I

Institutional and social connections to enslavement, derived from a wider entanglement between the crown and its servants, the navy, and slave-trading companies, exercised a significant but still largely unrecognized influence on Pepys’s life and career. As clerk of the acts at the navy board (1660–77), secretary to the admiralty commission (1673–9), and then secretary for the affairs of the admiralty (1684–9), Pepys regularly transacted business for both the RA and the RAC, which drew on the resources of the navy to advance and defend their commercial interests in Africa and the Caribbean.Footnote ¹⁰ His famous diary records social and business encounters with African company members, many of which continued after the diary ended in 1669.

Enslavement was not a distant reality for Pepys. As Susan Dwyer Amussen, Simon Newman, and others have shown, late seventeenth-century London had a significant enslaved population.Footnote ¹¹ Newman identifies ‘a network of merchants, ship captains, wealthy investors and others who were all to varying degrees engaged in the creation of both the transatlantic slave trade and colonial plantation slavery’, who brought enslaved people to England and sought to recapture them when they escaped.Footnote ¹² Pepys never invested in the slave trade or pursued fugitives, but in other respects he inhabited the world Newman describes. Yet his case also challenges several assumptions behind Newman’s idea of a London network of enslavers. First, the connection between Pepys’s involvement in the RA and RAC and his ownership of enslaved people was not linear, with one facilitating the other; rather, his direct involvement in slavery occurred in the space where his naval and African company networks intersected. Second, Pepys’s case shows that the practice of enslavement in England took shape not just through the networks and the social connections of enslavers, but through the agency they exercised over the written records that document, in fragmentary ways, the lives of the enslaved.

Pepys’s diary describes a London inhabited by both enslaved and free Black people.Footnote ¹³ In 1662, for instance, he recorded that his patron the earl of Sandwich bought two enslaved children, ‘a little Turke and a negroe’.Footnote ¹⁴ The diary mentions the Black servants of his colleagues and friends Sir William Batten, George Cock, and Sir William Penn; Batten left his servant Mingo property and money in his will.Footnote ¹⁵ Another, Doll the cook, whom Pepys borrowed from the wine merchant William Batelier in 1669, appears fleetingly.Footnote ¹⁶ Some of them may have suffered what Newman calls a ‘liminal state’ between slavery and freedom, at risk of being sent into enslavement in the Caribbean or the north American colonies.Footnote ¹⁷ The year after Pepys’s death in May 1703, a ‘Mary Skinner, and her Servant Maid Mary a Negroe’ were granted a pass to travel to Portugal.Footnote ¹⁸ This may well be Pepys’s partner of thirty-three years, Mary Skinner (d. 1715), who in 1698 had received a pass for France.Footnote ¹⁹

Pepys himself owned at least two enslaved people, who lived in his household: an unidentified boy in the mid-1670s, sold in Tangier in the summer of 1680, and an older man, enslaved in the 1680s, whom Pepys attempted to sell in September 1688. Slave and servant were fluid, often ambivalent categories, but there is little doubt that Pepys, who called them ‘my Black-Boy’ and ‘my Negroe’, treated the people he sold in the 1680s as property, not servants.Footnote ²⁰

That Pepys was an enslaver is not a secret. Since the publication of Arthur Bryant’s three-volume life in the 1930s, Pepys biographers have generally acknowledged, however briefly and allusively, that he owned enslaved people.Footnote ²¹ But, until recently, his white servants attracted more sustained attention than his Black slaves, and Richard Ollard, who decried the ‘barbarity’ of Pepys’s behaviour, was a rare critical voice.Footnote ²² Existing discussions of this issue are limited in other ways. Recent public discussions of the contested legacies of slavery in Britain have erred in the other direction and claimed, incorrectly, that Pepys profited directly from slavery by investing in the RAC.Footnote ²³

Kate Loveman’s recent book directly addresses Pepys’s slave ownership and the broader presence of Black people in the diary, arguing that the division between studies of his diary and of Pepys’s naval papers have inhibited our understanding of the diary as a source for the lives of Black people in early modern London and of Pepys as an enslaver.Footnote ²⁴ Loveman frames her approach as ‘reading against the grain’ of the diary, and as a study of a situation where, unlike in the diary, enslavement is ‘explicit’ in Pepys’s naval papers and treated with ‘no ambiguity’.Footnote ²⁵ This approach simplifies the complex agency that Pepys himself exercised over his correspondence and archives. Like others involved in enslavement in London at the time, Pepys in fact created a textual record heavily shaped by his personal and professional relationships and by institutional commitments. Reading it against the grain can produce valuable insights, but we also need to focus with greater critical acuity on the conditions under which enslavement was recorded and written about, acknowledging that these archival conditions have shaped our perceptions of the reality of enslavement in an English context.

Pepys, like most enslavers, was not ashamed of owning human beings. Nevertheless, for reasons of pragmatism and professional propriety, his official and personal correspondence strategically omits key details about them. In their dealings with enslaved people, Pepys and the ship captains who facilitated his slave ownership attempted to control what was recorded and what was erased, often for reasons tangentially connected to slavery itself. This article revises existing accounts by focusing on the particular conditions and imperatives that drove Pepys to record his involvement in slavery. It demonstrates that the archival evidence for the enslaved people in Pepys’s household is more partial and fragmentary than his biographers have acknowledged. Significant ambiguity enshrouds the identities, names, and fates of those whom he enslaved, some of which derives directly from choices made by Pepys and his admiralty clerks about the management and archiving of his correspondence. Pepys’s archive of slavery was constructed not just from the erasure of enslaved people, but through the evasive inscription of his personal and professional priorities, both of which were shaped by his long-standing interactions with the African companies.

II

Pepys’s involvement with transatlantic slavery began in the early 1660s, not with the direct ownership of enslaved people but through professional and social connections to the RA. The RA, which Pepys often called the ‘Guinea Company’, was a joint-stock company chartered first in 1660 and again in 1663 that traded gold, ivory, wood, cloth, and enslaved people between west Africa, England, and the Americas.Footnote ²⁶ After 1663 the RA’s commercial interests focused more directly on the slave trade, although the second Anglo-Dutch war of 1664–7 reduced its business severely, a situation Pepys described as ‘defeating them in their great Contract with Spaine for Blacks’ and ‘being most wholly to the utter ruine of our Royall Company’.Footnote ²⁷ Nevertheless, from 1662 to its final recorded voyage in 1672, it embarked at least 27,489 enslaved people aboard 105 ships.Footnote ²⁸ Its stockholders included Charles II, Pepys’s patron the duke of York, London merchants, courtiers, and politicians.Footnote ²⁹

The RA sat squarely within Pepys’s social and patronage networks. His patrons and navy board superiors Edward Montagu, first earl of Sandwich (1625–72), and Sir William Coventry (1627–86) held RA stock, served as assistants, and attended its meetings. Coventry was a regular attendee before 1667.Footnote ³⁰ Thomas Povey (1613/14–1705), Pepys’s colleague, rival, and predecessor as treasurer to the lords commissioner for Tangier, also invested.Footnote ³¹ Despite his many connections to its members, Pepys mostly moved in the outer orbit of the RA. The RA’s minute book gives no evidence that he joined the company, although his diary records that in January 1663/4 he was at the ‘Duke of Yorkes lodgings, where the Guinny Company are choosing their Assistants for the next year by balletting’.Footnote ³² On 26 April 1667 he attended a meeting of the ‘Guinny Company’ with Sir George Carteret and Lord Berkely, ‘and there stayed’.Footnote ³³

Kate Loveman and Ian Archer emphasize the varied nature of Pepys’s networks and their place in his persistent quest for news, status, and advantage.Footnote ³⁴ The African companies were a significant presence in these networks and formed part of the context for Pepys’s ownership of enslaved people. His main contacts with the RA came through the web of business and political relationships he created between the company and key figures in the navy, the London merchant community, and the court. Some of these connections were what Loveman characterizes as ‘strong ties’ – relationships, such as those with Sandwich and Coventry, involving significant contact and exchange.Footnote ³⁵ Others were more ephemeral: in general, Pepys’s relationships to RA members involved both his social superiors and, particularly in the later 1660s, those who were closer to him in status – in Loveman’s terminology, both ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ connections.Footnote ³⁶

Pepys’s RA connections intersected with his other overlapping social and institutional networks. Loveman describes his ‘ready-made network of navy contacts’, but he also joined institutions including the Royal Fishing Company and the Royal Society.Footnote ³⁷ Several RA investors known to Pepys, including the Baltic merchant George Cock (1615–79), the duke of York’s secretary Matthew Wren (1629–72), Sandwich, and Thomas Povey, became Fellows of the Royal Society, to which Pepys was elected in 1664, and of which he became president in 1684.Footnote ³⁸ Thomas Sprat characterized the RA as the ‘twin sister of the Royal Society’, and connections between the two institutions were extensive in the early 1660s.Footnote ³⁹ Wren was also named alongside Pepys on the 1664 charter of the Royal Fishing Company.Footnote ⁴⁰ Through his varied connections, Pepys encountered RA members, some of whom he knew well, in distinct but interrelated settings across London in the 1660s. But his most direct link to the RA was through the naval assistance the crown gave the company.

Charles’s II’s investment – loudly promised and slowly delivered – together with the grant of two royal charters and the appointment of the duke of York as its governor from 1663 meant that the RA, which in some respects acted as an instrument of royal policy in Africa and the Caribbean, could draw on practical and military assistance from the navy to protect its interests. Pepys administered that assistance, often by arranging the loan of naval vessels. In 1663, he drafted a memorandum outlining the terms on which the king would lend the RA a ship.Footnote ⁴¹ Pepys arranged several loans, including that of the Eagle in November 1665 and the grant of the Golden Lyon, captured from the Dutch, in April 1666.Footnote ⁴² In 1667 Coventry asked him to assist in managing the king’s increasingly tense financial relationship with the RA. The company’s mounting debts and deteriorating prospects prompted the court of assistants to call in unpaid subscriptions, the largest of which was due from the king. On 1 May 1667 Coventry told Pepys that, despite frequent ‘discourses in the Guinney Company of the Kings being indebted to them … when I consider how much hee hath paid for them in the Navy I beleeve they are in his debt’.Footnote ⁴³ At Coventry’s request, Pepys prepared memoranda detailing the naval assistance the RA received.Footnote ⁴⁴

Connections between the navy and the RA were sustained by the appointment in 1667 of the RA investor Matthew Wren as York’s secretary, in succession to Coventry. Wren’s main work for York was to manage naval and admiralty business, but he also took a significant role in governing the RA, pushing his master’s interests in the company. He served as an assistant from 1664; on the Committee of Seven, which managed the company’s business; as deputy governor in 1668 and 1670; and as sub-governor in 1669.Footnote ⁴⁵ Wren’s commitment to the company was substantial: in a letter of 2 February 1669, he apologized to Pepys that he had been ‘detained so long at the African house’ that he was unable to attend the navy board.Footnote ⁴⁶

Pepys admired and stood somewhat in awe of Coventry; he and Wren were friendly. The diary records that they dined together, sometimes accompanied by other RA members, and Wren became Pepys’s closest contact within the RA’s administration.Footnote ⁴⁷ They probably met through the Royal Society before Wren became York’s secretary; they corresponded and met frequently over naval business in the later 1660s.Footnote ⁴⁸ Their exchanges also involved more expansive, political matters. Discussing the proper governance of the navy, Pepys’s notes identify Wren as ‘a great asserter of the great requisiteness that the Crown should bring all the military power both at land and at sea into the hands of the nobility and gentry’, against his own view on the matter.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1669 Wren was involved in Pepys’s unsuccessful election campaign at Aldeburgh.Footnote ⁵⁰ The period from 1663 until the RA’s demise in 1671 was characterized by the fact that Coventry, and then Wren, held high office in the company and managed naval matters for York. Pepys’s later contacts with the RAC were polycentric and less dependent on close professional or personal relationships.

Pepys’s exchanges with the RA were mutual. Wren drew on Pepys for information and assistance for the RA; equally, even before Wren’s appointment, Pepys used the resources of the RA for his work in the navy office. After a visit in December 1663 to Erith to muster the ships Sophia and Wellcome, lent by Charles to the RA, Pepys compared the company’s low wages to the rates the navy offered.Footnote ⁵¹ On Wednesday 13 January 1663/4, he went ‘to the Affrican-house to look upon their book of contracts for several commodities for my information in the prizes we give in the Navy’.Footnote ⁵² More broadly, Pepys used his mercantile and naval networks to acquire information; his RA connections fitted into this web.Footnote ⁵³ He also received money from the company. On 21 September 1668 he got two of ‘the new 5l-pieces in gold coined by the Guinea Company’ from Thomas Holder, its treasurer, probably as a gift or as a reward for his assistance with the ship loans and other business.Footnote ⁵⁴ The RAC rewarded him more generously in the 1680s.

The significant overlap between RA members, merchants, and goldsmith-bankers involved in government finance meant that Pepys encountered members of the company in other areas of his professional life. These interactions did not directly concern slavery or the RA’s other business interests, but they show how far Pepys’s London networks were peopled with RA investors. Some of these meetings involved naval supply: in January 1664/5 Pepys recorded negotiations about tar with Sir William Rider, a merchant named on the 1663 RA charter.Footnote ⁵⁵ He also met RA members to discuss finance for Tangier and the navy throughout the 1660s, especially during the second Anglo-Dutch war of 1664–7.

The goldsmith-banker Edward Backwell, who attended RA meetings in the 1660s, was elected as an assistant in 1667/8, and later invested in the RAC, was heavily involved in crown finance in the 1660s and 1670s, particularly over Tangier, in which guise he features frequently in the diary.Footnote ⁵⁶ These Tangier transactions appear in Backwell’s 1669–70 ledger under Pepys’s name.Footnote ⁵⁷ Pepys also did personal business with Backwell, recorded in the diary, although Backwell’s ledgers for this account do not survive.Footnote ⁵⁸ Pepys socialized with Backwell and his wife, Mary; in the late 1660s the Backwells lived near Pepys, in Mark Lane, and he sometimes met them at services at St Olave’s, Hart Street.Footnote ⁵⁹ Pepys’s relations with Backwell were both sociable and professional, driven by the need to cultivate him as a significant lender to the crown and by his fondness for Mary Backwell, whom he admired as a ‘fine’ and ‘very pretty woman’.Footnote ⁶⁰ A similar pattern characterized his engagement with other goldsmith-bankers and RA members. The diary records that Pepys often met Sir Robert Vyner, with whom he deposited £2,000 in 1666,Footnote ⁶¹ and the goldsmith-banker John Colvil, another RA investor whose wife Pepys admired, on many occasions from 1665 onwards, usually over crown or naval finance.Footnote ⁶²

Pepys occasionally visited the RA’s London headquarters in Throgmorton Street, the African House, in the early 1660s.Footnote ⁶³ These visits commingled business and pleasure: like other chartered and city livery companies, the RA extended hospitality to reinforce solidarity among its members and to treat naval, merchant, and court contacts.Footnote ⁶⁴ Pepys praised the ‘very pretty dinner and good company and excellent discourse’ he found there.Footnote ⁶⁵ Coventry and Pepys also used the African House for admiralty and other crown business. Several visits involved the accounts of Henry Mordaunt, the second earl of Peterborough (1621–97), who was governor of Tangier in 1662 and an RA investor. On 18 February 1663/4, Pepys, who served on the Tangier committee, went ‘with Mr. Coventry to the Affrican-house and there fell to my Lord Peterborough’s accounts; and by and by to dinner, where excellent discourse – Sir G. Carteret and other of the Affrican Company with us’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Peterborough’s accounts provoked at least three other visits in the same year, usually accompanied by dinner at the African Company table.Footnote ⁶⁷ Alongside coffee houses, taverns, and the Royal Exchange, the African House was another venue where Pepys transacted business and practised the arts of sociable news-gathering described by Loveman.Footnote ⁶⁸

Reading the diary alongside the admiralty and navy board records shows the extent of Pepys’s social and professional involvement with the RA. He transacted business for the company and established relationships with its members. Some of these, such as his connection to Wren, were friendly; Pepys also met Wren’s friend George Cock frequently from the early 1660s.Footnote ⁶⁹ His opinion of Cock was mixed: he valued Cock’s bibulous, sociable company but doubted his intellectual abilities.Footnote ⁷⁰ He socialized away from the African House with Cock and other company members such as Humphrey Yard.Footnote ⁷¹ Pepys frequently visited Sir Robert Vyner’s London house, mostly on official business, but he also travelled to Vyner’s estate at Swakeleys in Middlesex where, on 7 September 1665, ‘He showed me a black boy that he had that died of a consumption; and being dead, he caused him to be dried in a Oven, and lies there entire in a box.’Footnote ⁷² Vyner was unusually callous in displaying the mummified body of his dead slave, but in keeping an enslaved boy in his household, whom he may have obtained through the RA, he was entirely typical of wealthy London merchants in this period.Footnote ⁷³ The incident captures several aspects of Pepys’s relationship to slavery in the 1660s: he was socially and politically important enough to visit Vyner, a key RA investor whom he knew from his naval work, but, unlike Vyner, was not himself a slave-owner. Within fifteen years, he would be.

III

Pepys’s connections to the RA’s corporate successor, the RAC, are rarely discussed, largely because they occurred after the diary ended in 1669. The RAC, chartered in 1672 after the failure of the debt-ridden RA in the late 1660s, transported far more enslaved people than its predecessor, expanding its business along the west coast of Africa and into the Caribbean. There were significant continuities between the old African company and the new: the duke of York became the RAC’s governor, many RA stockholders and officials joined, and its headquarters remained at the African House. Among Pepys’s acquaintance, Cock, Backwell, Povey, Vyner, Sir John Banks, and the duke of York were among the RAC’s original subscribers; Wren, who died after the battle of Solebay in 1672, also transferred his allegiance briefly to the new company.Footnote ⁷⁴ Banks, a close friend of Pepys and a member of the RA, was an RAC assistant (1672–4 and 1676–8) and sub-governor in 1674–5.Footnote ⁷⁵ Again, Pepys himself did not invest; although he was increasingly affluent by the early 1670s, he avoided speculative investments in joint-stock companies.

The RAC continued to summon the resources of the navy to protect its interests on the west African coast.Footnote ⁷⁶ Pepys was well acquainted with these operations. In December 1678, for instance, Captain Peter Heywood of the Norwich wrote to him detailing his operations against interlopers at Cabo Corso and enclosing a copy of the letter he had sent to the RAC.Footnote ⁷⁷ Several ships were dispatched in the 1670s and 1680s, all during Pepys’s tenure at the admiralty: the Phoenix in 1674, the Hunter in 1676, the Norwich in 1678, and the Mordaunt and Orange Tree in 1684.Footnote ⁷⁸ Pepys was involved in negotiating these loans and made practical arrangements for them. The case of the Hunter, which the RAC hired from the navy, is typical.Footnote ⁷⁹ In the spring and summer of 1676, acting as an intermediary between the king, the lords of the admiralty, and the company, Pepys corresponded with the RAC’s sub-governor Andrew King to agree terms for the loan of the Hunter and to finalize instructions for its captain, Richard Dickinson.Footnote ⁸⁰ On 22 July 1676 he drew up a memorandum of a discussion at Whitehall between the king, York, the lord privy seal, the secretaries of state, and the Speaker over these instructions and their implications for the RAC’s monopoly.Footnote ⁸¹ The loan of ships from the navy allowed the RAC to exert power over interlopers on the African coast; it also brought Pepys into frequent contact with RAC officers and with the captains of ships transporting enslaved people from Africa to the Caribbean. This contact expanded Pepys’s existing naval networks into the RAC, but it also had more direct consequences. Section IV demonstrates that the loan of the Phoenix in 1674 was a particularly significant context for his private involvement with enslaved people.

Pepys’s direct involvement with the RAC ended when the political crisis of 1679–80 and his imprisonment in the Tower on charges of popery and corruption provoked his departure from the navy. It reignited in May 1684 on his return to office as secretary for the affairs of the admiralty, when he again arranged ship loans. The RAC had been planning to obtain a man-of-war from the navy since April 1684.Footnote ⁸² It received two ships. Pepys transferred the Orange Tree on 28 May 1684, and the RAC received it in June.Footnote ⁸³ This ship was intended as a slave-trading vessel, and was probably crewed by the RAC, whose court of assistants drafted its instructions.Footnote ⁸⁴ The RAC needed another ship to harry privateers and interlopers on the African coast; the Mordaunt, with a captain and crew supplied by the navy, was sent shortly after the Orange Tree. Again, Pepys handled its transfer and the detailed instructions given to its captain, Henry Killigrew. These exchanges show how far the RAC could dictate terms to the navy: its court of assistants drew up a paper that was ‘deliuered Sr Ben: Bathurst to giue Mr Pepys & gett them added to the Instructions or orders of Capt Killigrew’, further requesting that Killigrew ‘neither carryes out nor brings home any Passengers but what the Company shall have knowledge & approve of’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Bathurst, the RAC’s sub-governor, also dealt with Pepys over the East India Company’s business with the navy.Footnote ⁸⁶

The RAC rewarded Pepys generously. The court of assistants’ minute book notes the decision of 14 August 1684 ‘That 50 Guynies be presented Mr Pepys from the Company and Sir Benjamin Bathurst is desired to take that trouble to give it as an acknowledgment for his readines to promote the Companys intrest about the Mordant.’Footnote ⁸⁷ Ship captains and other officials were often given similar gratuities. Daniell Jones received twenty guineas in October 1689 ‘for his kind assistance of Mr Ralph Thorpe to bring his Shipp Phoenix into Port’, and in August 1677 a ‘silver Bowle of 45 oz with the Companyes Armes upon it’ was presented to Captain Samson Clarke.Footnote ⁸⁸ The court of assistants calibrated these gratuities carefully: Pepys received more than most captains rewarded in this period, but the same amount as George Hannoy on his appointment as provost marshal of Barbados in January 1683/4 and Captain Richard Dickinson of the Hunter, whose loan he arranged, in July 1676.Footnote ⁸⁹

Historians have commonly characterized the RAC both as a corporate expression of the royal prerogative, on which its monopoly rested, and as aligned with the imperial ambitions of Charles II and James II.Footnote ⁹⁰ Yet if the RAC, as Abigail Swingen puts it, ‘embodied the Stuarts’ economic and political vision of empire’, it did so in part through the practical co-operation of office-holders and crown servants like Pepys.Footnote ⁹¹ In rewarding Pepys, the RAC reaffirmed its long-standing connection to him and sought to encourage future effort on its behalf. It also acknowledged that gratuities – and their more flagrant siblings, bribes – oiled the engine of the admiralty. Mark Knights has shown that, although much of Pepys’s growing wealth from the 1660s onwards stemmed from bribes and gratuities delivered by supplicants for patronage, naval contractors, and naval creditors, his attitude to this stream of ambiguously acquired wealth was complex.Footnote ⁹² Like many grafters, he deplored the corruption of others and defended the legitimacy of his own behaviour.Footnote ⁹³ Pepys, Knights argues, defined the bribes given to him as ‘lawful rewards or friendly gifts for favours and exertion … [which] … were never done at the expense of the crown’s interests’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Knights does not discuss the African companies, but the fifty guineas Pepys received from the RAC certainly fits this description. The court of assistants’ minute book recorded the gratuity in terms of ‘the Companys intrest’, but the tight connections between crown and company, and the king’s personal investment, meant that Pepys’s private reward could also be presented as consonant with the interests of the crown. Given the accusations of corruption he faced in 1679, and his recent return to office, it was politic to do so in the summer of 1684.Footnote ⁹⁵ Section IV shows that his scrupulous and self-serving attitude to the ethics of gratuities also informed his ownership and treatment of enslaved people.

There were clear continuities between Pepys’s relationship to the RAC and the RA. He was a key point of contact between the navy and the companies and arranged the loan of ships. Both companies rewarded him. However, his diary suggests that his connections to the RA were based heavily in personal relationships – such as his friendship with Wren – whereas his involvement with the RAC had a more formal basis. This reflects changes in Pepys’s status: in the early 1660s he was a striving clerk, and in the 1670s a significant and influential figure in the navy. It also reflects the nature of the available evidence: without a source comparable to the diary, it is harder to trace RAC members in his social networks. However, it is still clear that, in the context of his work for the navy and his connections to the RAC, Pepys established relationships with ship captains who were important for his ownership of enslaved people. Three captains from his naval network played a significant role in his ownership and sale of enslaved people, and the evidence he preserved about them. The article now turns to them.

IV

Among the nearly three thousand bound volumes in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, are fourteen official letterbooks containing correspondence from 1673 to 1689, copied and indexed by Pepys’s clerks, including William Hewer (1642–1715). In the volume covering January 1674/5 to April 1676 is a letter from the naval officer John Howe to Pepys. The letter, listed under the topic ‘Neglects of Officers taken note of’, is described by Hewer as concerning ‘Capt How of ye Phoenix 5th May His failure in what he wrote to P. about takeing a reward’.Footnote ⁹⁶ In a similar fashion, Howe’s original letter was annotated on its verso side: ‘Lt How to P about securing a Comission for his succeding his late deceased Capt in the Comand of the Phoenix With offers of a gratuity vide P’s answer In his publick letter book in censure thereof’.Footnote ⁹⁷

As the index suggests, Howe offered Pepys a bribe, but the ‘gratuity’ was not an object but a person. The immediate cause of this offer was the ship Phoenix, lent to the RAC and dispatched to the west African coast in the summer of 1674. Its captain, George Watson, had orders to spend two months there ‘to take in the Gold & Teeth the Companys Factors shall provide’ and ‘to seize what shipps he finds there of his Majesties Subjects Trading without Lycence’.Footnote ⁹⁸ It then took enslaved people to Barbados. Arriving in November 1674, the Phoenix made a brutal voyage. Its log records the death of nineteen unnamed enslaved people, all of whom were ‘hove overboard’.Footnote ⁹⁹ In Barbados it delivered sixty-one ‘Negro Slaves’ to the RAC agent Edmond Steed, returning to England in February 1674/5 under the command of Captain Atkins after Watson’s death in June 1674, and arriving in April 1675.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

On 20 April 1675 Lieutenant John Howe wrote to the navy commissioners from the Phoenix at Plymouth, reporting his return and complaining that he was unjustly deprived of its command, ‘which did descend to me, both by the Death of our Former Comander Captain Georg Wattson, and the Unanimous consent of our whole ships Company’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The decision to make Atkins captain, Howe insisted, contradicted the usual precedent. Pepys agreed and on 23 April he confirmed Howe’s command.Footnote ¹⁰² Unaware of Pepys’s decision, Howe mustered support. Richard Row wrote to Pepys on 24 April recommending Howe as ‘a Man Deserveing and knows how to Accknowledge favours’; Row suggested that Howe wished to give Pepys ‘An hon[our]able present for you and I hope Worth your Acceptance’.Footnote ¹⁰³

The nature of this present was revealed on 30 April 1675, when Howe wrote directly to Pepys. By now aware that Pepys had favoured him, he ‘would craue your acceptance of a small Neager boy, which I brought haue on board for your honour, & intend to present you with at the first conveniency, instead of something better worth your acceptance, hopeing he is so well seasoned to endure the cold weather as to live in England’. Howe apologized ‘for this boldnes from an un-known hand, which I presume only upon my friends acquaintance’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ His actions were bold but not unusual; Howe was one of many naval officers who proffered gifts and bribes to Pepys. In September 1675 Captain William Harman offered ‘a Present of a hundred Ginneys for my thankfulness’ if Pepys would secure the command of the Cleveland for him.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Pepys rebuffed him, provoking an abject letter from Harman repenting his ‘Rashnes in the comiting of my late verey Errar’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Howe was not the only officer to import enslaved people. From the 1670s to the 1690s, RAC captains and investors often petitioned its court of assistants for permission to bring enslaved people – usually, but not exclusively, young boys – to England on ships returning from the Caribbean.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The court’s ruling in October 1681 ‘That Captaine Abraham Wheelock have liberty to buy one Negroe person for his owne Accountt provided he doe not dispose of him abroad but bring him home upon his Shipp’ was typical.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Wheelock and the other captains needed permission because the RAC, which itself sent back enslaved people to London, feared that they might undermine its monopoly by trading slaves and other goods privately in the colonies.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Nevertheless, the RAC minute books capture only part of a much larger phenomenon. Despite the company’s vigilance, not all captains declared their human cargo; merchant ships, naval vessels like the Phoenix, and planters returning from the Caribbean also carried enslaved people to London. Given the numbers recorded in the minute books, RAC captains clearly traded enslaved people in England; some brought back many enslaved people across several voyages. Captain William Goose, who brought back at least nineteen slaves from 1684 to 1689/90, was one of the most prolific.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Nor were officers the only crew members involved; ships’ mates and surgeons are regularly listed as the owners or beneficiaries of these transactions.Footnote ¹¹¹ The pay book of the Phoenix records in 1674/5 ‘A slave bought by the purser’, who may have been carried on board in addition to the boy Howe offered to Pepys.Footnote ¹¹²

Enslaved people were given or sold to other members of the RAC, to aristocrats, and to other wealthy Londoners.Footnote ¹¹³ On 27 September 1687 the court granted Goose permission ‘to bring a negroe Girle for Mr Edward Colston’, the Bristol merchant, philanthropist, and RAC member.Footnote ¹¹⁴ They might also be used to solicit political patronage. In April 1683 Captain Bradshaw was allowed to ‘bring home from Capt Cornelius Hodges a Negro boy & Girle as is desired by Mrs Eleanor Ashmouth ^ye said^ Hodges sister they being for the Duke of Richmond & dutches of Portsmouth’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Howe’s offer to Pepys was part of a bigger network of exchange, through which enslaved people were traded and gifted.

Pepys’s biographers have often assumed that he accepted the enslaved person.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In fact, he indignantly rejected Howe’s offer and Row’s intervention. On 5 May he rebuked Howe for ‘your thinking that any Consideration of benefitt to my Self, or expectation of Reward from you should be of any Inducement with mee’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Without describing the gift, Pepys asked Howe to ‘reserve that sort of Argument for such as will be guided by it, and know that your meritting well of ye thing is ye only Present that shall ever operate with mee’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The root of his objection was that Howe, like Captain Harman, attempted publicly to influence his conduct, implying that Pepys’s private interests might sway an official decision. As Knights has shown, Pepys’s attitude to bribe-taking was shaped by circumstance. In this case, his sensitivity may have been provoked by his recent experience in parliament, where, after taking his seat as MP for Castle Rising in late 1673, he was attacked by the earl of Shaftesbury and his allies for his allegedly Catholic sympathies.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Although growing in wealth and influence, Pepys was still politically vulnerable.

Yet the ethical issue troubling him was the impropriety of Howe’s offer, and the publicity that a letter directed to him at the navy board might create, not the use of an enslaved person as a bribe. Pepys’s concern to document his propriety directly shaped how this incident was recorded: Howe’s intervention required not just a performance of probity from Pepys, but an exercise in the political management of his archive. From this point on, Pepys and Howe’s correspondence refers only to a ‘present’, ‘gratuity’, or ‘reward’, rather than to enslavement. Hewer’s role, under Pepys’s direction, in indexing and organizing his official correspondence further reinforced the impression of propriety Pepys sought to create in his letter to Howe. The network of naval captains importing enslaved children had a proper place in the minute books and archive of the RAC, which by documenting sought to control it, but not in Pepys’s official correspondence or, by extension, in the carefully curated letterbooks he chose to enrol in his own library. Collectively, these self-conscious acts of archival curation directed attention away from the vulnerable person of a small boy towards a more abstract world of ‘gratuity’ and ‘reward’.

Howe’s reply was a performance of wounded innocence. ‘I am’, he protested on 6 May, ‘hearty greived that you should haue the least Conceipt I deeme you any way mercenary But I must Ingeniously Confesse my owne oversight in mentioning my intentions to you to whom I am soe much obliged.’Footnote ¹²⁰ His indignation does not exclude the possibility that Pepys accepted the offer while publicly condemning it: crucially, there is no archival record of whether the boy entered his household. Accounts of this incident, including Claire Tomalin’s biography, that rely on the calendar of Pepys letters in the Rawlinson papers rather than on the original manuscripts smooth over this uncertainty.Footnote ¹²¹ Pepys’s official outrage at Howe’s behaviour and the subsequent decisions made about the archiving and arrangement of his correspondence had an unintended consequence: the erasure of an enslaved person, whose name remains unknown, and who disappears from the written record after Howe’s first letter.

V

In late 1679 Pepys arranged to sell an enslaved person through another of his naval contacts, Captain John Wyborne (d. 1691). He had been released from the Tower in July of that year and was no longer secretary to the admiralty commission, but maintained many of his old connections. On 4 December 1679 he wrote about his slave, who was on board Wyborne’s ship the Bristol: ‘Pray not my Black-Boy add any thing to your Care, your kindness to mee on my own Score haveing been already too burthensome to you’.Footnote ¹²² The plan was to sell the unnamed boy at Tangier, where Wyborne, who left Portsmouth on 3 December and transferred mid-voyage to the Rupert, arrived in March.Footnote ¹²³ Although enslaved people changed hands in London, Pepys preferred a sale abroad, effected through his naval network. This was a strategy he repeated, in different circumstances, in 1688. The motives for the sale are unclear, but they probably stemmed from the change in Pepys’s circumstances after his release, when he moved to his friend and former clerk Will Hewer’s house in Buckingham Street.Footnote ¹²⁴ In these comfortable but reduced circumstances – he maintained his own coachman – Pepys may not have needed a slave.Footnote ¹²⁵ Political prudence may also have played a part. After his 1679 arrest, in which his resentful former butler, John James, played a key role, Pepys may have wished to distance himself from an unwilling member of his household. When he first wrote to Wyborne, he was still gathering information and witnesses to defend himself against the charges laid against him in 1679. In the broader political sphere, the RAC’s slave-trading business and its connections to York faced attack in parliament: in April 1679 the commons launched an inquiry into the activities of the Hunter in seizing the vessels of interloping merchants.Footnote ¹²⁶ Its remit, to determine whether ‘His Majesty’s support for the Royal African Company was legal and appropriate’, probably caused Pepys, who administered the Hunter’s loan, some justified disquiet.Footnote ¹²⁷

Wyborne took care of Pepys’s errand. On 3 June 1680 he wrote from the Rupert in the Downs, informing Pepys that ‘I have sould your black boy for twentyfive pistoules and Would a haue Laid it out for you at Cadiz but Did Not know What you might fancy that this place afoorded’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Wyborne had just arrived from Tangier and would shortly return to the Mediterranean.Footnote ¹²⁹ Pepys replied on 15 June to confirm the arrangement: ‘I am much oblig’d to you for the Bargain you have made for mee, & if I may choose, could bee well contented you would at your returne from Spaine buy mee a little good Sherry with the proceed of it, & a little good Chocolaty against winter.’Footnote ¹³⁰ This letter combines aspects of Pepys familiar to modern readers of the diary – his interest in a ‘Bargain’, his delight in consumable luxuries, and his ability to describe these delights in an artful, but apparently artless, style – with a less familiar facet: his matter-of-fact approach to selling an enslaved person.

When Pepys solicited Wyborne’s help he drew on an existing professional and social relationship.Footnote ¹³¹ He wrote to Wyborne frequently on naval business in the 1670s, but his letters also convey warm regards to Wyborne’s wife, Kathryn, and a concern for her health that suggest a personal friendship.Footnote ¹³² This friendship continued after 1680. In 1682 Wyborne was one of the captains present at the sinking of the Gloucester, from which the duke of York escaped and which Pepys witnessed from a nearby ship.Footnote ¹³³ From 1686 to 1690, Wyborne was the East India Company’s deputy governor in Bombay, from where he and his wife sent regular and generous gifts to secure Pepys’s assistance at court.Footnote ¹³⁴

Pepys’s biographers have generally assumed that the boy Wyborne sold was the one Howe offered to Pepys in 1675.Footnote ¹³⁵ However, as the previous section shows, since there is no evidence that he accepted Howe’s offer, the boy Wyborne sold may have been another person entirely, even one who arrived in Pepys’s household after 1675 through his naval, mercantile, or RAC networks. In this respect, the existing narrative of Pepys’s involvement with enslavement, in which Wyborne sold a slave Pepys acquired in 1675, is too neat.

Pepys’s 1679 and 1680 letters to Wyborne display a distinct approach to enslavement. They survive as part of his personal correspondence, and, although they are in Hewer’s hand, they were not indexed or copied into an official letterbook. Some of Wyborne’s letters to Pepys from this time apparently do not survive, but his official letters to the navy board, unsurprisingly, make no mention of Pepys’s request.Footnote ¹³⁶ Unlike Pepys’s correspondence with John Howe, where concerns over the propriety of Howe’s offer and the threat it posed to his reputation shaped his description of an enslaved person as a gratuity or gift, these letters are more direct: nevertheless, Pepys still does not name the child Wyborne sold, referring to him only as a ‘Black-Boy’. This distinction is more than semantic or stylistic. It reflects both a greater degree of familiarity between Pepys and Wyborne, who knew each other relatively well before they exchanged letters, and the extent to which the construction of Pepys’s official correspondence erased enslaved people as an expression of his own priorities and of those of the clerks who indexed and assembled his letterbooks.

VI

After Wyborne sold Pepys’s boy in Tangier, there is no direct record of Pepys’s ownership of enslaved people until September 1688, when he again arranged for a slave to be sold abroad. The circumstances of this sale were dramatic, and Pepys’s correspondence gives more detailed evidence about his motives than for the 1675 sale. This section draws on a wider range of manuscript evidence than previous accounts, arguing that aspects of this incident must be rethought to reflect the partial nature of that evidence, and its creation as part of a process of archival curation.

On 11 September 1688 Pepys wrote hastily to Captain Edward Stanley of the Foresight, then anchored at Longreach, having returned to England from the Caribbean in July.Footnote ¹³⁷ Pepys did not know Stanley well, although he had written to him several times over the previous month on naval business.Footnote ¹³⁸ Now, with some embarrassment, he begged a favour. Shortly before his letter reached Stanley, and apparently without forewarning, a man Pepys called ‘my Negroe’ had been sent aboard the Foresight at the insistence of his housekeeper, Jane Fane, who

This criticism clearly reflected wider tensions in Pepys’s household, which was still in Buckingham Street. In July 1689 he wrote to his friend James Houblon of his dissatisfaction with Fane and his intention to dismiss her.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Although Pepys blamed his housekeeper and Russell for the unexpected arrival, his letter emphasized that the decision to ‘ridd my Selfe of him’ was his, and based on the unnamed man’s behaviour:

Pepys further requested that the man

The letter reveals how far Pepys, like most enslavers in London and elsewhere, was prepared to use violence in the face of resistance – ‘whipping or Fetters’ – but it also suggests a need to justify his actions to Stanley in moral, rather than financial, terms. The emphasis Pepys placed on his slave’s bad character and his status as a ‘Rogue’ reflects not just his need to convince Stanley, whom he had co-opted without forewarning, but also the extent to which he presented the man’s refusal to co-operate as a moral failing incompatible with Pepys’s conception of his household as a ‘Sober Family’. By expelling him, again at a moment of wider political uncertainty, as rumours of a Dutch invasion spread, Pepys presented himself as exercising the authority proper to the head of a household, a fact that influenced how he recorded and archived the incident.

Like his 1675 rebuke to Howe, but unlike his request to Wyborne, a copy of this letter is preserved in one of Pepys’s official letterbooks, compiled by Hewer and now held in the Pepys Library. It is bluntly described in the letterbook index as referring to Pepys’s ‘Negro’, but without naming the enslaved person.Footnote ¹⁴³ In this respect, its enlistment into Pepys’s official archive reinforced the original letter’s erasure of the enslaved man’s identity, while preserving key details of the treatment he received from Pepys and his housekeeper. This is a different form of erasure from that evident in the Howe case, where Pepys’s concerns about propriety and bribery shaped the language he used to describe Howe’s ‘gift’, glossing over the enslaved boy’s unfree status. Information about Pepys’s attempt to dispose of his slave in 1688 survives because of decisions made about the archiving of his official correspondence and because Pepys felt more comfortable with recording what he saw as the just removal of an unruly ‘Rogue’ from the moral economy of his household, and with recording the performance of his authority, than with acknowledging that he might accept a bribe.

The construction of Pepys’s letterbook limited the information recorded about the enslaved person and his arrival on the Foresight, including, crucially, his name. Discussions of this incident, by Tomalin, Newman, and others, identify the enslaved man as ‘Sambo’. In fact, as Loveman recognizes, Pepys’s letter, like his correspondence with Howe, does not name the man at all.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Tomalin and Newman both cite Arthur Bryant’s discussion from 1938, which quotes Pepys’s official letterbook at length, but both mistake Bryant’s racist language – he refers to him as ‘the offending negro’, ‘this troublesome black buck’, and ‘poor Sambo’ – for that of Pepys.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ As a result, until recently Bryant’s racist epithet has been attributed to Pepys, and by extension given to the man he sold. A sad irony underlies these accounts: seeking to put a name to the enslaved person and recover some of his experience, but without consulting the original manuscripts or considering the conditions of their production, Tomalin and Newman overlaid the fragmentary seventeenth-century reality with Bryant’s racist slurs.

Other acts of official record-keeping and information storage, not previously considered by Pepys scholars, shaped what can now be known about this enslaved man. In particular, the logs of the Foresight, which have not been used in previous discussions of this incident, make no mention of the unwilling passenger Stanley was asked to carry.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Stanley’s log ends on 31 August 1688; the captain’s log for early September does not survive. However, the logs of John Groves, mate, and James Mann, second lieutenant, still exist.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Mann would have been aware of Pepys’s instructions: a letter from Pepys to Stanley of 13 September 1688, granting the captain a few days’ leave, insisted that ‘your Lieutenants be kept aboard in your absence, to keep good Order aboard, and take care for the Dispatch of what is yett to be done towards the fitting your Shipp for the Sea’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In the weeks before Pepys wrote to Stanley, when the Foresight was moored at Woolwich, both Groves and Mann recorded the arrival and departure of supply vessels, lighters, and other ships, and enumerated the goods loaded on board. Neither mentions the waterman Harry Russell and his human cargo.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Although logs from this period commonly record significant incidents as well as routine observations, the unexpected arrival of Pepys’s slave fell into an uncertain category between private enterprise and official business that may have prompted Groves and Mann to silence. The man who arrived on the Foresight may have seemed beneath the notice of both the mate and the second lieutenant, but the silence in their logs also reflects both the priorities of these official documents and, given their subordinate position, a degree of tactical reticence on the part of their creators. Pepys was comfortable recording his instructions about the enslaved person in his letterbook because it spoke to his ability to exercise authority at a moment of political uncertainty. Groves and Mann, whose record-keeping had to demonstrate their ability to follow official instructions and left less space for private enterprise, apparently felt otherwise.

The fate of the enslaved man whom Pepys sent aboard the Foresight is uncertain. Pepys may have chosen Stanley’s ship because he expected it to depart on another Atlantic voyage, but William of Orange’s invasion in the autumn of 1688 and the dilapidated condition of the Foresight set it on another course. The lieutenants’ logs and Stanley’s letters to the navy board show that he did not sail immediately, as Pepys presumably hoped, but instead remained in the Thames, under repair and in search of more men, until early the next year.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ It seems unlikely that Stanley kept his unwilling extra passenger on board for that long. He may have been transferred to another ship or, despite Pepys’s strictures on security, and like other enslaved people in England at the time, he may have escaped.

Acknowledging the fragmentary nature of the evidence and the extent to which it was shaped by the intersection of Pepys’s priorities with naval record-keeping opens up space to think about how Pepys himself viewed this incident: as a problem centred on his household that could be resolved by deploying the authority of his naval position and his personal networks, and, as such, a chain of events fit to be recorded in his official archive. It also coincided with the end of Pepys’s official connections to the navy and RAC and a shift in what he recorded and preserved. After the installation of William and Mary in 1689, Pepys was expelled from the admiralty, spending the rest of his life as a private citizen. From that point, the particular mixture of official duty and private interest that shaped both Pepys’s attitude to enslavement and the way he recorded his involvement in it dissolved.

VII

Like many prosperous Londoners in the late seventeenth century, Samuel Pepys made a career and pursued a sociable life that intersected with the business and practices of transatlantic slavery. Mediated by his professional and social connections to the African companies, he was a key conduit between the companies and the navy, transacting their business, taking their gratuities, and gathering information from them for the crown. Most directly, he was offered and owned enslaved people himself. The relationship between these two kinds of activity was not direct, since neither the RA nor the RAC gave enslaved people to Pepys. Instead, the connections he established through twenty years of professional engagement with the navy and the African companies created networks that allowed him to sell enslaved people.

Throughout this time, Pepys and his clerks recorded, erased, and discarded information about his professional life. Pepys himself preserved many of these papers after he left the admiralty in 1689 in his private archive. As a result, the limited information that survives about his ownership and treatment of enslaved people is heavily shaped by the professional and personal forces that conditioned his practices of writing and archive-making. Our understanding of Pepys as an administrator and as a slave-owner – and of the early modern archives of slavery – should be more attuned to the impact of these practices. One significant impact is the limited amount of information we can recover – less, in some respects, than previously assumed – about those whom he enslaved. Yet, despite Pepys’s efforts and the impact of loss and chance on his papers, significant information about these people survives. We should understand it in the light both of his institutional connections and of the amalgam of erasure, caution, inhumanity, and power that characterized his approach to his official and private archives.

The micro-politics of Pepys’s archive has broader implications for the history of enslavement in an English context. Recent scholarship has focused on demonstrating and delineating the existence of enslavement in London and elsewhere in England, examining its extent, legal status, and culture, as well as attempting to recover enslaved experiences. Pepys’s case shows that attempts to recover the lives of enslaved people from the archival traces left by enslavers and to write the history of Atlantic enslavement in England should, while remaining optimistic about the possibilities of reading these sources against their stubborn grain, take more critical account of the political, ethical, and practical imperatives that drove the archive-making of enslavers.