The Diary of Samuel Pepys

As the year opens, Pepys is again concerned about his frequent playgoing and vows to go to plays less often.

On January 4, Pepys watches the king play tennis at the Tennis Court and is dismayed at the empty flattery with which the courtiers treat him as a player. This scene is typical of Pepys’s tendency in the Diary to reduce important figures to life size.

On January 19 Pepys reports experiencing eye trouble, which he attributes to “sitting up late writing and reading by candlelight” (199). Pepys’s eyesight will worsen in the coming years and will eventually force him to stop keeping the diary.

On February 3, Pepys goes to a coffeehouse near Covent Garden at which the poet John Dryden, who would become England’s first Poet Laureate in just five years’ time, and other “wits of the town” (201) gather. This episode illustrates the fact that Pepys moved in high circles of London society and that his lifetime coincided with a major period of English literature and culture.

Pepys’s entry for February 17 seems to record his activities in real time. He writes of how he is working late at his office until four in the morning; he then goes home “weary, sleepy, cold, and my head akeing” (202). This passage shows Pepys’s dedication to applying himself seriously to his work, a major concern throughout the Diary.

On March 4 Pepys meets and converses with Lord Montagu and is hopeful that, regarding his lord’s bad behavior, “the worst is past and all will be well” (202). Pepys also meets the Duke of York to discuss naval matters, and Pepys remarks that before then he had been afraid to meet the duke. These encounters show Pepys gradually rising in importance and influence in English public affairs—a rise that will culminate in his triumphant speech to Parliament in the Ninth Year.

On March 15, Pepys’s brother Tom dies after a brief illness. Tom’s death fills Pepys into a “very great transport of grief and cries” (204), a rare show of intense grief from the diarist. Yet after Tom’s funeral, Pepys is disturbed to discover that his feelings of sadness were short-lived (204). He muses that we too often “[make] nothing of the memory of a man an houre after he is dead” (204). In the following days Pepys discovers to his dismay that Tom’s finances were in disarray; he owed more money than he had.

The major event of the Fifth Year is the commencement of war between England and Holland (the Netherlands). This was the second of the four Anglo-Dutch Wars that occurred during the 17th and 18th centuries. England and Holland were both major naval powers, and their claims in colonizing and trade frequently conflicted, leading to rivalry. With his ascension as king, Charles II sought to have England replace Holland as the major trading power. In 1664 the English Navy conquered the Dutch holdings of Curaçao, New Amsterdam (now New York), and the West African strongholds from where the Dutch West India Company operated the slave trade. When the Dutch retaliated for these actions, the Second Anglo-Dutch War was on and would last until 1667 (the Eighth Year in Pepys’s Diary). On May 31, Montagu decides to go to sea with the Duke of York’s fleet to fight in the conflict, partly to salvage his reputation.

On June 27 the Pepyses acquire a new cook-maid, Jane, and on September 8 a new maidservant for Elizabeth, Mary Mercer.  

Also on the domestic front, Pepys and his wife have several disagreements, in some cases leading to light physical violence from Pepys. On April 5 Pepys pulls his wife’s nose, hurting her, after she had given a particular answer to a question of his. On December 19, Pepys strikes Elizabeth, giving her a black eye, because she had given him a “cross answer” after he reproved her for not keeping better control of her servants.

Again, on July 4, the Pepyses quarrel over Elizabeth’s having spent money on a new pair of earrings. Pepys orders her to exchange them and get the money back, and Elizabeth relents. However, Pepys, satisfied at her reaction, lets her keep the earrings; this action suggests that Pepys wants control over his wife above all.

On another occasion, Pepys is angered by his wife’s buying necklaces and jewelry because she is forgetting “the way of living cheap and under sense of want” (226).  

Typically, however, these quarrels are short-lived, and the couple is soon reconciled. On New Year’s Eve, Pepys kisses Elizabeth as the clock strikes one, thus ringing in the new year and showing that their love endures despite their quarrels and Pepys’s increasing infidelities—as illustrated in his encounters with Mrs. Jane Bagwell on December 19 and 20.

Toward the end of the year, a major astronomical event takes place in the form of the Great Comet of 1664, which Pepys succeeds in glimpsing on Christmas Eve. Isaac Newton’s (then 22 years old) observation of this comet would be a turning point in his early scientific career. Pepys’s attention to the comet illustrates his keen amateur interest in science. In addition, the appearance of the comet fueled apocalyptic theories and beliefs—part of the “fanatique” tendencies to which Pepys alludes throughout the Diary.