268 • The Great Plagueincluded the plague. A year later a fifteen-year-old girl entered Elizabeth’s
service. He avoided the temptation by a new round of liaisons outside the
household. But in 1668 , Elizabeth caught him in a sexual encounter with her
maid. The crisis, combined with fears of losing his eyesight, made him far
more considerate of his wife’s physical and emotional needs. “I have lain with
[her] as a husband more times since this falling-out [than] in I believe twelve
months before,” he wrote in one of the last entries in his diary. “And with
more pleasure to her [than] I think in all the time of our marriage before.”^8
Elizabeth Pepys had never experienced robust health. The plague and fire
had been unsettling, to say the least, and the threat of flames to her home
and possessions may have contributed to the loss of her hair shortly after. In
1669 she came down with a severe fever. Elizabeth had just turned twenty-
nine. The Hart Street rector, whom Samuel had criticized for fleeing from
the plague, came to Elizabeth’s bedside for a final communion. Her grieving
husband placed her body in a vault high in the chancel of Saint Olave Hart
Street. Samuel later eased some of the pain and loneliness by taking in a
housekeeper whose lower social status and sharing of his quarters scandal-
ized those close to him. He navigated the troubled religious waters of the
later Restoration years by being loyal to the covertly Catholic Charles II and
his openly Catholic brother James II. Briefly arrested on the spurious
grounds of treason, Pepys retired from public life when the Glorious Rev-
olution of 1688 replaced James with his Protestant son-in-law William III.
It had been more than twenty years since plague had swept through the
capital, and many of Pepys’ friends who had survived that nightmare were
now dying. Among them was his longtime colleague in the navy victualing
business, Denis Gauden. In perhaps Pepys’ finest hour, he eased the financial
burdens of his friend’s last months by forcing the state to honor more of the
procurement debts that had bankrupted him. The Gaudens’ mansion at
Clapham passed on to Samuel Pepys’ old servant Will Hewer, and it was
there that Samuel retired, dying in the house during his seventieth year in
1703. His body was placed in the family vault next to Elizabeth’s in Saint
Olave Hart Street church. His enormous range of papers, letters, and other
writings are in four locations: the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich,
the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Public Record Office at Kew, and the
Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where the diary can be seen
with its shorthand entries, first decoded in 1825 and available since 1971 in the
eleven-volume scholarly edition of Robert Latham and William Matthews.^9
Two prominent Londoners continued to serve the common good in the
unique ways they had shown during the Great Plague. The inveterate bach-