The Diary starts and ends in considerations of marriage. Pepys marks it as the central fact of his life at the beginning, and on each of the last two days he records being ‘called by my wife’. The nine and a half years between give as good an account of the married state as has ever been written, its struggles, its woes, its pleasures and its discontents. You might put the Diary into the hands of a Martian to explain the institution and its workings, at least as it existed for the middle classes for three centuries, from the seventeenth until the twentieth, when men held economic and intellectual sway over their wives; and in many aspects it is still perfectly relevant, because its great achievement is to map the tidal waters of marriage, where the waves of feeling ebb and flow from hour to hour and month to month. The Pepyses were always moving between dependence and resentment, protectiveness and impatience, pride and shame, jealousy and anger, complicity and indifference, love and hate. They were capable of low abuse and physical violence towards one another, and also of delicacy, tenderness and forbearance. Whether it was a happy or an unhappy marriage is as difficult for us to pronounce now as it was for them at the time – everything depends on where you happen to be looking – but no one could accuse Pepys of not being in touch with his feelings about it at any given time.
The Diary describes long-running battles and sudden flares of rage. There were nights when she kept him awake with her complaining, others when he sulked. But ‘And so we went to bed and lay all night in a Quarrell’ is followed in the next sentence by ‘This night I was troubled all night with a dream that my wife was dead, which made me that I slept ill all night.’1 He was capable of blacking her eye, or twisting or pulling her nose, thoroughly nasty behaviour though casual violence, like a boy’s angry lashing out, rather than calculated brutality; Pepys did not go in for husbandly beatings, and he and Elizabeth, like most couples, agreed that his blows were a private matter, shameful to them both and best kept concealed from the world. Jealousy, as we have seen, ran through their lives, binding them in a tormenting double chain. Elizabeth always wanted more of his time and attention than he gave her, as the letter of reproach with which this book began made clear. As head of the household, he wanted docility from her, and was disturbed and upset by her perpetual rows with the servants. After a quarrel with one departing maid, the girl went on to gossip about Elizabeth, suggesting she sat too long in the dark with Pepys’s boy Tom Edwards, and kept him idle; Pepys expressed his anger in the Diary ‘that all my trouble in this world almost should arise from… the indiscretion of a wife that brings me nothing almost (besides a comely person) but only trouble and discontent’.2 He worried too that his rising prosperity would make her careless with his money: ‘I fear she will forget by degrees the way of living cheap and under a sense of want,’ he wrote in 1664.3
He could be blisteringly rude to her face too; as they walked to church one Sunday he was so critical of her clothes that she went home again, and then took herself to a different church. Another day he called her a whore for wearing ill-matched ribbons.4 But she was not easily crushed. After a row over her kitchen accounts he wrote, ‘I find she is very cunning, and when she least shows it, hath her wit at work; but it is an ill one.’5 She learnt how to bargain with him, offering to give up the false hair she liked, and he hated, on condition that he stopped seeing his actress friend Mrs Knipp. Criticism of clothes and hair was strictly one-sided, and nowhere in the Diary is there any mention of Elizabeth commenting on his appearance. Even when he decided, in November 1663, to let his barber cut his hair and sell him a periwig, and reports his anxiety about the response of his neighbours, colleagues, bosses and even maids, he says nothing about what she thought of the change, although for her it meant that the man she had married was transformed into a quite different creature, who went to bed with a shorn head and put on by day the sign of power and status.6 The fashion for periwigs came from France – the word is an Anglicized perruque – and Pepys was one of the first to adopt it in England. A wig declared your social standing at first glance. It was expensive to maintain, you needed several, and they were made of hair bought from someone poor enough to be prepared to sell theirs – Pepys also had one made from the first cropping of his own hair, which is how we know it was dark brown. He had enough doubts to grow his own hair long again, but in May 1665 ‘I find the convenience of Perrywiggs is so great, that I have cut off all short again, and will keep to periwigs.’7 A wig meant that you need never go grey or bald in public; you appeared more of an icon, less of a person. This is why wigs had such a deadening effect on portraiture, stifling individuality under those great cushions of curls. Sadly all the portraits of Pepys show him as a wig-wearer; you have only to look at the few wigless representations of his contemporaries to see how much livelier they are: Evelyn old and grey, Newton’s little bust with thin hair drawn back, Dryden in a rare wigless portrait.8
There were as many good times as quarrels in the marriage, when he confided in her and delighted in her company. The Sunday mornings when they lay late in bed, talking of his hopes and plans, were a particular pleasure and comfort to him; probably to her too, although we have to guess about that. Both enjoyed expeditions to theatres and shops together, as well as summer outings – on the river to Vauxhall or Barn Elms, or by coach to the country inns of Islington and Hackney. In October 1662 he reflected on how they have been ‘for some years now, and at present more and more, a very happy couple, blessed be God’.9 There were days when they cherished one another’s ailments sympathetically, she advising him to sit ‘long and upright’ when he tried to empty his bowels, often a problem for him; and he hurrying home from the office to comfort her when she sent a message to say she was ‘in great pain of those’.10 When he was exasperated by his colleagues or troubled about the office, he dreamt of enjoying life with her away from the Navy Board: ‘my wife and I will keep to one another and let the world go hang’.11 The afternoon might go to a mistress, but the evening talk was with Elizabeth, ‘with whom I have much comfort’.12
When things were easy between them, she happily took lessons from him: in music, arithmetic and astronomy. He prided himself on his teaching, and her eagerness to acquire knowledge and skills also tells us how she had been starved of education: to be a bright girl in that century was more frustration than joy. She took up painting and worked hard at it, turning out some work Pepys admired. What schooling she had enjoyed was in France, and part of her always yearned towards the country of her childhood and her convent teachers. The wandering habits and decayed gentility of her parents gave her the exotic aspect he was proud of but did not make her into the orderly housewife he also wished for: bœuf en daube and general resourcefulness, excellent; household accounts and discipline of servants, not so good. She liked long mornings in her dressing gown; when she passed an old gown on to her mother, Pepys remembered fondly that she had called it ‘her Kingdome, from the ease and content she used to have in the wearing of it’. It is one of the few Diary entries in which we hear her actual words.13
Like her husband, Elizabeth had a thorough appreciation of the pleasures of ordering and appearing in new clothes. She was a beauty – luscious and responsive in the Hayls portrait – and she cared for her appearance. As well as acquiring hairpieces, she had her teeth scraped by the royal dentist, wore patches and collected dew for her complexion. She was noticed with admiration by many men, including the duke of York, who eyed her ‘mightily’ in the park.14 She flirted with her admirers, capturing Will Hewer’s heart, enjoying herself with her handsome dancing master and disquieting her father-in-law by her receptiveness to an attentive Guards officer who shared a London coach with them.15 She appreciated the attentions of her Axe Yard neighbour John Hunt, and of Captain Robert Ferrer, both of whose names she put forward to be her Valentines in the year Pepys perversely chose to veto such expensive foolishness.16 Later he noticed her tendresse for one of the engineers of the Tangier breakwater, the charming Henry Sheeres, and suffered a jealous twinge. Sheeres offered to teach her the rules of perspective, and Pepys observed that he became even more attractive to her when he revealed that he was a poet as well as an engineer.17 She may have hoped for more poetry in Pepys, and in their life together.
What he called her vixen’s temper frightened him, and he was sometimes cowed by it. When she scolded him one day for not dining at home and he gave her ‘a pull by the nose and some ill words’ and left the house for his office, she followed him; and, fearing that she would carry on the quarrel in the hearing of his clerks, he diverted her into the garden to calm her down and ‘prevent shame’.18 She made scenes in public when she was infuriated by his attentions to their friends Mrs Knipp and Mrs Pearse. Pepys’s brother John was upset by her rudeness when he stayed at Seething Lane, and Pepys noticed her ‘carrying herself very high’ towards his father and sister at Brampton.19 She flew into a tremendous fury against old Mr Pepys after he told Pepys about her flirtatious behaviour in the coach; she held him in ‘absolute hatred’, she said, and would not consider having him to live with them after Pall married. ‘Very hot work a great while,’ wrote Pepys as she boiled up to deliver threats that she would also refuse to live with Pepys and shame him ‘all over the City and the Court’ with complaints about his meanness and her lack of freedom.20 He is unlikely to have felt too vulnerable to her accusing him to either the Court or the City, but she did know how to shake him. And about his meanness she was right, because he consistently spent more on his clothes and pleasures than he allowed her. About her freedom, less so: the Diary records her going out with friends, attending dancing parties and even staying out all night. At the same time he always felt it was bad for her to be away from his control, and that her character changed when he was not with her to keep her in order. When he visited her at Woolwich, where he took her during the great fire, he found her ‘out of humour and indifferent, as she uses upon her having much liberty abroad’.21 Another time, after she had stayed at Brampton for a long spell without him, he reflected on ‘my wife’s neglect of things and impertinent humour got by this liberty of being from me which is never to be trusted with for she is a fool’.22
The cycle of their relationship is established in the opening pages of the Diary, when she was twenty to Pepys’s twenty-seven, and they had been married for five years of poverty, illness, quarrels, separation and reconciliation, as political storms raged and their future was quite uncertain. Five years into the marriage he has not yet introduced her to his patron, Edward Montagu; her place is necessarily in the background of his narrative and he does not even give her name – ‘my wife’ was always enough for Pepys. Their social life is markedly with his family, not with hers: a visit to his parents, a Twelfth Night party with his cousins. She runs a race in the park with his cousin Jane Turner’s daughter Theophila, and borrows her mother-in-law’s woollen mantle and her brother-in-law John’s hat for Pepys to walk home in when it comes on to rain after their regular Sunday dinner en famille. She goes alone to visit her parents, and when her brother brings her a present of a dog, Baity is not named by Pepys either; he is pleased with the dog, but the pleasure does not last long, and soon he is telling her he intends to fling it out of the window ‘if he pissed the house any more’.23 It is her family’s fault. The first quarrel in the Diary comes when he goes out without her in the evening and she, objecting, follows him along the street. He escorts her firmly home, then sets out alone again and appears to have won the argument, but she has the last word, because she goes to her neighbours the Hunts and contrives to stay out later than he does.24 A fortnight into the Diary her fighting powers are well established.
Within the first month we are given a clear impression of how she lives, and indeed to women readers she starts as Everywife when on New Year’s Day she burns her hand doing up the remains of the Christmas turkey. We hear of her going to market to buy food, and preparing the dinner they give in the Montagu lodgings in Whitehall Palace, working late into the evening to make tarts and lard the chickens and larks. She cooks well and is practical, killing a turkey sent by Lady Montagu with her own hands. She sometimes gets lost in a book, like her husband, staying up at night after he has gone to bed because she can’t tear herself away from her French novel, Polexandre, about a beautiful queen who inhabits an inaccessible island and sends her knight to punish the royal suitors who aspire to her hand.25 But she is also a hard worker, up all through a frosty night doing the monthly wash with Jane. She takes a sisterly interest in Jane’s looks and does up her hair for her, to Pepys’s admiration. She and Pepys are more often comfortable together than not: lying in bed on a cold morning, she reads aloud to him while he is getting up. On another evening she watches as he writes, while a drum beats a single stroke outside, and they ask themselves what it can mean in those troubled times.
This ordinary life makes the backdrop to Pepys’s activities and the political events of the early months of 1660 – Monck’s arrival in London with his troops, Montagu and Downing each holding his breath for the right moment to make his submission to Charles. Elizabeth stayed at home with Jane in Axe Yard when Pepys rode off intending to see Montagu at Hinchingbrooke; but as soon as he knew he would be going to sea for an indeterminate period, he made arrangements for her to leave London. There was no question in his mind of her being with either her parents or his in town, and he took the trouble to ride out again, this time to Buckinghamshire, on a borrowed horse, through the darkness and with a severe cold in the head, to settle proper lodgings for her with trusted friends, the Bowyers, where she could take Jane and her dog. Then he arranged a treat before their parting. They went to Fish Street together and bought eightpence worth of salmon – a substantial piece – and had it cooked in the Sun Tavern; and there, over dinner, ‘I did promise to give her all that I have in the world but my books, in case I should die at sea.’26 A few days later she was in Buckinghamshire, and he made his will as he had said he would, with the afterthought that the French books were to be hers. This was Pepys at his most tender and thoughtful. During his absence, they both wrote letters as often as possible, but on his return he was too busy to give her much attention until they settled in Seething Lane and took up a new pattern of life. From then on he fulfilled the primary duty of a husband, to be a good provider; they rose steadily up the social scale, and she no longer had to labour in the house but lived the life of a lady.
A wife was expected, in return for her husband’s support and protection, to supervise household matters and to provide regular sex. The early years of the Diary have little to say about this last point, but we know he expected it because he complained when the service failed. On 2 August 1660 she had a pain – ‘her old pain in the lip of her chose, which she had when we were first married’, so a recurrence of the cyst in her private parts – and by the 6th he was ‘not a little impatient’. He was allowed access again on the 8th. Even this short interruption gave him licence to look elsewhere, and within days he recorded an encounter with Betty Lane, his old flame from Westminster Hall. She had several admirers, among them John Hawley, Pepys’s friend, whom he sometimes urged her to marry. He encouraged Hawley to the marriage too, ‘God knows I had a roguish meaning in it’, he explained to himself in the Diary.27 Roguish seems a mild term for such behaviour; and there was no marriage between Hawley and Betty. She might have hoped to marry Pepys himself had he not already been taken, because she enjoyed herself with him. He would supply a bottle of wine and perhaps a lobster, and she brought unabashed enthusiasm to their love-making. Later he describes an athletic performance under a tavern chair, and how he was disconcerted by her showing her own enjoyment; on another occasion she left him ‘almost defessus [exhausted] of the pleasure’.28 Unlike her, he felt guilty about what they did together, and about what people would think if they knew. He could not resist what she offered, but it made him anxious: ‘my mind un peu troublé pour ce que j’ai fait today. But I hope it will be la dernière de toute ma vie,’ he wrote after the session under the chair; but it was not the last.29
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 reassured 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
Fantasy and private pleasure was the simplest alternative to flesh and blood, and he writes of consoling himself with it, in church at the sight of another desired girl, or at home alone, calling up the image of a court beauty one night and boldly deciding to make it the queen the next.58 In the real world, like Mozart’s Don Giovanni, all his efforts left him with a low success rate. Perhaps this is why, however sorry you feel for some of the girls and women he pursued, you rarely lose all sympathy for him. He so often makes a mess of his attempts at wooing, and he does not attempt to justify his lewd and bungling behaviour. He had what may partly have provided an excuse, although he does not claim it as such, in his wife’s medical condition. Above all, he tells his stories of failure with an energy that lifts them to a sort of sublimity, close to the sublimity of Shakespeare’s (and Verdi’s) Falstaff, or the erotic poems of Goethe.
Take for example the history of his infatuation with Betty Michell. This Betty, like Betty Lane, came from Westminster Hall, where her parents were shopkeepers and friends of Pepys and where she first caught his eye when she was still a child. He thought she looked like Elizabeth: ‘a pretty girl and one I have long called wife; being, I formerly thought, like my own wife’, he wrote in 1663. From then on he mentioned her often, reminding himself of how he used to call her his second wife, predicting that she would grow up into ‘a mighty handsome wench’ and ‘a fine handsome woman’ and declaring his love for her; he also pumped the older Betty for information about the younger.59 To her he must have seemed a jolly uncle who hung about her parents’ stall, liked and trusted by them both as customer and friend. After watching her in the Hall one day, he conducted an experiment that he noted down with scientific interest. He summoned a boat and ‘lying down close in my boat, and… without use of my hand, had great pleasure, and the first time I did make trial of my strength of fancy of that kind without my hand, and had it complete avec la fille que I did see au-jour-dhuy in Westminster hall’.60 By now she was about to be married to Michell, the son of one of Pepys’s booksellers; this was after being betrothed to his brother, who died in the plague, ‘which is a pretty odd thing’, thought Pepys.61 But he was pleased that the young couple was to move to his part of town, to run a shop selling spirits at the eastern end of Thames Street.
Up to this point Pepys’s attitude to Betty was sentimental rather than rapacious. Now he became determined to have her. He embarked on a carefully thought-out campaign, described in all its deviousness in the Diary. He took Elizabeth to Westminster Hall to be introduced to Betty as a bride, daughter and daughter-in-law of long-established and friendly suppliers of his, and about to become a neighbour. Next he dropped in at the Michells’ shop to buy himself a drink and followed this up by creating an opportunity to give both husband and wife a lift in his boat. Then he went out of his way to do Michell a financial favour in the matter of a seaman’s ticket. So far so good, and, finding Betty alone when he called again, he decided the time had come to ‘steal a kiss or two’. The next move was to suggest to Elizabeth that the Michells might be invited to a Sunday dinner, as an act of kindness to the deserving young couple. They came, and after dinner the Pepyses took them out into the country in a hired coach. He was suffering badly from wind, but in spite of this the expedition was a success, because Elizabeth took to the Michells. She found them an attractive and innocent pair, and they were grateful for the Pepyses’ condescension and kindness. More invitations to dinner followed and were accepted.
The great fire of September 1666 interrupted the progress of his plans, but not for long. The Michells’ house was destroyed, and they moved to Shadwell, still close enough to be dinner guests. Betty was now pregnant, and her mother had confided in Pepys that young Michell was not as kind to her as he might be, and suggested that he, as a wiser and older man, might ‘appear a counsellor to him’.62 Delighted by this licence to interfere, what he actually did was to give Betty a lift home in a coach and succeed in getting her hand under his coat ‘and did tocar mi cosa con su mano [touch my thing with her hand] through my chemise, but yet so as to hazer me hazer la grande cosa [make me make the great thing, i.e., orgasm]’.63 Here was a new game, and he was so taken with it that he proceeded to set up shared trips whenever he could, persisting even when her husband was with them and against her pleas that she had a headache. After a theatre and shopping trip together he made Elizabeth change places with him in the coach so that he could get hold of Betty’s hand. The Sunday before Christmas he went to church with the Michells; there was snow on the ground, and he kindly offered to collect them from her parents later in the day. This time he had to use ‘some little violence’ to get hold of her hand ‘contra su will’ and force it to where he wanted it, ‘she making many little endeavours para oter su mano [to remove her hand] still’. Once at Seething Lane, Betty ‘did seem a little ill’. But Pepys kissed her goodnight blithely and went into his chamber, where ‘with my brother and wife did Number all my books in my closet and took a list of their names; which pleases me mightily, and is a job I wanted much to have done’. Comic, if you put aside thoughts of Betty, feeling rotten, pregnant and at a loss how to deal with an old family friend who was in a position to do her and her husband good.64
The climax of the affair came in February 1667. Pepys called on Michell and left an invitation to Betty to join Elizabeth and him that afternoon for some more shopping at the New Exchange. She turned up at five to find only Pepys, who made an excuse and insisted on buying her an expensive dressing box. It would take an hour to be prepared. He suggested a drink. She said she preferred to spend the hour visiting relatives near by and would return to the shop later. There they watched the work on the box being finished together. The next part of the story is one of Pepys’s virtuoso narratives. He mixes Spanish and French words into the English as he moves from delight to eroticism to fear, sweaty panic and relief:
the mistress of the shop took us into the kitchen and there talked and used us very prettily; and took her [Betty] for my wife, which I owned and her big belly; and there very merry till my thing done, and then took coach and home, in the way tomando su mano and putting it where I used to do; which ella did suffer, but not avec tant de freedom as heretofore, I perceiving plainly she had alguns [some] apprehensions de me, but I did offer natha [nothing] more then what I had often done. But now comes our trouble; I did begin to fear that su marido [her husband] might go to my house to enquire por ella, and there trovando mi moher [finding my wife] at home, would not only think himself, but give my femme occasion to think strange things. This did trouble me mightily; so though ella would not seem to have me trouble myself about it, yet did agree to the stopping the coach at the street’s end; and yo allais con ella home and there presently hear by him that he had newly sent su maid to my house to see for her mistress. This doth much perplex me, and I did go presently home (Betty whispering me, behind the tergo [back] do her mari, that if I would say that we did come home by water, ella could make up la cosa well satis [enough]. And there in a sweat did walk in the entry antes my door, thinking what I should say to my femme; and as God would have it, while I was in this case (the worst in reference a my femme that ever I was in in my life), a little woman comes stumbling to the entry-steps in the dark; whom asking whom she was, she enquired for my house; so knowing her voice and telling her su dona [her mistress] is come home, she went away. But Lord, in what a trouble was I when she was gone, to recollect whether this was not the second time of her coming; but at last concluding that she had not been here before, I did bless myself in my good fortune in getting home before her, and do verily believe she had loitered some time by the way, which was my great good fortune; and so I in a-door and there find all well. So, my heart full of joy, I to the office a little and then home.65
Pepys wrote up the episode twenty-four hours later, after a busy day, morning at the office, afternoon attendance at a recital of Italian songs and a long talk with Thomas Killigrew about the state of the theatre. During those hours his imagination worked on the material, and the chronicler became the writer, so that his adventure with Betty has a fast-moving plot and dramatic asides: ‘now comes our trouble’, ‘Betty whispering me’, ‘the worst in reference a my femme that ever I was in’. The foreign phrases are transparent as the narrator’s emotions shift from pleasure at being taken for the father of Betty’s child, to a complicit thrill at her whispering behind her husband’s back, to his moment of terror at the idea of being found out at his own house, to the near-miraculous reprieve when he meets the old woman. As in a comedy, all ends joyfully – at least for the time being. Pepys the man has provided Pepys the writer with his material, and he knows exactly how to handle it.
Elizabeth never found out. A week later Betty told him she did not like ‘touching’, and he resolved to ‘mind my business more’, although he still loved her – ‘I aime her de todo mi corazon’ [‘I love her with all my heart’]. Betty’s baby was born, a daughter, named after Elizabeth, who assisted the midwife and stood as godmother. Both Pepyses attended the christening, although he turned up his nose at the poor company. In the summer the baby died, and the Michells came and sat with the Pepyses in their garden to mourn the child. Betty became pregnant for a second time. Pepys did not get hold of her hand again, but he still yearned after her from time to time, even though he fell in love with another girl. Once he saw her in church and commented on how her looks had deteriorated, but on the last page of the diary he called at the Michells and found her with her mother, her husband being away: ‘And here yo did besar ella, but have not opportunity parar hazer mas with her as I would have offered if yo had had it.’ What he expressed in his Diary was what many – perhaps most – men feel at some time in their lives, when success is within their grasp and their energies are running high: that they would like to possess every pretty girl in the world, or at least to make love to every girl who catches their eye as she passes by in the street.
But Betty Michell, unpossessed, disappears into the darkness of unrecorded history, with her fading childish beauty, her dressing box, her sullen husband in his spirit shop beside the Thames and her second baby girl, whose fate we shall never know; having freed herself of uncle Pepys and sublimely unaware of the literary honour bestowed on her by him.
As to why he set down his own behaviour in all its shameful detail: no doubt it was partly to prolong the enjoyment, where there was enjoyment, and to give himself the chance to revisit it, with an extra gloss added by the exotic language. But also, and perhaps chiefly, for the reason that he was more interested in observing and recording his own actions than in presenting an immaculate or even favourable image of himself. So we have the spectacle of someone carefully noting down what any one of us would hide, from ourselves if we could and certainly from posterity. Lecher and liar as he knew himself to be, Pepys was a sceptic and a humanist as well; he was not confessing his sins here but setting down the facts of his experience as a man living in a complex environment. Only when you have taken in the least attractive bits of his behaviour in the Diary can you fully appreciate what a triumph of humanism it represents.
He is of course the hero of his narrative, painting himself in the brightest colours and finest details. In the background Elizabeth is a fainter, simpler figure, and voiceless since none of her letters survive. Robert Louis Stevenson, who found Pepys irresistible, called her vulgar, and twentieth-century feminist attempts to give her a voice have been unconvincing. Her failure to get on with any of her companions does not speak in her favour, although Lady Sandwich’s affection for her does. She could be generous to her servants, joining in Christmas parties and celebrations below stairs with them; and she would go to help other women in childbirth. The deepest bond in her life may well have been with her brother, Baity; it was reciprocal, and each is shown looking out for the other in the pages of the Diary. She persistently and successfully urged Pepys to help him; decades after her death he still took her wishes to heart. She had a lot to put up with in being married to Pepys, but on balance more to enjoy than not. She did not give up easily when she wanted something, and she held her own in argument. Wives of greatly energetic men can be cowed by them, as Catherine Dickens was. Not so Elizabeth. She never sank into inertia or depression, and she refused the role of victim. By the last page of the Diary the reader has lived through high drama, witnessing a tremendous power struggle between husband and wife, closely matched and fought to a bitter and surprising finish. We shall come to that later.