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did all of this stuff:

Samuel Pepys was not at his brightest. This was the great occasion: the day in 1660 that Charles II was due to cross the Channel back to England to be restored to the throne - and Pepys had been drinking in taverns round the clock.

He scrambled back on to the King's flagship with such a hangover that he, "rising to piss, mistook the sun-rising for the sun-setting".

So, nursing one eye injured when he fired off a celebration gun and forgot to duck, he went back to sleep for another five hours, until woken by a present of Breton oysters.

Pepys was then 27 years old, short and dark, with a fleshy face and lips and slightly protruding eyes. He had begun his diary, the most famous diary in the English-speaking world, on January 1, 1660, with this entry:

"Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain . . . I live in Axe Yard, having my wife and servant Jane, and no more in family than us three.

"My wife after the absence of her terms for seven weeks, gave me hopes of her being with child, but on the last day of the year she hath them again."

Like everyone else in the 17th century, sickness and death were major preoccupations. Medicine still had a lot in common with butchery. An operation to remove a bladder stone was frequently fatal. Pepys survived his, but the surgery was probably why they had no children.

Boastful, choleric, ambitious, generous, curious, widely knowledgeable, Pepys was utterly candid in his diary, to a degree which shocked later generations. Not until 1970 was that opening entry with its mention of his wife's periods printed in full.

Everything was grist to his mill, from matters of state to worrying about his periwig, and the result was the most rounded picture of a man in our literature.

Now, a film based on his lively historical writing is in production and will undoubtedly win him numerous new fans - after all, his turbulent life has all the ingredients of a box office hit.

Politically it was a dangerous age. Pepys was a child through the Civil War which divided the nation between royalists and republicans, Cavaliers and Roundheads.

Uniting the country was a deep suspicion of Catholics: in later years, his connections with his patron the Duke of York, Charles II's brother, would get Pepys a spell of imprisonment in the Tower of London.

It is not Pepys the public servant and man of affairs which makes the diary a masterpiece, so much as his life at home with his wife and servants.

Much as he loved Elizabeth - a vivacious French Huguenot whom he married as a child bride in 1655, two weeks before her 15th birthday - he was determined to be master of the household.

This did not make for a tranquil marriage. Elizabeth was a child in a foreign land, with few, if any, friends of her own age.

While Pepys darted across London meeting friends at the Navy Office, at clubs and at coffee-houses, she was stuck at home with only the servants for company. Like her husband, she was emotional and quick to anger.

Shortly before the Diary begins, Elizabeth walked out on him for several weeks, an episode which Pepys hated to remember and hardly ever mentioned.

"At the office all the morning; and coming home, find Mr Hunt with my wife in the chamber alone; which God forgive me, did trouble my head," he wrote in November 1661, "but remembering that it was washing day and that there was no place else with a fire for him to be in, it being also cold weather, I was at ease again."

Some time later, Pepys convinced himself that Elizabeth was having a liaison with Mr Pembleton, her dancing master. Watching his wife 'leer' at Pembleton in church, it dawned on him that she was unusually eager to attend both Sunday services.

One afternoon, discovering that she had sent the servants out of the house, he hurried back from work, suffering "a very hell in my mind".

And yes, the two of them were alone together, "which made me almost mad . . . And Lord, to see how my jealousy wrought so far, that I went softly up to see whether any of the beds were out of order or no".

They were not. More than likely Elizabeth had been flirting with the dancing master to provoke her husband.

However, in Elizabeth's case her jealousy was well founded. Very few were the days when Pepys's roving eye did not settle upon some desirable young wench.

In addition he kept two mistresses - Betty Lane, the wife of a linen- draper in Westminster Hall, and, later, her sister Doll.

By mid-1663 the liaison with Betty is in full swing. They meet in a wine-house, where Pepys gives Betty a lobster, "and do so towse [kiss] her and feel her all over, making her believe how fair and good a skin she had; and indeed she has a very white thigh and leg, but monstrous fat".

A month later they are carousing at The Crown pub in Palace Yard, "and I had my full liberty of towsing her and doing what I would but the last thing of all; for I felt as much as I would, and made her feel my thing also, and put the end of it to her breast and by and by to her very belly - of which I am heartily ashamed. But I do resolve never to do more so."

And so it goes on, with Pepys giving his wife the slip and his mistress the towsing, before he returns home full of remorse and promising himself never to stray again - sometimes giving Elizabeth a costly bangle which only feeds her suspicions.

In early 1664 he finally has his way with Betty, transferring discreetly into French to describe the act of consummation.

Meanwhile there are encounters with shop girls, tavern girls, street girls; he has a particular yearning for girls in their teens. Most of the time it comes to nothing: for all his boasting, his diary makes plain that he lacked sexual confidence.

For Pepys, brought up in the puritan belief that sex was sinful, the act of illicit fondling, or even the chase itself, could be a guilty pleasure. When Elizabeth came out in painful, humiliating sores, both husband and wife believed they were brought on by sexual activity.

As Pepys moved up in the world, so his household grew. Since mid-1660 they had been living in lodgings in Seething Lane, not far from the Tower of London, provided by his employer the Navy Office. By 1668 they had two maids, a boy, a lady's companion, a cook and a coachman who doubled as a waiter.

Pepys was a fair employer but a strict one, like most householders of his day, and he liked to grumble about them in his diary.

"Having from my wife and the maids complaints made of the boy, I called him up and with my whip did whip him till I was not able to stir, and yet I could not make him confess any of the lies that they tax him with . . . So to bed, with my arm very weary."

The young women servants naturally attracted the master of the household: having a go at the household maids seems to have been an established practice.

Elizabeth's companion Mary Mercer, a pretty 17-year-old who sang and played the harpsichord, was willing enough to be fondled while she washed Pepys's ears and cut his hair, but it created all kinds of jealousy.

In February 1665, Pepys hears that the maids are letting in "a roguing Scotch woman . . . to help them wash and scour in our house".

"I fell mightily out, and made my wife, to the disturbance of our house and neighbours, to beat our little girl; and then we shut her down into the cellar and there she lay all night. So we to bed."

Six months later Pepys resorted to his private code to describe Mary very differently - "Dressed and had my head combed by my little girl, to whom I confess . . ." before guiltily resorting to his code, and admitting he gave her presents if she allowed him to fondle her bare breasts.

All around them London was transforming itself into a great city, blossoming with prosperity and new growth. But Pepys was about to become one of the foremost chroniclers of two terrifying events, the most destructive in the city's history before the 1941 Blitz.

The plague arrived in Westminster in the late spring of 1665, reached its peak in the high summer and spread throughout the South-East the following year.

Since the authorities thought it was carried by infection, houses with plague victims were shut up with all their occupants for 40 days, together with the rats which actually carried the plague, and a quarter of London's population died.

Pepys and his wife fled to Woolwich. But he regularly commuted back to town, dolefully recording the death toll and his own brushes with fate:

"It struck me very deep this afternoon, going with a hackney-coach from my Lord Treasurer's down Holborn - the coachman . . . at last stood still, and came down hardly able to stand; and told me that he was suddenly struck very sick and almost blind, he could not see.

"So I alighted and went into another coach, with sad heart for the poor man and trouble for myself, lest he should be struck with the plague . . . But God have mercy on us all."

Yet in the midst of death, nobody was livelier than Pepys. Despite writing about plague-pits and shuttered shops, pest-coaches and churchyards covered in lime, his sexual appetite was as greedy as ever (though not his success rate).

By late summer he was hardened to the sight of corpses, but his thoughts still turn towards his appearance.

"Up and put on my coloured silk suit, very fine, and my new periwig, bought a good while since, but durst not wear it because the plague was in Westminster when I bought it.

"And it is a wonder what will be the fashion, as to periwigs, for nobody will dare to buy any hair for fear of the infection - that it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague."

By the end of the year he is in high spirits. The plague has subsided; he has more than tripled his wealth, gained two new boardroom posts and "never lived so merrily" - thanks in part to Mrs Knipp, an actress and independent spirit who had the confidence to flirt with him to his heart's content. But in nine months' time he would be in peril of losing everything.

The Great Fire, which started in a baker's shop in Pudding Lane in the early hours of September 2, 1666, burned down 80 per cent of London within the City walls and left 80,000 people homeless.

Pepys's account of it is the greatest single set piece in his Diary. Up in the early hours, he returned to the Thames in the morning, watching from a boat as desperate people threw their goods into barges or simply flung them in the water.

In Whitehall, passing the King's quarters, he was summoned by Charles II and "did tell the King and the Duke of York what I saw, and that unless his Majesty did command houses to be pulled down, nothing could stop the fire".

Told to pass the message on to the Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bludworth, he located this wreck of a man who, hours earlier, had refused pleas to create firebreaks, sneering, "A woman could piss it out".

Now, "he cried like a fainting woman, 'Lord what can I do? I am spent! People will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses. But the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it'."

When Pepys could no longer endure the firedrops showering in his face, he and Elizabeth took cover in a little Bankside alehouse to watch the fire grow.

"And as it grew darker, appeared more and more, and in corners and upon steeples and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire . . . It made me weep to see it."

That night, by moonlight, Pepys moved his money and valuables into the cellar and carried all his precious goods - his best wine and a good Parmesan cheese - into the garden and buried them.

Unlike the Great Plague, the Great Fire was a blessing. Only six fire-related deaths were reported, and out of the smouldering wilderness a new London arose, a city of wider streets and houses built of brick and stone.

One more marital battle is recorded in the diary - the last and the fiercest, since it was the only one in which he was caught in the act.

Seventeen when Elizabeth engaged her as her companion, Deb Willet was a slight, pretty girl who quickly became one of the family. Pepys, at 34, treated her like a daughter.

All the more shocking for Elizabeth when she came upon her husband fondling Deb's private parts. Weeping and raging at him, she kept him awake at night for 20 nights in a row, until Pepys was made to turn her away, as he glumly confided to the diary - yet he was besotted with the girl and with the urge to deflower her.

Elizabeth calls him "dog and rogue and that I have a rotten heart". But he still finds ways of meeting Deb. Discovering this, Elizabeth flies into a fearsome rage.

She threatens to slit Deb's nose; she strikes Pepys and pulls his hair, and terrorises him with a pair of red-hot tongs - all this while they are having better sex than ever before.

What happens? We shall never know in detail, because in late May 1669 the Diary comes to an end and this brilliant window into Restoration life is suddenly shuttered.

Pepys was convinced that writing in the small shorthand he used for the Diary was gradually sending him blind, and although he lived and prospered for another three decades he never picked up his pen to add to it.

Elizabeth died in November that year. Pepys never remarried, although he left money to a Mary Skinner, his companion during those latter years.

But that he loved Elizabeth there is no doubt. On Christmas Day in 1665 he goes with her to a wedding in church and muses tenderly upon, "the young people so merry one with another; and strange, to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and wife gazing and smiling at them".

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-477584/Revealed-eye-popping-private-life-compulsive-womaniser-Samuel-Pepys.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4598488&forum_id=2#40713362)

She threatens to slit Deb's nose; she strikes Pepys and pulls his hair, and terrorises him with a pair of red-hot tongs - all this while they are having better sex than ever before.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4598488&forum_id=2#40713461)

Sex in Samuel Pepy's Diary

Samuel Pepys’s diary (1660–69) is notorious for its liberal accounts of his sexual liaisons with women across London. Despite his marriage to Elizabeth St Michel (from 1655), Pepys had regular mistresses and engaged in casual affairs with servants, barmaids and companions alongside the wives, daughters and mothers of friends and colleagues. He flirted with, fondled or slept with Mrs Lane, Mrs Martin, Mrs Tooker, Mrs Burrows, Mrs Pennington, Betty Michell and Elizabeth Knepp in their homes, the backrooms of taverns, in carriages, in theatre stalls and even church pews.

The diary suggests that Pepys’s most enduring and regular mistress was Mrs (probably Elizabeth) Bagwell who lived here in Greenwich. She is mentioned almost fifty times, from 1663 onwards, and appears to have still been in Pepys’s life a month before the end of the diary. Mrs Bagwell was the wife of a ship’s carpenter, William Bagwell, who worked at Deptford dockyard. It is possible that William’s job came out of his wife’s liaison with Pepys, who at this time was a Clerk at the Navy Board, and he perhaps encouraged the affair as a way of furthering his career – William eventually rose to become master shipwright at Portsmouth dockyard.

The Private Life of Samuel Pepys

Pepys’s philandering also took place much closer to home. He had an eye for several of the young maids that worked in his household and engaged in a short, but intense, sexual relationship with his wife’s companion Deborah or ‘Deb’ Willet, which began around 1668. On 25 October of that year Pepys’s adultery was spectacularly uncovered when Elizabeth Pepys caught them ‘together’: ‘my wife, coming up suddenly, did find me imbracing the girl … and endeed, I was with my main in her cunny’. Elizabeth was angry and distraught, Deb was dismissed shortly afterwards and Pepys apparently ended the affair.

Although Pepys’s libido seems to have been insatiable, it was not always welcome. His opportunistic and predatory groping of women when the situation arose was resisted, fought-off and spurned by some. On 18 August 1667 Pepys wrote:

‘into St. Dunstan’s Church, where I … stood by a pretty, modest maid, whom I did labour to take by the hand and the body; but she would not, but got further and further from me, and at last I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again’.

Pepys sometimes showed remorse for his behaviour: ‘I went to her and played and talked with her and, God forgive me, did feel her; which I am much ashamed of’, yet he still recorded these intimate sexual experiences in his diary, concealing them with a comical combination of English, Spanish, French and Latin as if embarrassed to commit them to the page: ‘there did what je voudrais avec her, both devante and backward, which is also muy bon plazer’ (3 Jun 1666). Writing them down undoubtedly gave him pleasure and acted as absolution.

The Mistresses of King Charles II

Pepys was not only preoccupied with his own extra-marital affairs but was also thrilled by the salacious gossip about King Charles II's mistresses and goings on in the King’s bedchamber. Charles II quickly gained a reputation for his voracious sexual appetite. His notoriety earned him the nickname, ‘Old Rowley’, after the most virile stallion in the royal stables, and his sexual prowess and impressive anatomy were immortalised in the poetry of infamous rake, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester. Charles did little to crush this reputation – in fact he appears to have encouraged it – and his infidelity was certainly no secret. The King sired at least 12 children with a string of mistresses who resided in his palaces, while others, from actresses to aristocrats, passed through Whitehall via a side entrance on a nightly basis. Pepys was quick to judge Charles’s immorality but saw no hypocrisy in his own behaviour.

The unattainable women that accompanied the King were also objects of Pepys’s lust and are mentioned throughout the diary, perhaps none more than Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine. A clever and shrewd court beauty, she had met Charles before the Restoration and remained his mistress – on and off – until the King’s death in 1685. Barbara exuded sexual confidence and her reputation in the bedroom rivalled that of the King. Pepys records having an erotic dream about her – ‘the best that ever was dreamt’ – where he ‘was admitted to use all the dalliance’ he desired with her (15 August 1665). He also mentions the titillation of stumbling across Barbara’s undergarments in the privy garden at Whitehall: ‘the finest smocks and linnen petticoats … laced with rich lace at the bottom, that ever I saw; and did me good to look upon them’ (21 May 1662).

Marriage to Elizabeth Pepys

Like the King, Pepys was a married man. Despite his infidelity, it would be unfair to say that he didn’t care for his wife, Elizabeth. Both his diary and correspondence make it clear that he loved her very much. He was insanely jealous of any contact she had with other men – unfairly judging her in terms of his own behaviour – and despite rows which sometimes tipped into violence, they had much in common. Yet Elizabeth appears to have had serious gynaecological problems which may have stopped her from enjoying sex and Pepys bemoans her understandable lack of interest in it. Perhaps their sexual incompatibility – and the sheer thrill – was why Pepys therefore sought carnal gratification away from home.

https://www.rmg.co.uk/explore/blog/sex-life-samuel-pepys

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4598488&forum_id=2#40713474)

You can read it online. There are sites that post one diary entry every day.

He’s a funny little bugger.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4598488&forum_id=2#40713949)