Queer Places:
St Olave Hart Street Churchyard
London, City of London, Greater London, England
Samuel Pepys FRS (23 February 1633 – 26 May 1703) was an English diarist and naval administrator. He served as administrator of the Royal Navy and Member of Parliament and is most famous for the diary he kept for a decade. Pepys had no maritime experience, but he rose to be the Chief Secretary to the Admiralty under both King Charles II and King James II through patronage, diligence, and his talent for administration. His influence and reforms at the Admiralty were important in the early professionalisation of the Royal Navy.[2]
The detailed private diary that Pepys kept from 1660 until 1669 was first published in the 19th century and is one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period. It provides a combination of personal revelation and eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War, and the Great Fire of London.
According to a passage, Pepys was in his chamber with a colleague ‘with whom I
did intend to lie; but he and I fell to play with one another, so that I made
him go lie with Mr Shaply, So I lay alone all night.’ Pepys observed the women
as well as the men. In the summer of 1666 he was at Whitehall where ‘I find
the ladies of honour dressed in their riding garbs, with coats and doublets
with deep skirts, just for all the world like men, and buttoned their doublets
up the breast, with periwigs and with hats; so that, only for a long petticoat
dragging under their men’s coats nobody could take them for women in any point
whatever’.
The diary gives a detailed account of Pepys's personal life. He was fond of wine, plays, and the company of other people. He also spent time evaluating his fortune and his place in the world. He was always curious and often acted on that curiosity, as he acted upon almost all his impulses. Periodically, he would resolve to devote more time to hard work instead of leisure. For example, in his entry for New Year's Eve, 1661, he writes: "I have newly taken a solemn oath about abstaining from plays and wine…" The following months reveal his lapses to the reader; by 17 February, it is recorded, "Here I drank wine upon necessity, being ill for the want of it."
Pepys was one of the most important civil servants of his age, and was also a widely cultivated man, taking an interest in books, music, the theatre and science. Aside from English, he was fluent in French and read many texts in Latin. His favourite author was Virgil. He was passionately interested in music; he composed, sang, and played for pleasure, and even arranged music lessons for his servants. He played the lute, viol, violin, flageolet, recorder and spinet to varying degrees of proficiency.[8] He was also a keen singer, performing at home, in coffee houses, and even in Westminster Abbey.[8] He and his wife took flageolet lessons from master Thomas Greeting.[35] He also taught his wife to sing and paid for dancing lessons for her (although these stopped when he became jealous of the dancing master).
Pepys was an investor in the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, which held the Royal monopoly on trading along the west coast of Africa in gold, silver, ivory and slaves.[36]
St. Olave's Church, London
Propriety did not prevent him from engaging in a number of extramarital liaisons with various women that were chronicled in his diary, often in some detail when relating the intimate details. The most dramatic of these encounters was with Deborah Willet, a young woman engaged as a companion for Elisabeth Pepys. On 25 October 1668, Pepys was surprised by his wife as he embraced Deb Willet; he writes that his wife "coming up suddenly, did find me imbracing the girl con [with] my hand sub [under] su [her] coats; and endeed I was with my main [hand] in her cunny. I was at a wonderful loss upon it and the girl also...." Following this event, he was characteristically filled with remorse, but (equally characteristically) continued to pursue Willet after she had been dismissed from the Pepys household.[37] Pepys also had a habit of fondling the breasts of his maid Mary Mercer while she dressed him in the morning.[38]
Pepys may also have dallied with a leading actress of the Restoration period, Mary Knep. "Mrs Knep was the wife of a Smithfield horsedealer, and the mistress of Pepys"—or at least "she granted him a share of her favours".[39] Scholars disagree on the full extent of the Pepys/Knep relationship, but much of later generations' knowledge of Knep comes from the diary. Pepys first met Knep on 6 December 1665. He described her as "pretty enough, but the most excellent, mad-humoured thing, and sings the noblest that I ever heard in my life." He called her husband "an ill, melancholy, jealous-looking fellow"[40] and suspected him of abusing his wife. Knep provided Pepys with backstage access and was a conduit for theatrical and social gossip. When they wrote notes to each other, Pepys signed himself "Dapper Dickey", while Knep was "Barbry Allen" (a popular song that was an item in her musical repertory). Pepys's reference to purchasing the pornographic book L'Escole des Filles appears to be the first English reference to pornography. He writes in his diary that it was a "mighty lewd book," and burned it after reading it.[41]
Pepys was buried along with his wife in St Olave's Church, Hart Street in London.
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