 After the rolls were presented to the king they were archived in the royal collections . In 1680 Charles II gave two of the rolls to Samuel Pepys , a navy administrator and avid book collector . Pepys did not disclose the details of how the rolls were given to him , but it is believed that the gift came out of a meeting with King Charles where Pepys took down the king 's account of how he escaped from the Battle of Worcester ( 1651 ) . The plan was that Pepys would edit and publish the already famous story , but he never did so . It is also known that Pepys was planning to write a history of the navy and that he was gathering material for this task , but this project also was never finished . It is considered likely that King Charles was aware of Pepys ' plans and presented him with two of the rolls either as a gift or as payment for the intended publication of the escape story . The second roll could not be located at that time , and it was not until 1690 that it was discovered by Henry Thynne , keeper of the royal library 1677 – 89 and a close friend of Pepys . Thynne arranged for Pepys to make copies of some of the illustrations , but by 1690 Charles was dead and James II was in exile . Pepys had resigned from his position as Secretary of the Admiralty that same year and refused to recognize the reign of William and Mary , which meant that acquisition of the final roll for his collection was out of the question . The creation of the codex from the first and third rolls is therefore assumed to have been completed shortly after that time . After Pepys ' death in 1703 his library passed on to his nephew John Jackson . After the death of Jackson in 1724 the library , along with the codex , was then passed on to Pepys ' old college at Magdalene , Cambridge , where it remains to this day . 
