Private journals
The religious impulse to diary-keeping can occasionally allow us to glimpse the world of the relatively humble. The diary of Roger Lowe, for example, who refused to conform to the re-established church, allows us to picture a later seventeenth century mercer's apprentice living in a Lancashire village. We learn how prized his literacy was to his local community and how he acquired social importance through the sometimes quite unusual writing services he offered to his neighbours. For example, in October 1663 his friend John Hasleden told him 'that he loved a wench in Ireland, and so the day after I writ a love-letter for him into Ireland'. Yet Lowe is rather the exception. Generally, surviving diaries are the records of men and women of higher status. Their journals thus often mingle a world of public events with private ones. Acting as key mediators of local authority or privileged to receive and disperse information, they were aware of the seismic nature of the events through which they were living.
Samuel Pepys, the most famous diarist of the period, seems to have begun his diary because he was aware of the crisis affecting the nation at the start of 1660. An awareness of the importance of national events also seems to have triggered the activities of Roger Morrice, who began to keep an 'entring book' in 1678 after the revelation of a Popish Plot to assassinate Charles II and re-establish catholicism. Morrice, in one of the great unpublished journals of the later seventeenth century, continued to keep his register of public events until 'popery' was finally shaken off in the Revolution of 1688.
Let us look at that revolution from the perspective of very different eye-witness accounts, recorded in the diaries of two adherents of the church of England, John Evelyn and Sir John Reresby, and two dissenters, Ralph Thoresby and Roger Morrice.
'Samuel Pepys, the most famous diarist of the period, seems to have begun his diary because he was aware of the crisis affecting the nation at the start of 1660'
In the summer of 1688 Pepy's friend John Evelyn was close to seven protestant bishops who were put on trial by the catholic James II and who, when acquitted, became heroes for resisting popery. In October Evelyn noted the 'strange temper' that the nation had been reduced to, and wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, after his release from the Tower, urging him to co-ordinate his opposition with that offered by the earl of Clarendon and other lay devotees of the established church. Neither Archbishop Sancroft nor Clarendon were revolutionaries; nor was Evelyn. When he heard of William of Orange's landing, Evelyn thought it 'the beginning of sorrows' unless a free parliament could reconcile the king and the prince, and he seems to have been as surprised as any that the outcome was the crowning of William and Mary as joint monarchs. So when, on 22 February 1689, he attended their coronation, he had expected they would have shown at least 'some (seeming) reluctancy', but, he noted sourly, 'nothing of all this appeared'. Evelyn acquiesced in the result of revolution, but it would seem he had not predicted its outcome.
Published: 2001-04-01
Bookmark with:
What are these?