{"id":85702,"date":"2015-05-13T14:19:37","date_gmt":"2015-05-13T18:19:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=85702"},"modified":"2015-05-13T14:19:37","modified_gmt":"2015-05-13T18:19:37","slug":"roger-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/05\/13\/roger-that\/","title":{"rendered":"Roger That"},"content":{"rendered":"

The complicated sex drive of William Byrd II.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"William_Byrd_II\"<\/a>

Hans Hysing\u2019s portrait of Byrd, ca. 1724.<\/p><\/div>\n

William Byrd II was a colonial Virginia gentleman who, on occasion, was no gentleman at all. Writing about himself in the third person, in 1723, he bemoaned \u201cthe combustible manner in his constitution\u201d; he cursed the innate passions that \u201cbroke out upon him before his beard,\u201d making him a \u201cswain\u201d before all women. Byrd\u2019s carnal drive underscored the eyebrow-raising vigor of his lust. On a trip to London in 1719, according to his secret diary, he \u201crogered\u201d\u2014an easy enough euphemism\u2014no fewer than six women in nine days. Of one woman, he (proudly) recorded having \u201crogered her three times\u201d in a single evening. That same night, Byrd, aged forty-four, noted with a tinge of sadness that he had \u201cneglected my prayers.\u201d<\/p>\n

When he wasn\u2019t on a whore-chasing jag in the metropolis, Byrd was back on his Virginia estate, called Westover, with his wife, Lucy. At Westover, his sexual proclivities certainly raged with similar, singleminded intensity\u2014he wrote in his diary about having urgent sex with Lucy on a billiards table\u2014but it was also tempered by a healthy desire to achieve mutual pleasure with her. He was just as inclined to \u201cgive my wife a flourish\u201d\u2014bring her to orgasm\u2014as he was to \u201croger\u201d her, a semantic shift suggesting that Lucy\u2019s response to their sexual union mattered as much to Byrd as his own physical gratification. On April 30, 1711, he noted in his diary that although he discovered his wife in a \u201cmelancholy\u201d mood, the \u201cpowerful flourish\u201d he delivered filled her with \u201cgreat ecstasy and refreshment.\u201d He recalled one morning during which \u201cI lay in my wife\u2019s arms\u201d while, during another, his wife \u201ckept me so long in bed\u201d that \u201cI rogered her.\u201d That evening he got around to saying his prayers\u2014before rogering her again. The man could be a virtuous, even tender, Tidewater lover when he wasn\u2019t being a London sleazebag. <\/p>\n

If Byrd\u2019s sexual persona shifted between id explosion and conjugal control\u2014between hooking up and making love\u2014that tension was an apt reflection of the larger struggle faced by most eighteenth-century English gentlemen. In England, and even more so in Virginia, being a gentleman was coming to mean more than being a member of the lucky sperm club.\u00a0Hereditary wealth and family title no longer carried the weight they once did. A gentleman was now expected to behave. Specifically, he was expected to have cool mastery over his subordinates\u2014wives, children, citizens, employees, serfs, and slaves\u2014and achieving that mastery required mastering oneself.<\/p>\n

The inspirational text behind this anxiety-inducing expectation was John Locke\u2019s Some Thoughts Concerning Education<\/em>, published in 1693, embraced by genteel society, and placed prominently in Byrd\u2019s library. In it, Locke captured the essence of this relatively new social obligation when he wrote, \u201cthe Principle of all Vertue and Excellency lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own desires.\u201d<\/p>\n

Byrd must have shuddered at the prospect. Still, he took it seriously enough to enter the sentiment into his commonplace book (another accouterment of gentility), writing: \u201cIf I am incontinent, and lye with every Woman I meet, I use those women as if they belonged to me when they really do not, and suffer my Self to be governd by appetite like a Brute, & not by Reason like a man, and is in effect Saying that I am a brute.\u201d This recorded aspiration to avoid \u201cincontinence\u201d momentarily placed Byrd in the ranks of George Washington\u2014whose 110 \u201cRules of Civility\u201d shaped his public demeanor\u2014and Benjamin Franklin\u2014who, although more of a cad than Washington, made a good faith effort to live according to his \u201c13 virtues of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

But at the end of the day, Byrd\u2019s quest for decency\u2014a kind of self-directed pep talk to get his shit together\u2014proved no match for that \u201ccombustible manner\u201d of his.\u00a0Watching Byrd try to be virtuous is like watching a bull trying to behave in a china shop. He assumed so many Franklinesque postures of disciplined gentility\u2014ritualistically praying, exercising (\u201cI danced my dance\u201d), eating with moderation, and reading Greek\u2014that you\u2019d think he\u2019d have at least a slim chance at the mannered decency that would propel younger Virginians (Madison, Jefferson, Washington) into public prominence. But the halo of history would never hover over Byrd\u2019s troubled brow.\u00a0Though he\u2019d eventually enjoy moments of public significance\u2014elected to the House of Burgesses, member of the Royal Society, lead surveyor of the North Carolina\/Virginia boundary\u2014his place in the pantheon of colonial greatness ultimately yielded to zipper issues.<\/p>\n

Byrd\u2019s diary is a rap sheet of absolutely galling sexual misconduct. He wrote about having \u201ccommitted uncleanness with the maid because the mistress was not at home.\u201d Offensive enough. But then: \u201cwhen the mistress came, I rogered her.\u201d He referred to \u201ca dark angel\u201d\u2014likely a slave\u2014who \u201cstruggled just enough to make her Admirer more eager.\u201d Admitting to his \u201cwicked inclinations\u201d toward the wives of other men, Byrd, on at least one occasion, overstepped the bounds of his inclinations, kissing a woman \u201con the bed until she was angry and my wife was also uneasy about it, and cried as soon as the company was gone.\u201d It happens so often it almost becomes boring.<\/p>\n

History has deservedly fumed at William Byrd. But if there\u2019s a silver lining to his effusion of misogyny, it\u2019s the fact that the only thing Byrd did more actively than rogering a transatlantic array of women was to keep the presence of mind to write about it. His prose, while thematically troublesome, is, in terms of its frankness, historically unimpeachable. Byrd\u2019s emotional generosity lends exclusive insight into the psyche of a colonial gentleman struggling to mold libertine impulses into Lockean expectations. Every gentleman went through it. Those who conquered the task carefully cultivated themselves for a golden posterity. Those who failed disappeared into history\u2019s dustbin.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But not Byrd. He failed, and he stuck around. And, with confessional honesty, he had the perverse decency to let us know exactly why.<\/p>\n

James McWilliams is a writer living in Austin, Texas. He teaches at Texas State University and is the author of <\/em>Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The complicated sex drive of William Byrd II. William Byrd II was a colonial Virginia gentleman who, on occasion, was no gentleman at all. Writing about himself in the third person, in 1723, he bemoaned \u201cthe combustible manner in his constitution\u201d; he cursed the innate passions that \u201cbroke out upon him before his beard,\u201d making […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":732,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7555],"tags":[18100,7682,18103,2861,1050,14988,18101,13593,18102,179,6737],"class_list":["post-85702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-history","tag-colonies","tag-diaries","tag-flourishes","tag-history","tag-london","tag-misogyny","tag-plantations","tag-prostitutes","tag-rogering","tag-sex","tag-virginia"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Historically Complicated Sex Drive of William Byrd II<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Virginian\u2019s diaries are engagingly frank about sex and masculinity in seventeenth-century America.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/05\/13\/roger-that\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Roger That by James McWilliams\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"May 13, 2015 \u2013 The complicated sex drive of William Byrd II. 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