2 • The Great Plaguefrom as far away as the North Country, Wales, and Scotland. Goods left the
city, too; city merchants and suburban workers and their masters depended
on consumers in every county of the land. Year in and year out, villagers and
townspeople were drawn to the metropolis for employment, entertainment,
and a wide range of services that were harder to come by in their communi-
ties. Many a prosperous citizen’s parents were living out their last years in the
family’s country homestead, left behind by a son seeking his fortune in the
capital.
Overlapping public responsibilities had drawn together the city-based
Samuel Pepys and a country gentleman, John Evelyn, despite differences in
social background and temperament. The bon vivant Pepys relished every-
thing the capital had to offer someone of middling income like himself. The
accomplished gentleman gardener John Evelyn could not abide the un-
healthy air and crowded housing of the capital. The two men met over their
common interest in keeping the king’s navy shipshape and its men healthy—
Pepys as a procurer of naval supplies and Evelyn in charge of sailors sick or
wounded in the line of duty. The bonds and the danger of their offices were
soon to grow beyond the expectations of either man. Their experiences were
recorded in their voluminous correspondence and their very different diaries.
Evelyn’s journal was an open accounting to his family of his public deeds and
personal interests; Pepys’ journal was a secret record of his thoughts, acts, and
feelings, using his variation of a shorthand of the day.^2
Pepys, a tailor’s son, dreamed of being worth two thousand pounds and
having his own coach and four horses. Having begun public life with cash
balances approaching one hundred pounds, he had increased his wealth ten-
fold in five years, far above the average English household’s annual income of
about seven pounds. He was driven to gain more and more capital from his
influential office, to make life comfortable for himself and his wife, Eliza-
beth, and to enjoy the services of his newly expanded household staff.^3
How different life was for his new country-gentleman friend! John and
Mary Evelyn did not have to think about money or status, thanks to his in-
herited wealth and station and her father’s influential post as clerk of the
king’s Privy Council, which included a residence inside the Whitehall Palace
complex. On occasion, John was persuaded to join royal commissions, in-
cluding a special body to look into the urgent need to repair the crumbling
medieval cathedral of Saint Paul’s. When he participated in a public project,
he did so with a sense of purpose and responsibility that could lead to
danger. But his real passion was leisurely writing about exotic subjects, from
tree planting to engraving, at his family estate of Sayes Court in the down-