Byrd’s earliest known entries, made in 1709 when he was thirty-five, record frequent arguments with Lucy, his wife of three years. In one period of ten days he noted, “My wife was out of humor for nothing… I was ill treated by my wife, at whom I was out of humor… My wife and I disagreed about employing a gardener… My wife and I continued very cool… My wife and I had another foolish quarrel… My wife and I had another scold about mending my shoes…”
Problems continued into 1710: “In the afternoon I played at cards with my wife but we quarreled and she cried… I had a great quarrel with my wife… After we were in bed my wife and I had a terrible quarrel about nothing, so that we both got out of bed and were above an hour before we could persuade one another to go to bed again… About 10 o’clock I had a quarrel with my wife…”
All was not grim: Byrd also recorded warm walks in the garden with Lucy and good times in bed: “I gave my wife a flourish in which she had a great deal of pleasure… I rogered my wife… I gave my wife a short flourish… I gave my wife a flourish.”
Bonus:
[There’s also a bit that follows, too short for its own entry, perhaps, in which Byrd confessed to his diary that he both failed to cheat on his wife and went home to masturbate after having naughty thoughts about another woman in town. SAD.]
He tried to get one young woman to “go with me into my chambers but she would not.” Byrd himself saw his extramarital desires as wrong: “I had wicked inclinations to Mistress Sarah Taylor… Then I returned home and I committed manual uncleanness, for which God forgive me…”
Source:
Olasky, Marvin. “Golden Chains.” Fighting for Liberty and Virtue: Political and Cultural Wars in Eighteenth-Century America. Crossway Books, 1995. 46-7. Print.
Original Source Listed:
March 31-April 9, 1709, in William Byrd II, The Great American Gentleman: William Byrd of Westover in Virginia, ed. Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling (New York: Putnam’s, 1963), 13-15, 59, 73, 78, 103, 109, 119-20, 147-8, 186.
Further Reading:
I love a lot of these entries, but can I request a little more background on the characters be included? Thank you though. Very fun to learn the little idiosyncrasies of the past.