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“Many of the polyglot passages exhibit careful construction with alliteration, rhyme, and even metre. I think I’ve barely scraped the surface of that phenomenon.” – Author Guy de la Bédoyère talks about ‘The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations’

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The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations

“From the first time that Pepys’s diary was transcribed for publication, the graphic sexual content troubled his editors. They felt it would offend public sensibilities.”

WHAT: “The Diary of Samuel Pepys is the most celebrated personal journal in the English language. His candid revelations as he forged his career as a civilian naval official in Restoration London have fascinated readers ever since the first selection was published in 1825.

“The Confessions of Samuel Pepys focuses on Pepys’s controversial private life for a contemporary readership, by charting his varied and complex relationships with women. They included his wife Elizabeth whom he both loved and treated abominably, their domestic servants, the mistresses whom he secretly visited in Westminster and Deptford and other places, a host of other opportunistic encounters, the great ladies of the court whom he ogled, and the actresses and other female friends whose company he delighted in and combined with casual flirting and petting. All these he recounted in shorthand, often disguising the more salacious occasions in his own cryptic Franco-Latino polyglot or with a primitive system of extraneous consonants.

“Most of these controversial entries were excised from 19th century editions, but all are featured here in completely new transcriptions and Pepys’s secret code translated, following fresh forensic examination, from the original shorthand diary. The Confessions of Samuel Pepys also reveals how all previous transcribers of the diary and many of his biographers have deliberately massaged Pepys’s reputation.”

WHO: Guy de la Bédoyère is an historian and author with numerous books to his credit. One of very few authors with the ability to read and use the system of shorthand used by the diarist Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), he edited the letters exchanged by Pepys with the diarist John Evelyn (1620–1706) in Particular Friends: The Correspondence of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, covering their 38-year association and friendship. He has also produced the only edition of Pepys’s correspondence to be published in modern times in The Letters of Samuel Pepys. Guy lives in Britain.

MORE? Here! & Here!

Why ‘The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations’?

It became clear to me as the work progressed that Pepys was using his diary as a private confessional, even though these revelations were interspersed in amongst more routine events and experiences.

Was there a single moment that prompted you to look at these passages again and when did it dawn on you that our existing transcriptions/translations were still pulling their punches and obscuring the full picture?

My focus originally was only to translate the polyglot passages in the published Latham and Matthews edition. I thought this would be simple. However, I soon discovered that more than a few were untranslatable because they contained ‘words’ that aren’t words and weren’t words when Pepys wrote. Some were real words but made no sense. This really foxed me to begin with, and that was when I decided that I must make entirely new transcriptions.

An example is 20 March 1667. Latham and Matthews have ‘so to Mrs Martin’s whom I find in opposante’. The French word opposante means ‘challenger’ or ‘rival’. In the 1600s it was spelled opposant and it is listed in Cotgrave’s French dictionary which Pepys owned. Either way it makes absolutely no sense in this context, and had Latham and Matthews attempted to translate it they would surely have realized that. When I looked at the shorthand, I remembered that the symbol for ‘op’ also means ‘ap’ and that the terminal dot to indicate a closing vowel in this case meant ‘o’. The word correctly reads aposento, which is the Spanish word for ‘lodging’ and which can be found in Richard Percivale’s 1623 Spanish dictionary. Pepys owned a copy and it’s still in the Pepysian Library. Mrs Martin was at her lodgings. Pepys often uses the English word in similar contexts.

I admit I was mildly incredulous at this discovery, given the standing of the Latham and Matthews edition. While they did not make numerous mistakes like this, the discovery called into question their polyglot transcriptions for the first time. I found several other instances. Given that they claimed to have secured the assistance of a Spanish professor, the errors are difficult to explain.

Do you see your work as a contradiction or as a continuation of the Latham edition?

It’s a continuation. Transcribing and understanding Pepys is a cumulative process. Latham and Matthews felt constrained by the standards of their day. It was clear that their reluctance to confront the polyglot had prevented them from applying the same authoritative analysis they had to the rest of the text. In a few cases I felt that the mistakes were so obvious they might have been deliberate, designed to throw readers off the scent.

Pepys never uses Elizabeth’s Christian name in the diary; her portrait was hacked up,
supposedly by a puritanical member of the staff at Hinchingbrooke; Sam destroyed her
letters to him; as we flirt with the idea of cancelling him, is it time to uncancel her?

It would be wonderful if we knew more about Elizabeth, but unfortunately, absolutely nothing of hers survives beyond a letter or two addressed to her from France and now in Oxford. This means it is impossible to know more about her than is already known.

“The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” Could this be said of Pepys in our own moment? Or is it that we have collectively been too shy of the full, frank, and unsettling  Adult content self-portraiture Pepys left behind?

From the first time that Pepys’s diary was transcribed for publication, the graphic sexual content troubled his editors. They felt it would offend public sensibilities. But it is also clear they were uncomfortable about how publishing it would reflect on them. This subsisted right up to and including the Latham and Matthews edition, which was successfully marketed as definitive and unimprovable, carefully occluding the full truth. Pepys had both good and bad sides. He recorded it all, but until now, his own testimony has been modified and falsified in some way.

Was Pepys’ transactional relationship with sex was more or less unusual for the time?Did it become more usual as the morality of the Restoration era set in?

Much of what we know, or think we know, about seventeenth-century manners and standards comes back to Pepys. That means various notions about what constituted ‘normal’ in 1660s London are used to justify Pepys as only being a man of his times. But those notions normally come from Pepys. So, it’s circular. It’s clear that there were other men who behaved like him, but any proper research into the period into books of the period shows that behaviour like his was against the law and condemned. People who believe Pepys was ‘normal’ and his conduct representative of different standards are usually only basing that on Pepys. If you want to read research into late seventeenth-century attitudes towards sexual consent and violence (including the law) as they relate to Pepys’s actions, try Kate Loveman’s free academic article from 2022 in the ‘Historical Journal’ (especially pp. 1226–34).

You argue that Pepys’ behaviour got worse over time. Do you ever think the Diary could have been a contributing factor – the need to provide sensational content even as he aged and as Sam’s probable sterility became more obvious?

Pepys increased his references to his sexual behaviour and found new ways to make them more difficult to read, like the addition of ‘extraneous’ consonants, an idea he evidently derived from a book by his friend John Wilkins, which Pepys owned. I believe the diary provided him with an outlet, a repository for his ‘collection’ of sexual triumphs and misdemeanours. He felt remorse and shame, but appears to have been unable to resist easily the search for more dangerous and risky action.

If you could ask Pepys one question what would it be, and what’s the one thing you would tell Sam just so as to see his reaction?

I think we’d all like to know exactly how ‘Pepys’ was pronounced back then! But seriously, I think I’d like to know if he ever envisaged someone unravelling his polyglot passages and if so, who he imagined that person might be. I have never thought of what I might tell him, since asking him a question would be impossible. What I would like to know is what he looked like in person. The 1666 painting was posed, in costume, and he wears a wig. He did not look like that in everyday life, and he was also very short.

Do you think there is anything else “new” still hiding in plain sight in The Diary?

I think one would have to say that is always a possibility. Something I realized, which appears to have escaped observation and comment until my book, is that many of the polyglot passages exhibit careful construction with alliteration, rhyme, and even metre. I think I’ve barely scraped the surface of that phenomenon. But the truth is that even the polyglot wasn’t really hiding. It’s all there – all it needed was to be read correctly and translated, using Pepys’s English elsewhere and the dictionaries he owned as guides. Correct readings and the translations are usually obvious.

What are you currently working on?

I’m 68 and I’ve produced nine full-length books since 2014 on top of those that went before. Confessions is the result of over two decades of work learning the shorthand on top of all that. It’s now time sit back and I have no plans to produce anything else for a while. We travel a great deal and that’s the priority. Indeed, I’m answering these questions in Augusta, Western Australia, where the idea for Confessions came to me two years ago and where the book was completed in 2025. However, I will be lecturing on Confessions at the Gloucester Spring Festival on 18 April and at Pepys’s church of St Olave’s in London on 28 May 2026.

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“It’s too easy to depict the women as the only victims of the ambition and cruelty that pervaded the dynasty.” – Author Guy de la Bédoyère discusses Domina

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“Who could resist the chance to take time out at Tivoli? It’s the Roman world in miniature…”

Notorious. What other word can encompass the lives led by the women of the Julio-Claudian dynasty? As Rome morphed from a Republic to an Empire under the emperors Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero their wives and mothers took centre stage. With varying profiles of courage, ruthlessness, and skill women such as Livia, Octavia, as well as the elder and younger Agrippina, emerged as the true backbone of the dynasty. Their stories are familiar from the pages of I, Claudius. The various and nefarious paths each woman took to power are chronicled in Guy de la Bedoyere’s Domina, a behind-the-scenes tour of the machinery and chicanery that really made the Roman Empire tick.

Guy de la Bédoyère was born in Wimbledon and studied Archaeology and History at the Universities of Durham and London. Starting in 1998 he appeared regularly on the Channel 4 archaeological television series Time Team. That same year he became a freelance writer and broadcaster. In addition to his many respected studies of the Romans, especially during their occupation of Britain, Guy has published books chronicling the lives and friendship of the diarists Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn.

Domina: The Women Who Made Imperial Rome was published in September 2018 by Yale University Press. To find out more click here.

Why ‘Domina’?

Domina was the formal name for the female head of a household. Indeed, it comes from the word for a house, domus. The senior women of the imperial family were addressed by that title though some were also called Augusta if they had been given that title (not all empresses were). Domina covers all of them.

Roman women ran the household, many of which were staffed by people held as slaves. Why are we still surprised that Roman women knew how to successfully manage, manipulate, and tyrannise?

Roman history is completely dominated by accounts of men and written in terms of their lives or careers. There are no ‘lives’ of the empresses, for example. Roman women, especially powerful ones, were subjected to a great deal of stereotyping by Roman historians who either depicted them as women of great honour and purity, or as duplicitous and immoral schemers. These were rhetorical devices that were used by them to depict their husbands and sons in a good or bad light. Extrapolating the truth is very difficult and perhaps now impossible.

What is clear is that while women were able to operate outside the ‘system’ because they held no office, they were also restricted by having to work through men. There is no doubt that this led to a certain amount of subterfuge and lateral approaches. Those who were most successful were also the most vulnerable and liable to terrible retribution. But it is important to understand that the men of the dynasty suffered equally hideous fates too. It’s too easy to depict the women as the only victims of the ambition and cruelty that pervaded the dynasty.

The book details many of the objects created to enhance the image of the Julio/Claudian dynasty. If you could pocket one, even if you needed a very big pocket, which would it be?

I already have it. It’s the silver cistophorus coin of Claudius and Agrippina the Younger made at Ephesus in 51. There they are with their heads beside each other in the manner of joint rulers. It was unprecedented and never repeated. It shows how far she had managed to get. I was so fascinated by the coin I purchased it. It inspired the book.

Did Agrippina the Elder live up to the hype? Would she have made a good Augusta?

Agrippina the Elder was dealt a terrible blow when her husband Germanicus died in 19 in Syria. That destroyed any chance she had of becoming an empress unless she had been allowed long enough to survive into her son Caligula’s reign. Again, what is the truth? Tacitus was keen to depict her as a victim and as a woman of great dignity. It would seem that in some respects he may have been right. Germanicus and she would have been celebrated by the mob had he been made emperor. But for all we know he could have descended into despotism like their son Caligula. Who knows what Agrippina would have turned into?

Might the stupendous fabric of the Roman system have resisted yielding to the pressure of its own weight for longer if women had been woven in directly and able to exercise power in their own right, rather than through an occasionally pliant male?

Again, this is completely speculative and with so many factors involved it is impossible to say. The rise of the Severan women in the third century and then certain women like Galla Placidia in the fifth show that under certain circumstances women could gain even more remarkable power than the Julio-Claudians. But the Roman world was a militarized superstate and it depended on military leadership to survive. The women would have had to be prepared to lead armies. Agrippina the Elder showed that some women came close to being able to do that.

I’m guessing there’s a copy of ‘I, Claudius’ somewhere on your bookshelves. Are there any contemporary novelists (who use ancient Rome as their setting) there too? Who do you esteem and recommend?

In all honesty, I do not read much fiction and especially not ancient fiction. The real story is quite compelling enough. In fact, had a novelist invented the Julio-Claudians and their story he or she would have been laughed at for writing something so implausible. The little ancient fiction I have read usually contains the odd quite significant error that makes them totally implausible.

You’ve got a one-way ticket to the Roman Empire for you and your family. When and where are you taking them?

Funnily enough, not Rome. It would either be Pompeii and the chance to see the faces of the people who lived in the houses I have visited there, and to smell the place, or it would be Lullingstone Villa in Kent. I know Lullingstone very well. The setting is little changed and I’d love to see the original house as a living home with the people who lived there.

You’ve got a solo return ticket for either a year on campaign with Julius Caesar; a fortnight with Hadrian and his entourage at Tivoli; or a day in the Library of Alexandria. Which do you choose?

Who could resist the chance to take time out at Tivoli? It’s the Roman world in miniature with fabulous buildings and doubtless visited by interesting people, but most especially because of Hadrian. I’d like to meet him. He’d have been mesmerized by tales of the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution.

Will there ever be anything as good as Time Team on telly again?

Was it really that good? There’s a lot of rose-tinted spectacles going on with Time Team. It was great fun to be on and a privilege to participate in. I saw some remarkable places and met some very special people. But it was around for too long. The experience became repetitive and began to turn into a dog-day afternoon, especially on dud sites where we scrabbled around for a story. In fact making TV programmes is generally very boring and I got very bored of it.

On the whole I avoid TV like the plague now. The thought of hanging round all day on set is too ghastly to contemplate. Time Team was very expensive to make and those days are long gone. There will certainly be nothing like it again, at least not in our time, because the budgets do not exist to make shows like that. As for ‘as good’ I’m sure that as time moves on later generations will find plenty in their own lives that is just as good, even if it’s completely different. All things must pass. And Time Team is past – forever.

What’s next for you?

Perhaps I should think about selling one of my 1970s Honda motorcycles before I do anything else! I’ve been writing books for over thirty years. That is what I mainly do now, but with an increasing sense of uncertainty about where books and publishing are headed. I have two books on the boil at the moment, one a survey book of life in the Roman army from original sources, and one about how the Romans became rich and what it did to them.

I have lecture tours in Australia and New Zealand in 2020. After that, who knows? I travel a lot with my wife and we are enjoying seeing our granddaughters grow up. I’m 61 now and keen to make the most of being fit and well and having the time to do things I haven’t an opportunity to do before. Mick Aston was only five years older than I am now when he died. Robin Bush, Time Team’s archivist, was only six years older than I am now when he went. Tragedies like that are a lesson not to sit around waiting for the ‘right time’ to do something. As Mr Micawber said in David Copperfield, ‘something will turn up’.

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