The Dark Side of Samuel Pepys: Society's First Sex Offender

By Geoffrey Pimm

This historical biography reveals how the famous diarist of Restoration England used his professional position to act as a sexual predator.

Samuel Pepys is popularly known as the founder of the modern navy, a member of the Royal Society and, most of all, as a unique and frank diarist. Less well known is that he was a serial sexual offender by modern standards; a voyeur, a groper, and a rapist.

Set against the London society of Charles II’s restoration, and extensively using Pepys’ own words, this book concerns his numerous extramarital affairs. It demonstrates how he used his position of power and influence to advance the careers of his subordinates—in return for the sexual favors of their wives.

With his own descriptions, translated from the strange mix of languages and the seventeenth-century shorthand he used to camouflage the content, the reader witnesses in graphic detail how Pepys set about achieving his lascivious objectives – on occasion resorting to physical force where persuasion or bribery failed. Whether she be wife, daughter, mother, or humble maidservant, no woman was safe from his rapacious sexual appetite.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781526717313

Geoffrey Pimm

Geoffrey Pimm is a retired Member of the Institute of Risk Management and the Business Continuity Institute, London, with working experience in twenty-three countries (Australia, Belgium, China, Dubai, Eire, England, Finland, France, Greece, Holland, Hong Kong, Kuwait; Luxembourg, Philippines, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand) often in dangerous and/or challenging environments. Assignments have ranged from international financial organizations to national governments and security agencies. For more than thirty years, Geoff was a UK qualified private pilot of both single and twin-engined aircraft, amassing hundreds of hours flying both modern and vintage aircraft, with thirty-three aircraft types in his log book, including several ex-RAF marques. Now retired with his wife to the English countryside, Geoff was for several years a Parish Councillor and is now kept busy writing, singing in two male voice choirs, compèring concerts, growing fruit and vegetables, driving his 1937 Morgan sports car and doting on his five grandchildren and four step grandchildren.

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Introduction

Ask his contemporaries what they thought of Samuel Pepys and they would have told you that he was an upright and God-fearing citizen, renowned for his integrity, hard work and unblemished reputation. By dint of unswerving application to his duties he had risen from humble (if well-connected) beginnings to be amongst the most powerful men in the land, known and respected by everyone with whom he came into contact, including even King Charles II himself. Without Samuel Pepys, England may not have had the navy that, for centuries after his death, would preserve the country from foreign invasion and secure the greatest empire the world had ever known. The historian Arthur Bryant writing in 1938 described it as ‘his supreme achievement – that by virtue of which his country still rules the sea.’ As Secretary of the Royal Navy, a Member of Parliament, Master of Trinity House and President of the Royal Society, Pepys exerted his influence over every aspect of seventeenth century public life.

And yet we know from his personal diary, into which he carefully recorded every daily event in his public and private life over a period of more than nine years from January 1660 to May 1669, that there was a darker and much less reputable side to his character. For reasons which will almost certainly forever remain a mystery, Samuel Pepys recorded in unabashed and graphic detail, behaviour that might make even a modern case-hardened tabloid journalist blush. At first glance, it appears that it was never intended that the world at large would have access to this document – the whole text was written in shorthand, whilst very personal (and potentially highly embarrassing) episodes were first written in a strange mixture of foreign languages, before being transcribed into their encoded format, what modern code-breakers might call ‘double encryption’.

All the various translators of the diary have shied away from including plain English renditions of these episodes in their editions. Pepys’s diary was first made available to the general public during the nineteenth century, both in a notoriously bowdlerized edition by Lord Braybrooke and in a more accurate but censored version by Henry B. Wheatley, which he published over a number of years in seventy-three volumes. It was the early 1970s before a complete edition was published by Latham and Matthews, and even then, the offending passages were only rendered into their strange mix of foreign languages, without translation or explanatory notes.

Henry Wheatley also wrote two additional works on the subject; Samuel Pepys and the World He Lived In published in 1889 and Pepysiana subtitled Additional Notes on the Particulars of Pepys’ Life and on some Passages in the Diary. The Victorians were notoriously shy when it came to discussing the subject of sex, and Mr Wheatley was no exception. Pepys’ diary is full of women and his relationships with them – thirty-one female domestic servants alone are mentioned in varying degrees of detail, including an affair with one that very nearly destroyed his marriage. In Pepysiana fifty-one pages are devoted to notes about ‘Friends and Acquaintances’ yet ‘Women’ occupy rather less than a single page, in which Pepys is largely blameless and the characters of a few women are viciously assassinated; for example: ‘Mrs. Betty Lane, afterwards Mrs. Martin, who figures so largely in Pepys’s pages, is the most objectionable of all. There is no evidence that she had any virtue to lose, and her conduct throughout is very revolting.’

However, in a couple of matters, Wheatley allows a mild criticism of Pepys’ behaviour; With regard to the affair with Mrs Bagwell, which lasted for much of the diary period, ‘it appears that Pepys actually did seduce her, and that in a way much to his discredit.’ The affair with the maid Deb Willett, whom Pepys systematically and forcibly seduced and which nearly destroyed his marriage, is described as affording ‘a very curious illustration of Pepys’s code of morals.’

Whilst a student at Cambridge, Pepys probably had access to a work by Thomas Shelton called A Tutor to Tachygraphy in which the author enumerates some of the advantages of writing by his shorthand method, among them being ‘secrecy, brevity, celerity and perpetuity.’ Shelton went on to add a paragraph that must have appealed greatly to the young Pepys: ‘Sometimes a man may have occasion to write that which he would not have everyone acquainted with, which being set down in these Characters, he may have them for his own private use only.’

However, if it was never intended for other eyes, but for ‘his own private use only’ why did Pepys go to the trouble of collecting the pages of the diary into tooled leather bindings and catalogue them into what is acknowledged to be one of the greatest of surviving seventeenth-century libraries? At this distance in time it is unlikely that we will ever find the answers to these questions and thereby discover his real motivation. Nevertheless, his motives for keeping such a detailed history of his life for nearly a decade remain a subject ripe for speculation. It has been suggested that it was the product of a puritanical urge to record (and thereby correct) his moral lapses, but these only represent a relatively small percentage of the total record. Others suggest that it was motivated by an historian’s desire to record the momentous events of his time, yet when he began to keep the diary, he was a relatively humble clerk and many of the great events of the seventeenth century that he was to witness, participate in and record had not yet occurred or were even foreseen. It has even been suggested that he was attempting to render those lascivious memories less immediately part of his own consciousness thereby rendering them all the more titillating in the later reading; yet again these instances represent only a small proportion of the diary, so can hardly represent its raison d’etre.

Whatever his motives in keeping the diary, the encryption afforded by his knowledge of Shelton’s method suited his needs admirably, for away from the respectability of his professional life, he set down private opinions that polite convention would have suppressed. Moreover, he faithfully recorded acts of moral turpitude that in later centuries might have caused his name to be blazoned across the newspapers and in some instances, most probably lead him to be arraigned in the courts. During the diary period, he had sexual encounters of one sort or another with around fifty women other than his wife. At one end of the scale of improper behaviour he was a voyeur, even in church peeping at women through his telescope – gowns were cut lower than at any other time in history either before or since. He was a groper, assaulting his wife’s maids even in his own parlour and other women, pregnant or not, whenever and wherever he could – even on more than one occasion in his wife’s presence as the ladies sat either side of him in a coach.

Further up the scale of inappropriate behaviour, he unashamedly used his position in public life to further the careers of subordinate men, in return for enjoying the sexual favours of their wives. Finally at the very top of the scale of sexual offences, women who still remained uncooperative after blandishments, money, or their husbands’ advancement had failed to secure his lascivious objectives, found themselves physically forced into satisfying his lust, in a manner that modern courts would have no problem at all in finding to be rape.

Whilst on a visit to the notorious Bartholomew Fair in 1668, Pepys came upon a trained mare performing tricks at the instigation of her master, to the applause of the watching crowd. The showman instructed the horse ‘to go to him of the company that most loved a pretty wench in a corner.’ The mare unhesitatingly ambled over and to the amusement of the crowd, nuzzled Pepys. Unabashed, he flicked a shilling (5p) to the showman and turned and kissed an unknown pretty girl who stood next to him. (Diary 1st September 1668).

In the society of loose morals that was restoration England, led by a libertine king and court, Samuel Pepys, the celebrated member of the establishment and respectable pillar of society, took every opportunity that came his way to ‘love a pretty wench in a corner’ or at very least to kiss them and put his hand up their skirts.

Chapter 1

Pepys’ World

There can be almost no one, in the western world at least, that does not know the name Samuel Pepys. His daily personal diary, kept meticulously for almost a decade, remains not just a primary source of information on some of the most important events of the seventeenth century, but a fascinating window into the customs, morals and mores of the English restoration period. Through the pages of the journal, we see the world with his eyes; through his lips we taste the food he ate and through his nostrils smell the odours that pervaded the London streets and houses of his day, most of which, in an age long before closed drains and the invention of the water closet, would utterly disgust modern sensibilities.

The lack of sanitation and no knowledge of virology meant that life expectancy was comparatively short, with the average falling between 35 and 40 years, largely from diseases the origins of which were not understood and for which no effective treatments existed – Pepys’ own wife Elizabeth died from typhoid fever at the age of 29. However, this low life expectancy takes into account the fact that up to a half of all children died before the age of 16. If one survived to the age of 30, life expectancy rose to 59.

The seventeenth century was already one-third gone when Samuel made his appearance in the world in February 1633, his parents’ fifth child. His ancestors had first been yeoman farmers in the fens of Cambridgeshire, with various lands around Cottenham and including the manor of Impington. In1618 the sister of Samuel’s Cambridgeshire grandfather, Paulina (already widowed early in life) married a brother of the 1st Earl of Manchester, Sir Sydney Montagu, a genteel connection that was later to prove so beneficial to the rising young Samuel Pepys. As the century progressed several other members of the wider Pepys family rose to become pillars of the establishment. In 1625 his great uncle Talbot Pepys was Recorder and then for a short while MP for Cambridge. His father’s first cousin, Sir Richard Pepys, was elected MP for Sudbury in 1640, Baron of the Exchequer in 1654, and finally Lord Chief Justice of Ireland in 1655. But Samuel’s immediate antecedents were considerably more humble. His father John was a tailor who had married one Margaret Kite, the sister of a butcher from Whitechapel in London. In many ways, it was an apparently ill-matched pairing – a pious, Bible-reading, gentle artisan and a shrewish, illiterate wash-maid. Nevertheless, they obviously had something in common, as eleven children issued from their union over a period of fourteen years.

The London in which young Samuel was to establish himself was tiny compared with the modern metropolis; a conurbation of 475,000 in 1670 (Prof. Ian Mortimer ‘The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain’ Bodley Head 2017), extending for about 3 miles from Westminster Abbey in the west to the Tower of London in the east. A single bridge connected it to the thin strip of urbanization on the south bank that contained Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and Southwark Cathedral. From the higher vantage points of the city one could readily glimpse the green fields of the surrounding countryside, easily accessible on foot when the smells and the hubbub of the city became unbearable.

John Pepys had his tailoring business in Salisbury Court, accessed through a narrow cobbled lane from Fleet Street, on the western edge of the city and close to the northern bank of the Thames, where many of the rich and famous had their grand dwellings. Samuel was born literally above the shop, in one of the two bedrooms that comprised the top floor of the narrow three-storey timbered house, a dwelling typical of the city that was to all but disappear thirty-three years later in the famous conflagration of 1666. The house, in common with all in the neighbourhood, would have reeked by modern standards. In the absence of any lavatorial facilities that would be familiar to the twenty-first century, the house would have been equipped with several chamber-pots, some waiting to be emptied – either by being poured from the window into the street below or in better houses, taken down to the cellar and emptied into what was known as the ‘house of office’, a latrine containing a receptacle for the household’s human waste, there to wait upon its occasional removal by the ‘night-men’, a job so unpleasant that its operatives often denied their occupation, the lingering traces of their work so evident that people saw the truth, allegedly giving rise to the origin of the expression ‘you’re taking the piss!’. If not emptied regularly, the results could be disgusting to say the least:

This morning one came to me to advise with me where to make me a window into my cellar in lieu of one which Sir W. Batten had stopped up, and going down into my cellar to look I stepped into a great heap of turds by which I found that Mr. Turner’s house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which do trouble me, but I shall have it helped. (Diary 20th October 1660)

This was not the only time Pepys was incommoded by the lavatorial arrangements of his neighbours:

… at night home and up to the leads; but were, contrary to expectation, driven down again with a stink, by Sir. W Pen’s emptying of a shitten pot in their house of office close by; which doth trouble me, for fear it do hereafter annoy me. (Diary 30th April 1666)

Sometimes, even a convenient receptacle was not utilized – Dr Johnson once famously defecated into his hosts’ fireplace. Pepys did the same on at least one occasion when in urgent need and a suitable receptacle was not to hand:

… and so I to bed, and in the night was mightily troubled with a looseness (I suppose from some fresh damp linen that I put on this night), and feeling for a chamber-pott, there was none, I having called the mayde up out of her bed, she had forgot I suppose to put one there; so I was forced in this strange house to rise and shit in the chimney twice; and so to bed and was very well again. (Diary 28th September 1665)

Even Pepys, who must have been inured to the ever pervading stench, must occasionally have found it unbearable, but was pleasantly surprised by the efficiency of the ‘night-men’: ‘… thence home; where my house of office was emptying, and I find they will do it with much more cleanness than I expected.’ (Diary 28th July 1663)

However, the next day, it is clear that his expectations were ill-founded: ‘… and so home and there going to Sir W.Batten (having no stomach to dine at home, it being yet hardly clean of last night’s turds).’ (Diary 29th July 1663)

With no running water or toilet paper, clothes would quickly have become soiled, and as the laundry was generally only done once a month, dirty linen of all descriptions would either continue to be worn or piled up until the appointed wash-day arrived. Pepys records lying in bed with his wife, reminiscing about the time in their life before they could afford a maid and ‘…how she used to make coal fires and wash my foul clothes with her own hand for me, poor wretch, in my little room.’ (Diary 25th February 1667)

Personal hygiene was no better. Pepys only once records being totally immersed in water, when he visited the facilities in the city of Bath, where he regarded the immersion of so many people in a single body of water as distinctly unhygienic:

Up at four o’clock, being by appointment called up to the Cross Bath, where we were carried one after one another, myself, and wife, and Betty Turner, Willet, and W. Hewer. And by and by, though we designed to have done before company come, much company come; very fine ladies; and the manner pretty enough, only methinks it cannot be clean to go so many bodies together in the same water. (Diary 13th June 1668)

Sometimes, personal hygiene was so lacking that even contemporaries noticed it: ‘… the fine Mrs. Middleton is noted for carrying about her body a continued sour base Smell that is very offensive, especially if she be a little hot.’ (Diary 3rd October 1665)

That other famous diarist of the seventeenth century, John Evelyn, (with whom Pepys was friends for more than forty years) decided in August 1653 that he would experiment with washing his hair annually – presumably a routine that he followed thereafter whether it needed it or not!

But the worst pollution of all came from the coal which provided the whole city with its fuel, both for domestic heating and industrial processes, large numbers of which were conducted in people’s homes. In 1661, John Evelyn published a paper which railed against this ‘prodigious annoyance’ entitled Fumifugium or The Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoake of London dissipated. He describes with startling clarity the effect on the city’s population, familiar to anyone who lived through the London smogs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:

… her Inhabitants breathe nothing but an impure and thick Mist, accompanied with a fuliginous and filthy vapour, which renders them obnoxious to a thousand inconveniences, corrupting the Lungs, and disordering the entire habit of their Bodies; so that Catharrs, Phthisicks, Coughs and Consumptions, rage more in this one City, than in the whole Earth besides.

These foul emissions must have contributed significantly to the death toll of children, which the contemporary ‘Bill of Mortality’ records as being half of all those born in the city failing to achieve two years of age. Apart from coal, everyday rubbish, together with human and animal waste, comprised a major health hazard. The River Thames itself formed the main artery of the sewage system, with open street drains emptying into the dozen or more rivers that then flowed through the city. Everything went into these drains, not just human and animal sewage. Butchers threw the remains of their carcasses into the waters, the bodies of dead dogs and cats were plentiful, and no doubt more than a few human corpses wound their way into eternity along this route. One of the largest of these rivers, the Fleet, was so notorious that it moved several poets to compose odes to its revolting condition. Ben Jonson, who died in 1637, imagined a journey along its length in a poem entitled ‘On the Famous Voyage’:

How dare your dainty nostrils (in so hot a season,

When every clerk eats artichokes and peason,

Laxative lettuce, and such windy meat),

‘Tempt such a passage? When each privy’s seat

Is filled with buttock, and the walls do sweat

Urine and plasters? When the noise doth beat

Upon your ears of discords so un-sweet,

And outcries of the damned in the Fleet?

Nearly a century later, matters had not improved. In 1728 Alexander Pope was to write: ‘To where Fleet-ditch with disemboguing streams, rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames.’

Neither was it just dead dogs that floated into eternity by this route: ‘I was much troubled today to see a dead man lie floating upon the waters; and had done, (they say) these four days and nobody takes him up to bury him, which is very barbarous.’ (Diary 4th April 1662)

Even as early as the fourteenth century, the nineteen-arched single bridge over the river with its 200 buildings (some of them seven-storeys high) contained a multi-seated public latrine which overhung the bridge parapets and discharged directly into the river below; as did the many private latrines reserved for the bridge residents, shopkeepers and bridge officials.

It would be more than the smells of seventeenth-century London that twenty-first century Britons would find repugnant. Everyday sights would also revolt modern sensibilities. This was a time when the punishment for almost any crime that did not carry the death sentence was corporal in nature and was invariably administered in public. Whipping of both sexes with a cat o’ nine tails and branding or boring through the tongue with a red-hot iron were high on the tariff, together with the maiming of the nose or the amputation of ears. As if these penalties were not sufficiently cruel, they were often coupled with the unfortunate recipient spending several hours trapped by the neck and wrists in the pillory or by the ankles in the stocks. Thus the sufferer was obliged to stand for as many hours as the sentence demanded, their heads exposed to whatever the mob cared to hurl at them. These missiles might be relatively harmless, rotting fruit and vegetables being a favourite choice, or if the felon was unpopular, they might equally well have been rocks and stones and deaths are recorded as having ensued from a bombardment of this sort. Refinements in the cruel application of this punishment included the nailing of the culprit’s ears to the board. At the end of the period of suffering, the ears were either slit to free them from the nails, or amputated altogether.

The seventeenth-century poet John Taylor, writing in 1630, describes the necessarily extensive provision of the facilities required to inflict these punishments upon the hapless miscreants of London: ‘In London, and within a mile, I ween, There are jails or prisons full eighteen, And sixty whipping-posts and stocks and cages.’

The execution of felons was effected either by public hanging, or in the case of male traitors, by hanging, drawing and quartering (unless you were nobility, in which case you were mercifully decapitated!): ‘This morning, Mr. Carew was hanged and quartered at Charing Cross – but his quarters by a great favour are not to be hanged up.’ (Diary 15th October 1660)

Female traitors were merely burned alive, but it was not necessary to be a female spy to incur this penalty – plotting to murder one’s husband was prosecuted as ‘petit treason’. The penalty for men involved the cutting down of the miscreant whilst still alive, before disembowelling and then burning the still-warm entrails under the nose of the victim. The trunk was then dismembered and beheaded and the gory components exhibited in various parts of the city. Pepys (who at the age of 15 had witnessed the decapitation of King Charles I outside the Banqueting House in the Palace of Whitehall) watched just such a procedure when Major-General Harrison, one of the signatories of Charles’ death warrant, was thus executed for treason in October 1660. Difficult though it might be to believe now, these events were seen as great public entertainment and have been described elsewhere as ‘the pornography of the age’. Pepys recorded that: ‘… he [Harrison] was presently cut down and his head and his heart shown to the people, at which there was [sic] great shouts of joy.’

Oliver Cromwell, who led the Protectorate after King Charles’s execution, had died at the age of 59 in September 1658, thought probably to have been from septicaemia following a urinary infection. However, his relatively early demise from natural causes did not enable him to escape the ignominy demanded by the law for those convicted of treason. His body was exhumed on the 30th January 1661 and hanged by the neck on the public gibbet at Tyburn (close by what is now Marble Arch in London) all morning and most of the afternoon.¹ At four o’clock it was cut down, the cadaver decapitated and the head stuck on a pole outside Westminster Hall. Pepys must often have seen the gruesome relic on the many occasions he visited the building, as it remained there for the next twenty years until it eventually blew down in a storm.

In the diary, Pepys never mentions joining the baying crowds salivating over the bloody flogging of half-naked men and women, an everyday occurrence in his day, often administered with excessive cruelty. The notorious seventeenth century Judge Jeffries, having sentenced a woman to be publicly whipped, famously instructed the hangman to: ‘… pay particular attention to this lady. Scourge her soundly, man. Scourge her till the blood runs down. It is the Christmas season; a cold season for madam to strip in. See, therefore, man, that you warm her shoulders thoroughly.’

However, the public administration of justice was by no means the only form of public entertainment available in Pepys’ London. He describes his visits to see what to modern eyes would be equally barbaric amusements, many of which had been recently re-introduced after being officially banned under the Puritan rule of the Commonwealth. One of these was the ‘sport’ of baiting bulls with dogs:

And after dinner with my wife and Mercer to the Beare Garden, where I have not been I think of many years, and saw some good sport of the bull’s tossing of the dogs – one into the very boxes. But it is a very rude and nasty pleasure. (Diary 14th August 1666)

Also recently re-introduced was the equally bloody sport of cock-fighting: