The Confessions of Samuel Pepys by Guy de la Bedoyere: Pepys: diarist, sex addict...rapist

We have always known Pepys liked the occasional bit of nooky with a prostitute in an alley off Fleet Street, on his way home to his wife Elizabeth in Seething Lane.

But if like me you have always brushed off that behaviour as ‘that was just how things were in the 1660s, and I don’t think he did it too often’, it is time to think again. Unfortunately, as a new edition of his famous diaries illustrates all too vividly, we now have to add Pepys to the list of formerly respected famous figures who turn out to have fallen catastrophically short of acceptable sexual behaviour, to the point where their names are now mud. Most of us treasure Pepys as an essentially sound family-minded man, who buried his Parmesan during the Great Fire of London, made merry music round his table in the evenings, picked ‘sparagus’ from his garden, and sat up in bed late into the night talking and bickering with his dear wife.

His diaries are close to our hearts because they give us a uniquely detailed glimpse into how one man’s daily life was lived in those days: boats up and down the Thames, busy days in the Naval Office, fretting about over-expenditure on his wife’s clothes, a hearty supper, and so to bed.

All that will all change once you read historian Guy de la Bédoyère’s newly transcribed selected extracts from the diaries.

‘Selected’ is the key word. De la Bédoyère has sifted the 1.25 million words of the diaries (written in shorthand between January 1660 and May 1669) down to 40,000 or 50,000 words of wall-to-wall filth and sleaze.

He has left out all the charming, cosy stuff, and left in all the vile, predatory behaviour.

When you read the diaries in this light, you’ll see that Pepys was, in fact, a serial adulterer, a sex addict, a coercive predator, and a rapist.

Pepys was so adept at hiding his behaviour that it wasn’t till October 25, 1668, that Elizabeth caught him at it.

She came downstairs one evening and saw him with one hand under the coats of their pretty 16-year-old servant girl Deb Willet, his other hand touching her genitals, or her ‘cony’ as he called them in the slang of the day.

Elizabeth was distraught, and furious. In bed that evening, she ranted and raved, ‘calling me a dog and a rogue’, and threatened to publish his shame.

Pepys minded desperately about his reputation. He was appalled that his bourgeois wife should think of going public with his dalliance.

He wished she were more like the Queen, who was stoical about Charles II’s flaunting of his mistresses.

Elizabeth didn’t go public, but she would not let the matter rest. Poor Deb, in tears, was sacked. Pepys, though sorry for her, still wanted ‘to have the maidenhead of this girl which I should not doubt to have if I could get time to be with her’.

In deepest secrecy he stalked Deb to the lane lined with brothels near Lincoln’s Inn where she’d moved to. He tracked her down, forced her to pleasure him.

With outrageous hypocrisy, ‘gave her the best counsel I could to have a care of her honour’, in other words advised her how to steer clear of predatory men.

That sexual encounter with Deb is about the hundredth such encounter with women you’ll have read about once you get to October 1668 in this shocking, sometimes exhausting chronicle of non-stop adulterous sex.

Elizabeth didn’t know the half of it. Her husband craved and achieved an illicit sexual encounter once every few days. De la Bédoyère writes, ‘it’s too glib to dismiss him as a “sex pest” or a “sex offender”. His behaviour is consistent with the neuropsychological disorder of addiction’.

As well as the constant clandestine feeling-up of the maids who dressed him, he had a string of reliable women dotted about London, from Westminster to Deptford, who gave him sex on demand.

Betty Martin (nee Lane) and her sister Doll were regulars. ‘I f****d her under the chair two times,’ he proudly writes of Betty, only afterwards worrying that he might have hurt her.

Some of the women Pepys was seeing, such as Mrs Bagwell, were wives whose husbands wanted a promotion in the Navy.

Mrs Bagwell’s husband and in-laws may even have encouraged her to offer her body to Pepys, who as Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board had a lot of influence when it came to promotions.

There was a destitute naval widow, Mrs Burrows, who relied on Pepys for a widow’s pension. He groomed her to accept that the way to get it was to let him have his wicked way with her.

You know he’s about to describe the details of the sex when he goes into ‘polyglot’: his own weird mixture of foreign languages interspersed with English.

‘Did also tocar [touch] la thigh de su landlady’. ‘I did what I would con ella’ is a frequent one. ‘Tocanda sa cosa con mi cosa’ (touching her thing with my thing), ‘hazer me hazer’ (made me have an orgasm) . . . On and on it goes.

Why did the secretive Pepys write it all down? You get the sense that he had an urge to ‘chalk up’ his sexual ‘successes’, and by doing so in shorthand, which itself was half in a foreign language, he doubly disguised them.

When he was at his most predatory, he added extra consonants to English words, making them even harder (he hoped) for any future transcriber to decode. De la Bédoyère surmises that he recorded his encounters partly to expiate the guilt.

Quite often, the women protested. Pepys clearly got a kick out of his sexual conquers under duress – which were essentially rapes.

‘Many hard looks and sighs the poor wretch did give me,’ he writes of Mrs Bagwell, ‘and I think verily was troubled at what I did, but at last after many protestings I did arrive at what I would, with great pleasure.’

This happened a few more times; once, he was so violent towards her that he injured his own hand while holding her down. ‘Nevertheless in the end I had my will.’

Add to this the way he domestically abused his wife, once giving her a black eye, and how he beat his servants with broomsticks and shut them in the cellar all night, and you get a new, deeply unattractive picture of the controlling Pepys beneath the surface of his cheerful bustle.

I’m sure lots of men were at it, in those far less enlightened days, but that does not excuse him. He suffered from aching remorse – but that doesn’t let him off the hook either. The scales have fallen from my eyes.