Saturday 6 June 1663

Lay in bed till 7 o’clock, yet rose with an opinion that it was not 5, and so continued though I heard the clock strike, till noon, and would not believe that it was so late as it truly was. I was hardly ever so mistaken in my life before.

Up and to Sir G. Carteret at his house, and spoke to him about business, but he being in a bad humour I had no mind to stay with him, but walked, drinking my morning draft of whay, by the way, to York House, where the Russia Embassador do lie; and there I saw his people go up and down louseing themselves: they are all in a great hurry, being to be gone the beginning of next week. But that that pleased me best, was the remains of the noble soul of the late Duke of Buckingham appearing in his house, in every place, in the doorcases and the windows.

By and by comes Sir John Hebden, the Russia Resident, to me, and he and I in his coach to White Hall, to Secretary Morrice’s, to see the orders about the Russia hemp that is to be fetched from Archangel for our King, and that being done, to coach again, and he brought me into the City and so I home; and after dinner abroad by water, and met by appointment Mr. Deane in the Temple Church, and he and I over to Mr. Blackbury’s yard, and thence to other places, and after that to a drinking house, in all which places I did so practise and improve my measuring of timber, that I can now do it with great ease and perfection, which do please me mightily.

This fellow Deane is a conceited fellow, and one that means the King a great deal of service, more of disservice to other people that go away with the profits which he cannot make; but, however, I learn much of him, and he is, I perceive, of great use to the King in his place, and so I shall give him all the encouragement I can.

Home by water, and having wrote a letter for my wife to my Lady Sandwich to copy out to send this night’s post, I to the office, and wrote there myself several things, and so home to supper and bed. My mind being troubled to think into what a temper of neglect I have myself flung my wife into by my letting her learn to dance, that it will require time to cure her of, and I fear her going into the country will but make her worse; but only I do hope in the meantime to spend my time well in my office, with more leisure than while she is here.

Hebden, to-day in the coach, did tell me how he is vexed to see things at Court ordered as they are by nobody that attends to business, but every man himself or his pleasures. He cries up my Lord Ashley to be almost the only man that he sees to look after business; and with that ease and mastery, that he wonders at him. He cries out against the King’s dealing so much with goldsmiths, and suffering himself to have his purse kept and commanded by them.

He tells me also with what exact care and order the States of Holland’s stores are kept in their Yards, and every thing managed there by their builders with such husbandry as is not imaginable; which I will endeavour to understand further, if I can by any means learn.


36 Annotations

First Reading

TerryF  •  Link

louseing ~ delousing

"Louse Hunting" by Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)

Nudes--stark and glistening,
Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces
And raging limbs
Whirl over the floor one fire.
For a shirt verminously busy
Yon soldier tore from his throat, with oaths
Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice.
And soon the shirt was aflare
Over the candle he'd lit while we lay.

Then we all sprang up and stript
To hunt the verminous brood.
Soon like a demons' pantomime
The place was raging.
See the silhouettes agape,
See the gibbering shadows
Mixed with the battled arms on the wall.
See gargantuan hooked fingers
Pluck in supreme flesh
To smutch supreme littleness.
See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling
Because some wizard vermin
Charmed from the quiet this revel
When our ears were half lulled
By the dark music
Blown from Sleep's trumpet.

http://www.english.emory.edu/Lost…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaa…

TerryF  •  Link

Diagram of a louse.
Source: Hooke, Robert (1635-1703). Micrographia: or some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses : with observations and inquiries thereupon. (MDCLXVII [1667]) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imag…

"To a Louse" Robert Burns (1759–1796).

HA! whaur ye gaun, ye crowlin ferlie?
Your impudence protects you sairly;
I canna say but ye strunt rarely,
Owre gauze and lace;
Tho’, faith! I fear ye dine but sparely
On sic a place.

Ye ugly, creepin, blastit wonner,
Detested, shunn’d by saunt an’ sinner,
How daur ye set your fit upon her—
Sae fine a lady?
Gae somewhere else and seek your dinner
On some poor body.

[...]

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
An’ ev’n devotion!

http://www.bartleby.com/6/99.html

dirk  •  Link

"with what exact care and order the States of Holland’s stores are kept"

Dutch neatness... The Dutch have been known for this ever since the beginning of their Golden Age (17th c.). Often much to the surprise of other nations. There are contemporary stories for instance of Dutch people living abroad being stared at for cleaning their window panes -- something nobody did anywhere else in Europe (you just waited for the rain to take care of that -- cleaning them manually was supposed to wear them down)...

dirk  •  Link

Archangelsk

"The northern land was rich in fur game, shipmast timber, hemp, resin, tar and other goods luring merchants from overseas."

http://www.arh.ru/~seaport/eng/hi…

The above refers to the late 16th c -- the days of the Russian Tsar Ivan the Terrible -- but the situation would have been the same still in Sam's time.

Even today hemp is still one of the major crops of the area.

JWB  •  Link

"...pleased...remains of the noble soul...appearing..."

Russian hemp?

Glyn  •  Link

When he talks about the remains of the noble soul of the late Duke of Buckingham appearing in his house, in every place, I assume he means that the personality of the original owner is still evident by the architecture and fixtures and furnishings of the house.

Pepys doesn't know, but we do, that this is the place where he is going to move to when he is rich and powerful. They'll build some elegant houses in the grounds of York House after it is demolished.

And when Peter the Great comes to stay in London in the Russian embassy, Pepys will be living just across the street. Peter the Great will later move to the country to stay in Pepys' friend's (John Evelyn's) country house - so surely Pepys must have met Peter the Great even if he never spoke to him (and perhaps he did, since the Russian Tsar was so interested in the English navy).

dirk  •  Link

"The King of England has given to his sister, the Duchess of Orleans, a little bark of novel construction, to use upon the Seine, between Paris and Saint-Cloud. 'It goes', adds the writer, 'quicker than a post-horse';"

From a letter from Paris to the Duke of Ormond, dated 16 June 1663 new style = 6 June according to the British calendar.

Source:
The Carte papers, Bodleian Library
http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/s…

Robert Gertz  •  Link

James I's Buckingham was thought of so highly? I guess dying as a Protestant martyr helps...

I remember while taking Tudor-Stuart History in college reading some of the "Dear Dad and Gossip" letters between James and "his boys" Charles I and George while they were abroad trying to land a bride for Charles... Rather touchingly innocent in their way, considering James I is the monarch who happily allowed his ever-scheming mother to be imprisoned and executed by Elizabeth I in order to gain the English succession.

"As Christ had his James, so I must have my George..." James I.

Interesting to think that Charles II is the reasonably balanced and charming member of the family.

A. Hamilton  •  Link

between Paris and Saint-Cloud

Ah the off-topic memories. I lived opposite St. Cloud in Boulogne-sur Seine, just up the road from Longchamps race course and in front of a boat yard where I kept a bark of quite ordinary design brought down river from south of Paris, through the city and past the vast Usines Renault on a memorable trip.

Robert Gertz  •  Link

Moscow...

The returned ambassidor is waved to rise from the customary grovelingly prostrate position before his Tsar...

"And how do you find England, my friend?"

"Eh...Interesting. But such a filthy place, sire. We had to spend a whole day delousing before our departure..."

"Well. I shall send you to Japan next. If they don't kill you on arrival, the cleaniness is unbelievable."

***

Bradford  •  Link

"to York House, where the Russia Embassador do lie; and there I saw his people go up and down louseing themselves: they are all in a great hurry, being to be gone the beginning of next week."

But can this really mean that a bystander could enter York House and watch foreign courtiers picking lice off each other? No wonder they're in a hurry to be gone: lie down with dogs, &c. The past is indeed a foreign country, if so.

Robert Gertz  •  Link

Speaking of "a temper of neglect" noon-rising boy...

in aqua scripo  •  Link

Bradford: for the phrase, Sam again enters the OED.
Lousy be a nice english word that has wrecked havoc since Chaucer,
here be a nice turn of Phrase:
a1640 MASSINGER Very Woman III. ii. (1655) Dost thou think any State Would..trust thee with a secret above lousing?

for color
1. a. trans. To clear of lice, remove lice from (a person, oneself, a garment).
c1440 Promp. Parv. 316/2 Lowsyn, pediculo. 1514 BARCLAY Cyt. & Uplondyshm. (Percy Soc.) 11 Efte was she busy, them lowsynge and kemynge. 1596 SPENSER State Irel. Wks. (Globe) 631/2 Howe handsome it is to lye and sleepe, or to lowze themselves in the sunn-shine. 1596 LODGE Wits Miserie (1879) 112 Goe wretche as thou art and louse thyselfe

then . a. Full of lice, infested by lice.
1652 CULPEPPER Eng. Physic. (1809) 134 Some authors say, the eating of them [figs] makes people lousy

in aqua scripo  •  Link

Delousing a modern word post WW1:
trans. To clear of lice. So de lousing vbl. n. and ppl. a.
1919 Library Assoc. Rec. Sept. 6 The inhabitants of each barrack went in turn to the delousing station on the other side of the island, where the delousing process took three days.
1921 Glasgow Herald 9 July 7 The fact that there were no adequate means of delousing these men.

Australian Susan  •  Link

James I and Mary, Queen of Scots

Yes, James's behaviour seems unfilial, but James hardly ever saw his mother (who was largely debarred from seeing her son, kept safely in Stirling Castle) even before she fled to England (when he was 13mths old) and would have been brought up to vilify her, so could hardly have been expected to have any tender feelings towards her. And he would have known that whatever relationship he and Elizabeth had, she had hardly any options to ensure a smooth succession in 1603. Elizabeth blocked all communication between Mary and her son.

in aqua scripto  •  Link

"...Lay in bed till 7 o’clock, yet rose with an opinion that it was not 5, and so continued though I heard the clock strike, till noon, and would not believe that it was so late as it truly was. I was hardly ever so mistaken in my life before..."
The rooster failed to warn Samuell that the clock will strike.
Now we know one of the ways that he tells hour of the clock it be, before he takes a peek at the sundial on the lawn.

TerryF  •  Link

"Hebden, to-day in the coach, did tell me how he is vexed to see things at Court ordered as they are by nobody that attends to business, but every man himself or his pleasures....He cries out against the King's dealing so much with goldsmiths, and suffering himself to have his purse kept and commanded by them."

The King is in hock because Pariament cannot raise the sums it has allowed him; and he and almost all around him waste and want, but not for sex, drugs, plays and rock & roll.

Wim van der Meij  •  Link

Further to Dirk's remark above: Hebden could know about the Dutch care and order: he had been resident with the States General in 1660.
Also: Tsar Peter also stayed in Holland to learn things about ships and sailing: there is still a "Tsar Peter House" at Zaandam, where he was said to have lived. Quite a few Dutch nautical phrases found their way into Russian.

A. Hamilton  •  Link

The OED entry on "lousing" that cites Pepys. ( Public "lousing" by Russians especially noted.)

OED: 1. a. trans. To clear of lice, remove lice from (a person, oneself, a garment).

c1440 Promp. Parv. 316/2 Lowsyn, pediculo. 1514 Barclay Cyt. & Uplondyshm. (Percy Soc.) 11 Efte was she busy, them lowsynge and kemynge. 1596 Spenser State Irel. Wks. (Globe) 631/2 Howe handsome it is to lye and sleepe, or to lowze themselves in the sunn-shine. 1596 Lodge Wits Miserie (1879) 112 Goe wretche as thou art and louse thyselfe. 1663 Pepys Diary 6 June, To York House, where the Russia Embassador do lie: and there I saw his people go up and down louseing themselves. 1795 S. Hearne Journ. to N. Ocean 325 He frequently set five or six of his strapping wives to work to louse their hairy deer-skin shifts. 1822 E. D. Clarke Trav. Russia (1839) 52/1 [They] were lousing each other; and it surprised us that they did not discontinue their work+as we entered. 1824 Edin. Rev. XL. 482 Prince Potemkin+used to louse himself at dinner. 1596 Nashe Saffron Walden 15, I haue here tooke the paines to nit and louze ouer the Doctours booke.

JWB  •  Link

Glyn, "remains of the noble soul"

I took this to mean the appearance of Buckingham's ghost. After all Sam had just seen Hamlet and with the talk of the corruption @court, all the Stuart libels, as that whole literature is called, must have been in the minds of many. Waiting for the ghost of Felton, or his reincarnation?

Todd Bernhardt  •  Link

"drinking my morning draft of whay, by the way"

Okay, I know people have speculated on this before, and I've usually agreed with those who've said that such puns were the result of serendipity rather than linguistic playfulness, but this time I can almost see a smile chasing across Sam's lips as he writes this line.

A. De Araujo  •  Link

"up and down louseing themselves"
Would that be body lice or head lice or both? It somehow reminds me of a gorilla colony,socializing.

language hat  •  Link

Peter the Great in London

He won't visit till 1698, when William is king, but since we're discussing it (and the habits of Russians), allow me to quote from Robert Massie's lively biography of Peter:

For greater convenience, and to escape the crowds that were now beginning to dog his excursions, he moved his lodgings to Deptford, staying at Sayes Court, a large, elegantly furnished house provided for him by the English government. The house belonged to John Evelyn, the celebrated essayist and diarist, and it was Evelyn's pride; he had spent forty-five years laying out its gardens, its bowling green, its gravel paths and groves of trees. To make room for Peter and his comrades, another tenant, Admiral Benbow, had been moved out, and the house had been especially redecorated. For Peter, its attractions were its size (it was large enough to hold his entire suite), the garden in which he could relax in privacy, and the door at the foot of the garden which opened directly onto the dockyard and the river.

Unfortunately for Evelyn, the Russians cared little for his reputation or for his lifelong effort to create beauty. They vandalized his house. Even while they were still there, Evelyn's horrified steward wrote to his master:

"There is a house full of people and right nasty. The Tsar lies next to the library and dines in the parlour next your study. He dines at ten o'clock and six at night, is very seldom at home a whole day, very often in the King's yard [the shipyard], or by water, dressed in several dresses. The King is expected here this day; the best parlour is pretty clean for him to be entertained in. The King pays for all he [the Tsar] has."

But it was not until the Russians had left at the end of their three-month stay and Evelyn came to see his once-beautiful home that the full extent of the damage became apparent. Appalled, Evelyn hurried off to the Royal Surveyor, Sir Christopher Wren, and the Royal Gardener, Mr. London, to ask them to estimate the cost of the repairs. They found floors and carpets so stained and smeared with ink and grease that new floors had to be installed. Tiles had been pulled from the Dutch stoves and brass door locks pried open. The paintwork was battered and filthy. Windows were broken, and more than fifty chairs - every one in the house - had simply disappeared, probably into the stoves. Featherbeds, sheets and canopies were ripped and torn as if by wild animals. Twenty pictures and portraits were torn, probably used for target practice. Outside, the garden was ruined. The lawn was trampled into mud and dust; "as if a regiment of soldiers in iron shoes had drilled on it." The magnificent holly hedge, 400 feet long, 9 feet high and 5 feet thick, had been flattened by wheelbarrows rammed through it. The bowling green, the gravel paths, the bushes and trees, all were ravaged. Neighbors reported that the Russians had found three wheelbarrows, unknown in Russia, and had developed a game with one man, sometimes the Tsar, inside the wheelbarrow and another racing him into the hedges. Wren and his companions noted all this and made a recommendation which resulted in a recompense to Evelyn of 350 pounds and ninepence, an enormous sum for that day.

Stolzi  •  Link

Whay/way a pun?

Maybe or maybe not. I was brought up speaking a somewhat older dialect(SE USA) perhaps akin to 17th century English, and I did and do pronounced "wh" differently; in words like Whey or Where, for me, it's actually more like "hw."

I was amused by "in the way," though, picturing Pepys hurrying along with a big take-out paper cup in his hand :)

A. Hamilton  •  Link

Thanks,language hat. What a description!

in aqua scripo  •  Link

All of yee that be conceited , think again, in had a positve connotation in Pepys era. derived from? to conceive, in this instance, bright/smart."...This fellow Deane is a conceited fellow, and one that means the King a great deal of service, more of disservice to other people that go away with the profits which he cannot make; but, however, I learn much of him, and he is, I perceive, of great use to the King in his place, and so I shall give him all the encouragement I can...."
OED
For bad conceit, 'self' would be added, now we be lazy , any one that has high esteem, be [self] conceited.
Long entry on the subtle meanings

TerryF  •  Link

language hat, I echo A. Hamilton:
what your sources report also makes the rather public louseing-scene in York House all the more plausible.

in aqua scripo  •  Link

From L&M Conceit: Idea, notion.

Bradford  •  Link

Good Lord.

Second Reading

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

"James I's Buckingham was thought of so highly? I guess dying as a Protestant martyr helps..."

I wish someone had asked Robert Gertz what he meant by this. The first Duke of Buckingham was hated, especially for dragging so many men to their deaths at the Isle of Re in an unprovisioned fleet, and Felton murdered him for planning to do it all over again.

The Protestant martyr was Charles I.

I'm sure Robert knows this, so perhaps he has an angle that hasn't occurred to me yet.

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

"But that that pleased me best, was the remains of the noble soul of the late Duke of Buckingham appearing in his house, in every place, in the doorcases and the windows."

I bet that's supposed to read 'But that what pleased ..."

George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham rebuilt and moved to York House in 1624. Although the 2nd Duke sold most of the artwork long before Pepys' visit, the bones of the house were probably much as the 1st Duke knew them when he lived there.

Interestingly enough, 1624 is the first time the word "splendid" appeared in the English language. I don't think these events are connected, though.

Sasha Clarkson  •  Link

"I bet that's supposed to read 'But that what pleased ..."

Sorry to be contrary Sarah, but actually I doubt it :)
If in doubt, what I do is insert a different word to see how it sounds/looks: eg "but she that pleased me most...", which would read better than "but she what pleased me most..."

David G  •  Link

It seems likely that Sam got out of bed at 7:00 thinking it was still 5:00 and only discovered his mistake at noon rather than that he stayed in bed until noon. If nothing else, he had his "morning draft of whay" on the way to York House, after an unpleasant meeting with Carteret, so unless he had a morning draft in the afternoon, he must have been up and about well before he discovered his mistake about the time.

Sasha Clarkson  •  Link

"It was *that* that annoyed me" would be not uncommon idiom in parts of the UK - especially the north, meaning "it was that *which* annoyed me."

'that' and 'which' are interchangeable in usage sometimes :)

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