The Restoration

Samuel Pepys didn’t much like the subject of Dennis Sewell’s new biography. Sir George Downing (1623-84) was for a short time Pepys’s boss at the Exchequer, during which period the diarist observed that his employer was ‘so stingy a fellow I care not to see him’. Despite being one of the richest men in Restoration London, Downing’s parsimony was legendary and was the subject of one of the Diary’s most celebrated comic anecdotes. Having recently purchased a country estate in Cambridgeshire, Downing learned that it was customary for the landowner to host a Christmas dinner for the poor of the parish. Anticipating a grand celebratory affair, crowned by a belt-loosening

In April 1636, two aspiring lawyers, eager to make their way in the world, corresponded about the state of affairs in London. ‘Our best news,’ wrote Edward Hyde, the future Earl of Clarendon, ‘is that we have good wine… the worse is that the Plague is in town and no Judges dye.’ The recipient of this letter was Bulstrode Whitelocke, a fellow member of the Middle Temple, who, like Hyde, would go on to write an indispensable contemporary chronicle of the British civil wars of the mid-17th century. What makes the intimate, wry irreverence of Hyde’s missive seem startling in retrospect is that the two men ended up on opposite