Many people throughout history have kept diaries of some kind, but I suggest that Samuel Pepys is, as the Encyclopædia Britannica puts it, “the greatest diarist of all.”
Pepys’ 1.25 million words on the period 1660-1669 is not just a unique record of a formative and hugely interesting period in English life, but a ground-breaking literary advance in objective self-observation.
There had been other English diarists during the 17th century – the antiquarians Sir William Dugdale and Elias Ashmole, and of course John Evelyn – but none before had been so detailed, so personal or so vivid. As Robert Louis Stevenson enthused in 1881, the Diary manifests an “unequalled self.”
To this day, Pepys hovers over England’s imagination of the Stuart period – an acutely alive avatar for an era of enquiry, flamboyance, upheaval and vigour.
I have a rare 1917 volume issued by a circle called the Samuel Pepys Club, and the volume’s contents hint at the fascination he exerted on literary England even in the throes of the Great War.
There are painstaking analyses of the various portraits of Pepys, notes on how his manuscripts and collections were catalogued, profiles of a few of friends and acquaintances, details of his kidney and eyesight problems, lists of musical instruments he mentioned, what tunes he played with his friends, even how gladiatorial fights were staged in the theatrical productions Pepys watched.
The Samuel Pepys Club still exists, and since 1917 there have been several major landmarks in Pepysian studies – with bestselling 1930s books on Pepys by Arthur Bryant, the 1970 publication of the full unexpurgated Diary for the first time, and Claire Tomalin’s brilliant biography of 2002. The full Diary has been reissued several times since 1970, and both Pepys’ own 1690 reflections on naval reform, and the fragmentary diaries he kept later in his life have found publication.
Something that is less well known about Pepys is that he was an inveterate collector of ephemera – the printed broadsides and street ballads produced almost daily in London to comment upon or commemorate events, from folk tales to high politics, riddle-books to sensational crimes, and war news to high society scandals.
When he died, 115 chapbooks were found unexpectedly among his papers, filled with pasted-in papers picked up in the street – a copious collection of English folklore and popular concerns that have added greatly to our knowledge of the culture of those times. These too have been published, and constitute a unique folk-archive, helping keep alive national legends like Guy of Warwick, Tom Thumb and Jack of Newbury – but also loud voices of the London streets that would otherwise have been completely silenced.
Merely listing a few of the chapter headings is an evocative exercise – ‘King Henry VIII and a Cobler,’ ‘Mother Bunch’s Closet,’ ‘Cupid’s Sports and Pastimes,’ ‘A Pleasant Dialogue between Honest John and Loving Kate,’ ‘Sir John Barley-Corn,’, ‘Diogenes His Search Through Athens,’ and ‘Humphry Frollicksome.’
Then there are the songs, with the kind of titles you probably won’t find nowadays on streaming services – like ‘The Fortunate Lasses of London: OR, A brief Account of the many Benifit-Tickets drawn by poor Servants and Sinder-wenches, out of the late Maiden-lottery – To the Tune of, The Evening Ramble.’
Or how about, ‘Romes Plots Against the Present Government, Or, The Whore of Babylons Rich Robes, Turned into a Torn-Placket To the Tune Jones Placket is Rent and Torn!’
My own interest in Sam Pepys comes from a generic love of both London history and 17th century English culture. I also spent several years myself as a sailor, and in the 1990s lived in Deptford, where reminders of naval history are never very far away – even in an era which does not value English excellence.
Pepys was born in London in 1633, in Salisbury Court, off Fleet Street. His father John’s family had long been monastic reeves and minor gentry in Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and Lincolnshire. John Pepys was forced by circumstances to work as a tailor, and Pepys’ mother Margaret was the sister of a butcher from Whitechapel – but there were other Pepys who were lawyers and MPs, and one who became Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. There were also cousinly connections with the aristocratic Mountagus, which would prove of central importance in Pepys’ later career.
Samuel lived in London for the first seven years of his life until a plague outbreak, when his father sensibly sent him out of the stricken city to bosky Middlesex countryside – now rather less bosky!
In 1642, on the outbreak of war, he was dispatched to more peaceable Huntingdon, where he seems to have studied at the Grammar School. He famously learned Latin but little mathematics; he wouldn’t learn his times tables until he was twenty-nine.
Pepys seems never to have cared much for the countryside, but was a Londoner by inclination as well as necessity. He enjoyed visiting Huntingdonshire, and always took an interest in the family properties, but for almost all of his life he lived in either the City or Westminster. It was only during his final illness that he went into rustic seclusion – to a remote Surrey village known as Clapham!
He was back in London, aged 15, in the fateful year of 1649. He had the predictable sympathies of a boy from the Puritan-inclined eastern counties, and with his family connections. He seems to have witnessed the King’s execution, and later told his schoolfellows at St Paul’s School that if he were to preach on the event, he would take as his text Proverbs 10:7 “The memory of the wicked shall rot.” He chose not to dwell on this later in his career!
In 1654, he graduated BA from Magdalen College, Cambridge. By 1655, he was employed as a factotum and secretary in his slightly older cousin Edward Mountagu’s house – Mountagu soon to become a General-at-Sea, and close to Cromwell.
The same year, Pepys married Elizabeth St Michel, daughter of a French convert to Protestantism, who was beautiful but penniless.
She was only 15, and they did not actually live together until 1656. It seems really to have been a love match, although its early days were marred by privation, with the genteelly brought-up couple forced to share a little room in Montagu’s townhouse. Pepys later recalled how Elizabeth “…used to make coal fires and wash my foul clothes with her own hand for me, poor wretch!”
There were also frequent bickerings. Pepys could be very affectionate and attentive to his wife, with many entries about enjoying her company, and buying her gifts. But he could also be very insensitive, and even disparaging. He told her, for example, that her dancing lessons were not doing her much good, and that she had no ear for music!
He also complained about her buying things without asking him first, such on 12 August 1666, when, he says
I took occasion to fall out with her for her buying a laced handkercher and pinner without my leave. Though the thing is not much, yet I would not permit her begin to do so, lest worse should follow. From this we began both to be angry, and so continued till bed, and did not sleep friends.
But the chief problem was Pepys’ flirtatiousness and spasmodic unfaithfulness, which led to many jealous scenes. These were probably exacerbated by the fact they had no children, in whom Elizabeth might have been able to interest herself, and so forget some of her woes.
Pepys would buy gloves and silk stockings for favourite actresses and sing amorous duets with them. Acting was a disreputable profession, even for men – and female actresses were often seen almost as prostitutes. Elizabeth’s dislike of her husband’s amorous duets was doubtless aggravated by him having told her she couldn’t sing herself! Pepys played the lute, viol and flageolet extremely well, and tried his hand at other instruments; his passion for music rivalled his admiration of the fair sex.
Pepys often mentions kissing and fondling women, from actresses to barmaids, including domestic servants in his own house – although he also felt remorse about these activities. He often reproaches himself in the Diary, and hypocritically condemns the loose morals of the court. He euphemises some of his dalliances in a strange kind of guilty slang, in which English can become Franglais or even what sounds like Polari. The result is, if anything, more suggestive than if he had written plainly.
Pepys had a frankly exploitative affair with the wife of a Deptford carpenter – who knew, but allowed it in return for ‘preferment’. But his most famous liaison was with Deborah Willett, a pretty seventeen year old who came to live with them in Seething Lane in 1667, as Elizabeth’s companion. Elizabeth came to regret her choice, because her husband was immediately smitten. Pepys loved to have Deborah around him, and she would go to his room in the evening to comb his hair. The combing was a pleasure for him, but also a pretext. On 25 October 1668, he was having his hair combed when: “… my wife, coming up suddenly, did find me embracing the girl … con my hand sub su coats.”
The subsequent argument went on for several days, with the abashed Pepys promising to forswear all such activities in future. But the following month, he went out searching for Deborah desperately after dark, and when he found her: “…she come into the coach to me, and je did baiser her … and tocar her thing…at last yo did make her tener mi cosa in her mano, while mi mano was sobra her pectus, and so did hazer with grand delight.”
We can see why the first three editions of the Diary, published between 1825 and 1848 by the third Baron Braybrooke, were bowdlerised for what Braybrooke called “indelicacy.”
People now would call Pepys a sex pest. It is difficult to disagree. There have been several salutary feminist retellings of his life, from the point of view of women he knew. But as with everything in history, we need to note the cultural context. It is also important to emphasise Pepys was generous to those women with whom he dallied, and frequently assisted them materially – for example, helping ensure that Deborah Willet later made a good marriage.
As for his relations with Elizabeth, he was stricken when she died of typhoid in 1669. During her long illness, and then for weeks after her death, he ignored even the most urgent correspondence and failed to attend meetings. He would never remarry.
As well as being edited for indelicacy, the first editions of the Diary were, less understandably, brutally edited for length. Braybrooke also never gave due credit to the impoverished scholar, John Smith, who made the Diary’s publication possible in the first place by spending three years decoding Pepys’ shorthand notes, over 3,100 pages.
Poor John Smith was doubly unlucky. He later discovered that all those years he had been working on his decoding, sitting daily at the same desk in Magdalen College’s library, there had been a volume on the shelf above his head which contained a key to Pepys’ code! Braybrooke nevertheless deserves much credit for first bringing Pepys to public attention.
After the death of Cromwell in 1658, and the advent of his unlucky son Richard, the aptly nicknamed “Tumbledown Dick,” powerful individuals began working increasingly openly for the return of the future king. One of these was George Downing, the Teller of the Exchequer, now immortalised in the name of a certain street! Pepys started working for Downing around this time as a clerk, and became privy to all kinds of intrigues and secrets. Clearly bursting to tell some of these to somebody, he opened his Diary on 1st January 1660, and kept it assiduously until May 1669.
The fact that Pepys wrote in code might imply that he did not want it to be published, but it was really because he did not want Elizabeth to be able to read it – or perhaps even political rivals who might come across it by chance. It is clear he always did intend for it to be published someday, albeit safely after his death. He took pains to ensure the text’s survival, by bequeathing it to Magdalen College.
Apart from any wish to be remembered by posterity, Pepys seems to have felt driven to write, as a reflection of an inner desire for order. Pepys was a man who craved neatness and system, reflected in his love of formal gardens and Renaissance architecture. Even the books in his library were lined up and organised accorded to their sizes. This is what made him an ideal administrator. As Robert Latham noted in his introduction to the 1970 edition of the Diary,
The very inditing of the quick slim symbols of shorthand probably gave him a palpable satisfaction. It is likely that the diary itself, fully and regularly kept, tidy and neat, had the effect of making life itself seem neat and tidy – the quotidian chaos reduced to order, each day’s events packaged and tied up in a rounded summary.
He gave up the diary with enormous reluctance in 1669, and only because his eyesight was failing. He closes it harrowingly, “And so I betake myself to that course which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave.”
Pepys begins his great book in what would become his trademark style – a blend of easy domesticity and great affairs of state:
Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold. I lived in Axe Yard having my wife and servant Jane, and no more in family than us three. My wife…gave me hopes of her being with child, but on the last day of the year … the hope was belied. The condition of the state was thus:
Pepys goes on to outline the tense state of politics as they stood at 1 January 1660 – tense indeed, because on that very day General Monck had moved his troops across the Tweed and began to march south. He then returns to things closer to home:
My own private condition very handsome, and esteemed rich, but indeed very poor; besides my goods of my house, and my office, which at present is somewhat uncertain… This morning (we living lately in the garret) I rose, put on my suit with great skirts, having not lately worn any other, clothes but them. Went to Mr Gunning’s chapel at Exeter House, where he made a very good sermon upon these words: — “That in the fulness of time God sent his Son, made of a woman,” &c…Dined at home in the garret, where my wife dressed the remains of a turkey, and in the doing of it she burned her hand.
No other book offers such a combination of high politics with home scenes, state secrets and sexual escapades, street life and royal anecdotes, drunken soirees and the more rarefied Royal Society. We see the Restoration, Charles II and James II, wars with the Dutch, plague and the Great Fire, and the early days of the British Empire.
As well as being a time of enormous political importance, Pepys also knew everyone who was anyone. We socialise with Wren, Dryden, Evelyn, Sloane, Halley, Hooke, Newton, Penn, Petty, Purcell, the mathematician John Wallis, and too many others to mention – and agonise with Pepys about which suit to wear to attract female attention. We even hear about his bladder stones; in March 1658, he had undergone a dangerous lithotomy to remove one, and for many years afterwards he held a banquet to mark the anniversary.
All this rich fare is served as a stew, a brilliant blend of anecdote, anxiety, fairness, good humour, insecurity, insights, irrepressible curiosity, love of gossip, public-spiritedness, showing off, simplicity and above all sincerity.
He is a man full of contradictions – confident but sometimes shy, observant but capable of naïvete, careful yet at times a risk-taker. He is genuinely committed to making the Navy better, but also profited financially from his work.
He is not himself an original thinker, but he can recognize genius and originality in others, and helps bring it out, to his, their and our benefit. He is simultaneously man of affairs, and virtuoso.
He ultimately accepts himself for what he is – and others for who they are. His lack of partisanship or sectarianism were rare at that time, and are still deeply admirable. We can all see something of ourselves in him, and so instantly hold him in affection – and we find ourselves hoping that he can weather the crises of his life, and his time. As the literary historian Kate O’Brien asked in 1944, “What could be more interesting, consoling or alarming for any of us to read?”
Claire Tomalin put it even better in 2002 – “When you turn over the last page of the Diary, you know you have been in the company of both the most ordinary and the most extraordinary writer you will ever meet.”
In April 1660, Pepys found himself sailing aboard the naval ship Naseby as Mountagu’s secretary, heading for the Netherlands to bring Charles Stuart home from Holland. Pepys gives wonderful vignettes of the little squadron’s party atmosphere, such as when he gave a party in his cabin to broach a barrel of oysters, then they sang ribald lyrics to the tune of Greensleeves.
On the return journey, Pepys fell under the romantic spell of the royal party. He was even indulgent towards Charles’s spaniels when they defecated upon the decks.
It was on the quarterdeck of the Naseby (now re-named the Royal Charles) that Pepys first heard the story of Charles’s escape after the Battle of Worcester. Pepys was an empathetic listener, but he also checked the King’s account for accuracy, and would ask the King to retell the story 20 years later, one sunny afternoon while they were watching the races at Newmarket.
Pepys was appointed ‘Clerk of the Acts of the Navy,’ and moved into the Navy Office near the Tower of London, just around the corner from his house. He knew little about naval matters at first, but he was interested, and hardworking. “So to the office,” he wrote, “where I do begin to be exact in my duty there and exacting my privileges and shall continue to do so.” In the summertime, he would often be at his desk by 4am.
And he did not confine himself to the office, but often ventured downstream, to visit Chatham, Deptford and Woolwich, where he absorbed himself in the technicalities of keel-laying, rope-making, sailmaking, timber-storing, caulking, navigation, cannon-founding, battle-tactics, fisheries, provisioning, shipboard health and discipline. The whole Diary surges with life and movement. Even the river becomes almost sentient in his account – a restless force carrying all the traffic of English history downstream and out into the vasty deeps of the world.
Back at Westminster, he would often give evidence to Parliamentary commissions enquiring into naval matters. These were highly informed and effective performances that could last up to three hours.
On 23rd April 1661, he watched the Coronation in Westminster Abbey, an event wonderfully colourful and piquant after the republican interlude. He excitedly details all the revived pomp and pageantry, but characteristically also adds earthier touches. He recorded, “I had so great a lust to piss, that I went out a little while before the King had done all his ceremonies.”
Much later, he and Elizabeth went out into the streets where there were huge bonfires and “a great many great gallants” who made them drink Charles’s health, and then drank to them. Pepys somehow got home, but as he records “…no sooner a-bed with Mr. Shepley, but my head began to hum, and I to vomit, and if ever I was foxed it was now, which I cannot say yet, because I fell asleep and slept till morning. Only when I waked I found myself wet with my spewing.”
His Diary casts aspersions on the likes of Sir William Batten and Sir William Penn, who had been capable enough as sailors, but had little appetite for administrative work, let alone ending the abuses and corruption which plagued the senior service. He stood up publicly to Mountagu, and even royals, whenever he thought they were wrong. He cavilled even at the King for his lack of focus, although in his case diplomatically only in the Diary.
In 1665 he became Surveyor General of the Victualling Office, in charge of provisioning the fleet. He helped ensure good quality foodstuffs for the men, fairly priced for the Admiralty. Many ships were in very poor condition, and so he instituted a programme of rapid yet also high-quality shipbuilding and ship-fitting.
There would be many obstacles, and even humiliations for his beloved Navy, exemplified by the Dutch raid on the Medway in 1672 – but by the time of his eventual retirement, the Navy would have doubled, from 30 poor-quality battleships totalling around 25,000 tons, to 59 ships totalling 66,000 tons, and with vastly greater firepower.
He introduced systems of training officers and pilots, and drew up regulations governing everything from shore leave to how to fly the King’s colours.
Pursers were assigned to each ship, and made to keep a cash surety, and provide complete and accurate accounts.
Captains were forbidden to trade their own merchandise, but they were also given better pay.
He also introduced effective patrols against the French pirates then plaguing the English Channel.
The Admiralty was the largest spending department of state, but for the first time in its existence it was excellently run.
As well as being increasingly well-equipped and well-managed, Pepys’ navy was increasingly morally well-armed – given a new pride and esprit de corps, and what would become lasting traditions of bravery and discipline.
On the occasion of Pepys’ official retirement, the orator of Oxford University was surely right when he told him, “Truly, sir, you have encompassed Britain with wooden walls.”
Arthur Bryant went even further in 1935, with the final volume of his three-part life of Pepys entitled Saviour of the Navy.
It seems peculiar, even reprehensible, that no warship has ever been named in his honour – although there was a short-lived naval base called HMS Pepys on the Admiralty Islands between 1945 and 1946.
Being saviour of the Navy would have been enough of a legacy for most. But Pepys’ restless mind played endlessly across even wider fields.
He helped establish the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, and helped the first Astronomer Royal get the vital equipment he needed.
In 1665, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and would be its President between 1684 and 1686. His name appears as President on the title page of the Royal Society’s most famous publication, Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica – quite a distinction for a man who only learned his times tables at 29!
He and Newton also collaborated on the establishment of the Royal Mathematical School in 1673, which still exists as part of Christ’s Hospital School, now in Horsham. Pepys would always remain committed to the school, which commitment was recognized in 1699, when he was made a Freeman of the City.
He established and maintained correspondences with a huge number of people, despite failing eyesight, on a dizzying range of subjects – architecture, botany, cartography, chemistry, entomology, explosives, fen drainage, fort-building, ghosts, metallurgy, music and optics, and yet other things.
He is perhaps most renowned for his account of the Great Fire, for which he is still name-checked even by schoolchildren: “I… got up upon one of the high places…and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge.”
He sailed upstream to inform the King, then walked back to give the King’s instructions to the Lord Mayor. Soon, his own house was threatened, and he records frantic piling up of work papers for swift removal, depositing iron chests of coin in his cellar, and carrying household goods out into his garden by moonlight, where he famously buried his wine and Parmesan cheese. We feel we can smell the smoke, and see the flickering and ominous flames.
But even in the midst of private worries, he could not help noticing everything around him. He even noticed non-human victims: “The poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.”
As well as being too free with his hands, and terribly vain, Pepys also had the parvenu’s anxious snobbery – such as when his rather rustic sister asked to live with him in Seething Lane. He eventually agreed, although “not as a sister in any respect, but as a servant.” Yet Pepys later made her son John Jackson his principal heir.
Bathos, comedy and colour are never far away from serious matter. On 18 July 1660, Pepys was presented with half a roebuck, but it smelt too strong – so he gave it to his mother! He coined the phrase “pretty, witty Nell” about Nell Gwynn, the actress who became ancestress to the Dukes of St Albans. He records the joy of sampling a new fashionable drink from South America, named “Jocolatte.” He admires the new-fangled sport of skating in St James’s Park. He hurts his feet by standing on the wheel of a cart for an hour so he could watch the execution of a notorious thief.
In July 1667, he was startled by a religious demonstration: “This day a man, a Quaker, came naked through [Westminster] Hall, only very civilly tied about the privities to avoid scandal, and with a chafing-dish of fire and brimstone burning upon his head, did pass through the Hall, crying, “Repent! repent!”
Today’s Quakers are rather less colourful.
He moans about his health – “got a great Cold, I think by pulling off my periwig so often.” Periwigs and fashionable clothes were always of moment, as in March 1667 – “To church; and with my mourning, very handsome, and new periwig, make a great show.” He writes fondly about going out on May Day in 1669 with Elizabeth:
…my wife extraordinary fine, with her flowered tabby gown…now laced exceeding pretty; and, indeed, was fine all over; and mighty earnest to go, though the day was very lowering; and she would have me put on my fine suit, which I did. And so anon we went alone through the town with our new liveries of serge, and the horses’ manes and tails tied with red ribbons, and the standards there gilt with varnish, and all clean, and green refines, that people did mightily look upon us.
At the end of that month, he took Elizabeth on a long holiday to Flanders, France and Holland. Just two weeks after they returned, Elizabeth would be dead of a fever caught while away. He must have thought of that brave May Day during his period of mourning. But death was never far away, even in that most vigorous of Londons. At his brother’s funeral, the rather Shakespearean gravedigger assures Pepys he will do the corpse “all the civility he can” in the overflowing graveyard. He adds, “I will justle them together but I will make room for him.”
By then his Diary had been put away, to avoid overstraining his eyesight. He nevertheless became a magistrate and an MP, and Deputy-Lieutenant of Huntingdonshire. He was promoted to Secretary of the Admiralty in 1673, and was twice made the Master of the navigational guild known as Trinity House, a rare distinction. He somehow found time to become briefly Master of the Clothworkers Company, a touching tribute to his father’s old calling.
Danger came with 1678’s “Popish Plot,” which alleged that Jesuits were planning the assassination of the King. The King, as you will know, disbelieved the stories but others believed, and Pepys was absurdly accused of Catholicism, selling naval secrets, and even of being complicit in murder. One of his clerks at the Navy Office was accused of being accessory to the murder of a Protestant, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey – and one of the people with whom Pepys regularly played music was rumoured to be a Jesuit. Pepys had never emphasised his religion – one of the reasons suspicion swirled around him – but had always subscribed quietly to the Church of England.
He was deprived of his Secretaryship in 1679, and sent to the Tower of London for six weeks. In the end, no charges were preferred against him – which apparently disappointed him, because he had characteristically prepared a comprehensive defence, and amassed copious evidence to expose his accusers as fools and scoundrels.
In 1683, Pepys travelled on another important voyage. When Catherine of Braganza had become Queen, part of her dowry included the Portuguese colony of Tangiers, in what is now Morocco. It proved a ruinously expensive inheritance.
The departing Portuguese had stripped the town, and so the English had to improve the harbour, build defences and provide a garrison to fend off constant attacks. In 1664, 500 English troopers were massacred by Moorish forces, and there were endless smaller problems, in an unhealthy climate of little strategic value, difficult to defend, and too far away.
Pepys had become Treasurer of the government’s Tangier Committee as long ago as 1655, so was deeply committed to the cause of the colony. But by the 1680s, the Committee was chaired by Prince Rupert of the Rhine, who was rather less committed; Pepys says all Rupert ever did at meetings was laugh and swear. The King himself had lost interest in the place, because he was expected to pay its expenses personally. There were also worries about the loyalty of the garrison, by then made up largely of Irish soldiers, with little reason to worry about English interests.
The naval force on which Pepys sailed was sent to evacuate all British nationals and abandon the city entirely – and did so, after blowing up or removing all the things of value.
Thus the first British colony in Africa, the inglorious onset of the Empire.
Ironically for someone in his profession, Pepys always suffered badly from seasickness; he nevertheless wandered the decks at night, to see singing sailors dancing the hornpipe.
In Tangiers, he noticed everything, from what he called “silly” church sermons to the “most extraordinary spider that ever I saw, at least ten times as big as an ordinary spider” that shared his room. He seems not to have minded the spider – although he did dislike the bedbugs that swarmed in everyone’s sheets.
So insatiably curious was he that he even toyed with danger, going as close as he dared to the Moorish sentries watching the town, tensely awaiting the English withdrawal – sounding almost disappointed that they had not sought to abduct him.
While he was away, his friend William Cowley found an archipelago in the South Atlantic, and named it Pepys Island. The archipelago later became more famous as the Falklands.
By 1684, Pepys was again Secretary of the Admiralty, an unusually reliable public servant and source of continuity for those times, someone held in great trust at the highest levels. Just before James II fled in 1688, he would ask Pepys to witness his will.
Pepys would very likely have been dismissed under the new dispensation, but he wanted to go anyway. Enemies still sometimes made life difficult – he was held in custody again in 1690, for three months, suspected of being a Jacobite – but afterwards, he was able to spend most of his time quietly, maintaining friendships and augmenting his library, although a planned history of the Navy sadly never materialized.
His fine new house in York Buildings on the riverfront at Westminster was a model of orderliness, shared with his former co-worker and old friend, William Hewer, and presided over by a certain Mary Skinner, who was luckily thought to be highly respectable.
After his health started to break down in 1700, he made regular extended visits to Hewer’s other house, in Clapham, and it was while he was here, in February 1703, that he was struck down with kidney disease.
On the 14th of May that year, his old friend John Evelyn found Pepys “languishing with small hope of recovery.” On the 24th, the doctor advised him to pray for speedy deliverance. Later that day, he started to convulse, and had breathing problems.
Pepys’ last hours were spent praying, and urging all in his household to be friends – appropriate for someone who had always tried to be friends with everyone. At first light he asked for the curtains and windows to be opened – symbolic, perhaps, of his lifelong yearning for enlightenment.
Asked whether his nephew John Jackson should be called, his last distinguishable word was “Yes.” Jackson came to find him “ratling in the throat and breathing very hard.” That ‘ratling’ stopped at 3.47am.
Hans Sloane helped carry out the autopsy; Pepys would have approved of this friendly yet forensic treatment. He was buried beside Elizabeth in St Olave’s Church near the Navy Office – “our own church”, he had always called it – where their monuments can still be seen.
Pepys had been, John Evelyn lamented,
a very worthy, industrious & curious person, none in England exceeding him in the knowledge of the Navy…He was universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things, skilled in music, a very great cherisher of learned men.
It was a fine salute from one great chronicler to an even greater – a suitable epitaph for a superbly alive Englishman.
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