Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys rose through government service after the Restoration and became an important administrator of the Royal Navy. His work on finance, supply and professional standards helped strengthen naval administration during the Anglo-Dutch wars.

The diary he kept from 1660 to 1669 records politics, theatre, work, family life, the plague and the Great Fire of London with exceptional immediacy. Written in shorthand and not published until the nineteenth century, it has become one of the best-known personal records of seventeenth-century England.