post of permanent under secretary in modern times. It made him chief of the secretariat and a member of the administrating body of the navy. Though he was so ignorant of business that he did not even know the multiplication table when he first took office, he soon mastered the needful mechanical details by working early and late. He had other posts and honours, which came to him either as consequential on his clerkship or because he was a useful official. On the 23rd of July 1660 he was appointed one of the clerks of the privy seal, an office which returned him £3 a day in fees. He was made a justice of the peace. In 1662 he was appointed a younger brother of the Trinity House, and was named a commissioner for managing the affairs of Tangier, then occupied by an English garrison. In 1664 he became a member of the corporation of the Royal Fishery, to which body he was named treasurer when another official had brought the accounts into confusion. In that year he also joined the Royal Society. During the naval war with Holland (1664–67) he proved himself an indefatigable worker. As surveyor of the victualling, the whole burden of a most important department was thrown on him in addition to his regular duties. He in fact organized the department. While the plague was raging in London in 1666 he remained at his post when many of his colleagues ran away, and he manfully avowed his readiness to take the risk of disease, as others of the king’s servants faced the dangers of war. He had now gained the full confidence of the lord high admiral, the duke of York, afterwards King James II. When, on the termination of the war, the navy office was violently attacked in parliament, he was entrusted with its defence. The speech which he delivered at the bar of the House of Commons on the 5th of March 1668 passed for a complete vindication. In sober fact the charges of mismanagement were well founded, but the fault was not in the officials of the navy office only, and Pepys, who was master of the details, had no difficulty in throwing dust in the eyes of the House of Commons, which was ignorant. Nobody indeed was better acquainted with the defects of the office, for in 1668 he drew up for the duke of York two papers of inquiry and rebuke, “The Duke’s Reflections on the severall Members of the Navy Board’s Duty” and “The Duke’s answer to their severall excuses” (Harleian MS. 6003). In 1669 he travelled abroad. His success in addressing parliament gave him the ambition to become a member of the House of Commons. He stood for Aldborough, but the death of his wife, on the 10th of November 1669, prevented him from conducting his canvass in person, and he was not elected. In 1673 he was returned for Castle Rising. The validity of his election was questioned by his opponent, Mr Offley, and the committee of privilege decided against him, but the prorogation of the house prevented further action. The no-popery agitation was now growing in strength. The duke of York was driven from office by the Test Act, and Pepys was accused of “popery,” partly on the ground that he was said to keep a crucifix and altar in his house, partly because he was accused of having converted his wife to Roman Catholicism. The crucifix story broke down on examination, but there is some reason to believe that Mrs Pepys did become a Roman Catholic. Pepys was transferred by the king from the navy office to the secretaryship of the admiralty in 1673. In 1679 he was member for Harwich, and in the height of the popish plot mania he was accused, manifestly because he was a trusted servant of the duke of York, of betraying naval secrets to the French, but the charges were finally dropped. Pepys was released on bail on the 12th of February 1680. In that year he accompanied the king to Newmarket, and took down the narrative of his escape after the battle of Worcester. A proposal to make him head of King’s College, Cambridge, in 1681, came to nothing. In 1682 he accompanied the duke of York to Scotland, where the uncleanly habits of the people caused him great offence. In 1683–1684 he was engaged in arranging for the evacuation of Tangier. He visited the place and kept a diary of his voyage. In 1684 he was elected president of the Royal Society. On the accession of King James II. in 1685 he retained his place as secretary to the admiralty, to which he had been appointed by patent when James resumed the lord high admiralship (June 10, 1684), and Pepys was in effect minister for the navy. The revolution of 1688 ended his official career. He was dismissed on the 9th of March 1689, and spent the rest of his life in retirement, and, except for a brief imprisonment on the charge of Jacobite intrigue in 1690, in peace. He died at his house in Clapham on the 25th of May 1703. His last years were passed in correspondence with his friends, who included Evelyn and Dryden, or in arranging his valuable library. It was left on his death to his nephew, John Jackson, son of his sister Pauline, and in 1724, by the terms of his will, was transferred to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where it is still preserved.
Such was the outward and visible life of Samuel Pepys, the public servant whose diligence was rewarded by success. The other Pepys, whom Sir Walter Scott called “that curious fellow,” was revealed in 1825, when his secret diary was partly published. The first entry was made on the 1st of January 1660, the last on the 31st of May 1669, when the increasing weakness of his eyes, which had given him trouble since 1664, compelled him to cease writing in the conditions he imposed upon himself. If there is in all the literature of the world a book which can be called “unique” with strict propriety it is this. Confessions, diaries, journals, autobiographies abound, but such a revelation of a man’s self has not yet been discovered. The diary is a thing apart by virtue of three qualities which are rarely found in perfection when separate and nowhere else in combination. It was secret; it was full; and it was honest. That Pepys meant it for his own eye alone is clear. He wrote it in Shelton’s system of tachygraphy published in 1641, which he complicated by using foreign languages or by varieties of his own invention whenever he had to record the passages least fit to be seen by his servants or by “all the world.” Relying on his cypher he put down whatever he saw, heard, felt or imagined, every motion of his mind, every action of his body. And he noted all this, not as he desired it to appear to others, but as it was to his seeing. The result is “a human document” of amazing vitality. The man who displays himself to himself in the diary is often odious, greedy, cowardly, casuistical, brutal. He tells how he kicked his cook, and blacked his wife’s eye, and was annoyed when others saw what he had done. He notes how he compelled the wives of unfortunate men who came to draw their husband’s pay at the navy office to prostitute themselves; how he took “compliments,” that is to say gifts, from all who had business to do with the navy office; how he got tipsy and suffered from sick headache; how he repented, made vows of sobriety, and found casuistical excuses for breaking them. The style is as peculiar as the matter—colloquial, garrulous, racy from simplicity of language, and full of the unconscious humour which is never absent from a truthful account of the workings of nature in the average sensual man. His position enabled him to see much. His complete harmony with the animalism and vulgarity of the Restoration makes him a valuable witness for his time. To his credit must be put the facts that he knew the animalism and vulgarity to be what they were; that he had a real love of music and gave help to musicians, Cesare Morelli for instance; that though he made money out of his places he never allowed bad work to be done for the navy if he could help it; that he was a hard worker; and that he had a capacity for such acts of kindness and generosity as are compatible with a gross temperament and a pedestrian ambition.
The diary, written in a very small hand in six volumes, was included among his books at Magdalene. On the publication of Evelyn’s diary in 1818, the then head of Magdalene, the Hon. and Rev. George Neville, decided to publish Pepys’s. Part of the MS. was deciphered by his cousin Lord Grenville. The library contained both the short and the long-hand copies of Pepys’s account of King Charles’s adventures, but its books were so little known by the curators that this key was overlooked. The MS. was deciphered by John Smith, afterwards rector of Baldock in Hertfordshire, between 1819 and 1822. The first and partial edition, edited by Richard Neville Griffin, 3rd Lord Braybrooke, appeared in 1825 in two volumes quarto (London). It attracted great attention and was reviewed by Sir Walter Scott in the Quarterly for January 1826. A second edition in two octavo
