Samuel Pepys diaries. There is nothing quite like his account of Restoration England. London observed, London at work and London at play…
Pepys could listen avidly enough to accounts of the dissipated life at court. – of the amorous alarms and excursions, the untimely pregnancies, the timely abortions, the horrifying inroads of the pox. At the same time, he was dismayed that his natural superiors could not comport themselves better in the face of god and the public. As for Charles II’s own demeanor and conversation, these were the reverse of edifying. Pepys retails without comment a dialogue full of double entendres between the King and a pretty young Quaker girl who had brought him a petition:
This morning I stood by the King arguing with a pretty Quaker woman, that delivered to him a desire of hers in writing. The King showed her Sir J. Minnes, as a man the fittest for her quaking religion, saying that his beard was the stiffest thing about him, and again merrily said, looking upon the length of her paper, that if all she desired was of that length she might lose her desires; she modestly saying nothing till he begun seriously to discourse with her, arguing the truth of his spirit against hers;…( Jan,1664)
Where he could, Pepys blamed the young courtiers, “a company of sad, idle people,” who always rubbed his Puritanism the wrong way. But there were times when the King could not be excused- like that awful occasion when Sir William Petty, whom Pepys greatly admired, waited on Charles with a new design for a ship’s hull evolved by himself and other memebers of the Royal Society. His royal patron just laughed:
Thence to White Hall; where, in the Duke’s chamber, the King came and stayed an hour or two laughing at Sir W. Petty, who was there about his boat; and at Gresham College in general; at which poor Petty was, I perceive, at some loss; but did argue discreetly, and bear the unreasonable follies of the King’s objections and other bystanders with great discretion; and offered to take oddes against the King’s best boates; but the King would not lay, but cried him down with words only. Gresham College he mightily laughed at, for spending time only in weighing of ayre, and doing nothing else since they sat.(1664)
Unfortunately, this levity and indifference extended to affairs of state, and Pepys was increasingly worried at the slovenly way in which the navy was managed, especially since a new war with Holland was imminent. His colleagues on the Navy Board were a constant trial; and when he complained to William Coventry, the latter agreed, comparing Sir John Minnes, the controller, to a lapwing, “that all he did was to keep a flutter, to keepe others from the nest that they would find.” But an office was still a freehold, and unless a man was suspected of treason, it would be as difficult to remove him from his job as it would be to deprive him of his house or estate. Coventry told him that “all the King’s matters are done after the same rate…and even the Duke’s household matters,too,generally with corruption, but most indeed with neglect and indifferency.”