The Bagwells

Mrs Bagwell is Samuel Pepys’s most mentioned mistress. She is mentioned almost fifty times, from 1663 onwards, and even beyond the Bagwells’s brush with the plague, she appears to have still been in Pepys’s life a month before the end of the diary. In this novel I have called Mrs Bagwell ‘Bess’, the diminutive of Elizabeth, though her first name is never mentioned in Pepys’s diary. No marriage record has yet been traced which positively identifies her maiden name, but William Bagwell’s will of 1697 refers to ‘Elizabeth my well-beloved wife’. Marriage records for the Interregnum period often didn’t survive and the Bagwells’s marriage could have taken place at that time. From baptismal records, it appears they had no natural children.

Elizabeth Bagwell died in 1702 and was buried at St Nicholas, Deptford on 14th August. Her occupation then was given as Gentlewoman, so it appears they did eventually become a prosperous household, and Mrs Bagwell’s liaison with Samuel Pepys, as recorded in his diary, seems to have been instrumental in her husband’s promotion. William Bagwell held prominent shipbuilding positions in Chatham and also in Bristol, Plymouth and Portsmouth, becoming a Master Shipwright in 1696. William also fought on board the Providence in the Four Days Battle against the Dutch in 1666.

A novel must, for the benefit of the reader, be limited in time, but surprisingly, Pepys’s letters when he was Secretary of the Admiralty show that Mrs Bagwell was still soliciting his advice about her husband almost twenty years later. So some consensus of agreement must have been reached between all parties for their mutual benefit.

Following this story, the affair between Mrs Bagwell and Pepys continues. In my imagination, Bess and Will would have gone to Portsmouth for a while to recuperate before returning to Flaggon Row. Pepys states that the couple went to Portsmouth but not why.

On 13^th June 1666 Pepys says: ‘returned and walked to Mrs. Bagwell’s house, and there (it being by this time pretty dark and past ten o’clock) went into her house and did what I would. But I was not a little fearfull of what she told me but now, which is, that her servant was dead of the plague, that her coming to me yesterday was the first day of her coming forth, and that she had new whitened the house all below stairs, but that above stairs they are not so fit for me to go up to, they being not so.’

As for the rest of the Bagwells, Owen Bagwell, William’s father, was foreman at the Deptford Shipyard. I took his character from mentions of him in The Secret History of His Majesty’s Ship-Yard, where he seems to have been most unpopular! Although William had a younger brother John (or Jack), the life I have given him is purely fictitious, as are his children.