Diary of Samuel Pepys — Volume 69: November 1668

The condition of the State was thus. The officers of the army all forced to yield. Lawson lie[s] still in the River and Monke is with his army in Scotland. Only my Lord Lambert is not yet come in to the Parliament; nor is it expected that he will, without being forced to it. The entries from the first few months were filled with news of General George Monck 's march on London. In April and May of that year, he was encountering problems with his wife, and he accompanied Montagu's fleet to the Netherlands to bring Charles II back from exile. Pepys stopped writing his diary in His eyesight began to trouble him and he feared that writing in dim light was damaging his eyes.

He did imply in his last entries that he might have others write his diary for him, but doing so would result in a loss of privacy and it seems that he never went through with those plans. In the end, Pepys' fears were unjustified and he lived another 34 years without going blind, but he never took to writing his diary again. However, Pepys dictated a journal for two months in —70 as a record of his dealings with the Commissioners of Accounts at that period. The diary mostly covers work-related matters. On the Navy Board, Pepys proved to be a more able and efficient worker than colleagues in higher positions.

This often annoyed Pepys and provoked much harsh criticism in his diary. Pepys learned arithmetic from a private tutor and used models of ships to make up for his lack of first-hand nautical experience, and ultimately came to play a significant role in the board's activities.

Through Sandwich, he was involved in the administration of the short-lived English colony at Tangier. He joined the Tangier committee in August when the colony was first founded and became its treasurer in He was appointed to a commission of the royal fishery on 8 April Pepys' job required him to meet many people to dispense money and make contracts. He often laments how he "lost his labour" having gone to some appointment at a coffee house or tavern , only to discover that the person was not there whom he was seeking.

These occasions were a constant source of frustration to Pepys. Pepys' diary provides a first-hand account of the Restoration , and it is also notable for its detailed accounts of several major events of the s, along with the lesser known diary of John Evelyn. In relation to the Plague and Fire, C. As always with Pepys it is people, not literary effects, that matter. His colleagues were either engaged elsewhere or incompetent, and Pepys had to conduct a great deal of business himself. He excelled under the pressure, which was extreme due to the complexity and under-funding of the Royal Navy.

His idea was accepted, and he was made surveyor-general of victualling in October Pepys wrote about the Second Anglo-Dutch War: And King Charles II said: In , with the war lost, Pepys helped to discharge the navy. In June , they conducted their Raid on the Medway , broke the defensive chain at Gillingham , and towed away the Royal Charles , one of the Royal Navy's most important ships.

As he had done during the Fire and the Plague, Pepys again removed his wife and his gold from London. The Dutch raid was a major concern in itself, but Pepys was personally placed under a different kind of pressure: The war ended in August and, on 17 October, the House of Commons created a committee of "miscarriages". The Board did face some allegations regarding the Medway raid, but they could exploit the criticism already attracted by commissioner of Chatham Peter Pett to deflect criticism from themselves.

The Board was, however, criticised for its use of tickets to pay seamen.

These tickets could only be exchanged for cash at the Navy's treasury in London. It was, in the words of C. Knighton, a "virtuoso performance". The commission was followed by an investigation led by a more powerful authority, the commissioners of accounts. They met at Brooke House, Holborn and spent two years scrutinising how the war had been financed. In , Pepys had to prepare detailed answers to the committee's eight "Observations" on the Navy Board's conduct. In , he was forced to defend his own role. A seaman's ticket with Pepys' name on it was produced as incontrovertible evidence of his corrupt dealings but, thanks to the intervention of the king, Pepys emerged from the sustained investigation relatively unscathed.

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Outbreaks of plague were not particularly unusual events in London; major epidemics had occurred in , , and He did not live in cramped housing, he did not routinely mix with the poor, and he was not required to keep his family in London in the event of a crisis. On 16 August he wrote:. Jealous of every door that one sees shut up, lest it should be the plague; and about us two shops in three, if not more, generally shut up.

He also chewed tobacco as a protection against infection, and worried that wig-makers might be using hair from the corpses as a raw material. Furthermore, it was Pepys who suggested that the Navy Office should evacuate to Greenwich , although he did offer to remain in town himself. He later took great pride in his stoicism. In the early hours of 2 September , Pepys was awakened by his servant who had spotted a fire in the Billingsgate area.

He decided that the fire was not particularly serious and returned to bed. Shortly after waking, his servant returned and reported that houses had been destroyed and that London Bridge was threatened. Pepys went to the Tower to get a better view.

Without returning home, he took a boat and observed the fire for over an hour. In his diary, Pepys recorded his observations as follows:. I down to the water-side, and there got a boat and through bridge, and there saw a lamentable fire. Poor Michell's house, as far as the Old Swan, already burned that way, and the fire running further, that in a very little time it got as far as the Steeleyard, while I was there.

Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that layoff; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. And among other things, 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. Having staid, and in an hour's time seen the fire: The wind was driving the fire westward, so he ordered the boat to go to Whitehall and became the first person to inform the king of the fire.

According to his entry of 2 September , Pepys recommended to the king that homes be pulled down in the path of the fire in order to stem its progress. Accepting this advice, the king told him to go to Lord Mayor Thomas Bloodworth and tell him to start pulling down houses.

Pepys took a coach back as far as St Paul's Cathedral before setting off on foot through the burning city. He found the Lord Mayor, who said, "Lord! I have been pulling down houses; but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it. Later, he returned to Whitehall, then met his wife in St. In the evening, they watched the fire from the safety of Bankside. Pepys writes that "it made me weep to see it". Returning home, Pepys met his clerk Tom Hayter who had lost everything. Hearing news that the fire was advancing, he started to pack up his possessions by moonlight.

A cart arrived at 4 a.

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Many of his valuables, including his diary, were sent to a friend from the Navy Office at Bethnal Green. By then, he believed that Seething Lane was in grave danger, so he suggested calling men from Deptford to help pull down houses and defend the king's property. Pen and I to Tower-streete, and there met the fire burning three or four doors beyond Mr. Batten not knowing how to remove his wine, did dig a pit in the garden, and laid it in there; and I took the opportunity of laying all the papers of my office that I could not otherwise dispose of.

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And in the evening Sir W. Pen and I did dig another, and put our wine in it; and I my Parmazan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things. Pepys had taken to sleeping on his office floor; on Wednesday, 5 September, he was awakened by his wife at 2 a. She told him that the fire had almost reached All Hallows-by-the-Tower and that it was at the foot of Seething Lane.

In the following days, Pepys witnessed looting, disorder, and disruption. On 7 September, he went to Paul's Wharf and saw the ruins of St Paul's Cathedral, of his old school, of his father's house, and of the house in which he had had his stone removed. The diary gives a detailed account of Pepys' personal life. He liked wine, plays, and the company of other people. He also spent time evaluating his fortune and his place in the world.

He was always curious and often acted on that curiosity, as he acted upon almost all his impulses. Periodically, he would resolve to devote more time to hard work instead of leisure. For example, in his entry for New Year's Eve, , he writes: Pepys was one of the most important civil servants of his age, and was also a widely cultivated man, taking an interest in books, music, the theatre and science. He was passionately interested in music; he composed, sang, and played for pleasure, and even arranged music lessons for his servants. He played the lute , viol , violin, flageolet , recorder and spinet to varying degrees of proficiency.

He was known to be brutal to his servants, once beating a servant Jane with a broom until she cried. Pepys was an investor in the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa , which held the monopoly in England on trading along the west coast of Africa in gold , silver , ivory and slaves. Propriety did not prevent him from engaging in a number of extramarital liaisons with various women that were chronicled in his diary, often in some detail, and generally using a cocktail of languages English, French, Spanish and Latin when relating the intimate details.

The most dramatic of these encounters was with Deborah Willet , a young woman engaged as a companion for Elisabeth Pepys. On 25 October , Pepys was surprised by his wife as he embraced Deb Willet; he writes that his wife "coming up suddenly, did find me imbracing the girl con [with] my hand sub [under] su [her] coats; and endeed I was with my main [hand] in her cunny.

I was at a wonderful loss upon it and the girl also Pepys first met Knep on 6 December He described her as "pretty enough, but the most excellent, mad-humoured thing, and sings the noblest that I ever heard in my life. Knep provided Pepys with backstage access and was a conduit for theatrical and social gossip. When they wrote notes to each other, Pepys signed himself "Dapper Dickey", while Knep was " Barbry Allen " that popular song was an item in her musical repertory.

The diary was written in one of the many standard forms of shorthand used in Pepys' time, in this case called tachygraphy and devised by Thomas Shelton. It is clear from its content that it was written as a purely personal record of his life and not for publication, yet there are indications that Pepys took steps to preserve the bound manuscripts of his diary. He wrote it out in fair copy from rough notes, and he also had the loose pages bound into six volumes, catalogued them in his library with all his other books, and is likely to have suspected that eventually someone would find them interesting.

This tree resumes, in a more compact form and with a few additional details, trees published elsewhere in a box-like form. Pepys' health suffered from the long hours that he worked throughout the period of the diary. Specifically, he believed that his eyesight had been affected by his work. Pepys and his wife took a holiday to France and the Low Countries in June—October ; on their return, Elisabeth fell ill and died on 10 November Pepys never remarried, but he did have a long-term housekeeper named Mary Skinner who was assumed by many of his contemporaries to be his mistress and sometimes referred to as Mrs.



In he became an Elder Brother of Trinity House and served in this capacity until ; he was Master of Trinity House in — and again in — In he was involved with the establishment of the Royal Mathematical School at Christ's Hospital , which was to train 40 boys annually in navigation, for the benefit of the Royal Navy and the English Merchant Navy. In he was appointed a Governor of Christ's Hospital and for many years he took a close interest in its affairs.

Among his papers are two detailed memoranda on the administration of the school. In , after the successful conclusion of a seven-year campaign to get the master of the Mathematical School replaced by a man who knew more about the sea, he was rewarded for his service as a Governor by being made a Freeman of the City of London. He also served as Master without ever having been a Freeman or Liveryman of the Clothworkers' Company He was elected along with Sir Anthony Deane , a Harwich alderman and leading naval architect, to whom Pepys had been patron since By May of that year, they were under attack from their political enemies.

Pepys resigned as Secretary to the Admiralty. They were imprisoned in the Tower of London on suspicion of treasonable correspondence with France, specifically leaking naval intelligence. The charges are believed to have been fabricated under the direction of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury. They were released in July, but proceedings against them were not dropped until June Though he had resigned from the Tangier committee in , in he was sent to Tangier to assist Lord Dartmouth with the evacuation and abandonment of the English colony.

After six months' service, he travelled back through Spain accompanied by the naval engineer Edmund Dummer , returning to England after a particularly rough passage on 30 March The phantom Pepys Island , alleged to be near South Georgia , was named after him in , having been first "discovered" during his tenure at the Admiralty. From to , he was active not only as Secretary for the Admiralty, but also as MP for Harwich. He had been elected MP for Sandwich , but this election was contested and he immediately withdrew to Harwich. When James fled the country at the end of , Pepys's career also came to an end.



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He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in and served as its President from 1 December to 30 November Isaac Newton 's Principia Mathematica was published during this period, and its title page bears Pepys' name. There is a probability problem called the " Newton—Pepys problem " that arose out of correspondence between Newton and Pepys about whether one is more likely to roll at least one six with six dice or at least two sixes with twelve dice. He was imprisoned on suspicion of Jacobitism from May to July and again in June , but no charges were ever successfully brought against him. After his release, he retired from public life at age He moved out of London ten years later to a house in Clapham owned by his friend William Hewer , who had begun his career working for Pepys in the admiralty.

Pepys lived there until his death on 26 May Diary of Samuel Pepys — Volume January Diary of Samuel Pepys — Volume February Diary of Samuel Pepys — Volume May Diary of Samuel Pepys — Volume March Diary of Samuel Pepys — Volume December Diary of Samuel Pepys — Volume July Diary of Samuel Pepys — Volume August Diary of Samuel Pepys — Volume September Diary of Samuel Pepys — Volume October Diary of Samuel Pepys — Volume