GENERAL

J W M THOMPSON

A RESTORATION ROGUE

THEPLOTAGAINSTPEPYS

★

By James Long and Ben Long (Faber & Faber 322pp £17.99)

THECENTRALCHARACTERin this story is not, in fact, the eminent public servant Samuel Pepys, but one ‘Colonel’ John Scott (as he styled himself), surely one of the most comprehensive and unregenerate of villains from any period of English history. This Scott’s well-attested record included murder, theft, swindling, confidence tricks, bigamy, forgery, and other such matters. His significance here arises from the disreputable part he played in the politics of the Restoration years. He was a prize specimen of the chancers and rogues who flourished in those unstable times when England was repeatedly gripped by antiCatholic hysteria. In 1679, with fear of the ‘Popish Plot’ at its most extreme, Scott was happy to supply forged evidence (for money, of course) that implicated Pepys in the supposed conspiracy. His special function was to establish treasonable links between Pepys and the French by providing manufactured records of clandestine meetings and fake correspondence. To this was added the damaging allegation that Pepys was a secret Catholic. Of course, Pepys was not the real target – that was the Duke of York, Charles II’s brother, who, awkwardly, was a Roman Catholic and also the heir to the throne. Pepys, in his career as Secretary to the Admiralty and a principal creator of the Navy, had worked closely with the Duke. To destroy Pepys would thus gravely weaken the Duke’s already insecure situation, and Scott offered himself as a willing tool to such lordly anti-Stuart plotters as the Earl of Shaftesbury and the Duke of Buckingham. Had the attack upon Pepys succeeded, he would have been executed for treason. As it was, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London and had a desperate struggle to clear his name. The story has been told before, from several different angles, but it is not what most people think of first in connection with Pepys. The great Diary has familiarised us to a unique degree with the details of his early life, but after that (the diary ceased when he was thirty-six) a certain vagueness blurs our picture of Pepys as he rose to wealth and power. The authors of this lively, if at times uneven, account have set out to tell the story of Pepys’s dangerous later years with something of that rich detail which we find in the diary. They have researched diligently in the great mass of papers that Pepys left behind (which are now in the Pepys Library at Cambridge, the Bodleian and elsewhere). They have discovered much

there about both the plots: the suppositious ‘Popish Plot’; and the other plot, to strike at Pepys and through him at his royal patron. They have also unearthed much about Pepys’s chief accuser, John Scott, a fascinating if unsavoury character. Other historians have found that describing Scott adequately presents quite a challenge. Richard Ollard summed him up with some restraint as ‘a figure whose universal shadiness beggars description’. James and Ben Long do nothing to soften that picture. Scott’s usual pose was as the son of a landowner in Kent. In fact his father was a poor miller in that county, who probably went bankrupt and soon afterwards died, whereupon his widow emigrated to New England with her child. It seems that from an early age the boy showed a natural talent for dishonest transactions, helping himself to other people’s possessions (including, by trickery, an estate on Long Island). When things became too hot for him on that side of the Atlantic he decided to try his luck in London and, as the authors of this book indicate, the turbulent, lawless London of the day was a place where a swaggering scoundrel like Scott found plenty of opportunities. The Longs are father and son, not a collaboration often encountered. Their delving in the records has been tireless and fruitful, although the result occasionally gives the reader a sense of research overload, as the carefully accumulated details crowd the text. It is a complicated story, blending the iniquities of the unspeakable Scott and the other plotters with the increasingly desperate efforts of Pepys to defend himself. This defence required all the great administrator’s skills. He had to gather evidence from several parts of Europe, working through various agents, to prove his innocence. It seems to have been touch and go. The first accusation of treason had come to him as an ‘immense surprise’, it is said. What also emerges clearly from this narrative is the terrifying arbitrariness of the judicial processes in which he then found himself entangled, with the shadow of the scaffold drawing ever closer. There were no fastidious concerns about ‘human rights’ to rely upon. Even the recently passed Habeas Corpus law did not apply to prisoners in the Tower. When Pepys was temporarily freed from prison his bail was set at a huge sum, the equivalent in today’s values of many millions. One wonders what would have become of his diary had Pepys fallen victim to the plotters. Instead he lived out his last years tranquilly, cataloguing his fine library (which contained the diary as well as the papers which James and Ben Long have studied). As for Scott, when London eventually became unsafe for him, he sought new opportunities in the Caribbean. Evidently he had retained some of his confidence trickster’s skill to the last. He ended up as Speaker of the Montserrat Assembly. To order this book at £14.39, see LR Bookshop on page 37

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007 GENERAL

JAMESFLEMING

Tall, Dark and Handsome: Four Books about Trees

woodpecker; the hours of work that went into Silbury Hill (18 million); horse-mad Lesbos; the cyanide in apple pips – and the bat Don Bradman used for his record score of 334 against England in the third Test at Leeds in

THOMAS PAKENHAM’s fine new book, In Search of Remarkable Trees: On Safari in Southern Africa (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 192pp £25), is, like his others, essentially a Book of Marvels. He’s chosen some 100 of South Africa’s (and Madagascar’s) most spectacular trees – baobab, kokerboom, sausage tree, pod mahogany, fever tree, and so on – and illustrated each with photographs, sundry arboreal information and safari anecdotes. It’s a beguiling mixture. He’s especially good at wood uses. In a previous book we learned that the outer shell of the baobab is used for castanets. Now we find that it was up a sycamore fig that Zaccheus the publican climbed to see Jesus pass through Jericho; that the same wood was used for mummy cases; that lucky charms are made from the shiny red seeds of the coral tree. He has a good eye and ear. I enjoyed his description of a lion considering him for a meal as having a face ‘like a cross between that of Paul Kruger ... and the famous oval radiator of a Bugatti’. Did that come to him in the presence of the lion, I wonder? The book seems to have been compiled at speed, however. Fewer species of tree and a more reflective text might have been better. Roger Deakin’s Wildwood: A Journey through Trees (Hamish Hamilton 391pp £20) suffers in the opposite direction. The text is as thick as nectar but begs for something more substantial than a few line drawings. However, it is a wonderful book and stands proudly despite the publisher’s stinginess. Because of our soft climate, English culture, whether in prose, verse or art, has long existed in complete intimacy with Nature. Topsell, Evelyn, Gilbert White – well, at least that gets us to the eighteenth century. Let the late Roger Deakin take a place among that famous throng. I have read none of his previous books but on the evidence here he was incapable of being boring or commonplace, no matter whether he was describing the natural history of England or Australia or Poland or the vast walnut forests in the Ferghana Valley. (In respect of the last I was reminded of the work of another East Anglian naturalist, Douglas Carruthers.) In fact my notes are so extensive that I’m spoiled for examples of his breadth of learning. However, all readers will be grateful for knowing about: the etymology of our bizarre names for moths; the toes and tongue of the

The tree that Zaccheus climbed

1930. A good young bat should have no more than four grains in its face. His had ten. It was ancient. It could have splintered from the impact of any one of his shots and offered a catch. So wasn’t England unlucky! If the Pakenham is a Book of Marvels, this is a Book of Wonderment. Wildwoodsparkles in all directions and is none the worse for being worldly, tolerant and oldfashioned. It gave me real pleasure. Would that I could say the same for Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees: What If the Last Wilderness Is Above Our Heads?(Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 291pp £20). ‘Wild’ in this context means unclimbed and ‘tree’ means the Californian redwood, Sequoia sempervirens. The author would have us believe that he’s passionately interested in trees. But the tone is cold. It is as if he was casting round for a subject to follow up his previous book, The Hot Zone, and looking up saw the vague substance of a tree between him and the sun. For the record his book concerns the discovery, measurement and climbing of a succession of giant redwoods in California plus a snooty excursion to the Scots pines of Glen Affric. The only subject on which he threatens to become interesting is that of lichen and its various species. But there is neither force nor cogency in his remarks, which is a pity. To the birds with whom he perforce shares the canopy, I could find only one reference. The truth of the matter is that Zaccheus knew more about the value of tree-climbing than Preston. Finally, is the tree of Zaccheus a sycamore fig or a sycomore fig? Only in D J Mabberley’s The Plant-Book: A Portable Dictionary of the Vascular Plants can the correct answer to this and a million other botanical questions be found. (His answer, supported by the 1993 SOED but not by Pakenham, is that the word ‘sycomore’ has one application and one only: to Ficus sycomorus.) No brief mention can do justice to this book, first published in 1987. An updated edition was published last year. The pith of the book was compiled on the dense-thicket lines of Clapham, Tutin and Warburg – ‘Bletia: Ruiz &

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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