Samuel Pepys Diary - February, 1660

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Samuel Pepys PRS, MP, JP, (February 23, 1633 – May 26, 1703) was an English naval administrator and Member of Parliament who is now most famous for the diary he kept for a decade while still a relatively young man. Although Pepys had no maritime experience, he rose by patronage, hard work, and talent for administration to be the Chief Secretary to the Admiralty under both King Charles II and King James II. His influence and reforms at the Admiralty were important in the early professionalisation of the Royal Navy. The detailed private diary Pepys kept from 1660 until 1669 was first published in the 19th century and is one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period. It provides a combination of personal revelation and eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War, and the Great Fire of London. Pepys was born in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, London on 23 February 1633, the son of John Pepys (1601–1680), a tailor, and Margaret Pepys (née Kite; d. 1667), daughter of a Whitechapel butcher. His great uncle Talbot Pepys was Recorder and briefly MP for Cambridge in 1625. His father's first cousin, Sir Richard Pepys, was elected MP for Sudbury in 1640, appointed Baron of the Exchequer on 30 May 1654, and appointed Lord Chief Justice of Ireland on 25 September 1655. Pepys was the fifth of eleven children, but child mortality was high and he was soon the oldest survivor. He was baptised at St Bride's Church on 3 March. Pepys did not spend all of his infancy in London; for a while he was sent to live with a nurse, Goody Lawrence, at Kingsland, just north of the city. In about 1644 Pepys attended Huntingdon Grammar School, before being educated at St Paul's School, London, c. 1646–1650. He attended the execution of Charles I, in 1649. In 1650 he went to Cambridge University, having received two exhibitions from St Paul's School (perhaps owing to the influence of Sir George Downing, who was chairman of the judges and for whom he later worked at the Exchequer) and a grant from the Mercers' Company. In October he was admitted as a sizar to Magdalene College; he moved there in March 1651 and took his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1654. Later in 1654, or early in 1655, he entered the household of another of his father's cousins, Sir Edward Montagu, who was later created 1st Earl of Sandwich. Elisabeth de St Michel, Pepys' wife. Stipple engraving by James Thomson, after a 1666 painting (now destroyed) by John Hayls. Pepys married the fourteen-year-old Elisabeth de St Michel, a descendant of French Huguenot immigrants, first in a religious ceremony on 10 October 1655, and later in a civil ceremony on 1 December 1655 at St Margaret's, Westminster. n 1 January 1660 ("1 January 1659/1660" in contemporary terms) Pepys began to keep a diary. He recorded his daily life for almost ten years. This record of a decade of Pepys’s life is over a million words long and is often regarded as Britain’s most celebrated diary. In fact, Pepys has been called the greatest diarist of all time. This is due to his frankness in writing concerning his own weaknesses and the accuracy with which he records events of daily British life and major events in the 17th century. Pepys writes about the contemporary court and theater (including his amorous affairs with the actresses), his household and major political and social occurrences. To this day, historians still use his diary to gain greater insight and understanding of life in London in the 17th century. Pepys wrote consistently on subjects such as personal finances, the time he got up in the morning, the weather and what he ate. He talked at length about his new watch (that had an alarm—a new thing at the time), which he was very proud of, a country visitor who did not enjoy his time in London because he felt it was too crowded, and his cat waking him up at one in the morning. Because Pepys recorded even minor details, we have a much more thorough understanding of what everyday life would have been like for the British upper middle classes in the 1660s. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------