hen Pepys spoke to this effect:

"When I promised that the ships should be ready by the 30th of May,
it was upon the supposition of the money for 90 ships proposed by
the King and voted by you, their sizes and rates, and I doubt not by
that time to have 90 ships, and if they fall short it will be only
from the failing of the Streights ships coming home and those but
two.....

"Sir Robert Howard then rose and said, 'Pepys here speaks rather
like an Admiral than a Secretary, "I" and "we." I wish he knows
half as much of the Navy as he pretends.'"

Pepys was chosen by the electors of Harwich as their member in the short
Parliament that sat from March to July, 1679, his colleague being Sir
Anthony Deane, but both members were sent to the Tower in May on a
baseless charge, and they were superseded in the next Parliament that
met on the 17th October, 1679.

The high-handed treatment which Pepys underwent at this time exhibits
a marked instance of the disgraceful persecution connected with the
so-called Popish plot. He was totally unconnected with the Roman
Catholic party, but his association with the Duke of York was sufficient
to mark him as a prey for the men who initiated this "Terror" of the
seventeenth century. Sir. Edmund Berry Godfrey came to his death in
October, 1678, and in December Samuel Atkins, Pepys's clerk, was brought
to trial as an accessory to his murder. Shaftesbury and the others not
having succeeded in getting at Pepys through his clerk, soon afterwards
attacked him more directly, using the infamous evidence of Colonel
Scott. Much light has lately been thrown upon the underhand dealings
of this miscreant by Mr. G. D. Scull, who printed privately in 1883 a
valuable work entitled, "Dorothea Scott, otherwise Gotherson, and Hogben
of Egerton House, Kent, 1611-1680."

John Scott (calling himself Colonel Scott) ingratiated himself into
acquaintance with Major Gotherson, and sold to the latter large tracts
of land in Long Island, to which he had no right whatever. Dorothea
Gotherson, after her husband's death, took steps to ascertain the exact
state of her property, and obtained the assistance of Colonel Francis
Lovelace, Governor of New York. Scott's fraud was discovered, and a
petition for redress was presented to the King. The result of this was
that the Duke of York commanded Pepys to collect evidence against Scott,
and he accordingly brought together a grea