Samuel Pepys
23 February 1633 – 26 May 1703
Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) was an English naval administrator and Member of Parliament, famous for the detailed private diary he kept from 1660 to 1669. The diary, first published in the nineteenth century, provides an unmatched eyewitness account of Restoration London, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire, and Pepys's administrative reforms helped professionalize the Royal Navy.
Lived at the same time
Well-documented people whose lives overlapped with Samuel Pepys.
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- Christopher Wren (1632–1723) Overlapped 70 years →
- Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707) Overlapped 70 years →
- Mei Wending (1633–1721) Overlapped 70 years →
- Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) Overlapped 70 years →
- John Locke (1632–1704) Overlapped 70 years →
Life events
Pepys was born above his father's tailor shop off Fleet Street, the fifth of eleven children.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgAfter attending St Paul's School in London, Pepys took his bachelor's degree at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1654.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgPepys married the fourteen-year-old Elisabeth de St Michel, daughter of a Huguenot exile, in a civil ceremony on 1 December 1655.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgOn 1 January 1660 Pepys began the shorthand diary he would keep for almost a decade, now regarded as one of the most important primary sources of the Restoration era.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgThrough the patronage of his cousin Edward Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, Pepys obtained the influential post of Clerk of the Acts, beginning his career in naval administration.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgPepys observed the fire's spread, warned King Charles II, and left one of the most vivid eyewitness accounts of the disaster in his diary.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgPepys rose to become Secretary to the Admiralty, where his reforms of naval administration and officer standards had lasting influence.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgFalsely accused of treason and of leaking naval secrets to France during the Popish Plot hysteria, Pepys was imprisoned but the charges were eventually dropped.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgPepys served as President of the Royal Society from 1684 to 1686; Newton's Principia was published under his imprimatur.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgPepys died at the Clapham home of his friend and former servant William Hewer and was buried beside his wife in St Olave's Church, London.
Source: en.wikipedia.org