Caps and stockings

Today was a rather dull day, which saw me up with the lark and working on the motet flat out for something like 9 hours. My eyes ache and my fingers hurt from using the mouse on my computer. I would have gone to the gym, just for a break in the monotony, but haven’t been feeling very well today.


I started on Movement Two this morning, which begins with the Coronation of Charles II in 1661, an event which Pepys was lucky enough to have witnessed in the flesh. Perhaps calling the man lucky is to do him an injustice. One gets the impression that Pepys very deliberately placed a foot in every door to make sure he could be present at such events, one assumes so that he could document them with accuracy; both in his diary and more officially (and much more floridly) in copious letters to Montagu, various friends, associates and family members.

The 10th March 1660 was a Saturday and Pepys visited his father, who was busy at work. He was a tailor. He spoke about his plans to go to Sea with Montagu and they discussed where best to send his wife during the period. It seems she would have been quite incapable of looking after herself.  I guess she was only 19 at the time. But what seems almost unbelievable is that it was only after talking to his father that Pepys went home to tell his wife of his plans to go away. She was, perhaps unsurprisingly, somewhat troubled at the news, and there was an argument.

He must have been forgiven eventually, however, for when he returned in the evening, he found her lovingly making him a hat to keep him warm on his voyage and his maid, Jane, knitting him a pair of stockings. Bless.