Elizabeth Pepys

— Those who followed Mrs. Whiting’s account of Mrs. Secretary Pepys, in the December Atlantic, may like to hear something of her parentage and girlhood ; derived, not from the Diary, but from the Life, Journals, and Correspondence (London, 1841), — a work long out of print. When Pepys was elected, in 1673, M. P. for Castle-Rising, his competitor alleged that he was disqualified, being a Papist and having made his wife one. The Earl of Shaftesbury (Dryden’s Achitophel) even asserted that he had seen an altar and crucifix in Pepys’ house. Pepys wrote to his brother-in-law, Baltazar St. Michel, asking him to clear him from the imputation. The reply, given in full in the above-mentioned volume, has been omitted, or very inaccurately summarized, by editors of the Diary.

Elizabeth’s paternal grandfather, Marchant de St. Michel, was high sheriff, not of Anjou, which would have been an important provincial governorship, but of Baugé, a town thirty miles northeast of Angers. The high sheriff’s only son went to Germany to take part in the Thirty Years’ War, and there, when just of age, turned Protestant. On his father’s death he returned home, but found himself disinherited on account of his religion, everything being left to his sister. A rich uncle, a canon in Paris, offered him £20,000 if he would go to mass again, but the young man was proof against the temptation. Being “extreme handsome” — his daughter evidently took after him — “ and of mighty courtly parts,” he was appointed gentleman carver to Henrietta Maria on her marriage to Charles I., and accompanied her to England in 1625. A friar, however, noticed that he did not attend mass, like the rest of the household, and St. Michel — the plebeian name Marchant, answering to our name Chapman, had been, or was, gradually dropped ¹ — met his reproaches with a blow. The queen dismissed him, and soon afterwards he married the daughter of Sir Francis Kingsmill, the widow of an Irish squire ; and with £1300 of her dowry sailed for France to sue his sister for his patrimony. Captured by a Dunkirk corsair, and detained for some months, he returned to England, and settled on his wife’s small remaining income at Bideford, Devonshire, at or near which Elizabeth and Baltazar were born. After a time, St. Michel, at the head of a company of volunteers, went to assist the French against the Spaniards, and helped to capture Dunkirk, which must have been in 1646, albeit Baltazar makes the date 1648-49, and speaks also of the capture of Arras, which had taken place in 1640. When peace was concluded, St. Michel rejoined his family in Paris, but was “ full of whimsies and propositions of perpetual motion, etc., which soaked his pocket.” His wife had made some wealthy friends, who embittered her against him, promising, if she would desert him and change her religion, to provide liberally for her and her children. Elizabeth was to be a nun, and Baltazar page to the papal nuncio. Accordingly, in the husband’s absence, two coaches arrived ; one carrying off wife and daughter to the Nouvelles Catholiques, an institution for converts, and the other taking the son to a similar establishment for males. (This, we shall see, was not the only time the flighty English wife took French leave of her French husband.) Elizabeth, then twelve or thirteen, was ultimately “ deluded into the nunnery of the Ursulines,” but had not been there long before the distracted father, “by some stratagem,” says Baltazar, but perhaps by the information of Cromwell’s ambassador, Lockhart, always zealous for distressed Protestants, “got her out and us all.”

The whole family returned to England, settling in London, and at fifteen Elizabeth Marchant de St. Michel, as she was styled, married Pepys. The father was delighted with the match, and Baltazar remembered his remarking to Elizabeth that “among the greatest of the happinesses he enjoyed in his mind was that she had, by matching with you [Pepys], not only wedded wisdom, but also one who by it, he hoped in Christ, would quite blow out those foolish thoughts she might in her more tender years have had of Popery.” Elizabeth’s reply was that riper understanding and a Protestant husband had removed all fear of her tending that way any more. We may conclude that, though she sometimes pretended to be a Catholic, it was simply to tease her husband.

Whatever may have been the case in the first four years of his wedded life, Pepys, judging by the Diary, afterwards saw very little of his wife’s father. With scant ceremony he unsaints him, styling him “old Mr. Michell,” and his indexers follow suit ; so that we have to look under “Michell,” at the risk of confusion with “ little Michell,” or “ young Michell,” a pastry cook who had married Sarah, ex-housekeeper to Lord Sandwich, Pepys’ kinsman and patron. The dashing officer and enthusiastic inventor had apparently become prematurely old, and had lost all spirit. He had only £20 a year, half this pittance being an allowance from the French Church in London ; and he was glad to rule paper for the admiralty, to make a little money. His wife, during her son’s absence in Holland (he apparently returned with a wife), “ pawned all the things that he [Baltazar] had got in his service under Oliver [Cromwell], and ran of her own accord, without her husband’s leave, into Flanders.” Pepys, out of pity for the old man, was more like a father than a brother-in-law to Baltazar, for whom he obtained first an appointment on the Duke of Albemarle’s Guards, then the post of muster master of the fleet, and lastly the deputy treasurership of the navy, with £1500 for contingencies, “the whole profit to be paid to my wife, to be disposed of as she sees fit for father and mother’s relief.” With a dutiful son and a kind son-in-law, “ old Mr. Michell ” must have ended his life in comfort. We hear of his fetching Mr. and Mrs. Pepys to Baltazar’s wedding anniversary. “ A mighty pretty dinner we had in this little house,” says the epicure diarist, who, however, was evidently fond of Baltazar, and thought his wife Betty “ a pretty young thing, and amiable.” It is amusing to read, under date April 25, 1666, “ I come, to have my hair cut by my sister Michell and her husband, and so to bed.” Yet Pepys obviously cared little for the old people, for in ten years he records only three or four interviews with them. St. Michel died about 1672, three years after his daughter ; but his widow, though then “continually ill, and not likely long to survive him,” was still living in 1674. The estrangement which arose, after the Diary had ceased, between Pepys and “ Balty ” prevents our hearing more of the St. Michel family, but Balty with his daughter attended Pepys’ funeral.

May I add that the Diary was written, not in a cipher of Pepys’ invention, but in Jeremiah Rich’s shorthand, published in 1654, and already popular ? Two friends of mine, though usually writing two modern and briefer systems, corresponded with each other in Rich’s, which they had mastered out of interest in Pepys.