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drabbiticus | 8 months ago
> In an incident that is difficult to interpret as anything but rape, Pepys recounts entering the home of a ship’s carpenter—a man very much under his control, since Pepys was a naval official—and noting that, after a struggle, “finally I had my will of her.” His only recorded regret is “a mighty pain” in his finger, which he injured during the apparent assault.
> The victim, identified only as Mrs. Bagwell, had been instructed to offer herself to Pepys by her husband, who thought it would help his advancement. “The story,” notes Tomalin, “is a shameful one of a woman used by two bullies: her husband, hoping for promotion, and Pepys, who was to arrange it. Pepys did not present it in quite those terms, but it is clearly how it was.”
> Another obvious victim of Pepys’s sexual involvements beyond his household was his wife. In 1665, he had married fifteen-year-old Elizabeth St. Michel, the daughter of a French immigrant. Loveman describes the marriage as a “love match, albeit a tempestuous one.” The diary records the couple’s arguments over Pepys’s infidelities, and there were other tensions in the marriage. In an especially heated quarrel over Elizabeth’s management of the household, Pepys gave her a black eye.
> The full record of Pepys’s mistreatment of women is too extensive to detail here. That grim record could fill a book—and, in fact, it has. In The Dark Side of Samuel Pepys, author Geoffrey Pimm explores Pepys’s predations at length, drawing on the diarist’s own accounts of his misdeeds to build the case against him. Pepys, writes Pimm, “faithfully recorded acts of moral turpitude that in later centuries might have caused his name to be blazoned across the newspapers and in some instances, most probably lead him to be arraigned in the courts.”
Veen|8 months ago