Samuel Pepys and the Royal Navy's foundations

Who was the key figure in the development of the Royal Navy in the eighteenth century?

Samuel Pepys is a strong candidate because the later navy built on the administrative foundations he helped establish in the seventeenth century.

Samuel Pepys is the proposed starting point for explaining the eighteenth-century Royal Navy's development. His work belongs to the seventeenth century, but the later navy continued building on those foundations. Eighteenth-century strength depended partly on an earlier institutional inheritance.