Samuel Pepys - 1665 – Diary of a Plague Year

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Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) was a naval administrator, member of Parliament and devoted diarist. Kept between 16601669 and written in Sheltons shorthand, Pepys diary recorded major historical events, like the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London alongside his more personal concerns and activities, including politics, his work in public life and rows with his wife, Elizabeth.

Max Hastings is the author of twenty-six books, most about conflict, and between 1986 and 2002 served as editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph, then editor of the Evening Standard. He has won many prizes both for journalism and his books, of which the most recent are All Hell Let Loose, Catastrophe and The Secret War, best-sellers translated around the world. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of Kings College, London and was knighted in 2002. He has two grown-up children, Charlotte and Harry, and lives with his wife Penny in West Berkshire, where they garden enthusiastically.

Welcome to London in lockdown in 1665

The plague that swept through London in 1665 brought the city to a grinding halt. The bustle of business gave way to a grim air of fear as nearly a quarter of Londoners were struck down. Yet for Samuel Pepys, life went on.

In his lifetime, Pepys was a naval administrator and a friend and colleague of the powerful and learned. For nearly ten years he kept a private diary in which he recorded life in Restoration London, commenting on politics, public events and private matters. As well as recording public and historical events, Pepys paints a vivid picture of his personal life, from his socializing and amorous entanglements, to his theatre-going and his work at the Navy Board. Unequalled for its frankness, high spirits and sharp observations, the diary is both a literary masterpiece and a marvellous portrait of seventeenth-century life.

In 1665 that life was lived under an ever-present shadow of death, and Pepys offers us a glimpse into how that affected London and Londoners alike.

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One summers day long ago, a government bureaucrat recorded a resolution to set his worldly affairs in order, the season growing so sickly, that it is much to be feared how a man can scape having a share in it for which the good Lord God bless me, or be fitted to receive it. This officer of the Crown was, of course, Samuel Pepys, and the year was 1665. Bubonic plague raged, killing thousands a week in London with a population of less than 400,000. Pepyss great diary lays bare the terrors, horrors and the abyss of ignorance which prevailed almost four centuries ago. But these are matched today under the menace of the coronavirus. Only the rates of mortality, God be thanked the words the diarist himself would have used have so far been vastly lower in our own era.

The plague was just one among a procession of disasters and upheavals of Pepyss time that he recorded in his diary, interwoven with the minutiae of his daily life, between January 1, 1660 and May 31, 1669. He then abandoned the chronicle, which was already over a million words in length, believing that penning it each evening by candlelight was fatally weakening his eyesight. The portrait that he painted of Britain, and more especially of London, is one of the most important historical narratives ever compiled. He details court intrigue, his own role as a key manager of the Royal Navy in the Dutch Wars, the Fire of London and, of course, the plague. Moreover, thanks to the diary we know more about the life and thoughts of its author than those of any other human being until the twentieth century. If he was not a great man, he achieved a great thing.

Born in 1633 in Salisbury Court, off Fleet Street, Pepys was a tailors son whose brains, industry and unexpectedly influential connections enabled him to study at St. Pauls School, and then at Magdalene College, Cambridge. As a teenager he witnessed the execution of King Charles I in 1649, then got his start in government service under the Commonwealth. On October 10, 1655, he married the fourteen-year-old Elisabeth de St. Michel, a descendant of French Huguenot immigrants. Their subsequent relationship was fractious and childless the latter much to Pepyss sorrow. His almost obsessively priapic enthusiasms never ceased to include Elisabeth, but also included a long succession of chance encounters and steady relationships, one with the wife of a man who pimped her in pursuit of government custom; another with his wifes paid companion Deb, whom he loved to distraction.

As a young man Pepys suffered agonies from bladder stones, so great that on March 26, 1658 he bore the mortal risk and terrible pain of having them surgically removed. Every year thereafter, he celebrated and recorded the anniversary of this event, which transformed his health for the better, though bladder problems recurred in his later life. Following the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660, Pepys prospered as a protg of the Earl of Sandwich. In 1665, the year of this selection from the diary, he rose to become Surveyor of Victuals for the Navy and Secretary of the Tangier Committee, an important body which managed Britains short-lived North African colony. In his diary he also wrote constantly about his finances: increasing his own income was a perennial obsession, as it is for most of mankind. Although only mildly corrupt by the standards of government servants of his time, he contrived to become a modestly wealthy man. He noted the irony that 1665, a terrible year for many British people, was an unprecedentedly profitable one for himself.