This new exhibition at the National Maritime Museum opens with a huge painting showing the
execution of King Charles I in 1649. Somewhere in the crowd of onlookers on
that freezing winter day would have been a 15-year-old schoolboy, playing
truant to witness the historic event. Samuel Pepys (below, age 33) lived in turbulent times and later,
in 1660, began recording it all his
famous diaries. Of the execution, he wrote: ”the words that I said the day that
the King was beheaded.... ‘the memory of the wicked shall rot”’.
It’s a dramatic start to an
exhibition that brings Pepys’s era to life with a fascinating series of exhibits
and paintings. We see the death mask of Oliver Cromwell and items relating to
the restoration of the Stuart dynasty under King Charles II. (Pepys was at the coronation, though he
records he had to leave early as he had “so great a list to piss.”) There are
portraits of the many mistresses of Charles II, including a nude Nell Gwynn that would have been kept in a private room
and hidden behind another painting. The curators have also brought together a
selection of the lavish fashions of the day, including a court dress with costly Venetian needle lace collar and this embroidered velvet shoe.Pepys records his disapproval of the debauchery and excess at court: “The King does mind nothing but pleasures and hates the very sight or thought of business.” However he was himself frequently unfaithful to his own wife and recorded his escapades (and occasional remorse) in his diaries in a form of shorthand.
Pepys lived through the devastation of the plague (the exhibition records he chewed tobacco in the belief it would keep infection away) and
the destruction of the Great Fire of London in 1666 when he borrowed a cart to
take away his money and valuables and buried
his parmesan cheese in the garden. His house survived; we don't know the fate of the cheese. But
perhaps his greatest physical challenge
came in 1658 before he started his diaries, when he had a bladder stone the size of a billiard ball removed
without anaesthetic or antiseptic. His survival was probably due to being the
first on the operating table that day, reducing the risk of infection. Seventeenth-century
medical instruments on loan from the Royal College of Physicians – and a
similar stone – illustrate this extremely painful procedure.
During his lifetime Pepys was best known for his important work in
running the naval affairs of England, which brought him wealth and power, and
resulted in the creation of a truly professional navy. He also went to the
colony of Tangier as compensation assessor during the deliberate destruction of
the city’s defences (below) – the English were pulling out and didn’t want any rival
nation to benefit from them.
In later years he became an MP and
president of the Royal Society, though while matters discussed there
interested him, he confessed to not always understanding what he heard. It was the dawn of the scientific revolution and on display are books, documents and instruments relating to the experiments and findings.
The exhibition ends with the events of the Glorious Revolution, which
resulted in the overthrow of Pepys’s great patron, James II. With the accession of
William and Mary in 1689, he stepped down from office and spend his retirement
indulging his many interests.
Missing from the exhibition are the actual diaries, which he wrote from 1660 – 69. When he died these and his library of 3000 books went to Magdalene College Cambridge, where they
languished on a shelf until in 1819, prompted by the success of the publication
of diaries kept by John Evelyn, a
scholar there began decoding and transcribing them into longhand English. Three
years and 54 volumes later he finished, only to discover that a key to the
squiggles was in a textbook on a nearby shelf. As a condition of the bequest, the diaries may not leave the college,
but there are electronic images of them on display, with transcriptions now available at the touch of a finger (above).
http://www.rmg.co.uk/see-do/exhibitions-events/samuel-pepys-plague-fire-revolution-exhibition
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