Mr. Samuel Pepys ; an address delivered at St. Olave's, Hart Street, on May 28, 1927, / by Sir D'Arcy Power.

  • D'Arcy Power
Date:
1927
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Mr. Samuel Pepys ; an address delivered at St. Olave's, Hart Street, on May 28, 1927, / by Sir D'Arcy Power. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    advantage of the navigation of the King’s ships. His interest in the Navy is also shown by his election as Master of the Trinity House in 1675. In that capacity he must have attended the annual service in this Church to which, as I have already said, he was no stranger for whilst he lived in the Navy Office in Seething Lane he attended the services regularly from the day in 1660 when the minister, Mr. Milles, “ did begin to nibble at the Common Prayer by saying Glory be to the Father, etc., after he had read the two psalms and the people had been so little used to it that they could not tell what to answer.” Mr. Milles therefore was fully justified in giving him a certificate when his religious principles were called in question and he was said to have papist tendencies. It was somewhat hard on Pepys that his religious principles should ever have been called in question. If there was one thing more than another upon which he might have prided himself, it was upon that which Mr. J. R. Tanner very properly calls his “ pet establishment,” the one of which he was certainly the only begetter—the department of naval chaplains. He pointed out in December, 1676, that “few Commanders take any Chaplains in his Majesty’s ships and that when they do they are of a very undesirable character, whilst the poor seamen are obliged to contribute fourpence a month out of their pay whether they have any spiritual benefit or not from their ministrations.” A year later the establishment of naval chaplains had been placed upon a sound footing and it was ordered that they should be licensed by the Bishop of London. There is evidence in the Admiralty Library that Pepys left his mark upon the succeeding century as well as upon his own time. Dr. J. R. Tanner says that the prodigious respect paid to his authority by the naval administrators of the next generation led to a number of transcripts being made from the Pepysian manuscripts and preserved amongst the records of the Admiralty. And so durable was the tradition that the Commission which reported in 1805, when Pepys had