The two pieces of work which make up this volume were compiled by Pepys in the 1660s. The first is Pepys's own record of how the Navy Board functioned. It records details of meetings with fellow officers such as Sir William Penn and Sir John Mennes, and how work could be hampered at times by the refusal of an officer to sign a contract or bill as he had not been present at the original discussions. The Navy White Book gives the discussions which took place over a variety of matters, such as, contracts with Sir William Warren, a timber merchant; costs and quality of masts and canvas. The Brooke House Papers deal with the inquiry set up by the House of Commons into the conduct of the Second Dutch War, following the humiliation of the Dutch invasion of 1667, and the inefficiency of the Navy Board. The Brooke House Papers further show Pepys defending the Navy Board's professionalism and integrity, and also that naval administration during the Second Dutch War was efficient. The Papers also show Charles II 's role in protecting the Navy Board, by making his dissatisfaction with the inquiry known, through his disrespectful language and interruptions, as well as his support for Pepys, whom he makes the Board's spokesman.

The two pieces of work which make up this volume were compiled by Pepys in the 1660s. The first is Pepys's own record of how the Navy Board functioned. It records details of meetings with fellow officers such as Sir William Penn and Sir John Mennes, and how work could be hampered at times by the refusal of an officer to sign a contract or bill as he had not been present at the original discussions. The Navy White Book gives the discussions which took place over a variety of matters, such as, contracts with Sir William Warren, a timber merchant; costs and quality of masts and canvas. The Brooke House Papers deal with the inquiry set up by the House of Commons into the conduct of the Second Dutch War, following the humiliation of the Dutch invasion of 1667, and the inefficiency of the Navy Board. The Brooke House Papers further show Pepys defending the Navy Board's professionalism and integrity, and also that naval administration during the Second Dutch War was efficient. The Papers also show Charles II 's role in protecting the Navy Board, by making his dissatisfaction with the inquiry known, through his disrespectful language and interruptions, as well as his support for Pepys, whom he makes the Board's spokesman. efficient. The Papers also show Charles II 's role in protecting the Navy Board, by making his dissatisfaction with the inquiry known, through his disrespectful language and interruptions, as well as his support for Pepys, whom he makes the Board's spokesman.

The two pieces of work which make up this volume were compiled by Pepys in the 1660s. The first is Pepys’s own record of how the Navy Board functioned. It records details of meetings with fellow officers such as Sir William Penn and Sir John Mennes, and how work could be hampered at times by the refusal of an officer to sign a contract or bill as he had not been present at the original discussions. The Navy White Book gives the discussions which took place over a variety of matters, such as, contracts with Sir William Warren, a timber merchant; costs and quality of masts and canvas. The Brooke House Papers deal with the inquiry set up by the House of Commons into the conduct of the Second Dutch War, following the humiliation of the Dutch invasion of 1667, and the inefficiency of the Navy Board. The Brooke House Papers further show Pepys defending the Navy Board’s professionalism and integrity, and also that naval administration during the Second Dutch War was efficient. The Papers also show Charles II ‘s role in protecting the Navy Board, by making his dissatisfaction with the inquiry known, through his disrespectful language and interruptions, as well as his support for Pepys, whom he makes the Board’s spokesman.

For a decade, beginning in 1660, an ambitious young London civil servant kept an astonishingly candid account of his life during one of the most defining periods in British history. In Samuel Pepys, Claire Tomalin offers us a fully realized and richly nuanced portrait of this man, whose inadvertent masterpiece would establish him as the greatest diarist in the English language. Against the backdrop of plague, civil war, and regicide, with John Milton composing diplomatic correspondence for Oliver Cromwell, Christopher Wren drawing up plans to rebuild London, and Isaac Newton advancing the empirical study of the world around us, Tomalin weaves a breathtaking account of a figure who has passed on to us much of what we know about seventeenth-century London. We witness Pepys’s early life and education, see him advising King Charles II before running to watch the great fire consume London, learn about the great events of the day as well as the most intimate personal details that Pepys encrypted in the Diary, follow him through his later years as a powerful naval administrator, and come to appreciate how Pepys’s singular literary enterprise would in many ways prefigure our modern selves. With exquisite insight and compassion, Samuel Pepys captures the uniquely fascinating figure whose legacy lives on more than three hundred years after his death.

An extensively illustrated reference covering four tumultuous decades that gave birth to the modern Royal Navy. Winner of the Samuel Pepys Prize and Latham Medal This reference book describes every aspect of the English navy in the second half of the seventeenth century, from the time when the Fleet Royal was taken into Parliamentary control after the defeat of Charles I, until the accession of William and Mary in 1689 when the long period of war with the Dutch came to an end. This is a crucial era that witnessed the creation of a permanent naval service, in essence the birth of today’s Royal Navy. Samuel Pepys, whose thirty years of service did so much to replace the ad hoc processes of the past with systems for construction and administration, is one of the most significant players, and the navy that was, by 1690, ready for a century of global struggle with the French owed much to his tireless work. This major reference for historians, naval enthusiasts, and, anyone with an interest in this colorful era of the seventeenth century covers: naval administration ship types and shipbuilding naval recruitment and crews seamanship and gunnery shipboard life dockyards and bases the foreign navies of the period the three major wars fought against the Dutch in the Channel and the North Sea “Davies writes clearly, knows his subject extremely well, organizes the material effectively, and covers each topic thoroughly . . . there’s some new piece of revelatory detail on pretty much every page. If you’re at all interested in seventeenth century sailing ships—especially English ships—this is a truly fascinating and rewarding book.” —Corsairs and Captives

The correspondence included here represents the first selection of Pepys's letters drawn from all possible sources to be published since 1933. Since the Diary does not cover this period, the letters enable the reader to follow Pepys' early career on the staff of the Earl of Sandwich, his rise to greatness as Secretary of the Admiralty, and his retirement after the Glorious Revolution. Along the way Pepys fought battles with opponents of his naval reforms and enemies who tried to implicate him in the Popish Plot, while taking care of his various relatives and keeping up with an array of friends and acquaintances who included many of the great and famous of late-seventeenth-century England. The letters have been chosen to reflect all these aspects of Pepys's varied and fascinating life, and include 30 never before published. They are accompanied by a running commentary, biographies of persons mentioned, a glossary, a chronology, and an introduction that explains how the letters have survived and analyses how they were written.BR>Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and archaeologist with numerous books to his credit. His specialist field is Roman Britain but he has published three books for Boydell on the 'other' seventeenth-century diarist, John Evelyn (1620-1706), including the widely-acclaimed Particular Friends: The Correspondence of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn which features all the letters exchanged by the two men over a period of 38 years.

Samuel Pepys was a great collector of books, news, and gossip. This study uses his surviving papers to examine reading practices, collecting, and the exchange of information in the late seventeenth century. Offering the first extensive history of reading during the Restoration, it traces developments in the book trade and news transmission at a time when England was the scene of dramatic political and religious upheavals. The investigation goes beyond Pepys's famous diary of the 1660s, employing a variety of sources to explore the role that reading played in Pepys's life and in the lives of his contemporaries. It begins by examining what it meant to be a reader in Restoration London: the skills, the people, and the places involved. Pepys's wide-ranging interests serve as starting points for considering news exchange and the reception of major literary genres in the Restoration. Particular attention is given to conduct books, histories, religious works, and recreational reading (romances, drama, and novels). The appeal that these works held for readers was not always what we might expect -or, indeed, what the authors and publishers had expected. Additional chapters explore the social interactions surrounding information gathering: the ways people acquired oral and written news in London; the experience of book-buying; and the acquisition of manuscript and print through social networks. Analysed alongside other records, Pepys's papers provide unrivalled insights into literary and cultural developments in the second half of the seventeenth century.

Pepys's diary has made him a literary celebrity. In his own time he was known as the chief naval official under Charles II and James II and this aspect of the diarist's life has not received the attention it deserves from his modern biographers. Charles Knighton, a Pepys scholar with a particular interest in naval history, reveals the full extent of Pepys's achievements in creating a modern navy which was both permanent and professional.

This remarkable work is a comprehensive historiographical and bibliographical survey of the most important scholarly and printed materials about the naval and maritime history of England and Great Britain from the earliest times to 1815. More than 4,000 popular, standard and official histories, important articles in journals and periodicals, anthologies, conference, symposium and seminar papers, guides, documents and doctoral theses are covered so that the emphasis is the broadest possible. But the work is far, far more than a listing. The works are all evaluated, assessed and analysed and then integrated into an historical narrative that makes the book a hugely useful reference work for student, scholar, and enthusiast alike. It is divided into twenty-one chapters which cover resource centres, significant naval writers, pre-eminent and general histories, the chronological periods from Julius Caesar through the Vikings, Tudors and Stuarts to Nelson and Bligh, major naval personalities, warships, piracy, strategy and tactics, exploration, discovery and navigation, archaeology and even naval fiction. Quite simply, no-one with an interest and enthusiasm for naval history can afford to be without this book at their side.