Samuel Pepys and Navy Contracts
Bernard Pool describes how the diarist was determined, in the interests of the Navy and for his own satisfaction, to strike the best possible bargain for the Crown.
There is in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich a bound volume of 898 pages entitled “S. Pepys’ Official Correspondence 1662-79”1 previously in the possession of the Pepys-Cockerell family. As was pointed out by Dr. J. R. Tanner, who published a selection of the letters in 1929,2 the description “Official Correspondence” is inaccurate. Most of the documents are copies of semi-official letters. They are none the less interesting on that account. A semi-official letter often gives background information which illustrates and is more illuminating than the bare statements in official correspondence.
Many of the copies were made by Pepys’s clerk, William Hewer; a few are in Pepys’s own hand. Some of the letters are wholly or partly in shorthand. These have been transcribed and edited by Edwin Chappell.3 The present article is mainly based on references to contract business in this “Official Correspondence”—some of it unpublished—and in the Diary itself.4
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