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

45

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007