5 Dec 1657, Samuel Pepys to Edward Mountagu (The Diary of Samuel Pepys)

For My Honoured Lord
General Mountagu at Hinchingbrooke
Leave this at Huntingdon

5 December 1657

MY LORD

My Thursday’s letter to Mr Barnwell mentioned my receipt of the £417 as also Mr Barton’s lodging here since this late business of the maid, which I am glad to understand by Roger [Pepys] is your Honour’s pleasure. As for my privity to her marriage, if no duty to yourself, a tenderness to my credit (as to my employment) obligeth me to avoid such actions which (like this) renders it so questionable. But I shall submit your opinion of my honesty in this, to that which Mr Barton and Roger shall inform you of from her own mouth. If the rendering me suspicious to the maid, and charging her to lock me from any room but my chamber, moved me to speak anything in an ill sense concerning my cousin Mark [Alcock], I desire it may be valued as my zeal to acquit myself, rather than prejudice him. For the weekdays I have not yet, nor for the future on Sundays shall I be more forth at night, though this was not past seven a clock, as my she-cousin Alcock¹ knows who supped with us at my father’s. Your commands concerning her removal I shall obey.

Captain Clerke with his humblest service hath presented you, with six goodly planks of cedar, I gratified the men that brought it, and paid their expenses. As for your goods in the Centurion the westerly wind hath kept them out, so that the vessel came not to Woolwich till today. The things will come to me on Monday, and the horse delivered to Roger. Captain Guy hath his order, and I suppose his money. He hath waited at Woolwich these five days about these things, and will bring the horse hither on Monday. For news there is only, my Lord Whitelocke’s being made Viscount Henley, and Colonel Hewson knighted, and that Mr Downing is to go resident into Holland.

Your Honour’s in all duty

SAMUEL PEPYS

This curious letter of 5 December 1657 ends with the usual news from the political front, but opens with what was obviously a very delicate subject. Since 10 October 1656 Pepys was living with his wife but the text seems to suggest that Pepys had acted in such a way as to lead a maid to assume he wanted to commit an indiscretion with her. But letters later in the sequence describe how Pepys had been trying to find out what she was up to, discovering that in fact the maid had had few duties, and had been eating out at a victualling house where she had come into contact with men and engaged in an illicit marriage. However, given Pepys’s candid confessions in the pages of the Diary about his inclination freely to indulge in sexual liaisons, solicited or otherwise, with almost any woman who took his fancy, especially servants, it seems more than likely that whatever misdemeanour this unnamed maid had committed, Pepys had very likely tried his luck with her.

Pepys also seems to have made allegations about his cousin Mark Alcock to defend himself for allowing the situation to arise, for which he now apologizes. If the maid was a victim, then she was to be a victim again – Mountagu had evidently instructed Pepys to sack her. In the series of letters that follows Pepys’s concern that he might have compromised his patron’s support gives rise to palpable panic.

Pepys’s private life was certainly not as settled as he would have liked it to be. Elizabeth Pepys suffered from a number of ailments that affected her ability to enjoy normal sexual relations. These included what has been identified as dysmenorrhoea, characterized by uterine cramps during menstruation. This contributed to their frequent quarrels, recorded throughout the Diary, though Pepys was liable to become infuriated by anything, from her cooking to what he regarded as her extravagance. For a while in the late 1650s they were certainly estranged. Pepys disliked recalling the experience, calling them ‘our old differences, which I hate to have remembered’ (Diary 4 July 1664). He was also particularly unsettled by the thought that anyone else should know about such things. On 9 January 1663 he destroyed, amongst other documents, a letter she had written a couple of months previously to him about her unhappiness ‘vexed’ at the thought it might be ‘met with and read by others’.

This refers to the debate about whether the Protectorate should be a hereditary or elective office. It means ‘Whether the soul of the protectorate must be procreated or elected’. ↩

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys to Edward Mountagu

Saturday 5 December 1657

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