How I Accidentally Sparked the Pepys ‘Cancellation’ Furore

A firestorm erupted recently involving Hinchingbrooke School and its decision – backed by a pupil vote – to remove the name of the diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) from one of its pastoral houses (certain other parts of the school remain named after him). Amongst other newspaper coverage there was a tirade by Simon Heffer in the Telegraph against the school leadership and staff, calling their actions “the height of historical ignorance”. One of the catalysts has been has been my book The Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations (Abacus 2025).

Whether Pepys’s name should be removed or not is up to any organisation to decide for itself. Far from making a kneejerk decision, Hinchingbrooke initiated a proper discussion process. The habit of naming places and buildings after historical figures is bound to throw up this sort of problem as we learn more about the past, particularly in this instance when considering the purpose of a pastoral house.

Pepys’s shorthand diary, written between January 1st 1660 and May 31st 1669, is the greatest diary in the English language and the most brilliant eyewitness account of his times during a tumultuous era in British history. Pepys was a civilian naval official who lived in Seething Lane in the City of London. He is mostly familiar from his description of the 1666 Great Fire of London and other selected passages, for example involving the Second Dutch War of 1665-7 and the plague of 1665.

A serial and obsessive abuser of women

Pepys was also, by his own admission, a serial and obsessive abuser of girls and women, despite being married to a woman he loved and was even infatuated with. Yet he routinely cheated on her. When she challenged his authority in the home, he sometimes beat her, and badly.

As I shall explain, the belief that certain 17th-century standards were different from today is a fallacy. Pepys was an opportunist and a predator who manipulated his intended victims, sometimes over months, into complying with his demands. He exploited his official position and his social status to do so. He was as likely to pursue pubescent girls as he was married women and widows.

Pepys selected his victims from among his own staff, other people’s households, his friends’ daughters, tavern waitresses, actresses, naval personnel’s wives and women he knew from commerce and other contacts. His descriptions of what he got up to were sometimes oblique and at other times graphic. He weaved his accounts of these activities into the rest of the diary text.

Pepys’s behaviour has often been treated casually, even by past diary editors and some biographers, as if he was engaged in recreational capers. They were more inclined to condemn Pepys’s victims for having loose morals. One even declared Pepys to have had a “kind of fundamental decency”.

In the Critic, the author Alexander Larman politely suggested that some of Pepys’s controversial passages were closer to wish fulfilment and fantasy. This is completely to misunderstand Pepys and how he wrote and represents a reluctance to accept the distasteful truth. Pepys did not make things up. This is obvious from the content and nature of composition. He wrote down what he saw and did. He was not creating rhetorical imagery for literary reasons.

Much of what Pepys described can be substantiated from other sources. Modern genealogical resources have also made it possible to trace far more detail about some of his victims. They were real girls and real women.

When it came to women Pepys employed language that matched contemporary machismo tropes. But if his references to sex were all or mostly fantasy then the truth of the whole diary text would be called into doubt. On the contrary, when Pepys fantasised, as on December 24th 1667, he said so.

Reading the original diary

A remarkable phenomenon has emerged in the last few days and weeks. Various people, ranging from academics and journalists to those launching into the comment sections on articles about Hinchingbrooke School, have leaped to Pepys’s defence with proprietorial outrage. This is in no small part thanks to a long tradition of massaging Pepys’s reputation by his diary editors and some of his biographers.

None even of Pepys’s biographers to date, let alone his most vocal defenders, have been able to read the original manuscript, written in a 1620s commercial form of shorthand known as Thomas Shelton’s Tachygraphy. Nor can any of those who have been so quick to criticise Hinchingbrooke School, for example in the Spectator, and it has been apparent that few have read my book.

There is an explanation for this. The 1970s diary edition was successfully marketed as definitive. Reviewers declared it to be unimprovable, though none of them had the slightest idea what they were talking about since they could not read the shorthand original.

The castigation of Hinchingbrooke School has been reductive, oversimplifying an immensely complex subject. It has taken me decades to reach the necessary proficiency to explore Pepys properly and even now I feel I have only just opened the door. I have been learning and using Pepys’s shorthand system for over 20 years and am now one of a tiny number of people capable of reading the original diary. I only know of one other. I have the entire manuscript in digital form on my computer.

The original transcriptions I produced from the diary for publication make me only the fifth person in two centuries to do so, but with the ability to zoom in on the text and digitally enhance it I had a huge advantage. This helped me to identify errors in the definitive 1970s edition and produce corrected transcriptions of the most controversial passages. Successfully transcribing shorthand is cumulative work and relies on the work of predecessors, ironing out past mistakes and improving.

Falsifying Pepys

All Pepys’s earlier transcribers and editors were troubled by the controversial passages they discovered in the shorthand manuscript. These referred to the assault and even possible rape by Pepys of females from pubescent girls to married women and widows. These passages included sections and phrases written in a confusing polyglot jumble of French, Spanish, Latin and Greek words. That helped Pepys to obscure the meaning of parts of these passages. He later added extraneous consonants to some of the English components to conceal them further.

The solution to appeasing 19th-century sensibilities was to cut and bowdlerise. This way Pepys’s own testimony was falsified, and thus his image in the eyes of readers. The celebrated 1970s edition included all the controversial content, after a fashion. Therefore, in one sense it’s true this material came out half a century ago. In another, it isn’t and therein lies the key misunderstanding of those who believe all there was to know about Pepys has been available for years.

Fearing litigation and controversy, triggered by the notorious 1960 prosecution of Penguin for Lady Chatterley’s Lover under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, despite it ending in acquittal, Robert Latham and William Matthews included but did not translate the polyglot passages (a far from straightforward task, as it turned out). They avoided analysing or commenting on them and did not point out which sections had not been published before.

Amazingly, Latham and Matthews did not even use Pepys’s own French and Spanish dictionaries to identify the polyglot words, often in archaic forms, he was using and his intended meaning. The Spanish dictionary is still in Pepys’s library at Cambridge. They therefore transcribed some words incorrectly. Some of their mistakes in the polyglot transcriptions are so obvious they appear like deliberate tactics to disguise the text.

They also avoided as much as possible discussing Pepys’s victims and when they did, largely dismissed them.

In its own way then, even the 1970s edition contributed to a long tradition of occluding Pepys’s own witnessing of his life. Thus, the editors fulfilled their claim to providing the whole diary text while simultaneously obscuring the most incriminating passages.

Pepys Exposed

With the help of those dictionaries, I introduced various corrections to the polyglot sections and then translated them into Pepysian English (often made easier by Pepys using the same or similar phrases in English elsewhere).

Multiple narrative strands are weaved throughout all diaries. By following that one crucial strand in detail Pepys’s descent into the compulsive and increasingly reckless pursuit of sexual gratification, regardless of the sensibilities of his victims, became clear. In more than one reference Pepys implies that the record in the diary is only a fraction of what he got up to.

One of the most extreme instances occurred on February 20th 1665 when Pepys went to Deptford seeking sex with Elizabeth Bagwell, the wife of a ship’s carpenter who had used her to entice Pepys into promoting him:

… it being dark did privately entrer en la maison de la femme de Bagwell [“privately enter the house of Bagwell’s wife”], and there had sa company, though with a great deal of difficulty, néanmoins enfin j’avais ma volonté d’elle [“nevertheless, in the end I had my will of her”]

He had almost certainly raped her, and it was not the first time. The following morning, he recorded how the force he had been obliged to use had injured his left hand. He said nothing about how much resistance Mrs Bagwell had evidently put up.

Is it fair to judge Pepys by modern standards?

The mistake made by some of Pepys’s modern defenders is crying foul at the thought of judging a 17th century lothario by 21st century standards. Pepys owned and read “with great pleasure” Thomas Ridley’s A View of the Civil and Ecclesiastical Law (1607) which condemned adultery as a destabilising “filthyness”.

Thomas Edgar, the probable author of a book on Women’s Rights published in 1632, bemoaned in a section on rape the futility of women making marital vows “when men have so many millions of ways to make them break them”. He described how if “sweet words, fair promises, tempting, flattering, swearing, lying” failed to “beguile the poor soul”, then “rough handling, violence and plain strength of arms” would be employed “to make them prisoners of lust’s thieves… so drunken are men with their own lusts”. He believed that were it not for the law, women aged from 12 years upwards would be unable to escape “ravishing” at all.

These are far from the only examples. It is nonsense therefore to suggest that Pepys’s conduct was acceptable in the 1660s. Do we seriously expect to believe that his victims did not recognise assault or even rape for what they were? The only real difference between then and now was that a hierarchical and deferential society made it easier for people like Pepys to escape prosecution and censure.

Pepys’s sternest critics were himself and his wife Elizabeth. Pepys was disgusted and ashamed by his antics, but he felt compelled to archive his activities, creating both a source of titillation and a confessional.

Pepys feared being caught, which he refers to on several occasions, either by his servants, his wife, members of the public, or the families of his victims because he knew what would happen if he was. He skated as close to the wind as possible but was also excited by the subterfuge.

Once in a tavern Pepys was apprehended removing a pubescent maid’s clothing by her uncle. He passed it off with a “laugh” but was “ashamed” (May 20th 1667). Only his higher social status protected him. As for the girl herself, when Pepys tried to assault her again on September 30th he was forced to give up when she started screaming. He went straight to another of his more reliable mistresses (a married woman, aged 31) to relieve himself.

The only defence, and it is a very limited one, of Pepys’s activities is that certain women were brought to him by their husbands in search of professional advancement in the naval service. In some cases, even the fathers-in-law brought their sons’ wives to Pepys. Which came first? Pepys’s proclivities, which they knew about? Or was he corrupted by being made offers he discovered he couldn’t refuse? Either way, Pepys frequently took advantage of what was on offer. That included a naval widow desperate to have her husband’s wages paid, a painful reminder that at the time sex was sometimes the only commodity a woman had to trade for financial security.  

Elizabeth Pepys acquired a 16 year-old new companion maid called Deb Willett in 1667. Pepys was entranced by her, and she repulsed his advances over the next year. On October 25th 1668 his wife caught him with his hand up Deb’s skirts and in her genitals while Deb was combing his hair (this was a domestic routine Pepys habitually exploited to assault female staff). Pepys was crucified by remorse and subjected to a hail of abuse and condemnation by the rightly outraged Elizabeth. Six days later he called it

…the greatest falling out with my poor wife, and through my folly with the girl, that ever I had and I have reason to be sorry and ashamed of it and more to be troubled for the poor girl’s sake, whom I fear I shall by this means prove the ruin of.

If Pepys could be damned by himself and his wife (and he refers to being ashamed on other occasions), why is it wrong for some people in the 21st century to feel deeply uncomfortable about placing him on a pedestal? If they are wrong, then that amounts to saying Elizabeth Pepys and his victims should have kept their mouth shut.

Deb was sacked. Even then Pepys could still not control himself, soft-soaping Elizabeth while continuing to pursue Deb. Having found her, he assaulted her in a carriage while encouraging her to protect her virtue (April 15th 1669). Despite his professed fears that he might be ruining the girl:

I led her into a little blind alehouse within the walls, and there she and I alone fell to talk and besar la and tocar su mamelles [“kiss her and touch her breasts”] but she mighty coy and I hope modest but however, though with great force, did hazer ella con su hand para tocar mi thing, but ella was in great pain para be brought para it [“did make her with her hand touch my thing, but she was in great pain to be brought to it”].

He was pursuing his mistresses even on the last day of the diary, despite professing his contrition. Did he stop thereafter? The circumstantial evidence suggests not, though his wife died from typhoid later that year.

A man of contradictions

It may seem unfair to single Pepys out. But he singled himself out by creating a unique record, an unmatched personal account of one man’s turbulent life. He was, and is, bound to gain more attention than anyone else from his time and be scrutinised accordingly. Paradoxically this was precisely why he was subjected to censorship by editors who in part feared how the truth might reflect on them and their choice of subject.

Pepys’s other qualities were real and important. Pepys was a superb naval administrator who became Secretary of the Admiralty, and a Fellow of the Royal Society who rose to be its president. He was highly esteemed by some of the greatest minds of his day and for his loyalty. The diary is rightly seen as one of the principal records of 1660s England, and as literature.

Conversely, Pepys was corrupt, a serial and manipulative philanderer, and given to sexual violence, all aspects of his life he regarded as unacceptable by his own standards and those of his day. If the extent of his behaviour had been exposed at the time he would have been denounced and his reputation destroyed. That was why he was so terrified of being caught.

We can only try to understand Pepys properly if we have his full account and which only now is that fully available, not a cleverly occluded version. The fact that he took care to preserve his diary volumes suggests that was what, ultimately, he wanted. Had his diary been published in full in the 1970s or even earlier, with the polyglot passages transcribed correctly and translated, analysed and commented on, and his behaviour fully acknowledged and explored, the self-confessed truth about Pepys would have been confronted half a century ago.

Armed with the whole story, we ought now to able to understand that Pepys was and will remain the greatest eyewitness of his times and is simultaneously someone whose assaults on women were unacceptable both by the standards of the 17th century, as he well knew, and our own. Confronting that conflict of course presents us with challenges, and so it should. The result is bound to involve different solutions, depending on circumstances.

Pepys is an object lesson in what can happen if evidence is suppressed, whether blatantly or subtly, and that our response to history is in constant flux as more evidence for the past comes to light.

Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer with numerous books to his credit. His latest is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations (Abacus 2025).