Diaries of the Seventeenth Century

Seventeenth century diary writing

In 1656 John Beadle, an Essex minister, wrote an advice manual on how to keep a diary and explained the variety of types that were written in the seventeenth century:

As this suggests, over the C17th diary-writing seems to have become a common genre that covered a multiplicity of different functions. One count, made in 1950, put the total number of diaries written before 1700 at 363, and since then many more have been discovered. But why did diary-keeping became more popular? And how are diaries useful to the historian?

The variety of motives outlined by Beadle for keeping a diary suggests that we should not look for one single factor explaining the rise of diary-keeping over the seventeenth century. Indeed we should consider growing literacy rates and a more literate culture, changes in the education system, cheaper paper and a heightened awareness of the 'self'. But one factor, the impact of the protestant reformation on the world of the 'thankful Christian', stands out.

The most common reason for keeping a diary in the seventeenth century was to keep an account of providence or God's ordering of the world and of individual lives. Ralph Josselin called the diary he kept between 1641 and 1683 'a thankfull observation of divine providence and goodness towards me and a summary view of my life'. As Isaac Ambrose put it in 1650, a diarist 'observes something of God to his soul, and of his soul to God'. Diaries also allowed their authors to meditate regularly on personal failings - a type of written confession in a protestant world that had rejected the need for a catholic priest to mediate sins. Or the diarist could count his blessings, and give thanks for births or marriages or seek consolation for illness and death. In an age when life in this world and salvation in the next were both uncertain, diaries were a way of making sense of and ordering existence. In short, they reflected the intensely introspective and anxious, self-examining religiosity of the seventeenth century, particularly (though by no means exclusively) among the 'hotter sort' of protestants, such as the presbyterians, independents, baptists and quakers.

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.

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.

Diary of a conspirator

Evelyn was a very reluctant revolutionary who had put church above crown. But another diarist, Sir John Reresby, was a victim of the crisis for reversing those priorities. Reresby, staunchly loyal to the Crown, had been appointed as governor of York. While his diary shows that he tried to avoid identification with the court's catholicising policies, he continued to serve James, even when, in the summer of 1688, the Marquis of Halifax:

Once William had landed Reresby sympathised with a plan to petition the king to call a free parliament but when on 22 Nov. the gentry assembled in York to sign it, Reresby was absent 'being il bruised by my horse falling upon me as I came from home'. But the meeting was the pretext for a pre-planned coup headed by Reresby's former patron and one of the architects of William's invasion, the earl of Danby. At a given sign, Reresby records, a man ran 'into the hall and crys that the papists were risen and had fired at the militia troops. At this all the gentlemen run out, and thos that were privy to the design gett their horses, which were laid ready for them'. Danby 'was ready in his lodging expecting this feigned alarme'. He and his retinue made about 100 horse 'and rode up to the four militia troops drawn out for another purpas and cryed for a free parliament and the protestant religion and noe poperie'. The militia joined them. On hearing this, Reresby tried to reassert control but his orders were ignored. As he was preparing to go to the regular soldiers, Reresby was surrounded by Danby and his men, told 'that to resist was to noe purpas' and confined to his room. The next day the troops all defected to Danby. Thereafter Reresby was understandably regarded as 'disaffected' to the new regime.

Diary of a revolutionary

The revolution in the north of England was nevertheless seen as a trick of a different kind by a Leeds dissenter, Ralph Thoresby. His account tells us about a popular rather than a noble revolution, accomplished through rumour and panic rather than William's invasion:

7000 assembled in Leeds to defend themselves against this imaginary force of bog-trotting papists, roused to the height of fear in the night by the call of 'horse and arms!... The drums beat, the bells rang backwards, the women shrieked and such dreadful consternation seized upon all persons'. Thoresby's revolution was a popular one, managed 'artfully' by the power of rumour.

Thoresby was a dissenter, the group who had at first been persecuted in the High Church, Tory reaction of 1681-5, and then courted by a catholic king desperate for allies between 1686 and 1688. This experience deeply colours the account of the very well informed presbyterian Roger Morrice, who was close to the presbyterian leaders in London. His suspicions of the church hierarchy - the very men who now ironically seemed to be standing up to popery - shaped his view of the revolution.

A matter of perspective

Just before William entered the capital, Morrice confided to his journal that he feared men 'to be laying a foundation upon a narrow bottom for Toryisme, again to the exclusion of the true Reformed interest in the kingdome, and for restoring the Hierarchy to its zenith'. Moreover, he thought that those, like the Danby faction in the north, who petitioned for a free parliament 'did not antecedantly consult the Prince's sense', for delay would only play into James's hands. Morrice feared that the mistakes of the restoration of 1660 might be repeated because of the zeal of the churchmen:

Yet Morrice vacillated between pessimism and the optimism of his very next entry. The churchmen, he reported, now showed more respect to the dissenters 'and from their present judgement and resolution I do believe some of them will not depart, tho they made as great promises at the Restauration and did depart from them'. For Morrice the revolution was a struggle with a perfidious set of churchmen, from whom ease for dissenters might, with William's aid, finally be extracted or forced.

These four men saw the revolution in different ways. We can discern an anglican revolution that went beyond the intentions of the churchmen, an elite and bloodless revolution, a popular revolution based on fears of a popish massacre, and a revolution that was eventually to rewrite the restoration religious settlement and grant toleration for dissenters. Reading their diaries reminds us of how differently individuals read the world around them.

Find out more

Books

British diaries : an annotated bibliography of British diaries written between 1442 and 1942 compiled by William Matthews (1950)

The Family Life of Ralph Josselin pp.3-14. by A.Macfarlane (1970)

The Diary of John Evelyn edited by E.S. De Beer (1959)

The parliamentary diary of Narcissus Luttrell, 1691-1693 edited by Henry Horwitz (1972)

Diary of Samuel Pepys edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (1970-1983)

The Diaries of the Popish Plot edited by D.C.Greene (1977)

The Memoirs of Sir John Reresby edited by M.Geiter and W.Speck (1991)

Wallington's world : a puritan artisan in seventeenth-century London by Paul S. Seaver (1985)

About the author

Dr Mark Knights is a Senior Lecturer in British History at the University of East Anglia, and author of Politics and Opinion in Crisis 1678-1681 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), as well as a number of articles about politics, religion and political ideas in the Restoration. He is currently writing a book about politics, language and political culture in the later Stuart period.