In 1663, just before Samuel Pepys visited the stables of the elegant Thomas Povey, where he found the walls were covered with Dutch tiles, like his own fireplaces, he was worrying about Navy pay. People who were owed money by the Navy had to apply for it at a goldsmith’s shop, where they would have to forgo 15 or 20 per cent to secure it. Pepys called this ‘a most horrid shame’.
Pepys also used the phrase horrid shame about a case of mistreatment of a watchman by the Lord Chief Justice, and of the King climbing over the garden wall of Somerset House to visit the Duchess of Richmond.
It was what we might call a scandal. As for Pepys’s use of ‘horrid’, it was slangy at the time, the word having declined from a conscious connection with the Latin horridus, ‘bristling’. Yet it sometimes retained force, as in his well-known description of the Fire of London’s ‘most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire’.
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