Grit in the Oyster-Shell 
Colin Burrow
- Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin
Samuel Pepys was the son of a London tailor and a president of the Royal Society. He was a philanderer who could feed a wench lobster before having his way with her under a chair in a tavern (twice, on a good day), and a sage moralist who wrote solemnly to rebuke his chief patron, the Earl of Sandwich, for an extra-marital affair which threatened his career. He kept pictures of Oliver Cromwell among his collection of images of the kings and queens of England, and yet late in life was accused of Popery and Jacobitism. He radically reformed the administration of the Navy by labouring (often) from four in the morning until the middle of the night, and yet he was quite capable of making a shabby deal to share kick-backs from the illegal sale of goods from prize ships. In his lifetime he saw the English state transformed from monarchy to Commonwealth and back again, and the English Church sway from extreme Puritanism to near Catholicism. He seemed always to be in the right place at the right time: he was there for the execution of Charles I, and on the ship that brought Charles II back from exile. He watched London burn in September 1666 from the window of his house, and felt ‘a shower of Firedrops’ on his face. He experienced the terror of the Dutch fleet advancing up the Medway in June 1667, was accused of ‘Piracy, Popery, and Treachery’ in the hysteria surrounding the Popish Plot in 1679 and, after returning to office in 1684, had to resign his post as Secretary to the Admiralty after the ejection of his patron (and former Lord High Admiral) James II. When Pepys died in May 1703, aged 70, the autopsy confirmed that he had lived hard: his lungs were full of black spots, his kidneys full of stones and his gut was discoloured and septic.
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