Okay, let's unpack this. I want you to picture
the scene because it is one of those chaotic
moments in, well, in the history of the Western
world. It's September 1666. London is literally
burning to the ground. The Great Fire is raging.
Just imagine it, the heat, the smoke. The heat
radiating off the timber frames, the smoke is
choking the streets, and the panic is just absolute.
People are fleeing for their lives, grabbing
their children, their gold, their most precious
heirlooms, throwing things into the river just
to save them. Total chaos. And then there's this
one guy, a high -ranking government official.
And what is his priority in this moment of absolute
apocalypse? He runs into his garden to dig a
hole. Not to hide himself, no. He is digging
a hole to bury his Parmesan cheese. It is a wonderful,
almost surreal image, isn't it? But it captures
him so perfectly. That cheese was a luxury item,
a very expensive Italian import, and he was just
not about to let the fire have it. It's so petty.
It's practical, it's petty, and it's deeply,
deeply human. Exactly. And that man, the man
with the shovel and the cheese, is Samuel Pippies.
Today we are diving deep into his life. Honestly,
before looking at this source material, I used
to think of Pepys as just some dusty historical
figure in a wig. Yeah, the guy from the fire.
Yeah, from the fire, exactly. Maybe someone you
read a paragraph about in school. But looking
at the massive biographical overview we have
today, specifically focusing on his diary and
his career, he is so much more than that. He's
essentially the ultimate fly on the wall for
the 17th century. Fly on the wall is a good start,
but I'd argue he's more than that. He is arguably
the greatest diarist of all time. I mean, without
him, our understanding of the restoration period
in England, the Great Plague, the Great Fire,
the birth of the modern British Navy, it would
all be significantly flatter. It would be black
and white. It would. He gives us the unfiltered,
high -definition, 4K version of history. But
what makes this deep dive so fascinating is that
while he's recording these massive geopolitical
events, he's simultaneously recording the most...
intimate, mundane, and, well, sometimes shockingly
scandalous details of his own life. It is such
a wild mix. We're talking about a source material
that covers a diary spanning over a million words.
One and a quarter million, to be precise. One
and a quarter million words. But it also covers
his medical history, which is, frankly, terrifying.
His rise to power, which is a masterclass in
administration, and his personal life, which
is, well... Complicated is one word for it. It's
a study in contradictions. He is a man of intense
public service and intense private vice. So our
mission today is to try and figure this guy out.
How does a tailor's son become the chief secretary
to the admiralty? Why on earth did he write his
diary in code? And what happens when you write
down literally everything, every bribe, every
affair, every embarrassing thought for 10 years
straight? It really is an interrogation of the
human condition. all set during a time of absolute
catastrophe. So let's start at the very beginning.
Who was this guy before the diary? Because he
didn't start out as a big shot Navy administrator
burying expensive cheese. No, far from it. Samuel
Papis was born in 1633, right off Fleet Street
in London. And his background was... Well, it
was humble but respectable. His father, John
Pepys, was a tailor. His mother, Margaret, was
the daughter of a washmaid. So he isn't born
into the aristocracy, not at all. Not even close.
He is thoroughly middle class in a time when
social mobility was possible, but, I mean, it
was extremely difficult. He wasn't born to power.
He really had to work for it. He did, and you
have to remember the context. He was the fifth
of 11 children, but... And this tells you something
so stark about the era. He was soon the oldest
survivor. Eleven children. Child mortality was
incredibly high. It was a world where death was
just. It was always in the room with you. Wow.
That's a pretty grim tone right away. But he
was educated, right? He wasn't unlearned. Oh,
he was very bright. He went to St. Paul's School
in London, which was a prestigious institution,
and later to Magdalene College, Cambridge. But
there's a detail from his childhood that I think
just anchors us in the violence of the time.
In 1649, when he was just a schoolboy, he skipped
school to attend the execution of King Charles
the Circe. He watched the king get beheaded as
a teenager. He was there. In the crowd, he saw
the axe fall. And he even made a remark later
that was quite anti -monarchist, something about
how the memory of the wicked king should perish.
Which is so ironic considering he spent his adult
life serving that king's son, Charles II. Exactly.
But yeah, he wasn't born with a silver spoon.
He had connections, specifically a powerful cousin,
Edward Montague, who later became the Earl of
Sandwich, and that was his foot in the door.
But once that door was open... Peeps had to hustle.
Okay, so he's smart, he's ambitious, he's climbing
the ladder. But there's this one shadow hanging
over his early life that I found absolutely horrifying
in the research. We have to talk about the stone.
Ah, yes. The cut of the stone. You simply cannot
understand Samuel Pepys without understanding
his bladder. I never thought I'd say that sentence
about a historical figure, but... Let's just
pause on the risk of this surgery here. We say
surgery today and we think sterile rooms, anesthesiologist,
recovery rooms with nurses. Right. But in 1658,
surgery was practically a spectator sport for
the morbid, wasn't it? What are we actually talking
about here? We were talking about something called
lithotomy. And it was a specialized trade, actually
separate from regular physicians. You have to
understand, bladder stones were the scourge of
the century because of the... Diet, lots of meat,
bad beer, very little water, cold, damp houses.
As they were common. Horribly common. Stones
would form in the kidneys and drop to the bladder.
And without intervention, it was a slow, agonizing
death sentence. But the intervention? Well, the
mortality rate for the surgery was roughly 20
to 30 percent. So a one in three chance you just
don't wake up. Or, you know, you die of infection
a week later. Precisely. And Pepys had suffered
since he was a child. Constant pain, blood in
the urine, inability to pass water. By the time
he was 25, the stone was so large it was ruining
his life. He decided to risk the operation. I
can't even imagine making that choice. He went
to a man named Thomas Hollier at St. Thomas'
Hospital. Hollier was a lysotomist. A cutter?
And the preparation wasn't just show up. Peeps
had to purge his system for days with enemas
and laxatives. He was weak before he even laid
down on the table. And the table isn't a bed.
It's a specific kind of apparatus. Correct. They
didn't just tie him down. They placed him in
what's still called the lithotomy position. Knees
up, spread wide, ankles bound to wrists. It exposes
the perineum, the area between the scrotum and
the anus. Oh, God. And because there is no anesthesia,
maybe a draft of opiate or alcohol, but nothing
that actually stops the pain speed is the only
mercy. Hollier had to be fast. Incredibly fast.
How fast are we talking? Five minutes. Ten. Less.
Maybe less than two minutes for the cut and the
extraction. He inserts a sound, a metal rod up
the urethra to locate the stone by sound. Clink.
That tells him where to cut. Then he takes a
knife, plunges it into the perineum to find the
bladder neck, cuts it open, inserts forceps.
And just pulls the stone out through a three
-inch incision. While the patient is fully conscious
and screaming. Four strong men held him down.
The psychological impact of lying there, helpless,
knowing a man is cutting into your most sensitive
anatomy with a knife that has likely been used
on 10 other people that week. It changed Peepis.
It had to have hardened him. And the stone itself.
We skipped over this. It wasn't a pebble. It
wasn't a small thing. No. The source material
says it was the size of a tennis ball. A tennis
ball. Inside his bladder. That's physically impossible
to imagine. A 17th century real tennis ball was
a bit smaller than a modern one. But still, we
are talking about a jagged, crystallized rock
the size of a tangerine or a small apple. The
fact that he survived the shock and didn't die
of gangrene or sepsis in the days following is
a statistical miracle. And he knew it was a miracle.
He kept the stone, didn't he? Like a souvenir.
He did. He had a special case made for it. It
wasn't just a souvenir. It was a trophy. He had
defeated death. And every year on the anniversary
of the surgery, March 26, he held a stone feast.
A stone feast. He would invite friends over,
bring out the stone, and they would celebrate
the fact that he was still breathing. But such
a specific, weird, and wonderful detail. Happy
anniversary to my bladder surgery, everyone.
But it did leave a mark physically, right? This
wasn't a clean recovery. Indelibly. The incision
actually broke open again years later, late in
his life. It never fully healed perfectly. And
there's very strong speculation that the surgery
left him sterile. The incision through the perineum
can easily damage the vasodephrine. He and his
wife Elizabeth never had children, despite no
evidence of fertility issues before the operation.
Which is tragic in its own right, but you mentioned
earlier that this might explain his attitude
in the biary, his whole worldview. I really think
so. When you survive something that painful and
that dangerous at age 25, it gives you a certain
carpe diem attitude, a seize the day mentality.
He had this incredible zest for life, for food,
for music, for success, for women. That feels
like someone who knows he's living on borrowed
time. He's grabbing at life with both hands.
Exactly. Because he knows intimately how fragile
it is. That makes a lot of sense. He's living
life in high definition because he almost lost
it. So, okay, let's get to the thing he's most
famous for. The diary. He starts writing it on
January 1st, 1660. Why then? What was so special
about that day? The timing was just... Perfect,
historically speeding. England was in complete
chaos. Oliver Cromwell had died. His son Richard
had failed to hold power. The government was
collapsing. It looked like the monarchy might
be restored. A major turning point. A huge turning
point. And Pepys was right there, working for
the Navy under his cousin Montague, poised to
be part of the transition. He sensed history
was happening and he wanted to record it. And
he keeps this diary for almost 10 years. But
let's talk about the physical act of writing
it. It's not written in plain English, is it?
It's not like a journal you buy today. Mostly
not, no. He used a system of shorthand called
tachygraphy, which was devised by a man named
Thomas Shelton. It looks like little squiggles,
dots, and geometric shapes. Very strange to the
modern eye. So was he trying to hide what he
was writing? Was this a... keep out top secret
situation from day one? Yes and no. I mean, shorthand
was common for efficiency. Paper was expensive.
Candles were expensive. And writing longhand
just takes a lot of time. If you're going to
write every single day, you want to be fast.
It's a practical choice. But he definitely used
it for privacy, too. And here's where the code
gets really interesting. He had a special layer
of encryption for the illicit parts of his life,
his affairs, his sexual encounters, his darker
thoughts about his colleagues. Oh, right. The
famous lingua franca. I've heard about this.
Exactly. When he was describing something scandalous,
he wouldn't just use shorthand. He would switch
into this pigeon mix of Spanish, French, Italian,
and Latin. He might write something like, you
know, I did kiss the woman, alongside a shorthand
symbol. He thought he was being so clever and
discreet. He did, but... The source material
points out the wonderful irony here. He'd be
writing in this elaborate code to hide an affair,
but then right in the middle, purely out of habit
or anger, he'd throw in an English profanity
or a very clear name. So it wasn't the most unbreakable
enigma code? Not at all. It was enough to keep
the casual glance of a servant or his wife from
immediately understanding, but anyone determined
could absolutely crack it. Which begs the really
big question. Did he expect people to read it?
Because if I'm writing a diary about how I took
a bribe or cheated on my wife, I am burning that
thing before I die. No question. That is the
great contradiction of Samuel Pepys. He didn't
plan on his contemporaries seeing it. He was
terrified of his wife Elizabeth seeing it. But
he was a bibliophile, a book collector. He loved
his library. And before he died, he carefully
cataloged the diary volumes and included them
in his library's index. He put them on the list.
He put them on the list. He even made sure the
guide to the Shelton shorthand system he used
was included in the library. No. He left the
key to the code right next to the lockbox. Essentially,
yes. He wanted his library preserved exactly
as he left it. So deep down, his ego... or his
sense of history, demanded that this record survive.
He cataloged his own sins for future generations
because he believed his life, his entire life,
was worth examining. That is a fascinating duality.
Don't look at this now, but please, please admire
it in 200 years. So he starts writing 1660. And
the 1660s in London, I mean, if you had to pick
a decade to keep a diary, you couldn't pick a
more dramatic one. It is the blockbuster decade
of London history. It's just one thing after
another. You have the restoration of the King,
you have war with the Dutch, you have plague,
and you have fire. Let's talk about the first
major disaster. The Great Plague of 1665. The
Bubonic Plague. It wasn't the first time it had
hit London, not by a long shot, but this was
the big one. The Great Plague. It killed perhaps
100 ,000 people, which was roughly a quarter
of London's population at the time. A quarter
of the city. Usually when the plague hits, the
rich people flee, right? They head to their country
estates. Correct. The king left, the court left,
most wealthy merchants packed up and left. Pepys
actually sent his wife to Woolwich for her safety,
but he stayed in the city, at least initially.
He had work to do. And his descriptions of it
are just haunting. They are, because they focus
on the silence. He writes about walking through
the city of London and seeing almost no one.
The shops are shuttered. The only sound is the
church bells tolling for the dead, until eventually
even they stopped because there were just too
many to ring for. It sounds like a post -apocalyptic
film. He describes seeing doors marked with red
crosses. Yeah. Lord have mercy upon us. That
was the phrase painted on the doors of infected
houses. If one person in the house had it, the
whole house was boarded up with the family inside
for 40 days. So it's a death sentence for everyone
in there. Pretty much. And Peeps captures the
paranoia of it all perfectly. He describes interacting
with people. You stand at a distance. You try
not to touch the same money. You chew tobacco.
The tobacco thing is interesting. Why tobacco?
There was a popular medical belief that the plague
was caused by miasma, basically bad air or foul
smells. So they thought that strong, pungent
smells could ward off the infection. So peeps
chewed tobacco constantly as a sort of chemical
mask. And there was a weird detail about wigs
in the notes we looked at. Oh, this is classic
peep anxiety. It's so telling. He loved fashion.
He was very proud of his expensive wigs. But
during the plague, he became terrified to wear
them. He started wondering. Where did the hair
come from? Oh, no. He worried that the hair used
to make the wigs might have been sheared off
the heads of plague victims in the pest houses.
Which is a valid concern, honestly. It is. It's
a horrifying thought. But here is the thing about
Peeps. He is so complex. While he's writing about
the tragedy and the death tolls and his fear
of wigs, he's also writing about how great his
life is. He writes, and this is almost a direct
quote, I have never lived so merrily. Besides
that I never got so much as I have done this
plague time. Wait, wait. Never got so much? You
mean money? Yes. The plague year was his most
profitable year yet. He was ghoulish. Victualing.
Supplying the navy. The Second Anglo -Dutch War
was ramping up. While everyone else was paralyzed
by fear or had fled the city, Peeps was working.
He was at his post, organizing contracts for
food, beer, timber for the fleet. So opportunity
and chaos. A huge opportunity. Because the normal
oversight mechanisms were disrupted by the plague,
he had a much freer hand to negotiate deals and
to take his cuts and his gifts. He quadrupled
his wealth during the year the city was dotting
around him. That is morally complicated, to say
the least. thriving while the city is collapsing.
It captures the survivor mentality, though, doesn't
it? Life goes on, business goes on, even in the
apocalypse. And to be fair to him, the Navy desperately
needed those supplies. If he hadn't done it,
the fleet wouldn't have sailed. He was doing
his job and doing it well. Speaking of apocalypse,
we barely get out of the plague when 1666 rolls
around. The Great Fire. The fire that shaped
modern London. And Samuel Pepys is our primary,
most vivid witness. So it's 3 a .m. September
2nd. His maid, Jane, wakes him up. She sees a
fire in the distance. And Pepys looks out the
window, decides it's not that big a deal. It
looks far away over by London Bridge, and he
goes back to bed. That is the most relatable
thing I've ever heard, is the world ending. Nah,
I'm tired. It just shows how common fires were
in a city built of wood and pitch and thatch.
But when he wakes up later that morning, it's
a different story entirely. He realizes the scale
of it. And this is where Peeps becomes a man
of action. He doesn't just watch. No, he goes
to the Tower of London to get a high vantage
point. He sees the fire raging, a lamentable
fire, as he calls it. And he sees the pigeons.
This stood out to me so much in the source material.
Yes. This is one of those literary details that
makes the diaries so special, so human. He describes
these poor pigeons hovering around their balconies,
unwilling to leave their nests, their homes,
until their wings literally burn and they fall
down into the flames. It's such a poignant, heartbreaking
image of reluctance to leave what you know, even
when it's destroying you. It's incredible. But
then he stops just watching and he starts doing,
he becomes the first person to actually go and
tell the king, Charles II, how bad this is. He
takes a boat up the Thames to Whitehall. The
fire hadn't reached there yet. He marches in.
finds the king and the duke of york and tells
them that unless they order houses to be pulled
down to create fire breaks the whole city is
lost pulling down houses seems so extreme it's
the only way blowing them up with gunpowder or
pulling them down with these huge hooks you have
to starve the fire of fuel the lord mayor at
the time was too afraid to do it because of property
rights he was worried about getting sued he's
worried about lawsuits while london burns papes
told the king you have to authorize this now
and the king listened to him He sent Peeps straight
to the Lord Mayor with the royal order. Imagine
the chaos of that scene. He finds the Lord Mayor
and the guy is just broken, right? Completely.
He describes the Lord Mayor, a man named Thomas
Bloodworth, as being exhausted, walking around
like a man in a daze, crying out, Lord, what
can I do? People will not obey me. I have been
pulling down houses, but the fire overtakes us
faster than we can do it. It's total anarchy.
So Peeps goes home. And now the fire is getting
closer to his own house in Seething Lane. And
this leads us back to the beginning. Back to
the Parmesan cheese. Yes. As the fire approaches,
he has to evacuate his own goods. He sends his
money and his wife away to safety. But some things,
well, you have to improvise. He digs a pit in
his garden. He buries his wine good French vintage
and his Parmesan cheese. He saves the cheese.
Did his house survive? It did, just barely. The
fire stopped just before it reached Seething
Lane. But he walked through the ruins afterwards.
He saw his father's house destroyed, his old
school destroyed, the house where he had his
stone surgery destroyed. The London of his childhood
was just wiped off the map. It's incredible that
we have this first -person record. But we need
to shift gears a bit here. We've talked about
Peeves the Observer, but he was also a worker,
a government man. Section 4 of our outline calls
him the Navy Man. And this is where his historical
significance really lies, outside of the diary.
If you take away the diary completely, Samuel
Pepys is still a major figure in British history
because he essentially professionalized the Royal
Navy. But when he started at the Navy Board as
clerk of the acts, he knew nothing about ships.
Zero maritime experience. He was a clerk. But
unlike his colleagues, who were often lazy aristocrats
or just political appointees, Pepys was diligent.
He was a true workaholic. He hired a tutor to
teach him arithmetic and multiplication tables.
He taught himself math as an adult. He did. He
bought model ships to understand how the parts
fit together, how rigging worked. He learned
the business from the hull up. He visited the
dockyards. He talked to the sailors. He learned
about timber and rope. He was a technocrat before
that was even a word. Precisely. And the Navy
desperately needed it. They were in the middle
of the Second Anglo -Dutch War and things were
not going well. That's putting it mildly. The
whole thing was a mess. It was. And a big part
of the problem was that the Navy was chronically
underfunded. And this leads to the scandal of
the tickets. We need to explain this because
it defines the corruption of the era. Right.
So how did sailors get paid back then? Well,
often they didn't. Not in cash, anyway. The king,
Charles II, was constantly broke and fighting
parliament for money. So when a sailor returned
from a long, dangerous voyage instead of cash,
the Navy board would give him a ticket. It was
essentially an IOU. The king owes you 10 pounds.
But a sailor can't buy bread for his family with
a ticket. He's starving. Exactly. So a secondary
market pops up. Predatory brokers would stand
outside the Navy office and say, I'll give you
five pounds cash for your 10 pound ticket right
now. And the sailor, desperate for any money
at all. Takes the loss just to eat. That is just...
It's predatory. And Peeps was involved in this
system. The whole board was complicit. They knew
the tickets were losing value. And guess who
was often investing in those brokers or facilitating
the administrative delays that made the tickets
worthless so the price would drop? Peeps absolutely
profited from the liquidity crisis of the very
men he was managing. Wow. When you read the diary,
he's terrified of the sailors. He describes them
starving in the streets, shouting at him, threatening
him. He's afraid of being mobbed because he knows
he's part of the problem. So we call him. corrupt
because he took money but was he like stealing
from the till or was this something more systemic
because the line between a bribe and a salary
seems incredibly blurry here it's incredibly
blurry navy clerks like peps weren't paid a living
wage their official salary was tiny they were
expected to monetize their position if someone
wanted a contract for timber they might give
pippi's a nice gift a gratuity so it was just
part of the job description it was but peps established
a rule for himself which he writes about I will
take the bribe, he decides, only if the person
I'm hiring is actually the best person for the
job. That's a very convenient moral loophole.
I'll take your money, but only if you're competent
enough to deserve the contract anyway. It was.
But in the 1660s, that was revolutionary. His
predecessors took the money and hired their incompetent
nephews. Pipps took the money and hired the best
shipwright. He rationalized it as efficiency
for the state. But yes, his net worth jumped
from almost nothing to over 7 ,500 pounds in
seven years on a 350 -pound salary. The math
doesn't lie. And despite his efficiency, the
war went badly. In 1667, there was this massive
national humiliation called the Raid on the Medway.
This is the absolute low point for the English
Navy in that century. The Dutch fleet, under
Admiral de Ruyter, actually sailed up the River
Medway, broke through the defensive chain, burned
English ships at anchor, and towed away the flagship,
the Royal Charles. That's like someone breaking
into your garage and stealing your prized Ferrari
while you watch from the window. It was a national
disgrace. And everyone was looking for a scapegoat.
The parliament was furious, and they summoned
the entire Navy board to answer for these miscarriages.
And this is Pepys' big moment, right? He has
to defend the indefensible. On March 5th, 1668,
he stood at the bar of the House of Commons.
He had prepared for weeks. He stayed up all night.
He drank brandy to steady his nerves. And then
he spoke for over three hours without notes.
Three hours. Straight. It was a virtuoso performance.
He dazzled them with details, facts, figures,
logistics. He essentially proved that the failures
weren't the board's fault, but were due to a
catastrophic lack of funding from Parliament
and strategic errors by the king's commanders.
He buried them in data. He out -bureaucrated
the bureaucrats. He did, and they loved it. He
saved his own skin and the boards. He walked
out of there a hero. He wrote in his diary that
night that he was hailed as the savior of the
Navy. So he's competent. He's a hero administrator,
a brilliant, corrupt workaholic. Yeah. But we
have to pivot to the dark. darker side of his
personal life. We can't talk about peeps without
talking about women. And looking at this through
a modern lens, a Me Too lens, it is pretty disturbing
stuff. It is. And we have to be clear here. For
a long time, historians sort of winked at peeps'
affairs as dalliances or the behavior of a lusty
rogue. But the source material, his own words,
detail behavior that is, by any modern definition,
sexual harassment and sexual assault. Let's start
with his marriage first. Elizabeth. Elizabeth
de Saint -Michel. She was the daughter of French
Huguenot exiles. And she was only 14 when they
married. He was 22. And her youth sets up a dynamic
of control right from the start. It absolutely
did. And their relationship was incredibly volatile.
The diary shows they loved each other. They played
music together. He taught her to sing and play
instruments. But they fought constantly. He was
intensely jealous of other men even looking at
her. And she, well, she had every reason to be
jealous of him. Because he was constantly cheating
on her. Constantly. The diary is a catalog of
it. He pursued shop girls, the wives of his colleagues,
servants in his own house, actresses. and he
wrote it all down in meticulous, often sordid
detail. There's one specific incident that seems
to be the climax of this domestic drama, the
Deb Willett affair. This is the moment the diary
becomes a full -blown domestic tragedy. Deb Willett
was a young woman, a teenager, who was hired
to be a companion for Elizabeth. And Pease became
obsessed with her. And he got caught. Oh, red
-handed. On October 25, 1668, Elizabeth walked
in on them unexpectedly and found Pease embracing
Deb Willett. He writes, and he uses his most
secret code here, that his hand was under her
coats. Elizabeth must have gotten it clear. She
did. she was devastated and furious she screamed
at him she threatened to leave him she threatened
to shame him publicly by telling everyone he
describes her in a rage threatening him with
hot tongs from the fireplace wow peeps was filled
with remorse he cried he begged for forgiveness
he swore it would never happen again but did
he stop no that's the thing deb willett was fired
obviously but pete's continued to try to find
her and meet her secretly it shows this compulsive
destructive side to his behavior that even his
own guilt could control. And you mentioned earlier
the darker side of this. It wasn't always, you
know, consensual affairs with women of his own
class. No, not at all. The modern scholarly analysis
points out that he often targeted women who were
socially and economically inferior to him, servants,
subordinates, wives. He would mask his coercion
as being playful or kind. He would fondle his
maid, Mary Mercer, while she was helping him
get dressed in the morning. And because he was
the boss, the master of the house, what could
she do? She couldn't really say no without losing
her job, her home. Exactly. There was an inherent
power imbalance. He believed, as many men of
his time did, that he was entitled to access
to women's bodies. When a shipwright's wife named
Lane, who he had a transaction with, claimed
he assaulted her, he dismissed it in his diary
as her being false, not because he claimed he
didn't do it, but because he felt she had no
moral right to complain. It's important we don't
gloss over that. He's a historical genius, but
he was also, in many ways, a predator. You have
to hold both those truths at the same time to
understand him. So the diary ends in May 1669.
Why? He lived a lot longer than that. This is
the great irony and the great tragedy for historians.
He stopped writing because he thought he was
going blind. The strain of writing all those
tiny shorthand characters by candlelight. Yes.
His eyes were painting him constantly. He was
terrified. He wrote this heartbreaking final
entry saying that to stop the diary is... almost
as much as to see myself go into my grave. He
thought he would be totally blind within months.
But he wasn't. No. He lived another 34 years.
He never went blind. The current theory is that
it was likely just severe eye strain or a condition
like presbyopia that resolved itself as he stopped
doing the intense close work of the shorthand.
But for whatever reason, he never picked up the
diary again. That is such a loss for history.
Imagine what we missed in those next three decades.
Because he didn't just retire to the garden and
grow roses, did he? Not at all. His second act
is arguably even more impressive in terms of
public service. He became a member of Parliament.
He eventually rose to become the Secretary to
the Admiralty, the big boss, the top job. But
it wasn't smooth sailing. You mentioned he was
imprisoned. Twice. The guy who saved the Navy
with his big speech got thrown in the Tower of
London. Why? What on earth for politics and religion?
In the late 1670s, there was this national hysteria
about a popish plot, a supposed Catholic conspiracy
to assassinate the king. And Pepys was accused
by his political enemies of being a secret Catholic
and selling naval secrets to the French. Was
there any truth to it? None at all. It was all
fabricated. But in that climate of hysteria,
people were being tried and executed on far less
evidence. He spent weeks in the tower, genuinely
fearing for his life. That must have been terrifying
considering he watched Charles Assers get executed
as a boy. He knew what could happen. He had to
use all his administrative skills and his connections
to save himself. He investigated his main accuser,
a con man named Colonel Scott, and he proved
he was a fraud. He gathered dossiers of evidence.
He basically lawyered his way out of a death
sentence. And he didn't just survive politically.
He thrived in the intellectual world, too. He
became president of the Royal Society. Which
is a huge deal. The Royal Society was the premier
scientific organization in the world at that
time. And here's a fact that just blows people's
minds. If you look at the title page of Isaac
Newton's Principia Mathematica, one of the most
important books in the entire history of science,
whose name is on the cover, authorizing its publication.
Don't tell me it's Samuel Pepys. It is. Imprimatur,
S. Pepys. Red, Sacco, Brazes. Samuel Pepys, president
of the Royal Society. His name is on the book
that gave us the laws of motion and universal
gravitation. That is absolutely amazing. But
I want to dig into this famous correspondence
with Isaac Newton. It's 1693. Pepys is retired.
Newton is, well, he's Isaac Newton. And Pepys
writes to him about dice. This isn't just, hey,
want to play craps, right? This was a serious
question. No, it was a very specific probability
query. This is now known as the Newton -Pepys
problem. Pepys was likely asking on behalf of
a gambling friend who was a bit of a high roller.
The question is essentially this. Which of these
three scenarios offers you the best odds of winning?
Okay, lay it on me. Scenario A, rolling at least
one six when you toss six dice. Scenario B, rolling
at least two sixes when you toss 12 dice. Or
scenario C, rolling at least three sixes when
you toss 18 dice. Okay, so my intuition says
they are all the same, right? One required success
in six dice, two in 12, three in 18. It's all
a one -sixth ratio. That's exactly what Peeps
thought. He was a man of simple arithmetic, and
he assumed the probability was identical for
all three. But Newton wrote back and said, no,
you are completely wrong. Because probability
isn't linear like that. It gets more complicated.
Correct. Newton explained that with six dice,
the odds of getting at least one six are actually
quite high. It's about 66 .5%. But as you add
more dice and require more specific outcomes,
like two sixes or three sixes, the difficulty
scales up much faster than the number of dice
helps you. He showed that scenario A was the
best bet. Did Peaks understand the math? Because
I'm not sure I do. Not really. Newton tried to
explain it with pages of arithmetic, but Pips
kept writing back saying, essentially, I still
don't get it. Eventually, Newton basically said,
look, just trust me on this. Take the first bet.
It's weirdly comforting to know that even Samuel
Pepys, the man who organized the entire British
Navy, couldn't wrap his head around high -level
statistics. It highlights the massive intellectual
shift happening in that era. Pepys was a man
of lists and catalogs, an accumulator of facts.
Newton was a man of abstract principles and universal
laws. You see the old world trying to organize
itself and the new world of modern science emerging.
So Pepys lives until 1703. He retires to a place
called Clapham. A nice country retreat just outside
London back then. And when he dies, he leaves
behind this incredible library, his life's passion.
3 ,000 volumes, all perfectly preserved. And
he was so incredibly particular about them, he
didn't just leave them to his old college, Magdalene.
He left pages of instructions on how they should
be shelved. I read this. It's amazing. He wanted
them arranged by size, right? Not by subject.
Yes, purely for aesthetics. He specified that
little books should be placed on top of big books
if necessary to make the tops of all the books
level. And he had special wooden blocks made
almost like little high heels to put behind the
shorter books so the spines would all line up
perfectly flush at the front of the shelf. That
is some serious type A personality right there.
obsessive it is but that obsessive nature that
need to catalog and control and preserve everything
perfectly is exactly why the diary survived he
treated his life like he treated his books it
had to be organized cataloged and preserved for
posterity and the diary volumes are still there
in the original bookcases he designed at cambridge
you can go and see them today exactly as he left
them that's incredible so we've looked at the
man the stone the fire the affairs and the ships
It's been quite a journey. It really has. Let's
try to sum this up. If you had to describe him
in a sentence, who is Samuel Peeves? He is a
man of profound contradictions. He's a diligent,
brilliant bureaucrat who built the modern Navy,
but he's also a corrupt official taking bribes.
He's a devoted husband who clearly loves his
wife, but he's a serial philanderer and, by our
standards, a predator. He's a man terrified of
the plague, yet he stays in London and makes
a fortune from it. He's human. messy, brilliant,
flawed, and deeply recognizably human. And that's
why we're still talking about him 300 years later.
Most historical figures, we only see the statue
in the park. We see the great man on a pedestal
with peeps. We see the guy in his nightgown worried
about his bladder, fighting with his wife and
burying his cheese. It brings history down to
a human level. It does. It makes it real. So
here is the final thought I want to leave everyone
with. Peeps wrote this diary for himself. but
he cataloged it for the future. He made a conscious
choice to let it survive. He wanted to be remembered,
warts and all. There is a really uncomfortable
question for us, I think. If you recorded your
daily life with total honesty, every weakness,
every shady deal, every embarrassing thought,
every hand -under -coats moment, would you want
history to read it? It's a terrifying thought.
Most of us would hit delete. We would. So is
Pepsi unique simply because he possessed the
ego to believe that his life, his tennis ball
stone, his wig anxiety, and his buried Parmesan
cheese were actually worth remembering? Maybe
that's his greatest legacy. Just the sheer audacity
to believe his own flawed, complicated life mattered.
I think you might be right. The courage to be
seen. Thanks for listening to this deep dive
into Samuel Pipps. We'll see you next time.