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Samuel Pepys carefully curated evidence of his links to slavery. A new study, by Dr Michael Edwards (History 1997) reveals how and why.

That Pepys owned at least two enslaved people in 17th-century London is no secret. In some of his personal letters he was unashamedly open about this. In September 1688, he told a ship’s captain that neither ‘whipping or fetters’ had reformed a ‘mischievous’ slave in his household. He asked the captain to feed the man on ‘hard meat, till you can dispose of him in some plantation as a rogue’.

But in a study published in (Cambridge University Press), shows that Pepys both erased and preserved details of his connections to slavery to protect his reputation and political career. In a particularly high-stakes episode, Pepys carefully recorded rejecting the offer of an enslaved boy as a bribe.

“Pepys had so many connections within England’s African trading companies as well as in the Navy,” says Dr Edwards. “Combined, these connections put him in a privileged position to acquire enslaved people. This part of the story has gone mostly untold.”

Dr Edwards examines, for the first time, how Pepys and his trusted clerks carefully ‘curated’ his official and personal correspondence to shape and limit our knowledge of his slave dealings. The historian consulted hundreds of records in The Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge; The National Archives; and the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

One of the study’s most startling findings concerns the loan of a ship and the subsequent offer of a human bribe.

Read the full story on the University of Cambridge website:

Main image: Dr Michael Edwards with Pepys Library MS 2861, one of Samuel Pepys' letter books, open at a letter written in September 1688 asking Captain Edward Stanley to sell an enslaved man in a plantation abroad (Credit: ).