Roaring Girls

Before her grilling in the Bishop’s court was over, Mary’s accusers succumbed to the age-old assumption that her cross-dressing must go hand in hand with whoredom, and so there came the inevitable charge that she had also been ‘dishonest of her body’ as a prostitute and ‘drawn other women to lewdness’ as a bawd (or madam). If the diary is to be believed, Mary did indeed have a sideline as a bawd, though even then, she managed to defy convention – as well as procuring women for men, she apparently also found ‘the sprucest fellows the town afforded’ for the pleasure of ‘great women’, and in one anecdote even convinces these fellows to pay maintenance for their illegitimate children.[44] The real Mary Frith, however, ‘absolutely denied that she was chargeable with either of these imputations’, and aside from the diary anecdote, there’s no evidence to suggest she was lying. Nonetheless, the Bishop of London ‘thought fit to remand her to Bridewell … until he might further examine the truth of the misdemeanours enforced against her without laying as yet any further censure upon her’.[45] The authorities didn’t know what to do with Mary Frith, so for want of any other ideas, they bundled her off to prison for the third time.

In time, the Bishop’s court hit upon what it thought would be the perfect punishment for Mary: she must do public penance in a white sheet at St Paul’s Cross – a purification ritual that would act as a second baptism and openly humiliate her, too.[46] Public shaming was an integral part of retributive law enforcement before and beyond the seventeenth century – the stocks, the pillory, the drunkard’s cloak, skimmingtons and carting were among the standard punishments for errant citizens[47] – and though such draconian tactics may have worked on some, they seem to have yet again abjectly failed to ‘correct’ Mary. The prolific letter-writer John Chamberlain witnessed the scene at St Paul’s Cross that day in February 1612 when Mary performed her penance, and he wasn’t fooled by her act of contrition. With little sympathy for this ‘notorious baggage’, he wrote to a friend the following week that ‘she wept bitterly and seemed very penitent, but it is since doubted she was maudlin drunk, being discovered to have tippled three quarts of sack [wine] before she came to her penance.’ Her bleary-eyed speech of mock-repentance went unrecorded, but Chamberlain noted with some amusement that ‘she had the daintiest preacher or ghostly father that ever I saw’, who delivered his sermon so ‘extreme badly’ that most of the audience didn’t bother to hear the end of it. Those who did, he said, ‘tarried rather to hear Mall Cut-purse than him’.[48]

The event was nothing short of comical. And in the diary’s account of the episode, Mary’s defiance in the face of it is everything you would hope for: ‘They might as soon have shamed a black dog as me with any kind of such punishment,’ she says bullishly. For half a penny, she crows, she would have travelled to all the market towns in England in her white sheet, wearing it as a badge of honour rather than a cloak of shame.

Unrepentant, undeterred, unchanged, the Mary of the diary relishes every ripple of disruption she causes, and ensures she has the last laugh on the crowd who come to watch her: ‘without any regard to the sacredness of the place’ and ‘in revenge of this disgrace intended me’, her gaggle of trusty fingersmiths ‘spoiled a good many clothes by cutting off part of their cloaks and gowns and sending them home as naked behind as an ape’s tail’. We can only hope it’s true: that all those who came to gloat over Mary that day left St Paul’s with their bare arses exposed, even more humiliated than her.

THE QUEEN REGENT OF MISRULE

Unrepentant she may have been, but Mary Frith was not stupid. This latest brush with the law – her most serious and unsettling yet – convinced her that if she were to continue her Fagin-like career as a thief and fence, she would have to do so with a little more care and stealth. Her dalliance with the entertainment world meant that to the playwrights, players and pickpockets of London she was now a rebel heroine and a fascinating curio, but in the eyes of the law, she was a menace who was drawing too much attention to herself. In order to navigate such dangerous waters, Mary would have to negotiate this contradiction and twist her unusual position to her advantage.

Far from being the symbol of anarchy she represented to the outside world, within the confines of her netherworld, Mary prided herself on creating order out of chaos. According to the diary, she ran a tight ship and whipped the criminals of London into shape with ‘rules and orders’ to create ‘a perfect regulation of this thievish mystery’. It soon occurred to her that she could use these managerial skills to confer upon herself a degree of much-needed respectability, and so, by 1614, two years after her run-in with the Bishop of London, she was calling upon her contacts to set up her own house as a brokery – a kind of ‘lost property office’, or ‘insurance office’, where victims of theft might reclaim their stolen goods (for a price). It was a new career move that earned her another new nickname, this time ‘Mary Thrift’.

Her strategy was simple: to stay organised and in control, and to keep her house clear of ‘any unseemly or lewd action’. In doing so, she could keep a low profile and her hands ostensibly clean, so that to the casual observer she was ‘free from all manner of suspection’. With no effective law against receiving stolen goods, and no organised police force, constables would turn a blind eye to her business dealings if, in return, they could mine her network of connections in London’s criminal underbelly. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement that allowed Mary to straddle the fine line between the legal and illegal, and to assume a highly unusual position in London society. By protecting thieves who made it worth her while, but also helping the victims of theft to recover their valuables, she made herself an invaluable asset to both sides of the law.

The modus operandi of Mary’s new business is evident in her dealings with a gentleman called Henry Killigrew, who in 1621 was robbed by a prostitute while he was still buttoning up his breeches. His first port of call was Mary Frith’s office, for he had ‘heard how [by her] means many that had had their purses cut or goods stolen’ had managed to recover them. From a description of where this woman lived, Mary identified the thief as Margaret Dell, who was promptly arrested by the local constable of the parish of St Bride’s and taken to Mary to be cross-examined. The alleged pickpocket’s husband, Richard Dell, soon followed, accusing Mary of being ‘a notorious infamous person’ who was ‘well known & acquainted with all thieves & cutpurses’. He demanded that his wife be released from her clutches, but Mary had the perfect retort. She had a legitimate commission from the authorities to examine criminal suspects and advised Dell to either leave her office or receive a beating. After the Dells lodged an official complaint in the Court of Star Chamber in May of that year for wrongful imprisonment, Mary found herself in court yet again on 4 June, and, as ever, she was unyielding in her defence. She had apprehended the thief fair and square, and if the Dells gave her ‘any ill words or language’ again, she warned, she would give as good as she got – ‘in some tart or angry manner’.[49] Clearly, Mary was a woman of unusual influence, and was not one to cross.

This influence extended even to matters of life and death. Mary was careful to cultivate close ties with various lords of the court, which granted her enough authority to either save criminals from the gallows or condemn them as she deemed fit. Consequently, according to the diary, the thieves of London held her in such thrall, subjected as they were by ‘love and fear’, that they metaphorically crowned her the ‘Queen Regent of Misrule’. For a woman of low birth, little means and an eccentric demeanour, this was an impressive rise to power, though it seems Mary had long been a queen in the making. Her role as sovereign of the London underworld was acknowledged in The Roaring Girl several years before, in a speech that shows just how much sway she held over the ne’er-do-wells of the city even before she set up her brokery. ‘You do not know the benefits I bring with me,’ says Moll:

No cheat dares work upon you, with thumb or knife,

While you’ve a roaring girl to your son’s wife. [50]

In the years that followed, operating as a licensed fence and an intermediary between the thieves, the victims and the authorities, Mary would become – and remain – the undisputed ring-mistress of London’s shady demi-monde.

To complement her new reputation as a figure of some standing, albeit in the murky hinterlands, Mary continued to feed her legend as a delightful peculiarity. Several of the diary’s claims glory in her nonconformity, often concurring with other versions of her, and sometimes even outdoing them in eccentricity. The diary makes the specious claim, for example, that she was the first woman in England ever to smoke tobacco, a habit she took to with gusto, she says, ‘because of its affected singularity’, unwittingly sparking a trend in the process. In fact, women were known to have taken up this expensive new fad by 1590, when Mary was still a child.[51] That she swore like a trooper and ‘loved good liquor, especially good wine’ we know to be true, and her prowess with a sword is entirely plausible. When she boasts that she could ‘use a backsword as well as the best of them’ and once challenged an expert swordsman to a fight ‘whom I so soundly beat that he was forced to lay it down and confess me the conqueror’, she appears to be the very same Moll Cutpurse who wields one to such effect in The Roaring Girl.

Elsewhere, the diary unashamedly plays up the ‘mad spinster’ image that would have been almost as familiar to seventeenth-century readers as it is to us. Apparently, Mary’s house was a cacophonous zoo, overrun with parrots, bulldogs, baboons, apes, squirrels and parrots, while the walls were hung all over with looking glasses, ‘so that I could see my sweet self all over in any part of my rooms’. (Given the frequent assertion that Mary was no looker, one can only presume this is a snide little joke on the part of the authors.) On the flip side, she is also portrayed as a good sport: self-mocking, unconcerned, even delighted at her lack of personal charms. Indeed, according to the diary, she lacked every feminine accomplishment on the list (her singing voice, too, ‘was the untuneablest thing that ever was heard’), and she couldn’t care tuppence.

Mary’s oddball status was almost certainly exaggerated for comic effect, but her history of daring performances in drag is a matter of historical fact, which lends one of the more improbable capers in the diary an air of plausibility it might not otherwise have. The story goes that Mary accepted a bet from her ‘fellow humorist Banks the Vintner’,[52] who wagered her twenty pounds to ‘ride from Charing Cross to Shoreditch astraddle on horseback in breeches and doublet, boots and spurs, all like a man’ – a showy stunt that could easily land her back in Bridewell. Mary was undaunted – ‘I was for all such sudden whims,’ she says, and in typical fashion she upped the stakes rather than backing away. To make herself as conspicuous as possible, she decided to carry a banner and a trumpet, too, and set out on the appointed day as resplendent as a cavalry officer.

She made it to Bishopsgate without drawing suspicion, but then a ‘plaguey orange wench’ yelled out ‘Moll Cutpurse on horseback!’ and set the crowds ‘hooting and hallowing as if they had been mad’. ‘Come down, you shame of women, or we will pull you down,’ they bawled, forcing Mary to take fright and seek refuge in a friend’s victualling house. The mob only followed, chuckling one minute, cursing her the next, unsure as ever whether they were enjoying her crackpot capers or heartily disapproved. When a wedding party momentarily distracted them, however, Mary slipped away, made it to Shoreditch, won her wager and breathed a sigh of relief that she was safely ‘out of danger’. It’s no wonder she was nervous – it could have gone much worse – but her imagination was caught up in the pride and pomp of her whimsical adventure: ‘In my own thoughts …’, she says (in a literary allusion unlikely to have come from her), ‘I was squiress to Dulcinea of Toboso, the most incomparably beloved lady of Don Quixote.’

FEME COVERT

The Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith roams freely through Mary’s career as a thief, broker and professional provocateur, but there is one significant event in her personal life that it entirely neglects to mention. On 23 March 1614, when she was still in her late twenties and just starting out as a fence, Mary Frith did something wholly unexpected: she went to St Saviour’s Church in Southwark (now Southwark Cathedral) and married a man named Lewknor Markham.[53]

This staggering omission isn’t the first or only clanger to muddy the integrity of Mary’s ‘diary’ – The Roaring Girl is also not mentioned and there is a thorny discrepancy over her age[54] – yet in this instance, it’s easy to see why it might have been left out. For a woman who defied convention and resisted authority at every turn, and who, according to legend, was resolutely single and had no interest in men, marriage seems a particularly odd choice. This inconvenient detail simply didn’t fit with the image of Mary that was being cultivated in the public consciousness; it disproved all the theories that she was an unnatural man-woman whom no man would ever marry, or a scorned woman who spurned all men, as the diary variously portrays her.[55] It didn’t fit, either, with the Moll of the play, who was ‘too headstrong to obey’ a husband and had ‘no humour to marry’.[56] For here she was, conforming to all the social conventions and acting like a perfectly ‘normal’ woman.

The records shed only a glimmer of light on the real story behind Mary’s marriage to Markham, but it’s enough to reveal that this was almost certainly no sweeping love story and that, as we might expect, Mary was not being quite the conventional good woman here that she at first appears to be.

On the contrary, Mary went out of her way to confuse the world about her marital status. Her primary motive for marriage seems to have been to manipulate the gender discriminations of coverture under English Common Law to maximise her freedoms, so that she could run her own business as a single woman, while at the same time claiming the legal immunity of a married one. Coverture laws decreed that when a man and woman married, they quite literally became one. In legal terms, at that moment a woman became a feme covert and her legal existence as an individual was nullified: she could no longer hold her own property or money, nor could she sign contracts or be sued in her own right. If she remained single, however, she retained these scraps of legal rights and was referred to as feme sole. Rather than submit to the disempowerment that these laws entailed for women, Mary decided to play the law for a fool. She became an expert at exploiting its loopholes, by posing as two different women – Mary Frith, feme sole, and Mary Markham, feme covert – as and when it suited her.

As a newly established businesswoman, for example, it suited her to be single. That same year, 1614, was when Mary set up her lucrative and semi-respectable ‘lost property office’, and for that she needed her legal independence. In order to have her cake and eat it, Mary seems to have negotiated a marriage settlement of convenience with Lewknor Markham, which allowed her to run her own business and retain her own earnings, despite being married, as if she were Mary Frith, feme sole.[57]

As a woman who flirted with crime on a daily basis, however, being Mrs Markham, feme covert and legal non-entity, could be extremely helpful. It meant that in the various lawsuits she was frequently embroiled in, she was virtually invincible, because the law would always assume that a married woman was acting under her husband’s direction. Ten years later, in 1624, for example, when a hatmaker named Richard Pooke sued Mary Frith, spinster and feme sole, for some expensive beaver hats she had bought eight years before and still not fully paid for, her chief defence was that she could not be sued as a feme sole, because she was Mary Markham, a married woman, who was not legally liable for her own misconduct and therefore could not be sued. Pooke had been warned that Mary had used this trick before to overturn several previous lawsuits, but he fell into the trap anyway and, sure enough, Mary triumphed. It came out in this same trial that she and Markham had not lived together for years, and possibly never had, supporting the theory that, far from being a great romance, this was a marriage of convenience – and clever opportunism – on Mary’s part.[58]

BEDLAM

There follows a gap of some 20 years before the records mention Mary Frith again, and when they do, it’s to reveal another dramatic development that the diary fails to mention. Although perhaps this omission isn’t so surprising either, because by the summer of 1644, when she was approaching 60, Mary was an inmate of the madhouse. On 21 June that year, the governors of Bridewell Prison and Hospital decreed that she, along with several others, ‘be delivered & discharged out of the Hospital of Bethlem’, as they were now ‘recovered of their former senses’ and well enough to be looked after elsewhere.[59] Bethlem Hospital, or Bethlehem, commonly known as Bedlam, was the notorious asylum then situated in Bishopsgate, where London’s pauper lunatics were sent to be ‘cured’ of their madness.

The record gives no further details of why Mary was committed, and although there were doubtless plenty of her contemporaries who thought her mad, there was more than one way to end up in Bedlam. London’s teeming, poverty-stricken slums, for example, were considered dire enough to send the city’s inhabitants mad if they weren’t already; the scholar Robert Burton, who had himself suffered from depression, observed in 1621 that England was a country that ‘must needs be discontent’, for it ‘hath a sick body’.[60] But Mary Frith had always thrived in this world before. She was a formidable businesswoman, a shrewd criminal, a hardy Banksider. Now, as old age encroached, had a lifetime of hard drinking, tough talking and wild living taken its toll on her mental health? Had the stress of keeping up multiple personalities and swatting away run-ins with the law pushed her to the brink?

The very notion of the robust Mary Frith having any kind of breakdown seems so incongruous that some have argued she may not have been mad at all but shamming madness to escape the war.[61] After all, in 1644, when Mary was released, England was a country riven by political division. The Civil War had been rolling on for two years already: divine-rights monarchy was facing an existential threat; King Charles I was at war with his own parliament, and up and down the land people were taking sides and falling into factions: Royalists versus Republicans. English society was floundering – any sane person might wish to avoid the unrest – and, performer as she was, Mary might have found it easy to play mad when she had to. But we shouldn’t be so quick to assume. Even the most extrovert characters can be laughing in the dark, and the truth was that in Mary’s day and beyond, women could find themselves carted off to lunatic asylums with alarming ease, thanks to the dangerously common belief that they were physiologically predisposed to insanity.

Doctors’ casebooks across the country testified to the scores of women in Britain who were apparently ‘mad’. Somerset physician John Westover, for example, treated three times as many women for mental disorders than men. Perhaps it was indicative of their restrictive, stultifying, frustrating existence, but the majority of those women were diagnosed with ‘melancholy’; the others ‘hysteria’ or ‘distraction’.[62]

The fault in these diagnoses lay with the archaic ideas that seventeenth-century medicine had inherited from Hippocrates and Galen, who had spouted the toxic theory that a woman’s body was fundamentally unstable, prone to debilitating diseases of the mind and at the mercy of overwrought emotions. The cold, wet elements that supposedly comprised her body were believed to soften and weaken her brain, while her ‘wandering womb’, which roved around her body causing all kinds of havoc, would drive her to hysteria the moment it reached her head. Nervousness, depression, anxiety, hormonal mood swings and sexual desire might all be interpreted as madness in women, with virgins, widows and spinsters thought to be particularly susceptible. (The best cure, unsurprisingly, was believed to be sex and pregnancy.)[63] As a childless woman famed for her love of drink and her volatile, masculine behaviour, Mary fitted the template all too well. Perhaps it was always inevitable that her ‘mad pranks’ would one day land her in Bedlam.

If Mary wasn’t mad when she went in, however, she may well have been by the time she came out. Conditions at Bethlem Hospital at the time were notorious. Corruption, abuse and neglect were rife, and from its cold, dank cells harrowing reports emerged of ‘cryings, screechings, roarings, brawlings, shaking of chains, swearings, frettings, chaffings’.[64] The complexities of mental illness were so little understood that physicians used ‘madness’ as a woolly, catch-all term to cover every kind of affliction. Consequently, the ‘lunatics’ languishing within Bethlem’s walls might include those plagued by voices, delusions, melancholy, rage, poverty or drink, as well as those with learning difficulties, epilepsy, dementia and anxiety. Among them, too, were those who were merely eccentric. The ‘treatments’ they were subjected to were invariably punitive rather than therapeutic, with inmates chained, starved and beaten, and often left to wallow in filth and excrement.[65] To complete the degradation of the inmates, come Sunday mornings, members of the public could pay a few shillings to stroll in and gawp, taunt the poor souls and even ply them with drink. No doubt there were many who queued up to see the famous Moll Cutpurse chained up in her cell, though what state they found her in will have to remain a mystery.

Mary’s ‘madness’ was yet another inconvenient detail that didn’t fit the Moll Cutpurse brief, and as a result, her later years look very different in the pages of her diary. Far from depicting a woman who was fading away and losing her mind, her biographers suggest she was now at the top of her game, operating at the highest levels of the criminal world as boss to even the most eminent male criminals. According to their account, Mary masterminded the feats of the famous highwaymen James Hind and Richard Hannam in the 1640s and ’50s, and like them, she is portrayed as a highly vocal Royalist, who hosts a street party in honour of Charles I and stages a public protest against his enemies in the form of an allegorical bull-baiting, in which the Parliamentarians are cast as the ravaging dogs.[66]

Most scholars suspect this political subplot to be grafted on – a bit of Royalist propaganda on the part of the writers to savage Oliver Cromwell and his puritan protectorate and endear Mary Frith to the Restoration audience for whom her story was published.[67] Indeed, it’s hard to imagine an irreverent, insubordinate character such as Mary supporting the absolute authority of King Charles I. At the same time, however, a character less puritan than Mary – whose life revolved around thieving, carousing, performing and cross-dressing – is even harder to imagine. Whatever her genuine political allegiance (if indeed she had one), the last ten years of her life coincided with the strange decade after the country had executed its king, when Britain was ruled by a puritan republican regime. How Mary coped with the prohibition of everything she loved most, from the theatres to drinking to swearing, we’ll never know; nor can we know her true feelings about her lost king. Come the Restoration of his son in 1660, however, the politic decision was made by her biographers to ensure that, whether true or not, this renegade woman would be safely remembered as a loyal subject of the Crown.