Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys was born in February 1633 above his father’s shop in Salisbury Court, a lane that ran between Fleet Street and the Thames, and was baptised in the nearby St. Bride’s church. His father was a tailor and mother a former laundress. Both were of puritan faith and his mother quite extreme in her beliefs. During the Civil War the teenage Samuel witnessed several of the great events of the time. In the summer of 1647 he watched as the New Model Army marched into London and in January 1649, as a 15-year-old boy, was in the crowd in Whitehall to witness the execution of King Charles.

Pepys studied at the eminent cathedral school at St. Paul’s where he was taught about the Bible and classical literature, giving him a love of books for the rest of his life. From there he won a scholarship to Cambridge University. Graduating in 1654, he returned to London where he soon married a 15-year-old girl, Elizabeth, a Huguenot immigrant, at St. Margaret’s church at Westminster.

After completing his studies Pepys found work as assistant to a relation, Edward Montagu, a member of the Admiralty Committee of the Parliamentary navy, which brought with it a small apartment at Whitehall for Samuel and his wife. That was followed by a position in the Exchequer’s office, which was headed by George Downing (after whom Downing Street is named).

As London descended into chaos in the dying days of the Commonwealth government at the end of 1659 Pepys decided to begin writing a diary. At university he had learnt a system of shorthand known as Tachygraphy with which he was able to accurately record lectures and sermons. It was by that method that he wrote his diaries except for names, which were written in longhand. He continued until 31^st May 1669, describing in candid detail his life, his thoughts, and the world around him.

When Charles II returned from exile following the Civil War and Commonwealth period, Pepys was part of the entourage that sailed to Holland to bring back to England the King and his brother James. Later that year Pepys witnessed the spectacle of Major General Harrison, a Parliamentarian and signatory of the execution of Charles I, being hung, drawn and quartered at Charing Cross.

For his part in the return of the monarch Montagu was elevated to become Earl of Sandwich and he found Pepys a new role as Clerk of the Acts of the Navy Board. The Clerk was one of the four principal officers responsible for the administration and equipping of the entire naval fleet, along with their staff of commissioners and clerks. They reported to the Lord High Admiral, who by then was the King’s brother James, the Duke of York. In July 1660 Samuel and Elizabeth moved into a splendid apartment within the Navy Board building at Seething Lane on the north-east side of Tower Hill, where they were to live for many years.

Pepys immersed himself in learning the workings of the navy, spending much time at Deptford and Woolwich to understand every detail of the royal dockyards. The navy had grown in size during the Interregnum and by the time he joined the Board accounted for one quarter of all government spending, supporting a large part of the country’s industry. With such a great level of expenditure and a large number of suppliers Pepys soon found that the navy was riddled with corruption at almost every level. He spent much of his career reforming practices, while at the same time not averse to occasionally lining his own pockets. The navy also faced a continual financial crisis, an issue that was to dominate much of his career.

A national disaster occurred with the devastation by the Dutch of the laid-up English fleet in the Medway in June 1667. The debacle was a great shock to the nation and Parliament wanted answers as to how it had occurred. Fingers were pointed in the direction of the Navy Board, with Pepys having to defend his department at an inquiry in October 1667. He and his colleagues were called before Parliament in March 1668. Pepys delivered a masterful three-hour-long speech that senior politicians agreed was the best they had ever heard in the House. The following day when he chanced upon the King and Duke of York in the park they congratulated him on his great success.

Pepys read around one book each month through much of his adult life, building an extensive library. The Restoration was a period of scientific progress. He purchased a microscope and built a small collection of other technical instruments. Knowing many of its members, in 1665 he joined the Royal Society, the hotbed of scientific ideas. Pepys also had a great love for music, could play several instruments, and was a reasonable baritone singer.

The performance of plays had been banned by the Puritans during the Commonwealth but was to blossom again after the Restoration. Pepys attended his first play in 1660 and in January 1661 was present at one of the earliest performances by an actress in an English theatre. He enjoyed the company of actors and actresses, including Nell Gwynne.

Pepys also delighted in male comradeship and had a great circle of friends from amongst the nobility and London’s merchant and professional classes. One man whose company he found particularly stimulating was his fellow diarist John Evelyn. Others included Sir Christopher Wren and the wealthy and cultured London merchants Sir John Banks and Sir James Houblon.

London’s two great disasters of his time, the Great Plague and the Great Fire, were both captured by Pepys in his diaries. His wife was dispatched to safety at Woolwich during 1665 but throughout the months of the Plague he remained in London and described the terrible scenes as people died around him, including at one point, the driver of the carriage in which he was travelling.

Witnessing the Great Fire of September 1666 at first-hand, it was Pepys who travelled upriver by boat on the first night to break the news of the disaster to the King and the Duke of York. A magnificent dinner had been arranged at Seething Lane for the following night at which Pepys was to show off his splendid new book cabinets, but the celebration took place with houses in flames only streets away. As the city burned, Pepys and Sir William Batten, his colleague at the Navy Board, loaded carts to take their possessions to the safety of Bethnal Green. He and Batten dug a hole in the garden of their office where they buried their papers, wine and Parmesan cheese. Fortunately, the wind was blowing in a westerly direction and his apartments at the Navy Board were narrowly spared while much of the city was consumed during those three days.

Over a number of years, toiling long hours at the Navy Board, his sight deteriorated to the point where Pepys could barely see to read and write. By 1669, the entries in his diary were becoming shorter and on 31^st May of that year, mistakenly believing he would lose his sight, he made his final entry. In August he decided to take a lengthy holiday with his wife, travelling for two months to France and the Low Countries. While in Brussels Elizabeth fell ill and she died returning to London, aged just 29 years, and was buried at St. Olaves church, Hart Street.

The King planned to go to war with the Dutch, together with his French allies. A huge joint naval force engaged the Dutch off the coast of East Anglia in 1672 but with disastrous results, including the death of Pepys’s original benefactor and relation, Edward Montagu, whose funeral took place at Westminster Abbey. The defeat led to Pepys having to defend the Navy Board yet again in an inquiry in 1670.

When the Duke of York was forced to resign his position in 1673 the naval hierarchy was reorganised, and Pepys was promoted to secretary to the Lord High Admiral. Using all his talents, experience and contacts he set about ensuring that he was at the centre of the entire administration, with a direct influence on the King. In early 1674 he moved himself and the Admiralty to Derby House at Westminster where they could be closer to Parliament and Charles’s palace at Whitehall. Further honours lay ahead. During the next few years he became master of the Clothworkers’ Company, a governor of Bridewell Prison and master of Trinity House. His income was boosted by the right to charge a fee of 25 shillings for each English ship trading in the Mediterranean.

During his many dealings with Parliament, Pepys came to the conclusion that the MPs who controlled the funding for the navy were ignorant of its needs. To change that he decided to join their ranks. After some failed attempts he won an election at Castle Rising. When he took his seat in January 1674, however, he found himself at the centre of the anti-papist storm raging in Parliament. As a former loyal servant of the Catholic Duke of York Pepys became an ideal target for the Anglican opposition, led by the Earl of Shaftesbury. The political manoeuvrings forced Pepys to resign his position at the Admiralty.

Worse was to come. In order to discredit him further, false stories were concocted that he was in league with the French, allies to the King but despised by the opposition. Pepys and his brother-in-law, his supposed accomplice, were arrested and sent to the Tower of London and then to Marshalsea Prison before being allowed out on bail. During 1680, political orchestrations by the King against the Shaftesbury opposition were beginning to pay dividends, however. Shaftesbury and his Whig followers were branded as subversives and Parliament was dissolved. Furthermore, their underhand methods of discrediting Pepys had come to light and the long-anticipated court case against him collapsed.

Throughout that period Pepys continued to take a keen interest in the Royal Society, and in recognition of his efforts he was elected President of the organisation in 1685. (During that time, member Isaac Newton published his outstanding work, Principia, under the imprimatur of Pepys as the Society’s President.)

In 1682 Charles decided to abandon Britain’s colony at Tangier and sent Pepys to supervise the withdrawal. It was there that he learnt how discipline in the Royal Navy had collapsed since his departure from the Admiralty and on his return immediately reported his findings to the King. Not long after, Charles took the navy under his own personal control, dismissed the incumbent officials and appointed Pepys as his Secretary for the Affairs of the Admiralty. Pepys set about preparing a full report on the perilous state of the naval forces but in 1685, just as it was ready to be presented, Charles unexpectedly died. Pepys was one of those who bore the royal canopy during the coronation procession of the new monarch, James II, from Westminster Hall.

In the latter years of Charles’s reign the strength of the navy was badly diminished with many ships laid up and rotting. Pepys continued as Secretary of the Admiralty as he and James worked hard to rebuild the navy to its former defensive strength. In the end it came to nothing as the fleet found itself pinned down at anchor by an easterly wind that carried the massive invasion force of Prince William of Orange across the North Sea in November 1688, effectively deposing King James.

The day after arriving in London William called for Pepys and requested that he remain at his post. When the first Parliamentary election of the new King’s reign took place in February 1689, however, Pepys, considered by the electorate to be one of the detested James’s men, lost his seat. He was a man whose time had passed and he resigned his position at the Admiralty.

He was succeeded at the Admiralty by men who had helped William come to power and who Pepys considered his enemies. He also refused to swear an oath of loyalty to William and Mary, which put him in a difficult position. Understanding the danger, he took with him a large number of records from the Admiralty and composed his memoirs of his time in the post. Arrested for ‘treasonable practices’ he was able to use the records to argue against the charges.

Enjoying the company of men of intellect, Pepys continued to hold gatherings every Saturday morning until the end of the century at his apartment in London. His former employee at the Navy Board, Will Hewer, had made a lucrative career for himself and purchased a large country house at Clapham. A loyal friend of his former master, in 1701 Hewer invited the elderly Pepys to live there permanently. Yet the country life was to last only a couple of years and in May 1703 Pepys died. His funeral at St. Olave’s was attended by many notable friends and acquaintances. He was buried alongside his wife Elizabeth and their monument stands there today.

By the time of his death, Pepys had collected a library of 3,000 magnificent books and manuscripts. In his will he gave very specific instructions to his executors as to what should happen to the library, which included the original copy of the diary and the book cabinets, stating that the collection should not be added to after his death. Following his wishes, they arranged for it to be given to Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1724 the college set up the library, more or less how it could be found in Pepys’s own home, in the New Building to which he himself had been one of the benefactors and there it remains to this day.