The materials for the administrative history of the Royal Navy from the Restoration to the Revolution are largely contributed by Cambridge.

The section of the Pepysian Library at Magdalene which Samuel Pepys classified as 'Sea Manuscripts' contains 114 volumes, the contents of which cover a wide field of naval history. Pepys's leading motive in collecting these is probably to be found in his projected 'History of the Navy.' Early in his career he thought of writing a 'History of the Dutch War,' 'it being a thing I much desire, and sorts mightily with my genius.'[1] Later on the design expanded into a complete naval history, upon which, at the time of his death, he was supposed to have been engaged for many years. Evelyn writes in his Diary on 26 May, 1703: 'This day died Mr Samuel Pepys, a very worthy, industrious, and curious person, none in England exceeding him in knowledge of the navy.... He had for divers years under his hand the History of the Navy, or Navalia as he called it; but how far advanced, and what will follow of his, is left, I suppose, to his sister's son.' Pepys's correspondence with Evelyn and Sir William Dugdale suggests that it would have included in its scope the antiquities of the Navy and possibly the history of navigation, as well as administrative history; and this view is supported by his selection of 'sea' manuscripts for his Library.

These manuscripts may be roughly classified in three groups:

(i) Official documents of Pepys's own time, the presence of which in the Library may be explained by the predatory habits of retiring officials in his day. Among these are to be found collections of real importance for the administrative history of the navy during his time, such as (1) Naval and Admiralty Precedents from 1660 to 1688—described as 'a collection of naval forms and other papers, serving for information and precedents in most of the principal occasions of the Admiralty and Navy calling for the same'; (2) Admiralty Letters, 14 volumes containing the whole of the ordinary correspondence which passed out of Pepys's office during his two Secretaryships, 1673-1679 and 1684-1688[2]—the equivalent of the modern letter-copying books, but in those days transcribed afresh with laborious care by a staff of clerks; (3) the Admiralty Journal, the minute-book of the Commission of the Admiralty from 1674 to 1679; (4) Naval Minutes, a volume in which Pepys made miscellaneous memoranda, many of them notes for his projected History; and (5) the Navy White Book, in which he noted abuses in shorthand, and wrote down what he called 'matters for future reflection' arising out of the Second Dutch War.

(ii) A second group of papers consists of official and unofficial documents—many of them acquired or copied at some expense—brought together deliberately in order to serve as material for the projected 'History of the Navy.' These include (1) a copy of Sir William Monson's Naval Discourses; (2) copious extracts from naval authorities and historians carefully indexed; (3) Penn's Naval Collections, being 'a collection of several manuscripts, taken out of Sir William Penn's closet, relating to the affairs of the Navy'; (4) various volumes relating to shipbuilding and navigation, including the curious and valuable work entitled Fragments of Ancient Shipwrightry and Sir Anthony Deane's Doctrine of Naval Architecture. This last contains delicate and elaborate drawings of a ship of each rate, and Evelyn records in his Diary under date 28 January, 1682, the remarkable impression which a sight of it made upon him: 'Mr Pepys, late Secretary to the Admiralty, showed me a large folio containing the whole mechanic part and art of building royal ships and men-of-war, made by Sir Anthony Deane, being so accurate a piece from the very keel to the lead block, rigging, guns, victualling, manning, and even to every individual pin and nail, in a method so astonishing and curious, with a draught, both geometrical and in perspective, and several sections, that I do not think the world can shew the like. I esteem this book as an extraordinary jewel.' There also falls into this group (5) the large and important collection in eleven volumes entitled by Pepys A Miscellany of Matters Historical, Political, and Naval. This contains copies of 1438 documents, transcribed from various sources, and ranging from a complete copy in 114 folio pages of Sir Philip Meadows's work on the Sovereignty of the Seas down to 'A true Copy of the Great Turke his Stile which he most commonly writeth in His great Affaires.' They include documents relating to naval abuses; papers concerning salutes and the history of the flag, shipbuilding, victualling, and finance; a number of patents, commissions, and lists of ships; transcripts from the Black Book of the Admiralty; and collections relating to the Shipwrights' Company and to the Corporation of Trinity House.

(iii) The third group consists of books and papers which specially appealed to Pepys's characteristic curiosity, and have no direct bearing upon naval history. The line between this and the second group cannot, however, be sharply drawn, as few of the 'Sea Manuscripts' are merely curious, and irrelevant to the history of the navy as Pepys himself interpreted it. The contents of this group are not important for our present purpose, but one interesting fact may be noted. The inclusion in the Miscellanies of papers relating to Sir William Petty's calculations and experiments, and of a copy of 'A Discourse made by Sir Robert Southwell before the Royal Society, 8 April, 1675, touching Water,' suggests that Pepys's scientific interests were genuine, and were not due, as has been suggested, to a desire to commend himself to Charles II.

It is fortunate for the student of naval administration during the Restoration period that the 'Sea Manuscripts' in the Pepysian Library include two 'Discourses'[3] upon naval abuses written at the beginning of the period, which enable us to understand some of the difficulties with which Pepys and his colleagues had to contend. The Second Discourse by John Hollond, in succession Paymaster, Commissioner, and Surveyor of the Navy under the Commonwealth Government, following a First Discourse of 1638, is dated 1659; and the Discourse by Sir Robert Slyngesbie, a royalist naval commander, made Comptroller of the Navy on the King's return, is dated 1660. These give us the criticisms of a Parliamentarian of administrative experience and those of a royalist of experience at sea, made at the Restoration and supplying an excellent groundwork for the study of the period which followed it.

There is no time to traverse the whole field of the Discourses, but certain points may be considered by way of illustration.

1. They bring into relief the remarkable durability of naval abuses. John Hollond was not the first writer to denounce abuses in the navy. This had been a fruitful topic for anonymous writers long before his day, and if the scattered papers on the subject were collected they would constitute a complete literature. The charges begin at least as early as the time of Hawkyns, and one writer[4] accuses him of what has always been regarded as one of the more modern refinements of cheating—the manufacture of a complete set of false books and vouchers for the purpose of baffling enquiry. The Pepysian Library contains copies of a number of exposures ranging from 1587 to 1611. The Reports of the Commissions of 1608 and 1618, and in a lesser degree of that of 1626, are of special importance in the history of the evolution of fraud. Sir William Monson, who in 1635 'turned physician' and studied 'how to cure the malignant diseases of corruption' that had 'crept in and infected his Majesty's whole navy,'[5] assigns some passages in his Naval Tracts to naval abuses; and in 1636 the Earl of Northumberland, fresh from the experience of a naval command, denounces them in a state paper to the King in Council[6]. Hollond only develops in detail earlier themes, and Pepys, who thought very highly of his Discourses, 'they hitting the very diseases of the navy which we are troubled with now-a-days,'[7] takes up the same tale. And such is the tenacity of life exhibited by a well-established naval abuse, that a Parliamentary enquiry of 1783[8] into the Victualling Department at Portsmouth revealed malpractices of a kind very similar to those described by Hollond. The keys of the victualling storehouses had been entrusted to improper recipients, who had access to the stores at all hours; certain persons kept hogs in the King's storehouses, which were 'fed with the King's serviceable biscuit'; planks, spars, staves, and barrels were converted to private use; 'mops and brooms' from the store were appropriated by an official who 'kept a shop and dealt in those articles'; the King's wine was drawn off in large quantities 'in bottles in a clandestine manner'; certificates were granted for stores before they were actually received, and for articles received short, these being signed in blank by the clerk of the check beforehand; it was a 'common practice' to send in bags of bread deficient in weight; the accounts were imperfectly kept, and showed enormous deficiencies of stores; by collusion with the contractor stores were accepted that were 'of improper quality and not according to contract'; and the victualling board paid excessive prices to a bread contractor with whom they were in collusion and refused to allow others to tender.

2. Let me give you next a few illustrations of the kind of abuse which Hollond and his predecessors had pointed out, and with which Pepys and his colleagues had to deal.

(a) Hollond, like Pepys, appears to have had a genuine sympathy for the sorrows of the 'poor seaman,' and he complains bitterly of the long delays in paying wages; the 'intolerable abuse to poor seamen in their wages' by naval captains' who are of late turned merchants, and have and do lay magazines of clothes, ... tobacco, strong waters, and such like commodities into their ships upon pretence of relieving poor seamen in their wants, but indeed for no other reason than their private profit'[9]; the practice of discharging sick men without adequate funds to take them home; and the payment of wages by tickets instead of cash, thus creating a depreciated paper currency.

(b) Hollond also speaks strongly against the practice of using the State's labour in the gardens or grounds of officials, and the State's materials in repairing private houses or sumptuously decorating official residences, 'by painting, paving, and other ornamental tricking.'[10] Here he attacks a longstanding abuse, for a writer of 1597 had already charged the Comptroller of the Navy with employing five labourers from the dockyard 'by the space of half a year' at his house at Chatham 'about the making of a bowling alley and planting of trees,'[11] and in 1603 Phineas Pett was accused of appropriating the King's timber 'to make a bridge into his meadow' and to set up 'posts to hang clothes on in his garden,' and also labour for the same[12]. It is true that Pett's accuser is not above suspicion, for he begins his philippic with an artless exposition of his motives: 'In the last year of the Queen's reign, I, seeing some abuses by Phineas Pett, told him he had not done his duty. He strook me with his cudgel. I told him he had been better he had held his hand, for he should pay for it.' Pett was in some respects a calumniated man, but this particular kind of peculation is more easily justified to the official conscience than any other, and there is nothing inherently improbable in the accusation.

(c) The combination of captains and pursers to return false musters, or to present men to receive pay who never served, was another longstanding abuse. There was in the navy a recognised system of drawing pay for non-existent persons to which no discredit attached, for it was the regular way of giving the officers extra pay. Thus the captains were allowed a 'dead pay' apiece on the sea-books 'for their retinues'; and in harbour no less than four varieties of dead pay were recognised, including wages and victuals paid to men for keeping ships 'which long since had no being.' We also hear of an allowance demanded in the Narrow Seas 'for a preacher and his man, though no such devotion be ever used on board.' The same principle appears in the 18th century in connexion with what were known as 'widows' men.' The captain was authorised to enter one or two fictitious persons in every hundred men of his ship's complement, and the wages drawn in their names and the value of the victuals to which they would have been entitled were applied to the relief of the widows of officers and seamen who had served in the navy[13]. In the 16th and 17th centuries, however, the established principle was liable to a variety of fraudulent applications. A paper of 1603 gives a circumstantial account of a case in which the companies of a squadron of four ships were mustered, and it was found that of 1250 men charged for, only 958 were actually serving, the King being 'abused in the pay of 292 men, which for four months, the least time of their employment,' was £800[14]. The Report of the Commission of 1608 explains how this could happen, for 'the captains, being for the most part poor gentlemen, did mend their fortunes by combining with the pursers'[15]; and Hollond, in his First Discourse, urges as a remedy 'an increase of means from the King' for 'all subordinate ministers acting in the navy,' since 'for want thereof' they are 'necessitated to one of these two particulars, either to live knaves or die beggars—and sometimes to both.'[16]

(d) The danger of collusion among officials was one of the chief difficulties in the way of would-be reformers, and just as collusion between the captains and the pursers defrauded the King in the matter of pay, so collusion between the victuallers and the pursers defrauded the King over the provision of victuals. Sir William Monson, in his Naval Tracts, gives instances of such collusion, and shews how easily it can be managed. Thus the victualler and the purser would contract between themselves for the purser to be allowed to victual a certain number of men on board each ship, paying the victualler for the privilege but making his own profit on the victuals he supplied. 'Which,' says Monson, 'besides that it breeds a great inconvenience, for the purser's unreasonable griping the sailors of their victuals, and plucking it, as it were, out of their bellies, it makes them become weak, sick, and feeble, and then follows an infection and inability to do their labour, or else uproars, mutinies, and disorders ensue among the company.'[17] Even if the officers of the ship did their duty, it was sometimes the case that the higher authorities ashore intervened from corrupt motives. Monson tells us that when the James was taking in victuals in Tilbury Hope, 'there appeared a certain proportion of beef and pork able with its scent to have poisoned the whole company, but by the carefulness of the quartermasters it was found unserviceable. Yet after it was refused by the said officers of the ship, and lay upon the hatches unstowed, some of the Officers of the Navy repaired aboard and, by their authority and great anger, forced it to be taken in for good victuals.... My observation to this point is that, though the Officers of the Navy have nothing to do with the victualling part, yet it is likely there is a combination betwixt the one and the other, like to a mayor of a corporation, a baker, who for that year will favour the brewer that shall the next year do the like to his trade when he becomes mayor.'[18] Hollond's remedy for these abuses was to abolish the victualling contractor altogether, and for the State to take over the victualling by means of a victualling department[19]. This system of victualling 'upon account,' as it was called, was actually adopted from 1655 to the Restoration, and again after 1683; but the difficulties were not altogether met by the change, for the officials who victualled 'upon account' were liable to collusion with the vendors of victuals from whom they bought, and in this case the King's service suffered in a different way.

(e) The administrative defects of the victualling recurred on almost as serious a scale in the department of stores, and great complaints are made, both by John Hollond and the earlier writers, of the bad quality of cordage and timber and of the frauds connected with their purveyance. Cordage would be entered by the storekeeper as heavier than it weighed; old cordage would be sold at absurdly low prices to the minor officials of the dockyard; and materials still fit for service would be condemned as unserviceable by an official who himself acted as a contractor for purchasing unserviceable stores[20]. The inefficiency of the surveyors of timber led them to purchase bad materials[21], and their dishonesty provoked them to glut the King's stores with defective timber at exorbitant prices[22] in order to favour the monopolist or merchant with whom they were in profitable collusion.

The worst and most corrupt period of naval administration was the reign of James I, and by the Restoration the navy was on a higher plane of efficiency and honesty; but the criticisms of such writers as Hollond and Slyngesbie shew how much remained for the reformer to do. It is remarkable that the period of the later Stuarts, so deeply sunk in political corruption, produced a great naval organizer and reformer in the person of Samuel Pepys.

There are 17 different ways of spelling the Diarist's name, but only three of pronouncing it. The descendants of his sister Paulina, now represented by the family of Pepys Cockerell, pronounce it Peeps; this is also the established tradition at Magdalene, and is probably the way in which Samuel himself pronounced it. The branch of the Pepys family which is now represented by the Earl of Cottenham, pronounce their name Peppis. The British public calls it Peps, and this is the only pronunciation in favour of which there is no family or other tradition. An epigram contributed to the Graphic in November, 1891, not only comes to a wrong conclusion about the pronunciation, but is also full of misleading statements about the man:

But is he nothing more than 'the talkative Samuel,' 'the delightful old Diarist,' 'the garrulous gossip'? Even 'old' is the wrong epithet unless it is restricted to historical antiquity, for Pepys was not 27 when he began the Diary[23], and only 36 when the partial failure of his eyesight compelled him, to his great regret, to give it up, 'which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave.'[24] Yet he lived to be 70 years of age, and although for part of his career he was out of office, he certainly became, what Monck had called him earlier with exaggerated compliment, 'the right hand of the navy.'[25] The maturity of his powers lies outside the period of the Diary, and it is his later life that makes good his claim to be regarded as one of the best public officials who ever served the State. In fact, Pepys's Diary is only a by-product of the life of Samuel Pepys.

Nevertheless the Diary, in spite of its infinite accumulations of unimportant detail, and its conscientious record of small vices, shews us the great official in the making. Let me give two illustrations, one on the lower levels of the Diary and the other where it reaches its highest plane.

30 May, 1660: 'All this morning making up my accounts, in which I counted that I had made myself now worth about £80, at which my heart was glad and blessed God.' 3 June, 1660: 'At sermon in the morning; after dinner into my cabin to cast my accounts up, and find myself to be worth near £100, for which I bless Almighty God, it being more than I hoped for so soon.' 5 September, 1660: 'In the evening, my wife being a little impatient, I went along with her to buy her a necklace of pearl, which will cost £4. 10s., which I am willing to comply with her in for her encouragement, and because I have lately got money, having now above £200 cash beforehand in the world. Home, and having in our way bought a rabbit and two little lobsters, my wife and I did sup late, and so to bed.' This methodical care in calculating ways and means and recording expenditure, when applied to the greater affairs of the navy, appears as a habit of method and order, and a remarkable instinct for business. Pepys introduced into a slipshod and rather chaotic organisation a high degree of system and method, and so vastly increased its efficiency in every direction.

My other illustration is from the account given in the Diary of the funeral of Sir Christopher Myngs, who had been mortally wounded in action on the last day of the great battle with the Dutch off the North Foreland, June 1-4, 1666. Pepys was present at the funeral in a coach with Sir William Coventry, at which, he tells us[26], 'there happened this extraordinary case—one of the most romantique that ever I heard of in my life, and could not have believed but that I did see it; which was this:—About a dozen able, lusty, proper men come to the coach-side with tears in their eyes, and one of them that spoke for the rest begun and says to Sir W. Coventry, "We are here a dozen of us that have long known and loved and served our dead commander, Sir Christopher Mings, and have now done the last office of laying him in the ground. We would be glad we had any other to offer after him, and in revenge of him. All we have is our lives; if you will please to get his Royal Highness to give us a fireship among us all, here is a dozen of us, out of all which choose you one to be commander, and the rest of us, whoever he is, will serve him; and, if possible, do that that shall show our memory of our dead commander, and our revenge." Sir W. Coventry was herewith much moved (as well as I, who could hardly abstain from weeping), and took their names, and so parted; telling me he would move his Royal Highness as in a thing very extraordinary, which was done.' No more touching tribute than this has ever been paid to the memory of a great seaman, nor better evidence given of the simple loyalty of sea-faring men which in their descendants has served us so well of late. 'The truth is,' continues Pepys, 'Sir Christopher Mings was a very stout man, and a man of great parts, and most excellent tongue among ordinary men.... He had brought his family into a way of being great; but dying at this time, his memory and name ... will be quite forgot in a few months as if he had never been, nor any of his name be the better by it; he having not had time to will any estate, but is dead poor rather than rich.' A writer who could describe such a scene in a style which comes so near distinction, and could then reflect with dignity upon the swift passing of human greatness, is something more than a 'delightful old Diarist' or a 'garrulous gossip'; but it is characteristic of Pepys that he should thus conclude his entry for the day: 'In my way home I called on a fisherman and bought three eeles, which cost me three shillings.'

I have quoted this passage about the funeral of Sir Christopher Myngs for another reason—it enables us to understand how Pepys developed later on so impressive an official style. He takes pleasure in long, labyrinthine sentences, in which the thread of thought winds deviously through an infinity of dependent clauses, but the thread is never lost, and the reader always arrives in the end at the destined goal. He has a discriminating taste in the selection of words, always choosing the more impressive, and leaving the reader with the sense of something dignified moving before him, like a procession, but never sacrificing clearness and precision to mere sound. Yet associated with all this pomp is a sense of humour, usually full-flavoured, but on occasion as subtle and delicate as need be[27], and finding its way even into the more dismal kinds of official correspondence.

To illustrate the point of complexity, let me read you a letter to the Navy Board of 2 June, 1677, which I came across not long ago among the Pepysian papers[28]. It consists of a single colossal sentence, yet the meaning is perfectly clear. If you want a parallel, you should go to the Prayer Book, to the Exhortation which precedes the General Confession; for this, although punctuated as three sentences, is structurally only one.

The reputation of Samuel Pepys has suffered in two ways. Readers of the Diary under-estimate him because they conceive of him as a diarist only, and do not realize the seriousness of his public responsibilities or the greatness of his official career. On the other hand, naval historians have often under-estimated him because they have failed to appreciate the difficulties with which he had to contend. If these difficulties are allowed for, the services rendered by Samuel Pepys to the navy are incomparable. He stood for a vigorous shipbuilding policy, for methodical organisation in every department, and for the restoration of a lost naval discipline. This was recognised by his immediate posterity, and in the century after his death a great tradition grew up about his name. A commission which reported in 1805 spoke of him as 'a man of extraordinary knowledge in all that related to the business' of the navy, 'of great talents, and the most indefatigable industry.' The respect paid to his authority by the generation of naval administrators which succeeded his own—comparable only perhaps to the weight which Lord Chief Justice Coke had carried among the lawyers of an earlier time—led to a number of transcripts being made from the Pepysian manuscripts and preserved in the Admiralty Library for the guidance of his successors. And this tradition has to be reconciled with the other and widely different tradition associated with the Pepys of the Diary.

It is not easy to realise that the two traditions belong to the same person. It is extraordinary that a man should have written the Diary, but it is much more extraordinary that the man who wrote the Diary should also have been 'the right hand of the navy.' From the Diary we learn that Pepys was a musician, a dandy, a collector of books and prints, an observer of boundless curiosity, and, as a critic has pointed out, one who possessed an 'amazing zest for life.' From the Pepysian manuscripts we learn that he was a man of sound judgment, of orderly and methodical business habits, of great administrative capacity and energy; and that he possessed extraordinary shrewdness and tact in dealing with men. At certain points in the Diary we can see the great official maturing, but in the main the intimate self-revelation of a human being seems far removed from official life. It is the combination of qualities that is so astounding, and those who regard Pepys only as 'the most amusing and capable of our seventeenth century diarists'[29]—a mere literary performer making sport for us—do little justice to a great career.