Four years later, in 1684, a pamphlet was issued with the title of The She-Wedding: or a mad Marriage, between Mary, a Seaman’s Mistress, and Margaret, a Carpenter’s Wife, at Deptford. Mary was pregnant, but her lover was on the high seas. How could she persuade the sailor’s family to support her and her infant? Her friend, Margaret, came to her rescue. Margaret disguised and dressed herself as man before going through a marriage ceremony with Mary. The marriage was then entered in the parish register where it was antedated by a corrupt parson. They lived as man and wife for six weeks before being discovered, whereupon they were incarcerated. Two or three cases may not amount to much but they do lead to speculation that other such clandestine marriages between women have gone unrecorded.
Some women were undoubtedly masculine by instinct, as has been seen, and not by sexual orientation. They might dress up as sailors and soldiers, brave the vicissitudes of the sea and charge the enemy. As a result they were generally admired. They had surpassed their sex, and any hint of queerness was dissipated by their usual return to a husband and domesticity. Some of them opened public houses on the merits of their reputation; others took to the stage or the circus. Marianne Rebecca Johnson worked aboard a collier, the Mayflower, without once being suspected; she had consigned herself to service in fear of an abusive stepfather. Anne Chamberlayne, ‘fought under her brother’, according to her memorial stone, ‘with arms and manly attire, in a fire-ship, for six hours on 20 June 1690’. The cross-dressing women were not often the target of obloquy or mockery. They were praised for their hardiness and for their ambition. They were attempting to be ‘as good as’ men.
When in 1693 Ralph Hollingsworth was accused of multiple bigamy he excused himself on the grounds that one of these previous wives had been no wife at all. The woman, Susannah Belling, according to his testimony, ‘knowing her infirmity ought not to have married; her infirmity is such that no man can lie with her, and because it is so she has ways with women … which is not fit to be named but most rank whorish they are …’
Some women dressed as men in order to make money. Anthony Wood, an Oxford antiquarian, described in a letter of 1694 how one young woman had appeared at the King’s Bench in male apparel where she ‘was found guilty of marrying a young maid, whose portion she had obtained and was very nigh of being contracted of a second marriage’. Her letters to other projected wives were read out in court, to much laughter, and she was sentenced ‘to be well whipped and kept to hard labour’.
In 1695, as recorded in a pamphlet with the title of The Counterfeit Bridegroom, a lady of Southwark advertised a dowry of £200 for any eligible suitor for her daughter. There must have been a crowd of young men tempted by such bait, but the young lady herself chose ‘a young smock-faced pretended youth, lately arrived from Ireland, under the disguised name of Mr K, a squire’s son’. In truth he was a she. As soon as they were in bed, the fraud was discovered; but not until Mr K had escaped with the dowry. Another kind of speculation came to light in the summer of 1701 when, according to The English Post, ‘a woman, in the habit of a man, was lately seized at Soho in the act of coining and was sent to Newgate’. A similar financial speculation was recorded in a London prison list of 1720 where Sarah Ketson, calling herself John, tried to inveigle Ann Hutchinson into marriage.
The funereal monument of Katherine Bovey was raised in Westminster Abbey after her death in 1727. According to its inscription the memorial was at the behest of Mary Pope ‘who lived with her near forty years in perfect friendship’. More interestingly, it has been plausibly suggested that Katherine Bovey was the model of ‘the perverse widow’ in the Spectator of 1711 who delighted in luring on passionate bachelors only to reject their suits at the last moment. Richard Steele wrote that ‘this perverse woman is one of those unaccountable creatures that secretly rejoice in the admiration of men, but indulge themselves in no further consequences’. He added, with no attempt at irony, that ‘she is always accompanied by a confidante, who is witness to her daily protestations against our sex’. One of those confidantes may have been Mary Pope.
9
Suck thy master
Many trysting places for males could be found in seventeenth-century London. Saffron Hill, south of Clerkenwell and close to Cowcross Street, was always worth a visit. The courtyards and alleys of Clerkenwell itself were interesting; Field Lane was one of its more notorious venues. ‘I am ruined, for ever ruined!’ one of the characters in John Dryden’s The Wild Gallant (1663) laments. ‘Plague, had you no places to name in town but Sodom and Lucknor’s Lane for lodgings!’ ‘Sodom’ may have been the brothel close to the Whitefriars Theatre, while Lewknors Lane, as it was properly called, off Drury Lane, may have had a similar reputation. As the city progressed to the west, however, so did the centres of sex move with it to Vauxhall and to the newly established ‘West End’. The Fountain Tavern, a public house just off the Strand, was one example. Dick’s Coffee House in Aldersgate, and the Pheasant in Fuller’s Rents, Holborn, were well known for their special clientele. They were not alone. There were probably as many ‘gay bars’, in terms of population, in seventeenth- as in twenty-first-century London.
The Royal Exchange in the City, with its arcades and quiet corners for trade, had been a haunt ever since its inception; towards the end of the century the London Spy described how a group of sightseers ‘went on the ’Change, turned to the right, and jostled in amongst a parcel of swarthy buggerantoes, preternatural fornicators, as my friend called them, who would ogle a handsome young man with as much lust as a true-bred English whoremaster would gaze upon a beautiful woman’. In the middle of the seventeenth century a ‘spintry’, or male brothel, was established in the Mulberry Garden, on the present site of Buckingham Palace. The prostitutes were often paid with clothes rather than money. A contemporary list of ‘common whores’ included some male names, among them Little Taffy, Dick Steckwel, Ned Brooks and Ralph Asbington, also known as ‘Shittern-arse’. Five ‘beastly sodomitical boys’ embarked on the crossing over the Atlantic in 1629, no doubt ready to ply their trade in the New World; but they were caught in the act and sent back to England.
Anyone in a public space was fair game. The aisles of St Paul’s Cathedral, as well as St Paul’s Churchyard, were honey traps. The secluded alley to the north of the Chapter House was a particular favourite. ‘Sodomites’ Walk’ on Upper Moorfields was obviously well named. Others were attracted to the dark river, where the various dank and dirty lanes running into Shadwell or Limehouse fostered good trade in seamen seeking male prostitutes or men in search of sailors. Men might lounge against the pillars of Covent Garden market, or they might make frequent visits to the public toilets of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Moorfields and Green Park. In fact the latrines of any park would do; trees, grass and bushes stirred the blood. In John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy (1628) a male servant, dressed as a female and called Lady Periwinkle, is enjoined to ‘suck thy master’; the primary meaning was ‘suckle’, but the other meanings were known.
A contemporary records that ‘if one of them sits upon a bench he pats the back of his hands; if you follow them, they put a white handkerchief through the skirts of the coat, and wave it to and fro; but if they are met by you, their thumbs are stuck in the armpits of their waistcoats, and they play their fingers upon their breasts’. They wore Italian short cloaks to emphasise their buttocks.
The gestures of the hands were important. If the middle finger was advanced, it was a sign of effeminacy. The hand turned up, in the course of conversation, was another token. So, unusually enough, was the act of scratching the head with one finger. If you ‘wagged’ your hand as you walked, it was a sign of sodomitical shamelessness; it was a completely unnecessary, and therefore wanton, gesture. This may be the first example of what became known as the ‘swishy’ gay.
A servant, Meredith Davy, had the habit of taking to his bed one of his master’s young apprentices by the name of John Vincent; he limited himself to Sundays and holidays, aft
er he had been drinking. But he did not do so in privacy and seclusion; another servant shared the bedchamber and could clearly hear the sounds of sexual activity; the bed creaked and the boy groaned. When the servant eventually gave evidence to that effect, at his prosecution in 1630, the reaction of the defendant was bewilderment. It had not occurred to him that he was doing anything particularly wrong. Perhaps it was the custom of the county. He said in his defence only that ‘he denieth that he ever used any unclean action with the said boy as they lay in bed together; and more he sayeth not’. He was not charged, and went back to the same sleeping arrangements as before. Why would he engage in intercourse with the boy in front of a witness? Why did he deny any uncleanliness? Did the combination of drunkenness and Sundays or holidays make it somehow acceptable, a kind of ritual practice? Meredith Davy would no doubt have flatly denied that he was a sodomite, and he would have been readily believed.
The case of Mervyn Touchet, earl of Castlehaven, was quite different. In 1630 his son, James, complained about his father’s unnatural behaviour with the young servants of the house; he claimed that his father committed sodomy and buggery and, at the subsequent Privy Council investigation, three pages and a footman confessed to congress not only with the earl but with the earl’s wife and daughter-in-law. It all became very messy. Audley and two of the servants were hanged on the charges of rape and sodomy. His gravest sin, however, was to threaten the stability of the patriarchal household; all his crimes and sins were rolled together as a danger to social order. He had to go.
The execution of Charles I, and the subsequent quasi-monarchical reign of Oliver Cromwell, may conceivably have cast a pall on the more obvious signs of urban queerness. The theatres, for example, were closed down in 1642. A few illicit productions were still staged in private houses, but much of the gaiety had gone. All was changed with the restoration of Charles II. We read of a new tavern for ingles, the Three Potters, in Cripplegate Without, thriving by 1661. And the theatres were open once more. The boy actors returned and one of them, Edward Kynaston, became the darling of the age. Buggery was once again in fashion, even if perhaps more delicately handled than in the time of James I. The merry monarch did not mind what came to be known as mollies.
Kynaston specialised in female parts and as such he obtained many male admirers who were more interested in his own parts. He was described at the time as ‘a complete stage beauty’, even though female actors themselves were now permitted on the stage. In his diary Pepys describes him as ‘the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life’. One of his lovers, according to London rumour, was George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, who was a favourite of the king. One contemporary satire remarks that ‘Kenaston’s arse knows its own buggerer’ while Buckingham is described ‘with Kenaston acting both Venus and Mars’. In his old age Kynaston recalled the time when he was ‘so beautiful a youth’ that the fashionable ladies ‘prided themselves in taking him with them in their coaches to Hyde Park, in his theatrical habit [costume], after the play’. It seems, however, that it was not only the ladies whom he entertained. Buckingham himself enjoyed masculine as well as feminine attentions but, according to one report of the court of Charles II, he particularly relished the ‘most rascally lackeys’ or male servants.
The Wandering Whore (1660), already marked out as the setting for lesbian pornography, laments the fact that male customers who attended brothels ‘had rather be dealing with smooth-faced ’prentices’. It also provides one of the few descriptions of an effeminate male in this period. ‘There likewise hermaphrodites, effeminate men, men given to much luxury, idleness and wanton pleasures, and to that abominable sin of sodomy, wherein they are both active and passive in it, whose vicious actions are only to be whispered amongst us.’
Another cross-dressing actor who graced or disgraced the Restoration stage, James ‘Nursery’ Nokes, was a victim of suspicion and innuendo. He is one of the subjects of the Satyr on the Players (1682), where unwitting apprentices are asked to:
Secure your gentle bums
For full of lust and fury see he comes!
’Tis buggering Nokes, whose damned unwieldy tarse
Weeps to be buried in his foreman’s arse,
Unnatural sinner, lecher without sense,
To leave kind cunt to dive in excrements.
A further insight into the Restoration court is furnished by an entry in Pepys’s diary. In the summer of 1663 one of the more notable courtiers, Sir Charles Sedley, went naked onto the balcony of the Cock Inn in Bow Street where with a companion he acted out ‘all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined’. (An anonymous song of the period records that ‘Sedley has fuck’t a thousand arses’.) Pepys then records the subsequent conversation at a dinner party when two naval officials ‘both say that buggery is now grown almost as common among our gallants as in Italy, and that the very pages of the town begin to complain of their masters for it. But blessed be God I do not to this day know what is the meaning of this sin, nor which is the agent nor which the patient.’ The sense of an earlier entry in the diary, for 15 August 1660, is therefore open to interpretation. Pepys was in his chamber with a colleague ‘with whom I did intend to lie; but he and I fell to play with one another, so that I made him go lie with Mr Shaply, So I lay alone all night.’ They were clearly not playing cards.
Pepys observed the women as well as the men. In the summer of 1666 he was at Whitehall where ‘I find the ladies of honour dressed in their riding garbs, with coats and doublets with deep skirts, just for all the world like men, and buttoned their doublets up the breast, with periwigs and with hats; so that, only for a long petticoat dragging under their men’s coats nobody could take them for women in any point whatever’. It was a queer world.
In 1668 the first play by a woman that celebrates female eroticism, as well as female transvestism, was composed. The Convent of Pleasure by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, concerns a group of women who flee from a world of males to enjoy each other in their own cloistered nook. A great foreign princess, described as ‘a princely brave woman truly, of a masculine presence’, begins what can only be described as an affair with Lady Happy. Some strong sentiments follow. Lady Happy has a question. ‘But why may not I love a woman with the same affection as a man?’ A few lines later the princess ‘of a masculine mind’ replies ‘nay, it were a sin in friendship, should we not kiss’. The stage direction reveals that ‘they embrace and kiss, and hold each other in their arms’. Female eroticism had come out into the open.
The poet of Restoration London was undoubtedly John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who led a profane and reckless career at court under the usually benevolent eye of the king. Rochester knew all the vices of London, and could begin with the trees and bushes of St James’s Park: ‘And nightly now beneath their shade / Are buggeries, rapes and incests made.’
He sent his French page to a close friend, Henry Savile, with the message that ‘the greatest and gravest of this court of both sexes have tasted his beauties’.
Rochester is also presumed to be the author of a fantastical farce entitled Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery (1684) in which the king of Sodom issues a proclamation in favour of sodomy:
I do proclaim that bugg’ry may be us’d
Through all the land, so cunt be not abus’d …
To Buggeranthus let this charge be given,
And let them bugger all things under heaven.
His own motto is ‘I’ll reign and bugger still!’ The women protest, claiming that they are better lovers because they are insatiable, and the curtain comes down on scenes of fire and brimstone as the king calls out in defiance:
Let Heavens descend and set the world on fire!
We to some darker cavern will retire;
There on thy buggered arse I will expire.
Rochester became a little more serious in his tragedy Valentinian (1685), where the emperor tells the eunuch:
Oh let me press these balmy lips all
day,
And bathe my love-scorched soul in thy moist kisses.
Rochester’s poem to his supposed mistress was far less sentimental:
When each the well-looked link boy strove t’enjoy,
And the best kiss was the deciding lot
Whether the boy fucked you, or I the boy.
Link boys, who held lights to aid pedestrians at night, were well known for their readiness to provide other favours.
Boys did indeed seem to become an endangered species. A pamphlet of 1669, entitled the Children’s Petition, was directed against unmitigated flogging and its attendant practices. The ‘children’ state that ‘our sufferings are of that nature as makes our schools to be not merely houses of correction, but of prostitution, in this vile way of castigation in use, wherein our secret parts which are by nature shameful and not to be uncovered, must be the anvil exposed to the immodest eyes, and filthy blows of the smiter’. The schoolmaster whipped the buttocks of the boy because they were the source of his temptation and sin, but they may have excited the posterior for further action. The pamphlet concludes that ‘if the nation will not take the warning, but will be wicked, and a Sodom, let it be wicked still’.
Queer City Page 8
