reporting from the House (to his diary at https://archive.org/details/bulst…) confirms our estimate of 18,000 men in the Navy. So the officers would seem to eat for about as much as the lowly tars.
Maybe he played the trumpet? But no. It would depend on which English remember him. His Wiki lists a Louis, and a quick check on https://www.geneastar.org/ reveals at least one distinct family with a bunch of 16-17C Louis (hardly an original choice at the time). None of them seem to have left much of a trace but they were a military family in Brittany. At least some will be notable counter-revolutionaries, as was their home region generally, so maybe they jumped across the Channel and made a career.
Sam's misgivings concerning the Duke of Lerma seem another little window into his brain, where we suspect we see in action the hypertrophied Survivall Circuit, typical of high-level civil servants and of anyone with recent experience of a dictatorship (we mean Oliver!!) It sends alarms at the slightest sign that anything within a radius of several meters could be construed as partaking in dissent, or impure thoughts, or lèse-majesté. And who knows what innocent-seeming repartee could have sent ripples of knowing chuckles ...
Being stuffed into the mailbag today (at https://play.google.com/books/rea…): a note from Porsmouth that Monsieur De La Roche is still at Cowes (No. 20); an order co-signed by Sam at the Office, hopefully clearing the name of James Whiston the ex-purser of the Loyal Merchant (No. 18); at the preceding page, a somewhat more interesting message (No. 13) to Sam from John Tinker, on his hesitation to let the Revenge sail away "with the 80 or 90 [men] she has, few being seamen". Another problem then: as the professionals won't come back after they didn't get paid, the crews now consist of pressed turnip farmers who can't tie or untie a knot. Tinker implies he wants an order to loose the ship and its flawed crew. Anyone wants to put his elegant signature to that Miscarriage-in-Waiting?
De La Roche's interesting career and Dartagnanesque mustache can be examined in his Wikipedia biography, at https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil…. Charles had, indeed, a debt to him. How secure De La Roche felt in English waters is not known (alas, he left no memoirs), but Louis certainly felt he was the right officer to send there, and orders are orders.
Shockingly it is in French only, however to deal with tongues foreigne we recommend Dr. Google's unguent, Google Translate, which can even be applied automatically (to entire pages in one swoop if used as an Extension) to documents viewed in Chrome (at the Sign of the Chrome, past the ruins of the Fire Fox). It renders everything from Albanian to Zulu (and definitely French or Dutch or Spanish) into increasingly flawless English and is like the dragon's blood to Siegfried, if we may be permitted this slight anachronism.
The somewhat vague gossip that Sam has picked up on this La Roche's reakes is running ahead of at least one dispatch written this day (and recorded as No. 235 in the State Papers, https://play.google.com/books/rea…), forwarding depositions by "several Ostand mariners" whose good ship the St. Mary was seized around a week ago by Capt. De La Roche, despite the crew's attempt to sink her and their escape to Torquay with "their sails, ammunition, &c." They couldn't run too fast with all that stuff, and La Roche caught them up while still at Torquay and seized the not-sinking-fast-enough St. Mary and the "ammunition, &c."
What did we say recently on how those Ostenders would end up bringing their fight with the French into English ports? There we are, while the ink is still fresh on a royal decree to, precisely, keep everyone peaceful and neutral in English ports, and incidentally to ban the likes of La Roche from hiring English mercenaries, as he's just been doing on a scale of several dozen. And De La Roche, last reported 3 days ago to have already moved on to the Isle of Wight, seems to be running around like he owns the place.
So it's a mess and it better be contained, because La Roche isn't just "a French captain", he's the "chef d'escadre des armées navales", one of the highest-ranking and most trusted naval favorites of the Most Christian, who put him there with a substantial fleet (eight big ships) precisely to hunt Ostenders (another report this day, from John Pocock, relates how a St. Malo ship "speaks much of the great prejudice done to that place by the Ostenders"). He also happens to know all the brass in England, where Charles himself pardoned him over tea and sconces (we imagine) after he was captured in that tiff barely 18 months ago. So De La Roche might not be too impressed by a decree to please be nice in our ports, even assuming he knows about it, especially if those Ostend pyrates (with all that ammo they weren't just fishing, right?) are now playing the aggrieved victims. The decree also included orders to the English fleet to secure the waters against foreign privateers, and where was the English fleet in all this?
Incidentally and just for its crustiness we note also this report (at No. 211), of a French vessel raided by Ostenders, who "stripped the French passengers of their clothes, so that they were constrained to borrow some old sea clothes to cover their nakedness". So that's definitely an Ostender tactic, and they don't mean just give me your hat and your boots. In mid-February, brrr. Ironically, at No. 213 Capt. Taylor relates "the pitiful condition of the Spanish soldiers in Ostend, for lack of clothes, &c." Ah, the wily Ostenders.
£5,000 doesn't seem so shabby for an embassy, especially as Sandwich is about done and to be recalled; and he's a star in Spain and the Portugall, probably hardly ever has to pay for a drink.
-- Feb. 18: Warrants to pay to Sir Denis Gauden, victualler of the Navy, 28,000L for providing sea victuals for 5,000 men for 6 months; also 15,734L for sea victuals for 6 months, for fleets to be set out for the winter guard, the Straits and West Indies; also 55,300L for victuals for 9,875 men, to be employed on 50 of his Majesty's ships.
So, that gives us the victualling budget (£99,034, nearly half the £200k labeled "Navy" in the budget that will be agreed a month from now and is listed at https://play.google.com/books/rea…); the daily cost per man (£0.03, or 0.6s., or 7.2 pence, or 1/13th of what Sam splurged on his French-style lunch today, and even 1/26th on two meals/day); and the size of the naval force (about 18,000 men if we count right and if the officers don't eat all the budget).
Well, maybe pouches for the laundry bills and the not-so-interesting papers, and books for the noble stuff, the letters and accounts. Pouches are messy and would be edited out of engravings of Sam's beautiful office, but pouches also for the noble stuff until Sam is quite sure he's rounded up everything for the year and it's ready for binding because... "Look, Bess, my letters of 1667, all nicely bound in leather and gold". "Except this one I found under the bed, dear. Sam? Samuel! Come back! These bindings are expensive!"
So, what Sam and the now exponentially-growing bureaucracies of Europe would have killed for may not be file folders, but three-ring binders. Those seem within the reach of 1668 technology, the age of clocks and blood transfusion, but, again, we'll have to wait 200 years. Osipina, an office equipment company in the Philippines that you might otherwise not expect to come across on pepysdiary.com, tells the story in some detail and notes (at https://www.opisina.com.ph/journa…) that a necessary preliminary was "the invention of the loose-leaf paper in 1854" (Sam after two days of office cleaning might disagree on the date), which it enthusiastically suggests is "perhaps the most popular event in office supplies history".
Sam was kind enough on February 13 (in https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…) to answer me on how he feels about this new Committee, formally the Committee of the Council for Navy Affairs, after Carteret was called to it. What a surprise: he doesn't like. It is made up of "men wholly improper", incompetent and unknown even to the Lord Admiral.
A quick trip in the time machine suggests that filing favorites were pouches hung on the walls and papers stuck on nails (in Holland in "Lawyer's Office during Business Hours" by Pieter de Bloot, visible at http://officemuseum.com/photograp…, and in "A Notary in His Office" by Job Adriaensz Berckheyde (1672, what would we do without these Dutch masters), and in France at https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo….
Another technique was, apart from lotsa pouches, great messy heaps such as at https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo…, which also cannot but evoke the Navy Office's front office, with seamen come hat in hand to see about those tickets.
Not a folder, not a box in sight. Histories of folders (which seem quite limited, as if historians didn't see the blockbuster and movie rights waiting to be got from such a theme) seem to agree on the manila folder not showing up before 1898. After the telephone? What took so long? What took so long was mass-produced, cheap but thick paper. Amazingly it seems the price of paper in 1668 was about the same as it would be in 1850 (as per https://www.diva-portal.org/smash…), but for some reason the manila folders had to wait for someone to think of pulping plantain leaves from the Philippines.
Right now the Philippines are Spanish, and the Spanish colonial office sure is good at archiving; there is a parallel universe where Sandwich gets rewarded by Spain with trading rights for early manila folders, and Sam's filing woes disappear. But, in that parallel universe, the cost of shipping paper from the antipodes is also much lower than in this one, where Spain, not realizing the treasure it has on its hand with all these rotting plantain leaves, is foolishly focused on gold and nutmeg instead.
Today John Tinker advises Sam that he's contracted for 40 pairs of oars, "not to be delivered till there be money to pay for them" (State Papers No. 187, https://play.google.com/books/rea…). Maybe a workable compromise, if it's OK with the oar-makers.
And, still tracking M. de la Roche: He's in Cowes. His English soldiers (now of dubious legality) include a son of Sir John Skelton. He's there to "prevent the Ostend privateers", and apparently didn't slaughter them all when he caught some. So, a gentleman on a mission for Good, with quality people aboard and good manners. Really nothing to worry about (State Papers No. 190).
The boxes make a lot of sense. It seems inconceivable that Sam, who is so fussy as to reject books that don't fit in the bookcases, would deface his beautiful (and expensive, and already labelled) book bindings with hundreds of little paper labels. Imagine the mess, with the glop that 1668 glue must have been; also, we see no labels or glue stains on the (few) books visible on Magdalene College's website. However, the office must have been awash in loose-leaf material, what with all these letters, and pamphlets, and the continual whirlwind of business, especially with no office-cleaning for a year. What to do with all that stuff? Folders? The history of file folders seems to start in the 19th century (we imagine that Sam would have killed for them). Boxes? Cardboard boxes are still 150+ years in the future, so wooden boxes; maybe pigeonholes. Those would need labels; would the girls, admirable creatures that they are, have been trusted with filing? Maybe not, but the boxes would need labels and, Sam being Sam, those would have to be all exactly the same size, and written just so.
Not really in Sam's department, beggin' your pardon, but we resist not mentioning the news sent this day by Capt. Silas Taylor from Harwich, that the ship which the Postmaster General of Holland, the delightfully named Mynheer Quack, had boarded last month to personally deliver the mail to England, and of which there had been no news, "was taken up safe in Camphere Downs with all his letters (...); the vessel had not shipped water, but no one was in her" (State Papers, No. 180, https://play.google.com/books/rea…).
Hopes that Quack & crew had jumped ships and were in Sweden (whatever for?) were disillusioned, as they never reappeared. And so here we are in Camphere Downs (wherever that is): a ghost ship! The Flying Dutchman, a century before its (reputed) time!
On this day the Very Busyness at the Office included a bit of unpleasantness, the writing with Lord Brouncker of a letter to the Governors of the Chest - the Chatham Chest, the fund for sick and wounded sailors which the recently departed Will Batten had managed and about which Sam had suspected Batten of hiding something. As he finally gets his hands on Batten's papers Sam has found that the rapscallion had indeed filched out £500 from the fund:
-- "Now, we think ourselves obliged to take notice of two particulars demanded in the account which we can by no means think (...) justifiable for us to allow, namely (...) £500 by Sir W. Batten himself in consideration of his pains. We are sorry this ill office was left to us to do after the death of Sir W. Batten, but you well knowing what endeavours were used by us in his lifetime to the obtaining a state of this account, and how he to the time of his death did avoid the giving of the same (...) [F]or this reward of £500 to himself, we do declare ourselves totally unsatisfied therewith, it being a work taken upon him with profession during his whole life of doing it in charity for the Chest, without any the least intimation in all his discourses of anything of profit expected by him for the same (...)"
And so the office would like the £500 "expunged", and disclaims liability. The angry letter (you don't want to meet a "Totally Unsatisfied" Sam Pepys), not part of this Society's collection, is in "The Letters of Samuel Pepys, 1656-1703" (Boydell Press, 2006) and may be viewed at the usual Hours at https://books.google.fr/books?id=…
Finally, we wish to briefly bookmark today's entry as a very rare instance of a clear historical record of a wink (one of only two in the whole Corpus Pepsycus). Non-verbal communication rarely fossilizes, and the learned Mr. Google, queried on the "history of winking", could tell us little more than the antiquity of the word, suggesting the act was, in Northern Europe, one of reverence to Odin the one-eyed god and, in the Biblical Levant (as per https://www.bible-history.com/isb…), evil except when made by God.
Speaking of intelligence and the French, ours is that Monsieur le Capitaine de la Roche has surfaced at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, still tracking down his ships scattered by the storms and the Ostenders (the Gazette will report on it next week in its No. 236, but our sources run faster). Here's a man worth paying some spies to watch.
Secretary Morrice's sally on his intel budget in fact seems part of a tussle that might have been going on for at least a month, as he and Arlington were instructed sometime in January to "reduce the expense of intelligence to 4,000L a year" (State Papers No. 147, https://play.google.com/books/rea…). We expect that number to stick. Whether Sir Stephen's £6,000 should be added or pays for "secret services" other than riffling the letters of foreign princes, who knows; as paymaster of the forces he could pay for all manners of skull-crushing, or pyrate tracking, or even to hush up some great lady's gambling debt.
Knicknacks for foreign ambassadors are surely not always just for good memories either, wink wink. In that department, the Spanish ambassador who got ear pendants could sigh at the (unfortunately not easily searchable) Gazette de France, which last year reported that more than one of his colleagues walked out of Versailles with their entire portrait made out of diamonds and rubies.
Comments
Second Reading
About Tuesday 25 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
Feb. 25, Portsmouth. (Name missing) to Williamson. (...) Mons. De La Roche with his consort has gone for the coast of France, but met with Sir Thos. Allin's squadron of 5 frigates. Some guns fired, and they have lain this hour muzzled together [State Papers No. 77, https://play.google.com/books/rea…]
Uh-oh.
Wait a minute. Weren't Allen's instructions, dated just two days ago, to do nothing if De La Roche "is gone eastward, or to the coast of France"?
Our spy at the Savoy reports that Williamson will put this dispatch almost verbatim in the next Gazette (No. 238, of 24 Feb.), only adding that the engagement took place "off the Horse". We're unsure where that is, if it's a place. However we're also told, quite interestingly, that three items down the page will appear one official notice, rather unusual and in the extra-large typeface reserved for what Whitehall wants you not to miss, on how a book "lately published" contains "indecent expressions, and reflections upon the Most Christian King", Louis the Great; and on how "it must be acknowledged that the said Expressions and Reflections unhappily escaped the view of the Peruser, and that nothing of that Nature ought to be justified".
We are walking on eggs there, aren't we. We asked our bookseller, but he said someone just bought his entire stock of anti-French books. He offered us L'Escholle des Filles instead, but that's just not the same.
About Sunday 23 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
"the practice heretofore, for all foreign nations, at enmity one with another, to forbear any acts of hostility to one another, in the presence of any of the King of England’s ships"
Very cute. Better send a telex to every other ship captain in the world, or the potential for misunderstandings and incidents will be high. In the real world, bilateral peace treaties allow up to a year of additional hostilities until there has been a chance to give everyone the memo. Expect a brisk trade in bootleg English flags, too.
About Sunday 23 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
Why, you ask, is Louis (it's "the Most Christian", "the Sun King", "Louis the Great", or maybe "the Dear Leader" to you) poking the sleeping dog? Because it's a sleeping dog, and while he will cajole the docile ones, he'll render those who give him trouble into sausage meat. Louis has just had a very hot war against England in the Americas, where he trashed Nevis and St. Christopher, and just this week he was handed back Cayenne and L'Acadie. He is winning (for now, OK) in Flanders, in the France Comté, in Luxembourg, is poking at Poland, commands one of Europe's largest armies if not the largest, and -- never, ever forget this -- anything Louis does is God's will. God right now wants to secure French borders and to expand them to wherever a claim can be discerned, and Louis has never felt so good about himself.
Louis' views of England in his mémoires for 1667-68 (searchable, in French only we're afraid, at https://books.google.fr/books?id=…) range from neutral to disparaging. He wants to keep Charles neutral mainly to remain free on other fronts but considers him feeble, corrupt and easily bullied. See, at page 192, how he will, years later, boast of having brilliantly shoehorned Charles into signing the Treaty of Breda, without even using the bribe set aside for this, "for the English, not daring to put their fleet to sea out of fear that I would join to the Dutch my own, that I kept all ready, were so maltreated in their own ports that they were forced to consent shamefully to the conditions they had previously refused". And at page 275, he gloats of having filched some of Charles' own gendarmes, along with a number of other good soldiers, because they were Catholics, and falling over themselves to rally France's glorious cause.
Just give it, say, ten years, and you'll see. Louis will turn against everybody. God's will is something to have on your side.
About Tuesday 18 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
February 18: John Bulstrode reporting from the House (to his diary at https://archive.org/details/bulst…) confirms our estimate of 18,000 men in the Navy. So the officers would seem to eat for about as much as the lowly tars.
About Wednesday 19 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
Maybe he played the trumpet? But no. It would depend on which English remember him. His Wiki lists a Louis, and a quick check on https://www.geneastar.org/ reveals at least one distinct family with a bunch of 16-17C Louis (hardly an original choice at the time). None of them seem to have left much of a trace but they were a military family in Brittany. At least some will be notable counter-revolutionaries, as was their home region generally, so maybe they jumped across the Channel and made a career.
About Thursday 20 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
Sam's misgivings concerning the Duke of Lerma seem another little window into his brain, where we suspect we see in action the hypertrophied Survivall Circuit, typical of high-level civil servants and of anyone with recent experience of a dictatorship (we mean Oliver!!) It sends alarms at the slightest sign that anything within a radius of several meters could be construed as partaking in dissent, or impure thoughts, or lèse-majesté. And who knows what innocent-seeming repartee could have sent ripples of knowing chuckles ...
Being stuffed into the mailbag today (at https://play.google.com/books/rea…): a note from Porsmouth that Monsieur De La Roche is still at Cowes (No. 20); an order co-signed by Sam at the Office, hopefully clearing the name of James Whiston the ex-purser of the Loyal Merchant (No. 18); at the preceding page, a somewhat more interesting message (No. 13) to Sam from John Tinker, on his hesitation to let the Revenge sail away "with the 80 or 90 [men] she has, few being seamen". Another problem then: as the professionals won't come back after they didn't get paid, the crews now consist of pressed turnip farmers who can't tie or untie a knot. Tinker implies he wants an order to loose the ship and its flawed crew. Anyone wants to put his elegant signature to that Miscarriage-in-Waiting?
About Wednesday 19 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
De La Roche's interesting career and Dartagnanesque mustache can be examined in his Wikipedia biography, at https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil…. Charles had, indeed, a debt to him. How secure De La Roche felt in English waters is not known (alas, he left no memoirs), but Louis certainly felt he was the right officer to send there, and orders are orders.
Shockingly it is in French only, however to deal with tongues foreigne we recommend Dr. Google's unguent, Google Translate, which can even be applied automatically (to entire pages in one swoop if used as an Extension) to documents viewed in Chrome (at the Sign of the Chrome, past the ruins of the Fire Fox). It renders everything from Albanian to Zulu (and definitely French or Dutch or Spanish) into increasingly flawless English and is like the dragon's blood to Siegfried, if we may be permitted this slight anachronism.
About Wednesday 19 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
The somewhat vague gossip that Sam has picked up on this La Roche's reakes is running ahead of at least one dispatch written this day (and recorded as No. 235 in the State Papers, https://play.google.com/books/rea…), forwarding depositions by "several Ostand mariners" whose good ship the St. Mary was seized around a week ago by Capt. De La Roche, despite the crew's attempt to sink her and their escape to Torquay with "their sails, ammunition, &c." They couldn't run too fast with all that stuff, and La Roche caught them up while still at Torquay and seized the not-sinking-fast-enough St. Mary and the "ammunition, &c."
What did we say recently on how those Ostenders would end up bringing their fight with the French into English ports? There we are, while the ink is still fresh on a royal decree to, precisely, keep everyone peaceful and neutral in English ports, and incidentally to ban the likes of La Roche from hiring English mercenaries, as he's just been doing on a scale of several dozen. And De La Roche, last reported 3 days ago to have already moved on to the Isle of Wight, seems to be running around like he owns the place.
So it's a mess and it better be contained, because La Roche isn't just "a French captain", he's the "chef d'escadre des armées navales", one of the highest-ranking and most trusted naval favorites of the Most Christian, who put him there with a substantial fleet (eight big ships) precisely to hunt Ostenders (another report this day, from John Pocock, relates how a St. Malo ship "speaks much of the great prejudice done to that place by the Ostenders"). He also happens to know all the brass in England, where Charles himself pardoned him over tea and sconces (we imagine) after he was captured in that tiff barely 18 months ago. So De La Roche might not be too impressed by a decree to please be nice in our ports, even assuming he knows about it, especially if those Ostend pyrates (with all that ammo they weren't just fishing, right?) are now playing the aggrieved victims. The decree also included orders to the English fleet to secure the waters against foreign privateers, and where was the English fleet in all this?
About Tuesday 18 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
Incidentally and just for its crustiness we note also this report (at No. 211), of a French vessel raided by Ostenders, who "stripped the French passengers of their clothes, so that they were constrained to borrow some old sea clothes to cover their nakedness". So that's definitely an Ostender tactic, and they don't mean just give me your hat and your boots. In mid-February, brrr. Ironically, at No. 213 Capt. Taylor relates "the pitiful condition of the Spanish soldiers in Ostend, for lack of clothes, &c." Ah, the wily Ostenders.
About Tuesday 18 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
£5,000 doesn't seem so shabby for an embassy, especially as Sandwich is about done and to be recalled; and he's a star in Spain and the Portugall, probably hardly ever has to pay for a drink.
The State Papers today (https://play.google.com/books/rea…) also have a good one at No. 191:
-- Feb. 18: Warrants to pay to Sir Denis Gauden, victualler of the Navy, 28,000L for providing sea victuals for 5,000 men for 6 months; also 15,734L for sea victuals for 6 months, for fleets to be set out for the winter guard, the Straits and West Indies; also 55,300L for victuals for 9,875 men, to be employed on 50 of his Majesty's ships.
So, that gives us the victualling budget (£99,034, nearly half the £200k labeled "Navy" in the budget that will be agreed a month from now and is listed at https://play.google.com/books/rea…); the daily cost per man (£0.03, or 0.6s., or 7.2 pence, or 1/13th of what Sam splurged on his French-style lunch today, and even 1/26th on two meals/day); and the size of the naval force (about 18,000 men if we count right and if the officers don't eat all the budget).
About Saturday 15 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
Well, maybe pouches for the laundry bills and the not-so-interesting papers, and books for the noble stuff, the letters and accounts. Pouches are messy and would be edited out of engravings of Sam's beautiful office, but pouches also for the noble stuff until Sam is quite sure he's rounded up everything for the year and it's ready for binding because... "Look, Bess, my letters of 1667, all nicely bound in leather and gold". "Except this one I found under the bed, dear. Sam? Samuel! Come back! These bindings are expensive!"
So, what Sam and the now exponentially-growing bureaucracies of Europe would have killed for may not be file folders, but three-ring binders. Those seem within the reach of 1668 technology, the age of clocks and blood transfusion, but, again, we'll have to wait 200 years. Osipina, an office equipment company in the Philippines that you might otherwise not expect to come across on pepysdiary.com, tells the story in some detail and notes (at https://www.opisina.com.ph/journa…) that a necessary preliminary was "the invention of the loose-leaf paper in 1854" (Sam after two days of office cleaning might disagree on the date), which it enthusiastically suggests is "perhaps the most popular event in office supplies history".
About Wednesday 5 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
Sam was kind enough on February 13 (in https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…) to answer me on how he feels about this new Committee, formally the Committee of the Council for Navy Affairs, after Carteret was called to it. What a surprise: he doesn't like. It is made up of "men wholly improper", incompetent and unknown even to the Lord Admiral.
About Saturday 15 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
A quick trip in the time machine suggests that filing favorites were pouches hung on the walls and papers stuck on nails (in Holland in "Lawyer's Office during Business Hours" by Pieter de Bloot, visible at http://officemuseum.com/photograp…, and in "A Notary in His Office" by Job Adriaensz Berckheyde (1672, what would we do without these Dutch masters), and in France at https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo….
Another technique was, apart from lotsa pouches, great messy heaps such as at https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo…, which also cannot but evoke the Navy Office's front office, with seamen come hat in hand to see about those tickets.
Not a folder, not a box in sight. Histories of folders (which seem quite limited, as if historians didn't see the blockbuster and movie rights waiting to be got from such a theme) seem to agree on the manila folder not showing up before 1898. After the telephone? What took so long? What took so long was mass-produced, cheap but thick paper. Amazingly it seems the price of paper in 1668 was about the same as it would be in 1850 (as per https://www.diva-portal.org/smash…), but for some reason the manila folders had to wait for someone to think of pulping plantain leaves from the Philippines.
Right now the Philippines are Spanish, and the Spanish colonial office sure is good at archiving; there is a parallel universe where Sandwich gets rewarded by Spain with trading rights for early manila folders, and Sam's filing woes disappear. But, in that parallel universe, the cost of shipping paper from the antipodes is also much lower than in this one, where Spain, not realizing the treasure it has on its hand with all these rotting plantain leaves, is foolishly focused on gold and nutmeg instead.
About Sunday 16 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
Today John Tinker advises Sam that he's contracted for 40 pairs of oars, "not to be delivered till there be money to pay for them" (State Papers No. 187, https://play.google.com/books/rea…). Maybe a workable compromise, if it's OK with the oar-makers.
And, still tracking M. de la Roche: He's in Cowes. His English soldiers (now of dubious legality) include a son of Sir John Skelton. He's there to "prevent the Ostend privateers", and apparently didn't slaughter them all when he caught some. So, a gentleman on a mission for Good, with quality people aboard and good manners. Really nothing to worry about (State Papers No. 190).
About Saturday 15 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
The boxes make a lot of sense. It seems inconceivable that Sam, who is so fussy as to reject books that don't fit in the bookcases, would deface his beautiful (and expensive, and already labelled) book bindings with hundreds of little paper labels. Imagine the mess, with the glop that 1668 glue must have been; also, we see no labels or glue stains on the (few) books visible on Magdalene College's website. However, the office must have been awash in loose-leaf material, what with all these letters, and pamphlets, and the continual whirlwind of business, especially with no office-cleaning for a year. What to do with all that stuff? Folders? The history of file folders seems to start in the 19th century (we imagine that Sam would have killed for them). Boxes? Cardboard boxes are still 150+ years in the future, so wooden boxes; maybe pigeonholes. Those would need labels; would the girls, admirable creatures that they are, have been trusted with filing? Maybe not, but the boxes would need labels and, Sam being Sam, those would have to be all exactly the same size, and written just so.
About Saturday 15 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
Not really in Sam's department, beggin' your pardon, but we resist not mentioning the news sent this day by Capt. Silas Taylor from Harwich, that the ship which the Postmaster General of Holland, the delightfully named Mynheer Quack, had boarded last month to personally deliver the mail to England, and of which there had been no news, "was taken up safe in Camphere Downs with all his letters (...); the vessel had not shipped water, but no one was in her" (State Papers, No. 180, https://play.google.com/books/rea…).
Hopes that Quack & crew had jumped ships and were in Sweden (whatever for?) were disillusioned, as they never reappeared. And so here we are in Camphere Downs (wherever that is): a ghost ship! The Flying Dutchman, a century before its (reputed) time!
Whatever you do, don't accept those letters!
About Thursday 6 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
On this day the Very Busyness at the Office included a bit of unpleasantness, the writing with Lord Brouncker of a letter to the Governors of the Chest - the Chatham Chest, the fund for sick and wounded sailors which the recently departed Will Batten had managed and about which Sam had suspected Batten of hiding something. As he finally gets his hands on Batten's papers Sam has found that the rapscallion had indeed filched out £500 from the fund:
-- "Now, we think ourselves obliged to take notice of two particulars demanded in the account which we can by no means think (...) justifiable for us to allow, namely (...) £500 by Sir W. Batten himself in consideration of his pains. We are sorry this ill office was left to us to do after the death of Sir W. Batten, but you well knowing what endeavours were used by us in his lifetime to the obtaining a state of this account, and how he to the time of his death did avoid the giving of the same (...) [F]or this reward of £500 to himself, we do declare ourselves totally unsatisfied therewith, it being a work taken upon him with profession during his whole life of doing it in charity for the Chest, without any the least intimation in all his discourses of anything of profit expected by him for the same (...)"
And so the office would like the £500 "expunged", and disclaims liability. The angry letter (you don't want to meet a "Totally Unsatisfied" Sam Pepys), not part of this Society's collection, is in "The Letters of Samuel Pepys, 1656-1703" (Boydell Press, 2006) and may be viewed at the usual Hours at https://books.google.fr/books?id=…
About Friday 14 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
Finally, we wish to briefly bookmark today's entry as a very rare instance of a clear historical record of a wink (one of only two in the whole Corpus Pepsycus). Non-verbal communication rarely fossilizes, and the learned Mr. Google, queried on the "history of winking", could tell us little more than the antiquity of the word, suggesting the act was, in Northern Europe, one of reverence to Odin the one-eyed god and, in the Biblical Levant (as per https://www.bible-history.com/isb…), evil except when made by God.
About Friday 14 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
Speaking of intelligence and the French, ours is that Monsieur le Capitaine de la Roche has surfaced at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, still tracking down his ships scattered by the storms and the Ostenders (the Gazette will report on it next week in its No. 236, but our sources run faster). Here's a man worth paying some spies to watch.
About Friday 14 February 1667/68
Stephane Chenard • Link
Secretary Morrice's sally on his intel budget in fact seems part of a tussle that might have been going on for at least a month, as he and Arlington were instructed sometime in January to "reduce the expense of intelligence to 4,000L a year" (State Papers No. 147, https://play.google.com/books/rea…). We expect that number to stick. Whether Sir Stephen's £6,000 should be added or pays for "secret services" other than riffling the letters of foreign princes, who knows; as paymaster of the forces he could pay for all manners of skull-crushing, or pyrate tracking, or even to hush up some great lady's gambling debt.
Knicknacks for foreign ambassadors are surely not always just for good memories either, wink wink. In that department, the Spanish ambassador who got ear pendants could sigh at the (unfortunately not easily searchable) Gazette de France, which last year reported that more than one of his colleagues walked out of Versailles with their entire portrait made out of diamonds and rubies.