One of the peculiarities of the molly was the aspiration to fake grandeur like that of Princess Seraphina. John Hyons liked to be known as Queen Iron; he also called himself, or was called, Pippin Mary. Lady Godiva was a waiter, and the Duchess of Gloucester another butcher. It was innocent enough, and sufficiently diverting to keep the men amused. But the mollies were on the periphery of a dangerous world. In the subsequent trials there is much evidence of violent quarrels and vicious arguments; it was difficult to know whom to trust, and one of their number was denounced as ‘a treacherous … blowing-up mollying bitch’.
Four trials, in particular, captured public attention. Richard Branson was accused of importuning James Fasset, a sixteen-year-old. Fasset testified that Branson ‘asked me if I never got any girls, or if I never fucked them’. The boy said that he had no such thoughts. Branson then kissed him and sucked his lips. He asked another question. Had the boy ever frigged himself? No. Branson said that ‘if I would go back, he would learn me’. All this time the boy kept a tight hold of his breeches. ‘He asked me if I had my maidenhead … If I had he should be very glad to take it from me, but supposed I saved it for a young woman.’
Michael Levi lived in Holborn and possessed a stall beside an alehouse, the Baptist’s Head. One night he asked Benjamin Taylor, twelve years old, to take up some of his boxes to the room which he rented in the alehouse itself. Once there Levi locked the door, flung the boy on the bed and proceeded to rape him. Then two other boys came forward, one of them saying that ‘he thought the prisoner had pissed on him’. He was likely to have confused semen with urine.
Isaac Broderick was a schoolmaster at a school run by the Company of Coopers who had taken a liking to some of his pupils. Eventually it came out. One of the young boys, Edward Calley, aged ten, told his grandfather that ‘his master had served him as the two men had served one another that stood in the pillory’. He was a knowing London youth.
John Holloway met Henry Wolf in the street, and asked him for directions. This seems to be a typical scenario, suggesting that ‘asking for directions’ was more than what it seemed. A Londoner would surely know the way. But Holloway may have got more than he expected. Wolf put his arm about his waist, tickled him and took him to a local alehouse where he groped him. He then took the boy onto the streets and purchased for him a pint of wine, a nosegay and a penny custard. They were just passing Bedlam when Wolf suggested that they pay a visit to the mad people. Once there, they went into the necessary house (otherwise known as the bog house or house of office) where Holloway fellated him. Other such cases could be cited but it has become clear enough that the queer life of London could be difficult and hazardous. When one man was caught after the act he cried out ‘My dear! My dear! First time! First time!’
Another dramatic episode occurred at the Mermaid Inn in Great Carter Lane. The landlady, Sarah Holland, testified that two customers, Richard Manning and John Davis, had taken a room on New Year’s Eve 1744. She suspected something between them and had given them a chamber next to her own bedroom. She went over to a small glass partition between the two rooms and found them ‘sitting facing one another with their knees jammed together’. She then observed them putting their hands into each other’s breeches. They went over to the partition, as if to see ‘the shade of any body’ but she drew back and could not be detected. They carried on with their kissing and fondling.
Then Sarah rushed up to another lodger. ‘I have heard talk of sodomites, and believe there are some here!’ ‘God forbid!’ he replied. Another lodger had been called into her bedroom. ‘I don’t like the thoughts of them,’ he said. But he also looked through the glass partition and saw them ‘bussing’ or kissing. The cry went up. Sarah called out ‘You damned dogs! What are you doing of! Nasty fellows! Vile rogues!’ One of the men eventually arrested, Richard Manning, was said to resemble ‘an old rat in an iron cage’ and ‘did not make any attempt to go away’.
They were sentenced to be well whipped and Manning, at least, was consigned to prison. In his own defence John Davis testified that he was too drunk to know where he was or what he was doing. The jury did not believe him. But it must have occurred to some that the act of Sodom might appeal to any man who was drunk enough to ignore the possible consequences. It did not represent some particular temperament. It was a weakness common to men and women alike. Manning was walking along Fleet Street, just after his release from prison, when an acquaintance came up to him. ‘So, Molly!’ he said. Manning reacted in shock. ‘I never mollied you!’ Yet once again he was taken up by the constables.
Some convicted of sodomy were married men with children. This would cause no considerable surprise at a later date, but at this time it was widely believed that a married man, who had sired offspring, could not have committed the unmentionable sin. The wives and children were sometimes brought into court to confront the man’s accusers. One caught in the act was a waterman who was father to several children. Another found guilty had been married for twenty-five years and had twelve children. A certain leniency of punishment was then in order. But not all were so lucky. An upholsterer of forty-three, with two children, was sentenced to death and at his execution stated that ‘he hoped the world would not be so unjust as to upbraid his poor children with his unfortunate death’.
The punishment varied with the circumstance, the occasion and the magistrate. Some men faced the pillory and the prison, while for others the penalty was death. Some of them formed gangs to fight back against officers come to arrest them. They could be mean and violent as well as gay and effeminate. Some of them certainly became prostitutes, or pimps, or blackmailers; they might also be informers. Some of them, at least, were part of dirty and violent London.
13
Flats
‘Two Kissing Girls of Spitalfields’ were the subject of a ballad in 1728.
She kisses all, but Jenny is her dear,
She feels her bubbies, and she bites her ear:
They to the garret or the cellar sneak,
Play tricks, and put each other to the squeak.
Curiously enough such behaviour would probably have gone unnoticed or unmentioned in an earlier period. In another production of 1728, Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy, the anonymous author declared that ‘when I see two ladies kissing and slopping each other in a lascivious manner, and frequently repeating it, I am shocked to the last degree’.
Mother Courage ran a house exclusively for females in Suffolk Street while one in Bow Street catered for a similar clientele. Miss Redshawe held ‘an extremely secretive discreet house of intrigue in Tavistock Street catering for ladies in the highest keeping’. Some wealthy married ladies also called there for furtive pleasures. It was widely believed that pregnant women were subject to unnatural lusts which might incline them towards their own sex.
In Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a useful guide to the prostitutes of the town, published annually from 1757 to 1795, reference is made to Miss Wilson of Green Street, Cavendish Square, whose burly physique was ‘more calculated for the milk carrier than the soft delights of love’. Some women might then have become interested. The entry added that Miss Wilson had declared that ‘a female bed-fellow can give more real joys than ever she experienced with the male part of the sex’ and revealed that ‘many of the pranks she has played with her own sex in bed (where she is as lascivious as a goat) have come to our knowledge’. One of those pranks might well have been the queer game of ‘flats’, involving the rubbing of female pudenda one against another. At the end of the seventeenth century it was described as a ‘new game, called flats with a swinging clitoris’. At a later date it was known as a ‘flat fuck’.
In 1730 Mary East married a young female friend under the name of James How; they moved to Poplar, in east London, where they kept an alehouse or inn for the next thirty-six years. James How also became a parish officer and fulfilled the duties without provoking comment. No one seemed to notice that in fact one woman was liv
ing in masquerade with another. The matter only came to light when a previous neighbour recognised How and proceeded to blackmail her. It was reported in the Gentleman’s Magazine of July 1776 that in her female character How ‘appeared to be a sensible well-bred woman, though in her male character she had always affected the plain plodding alehouse-keeper’. So she was a competent actor as well as a convincing cross-dresser. It was said that both women had been ‘crossed in love’ when they were young and had wished to avoid further disappointment. This was often given as the reason for female transvestism; it preserved male pride while palliating the female transgression.
In fact cross-dressing with or without queer connotations may not have been uncommon. It was a way of making a living in a predominantly male world where, as another girl who passed as a boy put it, ‘boys could shift better for themselves than girls’; it invited respect where the union of two women might not; it was a way of avoiding unwanted male attention; it was a ready form of companionship, even if no sexual bond existed. It seems likely, too, that some people must have suspected the truth but were unwilling to voice it. How might have been eccentric and nothing more. She might have been jilted by a man, and to have taken her revenge in this way. She might have been too ugly to be accepted as a female. These were the contemporary explanations. It was always easier for a women to dress as a man than a man to dress as a woman. Sexual intercourse, of whatever description, was considered to be intrinsically less serious between females than between males; women had no fertile seed, according to contemporaneous medical texts, and therefore no waste of life was implied. There was also no fear of an unwanted pregnancy.
The roll call of honorary soldiers and sailors includes the names of Hannah Snell, Mary Anne Talbot, Mary Knowles and Christina Davies. All of them joined the army or the navy; they may have wanted the excitement of combat, but popular legend was that they had enlisted in order to keep company with serving husbands or lovers or to search for them. It was almost a plausible excuse. But a moment’s acquaintance with female pirates, such as Ann Bonny and Mary Read, suggests that females could indeed be just as brave and ferocious as the males. They must have been good sailors and soldiers to survive for so long.
Hannah Snell joined the marines, and was injured in action. On her return to England she earned her living by appearing in full uniform in various minor theatres where she marched and sang. In her early years Christina Davies, according to a contemporary pamphlet, ‘felt a love for boyish amusements and the pleasure she took in manly occupations’. She married; but her husband disappeared and she subsequently enlisted into the army under the name of Christopher Welsh. Eventually she opened a pub in the London docks called the Widow in Masquerade. She received a pension from the Royal Hospital of Chelsea for wounds received at the siege of Pondicherry in 1778, but her title as ‘the Chelsea Amazon’ was shared with Catherine Walsh who served with the Royal North British Dragoons or Scots Greys and was wounded in action during the Battle of Ramillies in 1706.
Mary Anne Talbot was better known as James Talbot, sailor. She ran the gamut of juvenile naval occupations as drummer, powder monkey, cabin boy and steward. She may have had queer longings because ‘she actually made a conquest of the captain’s niece … the young lady even went so far as to propose marriage’. On her return to England she was ‘still inclined to masculine propensities’. She did now dress as a female ‘though at times I could not so far forget my sea-faring habits, but frequently dressed myself and took excursions as a sailor’.
Some women dressed and acted as men simply in order to marry for money. Sarah Getson became John for an advantageous union, while another female was charged with marrying three different women. Sums of money sometimes exchanged hands, but often these counterfeit husbands stole the money and ran off. Nevertheless innocents were abroad. John Chivy was the perfect spouse and was married to the same woman for almost twenty years; only on his deathbed in 1764 was he pronounced to be female. In 1760 Samuel Bundy was discovered to be a female and was briefly jailed in Southwark ‘for defrauding a young woman of money and apparel by marrying her’. But Mrs Bundy came forward to defend her supposed husband and refused to press charges. The London Chronicle reported that ‘there seems a strong love or friendship … as she keeps the prisoner company in her confinement’. Samuel Bundy was ordered to burn her female clothes, but that was the only punishment.
At the end of 1734 a Soho clergyman refused to sign a marriage certificate for John Mountford, tailor, and Mary Cooper, spinster; he noted that he ‘suspected two women, no certificate’. Two other London females were more fortunate in 1737, when the clergyman wrote briefly that ‘by the opinion after matrimony my clerk judged they were both women, if the person by name John Smith be a man, he’s a little short fair thin man not above five foot. After marriage I almost could prove them both women, the one was dressed as a man [with] thin pale face and wrinkled chin.’ Yet he still joined them in matrimony. A note of 1 October 1747 recorded the marriage of John Ferren and Deborah Nolan to the effect that ‘the supposed John Ferren was discovered, after the ceremony were over, to be in person a woman’. It seems that no further action was taken. Many poor clergymen could be found in Fleet Street and its environs ready to marry anyone and everyone for a fee. Barbara Hill had taken the name of John Brown before marrying another woman ‘with whom she has lived very agreeably since’; John Brown had previously worked as a stonecutter’s apprentice and a London post-chaise driver. There may have been an indeterminate boundary between young beardless men and young women. Their Shakespearean heroes or heroines might have included Viola, Portia and Rosalind.
Henry Fielding took up the strange life of Mary Hamilton in The Female Husband, a pamphlet of 1746. She had been arrested in the autumn of that year for posing as a male physician by the name of Charles Hamilton. His wife, Mary Price, was supposed to have testified in court that ‘after marriage they had lain together several nights and that the said pretended Charles Hamilton who had married her aforesaid entered her body several times, which made this woman believe at first that the said Hamilton was a real man’. It was believed that Mary Hamilton had deployed a leather dildo, although it is not clear how this instrument had deceived the new wife. It may have occurred to some that Mary Price actually enjoyed the experience.
Hamilton’s queerness was no crime, but for the charge of vagrancy and of ‘imposing on His Majesty’s subjects’ it was declared that ‘we, the Court, do sentence her or him’ to four public whippings and six months’ hard labour. It was a harsh punishment and may have caught Henry Fielding’s eye. It was subsequently discovered that she had married anywhere between three and fourteen women over a period of years, and out of this Fielding created a narrative that is essentially fiction with a stratum of fact somewhere within it. This is of course true of most eighteenth-century accounts of sexual transgression. It was the transgression, and not the sex, that enraged the crowds who watched her pass them on the way to court. She had belittled the sanctity of marriage and had breached the laws of social custom. That was why she was punished. She had become literally and legally a vagrant, inconstant and unsettled.
The custom of female queerness was so common, and so universally understood, that in the spring of 1749 the London Evening Post advertised ‘The Sappho-an. An heroic poem of three cantos, in the Ovidian style, describing the pleasures which the fair sex enjoy with each other.’ In his pornographic An Essay on Woman, John Wilkes mentions that ‘there is a bastard plant called clitoris, much of the same nature, although seldom large … The Lesbian ladies knew perfectly the virtues of it.’ Even Swift’s Gulliver mentions it: ‘I expected every moment that my master would accuse the Yahoos of those unnatural appetites in both sexes, so common among us.’ This was no longer the secret, or the silent, activity. It was rumoured that notable lesbians were invited to join the Hellfire Club, at Medmenham Abbey by the Thames, where they could freely enjoy their sport in various orgies and rituals. Such habits were repo
rted to be rife in female boarding schools, in servants’ quarters, and in the female sections of workhouses where ‘grubbling’ or groping in the dark was common.
Charlotte Charke was another female in disguise. At the age of seventeen she took to the stage, where she specialised in ‘breeches parts’ or male characters; they seemed to suit her and she began wearing male apparel off the stage as well and assumed the name of Charles Brown. She became a sausage-maker, a playwright, a pastry cook, a farmer, a strolling player, a waiter, a puppet-master, a gentleman’s valet and the proprietor of the Charlotte Charke Tavern on Drury Lane. She also wrote A Narrative of the Life of Mrs Charlotte Charke (1755) in which she recorded ‘mad pranks’ as well as her adoption of male habits including ‘a shrug of the shoulders and a scratch of the head, with a hasty demand for small beer’. She seems to have been a born actor, a Proteus of trades and personalities, and she was also twice married with a daughter. She may have been en travesti but it is not clear that she had queer relations with other women. She never admitted as much but, at the end of her Narrative, she confesses that ‘I have, throughout the whole course of my life, acted in contradiction to all points of regularity … There is none in the world more fit than myself to be laughed at.’ But her ability to dress and behave as a man does suggest the precariousness of conventional sexual roles with consequent social unease. That is why some unlucky women, caught at the wrong time or in the wrong place, were whipped for it.
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