History has long done full justice to the Samuel Pepys who reveals himself in the Diary, but historians have sometimes underestimated the importance of the long official career of which the Diary was only a bye-product. This career was efficient, and even distinguished, in a high degree; and its merits can only be properly appreciated if allowance is made for the difficulties which had to be encountered by the naval administrator of Pepys's day.

Some of these difficulties were of the nature of an inheritance, for the disease of the Restoration period had already declared itself before the Restoration took place. The earlier governments of the Interregnum were well financed, but to a certain extent they were living upon capital—the capital represented by confiscations and Royalist compositions. Thus towards the end of the period the pressure of financial difficulties began to be felt, and three months before the king came back the debts of the Navy stood at a million and a quarter. The Navy “is in very sad condition,” wrote Pepys in the Diary, as early as 31st July 1660, “and money must be raised for it.”

The financial problem with which Pepys and his colleagues were faced was difficult in time of peace, but when the Second Dutch War broke out, in the spring of 1665, the situation, in spite of large Parliamentary grants, soon became very serious.