Samuel Pepys

English diarist and bureaucrat

• Born: February 23, 1633
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: May 26, 1703
• Place of death: Clapham, England

Pepys’s diary remains a unique account of the personal and professional life of a man involved in the major historical events of his day. His work for the government, moreover, laid the foundation for a professionally administered British navy.

Early Life

Samuel Pepys (SAM-yu-uhl PEEPS) was born February 23, 1633, in a room above his father’s tailoring shop, one of eleven children born to John Pepys and Margaret Pepys; four survived to adulthood. Although John Pepys was not wealthy, the family was connected to prominent people, including Sir Sydney Montagu (or Mountagu), a member of one of the nation’s most important families. These connections made it possible to remove the young boy from the dirt and disturbances of London.

During Pepys’s childhood, King Charles I was overthrown, Oliver Cromwell ruled during the Commonwealth period, and, after Cromwell’s death in 1658, social disorder threatened. For much of this period, Pepys studied in the country. Later, he attended Saint Paul’s School in London. As a young man, he was a revolutionist and, in 1649, witnessed with approval the execution of Charles I. He won a scholarship to Magdalene College, Cambridge University, entering in 1650, and received a B.A. in 1654. Upon graduation, he went to work for Edward Montagu, the Viscount Hinchingbrooke and future first earl of Sandwich, who was a relation. In 1655, he married fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Marchant de Saint-Michel. On March 26, 1658, he underwent surgery for kidney stones, an extremely hazardous matter in an age before anesthetics or sterile surgical instruments. Thereafter, he was to celebrate his survival each year on the anniversary of this date.

Life’s Work

Pepys’s great literary achievement was his diary, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1825; partial publication, as Memoirs of Samuel Pepys…, 1848-1849; as Diary and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys, 1875-1879 [6 volumes], 1893-1899 [10 volumes]; as The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, 1970-1983 [11 volumes]). He kept this diary from January 1, 1660, until May 31, 1669, when he was forced by deteriorating eyesight to stop. He used a system of shorthand created by Thomas Shelton (fl. 1612-1620), occasionally punctuating the shorthand with a variety of languages to conceal his sexual exploits. That he intended the diary to be preserved for a later generation is clear from his efforts to save the diary from the 1666 Great Fire of London, as well as his donation of the work to Magdalene College after his death, but he did not want it read during his lifetime.

In his diary, Pepys recorded in unusual detail both his achievements and his faults. His stormy marriage was abusive; he recorded his share of the abuse, his regrets, his pride, and his shame. He pursued other women; these episodes, too, he recorded, along with their consequences. His diary was not intended to impress others, but to record his life as if he were viewing himself under a microscope.

Pepys was involved in the historical and cultural events of his age, and these, too, he recorded. He went to Holland with Edward Montagu on the mission that was to bring back King Charles II to rule over a restored monarchy. His boyhood observations of social chaos had turned him from revolutionist to conservative, and his allegiance to Charles and to the king’s brother James, duke of York (the future James II ), brought him to the center of power. He became a keen observer of the courts, both attracted by the mistresses of Charles II and appalled by the waste of the monarch’s time. The theaters had generally been closed under the Commonwealth. When they reopened, he was a dedicated theatergoer and welcomed the presence of actresses for the first time on the English stage. (Previously, female roles had been played by men.) From his father’s family, he gained a love of music. Fascinated by science although not a scientist, he became a member of the scientific Royal Society and was its president from 1684 to 1686.

For later readers, much interest lies in Pepys’s eyewitness accounts of two great disasters that swept through London in the 1660’s. Plague was common in London, and major outbreaks had occurred in 1592, 1603, 1625, and 1636. Usually, the wealthy left the city; the poor remained and died. The epidemic of 1665, however, was far worse than any previous one. Pepys, dedicated to his work, remained in the city, until more than seventy-four hundred persons died in a single week and the streets were almost empty of living beings. His account of the dead and dying is a vivid one.

Equally vivid is Pepys’s account of the Great Fire, which destroyed much of London in 1666. On the morning of September 2, a servant told him that a fire was visible in the distance. Pepys went back to sleep; fires were normal in all cities before the invention of effective fire-fighting equipment. When the servant returned to tell him that three hundred houses had burned, however, Pepys went to observe the fire. As with his account of the plague, Pepys’s eye was for individuals, whether for individual corpses in the streets or individual pigeons flying overhead until, their wings singed, they dropped into the flames. Pepys managed to remove his most treasured possessions, including his diary, and, at the same time, to visit King Charles and the duke of York to warn them of the need to destroy buildings to create a barrier to the passage of the flames.

For military historians, interest lies in Pepys’s attempts to create an efficient basis for naval operations, although Pepys’s work here continued long after his diary ended. Pepys’s rapid ascent to power was largely the result of his laborious attention to detail and his capacity for hard work. He sometimes began work at 4:00 a.m. and ended at midnight. He learned arithmetic, and he learned about ships. He kept detailed records and could justify repeated demands for money from Parliament. Although he shared with his colleagues the habit of taking bribes, especially early in his career, he was increasingly dedicated to his patron, the duke of York, and to the need to curb abuses in fitting out ships, provisioning them, and paying seamen. He laid the groundwork for a formal examination for naval officers, attempting to place ships in the hands of competent leaders, not mere political appointees.

From the position of a simple clerk, Pepys rose to become surveyor-general of the victualing in 1665, and, in 1673, secretary to the Admiralty. In 1684, he was named the king’s secretary for naval affairs, and, the following year, was elected to Parliament for the first time. His detailed notes saved him several times when, especially after the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars (1665-1667, 1672-1674), the condition of the navy was questioned in Parliament.

As the life of Charles II drew to a close, the Roman Catholicism of his brother James caused rising anti-Catholic sentiment in England. This rose to hysteria after the king’s death in 1685, especially because the Catholic wife of James, now King James II, had borne a son, so there was now a Catholic heir to the throne. James was Pepys’s patron, and Pepys himself was threatened by the furor of the time. He was arrested and in danger of his life; again, his eye for detail saved him. Although loyal to James, Pepys sensed that James was jeopardizing his position by forcing his Catholicism upon England.

James was, indeed, forced to leave the country in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In 1689, William of Orange of the Netherlands and his wife Mary Stuart officially became joint sovereigns as William III and Mary II. Becuase Pepys had sworn allegiance to James, he resigned his position rather than violate his oath. Nonetheless, he was briefly imprisoned again in 1690.

Elizabeth Pepys had died in 1669, and the couple was childless. His health declining, Pepys made his home with Will Hewer, a former servant and clerk who had risen to power with him. After an agonizing recurrence of kidney stones, Pepys died on May 26, 1703.

Significance

The full significance of Pepys’s diary was not apparent until the first publication of the entire diary, The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, an eleven-volume edition, edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews and published between 1970 and 1983. All earlier editions had been abridged, as passages concerning Pepys’s sexual activities could not have been published during the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. Pepys’s achievements as a naval administrator had long been praised. Moreover, his diary had already, for more than a century, been considered perhaps the single most important primary source on seventeenth century English history, and its already great importance increased dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century, when social and cultural history arose as major fields of study, equal in stature to traditional military and political history. Nevertheless, it was only with the full publication of the diary that it became possible to recognize Pepys’s more intimate achievement, to see the reality of a man’s life, laid out with all its flaws, foibles, pains, pleasures, rewards, and achievements. Among published diaries, it is unique.

Bibliography

Coote, Stephen. Samuel Pepys: A Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Shows Pepys’s growth from the pleasure-loving man of the diary to the dedicated, severe naval official.

Latham, Robert, ed. The Shorter Pepys. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Single-volume abridgment of the eleven-volume Latham and William Matthews edition; 1,096 pages; includes maps, glossary, and chronology.

Latham, Robert, and Linnet Latham, eds. A Pepys Anthology: Passages from the Diary of Samuel Pepys. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Extracts published thematically rather than chronologically, under topics such as “The Husband,” “The Man of Fashion,” “The Theatre-goer,” “Christmas,” “The Fire of London,” “The Plague,” and “Street Life.”

LeGallienne, Richard, ed. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Text for general readers first published in Modern Library series (1923) as Passages from the Diary of Samuel Pepys; contains an essay about Pepys by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Taylor, Ivan E. Samuel Pepys. Updated ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989. First published in 1967 and revised following publication of the Latham and Matthews edition; includes biographical material, chronology, bibliography directed toward general readers.

Tomalin, Claire. Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self. New York: Random House, 2002. Offers a detailed look at everyday life, a balanced view of the Pepys marriage, and an understanding of connections between historical events and those of modern times.