86 • ConfusionAt Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys’ dinner table, the conversation turned to
flight. The questions did not come easily, but come they did. How long could
he wait before pressing his mother to go back to the family home in Cam-
bridgeshire, which she had left for London out of boredom? And where
could he and his wife go if the plague got worse? Cambridgeshire was too far
from the downstream ports where much of his navy business took him.
There were also Elizabeth’s maids to think of—Mary and Alice and the lit-
tle girl Su. With her husband’s rise in the world, Elizabeth Pepys had been
able to take on all this household help, and she couldn’t think of doing with-
out them. But if they came along, who would guard the family’s possessions
in Seething Lane?
Pepys also worried about his assistant, Will Hewer. Will had become in-
dispensable, first as his manservant and then as his clerk at the navy office.
But Will was spending a considerable amount of time looking after his own
parents in Saint Sepulchre parish, one of the centers of the raging plague.
Pepys feared that Will might catch the infection from his folks’ neighbor-
hood. He couldn’t afford to lose Will. And if truth be known, Pepys was
wary of his assistant carrying the infection into Seething Lane.^19
Dark thoughts of encroaching death were interrupted by a great naval vic-
tory over the Dutch near Lowestoft on the North Sea coast. “The Lord good
in our wonderful success,” Josselin wrote.^20 Londoners heard the cannon
shots and hoped the Dutch would sue for peace. Bonfires and bells and
dancing in the streets rivaled the celebrations held after the Spanish Ar-
mada’s defeat and the foiled Gunpowder Plot to blow up the king and Par-
liament.
The celebrations were premature. The Dutch escaped total disaster when
a bungling English officer called off pursuit of the battered and retreating
fleet. Hundreds of wounded royal sailors and thousands of captured Dutch
seamen streamed ashore. Evelyn’s prison and hospital costs soared to one
thousand pounds, and he began to despair of a war he called “bloody” and
“miserable.”^21 The Anglo-Dutch conflict would go on for three years, with
astronomical costs for maintaining the navy with ships, men, and supplies—
a nightmare for the navy high command, though an opportunity for Pepys to
increase his profits.
By a cruel fate, war and pestilence became connected by ritual and reality
as well as by the forecasts of popular almanacs. Pepys went down to the naval
port at Woolwich and engaged rooms for Elizabeth and her maids “for a
month or two.” The king had set aside a national day of celebration andsor-
row. On June 20 the English people were to gather at their churches to thank