A Very Pepysian Christmas

by Marlo Avidon (@marloavidon.bsky.social)

In seventeenth-century England, Christmas services could be a drawn-out affair. For Restoration diarist Samuel Pepys, the lengthy 1667 Christmas Eve service in the Royal Chapel proved especially tedious; his attempt to combat his boredom led to one of the most shocking passages of his Diary. 

After arriving at the Royal Chapel and pushing his way to the front railing, Pepys patiently waited amongst the masses to catch a glimpse of the Queen and her Ladies. He was shocked by ‘what an odde thing it was for me to be in a crowd of people, here a footman, there a beggar, here a fine lady, there a zealous poor papist, and here a Protestant, two or three together, come to see the shew.’^[1]

However, the Royal Christmas Eve service ran from 9pm to 2am, and the diarist’s enthusiasm inevitably began to wane. In true Pepysian fashion, he passed the time in a rather curious fashion. Masked in a combination of Spanish, Latin, English, and other languages, Pepys recalled that ‘I did make myself to do la cosa by mere imagination… which I never did before — and God forgive me for it, it being in the chapel.’^[2] Though written in code, Pepys’s regular use of ‘la cosa’ to describe his sexual encounters and his self-proclaimed guilt at undertaking the activity in chapel make it explicitly clear what he achieved through the power of imagination.^[3]

Pepys’s exhibitionism was so scandalous, that when the Diary was first published in the nineteenth-century, the editors saw fit to excise the particular passage alongside several references to his immoral activities. Thankfully for historians, newer editions of the Diary have reintegrated Pepys’s candid commentary fully uncensored, making it an invaluable source for any study of early modern gender and sexuality.^[4] While Pepys might have been ashamed of his behaviour in the Royal Chapel, four centuries later it serves as a surprising anecdote illustrating the life of one of the Restoration’s most colourful characters and how he chose to spend the holidays. 

Cover Image Credit: The Chapel Royal, Hampton Court Palace, photograph, accessed via https://www.chapelroyalhamptoncourt.org.uk/architecture/

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^[1] Samuel Pepys, Diary, ’24 December 1667’, accessed via https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1667/12/24/#annotations

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] On Pepys’s sexuality, see Joseph R. Roach, “Celebrity erotics: Pepys, performance, and painted ladies.” The Yale journal of criticism 16, no. 1 (2003): 211-230.

^[4] Anna Clark, “Diaries as a Source for the History of Sexuality: Samuel Pepys, Anne Lister, and Roger Casement.” In Sources and Methods in the History of Sexuality, pp. 165-174. Routledge.