Estate / Collection: The Victor Gulotta Collection

PEPYS, SAMUEL and KING JAMES II

Document signed by King James II at the head and countersigned by Samuel Pepys, the King instructing that Lieutenant Simon Foulks should receive captain's pay for his temporary service as commander of HMS Bristol from June to August 1682. Single page on a sheet, 22 lines in a secretarial hand, dated Whitehall (the royal residence in London), 5th November 1686, signed above the text by James II, and at the foot by Pepys as Secretary to the Admiralty. Usual folds, minor foxing and soiling, framed with a portrait of James II and of Samuel Pepys.

An attractive English naval document signed by King James II and Samuel Pepys, of diary fame. The Bristol, for the command of which Foulks was remunerated by the instructions in this document, was a 44-gun fourth-rate, and apparently the first named vessel in the British Navy. Pepys had served as Secretary under Charles II, and he continued in that role after the accession to the throne of James II (following the death of Charles in 1685), and the present document was prepared quite early in the reign of the new King.

Pepys was interested in witchcraft; his library included a number of works, including both those that reflected positions doubtful of its existence and those evincing full belief (Reginald Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft in the former category, and Bodin's treatise on demonology in the latter). His diaries do not really reflect on what side of the debate he stood, and unfortunately, they conclude well before the period of the Salem witch trials, so we do not know what he thought of that folly. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, an intellectual who was au courant with the trends in natural philosophy of the epoch, so it is likely enough that he was an interested skeptic.

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