The Great Fire

Samuel Pepys

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Time Line:

• Born 23 February 1633
• Educated at St. Paul's School and Magdalene College, Cambridge employed from c. 1654 as a man of business to his cousin Edward Mountagu (Councillor of State Samunder Oliver Cromwell; later Earl of Sandwich)
• In 1655 he had married Elizabeth St. Michel, daughter of a refugee Huguenot
• junior clerk in the Exchequer 1655-1660
• Clerk to the Navy Board 1660-1673
• member of the Tangier Committee 1662-79 (and its Treasurer 1665-1679)
• Secretary to the Admiralty 1673-1679
• Secretary to the King for Naval Affairs 1684-1689
• Member of Parliament 1673-9, 1679 and 1685-1688
• Fellow of the Royal Society from 1665 (President 1884-1886)
• He resigned from the Admiralty at the Revolution in February 1689
• died on 26 May 1703 (Elizabeth Pepys died childless in 1669. Pepys never married again, but in his will left a legacy to Mary Skynner, daughter of a London merchant, who had been his companion for thirty-three years.)

From Pepys: A Biography by Richard Ollard: "The contrasts, not to say contradictions, of his character, emotions, tastes, opinions, conduct and circumstances challenge our understanding. Partly, no doubt, they can be explained by his extraordinary capacity for absorbing experience and making it nourish the consciousness that neither age nor disease could blunt or blur...His ear for the music of life always kept him in time; he could make a harmony of the trials and infirmities of old age as he had of the hot idleness of youth and the rush-hour traffic of middle age. 

"The artist in Pepys lies at the root of his nature. A passion for perception and a passion for imposing order on everything he perceived run through and through his life. He was an aesthete, if not after the Walter Pater's own heart at least after his famous formula:

'Every moment some form grown perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us--for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but the experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in the purest energy?

"Pepys possessed to a high degree the power of empathy, of entering into a mind or a milieu very different from his own and, as he did so, changing the colour and the tone of his mentality with the naturalness of a chameleon. Except that unlike the chameleon he was in some way changes and enriched by his experience. Rather, like Ulysses, he was a part of all that he had met."