Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, the production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Polly Frying. Samuel Peeps has been something of a recurring character on our show. We have either name dropped him or read bits of his diaries, and our episodes on and Lister and the Pirate Henry every and the Straw Hat Riots and Britain's Theft of Tea from China and the body House Riots of sixteen sixty eight, uh, and the belief that the Royal Touch could cure your scraffula. I have to imagine previous hosts have at some point said something about Samuel Peeps too, but that's a lot harder for us to track at this point. I think all historians eventually talk about Namuel Peeps at all. Eventually comes back to Peeps. Something that came up in one of these discussions between Holly and me, which is was that we had both read selects from Peep's diary in school, and yet we did not know until working on this podcast how funny it could be. It was like our experience was the opposite of The Princess Bride, where somebody had gone through the diary and only left in the boring parts. When I started working on this episode, I was also surprised to learn that the funny parts were not the only thing left out of my Samuel Peep's experience in school. Our episode on Anne Lister's diaries talked about how much of them were dedicated to detailing her sexual relationships, and the same thing. It's true for Samuel Peeps, and parts of his diary are similarly explicit. Like one passage that I was reading as I was researching this caused me to go whoa out loud at my desk. We aren't gonna be reading that packet passage, but just like fair warning. See, I knew there was dirty stuff in the diaries, and I wonder if, and I don't remember exactly what copy I read at various points in my education, I wonder if maybe in my case, some of the funny stuff was there, but I didn't at the comedy. I think probably every every Samuel Peeps thing that I had read had been in an anthology, like, not a standalone copy of anything, And I like I went back and looked as I was working on this to be like am I am I like fudging my own memory here, and no, like my Norton Anthology of English Literature from back in my college days, like only has a couple of passages. They're only about the fire. They're not funny or racy in any way, and I think that like was the case, like anything that I was reading was was excerpted in another work and not like a standalone, more lengthy thing. Regardless, though, we're coming up on the anniversary of Peep's last diary entry, which was written on May thirty one of sixteen sixty nine, so it seemed like a good time to take a closer look, not just at the diary, but also at who Peeps was beyond his famous chronicle of life in seventeenth century London. Samuel Peeps was born in London on February sixteen thirty three. His father was a tailor and his mother was a butcher's daughter, so they were not a particularly prominent or affluent family. Samuel had ten siblings, but only two of them lived to adulthood, and of those three, Samuel was the oldest. With the help of other family, Samuel was able to go to school He went to Huntington Grammar School and then moved on to Saint Paul's School. From there he went to Cambridge, where he started a lifelong friendship with John Dryden, who would go on to be England's first poet Laureate. Peep's graduated with a b a in sixteen fifty three. The Peep's family had one connection that served Samuel extremely well. That was Edward Montague, who was Samuel's father's cousin and would eventually become the first Earl of Sandwich. He took an interest in Samuel and hired him as a secretary. Had that not happened, Samuel probably would have pursued a career in law. In sixteen fifty five, Samuel married Elizabeth sa Michelle. She was the daughter of a French Huguenot who had come to England as a refugee. They had a religious ceremony on October ten, sixteen fifty five, when Elizabeth was fourteen and Samuel was twenty two, and then they had a civil ceremony on December one, by which point she had turned fifteen. This was definitely a match made for love and not for money. The Sa Michelle's had been well off and prominent, but they had fallen on hard times, in part because of her father's religious conversion. Samuel wound up supporting several of them financially, but at the start of his marriage to Elizabeth he wasn't in a position to do that at all. He couldn't even afford lodgings for the two of them, so they had to live in his room in Montague's quarters at Whitehall Palace. In spine of their feelings for one another, which I mean, they do, seem to have genuinely been very fond of each other, and their ages today are highly questionable, but at the time, like that was, those are pretty normal ages to get married. Their marriage got off to a really rocky start. Elizabeth had some sort of recurring, persistent gynecological problem, and Samuel was in a lot of pain due to stones and his bladder and urinary tracts, so from the very beginning their physical relationship was difficult and probably painful for both of them. Elizabeth's feelings on this aren't really recorded anywhere, but it was hugely frustrating for Samuel. Also, while Samuel was besotted with his wife, he was deeply jealous and possessive. She was lovely, lively, and charming, intended to attract the attention of other men. As far as we know, Elizabeth was always faithful to Samuel, but she also clearly enjoyed flattery and attention. If Samuel thought a man was paying too much attention to her, or that she was being too flirtatious, he would get angry about it, and assigned from that he could be very critical of her. All of this together made their relationship really tense. Elizabeth went back home to her family for a few months in sixteen fifty seven, returning to Samuel at Whitehall in December. They finally moved into a place of their own the following August. Although their relationship continued to have just serious ups and downs. They both had volatile tempers. Peeps had a lot of affairs, and they were known to fight and even threaten each other when things got really heated. At least in Peep's diary, though, which is virtually the only source of information that we have about Elizabeth. They also seemed really genuinely fond of each other when things were good. On March sixty eight, Peeps had a lethotomy, which is a surgical procedure to remove a bladder stone. A surgeon named Thomas Hollier removed a stone that measured about two inches in diameter, which Samuel kept in a specially made case to show to people afterward. He recovered with no complications, which is incredible considering that there was no anesthesia and the instruments weren't in any way sterile. These surgeries weren't uncommon at the time, but deaths and complications were pretty commonplace. Peeps developed other stones later on, but for a time after this procedure, he was almost symptom free. I said in this outline that he recovered with no complications. He and Elizabeth never had any children, and one of the things that people site as maybe a reason for that is that this procedure might have been successful at removing the stone, but also might have inadvertently made him unable to have children. That's all very speculative, though, like we don't know exactly why they didn't have any children. Peeps wrote his first diary entry on January first, sixteen sixty, and he referred to this ailment in the very first sentence, quote, Blessed be God. At the end of the last year. I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold. We'll talk more about the diary later, especially through this next section of the episode, but this is when he started keeping it. Sixteen sixty was a big year for Samuel Peeps. He finished his master's degree and he was part of the fleet that brought King Charles the Second back to England. Super quick recap Charles the Second Father Charles the First was king during the English Civil War, which were a series of conflicts primarily between Royalists and parliamentarians. Charles the First was executed in sixteen forty nine and Charles the Second was forced into exile in sixteen fifty one. Oliver Cromwell, who had been a general on the parliamentarian side, became Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland. Not long after Cromwell's death in sixteen fifty eight, royalists started working out a deal to restore Charles two to the throne. Obviously, it was a lot more complicated than those quick highlights, and also complicated were their loyalties of Peep's patron Edward Montague. Montague had fought on the parliamentarian side and he had been closely connected to both Oliver Cromwell and his son Richard, who tried unsuccessfully to follow in his late father's footsteps. Montague had actually advocated for Oliver Cromwell to be crowned as king. But by the spring of sixteen fifty nine, royalists and parliamentarians alike, we're wondering if Montague's allegiance was shift ding Charles the Seconds. Representatives made overtures to him, while Parliament stripped him of his Admiralty commission, and for good reason, he was negotiating in secret for the return of the king. But after a very politically chaotic end of sixteen fifty nine and beginning of sixteen sixty, Montague was reappointed to the Admiralty Commission and made General of the Sea, along with George Monk, who was actively working to restore Charles the Second to the throne. Once a deal was negotiated for Charles's return, Montague secured the fleet that traveled to the Netherlands to bring him back to England, and thanks to Montague's influence, Samuel Peeps was on board with that fleet. The fleet landed back at Dover with the King on sixteen sixty, and almost immediately Charles the Second made Montague and Earl. That was the beginning of a tremendously eventful decade for Peeps personally and for Britain in general. And then we're going to talk more about all of that after a sponsor break. After Edward Montague became the Earl of Sandwich, he told Samuel Peeps quote, we must have a little patience and we will rise together. In the meantime, I will do you all the good jobs I can. This worked out really well for Peeps through the Earl's influence. In the summer of sixteen sixty, he was named Clerk of the Acts at the Navy Board. That's the administrative board responsible for running the Royal Navy and keeping it maintained and supplied. This position came along with a salary and a house, and it also meant that Peeps became a Justice of the peace in the counties where the dockyards were located. This was the beginning of a lifelong career as a naval administrator. Peeps was a very hard worker, but he didn't actually know anything about the navy like at all. Nearly his entire experience was going on that voyage to bring Charles the Second back to England. So at first he mostly just deferred to the rest of the words, some of whom had decades of navy experience. But over the next couple of years, Peeps realized that having a long career in the Navy didn't necessarily make a person an upstanding naval administrator or any good at it. He started to see a lot of laziness and waste and corruption, and he became especially distrustful of the men whose commands had been passed down to them through their families rather than rising through the ranks based on their merit. But none of these opinions erased the fact that these men had knowledge and experience that Peeps just didn't, so he got to work trying to close that gap as much as he could. His own education had been really weak in maths, so he got a tutor and started learning multiplication tables. He immersed himself in the terminology and procedures and measurements that were needed to build, maintain, and supply ships. Soon he stopped following the lead of the more senior board members and started trying to make things more efficient and orderly, which really drew the ire of some of his colleagues. Peeps was taking on an additional roles as well. He became secretary of the committee that ran the English colony at Tangier, which had been part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry when she married Charles the Second. He was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society in sixteen sixty five. The Second Anglo Dutch War started later that year, and many of the rest of the board were aging or at sea, so Peeps found himself overseeing a large part of the Navy's wartime administration, including setting up a centralized provisioning system. In the mid sixteen sixties, Peeps witnessed two catastrophes in very quick succession, the Great Plague of London and the Great Fire of London. The plague struck London in sixteen sixty five, although Peep's diary also includes news of the diseases spread elsewhere in the years before that, On April thirtieth, sixteen sixty five, he wrote, quote, great fears of the sickness here in the city, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us. All his entries through sixteen sixty five and into sixteen sixty six, detail fear of the plague and death tolls, some of which were enormous. On August thirty one, he wrote, quote in the city died this week seven thousand, four hundred ninety six and all of them six thousand, one hundred two of the plague. But it is feared that the true number of the dead this week is near ten thousand, partly from the poor that cannot be taken notice of through the greatness of the number, and partly from the Quakers and others that will not have any bell ring for them. For the first few months of sixteen sixty six, he records numbers that decrease, and an increase, and the decrease again, then finally noting a day of thanksgiving for the plagues end on November twenty, although he acknowledges that people were still dying, the plague was in its last months when the fire began on September two, sixteen sixty six. Peep's chronicled the fire much like he did the plague, detailing people's fears along with what was burning and the progression of the fire itself, and how this that he tried to stop it. The fire affected Peeps for months after it was over. The following February he wrote, quote, the weather for three or four days being come to be exceedingly cold again as any time this year. I did within these six days see smoke still remaining of the late fire in the city. And it is strange to think how to this day I cannot sleep at night without great terrors of fire. And this very night I could not sleep till almost two in the morning through thoughts of fire. The Second Anglo Dutch War was going on through all of this, and peace negotiations started in August of sixteen sixty six and lasted into the following year. As the negotiations progressed, the British government decided to recall the fleet and scale down the navy while still trying to protect England from a Dutch attack. On March twenty three, Peeps wrote, quote, at the office where Sir w Pen come, being returned from Chatham from considering the means of fortifying the River Medway by a chain at the dakes, and ships laid there with guns to keep the enemy from coming up to burn our ships. All our care being now to fortify ourselves against their invading US. So basically they didn't have enough money to keep maintaining the navy like at the strength that it had been while they were more actively at war. But the peace treaty had not been signed yet, so they needed to still have some kind of defense, and they were attempting to do this with a chain stretched across the mouth of the river. But a Dutch force did indeed attack the river midway. That happened on June nine, sixty seven. They broke through that chain, destroyed some of the ships, and captured others, including capturing the fleet's flagship, the Royal Charles. This was disastrous for the navy. It was terrifying for the British people since it put the Dutch in striking distance of London. Of course, then people questioned the judgment of the king over the whole thing, but the war did end with the Treaty of Bretta a month later. Peeps, being the administrator who had arranged so much of the withdrawal, was investigated repeatedly in the end, though the officers who made the decisions took more of the blame than the Navy board, who had figured out just how to carry out those decisions soon, though Peep's had other problems to worry about. On October eight his wife caught him with one of their maids, Deborah Willett. Deb was eighteen and she had been hired primarily as Elizabeth's companion, and Elizabeth was of course outraged. They were not caught talking. Peeps was explicit in his diary about exactly what was going on. On October thirty one, he wrote, quote, so ends this month with some quiet in my mind, though not perfect, after the greatest falling out with my poor wife, and through my folly with the girl that I ever had, and I have reason to be sorry and ashamed of it, and more to be troubled for the poor girl's sake, whom I fear I shall, by this means prove the ruin of though I shall think myself concerned both to love and be a friend to her. In November, Elizabeth forced Samuel to dismiss deb from their staff and agree to never see her again, but he did not keep that promise. He figured out where deb had gone and went to visit and give her some money. It is not clear whether he continued their affair after she was out of the household, though, and also this was not the only affair that Peeps detailed in his diary. He wrote about dalliances with his friends wives and his wife's friends and maids in their household, and on and on and on, and his attentions and these episodes were not always welcome. On August eighteenth of sixteen sixty seven, he wrote about going to church, where he quote stood by a pretty modest maid, whom I did labor to take by the hand and the body, but she would not, but got further and further from me, and at last I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again, which seeing I did forbear, and was glad I did spy her design. And then I fell to gaze upon another pretty maid and a few close to me, and she on me, and I did go about to take her by the hand, which she suffered a little, and then withdrew. So the sermon ended, and the church broke up, and my wars ended too, And so took coach and home, and there took up my wife and to Islington with her. Oh Peeps, as he was writing about the fallout of his wife's discovery of his affair. Peeps was also writing about problems with his eyes. His diary entries record pain, sensitivity to light, and trouble seeing. He found that drinking made it worse, but he didn't want to give up drink. He loved going to the theater, but the light bothered him there and he was forced to stop going. He tried all kinds of compresses and potions and pills to no effect, and he was granted several months of leave to try to recover. On May thirty one, sixteen sixty nine, he wrote his last diary entry, saying, in part quote, and thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand, And therefore, whenever comes of it, I must forbear, and therefore resolve from this time forward, to have it kept by my people in Longhand, and must therefore be contented to set down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know, or if there be anything which cannot be much, how my amours to deb are past, and my eyes hindering me in almost all other pleasures, I must endeavor to keep a margin in my book open, to add here and there a note in shorthand with my own hand. And so I would take myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave. For which and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the Good God prepare me. Not long after, Samuel and Elizabeth went to the Low Countries in France, where she contracted some sort of fever. She died on November ten, sixty nine, at the age of twenty nine. Samuel never remarried, but he did start an ongoing relationship with a woman named Mary Skinner not long after. She eventually moved into his home and seems to have acted as his wife in everything but name. But in spite of this real certainty in the last diary entry that he was going blind, Peeps did not lose his sight as he feared that he would, and his career continued on for almost two decades after his wife's death. We'll have more on that after another quick sponsor break. As Samuel Peeps was struggling with his eyesight and traveling with his wife. He was also up for election to the House of Commons, and that was an election that he lost. He also started facing rumors that he was a crypto papist or a secret Catholic. Catholics were highly suspect in England at this point, and Peeps had Catholic friends, some Catholic family members. There were some Catholic books in his library. All of this raised a lot of eyebrows. The Third Anglo Dutch War started in March of sixteen seventy two, and Peep's old benefactor, the Earl of Sandwich, was killed in action. The two men hadn't been close for a while. The Earl had been caught up in a scandal about the distribution of wartime prizes, and Peeves had made enough of a name for himself that he didn't really need the Earl's patronage anymore. Even so, Peeps was a banner bearer at the funeral. In sixteen seventy three, Parliament passed a test Act which banned Catholics and nonconforming Protestants from holding public office. King Charles the Second's brother, the Duke of York, refused to take the required oaths that were uh mandatory for Catholics, which he was, so he was forced to resign as Lord High Admiral. Afterward, the King established an Admiralty Commission and Peeps became its secretary. This was a promotion. It came with more income, more prestige, and a lot more influence. On November four, sixteen seventies, Peeps was elected to the House of Commons, but once again rumors surface that he was secretly Catholic, which led to another investigation. In the end, he kept his seat, although his work as an MP mostly stuck to matters of the navy, and he kept picking up new roles outside the government and his job with the Admiralty, including becoming a governor of Christ's Hospital, the Master of the Cloth Workers Company, and the Master of Trinity House. He also worked to reform and revitalize the Navy, especially when it came to setting standards and establishing regulations for how things should be done. He successfully lobbied for funding to build new ships, convincing the House of Commons to allocate six hundred thousand pounds for it in sixteen seventy seven. Largely due to Peep's influence, and planning. The strength of the Royal Navy nearly doubled while he was with the Admiralty. He did all this in the face of ongoing accusations that he was a crypto papist. His opponents even went so far as to accute his clerk of murder. In May of sixteen seventy nine, Peeps and Sir Anthony Dean were accused of leaking British secrets to France, and Peeps was again accused of secretly being Catholic. He resigned his position with the Admiralty and he and Dean were both sent to the tower. As this was going on, it was widely believed that Catholics were planning to assassinate the king and put his brother, the Duke of York, on the throne. This so called Popish plot did not exist, but people were certain that it did. Peeps started trying to put together his defense, but it turned out that the prosecution really did not have much of a case. One of the key witnesses against him was a butler that he had previously fired, and the charges were eventually dropped. Peep spent the next few years mostly out of the public eye, traveling, collecting books for his library, and acting as a secretary to Lord Dartmouth during an expedition to evacuate the British colony of Tangier after Britain decided to abandon it. Peep's returned to the Admiralty in four in a position that was created for him. That same year, he was elected President of the Royal Society. His biggest claim to fame in this role is that he arranged for the publication of Isaac Newton's prince Shipia Mathematica, with peeps imprimature featured very prominently on the frontispiece. This was, however, funded by Edmund Halley, not by Peeps or the Royal Society. This was because Peeps had already spent the Society's budget and some of his own money on the elaborately illustrated History of Fish by Francis Willoughby, which then had been a total commercial flop, like we talked about in our Christmas Time episode, or we talked about Charles Dickens and uh Christmas Carol and how he just really wanted all of these engravings and illustrations. All those things were very, very expensive, and Peeps that run through the whole entire budget. But if you look, there's i mean plenty of scans of the the frontispiece of of Newton's Princeship of Mathematica, and it's Samuel Peeps's name is one of the bigger things on that document. In sixteen eighty five, King Charles the Second died, and his brother, the Duke of York finally did become king, becoming James the Second and seventh. Peeps continued on with the admiralty under the new monarch, resuming his plans to strengthen the Royal Navy, while also just endlessly criticizing the people that had been in charge while he was gone. But none of this preparation did the king a lot of good. In sixteen eighty eight, William, the third Prince of Orange overthrew James and the Glorious Revolution. William became co regent with his wife Mary, who was also James's daughter. The new administration purged Charles's supporters from office. Peeps resigned, was briefly detained under suspicion for treason, and was ultimately released on medical grounds. Peeps spent most of his remaining life reading and studying, and amassing a huge library which he just continually reorganized and curated. He also published a book, Memoirs of the Royal Navy in sixteen ninety. Samuel Peeps died on May seventeen o three, at the age of seventy. He was buried next to his late wife Elizabeth, at St Olive Church. He left his three thousand volume library to Magdalen College at the University of Cambridge, with the stipulation that they be kept separate from the rest of the college's collection. Today, those are housed as Peep's Library, which is open to the public and to scholars alike. Peep's diaries were part of this collection. During the nine years that he was keeping the diary, Peeps would note each day's activities, often ending with and so to bed, and then every few days he would edit them a little bit. He didn't seem to meaningfully change the content, but he can't clean u up a little bit and copy them into a master journal. In addition to writing these in shorthand, he also used a hodgepodge of codes and other languages for the most salacious parts of it. The result was a set of six large volumes containing more than wanted a quarter million words for more than one hundred years after Peepe's death, no one knew what was in these diaries. It was only after John Evelyn's diaries were published in eighteen eighteen that scholars started trying to transcribe Peeps as well. Evelyn and Peeps lived at the same time. They were also friends. Yeah, they're sort of the two companion diarists of this time in London. At the time, the people working with the diary thought that it was written in code, and a Cambridge undergraduate named John Smith took on the task of decoding it. King Charles the Second had dictated an account of his sixteen fifty one escaped from England to Samuel Peeps. Peeps had taken the dictation in Shorthand and then later transcribed it into longhand, intending to publish it. Smith compared these two versions to work out how to transcribe the diaries. This work wasn't actually necessary though. Peeps was really writing in Thomas Shelton's system of Shorthand, and the handbook for it, title Tutor to Techiography, was there in Peep's library as well. Somebody apparently told John Smith like some years later, by the way, the manual to this. It was like, it was right there. You didn't really I don't know what his reaction was. I envisioned some hair pulling and some screaming, but maybe that would just be me. It's it's either hair pulling and screaming. Were like. That was a fun challenge, though I don't mind that I did a bunch of totally unnecessary, tedious work. Portions of the transcribed diary were published starting in eight five, with longer editions coming out in the years that followed. A mostly complete addition, edited by HB. Wheatley, came out in ten volumes across through eight and all these nineteenth century versions, profanity and the most explicit parts are all edited out. There are phrases, sentences, or sometimes whole days removed. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about the Diaries in eighteen eighty six. He expressed some chagrin at the idea that some parts of them were quote unfit for publication, saying, quote we may think, without being sorted, that when we purchased six huge and distressingly expensive volumes, we are entitled to be treated rather more like scholars and rather less like children. The first edition that didn't edit out the sex and profanity came out almost another century later. It was another series of volumes published between nineteen seventy and nine eight three. So if you have only read the parts of the diary that are in the public domain and are probably also about either the plague or the fire, like we talked about at the top of the episode, you might have a very different impression of this diary than if you read other parts of an unexpurgated version. Just as examples. On October thirteen, sixteen sixty, he went out to see a public hanging, something that he seems to have really enjoyed doing this. One was Major General Thomas Harrison, who had been convicted of regicide in the execution of King Charles the First. Peep's wrote quote, I went out to Charing Cross to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered, which was done there. He looking as cheerful as any man could in that condition. While on the boat with Charles the Second during his return to England, Peeps wrote about a dog defecating on the deck, saying quote, I went with Mr Mansell and one of the King's footmen with a dog that the King loved, which expletive deleted the boat, which made us laugh, which made me think that a king and all that belonged to him are but just as others are. He also didn't temper his opinions. On September sixty two, he wrote, quote, we saw Midsummer Night's Dream, which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life. I saw I confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my pleasure. So yes, Peep's diaries include a pretty straight forward eyewitness account of several major historical events in the sixteen sixties. But Peep's clearly also thought everything around him was interesting and worth noticing. So these diaries are also a fascinating account of daily life in London, including what people ate and what they saw at the theater and what music was popular, and then little details like discovering that the wig you bought was full of knits, or what to do when you had tummy trouble while you were staying at somebody else's house and the maid forgot to leave you a chamber pot. It's full of all kinds of random things that he saw and was just delighted or surprised by, and of course all of those many, many affairs, and it's all online for free, except those most explicit parts. Uh. If you go to Peep's diary dot com, it's been putting up an entry a day at a time since two thousand thirteen, along with lots of annotations and letters and other information. And there are additions at Project Guttenberg and archive dot org as well, so you have plenty to dig through. If you want to learn more, you can just click on some random stuff. You might have a day where he was in the office and everything was sort of just political administrative stuff. Or you might get one about a dog pooping on the deck of a boat. Do you have a little bit of listener mail? I do have listener mail. This from Maureen, Uh jumps back to a little bit older episode, but I still thought it was super interesting, so Marine says Hi, Tracy and Holly. I've been jumping around in the archive, so I know you've already received many emails on Sir Walter Raleigh. However, I thought you may enjoy this family story. My grandfather was a member of the Merchant Marines during World War Two, he always claimed that he had been on a boat that was sunk off the coast of Africa, not one, but two times during the war. Both times they were close enough to the shore that he was able to swim to safety. One of these times the locals came out in boats to rescue them. However, before being allowed to board the boat, each man had to pay for his passage with cigarettes. My grandfather apparently had the wrong brand. Either it was as Sir Walter Raleigh brand and they wanted something else, or vice versa. Regardless, only those crewmen with the appropriate brand were allowed to ride in the boats, while the rest had to swim the remaining distance. While he was stationed in Africa, we have a picture of him and uniform in front of the pyramids. My dad was always skeptical of this story, as my grandfather was known to be fond of a good story. However, recently, when doing some genealogy research, I came across an admittance document for him to the Port of New York in ninety four. There was a space to explain why he didn't have the appropriate paperwork, and it said went down with the ship, so we do at least have verification that he survived one shipwreck. On a separate note, I recently listened to your trans Atlantic cruising episode, Holly. If you ever do choose to go on at Disney Cruise, I recommend you choose either The Magic or the Wonder. Those two ships have adults only areas that are truly removed from kids on the ship. The Dream and Fantasy have awkwardly placed central adult suddenly areas where kids or adults with small kids accidentally have to walk through to get one side of the ship to the other. Bless you for this knowledge you have bestowed. Uh. That reminds me of the Some of the the cruise ships that I have been on have the casino awkwardly placed so that you have to walk through it to get from one part of the ship to the other end. The casino has traditionally been one of the places on the ship where smoking is allowed, so there has been sort of like if you would really rather not be around the smoke, some uh, some funagling to figure out how to get from one place on the ship to the other without walking through there anyway. She ends with an episode suggestion and thanks us for the detailed research and keeping her company on her commune. Thank you so much, Maureen, thank you for this note. I love it when people have family stories that connected the podcast in some way. That always delights me so much. And I also really like it when people have their stories to share about their family members in the service, because I had have family, my family members who have been in the of US, and I feel a little kinship when I hear people's other wartime military service stories. So thank you, Maureen. Thank you everyone to send who sends us emails if you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, or just to say hello. We love emails, just say hello and emails with people's pets, pictures, and them. We're a history podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and then we're also all over social media at missed in History. That is where you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter. You can come to our website, which is missed in History dot com, where you will find the show notes for all the episodes that Holly and I have done together, and you will find a searchable archive of every episode ever. And you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast, I Heart Radio app and wherever else you get your podcasts. Stuffy Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Two

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, the production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Polly Frying. Samuel Peeps has been something of a recurring character on our show. We have either name dropped him or read bits of his diaries, and our episodes on and Lister and the Pirate Henry every and the Straw Hat Riots and Britain's Theft of Tea from China and the body House Riots of sixteen sixty eight, uh, and the belief that the Royal Touch could cure your scraffula. I have to imagine previous hosts have at some point said something about Samuel Peeps too, but that's a lot harder for us to track at this point. I think all historians eventually talk about Namuel Peeps at all. Eventually comes back to Peeps. Something that came up in one of these discussions between Holly and me, which is was that we had both read selects from Peep's diary in school, and yet we did not know until working on this podcast how funny it could be. It was like our experience was the opposite of The Princess Bride, where somebody had gone through the diary and only left in the boring parts. When I started working on this episode, I was also surprised to learn that the funny parts were not the only thing left out of my Samuel Peep's experience in school. Our episode on Anne Lister's diaries talked about how much of them were dedicated to detailing her sexual relationships, and the same thing. It's true for Samuel Peeps, and parts of his diary are similarly explicit. Like one passage that I was reading as I was researching this caused me to go whoa out loud at my desk. We aren't gonna be reading that packet passage, but just like fair warning. See, I knew there was dirty stuff in the diaries, and I wonder if, and I don't remember exactly what copy I read at various points in my education, I wonder if maybe in my case, some of the funny stuff was there, but I didn't at the comedy. I think probably every every Samuel Peeps thing that I had read had been in an anthology, like, not a standalone copy of anything, And I like I went back and looked as I was working on this to be like am I am I like fudging my own memory here, and no, like my Norton Anthology of English Literature from back in my college days, like only has a couple of passages. They're only about the fire. They're not funny or racy in any way, and I think that like was the case, like anything that I was reading was was excerpted in another work and not like a standalone, more lengthy thing. Regardless, though, we're coming up on the anniversary of Peep's last diary entry, which was written on May thirty one of sixteen sixty nine, so it seemed like a good time to take a closer look, not just at the diary, but also at who Peeps was beyond his famous chronicle of life in seventeenth century London. Samuel Peeps was born in London on February sixteen thirty three. His father was a tailor and his mother was a butcher's daughter, so they were not a particularly prominent or affluent family. Samuel had ten siblings, but only two of them lived to adulthood, and of those three, Samuel was the oldest. With the help of other family, Samuel was able to go to school He went to Huntington Grammar School and then moved on to Saint Paul's School. From there he went to Cambridge, where he started a lifelong friendship with John Dryden, who would go on to be England's first poet Laureate. Peep's graduated with a b a in sixteen fifty three. The Peep's family had one connection that served Samuel extremely well. That was Edward Montague, who was Samuel's father's cousin and would eventually become the first Earl of Sandwich. He took an interest in Samuel and hired him as a secretary. Had that not happened, Samuel probably would have pursued a career in law. In sixteen fifty five, Samuel married Elizabeth sa Michelle. She was the daughter of a French Huguenot who had come to England as a refugee. They had a religious ceremony on October ten, sixteen fifty five, when Elizabeth was fourteen and Samuel was twenty two, and then they had a civil ceremony on December one, by which point she had turned fifteen. This was definitely a match made for love and not for money. The Sa Michelle's had been well off and prominent, but they had fallen on hard times, in part because of her father's religious conversion. Samuel wound up supporting several of them financially, but at the start of his marriage to Elizabeth he wasn't in a position to do that at all. He couldn't even afford lodgings for the two of them, so they had to live in his room in Montague's quarters at Whitehall Palace. In spine of their feelings for one another, which I mean, they do, seem to have genuinely been very fond of each other, and their ages today are highly questionable, but at the time, like that was, those are pretty normal ages to get married. Their marriage got off to a really rocky start. Elizabeth had some sort of recurring, persistent gynecological problem, and Samuel was in a lot of pain due to stones and his bladder and urinary tracts, so from the very beginning their physical relationship was difficult and probably painful for both of them. Elizabeth's feelings on this aren't really recorded anywhere, but it was hugely frustrating for Samuel. Also, while Samuel was besotted with his wife, he was deeply jealous and possessive. She was lovely, lively, and charming, intended to attract the attention of other men. As far as we know, Elizabeth was always faithful to Samuel, but she also clearly enjoyed flattery and attention. If Samuel thought a man was paying too much attention to her, or that she was being too flirtatious, he would get angry about it, and assigned from that he could be very critical of her. All of this together made their relationship really tense. Elizabeth went back home to her family for a few months in sixteen fifty seven, returning to Samuel at Whitehall in December. They finally moved into a place of their own the following August. Although their relationship continued to have just serious ups and downs. They both had volatile tempers. Peeps had a lot of affairs, and they were known to fight and even threaten each other when things got really heated. At least in Peep's diary, though, which is virtually the only source of information that we have about Elizabeth. They also seemed really genuinely fond of each other when things were good. On March sixty eight, Peeps had a lethotomy, which is a surgical procedure to remove a bladder stone. A surgeon named Thomas Hollier removed a stone that measured about two inches in diameter, which Samuel kept in a specially made case to show to people afterward. He recovered with no complications, which is incredible considering that there was no anesthesia and the instruments weren't in any way sterile. These surgeries weren't uncommon at the time, but deaths and complications were pretty commonplace. Peeps developed other stones later on, but for a time after this procedure, he was almost symptom free. I said in this outline that he recovered with no complications. He and Elizabeth never had any children, and one of the things that people site as maybe a reason for that is that this procedure might have been successful at removing the stone, but also might have inadvertently made him unable to have children. That's all very speculative, though, like we don't know exactly why they didn't have any children. Peeps wrote his first diary entry on January first, sixteen sixty, and he referred to this ailment in the very first sentence, quote, Blessed be God. At the end of the last year. I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold. We'll talk more about the diary later, especially through this next section of the episode, but this is when he started keeping it. Sixteen sixty was a big year for Samuel Peeps. He finished his master's degree and he was part of the fleet that brought King Charles the Second back to England. Super quick recap Charles the Second Father Charles the First was king during the English Civil War, which were a series of conflicts primarily between Royalists and parliamentarians. Charles the First was executed in sixteen forty nine and Charles the Second was forced into exile in sixteen fifty one. Oliver Cromwell, who had been a general on the parliamentarian side, became Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland. Not long after Cromwell's death in sixteen fifty eight, royalists started working out a deal to restore Charles two to the throne. Obviously, it was a lot more complicated than those quick highlights, and also complicated were their loyalties of Peep's patron Edward Montague. Montague had fought on the parliamentarian side and he had been closely connected to both Oliver Cromwell and his son Richard, who tried unsuccessfully to follow in his late father's footsteps. Montague had actually advocated for Oliver Cromwell to be crowned as king. But by the spring of sixteen fifty nine, royalists and parliamentarians alike, we're wondering if Montague's allegiance was shift ding Charles the Seconds. Representatives made overtures to him, while Parliament stripped him of his Admiralty commission, and for good reason, he was negotiating in secret for the return of the king. But after a very politically chaotic end of sixteen fifty nine and beginning of sixteen sixty, Montague was reappointed to the Admiralty Commission and made General of the Sea, along with George Monk, who was actively working to restore Charles the Second to the throne. Once a deal was negotiated for Charles's return, Montague secured the fleet that traveled to the Netherlands to bring him back to England, and thanks to Montague's influence, Samuel Peeps was on board with that fleet. The fleet landed back at Dover with the King on sixteen sixty, and almost immediately Charles the Second made Montague and Earl. That was the beginning of a tremendously eventful decade for Peeps personally and for Britain in general. And then we're going to talk more about all of that after a sponsor break. After Edward Montague became the Earl of Sandwich, he told Samuel Peeps quote, we must have a little patience and we will rise together. In the meantime, I will do you all the good jobs I can. This worked out really well for Peeps through the Earl's influence. In the summer of sixteen sixty, he was named Clerk of the Acts at the Navy Board. That's the administrative board responsible for running the Royal Navy and keeping it maintained and supplied. This position came along with a salary and a house, and it also meant that Peeps became a Justice of the peace in the counties where the dockyards were located. This was the beginning of a lifelong career as a naval administrator. Peeps was a very hard worker, but he didn't actually know anything about the navy like at all. Nearly his entire experience was going on that voyage to bring Charles the Second back to England. So at first he mostly just deferred to the rest of the words, some of whom had decades of navy experience. But over the next couple of years, Peeps realized that having a long career in the Navy didn't necessarily make a person an upstanding naval administrator or any good at it. He started to see a lot of laziness and waste and corruption, and he became especially distrustful of the men whose commands had been passed down to them through their families rather than rising through the ranks based on their merit. But none of these opinions erased the fact that these men had knowledge and experience that Peeps just didn't, so he got to work trying to close that gap as much as he could. His own education had been really weak in maths, so he got a tutor and started learning multiplication tables. He immersed himself in the terminology and procedures and measurements that were needed to build, maintain, and supply ships. Soon he stopped following the lead of the more senior board members and started trying to make things more efficient and orderly, which really drew the ire of some of his colleagues. Peeps was taking on an additional roles as well. He became secretary of the committee that ran the English colony at Tangier, which had been part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry when she married Charles the Second. He was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society in sixteen sixty five. The Second Anglo Dutch War started later that year, and many of the rest of the board were aging or at sea, so Peeps found himself overseeing a large part of the Navy's wartime administration, including setting up a centralized provisioning system. In the mid sixteen sixties, Peeps witnessed two catastrophes in very quick succession, the Great Plague of London and the Great Fire of London. The plague struck London in sixteen sixty five, although Peep's diary also includes news of the diseases spread elsewhere in the years before that, On April thirtieth, sixteen sixty five, he wrote, quote, great fears of the sickness here in the city, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us. All his entries through sixteen sixty five and into sixteen sixty six, detail fear of the plague and death tolls, some of which were enormous. On August thirty one, he wrote, quote in the city died this week seven thousand, four hundred ninety six and all of them six thousand, one hundred two of the plague. But it is feared that the true number of the dead this week is near ten thousand, partly from the poor that cannot be taken notice of through the greatness of the number, and partly from the Quakers and others that will not have any bell ring for them. For the first few months of sixteen sixty six, he records numbers that decrease, and an increase, and the decrease again, then finally noting a day of thanksgiving for the plagues end on November twenty, although he acknowledges that people were still dying, the plague was in its last months when the fire began on September two, sixteen sixty six. Peep's chronicled the fire much like he did the plague, detailing people's fears along with what was burning and the progression of the fire itself, and how this that he tried to stop it. The fire affected Peeps for months after it was over. The following February he wrote, quote, the weather for three or four days being come to be exceedingly cold again as any time this year. I did within these six days see smoke still remaining of the late fire in the city. And it is strange to think how to this day I cannot sleep at night without great terrors of fire. And this very night I could not sleep till almost two in the morning through thoughts of fire. The Second Anglo Dutch War was going on through all of this, and peace negotiations started in August of sixteen sixty six and lasted into the following year. As the negotiations progressed, the British government decided to recall the fleet and scale down the navy while still trying to protect England from a Dutch attack. On March twenty three, Peeps wrote, quote, at the office where Sir w Pen come, being returned from Chatham from considering the means of fortifying the River Medway by a chain at the dakes, and ships laid there with guns to keep the enemy from coming up to burn our ships. All our care being now to fortify ourselves against their invading US. So basically they didn't have enough money to keep maintaining the navy like at the strength that it had been while they were more actively at war. But the peace treaty had not been signed yet, so they needed to still have some kind of defense, and they were attempting to do this with a chain stretched across the mouth of the river. But a Dutch force did indeed attack the river midway. That happened on June nine, sixty seven. They broke through that chain, destroyed some of the ships, and captured others, including capturing the fleet's flagship, the Royal Charles. This was disastrous for the navy. It was terrifying for the British people since it put the Dutch in striking distance of London. Of course, then people questioned the judgment of the king over the whole thing, but the war did end with the Treaty of Bretta a month later. Peeps, being the administrator who had arranged so much of the withdrawal, was investigated repeatedly in the end, though the officers who made the decisions took more of the blame than the Navy board, who had figured out just how to carry out those decisions soon, though Peep's had other problems to worry about. On October eight his wife caught him with one of their maids, Deborah Willett. Deb was eighteen and she had been hired primarily as Elizabeth's companion, and Elizabeth was of course outraged. They were not caught talking. Peeps was explicit in his diary about exactly what was going on. On October thirty one, he wrote, quote, so ends this month with some quiet in my mind, though not perfect, after the greatest falling out with my poor wife, and through my folly with the girl that I ever had, and I have reason to be sorry and ashamed of it, and more to be troubled for the poor girl's sake, whom I fear I shall, by this means prove the ruin of though I shall think myself concerned both to love and be a friend to her. In November, Elizabeth forced Samuel to dismiss deb from their staff and agree to never see her again, but he did not keep that promise. He figured out where deb had gone and went to visit and give her some money. It is not clear whether he continued their affair after she was out of the household, though, and also this was not the only affair that Peeps detailed in his diary. He wrote about dalliances with his friends wives and his wife's friends and maids in their household, and on and on and on, and his attentions and these episodes were not always welcome. On August eighteenth of sixteen sixty seven, he wrote about going to church, where he quote stood by a pretty modest maid, whom I did labor to take by the hand and the body, but she would not, but got further and further from me, and at last I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again, which seeing I did forbear, and was glad I did spy her design. And then I fell to gaze upon another pretty maid and a few close to me, and she on me, and I did go about to take her by the hand, which she suffered a little, and then withdrew. So the sermon ended, and the church broke up, and my wars ended too, And so took coach and home, and there took up my wife and to Islington with her. Oh Peeps, as he was writing about the fallout of his wife's discovery of his affair. Peeps was also writing about problems with his eyes. His diary entries record pain, sensitivity to light, and trouble seeing. He found that drinking made it worse, but he didn't want to give up drink. He loved going to the theater, but the light bothered him there and he was forced to stop going. He tried all kinds of compresses and potions and pills to no effect, and he was granted several months of leave to try to recover. On May thirty one, sixteen sixty nine, he wrote his last diary entry, saying, in part quote, and thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand, And therefore, whenever comes of it, I must forbear, and therefore resolve from this time forward, to have it kept by my people in Longhand, and must therefore be contented to set down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know, or if there be anything which cannot be much, how my amours to deb are past, and my eyes hindering me in almost all other pleasures, I must endeavor to keep a margin in my book open, to add here and there a note in shorthand with my own hand. And so I would take myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave. For which and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the Good God prepare me. Not long after, Samuel and Elizabeth went to the Low Countries in France, where she contracted some sort of fever. She died on November ten, sixty nine, at the age of twenty nine. Samuel never remarried, but he did start an ongoing relationship with a woman named Mary Skinner not long after. She eventually moved into his home and seems to have acted as his wife in everything but name. But in spite of this real certainty in the last diary entry that he was going blind, Peeps did not lose his sight as he feared that he would, and his career continued on for almost two decades after his wife's death. We'll have more on that after another quick sponsor break. As Samuel Peeps was struggling with his eyesight and traveling with his wife. He was also up for election to the House of Commons, and that was an election that he lost. He also started facing rumors that he was a crypto papist or a secret Catholic. Catholics were highly suspect in England at this point, and Peeps had Catholic friends, some Catholic family members. There were some Catholic books in his library. All of this raised a lot of eyebrows. The Third Anglo Dutch War started in March of sixteen seventy two, and Peep's old benefactor, the Earl of Sandwich, was killed in action. The two men hadn't been close for a while. The Earl had been caught up in a scandal about the distribution of wartime prizes, and Peeves had made enough of a name for himself that he didn't really need the Earl's patronage anymore. Even so, Peeps was a banner bearer at the funeral. In sixteen seventy three, Parliament passed a test Act which banned Catholics and nonconforming Protestants from holding public office. King Charles the Second's brother, the Duke of York, refused to take the required oaths that were uh mandatory for Catholics, which he was, so he was forced to resign as Lord High Admiral. Afterward, the King established an Admiralty Commission and Peeps became its secretary. This was a promotion. It came with more income, more prestige, and a lot more influence. On November four, sixteen seventies, Peeps was elected to the House of Commons, but once again rumors surface that he was secretly Catholic, which led to another investigation. In the end, he kept his seat, although his work as an MP mostly stuck to matters of the navy, and he kept picking up new roles outside the government and his job with the Admiralty, including becoming a governor of Christ's Hospital, the Master of the Cloth Workers Company, and the Master of Trinity House. He also worked to reform and revitalize the Navy, especially when it came to setting standards and establishing regulations for how things should be done. He successfully lobbied for funding to build new ships, convincing the House of Commons to allocate six hundred thousand pounds for it in sixteen seventy seven. Largely due to Peep's influence, and planning. The strength of the Royal Navy nearly doubled while he was with the Admiralty. He did all this in the face of ongoing accusations that he was a crypto papist. His opponents even went so far as to accute his clerk of murder. In May of sixteen seventy nine, Peeps and Sir Anthony Dean were accused of leaking British secrets to France, and Peeps was again accused of secretly being Catholic. He resigned his position with the Admiralty and he and Dean were both sent to the tower. As this was going on, it was widely believed that Catholics were planning to assassinate the king and put his brother, the Duke of York, on the throne. This so called Popish plot did not exist, but people were certain that it did. Peeps started trying to put together his defense, but it turned out that the prosecution really did not have much of a case. One of the key witnesses against him was a butler that he had previously fired, and the charges were eventually dropped. Peep spent the next few years mostly out of the public eye, traveling, collecting books for his library, and acting as a secretary to Lord Dartmouth during an expedition to evacuate the British colony of Tangier after Britain decided to abandon it. Peep's returned to the Admiralty in four in a position that was created for him. That same year, he was elected President of the Royal Society. His biggest claim to fame in this role is that he arranged for the publication of Isaac Newton's prince Shipia Mathematica, with peeps imprimature featured very prominently on the frontispiece. This was, however, funded by Edmund Halley, not by Peeps or the Royal Society. This was because Peeps had already spent the Society's budget and some of his own money on the elaborately illustrated History of Fish by Francis Willoughby, which then had been a total commercial flop, like we talked about in our Christmas Time episode, or we talked about Charles Dickens and uh Christmas Carol and how he just really wanted all of these engravings and illustrations. All those things were very, very expensive, and Peeps that run through the whole entire budget. But if you look, there's i mean plenty of scans of the the frontispiece of of Newton's Princeship of Mathematica, and it's Samuel Peeps's name is one of the bigger things on that document. In sixteen eighty five, King Charles the Second died, and his brother, the Duke of York finally did become king, becoming James the Second and seventh. Peeps continued on with the admiralty under the new monarch, resuming his plans to strengthen the Royal Navy, while also just endlessly criticizing the people that had been in charge while he was gone. But none of this preparation did the king a lot of good. In sixteen eighty eight, William, the third Prince of Orange overthrew James and the Glorious Revolution. William became co regent with his wife Mary, who was also James's daughter. The new administration purged Charles's supporters from office. Peeps resigned, was briefly detained under suspicion for treason, and was ultimately released on medical grounds. Peeps spent most of his remaining life reading and studying, and amassing a huge library which he just continually reorganized and curated. He also published a book, Memoirs of the Royal Navy in sixteen ninety. Samuel Peeps died on May seventeen o three, at the age of seventy. He was buried next to his late wife Elizabeth, at St Olive Church. He left his three thousand volume library to Magdalen College at the University of Cambridge, with the stipulation that they be kept separate from the rest of the college's collection. Today, those are housed as Peep's Library, which is open to the public and to scholars alike. Peep's diaries were part of this collection. During the nine years that he was keeping the diary, Peeps would note each day's activities, often ending with and so to bed, and then every few days he would edit them a little bit. He didn't seem to meaningfully change the content, but he can't clean u up a little bit and copy them into a master journal. In addition to writing these in shorthand, he also used a hodgepodge of codes and other languages for the most salacious parts of it. The result was a set of six large volumes containing more than wanted a quarter million words for more than one hundred years after Peepe's death, no one knew what was in these diaries. It was only after John Evelyn's diaries were published in eighteen eighteen that scholars started trying to transcribe Peeps as well. Evelyn and Peeps lived at the same time. They were also friends. Yeah, they're sort of the two companion diarists of this time in London. At the time, the people working with the diary thought that it was written in code, and a Cambridge undergraduate named John Smith took on the task of decoding it. King Charles the Second had dictated an account of his sixteen fifty one escaped from England to Samuel Peeps. Peeps had taken the dictation in Shorthand and then later transcribed it into longhand, intending to publish it. Smith compared these two versions to work out how to transcribe the diaries. This work wasn't actually necessary though. Peeps was really writing in Thomas Shelton's system of Shorthand, and the handbook for it, title Tutor to Techiography, was there in Peep's library as well. Somebody apparently told John Smith like some years later, by the way, the manual to this. It was like, it was right there. You didn't really I don't know what his reaction was. I envisioned some hair pulling and some screaming, but maybe that would just be me. It's it's either hair pulling and screaming. Were like. That was a fun challenge, though I don't mind that I did a bunch of totally unnecessary, tedious work. Portions of the transcribed diary were published starting in eight five, with longer editions coming out in the years that followed. A mostly complete addition, edited by HB. Wheatley, came out in ten volumes across through eight and all these nineteenth century versions, profanity and the most explicit parts are all edited out. There are phrases, sentences, or sometimes whole days removed. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about the Diaries in eighteen eighty six. He expressed some chagrin at the idea that some parts of them were quote unfit for publication, saying, quote we may think, without being sorted, that when we purchased six huge and distressingly expensive volumes, we are entitled to be treated rather more like scholars and rather less like children. The first edition that didn't edit out the sex and profanity came out almost another century later. It was another series of volumes published between nineteen seventy and nine eight three. So if you have only read the parts of the diary that are in the public domain and are probably also about either the plague or the fire, like we talked about at the top of the episode, you might have a very different impression of this diary than if you read other parts of an unexpurgated version. Just as examples. On October thirteen, sixteen sixty, he went out to see a public hanging, something that he seems to have really enjoyed doing this. One was Major General Thomas Harrison, who had been convicted of regicide in the execution of King Charles the First. Peep's wrote quote, I went out to Charing Cross to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered, which was done there. He looking as cheerful as any man could in that condition. While on the boat with Charles the Second during his return to England, Peeps wrote about a dog defecating on the deck, saying quote, I went with Mr Mansell and one of the King's footmen with a dog that the King loved, which expletive deleted the boat, which made us laugh, which made me think that a king and all that belonged to him are but just as others are. He also didn't temper his opinions. On September sixty two, he wrote, quote, we saw Midsummer Night's Dream, which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life. I saw I confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my pleasure. So yes, Peep's diaries include a pretty straight forward eyewitness account of several major historical events in the sixteen sixties. But Peep's clearly also thought everything around him was interesting and worth noticing. So these diaries are also a fascinating account of daily life in London, including what people ate and what they saw at the theater and what music was popular, and then little details like discovering that the wig you bought was full of knits, or what to do when you had tummy trouble while you were staying at somebody else's house and the maid forgot to leave you a chamber pot. It's full of all kinds of random things that he saw and was just delighted or surprised by, and of course all of those many, many affairs, and it's all online for free, except those most explicit parts. Uh. If you go to Peep's diary dot com, it's been putting up an entry a day at a time since two thousand thirteen, along with lots of annotations and letters and other information. And there are additions at Project Guttenberg and archive dot org as well, so you have plenty to dig through. If you want to learn more, you can just click on some random stuff. You might have a day where he was in the office and everything was sort of just political administrative stuff. Or you might get one about a dog pooping on the deck of a boat. Do you have a little bit of listener mail? I do have listener mail. This from Maureen, Uh jumps back to a little bit older episode, but I still thought it was super interesting, so Marine says Hi, Tracy and Holly. I've been jumping around in the archive, so I know you've already received many emails on Sir Walter Raleigh. However, I thought you may enjoy this family story. My grandfather was a member of the Merchant Marines during World War Two, he always claimed that he had been on a boat that was sunk off the coast of Africa, not one, but two times during the war. Both times they were close enough to the shore that he was able to swim to safety. One of these times the locals came out in boats to rescue them. However, before being allowed to board the boat, each man had to pay for his passage with cigarettes. My grandfather apparently had the wrong brand. Either it was as Sir Walter Raleigh brand and they wanted something else, or vice versa. Regardless, only those crewmen with the appropriate brand were allowed to ride in the boats, while the rest had to swim the remaining distance. While he was stationed in Africa, we have a picture of him and uniform in front of the pyramids. My dad was always skeptical of this story, as my grandfather was known to be fond of a good story. However, recently, when doing some genealogy research, I came across an admittance document for him to the Port of New York in ninety four. There was a space to explain why he didn't have the appropriate paperwork, and it said went down with the ship, so we do at least have verification that he survived one shipwreck. On a separate note, I recently listened to your trans Atlantic cruising episode, Holly. If you ever do choose to go on at Disney Cruise, I recommend you choose either The Magic or the Wonder. Those two ships have adults only areas that are truly removed from kids on the ship. The Dream and Fantasy have awkwardly placed central adult suddenly areas where kids or adults with small kids accidentally have to walk through to get one side of the ship to the other. Bless you for this knowledge you have bestowed. Uh. That reminds me of the Some of the the cruise ships that I have been on have the casino awkwardly placed so that you have to walk through it to get from one part of the ship to the other end. The casino has traditionally been one of the places on the ship where smoking is allowed, so there has been sort of like if you would really rather not be around the smoke, some uh, some funagling to figure out how to get from one place on the ship to the other without walking through there anyway. She ends with an episode suggestion and thanks us for the detailed research and keeping her company on her commune. Thank you so much, Maureen, thank you for this note. I love it when people have family stories that connected the podcast in some way. That always delights me so much. And I also really like it when people have their stories to share about their family members in the service, because I had have family, my family members who have been in the of US, and I feel a little kinship when I hear people's other wartime military service stories. So thank you, Maureen. Thank you everyone to send who sends us emails if you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast, or just to say hello. We love emails, just say hello and emails with people's pets, pictures, and them. We're a history podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and then we're also all over social media at missed in History. That is where you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter. You can come to our website, which is missed in History dot com, where you will find the show notes for all the episodes that Holly and I have done together, and you will find a searchable archive of every episode ever. And you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast, I Heart Radio app and wherever else you get your podcasts. Stuffy Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Two