Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  Three weeks after seeing Betty Lane there was another episode, this time with Diana Crisp. As we have seen, he bought Elizabeth a pearl necklace the day after this. She did not know why then, but the sex–money equation continued to the end of the Diary, when her discovery of his gross misbehaviour won her the annual dress allowance she so much wanted at last. From her point of view, she accepted that he had a right to her body and saw his demands as a sign of her hold over him; she withheld herself only when she was ill, and she became anxious when he left her alone for months at a time. Not that there was much physical enjoyment for her. Only when she was roused to passionate fury, fourteen years into the marriage, did something approaching pleasure stir in her body. He improved on this by chance when, for the first time, he ‘poner my digito [put my finger] in her thing, which did do her much pleasure; but I pray God that ella doth not think that yo [I] did know before – or get a trick of liking it’.30 His anxiety that she might ‘get a trick of liking’ what he had done to her shows how strongly the stern tradition in which he was reared, which saw sex as intrinsically sinful, kept its hold over him. Men could hardly help desiring and enjoying it, but for a virtuous woman to share the pleasure was so disconcerting that he actually preferred her not to.

  None the less he expected her to be available and complained when she was ‘so ill of late of her old pain that I have not known her this fortnight almost, which is a pain to me’.31 To his credit, he also took a practical interest in helping to deal with her complaint. In May 1661, for instance, he was tending her himself, under the advice of her physician, Dr Williams: the treatment involved putting a ‘tent’ into the cyst, which had now become an infected abscess, to try to drain out the infection. This did not end the trouble, and two and a half years later they had to call in his surgeon, Hollier, for what had by then become an abscess three inches deep. Hollier recommended cutting it. Elizabeth was insistent that no one could nurse her but Pepys, because she feared her maids might think she had a shameful disease. Hollier then decided they would try to treat her with fomentations only; this appeared to ease things but could not cure the underlying condition.32 Both Elizabeth and Pepys believed, wrongly, that the trouble was brought on by sexual activity: ‘we fear that it is my matter that I give her that causes it, it never coming but after my having been with her’.33 It made a depressing situation for them both, he with his boisterous appetite, she tormented by secret, painful and humiliating sores. In the later years of the Diary he records long periods when he did not make love to her at all – more than half a year, he says, in August 1667.34 The most enjoyable night they ever spent together could be one they spent at a Hertfordshire inn – it was in Welwyn – where they found two beds in the room and slept single: ‘of all the nights that ever I slept in my life, I never did pass a night with more epicurisme of sleep – there being now and then a noise of people stirring that waked me; and then it was a very rainy night; and then I was a little weary, that what between waking and sleeping again, one after another, I never had so much content in all my life. And so my wife says it was with her.’35 The description is so delicious it makes you want to find just such an inn, such beds and such a rainy night to sleep and wake through; and it must be said that Pepys conveys delight here as he never does when writing about sexual activities.

  There was also the question of children. Pepys never shows Elizabeth grieving over their childlessness and does not appear to have talked the matter over with her or with their doctors. The Diary gives no clue about what she felt. Whether he was too self-absorbed to notice, or whether she concealed her feelings of sadness from him, they are not in evidence. Her habit of taking to her bed with every period may have been a signal of disappointment, but it could just as easily have been physical pain or a cultural pattern learnt from her mother. It is even possible that she did not mind too much about the lack of children. She saw other women perpetually pregnant, undergoing the ordeal of childbirth, losing their looks and their babies too, since more children died than survived; while she remained relatively free, young-looking and pretty. At least no little Pepyses were fathered on anyone else, and she learnt to fill her days with activity, with lessons, painting, dancing, house decorating, shopping and sewing. Occasionally she told her husband she thought she was pregnant, and he duly noted it down. The impression given by the Diary is that he was the one to brood. In January 1662 he was ‘considering the possibility there is of my having no child’. A few weeks later, at a shipboard dinner, where men’s tongues were loosened, he had to accept being linked with another man who could give his wife no children, both called ‘fumblers’. In November 1663 Elizabeth said she was certain she was pregnant, ‘which if it be, let it come and welcome’, he wrote; but she was not.36

  Early the next year came the bizarre incident of his uncle Wight, the rich fishmonger who was half-brother to Pepys’s father, and with a wife past childbearing. Pepys had hopes of becoming his heir and consequently saw a good deal of him. But instead of writing a will in his favour, uncle Wight privately declared his love to Elizabeth and proposed that he should father a child on her: ‘he would give her £500 either in money or jewel beforehand and make the child his heir. He commended her body and discoursed that for all he knew the thing was lawful. She says she did give him a very warm [i.e., angry] answer.’ Pepys remained admirably calm when she reported this unusual suggestion to him. She had sent the lecherous old man packing after all; and he decided it was best to say nothing. He did not even break off relations with the Wights, and the two couples continued to dine together from time to time as though nothing had happened; it must have posed one or two problems for Elizabeth, but Pepys was still hoping for a legacy.37 The equanimity with which he took other men’s passes at her suggests he thought it normal for men to try their luck, as he tried his, and that as long as she fended them off no harm was done. It was only when she showed active interest in another man that he became agitated.

  Uncle Wight’s behaviour did at least stir Pepys into seeking advice. In July 1664, when Elizabeth was away at Brampton, he attended a christening party given by his Joyce cousins in London, contributing half a dozen bottles of wine to the occasion because he went with a purpose, which was to ask advice of the older women. It must have made a striking moment as Pepys rose with the ladies, leaving the men to their after-dinner talk: ‘when the women were merry and ris from the table, I above with them, ne’er a man but I; I begin discourse of my not getting of children and prayed them to give me their opinion and advice; and they freely and merrily did give me these ten among them’. Pepys listed and numbered their suggestions with the same efficiency that he practised at his office, adding a note on which they considered the most important. These were: that he should drink sage juice; take wine and toast; keep his stomach warm and his back cool; make love when he felt like it rather than at a particular fixed time; and change the level of the bed so that his and Elizabeth’s feet were higher than their heads. The ladies also advised cool drawers for him and not too much tight-lacing for her. Some of their advice is still given to couples with fertility problems; but it did nothing for him.38

  That September Elizabeth again believed for a few days that she was with child.39 Pepys’s comment by then was that he neither believed nor desired it, and after this both seem to have given up; they had been married for nine fruitless years. Pepys embarked on more involvements with other women, and the crises of the war with the Dutch, the plague and the fire of London kept them both busy and on the move. There is some indication that he thought she rather than he was barren, because in July 1667 he expressed relief when Betty Martin gave him ‘the good news que esta no es con child… the fear of which… had troubled me much’.40 Later in the same month, when his brother John fell down in a mysterious faint while staying with them, Pepys suddenly wondered if he might be ‘left without a brother or son, which is the first time that ever I had thoughts of that kind in my life’.41 A few weeks later, seeing a pretty little boy
, the child of cousin Sarah Giles, who had lost several in the plague, he wished he was his own.42 He kept his liking for children but never fathered one, neither by Elizabeth nor anyone else, and had to settle for being a conscientious godfather and uncle.

  One of the principal themes of the Diary is the classic conflict between his practical, sensible self and his romantic and erotic impulses, between prudence and order on the one hand and following free-ranging sexual impulses on the other. A marriage begun in romance and without reference to money is one of the curious anomalies of his life, because it cut across so many of the values in which he was reared. Even lower-middle-class families expected their children to marry in consultation with their parents, who would ensure that there was some financial advantage for them; and if Pepys, as a young graduate, felt he had outstripped his parents’ advice, he could have set out to find himself a rich young widow or a City heiress. When his colleague John Creed wooed and won Lord Sandwich’s niece Elizabeth Pickering, daughter of Sir Gilbert and cousin of Dryden, Pepys professed himself shocked on the grounds that they were too unequal in rank, but his outrage was really jealousy of Creed’s success in carrying off such a coup.43 Pepys knew he had wasted his own chance to better himself, and there are moments in the Diary when he blames himself for his folly, blames Elizabeth for having no dowry and reminds her of this by calling her a ‘beggar’. At other moments he looks back fondly and approvingly at their courtship as an example of true love. Then again, when it came to the other members of his family, he did everything he could to ensure that none deviated from the path of prudence and proper financial settlements; we shall see that at the end of his life he disinherited his elder nephew for entering into exactly the sort of rash marriage he had made himself.

  The character of Charles II set up another conflict for him. As a young man Pepys lived in a society in which two cultures coexisted: the sexually liberated low life found among the Whitehall clerks, tavern and shopkeepers of Westminster Hall, and the puritan culture in which he was brought up, with its ideal of continence and perpetual wrestling to resist temptation. You can see Pepys aligning himself firmly with the puritan ethos when, for instance, he expressed his shock and shame at the discovery of his brother Tom having fathered a child outside wedlock; and again in his response to hearing of Lord Sandwich’s adultery. The same attitudes were still at work when, on Lord Brouncker becoming a navy commissioner in 1664 and moving into Seething Lane with Abigail Williams, the woman who shared his life but not his name, Pepys could hardly contain his disapproval and rarely missed a chance to abuse her in the Diary, calling her ‘whore’, ‘painted lady’, ‘lady of pleasure’ and ‘doxy’. At the same time he had for years been aware of, and tempted by, the other, low-life culture that, during the commonwealth years, maintained itself underneath the public life of high moral tone. With the return of the monarchy a dramatic change came about, as high life rapidly outdid low life in its freedoms. The example of king and court, described by Pepys as ‘nothing almost but bawdry… from top to bottom’, could hardly fail to make a young man who had a struggle to keep his own libido under control ask himself why he should bother.44 The king’s disregard for the institution of marriage was flagrant; he kept a virtual harem, he ennobled his mistresses and his children by them, he presided over a court given over to pleasure, in which great lords consorted with actresses and great ladies were said to be infected with the pox and to abort their unwanted babies. The duke of York behaved no better, and Lord Brouncker was said to pimp for him. Pepys heard much of the court gossip from his friend James Pearse, Montagu’s surgeon on the Naseby, who became surgeon to the duke in 1660 and picked up all the hot stories; although he hardly needed inside information, because everyone knew what went on at court. Pepys discussed Lady Castlemaine, the chief royal mistress, even with Lady Sandwich. His friend Povey entertained him with prurient accounts of the king’s sexual practices.45 More scabrous stuff came through his colleagues in the Navy Office. When Mennes and Batten gave him a robust commentary on the indecent pranks of the poet and courtier Charles Sedley, he confessed in the Diary that he did not know what buggery was: ‘But blessed be God, I do not to this day know what is the meaning of this sin, nor which is the agent nor which the patient,’ he wrote.46 Pepys was thirty at this point, but we are hearing the voice of the puritan boy.47

  Pepys’s own adventures, so frankly recorded, have given him a great reputation with posterity, but the truth is he had not much sexual confidence. Consider this: ‘walked (fine weather) to Deptford and there did business and so back again; walked, and pleased with a jolie femme that I saw going and coming in the way, which yo could aver sido contented para aver stayed with if yo could have ganar acquaintance con ella; but at such times as those I am at a great loss, having not confidence, ni alguno [nor any] ready wit. So home and to the office, where late; and then home to supper and bed.’48 The italics are mine: he is making a central statement about himself here. You see why he listened with such fascination to the flirtatious and worldly exchanges of Sedley and a court lady when he sat close to them in the theatre – it was because he longed to emulate their sophistication and ease in the game of courtship, and did not know how.49 Elizabeth had been an easily impressed child when he wooed and married her. Betty Lane, jolly and coarse, came out to meet him. Lady Sandwich was an untouchable ideal. He yearned for something else, something more – to be a charmer of witty ladies, to exchange badinage while he won their sexual favours.

  But he never achieved anything like this during the Diary years. Instead there are entirely down-to-earth encounters with shop girls, tavern girls and simple young women he picked up on out-of-town trips, like the silly shopkeeper’s wife of Rochester whom he met in a cherry garden, kissed and took into the fields in June 1667.50 Young girls were his regular targets, some apparently pre-adolescent, like ‘little Mrs Tooker’, the ‘very pretty child’ he made free with in his lodgings during the plague winter of 1665. She seems to have been accustomed to such treatment; there was no age of consent, and her mother was perfectly willing to hand her over and she to cooperate with Pepys; but to us she appears as a child victim, and by today’s standards what he did would have earned him a prison sentence.51 In his own household he launched himself routinely on the young women who served as his wife’s companions and maids. In 1666 he said he felt himself beginning to love Mary Mercer too much ‘by handling of her breasts in a morning when she dresses me, they being the finest that I ever saw in my life; that is the truth of it’.52 In her case, and in Jane Birch’s too, his advances were so habitual that they did not require many mentions in the Diary; occasional references make clear what went on. Girls in service must have been so used to being manhandled that they learnt to defend themselves, with threats to tell the mistress or laughter; or else they simply accepted that this was part of the scheme of things, as the cookmaid Nell Payne did.53 He extended his attempts to the Penns’ maid Nan, whom he also accused of being Sir William’s whore. Among married women he picked out those whose husbands could be rewarded for their complaisance with promotion or financial help, like Daniel, the naval lieutenant, and Bagwell, the shipyard carpenter. Mrs Knipp, the actress, was an exception; she was another strong-minded woman who did as she pleased, defying her horse-dealer husband, and she flirted, romped and exchanged kisses with Pepys on terms of perfect equality, sometimes accepting his caresses and sometimes pushing his hands away; no doubt her independent behaviour was sustained by her ability to earn her own living.

  By his own account, most of Pepys’s stories of women are stories of pursuit and sexual failure. In the course of the Diary he has designs on something like twenty but succeeds in seducing only three or four.54 John Donne’s lines ‘Whoever loves, if he do not propose/The right true end of love, he’s one that goes/To sea for nothing but to make him sick’ suggested that nothing would do except penetrative sex, but Pepys knew otherwise, and Povey’s account of the king’s enjoyment of non-penetrative sex must have r
eassured him that it was not to be undervalued.55 He got pleasure from the chase itself, stealing a kiss, touching a breast or a thigh, getting his hand under a petticoat. He also did his best to persuade women to caress him; most resisted, and he makes clear many times in the Diary how much he wanted more. He encourages himself by insisting that he could have a particular woman – Pegg Penn, Rebecca Allen, the shopkeeper’s wife at Rochester – if only the circumstances were more propitious. We don’t believe him, and he probably doesn’t really believe himself, but it looks good on the page and cheers him up.

  When it comes to what actually did happen between him and a particular woman on a particular occasion, he provides what has all the signs of being a fair record: there is no boasting about the facts. Hope, excitement, satisfaction, humiliation or failure may be involved, and his tone may be eager, comical or mortified; the setting is always real, often uncomfortably so, and he is always recognizably himself, the man who was taking part in a committee meeting in a previous paragraph, and a page later will be planning his house improvements. Every episode is set firmly in the context of his life and other preoccupations. There were days when he went out on his rounds like an animal, going from one fancied girl to another, getting what satisfaction he could from each – a kiss here, a squeeze there – and ending up with the reliable Betty Lane or at least compliant Mrs Bagwell, with whom he could take liberties he would not dream of doing with Elizabeth, such as taking a good look at all parts of her naked body.56 On other days he might wait for three hours in the cold outside Westminster Abbey on a Sunday for a shop girl he had arranged to meet. Or he could be crudely aggressive towards a stranger, such as the girl who defended herself with a pin in church.57