Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) was an English naval administrator, member of Parliament and diarist, the son of a London tailor, who rose through the patronage of his cousin Edward Montagu to become Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board in 1660 and eventually Secretary to the Admiralty. From 1660 to 1669 he kept a diary in shorthand recording the Restoration, the Plague and the Great Fire, and his own private life with a candor no English writer had attempted before. He stopped when he feared he was going blind. He left his library, including the diary, to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where it was deciphered in the 1820s.