University of Cambridge media release
UNDER STRICT EMBARGO UNTIL 20:01 US (ET) ON WEDNESDAY 25 TH MARCH 2026 / 00:01 UK (GMT) ON THURSDAY 26 TH MARCH 2026
‘ your meriting well of the thing is the only present that shall ever operate with me’
(Samuel Pepys to John Howe, 1675)
That Samuel Pepys owned at least two enslaved people in 17 th -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 today in The Historical Journal , Cambridge University historian Dr Michael Edwards 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, a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. “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.
As part of his senior roles in the Royal Navy in the 1670s and 80s, Pepys arranged the loan of ships to support the Royal African Company’s (RAC) mercantile operations, including slave trading, off the west coast of Africa. This brought Pepys into frequent contact with RAC officers and with the captains of ships transporting enslaved people from Africa to the Caribbean.
Pepys arranged for the navy ship Phoenix to be lent to the RAC and dispatched to the west African coast in the summer of 1674. It then took enslaved people to Barbados. Arriving in November 1674, its log records the deaths of 19 enslaved people, all of whom were thrown overboard. The ship returned to England in April 1675.
At this point, the ship’s naval officer John Howe complained to the Navy commissioners that he had been unjustly deprived of the ship’s command following the death of its captain. Pepys agreed and on 23 rd April he confirmed Howe’s command. Unaware of this decision, however, Howe took steps to win Pepys over.
An ally, Richard Rowe, wrote to Pepys on 24 th April recommending Howe as ‘a man deserving and knows how to acknowledge favours’. Rowe suggested that Howe wished to give Pepys ‘An hon[our]able present for you and I hope worth your acceptance’.
The nature of this present was revealed six days later. Now aware that Pepys had favoured him, Howe wrote directly to ‘crave your acceptance’ of a ‘small’ enslaved boy, which ‘I brought home on board for your honour, & intend to present you with at the first conveniency … Hoping he is so well seasoned to endure the cold weather as to live in England.’
Pepys indignantly rejected Howe’s offer and Rowe’s intervention. On 5 th May he rebuked Howe for ‘your thinking that any consideration of benefit to my self, or expectation of reward from you should be of any inducement with me’. 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 meriting well of the thing is the only present that shall ever operate with me.’
Dr Edwards argues that Pepys’ sensitivity may have been provoked by an unnerving recent experience in parliament. After taking his seat as MP for Castle Rising in late 1673, Pepys had been attacked by the Earl of Shaftesbury and his allies for alleged Catholic sympathies.
“Responding to this offer of a bribe, Pepys felt he needed to demonstrate his probity, but he also wanted evidence of this recorded in his archive,” Dr Edwards says.
Pepys’ clerk, William Hewer, indexed and organised the correspondence on this matter in such a way that Pepys’ innocence was preserved while the enslaved child at the heart of the bribe was erased as an irrelevance.
“Pepys wasn’t concerned about the morality of slavery. He’s only interested in his reputation at a time when he’s under scrutiny for corruption,” Dr Edwards says.
“He had good reason to be cautious. Pepys was Secretary to the Admiralty, so he was running one of the biggest parts of the state in this period. The Navy involved enormous amounts of money and was highly politicised. Pepys had lots of political enemies and a few years later, in 1679, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London, following charges of corruption and popery.”
Pepys appears to have accepted many bribes during his career and biographers have generally assumed that he did accept Howe’s enslaved boy. It has been assumed that this was the same individual Pepys arranged to be sold in Tangier in the summer of 1680.
“It’s really hard to tell,” Edwards says, “but my instinct is that Pepys did not accept Howe’s bribe and that these were different people. I think Pepys might have been too worried about being caught out. But unless new documents come to light, we’ll never know for sure.”
In late 1679 Pepys arranged to sell an enslaved male through another of his naval contacts, Captain John Wyborne, a friend.
In his personal correspondence to Wyborne on the matter, Pepys felt able to speak openly.
On 4 th December 1679, while his slave was onboard Wyborne’s ship, the Bristol , Pepys wrote: ‘Pray not my black-boy add any thing to your care, your kindness to me on my own score having been already too burthensome to you.’
Pepys had been released from the Tower in July the same year and was no longer secretary to the Admiralty commission. Pepys moved to the house of his friend and former clerk William Hewer in Buckingham Street. In these comfortable but reduced circumstances, Pepys may not have felt he needed a slave but Dr Edwards believes political prudence may also have played a part.
“After his 1679 arrest, in which a resentful former butler played a key role, Pepys may have wanted to remove an unwilling member of his household to avoid further trouble.”
Once Wyborne had arranged the sale in Tangier, Pepys wrote: ‘I am much obliged to you for the bargain you have made for me, & if I may choose, could be well contented you would at your return from Spain buy me a little good sherry with the proceed of it, & a little good chocolaty against winter.’
Dr Edwards says: “In some ways this is a very 17th-century story. Pepys would be bemused about our attitudes to enslavement. But powerful people have always thought about their image and tried to shape their reputation.”
For ease of understanding, 17 th -century spellings in quotes have been modernised so, for instance, ‘mee’ becomes ‘me’ and ‘ye’ becomes ‘the’. For clarity, some uppercase letters have also been changed to lower case. For entirely original quotes, please see Dr Edwards’ Historical Journal study.
M. Edwards, ‘Samuel Pepys, the African Companies, and the Archives of Slavery, 1660-1689’, The Historical Journal (Cambridge University Press, 2026). DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X26101435
Tom Almeroth-Williams, Communications Manager (Research), University of Cambridge: tom.williams@admin.cam.ac.uk / tel: +44 (0) 7540 139 444
Michael Edwards, University of Cambridge: mje28@cam.ac.uk
The Historical Journal
Samuel Pepys, the African Companies, and the Archives of Slavery, 1660-1689
26-Mar-2026