Virtue was Pandarus to Vice;
A maiden was a maidenhead,
A maidenhead a matter of price....”
That was the foible of a hateful age, and it was Pepys’s. He preyed upon modesty. He must overcome virtue. He could not tire of that, and wrought in his way incurable mischief. In short, he was a middle-class Minotaur, a devourer of virgins.
I shall not follow him in his hateful bird-netting except just as far as may be necessary to relate the manner of his discomfiture. It is sufficient to say that, given time to spread his lures, he succeeded often enough. His office and patronage were favourite decoys of his. So Mrs. Bagwell, who pleased him as “a virtuous modest woman,” became something else by his leading her to suppose that he would get her husband a good job, he being a carpenter in Deptford Yard. So it was with other unfortunate creatures who courted his dispensing of places to their men. But he had an easier prey, a natural prey nearer home, in his wife’s maids. It lay among their duties, it seems, to assist him at his levee and coucher: he certainly had a way with him—so what were the poor girls to do? They had no chance. It does not appear that any one of them escaped altogether, though, thanks to his lively fear of Mrs. Pepys, no one of them found Mrs. Bagwell’s fate. That was not their fault, poor things; they were mostly as wax under his hands. But Mercer, Mary Mercer, faced him and got off with nothing worse than a little fondling. She was a girl with both wit and courage; remained on friendly terms with the household afterwards, visiting terms; and, when once she had shown him her mind, was not chased by the destroyer. But she, who came of good people—“a decayed tradesman’s daughter”—was an accomplished young woman, with a singing-voice which had been well trained, and plenty of savoir faire. Really, I think, Pepys, taught by a rebuff, came to respect Mercer. In August 1665 he noted of her in his jargon that he had his head combed “by my little girle, to whom I confess que je sum demasiado kind ... mais il faut que je leave it lest it bring me to alcum major inconvenience.” That was just what it did lead to. Mercer left the house on the day the Fire of London broke out, and for the best Pepys could do did not choose to return. The Fire gave him other and healthier thoughts for a time: presently when he met her in church, she refused to look at him. So she escaped, slightly chipped; and afterwards, when, as I say, she came to be on visiting terms with Mrs. Pepys, there are signs that she came and went unmolested. But to her succeeded by-and-by Deb Willett, the last victim of the Minotaur of Axe Yard. It was the addition of this girl to his harvest which upset his load of Hesperian apples.
He was disposed to her on hearsay, before he saw her; for Mrs. Pepys had been light-minded enough to declare the engagement of a pretty girl—the very thing to set him on fire. So presently, on the 27th September 1667, “while I was busy at the office, my wife sends for me to come home, and what was it but to see the pretty girl which she is taking to wait upon her: and though she seems not altogether so great a beauty as she had before told me, yet indeed she is mighty pretty; and so pretty that I find I shall be too pleased with it.... She seems, by her discourse, to be grave beyond her bigness and age, and exceeding well bred as to her deportment, having been a scholar in a school at Bow these seven or eight years. To the office again, my head running on this pretty girl.” It certainly did, if we may trust the Diary. She kept him awake at night; and when she came, brought by Mr. Batelier, he was more than smitten with her, he was impressed. “So grave as I never saw a little thing in my life,” he says. “Indeed, I think her a little too good for my family, and so well carriaged as I hardly ever saw.” His next recorded sentiment is, “I wish my wife may use her well.” How are you to deal with a man like that—except by remembering that all men are like that?
She accompanied her employers to Brampton and gave satisfaction at least to one of them. By the middle of October that had been observed by the other, for he writes of that day that they had been to see “The Coffee House” at the Duke’s Theatre; and “here, before the play began, my wife begun to complain of Willett’s confidence in sitting cheek by jowl by us, which was a poor thing; but I perceive she is already jealous of my kindness to her, so that I begin to fear this girl is not likely to stay long with us.” She stayed too long for her comfort, or for his. On December 22nd Pepys “first did give her a little kiss, she being a very pretty humoured girle, and so one that I do love mightily.” In January she is promoted to be “Deb” in the Diary; in March she is kissed, and more than kissed. Then comes the last volume.
By the time that was reached, Pepys’s weakness had become a mania. His apple-cart, so to speak, was full to overflowing, Deb Willett, though he had no suspicion of it, the last fruit he was to add to it. His work suffered, his mind suffered; there were omens of dirty weather. June 18th, 1668: “At noon home to dinner, where my wife still in a melancholy, fusty humour, and crying, and do not tell me plainly what it is; but I by little words find that she hath heard of my going to plays, and carrying people abroad every day in her absence; and that I cannot help [fearing] but the storm will break out, I think, in a little time.” At night it was no better: “My wife troubled all night, and about one o’clock goes out of bed to the girl’s bed, which did trouble me, she crying and sobbing, without telling me the cause.” That ought to have warned him, if he had not gone too far. But he had. He pursued his course unabated; and then, October 25th, came the crash. It was Sunday. He rose, “discoursing with my wife about our house and the many new things we are doing of”; he went to church, saw Jack Fenn and his wife, “a pretty black woman”; he dined at home, had his wife and the boy to read to him; at night “W. Batelier comes and sups with us”—all well so far. And then—thunder, out of a clear sky, pealing about his ears. “After supper, to have my head combed by Deb, which occasioned the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world, for my wife, coming up suddenly, did find me embracing the girl....” (sic).
A comic scene, but humiliating to all three. “I was,” he says, “at a wonderful loss upon it, and the girle also, and I endeavoured to put it off, but my wife was struck mute, and grew angry, and so her voice come to her, grew quite out of order, and I to say little, but to bed.” To bed, but not to sleep. At two in the morning the storm which had been massing itself in the heart and mind of Mrs. Pepys broke over his head, at first in tears and a secret. That—and it was a shrewd hit—was that “she was a Roman Catholic, and had received the Holy Sacrament.” Pepys, who had always been a Puritan at heart, was very much disturbed, yet dared no reproaches, so that the blow failed of its mark. She went on, then, “from one thing to another,” until “at last it appears plainly her trouble was at what she saw.” Yes, but what had she seen? “I did not know how much she saw, and therefore said nothing to her.” Towards morning “a little sleep.” If he thought that the end of it, he was to find it only the beginning. Mrs. Pepys, outraged on her tenderest side, grew from strength to strength; and as for her deplorable spouse, for the first time in his Diary, if not in his days, he really felt something which reads like remorse. His mind, he says of it next day, “was mightily troubled for the poor girle, whom I fear I have undone by this, my wife telling me that she would turn her out of doors.” That threat was not at once executed. Deb was treated with severe clemency for the better part of a month, allowed to visit her friends and suit herself with a new situation; made to feel, however, that she was in disgrace, and definitely cut off from any further assistance at her master’s toilette. The miserable man hardly dared look at her; not a word seems to have passed between them, though after a while, forced to take a line of conduct by his wife’s reiterated attacks, Pepys “did by a little note ... advise her (Deb) that I did continue to deny that ever I kissed her, and so she might govern herself.” Deb read it and threw it back again as he bade her; but she could not “govern herself.” The very next day Mrs. Pepys examined her, and everything came out. Pepys had to dine alone that night, for his wife kept her room, and when he went up to see her, blazed out upon him his infidelity and perjury together. To make it all the worse for him, she then told him of temptations which had been put in her own way—by Captain Ferrers, Lord Sandwich and other friends of his. A la guerre comme à la guerre. All which “I did acknowledge, and was troubled for, and wept.”