Saturday 17 October 1668

Up, and to the office, where all the morning sitting, and at noon home to dinner, and to the office all the afternoon, and then late home, and there with much pleasure getting Mr. Gibbs, that writes well, to write the name upon my new draught of “The Resolution;” and so set it up, and altered the situation of some of my pictures in my closet, to my extraordinary content, and at it with much pleasure till almost 12 at night. Mr. Moore and Seymour were with me this afternoon, who tell me that my Lord Sandwich was received mighty kindly by the King, and is in exceeding great esteem with him, and the rest about him; but I doubt it will be hard for him to please both the King and the Duke of York, which I shall be sorry for. Mr. Moore tells me the sad condition my Lord is in, in his estate and debts; and the way he now lives in, so high, and so many vain servants about him, that he must be ruined, if he do not take up, which, by the grace of God, I will put him upon, when I come to see him.

15 Annotations

First Reading

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"my new draught of “The Resolution”"

Recall 15 July: "Captain Deane come and spent the evening with me, to draw some finishing lines on his fine draught of “The Resolution,” the best ship, by all report, in the world" http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1…

Jesse  •  Link

"if he do not take up"

'To take up. To borrow upon credit or interest.' Courtesy of Dr. Johnson who credits Shakespeare.

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"Mr. Moore and Seymour were with me this afternoon, who tell me that my Lord Sandwich was received mighty kindly by the King"

L&M remind that Mr. Moore had taken care of Sandwich's affairs while he was absent and John Seymour had been with Sandwich in Madrid.

Aaron McDonald  •  Link

Poor Lord Sandwich.

Robert Gertz  •  Link

Charlie has Sandwich on a pretty tight lease now...He can't turn to former disaffected Cromwellians easily having helped to hang so many at Restoration, he's been raised to a peerage that costs enormously to maintain at the "proper style" but lacks enough revenue so he's dependent on royal favor and pocketbook, and now he's been tarred with corruption serious enough to allow Charles to remove him from active naval command, his last power base, while being able to keep him under a severe sense of obligation. Nice job of political neutering.

***

Heaven...

"Rather wish now I'd taken the CoA job and you'd got the title, cousin." Sandwich sighs.

"It did work out rather well for me, my Lord." Sam, contentedly.

***

Don McCahill  •  Link

> Mr. Gibbs, that writes well, to write the name upon my new draught of “The Resolution;”

I other words, Gibbs is a bit of a Calligrapher, and since the Dynamo Lablemaker has yet to be invented ...

Dinah  •  Link

It is such a pleasure to read about Sam puttering about until midnight getting his house and art rearranged to his great satisfaction. Reading it three centuries later, we know exactly how good that feels.

Jenny  •  Link

I agree with you Dinah. I can just picture him holding his paintings to the wall, stepping back a bit, admiring them, moving them. Innocent pleasure.

Second Reading

Terry Foreman  •  Link

"I doubt it will be hard for him to please both the King and the Duke of York"

DOUBT -~ fear, suspect

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

What's a Dynamo Lablemaker?

(only joking ... time moves along so fast these days.)
But for young people reading this 10 years from now, it was a gismo that could be loaded with different colored plastic tape. There was a dial on the top with the alphabet, numbers and useful symbols. The operator turned the dial to the desired letter, squeezed the handle hard, and the imprint showed up on the tape in white. The operator squeezed out labels for the back of 3-ring binders [WHAT???] or important file folders. There was a way to cut the tape, with a secondary cut so the back could be easily peeled off leaving a sticky surface which attached to the binder/folder.

Now for 3-ring binders ... before computers stored documents in the cloud, it was necessary to make hard copies so your work wouldn't disappear when your computer crashed. Or you could make back-ups on discs, which took about 6 hours once a month. But even with backups, it was still easier to find, copy and share hard copies. Very often the documents for large projects would be 3-hole punched in the left margin and filed chronologically in binders with hard covers which would protect the contents.

The 3-hole punch was a gismo which required considerable body strength to operate if you were lazy like me, and wanted to do 15 sheets at a time ... blah blah blah

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

The volume of Domestic State Papers covering correspondence from Oct. 1668 to Dec. 1669 is at
https://play.google.com/books/rea…

THE SCAN SKIPS FROM PAGE 21 TO PAGE 24

@@@
… granting to Dr. Thos. Lamplugh the Deanery of Ripon,
void by promotion of Dr. Wilkins to the Bishopric of Chester.
[Parchment. Latin. S.P. Dom., Car. II. 248, No. 3.]

@@@
Oct. 17 1668.
Grant
to Rob. Swan of 80/. a year, for faithful service to the King in his escape after the battle of Worcester.
[Docquet, Vol. 23, No. 268.]
---
Kew Gardener reminded us of Robert Swan's story
https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…

@@@
Oct. 17 1668.
Abstract by P[epys]
of warrants, letters, and orders issued between 10 Dec. 1667 and 19 Sept. 1668,
with respect to hemp purchased of Sir John Shaw,
which was found not answerable to his contract,
but for which the Board finally determined that they would give 25/. per ton,
instead of 39/. as asked by Sir John Shaw.
[2 pages. S.P. Dom., Car. II. 248, No. 4.]

@@@
Oct. 17 1668.
Ordnance Office
Jonas Moore and Edw. Sherburne to the Navy Commissioners.

The captain of the Bonadventure complains of being delayed because no ordnance clerk was there to take the gunner's stores.
One of our clerks has been at Chatham since Monday, but the masters of
attendance being both away, the guns were not taken out till the 15th.

The clerk was there to receive the gunner's stores, but the master and pilot
declared they would not let them go, for fear the ship should prove too light to
turn up through the wrecks;

we have therefore taken as much care as in us lies, to prevent any growing charge.
We shall endeavour the same in the rest of the ships coming up, only desire that no stop or neglect may be in the master of attendance to take the guns out, which generally the occasion of stop, if any there be.
[S.P. Dom., Car. II. 248, No. 5.]

@@@
Oct. 17 1668.
Bonadventure, Upnor Castle, Chatham
Capt. John Narbrough to the Navy Commissioners.

I have ever given my attendance on board, and John Gorely, the pilot, has not
moved out of the ship until at her moorings, when he thought fit to sail, and I
judged he understood that office better than myself;

if you have been misinformed, I presume the masters of attendance who sent him aboard will justify the pilot.
[S.P. Dom., Car. II. 248, No. 6.]

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

@@@
Oct. 17 1668.
Harwich
Capt. Silas Taylor to the Navy Commissioners.

Particulars of a hulk and her expenses,
also of some lighters and boats, and of repairs required;

was obliged to have his house glazed before the King came,
especially the Duke of Monmouth's lodgings.
Will proceed with good husbandry.

Will want 60 loads of clay for wharfs, and a stack of chimneys.
[S.P. Dom., Car. II. 248, No. 7.]
---
A stack of chimneys, anyone?

Did they have brick chimneys in ship's kitchens to reduce the risk of fire?
---
"was obliged to have his house glazed"

My guess is that the King's advanced guard insisted on good glass in all the windows before nobility could sleep in the house.
I wonder what they had before that; shutters?
Mighty cold by the sea in Suffolk in the winter with that howling north wind.

Stephane Chenard  •  Link

The Dymo Corporation (not Dynamo) is alive and well, and seems truly a Behemoth of Labell-making. Alongside a range of Optickal printers it still churns out "embossing label makers" (the "Rhino M1011" displayed at https://www.dymo.com/label-makers… is quite fearsome), which bring tears of nostalgia and lyrical reviews from aficionados who, indeed, seem old enough to foist them on their kids and vinyl records.

Sam, who back in February (https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/…) had enrolled Bess and Deb. in a whole day of messy label-making for his books, would certainly have jumped at a Dymo Labelmaker. Let us imagine a pre-steampunk model (baroquepunk, then), an ornate instrument in bronze where a thin paper tape is embossed then gets a thin coating of glue. The mechanism is a trifle, making sufficiently fluid glue is surely within the reach of 17C chymists, and embossing was well in hand, at least for textiles (see https://refashioningrenaissance.e…).

Or would Sam-the-puritan have dismissed it as a vain toy, as he recently did calculating machines, and prevailed over Sam-the-technophile and his alarum watches?

Stephane Chenard  •  Link

Ooh, we forgot. Our baroquepunk Dymo of course has either a charcoal or (more expensive) a tiny ink brush to caress the embossed paper as it wends out. Ink and glue sold separately.

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