Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703), naval administrator and noted diarist, born in London and educated at St Paul's School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, from which he later transferred to Magdalene. Soon after obtaining his bachelor's degree Pepys entered the service of his first cousin once removed, Edward Montagu (1625–72), a
general-at-sea, who obtained for him a post as a clerk in the Exchequer. In December 1655 he married Elizabeth St Michel, an Anglo-French (Huguenot) girl of 14 with whom he lived in Montagu's lodgings.
In the republican administration set up by the army generals after Cromwell's death, Montagu's sympathies began to turn towards the royalist cause and he was driven from office. Pepys remained in charge of his cousin's affairs in London and set up his own household in Axe Yard, Westminster. The political turmoil of the times was one of the factors which encouraged him to begin his famous diary on 1 January 1660.
At the Restoration Montagu was again in office as general-at-sea and he took Pepys to sea with him as his secretary. On the return of the fleet with Charles II from Holland, Montagu was created Earl of Sandwich and showered with honours, and he promised Pepys that the two of them should rise together. As a first step he obtained for him the post of Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board, the body responsible for the civil administration of the English Navy. Through hard work and long hours of labour Pepys soon became a leading member of the board, and his powers were soon tested to the full during the Second Dutch War (1665–7) when the board's work was crippled by lack of money. Only Pepys's efforts to drive his colleagues, clerks, and the contractors, and a campaign to root out the worst cases of corruption, prevented a complete breakdown of the system of supply of the fleet.
In June 1667, through the premature
laying-up of the fleet while peace negotiations were still in progress, England suffered the humiliation of seeing the Dutch fleet in the Thames and Medway where for a time they set up a
blockade of London and destroyed a number of warships at Chatham. When attempts were later made to lay the blame on the Navy Board, Pepys addressed an elaborate and unanswerable memorandum to the Parliamentary Commission of Public Accounts justifying the conduct of the Navy Office throughout the war. He also made a memorable speech in Parliament proving that blame for the disaster lay elsewhere. Eyestrain and a belief that he was going blind led Pepys to end his diary, which was written in shorthand, in 1669.
In June 1673 Pepys left the Navy Board to become the first secretary to the
Admiralty or, more strictly, to the commission that exercised the office of the
Lord High Admiral. He now lodged at Derby House in Cannon Row, becoming one of the most important civil servants in the country. The Third Dutch War (1672–4) was drawing to a close and on its conclusion he launched a vigorous programme of recovery and reform. By 1678 he had developed the navy into a powerful, well-disciplined force and the previously unsystematic office of the Lord High Admiral into an efficient government department.
Pepys was Member of Parliament for Castle Rising, 1673–8, and for Harwich in 1679, being accepted in the Commons as spokesman for the service he had created and the administrative machine which managed it. Disaster now struck, however, when his old master and former Lord High Admiral, the Duke of York, was accused of conspiracy to betray the country to France and he himself was accused of being a secret papist and of selling naval secrets to France. After six weeks as a prisoner in the Tower of London, the charges against him were dropped; but for the next five years he was out of office.
Meanwhile Admiralty business suffered under an inept commission and in 1683—the year Pepys became president of the Royal Society—Charles II made him his Secretary for Admiralty Affairs, a post which he retained when the Duke of York came to the throne as James II. With the help of a special commission to perform most of the work of the Navy Board, set up in 1686, he set about a restoration of the good governance of the navy. Between 1685 and 1687 he was again Member of Parliament for Harwich and master of
Trinity House where he instituted many reforms.
However, after James II was dethroned in 1688, Pepys was once again falsely accused of treasonable relations with the French and of secret Jacobitism, and he was forced to resign. He now finally retired into private life. In 1700 his health began to break down and on 26 May 1703, after a long and painful illness, he died at the country home of his closest friend, William Hewer, at Clapham.
During his long service at the Navy Board and Admiralty, Pepys had an ambition to write an authoritative history of the English Navy. For this purpose he collected a great quantity of official and other papers, which passed on his death, together with his famous diary and library of 3,000 books, to Magdalene College, Cambridge. His great history was never written, but in 1690 he published his
Memoires Relating to the State of the Royal Navy, a business-like account of the work of the commission of 1686 in restoring the administration of the navy to a sound footing.
An abbreviated version of his diary was published in 1825 and more complete versions appeared in the 1870s and 1890s. In 1970 the first three volumes of a new, complete, and annotated edition in eleven volumes was published.
Bibliography
Ollard, R. , Pepys (1974).
Pepys, Samuel , The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews, 11 vols. (1970–83).
Tomalin, C. , Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (2003).
