Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

  Every reader notices the frequently repeated expressions, from the famous ‘and so to bed’ to ‘mighty merry’, ‘with much content’, ‘But Lord’, ‘brave dinner’, ‘noble discourse’, ‘to my great Satisfaction’, etc. They can become tedious, although most readers enjoy them as signature tunes, amusing and reassuring, evidence of the spontaneity of his writing – Pepys too could be lazy and fall back on cliché. Often he stands aside from himself: ‘a great joy it is to me to see myself in a good disposition to business’; ‘carried home £10 worth of book, all I hope I shall buy a great while’: he is offering himself the joy and the hope.53 His language is always close to speech. You can compare it with his laborious efforts for other writing by looking at the draft of a letter to a friend that appears in the Diary. It goes like this: ‘(God though God knows (though without vanity (though I thank God (though the world hath been p[retty favourable to myself (though I cannot complain of (though the world hath [not] been very unkind to me in this matter) that I have taken little joy in the notice of my [home] friends at home…’54 And so on. The vitality drains out in the effort to be polite; just as indeed it did drain out of his language in later years, when Augustan prose overcame him. It makes you wonder all the more at the incomparable liveliness and variety of the language of the Diary.

  19. Surprise and Disorder

  Only one of the love affairs recorded in the Diary is painted with the true colours of romance and tragedy, perhaps because it was also the only one found out by Elizabeth. After her discovery Pepys’s narrative takes on a desperate intensity as he struggles with his conflicting emotions, guilt towards both women, remorse and obsessive desire. There is no comedy in his account but tenderness and a great deal of pain. In certain passages he prefigures the great adulteresses of nineteenth-century fiction, alternating between ecstasy and torment like Bovary and enduring the punishment inflicted by an angry and virtuous spouse, like Karenina.

  The girl who set him on fire was Deborah Willet. She was just seventeen when she came to be Elizabeth’s companion in the autumn of 1667, a slight, pretty and respectable girl who had been at boarding school in Bow, a village on the River Lea a few miles north of the City, for seven or eight years. She had been sent there by her aunt, a woman of good education herself, who brought her from Bristol after her parents died young. Elizabeth chose Deborah, who was recommended by friends, and when Pepys first set eyes on her – ‘our pretty girl’ – he wondered if she were not ‘a little too good for my family’.1 Admittedly this was at the end of an evening out in which he had first flung down the barmaid at the Swan over a chair in order to fondle her thigh, and then called on Betty Martin for his usual entertainment. Deborah he thought very grave as well as pretty. Almost at once he and Elizabeth took her to the theatre, and then they all set off on a sightseeing trip to Audley End and Cambridge, with Will Hewer in attendance. For a girl who could scarcely remember her parents to find herself part of a family again must have been a powerful emotional experience. Suddenly she was the youngest, pet as well as servant, almost a daughter, with a jolly father and an elegant mother; and travelling with the Pepyses was as different from boarding school life as could be. They cannot have gone unnoticed, with their high spirits, their taste for good fare and comfort, and their plentiful spending money. At first Pepys sometimes forgot her name – for a few weeks he called her ‘the girl’ in his Diary – but she soon became Deb to them all, and she was included in everything. They visited King’s College Chapel, Trinity, and the library of St John’s (but not Magdalene, it seems); and they slept at the Rose Inn, where Elizabeth and Deborah shared a bed and Pepys took another in the same room, enjoying some merry night-time conversation with his two ladies.

  Cambridge was a stop on the way to Brampton, where he intended to dig up the gold his father and Elizabeth had buried in June at the time of the Medway crisis. He had not been there since the death of his mother in the spring or indeed for nearly three years before that, and he was pleased with the way his father had maintained the place, although he found the roofs low after his London ceilings. But his first thought was to visit Lady Sandwich at Hinchingbrooke. He had not seen her for two years, since her daughter Jemima’s wedding, and he found her the same as ever, excellent, good and discreet as they talked of her absent Lord, still in Spain. Elizabeth walked up the lane after him, bringing Deb with her; and that night in the Brampton house Deb took a trundle bed next to the high one shared by Pepys and Elizabeth.

  In London she had her own room. The other members of the household were Jane Birch, Tom Edwards and two more maids. Mary Mercer, although no longer officially part of the family, was an established friend, often with them and joining in many of their outings, and Will Hewer was also constantly in and out of the house. Elizabeth showed no sign of falling out with Deb apart from one frisson of jealousy Pepys observed when she noticed that he seemed fond of the girl. He resolved not to stir things up in any way.2 They were both old enough to be sensible now – Pepys was thirty-four – and he would treat Deb like a daughter. She joined in card games with Mercer and Will in the evening, she was included in parties, taken to the theatre and on shopping expeditions, and went with Elizabeth on her many visits to her tailor John Unthank. Nobody seems to have warned her to watch out for the master, not Jane or Mercer and certainly not Elizabeth herself; after her one jealous twinge she appears to have become sublimely unaware of any possibility of trouble. Pepys was working harder than ever, dealing with the parliamentary attacks on the Navy Board, and on top of that he had problems with his eyesight: enough to worry about.

  The Diary has not a word of warning, nothing to suggest any desires or plans he may have had. He simply lists a slow sequence of events, as though they came about without any volition on his part. There was nothing unusual about expecting Deb to comb his hair or help him prepare for bed, because these were both normal functions for one of the family, as she was. The combing began in November, and in January 1668 he mentioned his pleasure in having his head combed, ‘as I do now often do, by Deb, whom I love should be fiddling about me’.3 You can breathe the comfortable smell of hair, warm flesh and body linen arising from these words. He had given her his first paternal kiss when Elizabeth was ill and spending Sunday in her bed, three days before Christmas. No doubt Jane was preparing pies and puddings down in the kitchen, and Elizabeth needed bowls of water and chamber pots carried up and down stairs, and her bed tidied; everyone moved about the dark house from one patch of firelight to the next candle’s ring of brightness. Pepys approached Deb so carefully that there was no good moment to start resisting or objecting to him; besides, she had every reason to like him for his kindness. It was the end of March before he took her on his knees, after scolding her for failing to write down something correctly: reduced to tears, she could be comforted like a child. His description is pitched between the erotic and the sentimental: ‘I did give her good advice and beso la [kissed her], ella weeping still; and yo did take her, the first time in my life, sobra mi genu [on my knees] and poner mi mano sub her jupes and toca su thigh, which did hazer me great pleasure; and so did no more, but besando-la [kissing her], went to my bed.’4

  Elizabeth and Deb left for the country together the next day, so things remained as they were until August, when Pepys made his first unequivocally sexual attack. He managed ‘first with my hand tocar la cosa [thing, i.e., sexual parts] de our Deb in the coach – ella being troubled at it – but yet did give way to it’.5 After this he used the hair-combing and bedtime sessions to advance his caresses. By day Deb and Elizabeth occupied themselves with various pleasures, going with Mercer to have their fortunes told by gypsies, to the theatre and to Bartholomew Fair, and in September they travelled together to Cambridge again, this time without Pepys and at the invitation of cousin Roger, who wanted to show them Sturbridge Fair. They seem to have got on very well. During their Cambridge trip Pepys had a go at Jane Birch, standard stuff. When they returned he took Elizabeth and Deb with him t
o look at bed-hangings and beds, because he was planning a fine new bedroom and wanted to have an exact copy made of the bed belonging to the duke of York’s secretary, Matthew Wren, who obligingly allowed it to be viewed.

  Then one evening Elizabeth, ‘coming up suddenly’, found him embracing Deb ‘with my main in her cunny. I was at a wonderful loss upon it, and the girl also.’6 It was, wrote Pepys, ‘the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world’. Understandably, it also drove Elizabeth into a state of frenzy; because, although we, as readers of the Diary, know that there is nothing new happening here, for her it is the first and devastating discovery of his infidelity. Also, it was happening directly before her eyes, and with a girl who was her friend and companion. Her almost immediate reaction was to tell him she was a Catholic, perhaps because it was the worst thing she could think of to frighten him; and maybe too distress drove her to her girlhood pieties, and she knew it was true. She said she would turn Deb out, of course. She also threatened to shame him publicly, although it seems unlikely that a wife’s revelations of her husband’s infidelity would interest anyone else. Pepys kept his head down and admitted to nothing; Deb did likewise, and very little was said in the house for several days by anyone except Elizabeth. She kept Pepys awake every night as she raged at him. She also expressed her anger and sorrow by giving up any attempt to wash herself.

  Bad as things were, it looked as though they might yet be smoothed over. Deb’s aunt visited Elizabeth and discussed her parting ‘in kind terms’, and Deb went out to look for another place. But a worse storm was on the way. Halfway through November Elizabeth somehow extracted a ‘confession’ from Deb, poor child. Whatever she confessed, the effect was to send Elizabeth almost mad. This was when she told Pepys about Lord Sandwich’s attempt on her virtue; and she now insisted that Pepys must sack Deb and tell her that he disliked her. For three weeks Elizabeth had kept him from sleeping; he realized Deb had to go, but he feared becoming ‘a slave’ to his wife, still longed to ‘have the maidenhead of this girl’ and at the same time reported greatly increased sexual activity and pleasure with his wife. On 14 November Deb did leave, Elizabeth preventing him from going down to the kitchen to speak to her and telling him he was a dog and a rogue and that he had ‘a rotten heart’. The next day, a Sunday, he wrote up his journal, reflecting that he would be glad to find Deb, ‘though I fear it would be my ruin’, an expression of almost feminine despair. But on Monday he put his fears aside and did go out to find her.

  Two days later he tracked her down and persuaded her to meet him in a coach. A scene of passionate embraces and promises followed, in which he succeeded in making her ‘tener mi cosa [my thing] in her mano, while mi mano was sobra su pectus [under her breast], and so did hazer with grand delight’; and afterwards made her vow not to let any other man do what he had done to her. He gave her twenty shillings and a contact address at one of his booksellers and went home happy. But Elizabeth was too alert to his movements and moods not to guess what had happened. The next day she exploded with rage again, made him confess his latest exploit, cursed and threatened him, and said she was quite prepared to leave him if he would supply her with a few hundred pounds. For good measure she offered to slit Deb’s nose. At his wits’ end, he sent for Will Hewer, told him the story and asked him to intercede. Will cried like a child and Pepys swore to see Deb no more; but he wrote down that he had no intention of keeping the vow. To make things bearable at home he agreed to an arrangement whereby he would not leave the house except in Will’s custody. A sort of peace was made. Pepys made love to Elizabeth to placate her – he seems not to have minded her rank state – and then, alone in his bedroom, he prayed to God on his knees, asking Him to keep him true to ‘my poor wife’. He also noted that the upholsterers had just finished work on the splendid new best bedroom, but that he had not the heart to enjoy the effect.

  I know of no other account of marital rage and jealousy to match this one. Anyone who has lived through anything similar, in whichever position of the triangle, will recognize its truth and force, even though it is told entirely from one point of view. Pepys shows himself divided between sympathy for his wife, whom he acknowledges he has wronged, pity and grief for Deb, whom he has also wronged, and a profound pity for himself. And on the whole he is fair to everyone. On it went, as such things do. On 22 November, a Sunday, he tells us that Elizabeth at last decides to wash and ‘cleans herself, after four or five weeks being in continued dirt’. The following Sunday, Pepys reports that he cannot help thinking of Deb. Elizabeth forces him to write a letter to her telling her she is a whore. Will, also wanting to be fair to everyone, winks at him to indicate he will deal with this, and does so by removing the offensive part of the letter before he delivers it to Deb. One day in January, Pepys manages to go out without Will, and that night Elizabeth, as terrifying as Lady Macbeth, arrives at the bedside carrying a pair of tongs heated red hot.7 Pepys talks his way out of this tricky situation, and things quieten down for a time, though there are bumps, as when Elizabeth hears that Deb is living in fine style, wearing fashionable black spots and speaking ill of her. He reflects mournfully that he knows nothing of what has become of her, although ‘my devil that is within me doth wish that I could’.8 The more he suffers, the more he returns to the religious lessons of his childhood.

  At the end of March, after Jane’s wedding, he is pleased to think that there is now no servant left living in the house who remembers the Deb affair. His self-esteem is returning. Everything is over, he goes to Betty Martin in the old way – and then, on 13 April, he is in Whitehall with Will and

  as God would have it I spied Deb. which made my heart and head to work; and I presently could not refrain, but sent W. Hewer away to look for Mr Wren (W. Hewer, I perceive, did see her, but whether he did see me see her I know not, or suspect my sending him away I know not) but my heart could not hinder me. And I run after her and two women and a man, more ordinary people, and she in her old clothes; and after hunting a little, find them in the lobby of the Chapel below-stairs; and there I observed she endeavoured to avoid me, but I did speak to her and she to me, and did get her para docere me ou she demeures [to tell me where she lives] now. And did charge her para say nothing of me that I had vu elle – which she did promise; and so, with my heart full of surprize and disorder, I away.

  He went into the park with a colleague, returned to Whitehall to look for her again, worried in case Will should read his face. Pepys went home with him, where he agonized over whether God would let him see Deb, ‘whom indeed I love, and with a bad amour’ – a refinement, this. But whatever God intended he had her address safely, and two days later he was with her in an ale house, struggling to overcome her modesty, with only partial success, and giving her another twenty shillings.9

  This was their last rendezvous. Although she agreed to meet him in Westminster Hall the following Monday, she failed to appear. He walked up and down for two hours, and afterwards consoled himself with Betty’s sister, Doll Lane. Whether Deb let him down deliberately or was prevented we shall never know. Another unanswered question is whether she was in love with Pepys, as she might well have been; or had simply been unable to deal with his attentions. But although what happened may have shaken her faith in families and fathers, it was not the tragedy it might have been. She was not pregnant, and still technically a virgin. She could start her life again, and did so. There was a surprising moment when Pepys saw her in the street at the end of April, she with another gentlewoman and he with Elizabeth, who did not see her; and Deb winked and smiled at him. The next thing he heard was that she had moved to Greenwich, which set him longing to look for her again. The love affair seems to have left him more scarred than her, and he returned to it on the last page of the Diary, which speaks of ‘my amours to Deb’ as past.

  Elizabeth embarked on a flirtation of her own with Henry Sheeres. Pepys suffered a jealous spasm or two, but Sheeres was on the point of leaving England for Tangier, and in any case P
epys regarded him as a friend. The whole business has no clear conclusion, partly because such episodes rarely do, and also because the Diary came to an end on 31 May. Pepys had responded to Elizabeth’s anger because it revived his sense of the strict moral discipline in which he had been brought up, with its Christian basis, that decreed sex to be wrong and shameful outside marriage, and he saw the justice of her objection to what he had done in their home. But his response went only so far. He felt guilty when he was found out, but the power of his passion for Deb allowed him to believe he still had a right to her. It was the attitude of a romantic long before romanticism was thought of. And then outside the house, which could not be considered Elizabeth’s domain, he failed to change his ways at all. He continued to have sexual relations with Betty Lane and Doll, to call on and dream of conquering Betty Michell, to keep things going with Mrs Bagwell, to look out for meetings with ‘Mrs Tooker’s daughters’ and to flirt lewdly with an out-of-town dancing partner. Even at home, he began to fantasize about the new maid Elizabeth had taken on, Matt.10 But none of this was perceived by Elizabeth; and, Christian ethics apart, what had made him give in to her about Deb was above all his desire for a quiet life. As a disincentive to adultery it is likely to be stronger than any moral teaching.