The great diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) kept his record from the age of 27 in 1660 for almost a decade. He wrote it in a form of shorthand, which allowed him to refer with candour not just to his work and professional life, but to his multiple infidelities, against his long suffering wife, Elizabeth St Michel. Some of these were rendered in a mixture of French and Italian to further encrypt them. She died in October 1669 from a complaint contracted during their visit to the continent, the time his diarising ended. A native of London though living part of this life within the bounds of historic Kent, at the Restoration of King Charles the Second in 1660 he was appointed to the important position of Clerk of the Acts of the Navy Board, which means that his diaries have more than simply personal significance. They also have great historic importance because of the first-hand account they give of the Great Plague, and the 1666 Great Fire of London. His work meant he travelled often, and widely, particularly further into Kent to the dockyards at Chatham, despite the principle location of his work being in central London around Whitehall.
Chatham and its environs along the Thames, because of the nature of his work, naturally figures in his diary several times. On 1st October 1665 he writes of `calling and drinking at Dartford’ and then walking to Chatham, from which, after business, he went to dine in Rochester:
`I did there walk to visit the old castle ruines, which hath been a noble place, and there going up, I did upon the stairs overtake three pretty maids or women and took them up with me, and I did besarlas muchas vezes et tocar leaur mains and necks, to my great pleasure; but Lord, to see what a dreadful thing it is to look down precipices, for it did fright me mightily and hinder me of much pleasure which I would have made to myself in the company of these three if it had not been for that’ (`Pepys’s Diary’, Guild Publishing, London, 1981, ed. Robert Latham, 107-8)
On 30th June 1667, Pepys wrote of another visit to Chatham after an attack by the Dutch:
`Here I was told that in all the late attempt there was but one man that they know killed on shore; and that was a man that had laid upon his belly, upon one of the hills on the other side of the river, to see the action; and a bullet came and took the ground away just under his belly, and ripped up his belly and so was killed… It seems very remarkable to me, and of great honour to the Dutch, that those them that did go on shore to Gillingham though they went in fear of their lives and were some of them killed and notwithstanding their provocation at Scelling, yet killed none of our people nor plundered their houses; but did take some things of easy carriage and left the rest, and not a house burned.’ (176)
In 1669, on 23rd and 24th March, Pepys recorded one of the final visits in his diary era:
`And so out towards Chatham; and dined at Dartford, where we stayed an hour or two, it being a cold day; and so on and got to Chatham just at night with very good discourse by the way; but mostly of matters of religion, wherein Hutchinson his vein lies. After supper we fell to talk of spirits and apparitions, whereupon many pretty perticular stories were told….[24th March] A mighty cold and windy, but clear day, and had the pleasure of seeing the Medway running, winding up and down mightily, and a very fine country; and I went a little way out of the way to have visited Sir Jo Bankes, but he at London…. Thence to Maydstone, which I had a mighty mind to see, having never been there; and walked all up and down the town, and up to the top of the steeple and had a noble view, and then down again and in the town did see an old man beating of flax, and did step in the barn and give him money and saw that piece of husbandry, which I never saw, and it is very pretty. In the street also, I did buy and send to our inne, the Bell, a dish of fresh fish; and so having walked all round the town, and find it very pretty as most towns I ever say, though not very big, and people of good fashion in it, we to our inne to dinner, and had a good dinner’ (260-261)
The next day he went to Upnor castle, close to Rochester, to attend a Court Martial, and then back to close to Woolwich.
It is remarkable, and a little unsettling at the same time, that those that climb the well-worn steps within the great Norman keep at Rochester Castle to this day to get a view over the Medway from the towers there, are following in the footsteps of Pepys as he had one of his many predatory encounters. His visit is not memorialised in any way on the tower, and its links to the mores and habits of another age.