Winter, 1664–1665 • 23Merchants in the commercial center of the capital inside its ancient walls
were enjoying a brisk trade with the usual winter throng of country visitors. If
they stopped to think beyond their profits, merchants could count their bless-
ing of living in the healthiest part of the metropolis. Although the plagues of
Henry VIII’s and Elizabeth’s days had struck hardest at the city center, the
last epidemics had concentrated in the crowded, run-down suburbs, with
only a few parishes inside the wall being heavily infected—in 1603 in the
wharf area by the Thames River and in 1625 on either side of the city gates.
Elizabeth and Samuel Pepys celebrated New Year’s Day at their apartment
in the Navy Board building near the Tower of London. They indulged in a
venison pasty and a turkey and were “very merry.” After dinner, Samuel
slipped out to his adjoining office to go over his last year’s income and ex-
penses. A hard frost covered the ground the next day, but his growing profits
gave him a confident gait as he walked through the old walled city toward
Whitehall Palace in suburban Westminster, buying New Year’s “boxes” as
gifts for his business associates and hiring a coach to the impressive new Pi-
azza of Covent Garden for a noble French dinner with aristocratic friends.
Speeding homeward through the wall at Newgate, he stopped off at the
shops in Saint Paul’s yard and came upon Robert Hooke’s new book on the
microscope, “so pretty,” he wrote, “that I presently bespoke it.” Samuel was a
month shy of his thirty-second birthday. Elizabeth was twenty-four. This
rising star in the navy’s civilian administration had the ear of cabinet officers
of the Crown and did business with brokers in town who arranged supplies
for the Royal Navy’s ships and men.
Born and raised above his father’s tailoring shop in the shadow of sub-
urban Saint Bride’s church and nearby Bridewell prison, where pestilence
had struck hard during the Great Plague of 1625 , Samuel Pepys had come a
long way in a short time. After graduating from Cambridge in 1654 ,he
started out as a servant in charge of the personal affairs of a distant relative,
Lord Sandwich, who had lodgings at Whitehall. Soon Pepys was at work in
the government’s financial office, the Exchequer. In 1660 he joined the four-
member Navy Board as Clerk of the Acts in charge of recording its meetings
and preparing its correspondence. He greatly expanded his duties until he
was now indispensable to the board, the navy, and the king. Among the ben-
efits of office was the Pepys’ handsome apartment at the Navy Building on
Seething Lane in the well-off parish of Saint Olave Hart Street. Their spa-
cious new quarters were quite a contrast to the cramped turret room at
Whitehall that Samuel and Elizabeth had called home as newlyweds and to
the portion of a nearby house they had rented later in a dark cul-de-sac.