His cousin, Edward Viscount Montagu helped him get his first post with the Navy Board a Government office responsible for the provisioning and maintenance of ships. From —69, Pepys kept a diary, which recorded daily life and contemporary gossip as well as his work for the Navy. The diary is notable as it provides a record of some very important events in English history, including the Restoration of Charles II in ; the Great Plague of ; and the Great Fire of London in Pepys is also noteworthy as a source of information on the Second Anglo-Dutch War of —67, a seaborne conflict in which he was deeply involved as a Navy official.
Pepys discovered that cheating and theft had ruined standards of supplies and shipbuilding. After the Third Anglo-Dutch War —74 , sailors complained their food was so bad that it included mouldy bread and diseased meat. Instead of writing a considered narrative, such as would be presented by the historian or biographer or autobiographer, Pepys shows us hundreds of scenes from life - civil servants in committee, MP's in debate, concerts of music, friends on a river outing.
Events are jumbled together, sermons with amorous assignations, domestic tiffs with national crises. The diary's contents are shaped also by another factor - its geographical setting. It is a London diary, with only occasional glimpses of the countryside. Yet as a panorama of the seventeenth-century capital it is incomparable, more comprehensive than Boswell's account of the London a century later because Pepys moved in a wider world.
As luck would have it, Pepys wrote in the decade when London suffered two of its great disasters - the Plague of and the Great Fire of the following year. His descriptions of both - agonisingly vivid - achieve their effect by being something more than superlative reporting; they are written with compassion.
As always with Pepys it is people, not literary effects, that matter. The rest of Pepys's life after the spring of - some 34 years - is not recorded in the diary. To some extent it is recorded in history. He was Secretary to the Admiralty in , and in the same year became a Member of Parliament. He commanded the naval organisation during the Dutch War of , and was responsible for some important developments after it - a shipbuilding programme of unprecedented dimensions, and the introduction of half-pay for officers which, together with other reforms, laid the basis for a professional naval service for the first time in English history.
He was President of the Royal Society from Image: Getty. Although the church survived the raging flames of , it was not so fortunate during World War II. Suffering extensive bomb damage, All Hallows was restored in and stands today next to the rushing traffic of Byward Street—a small church made famous by a diary entry written more than three centuries ago.
Despite his history with women, Pepys never remarried but went on with his official career until , regarded for as long as he lived as a great authority on naval matters. In he moved his household to 12 Buckingham St.
The cream-colored house at No. Nine years later, in , Pepys once more moved, just down the street to a somewhat grander house at No. It was here on Buckingham Street that Pepys lived for most of his retirement from public service, beginning in A passionate bookman, Pepys now had the leisure to read, search for just the right volume for his library, make music and meet and exchange letters with friends such as John Evelyn, Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren, and William Penn. Elsewhere in the city, in an area where Pepys would have felt right at home, a small museum dedicated to his memory was opened in in one of the few timber-framed buildings to have survived the Great Fire.
With richly carved wooden paneling, windows flourished with stained glass and an ornate 17th-century ceiling said to be the finest example of Jacobean plasterwork in London, it is an appropriate setting for this interesting collection of Pepys memorabilia.
Along with prints, maps and documents pertinent to Pepys and some furniture said to have been his, there is a framed letter written by him in and a page from a 17th-century satire attacking Pepys and his clerk Will Hewer for the bribes they took at the Navy Office.
Although this site at 17 Fleet St. His library survives there—intact and complete—just as he directed in his will. Beautifully bound in calf and tooled in gold, the 3, volumes are arranged in the exact order Pepys specified in the oak bookcases that he had made over the years by dockyard joiners.
Of special interest, of course, is the original manuscript of his great diary—neatly handwritten in ink in shorthand, with occasional personal or place names in longhand. It is a remarkable accomplishment. It has been said that Samuel Pepys would be remembered today even if he had not written his immortal diary. As the great administrator of the navy, president of the Royal Society and friend to many of the great intellects of his time, his place in history is secure.
But to stand in the Pepys Library, surrounded by his books, the presses and the diary he so meticulously labored over, is to feel the essence of Samuel Pepys.
It is that which remains his most eloquent and enduring memorial. Search term:. Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets CSS if you are able to do so.
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