The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England

by Antonia Fraser

  Whores – and whorehouses – being a fact of life, from the customer’s point of view it was a case of striking some kind of balance between what his purse could afford and what his sensibilities could stand. The opportunities were infinite, ranging from Oxford Kate’s in Bow Street, a public eating-place as well as a covert bawdy-house (Sir Ralph Verney visited it under the Commonwealth because they dressed meat so well) down to the drabs on the mean streets ‘like Copper Farthings in the Way of Trade, only used for the convenience of readier Change’.59

  An Act of Charles I for their suppression described how wayfarers in Cowcross, Turmil Street, Charterhouse Lane, Saffronhill, Bloomsbury, Petticoat Lane, Wapping, Ratcliff and divers other places were ‘pestered with many immodest, lascivious, and shameless women generally reputed for notorious common and professed whores’. Sitting at the doors of their houses, sometimes at the doors of sack-houses, these women were ‘exposing and offering themselves to passengers’.60 Others acted with butchers and poulterers, selling themselves in markets on Sabbath days. Others still were involved in robberies, and thus entered the criminal records as a thief as well as a whore.

  The Wandering Whore was a publication, probably written as well as published by John Garfield, of which five numbers appeared between 1660 and 1661, taking advantage of the newly permissive atmosphere following the Restoration. It used as its form a favourite device in this particular literary market, a conversation between a young whore and old bawd, and included what has been taken to be a comprehensive list of streets noted for prostitution and for brothels, such as Fleet Lane, Long Acre and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Other favourable districts for this kind of enterprise in London were Lewkenor’s Lane, Whetstone’s Park, Cheapside or Moorfields.61

  Outside London, organized prostitution was mainly concentrated in the bigger towns, to which visits could be paid. Cambridge for example in 1676 had no fewer than thirteen bawdy-houses. It should not for this reason be seen as an unchecked centre of disrepute. Elizabeth Aynsworth had kept a loose house at Cambridge in the 1660s, but was banished thence at the instigation of the university proctors. She settled down again at the Reindeer Inn at Bishop’s Stortford, to which ‘all the goodfellows’ of the county speedily repaired. She once served the very proctor responsible for her dismissal ‘a most elegant supper’ on silver plate. His party dared not touch the meal for fear they would have ‘a lord’s reckoning’ to pay, but Mrs Aynsworth then appeared and observed with some style that it was a gift, since she was so grateful to the proctor for contributing to her advancement. Ale-houses and inns generally provided a natural network for such needs, knowing what local talent could be called upon.62

  Then there were the looser arrangements. Thomas Heath of Thame, a maltster, was presented before the ecclesiastical court for having ‘bought’ the wife of George Fuller of Chinner for three weeks; he paid 2d per pound of her weight, which, after Mrs Fuller had been weighed in, resulted in 29s and one farthing changing hands. (In court the maltster admitted the sale, but denied that intercourse had taken place as a result.)63

  Pepy’s relationship with Betty Lane, later Martin, was certainly not a straightforward one of client and prostitute: Betty Lane and her sister Doll, with whom Pepys also dallied, were linendrapers in Westminster Hall, from whom Pepys purchased his linen ‘bands’; they were distinguished sharply in Pepys’s canon from the ‘sluts’ at the Black Spread Eagle in Bride Lane, who turned his stomach. On the other hand Betty granted Pepys the most intimate sexual favours over a long period of time, more or less whenever he demanded them; neither her marriage to the Exchequer clerk Samuel Martin nor pregnancy proving any impediment. In return she received entertainment of wine and chicken and cake when that was her prime need, and Pepys’s patronage when Samuel Martin wanted a post. Pepys in his diary consistently criticized Betty for her lack of ‘modesty’ in what she permitted him to do to her and equally consistently resolved not to see her again. ‘I perceive she is come to be very bad and offers anything’, he wrote piously in February 1666. By June however Pepys was recording that he had had Betty ‘both devante and backwards which is also muy bon plazer’. His utilitarian attitude to Betty Martin was not to be equated with his romantic feeling for the banished ‘companion’, poor little Deb Willet. When Pepys encountered Deb by chance years after her dismissal, he took her into an alley-way and forced her to touch him intimately. Deb’s reluctance to do this happily convinced Pepys that she was still ‘honest and modest’.64 For Betty Martin’s part, sex was simply one of a number of ways in which she tried to keep afloat. She too used or attempted to use Pepys; although he seems to have had rather the best of the bargain, at least according to the diary.

  Famous madams included Mistress Damaris Page, given by Pepys the honorific title of ‘the great bawd of the seamen’. Then there was Madam Cresswell, who had her house pulled down by the London apprentices in the riots of 1668. (Why did the apprentices frequent the bawdy-houses, if they were to pull them down? inquired Charles II, sensibly enough.) There were frequent references to Madam Cresswell in the literature of the time, from the high of Otway’s Venice Preserv’d (‘To lewdness every night the lecher ran … Match him at Mothers Creswold’s if you can’) to the low of the satires. The apprentices’ attitude to the bawdy-houses was indeed ambivalent. The Whore’s Rhetorick was another fictional dialogue of 1683 in which the old bawd ‘Madam Cresswell’ instructed the young whore ‘Dorothea’ in her duties; these included keeping herself free for the apprentices on Sundays, when their masters gave them the day off.65

  The real Madam Cresswell lived to be convicted in 1681 of ‘above thirty years’ practice of bawdry’. By the time she died towards the end of the century, she had turned optimistically to a public parade of piety. Madam Cresswell bequeathed £10 for an Anglican clergyman to preach her funeral sermon, but with that caution inculcated by the thirty years of business in her particular profession, she made it a condition that he spoke ‘nothing but well of her’. The clergyman solved the problem by mentioning her name only briefly in the course of his oration, and in these terms: ‘She was born well, she lived well, and she died well; for she was born with the name Cresswell, she lived in Clerkenwell and Camberwell, and she died in Bridewell.’66

  The fictional Madam Cresswell of The Whore’s Rhetorick was described as ‘livid’ in appearance, with hoary eyebrows, yellow gummy eyes, sagging breasts and a beard: in short the prototype of the menacing witch-like female, frightening because she was ugly and ugly because she was old. Dorothea, on the other hand, as a virginal gentlewoman, represented someone for whom a more hopeful future was proposed. She was described as one whose father ‘had much more Nobility in his Veins than Money in his Purse’, her dowry having been sacrificed in the Civil Wars. Unable to go out to work like her brothers, Dorothea was advised by Madam Cresswell to put her beauty up for sale and become ‘a Woman of the Town’.67

  The ancient bawd pointed out to Dorothea that ‘Liberty was the first and the greatest benefit of nature’, and that in consequence she should look on it as ‘the great business’ of her life to please others and enrich herself. That way Dorothea could look forward to retirement in the country, or even contemplate marriage, so long as she secured a third of her husband’s estate as a dower: ‘the most precious Jewel, next to life and liberty’. A rich merchant or some other honest citizen was probably the best hope for setting her up: ‘these are the golden lovers’, better than ‘a score of ranting Blades’.68

  Where her work with old men was concerned, Dorothea was adjured to bear in mind England’s historic past: ‘It is odds if sometimes in a rapture a-Bed, he do not get astride of thy Back, to demonstrate how he managed his horse at Naseby fight’ (some forty years earlier). With all her lovers, it was essential for Dorothea to add to her lover’s pleasure by simulating her own: ‘You must not forget to use the natural accents of dying persons … You must add to these ejaculations, aspirations, sighs, intermissions of words, and such like gallantri
es, whereby you may give your Mate to believe, that you are melted, dissolved and wholly consumed in pleasure, though Ladies of large business are generally no more moved by an embrace, than if they were made of Wood or stone.’ Blushing was also a useful accomplishment: ‘it is a token of modesty, and yet an amorous sign’.69

  It is not suggested that all whores enjoyed the rich standard of life suggested by Madam Cresswell for Dorothea, or that they were equally salubrious. ‘A trading lady’, said the old bawd, needed ‘a small convenient house of her own’, with one or two maids, otherwise she would not be content; everything within had to be exceptionally neat and clean (including Dorothea’s own person). Jenny Cromwell, Jenny Middleton, Moll Hinton, Sue Willis and Doll Chamberlain, the celebrated women of the town to be found at the New Exchange, were likely to lead a more rackety life. The Wandering Whore, listing the well-known prostitutes of 1660, gave exotic names such as the Queen of Morocco as well as some more homely: Welsh Nan Peg the Seaman’s Wife, Long-Haired Mrs Spencer in Spitalfields, Mrs Osbridge’s Scolding Daughter (catering clearly for some special masochistic taste) and Mrs Osbridge herself, who practised within Bedlam.70

  In 1671 the Earl of Dorset announced that he was bored by the constant sentimental addresses to ladies of the court under pastoral names. Instead he proposed to serenade ‘Black Bess’ – the notorious prostitute Bess Morris:

  Methinks the poor town has been troubled too long

  With Phillis and Chloris in every song

  By fools, who at once can both love and despair,

  And will never leave calling ’em cruel and fair;

  Which justly provokes me in rhyme to express

  The truth that I know of bonny Black Bess.

  The ploughman and squire, the arranter clown,

  At home she subdued in her paragon gown;

  But now she adorns both the boxes and pit,

  And the proudest town gallants are forc’d to submit;

  All hearts fall a-leaping, wherever she comes

  And beat day and night, like my Lord Craven’s drums.

  In Restoration society Bess Morris had her place as well as Phillis and Chloris, and was well aware of it. When ‘a great woman’ named Bess to her face as Dorset’s whore, Bess Morris answered that she was proud of the fact that she pleased at least ‘one man of wit’; let ‘all the coxcombs dance to bed with you!’ she retorted.71

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Actress as Honey-Pot

  ‘’Tis as hard a matter for a pretty Woman to keep herself honest in a Theatre, as ’tis for an Apothecary to keep his Treacle from the Flies in Hot Weather; for every Libertine in the Audience will be buzzing about her Honey-Pot …’

  TOM BROWN, ‘From worthy Mrs Behn the Poetress to the famous Virgin Actress’

  According to John Evelyn, Margaret Godolphin was so mortified to find herself ‘an Actoress’ in 1674, in the court masque Calisto, that she spent all her time off stage reading a book of devotion; she could hardly wait for the performance to end before rushing to her oratory to pray. This distaste was recorded with ecstatic approval by Evelyn: in her dress worth nearly £300, and £20,000’s worth of borrowed jewels his favourite looked like ‘a Saint in Glory’; even when on the stage, she had the air of abstracting herself from it.1

  The behaviour of the rest of the cast did not live up to this high standard. The ‘tiring-room’ was crowded with gallants, with whom the lady performers passed the time agreeably between entrances. The celebrated singer Mrs Knight, whose services had been called upon to supplement the somewhat weak voices of the amateurs, was an ex-mistress of the King. Renowned for the range of her voice, she had recently been ‘roaming’ in Italy, as a result of which her range was still further extended. Mrs Knight sang ‘incomparably’ on this occasion; nevertheless she was not a particularly welcome sight at court to the royal ladies. Another professional invited, Moll Davis – ‘Dear Miss, delight of all the nobler sort’ – had cast such enchantment over the King with the sweetness of her singing on stage that he had made her his mistress on the strength of it; she had recently borne him a child.

  Although Evelyn was carrying prudery a little far in suggesting that Margaret Godolphin condemned a masque – the real cause of her pique lay elsewhere2 – nevertheless it was true that in the 1670s a respectable woman could not give her profession as that of ‘Actoress’ and expect to keep either her reputation or her person intact.

  It was a royal warrant of 21 August 1660 which brought Englishwomen on to the English stage for the first time, so that plays should become ‘useful and instructive representations of human life’, from being merely ‘harmless delights’. Before that, women had been seen on stage – but they had been foreigners, and as such highly suspect. Some of these were more travelling performers, mountebanks in the original sense of the word (monta in banco – mount on the bench), than actresses: in the time of Queen Elizabeth for example the honest town of Lyme had felt both thrilled and threatened by the ‘unchaste, shameless, and unnatural tumbling of Italian women’. In 1629 a troupe of genuine actresses had arrived from France and had performed at Blackfriars, in the Red Bull and Fortune Theatres; they had been hissed off the stage by the English as being immoral. Later William Prynne in Histriomastix denounced them as ‘notorious whores’.3

  Under the Protectorate, when Sir William Davenant performed the brilliant conjuring trick of persuading the music-loving Cromwell that the new dramatic form of opera bore absolutely no relation to the scandalous theatre, a woman, Mrs Edward Coleman, had sung the part of Ianthe in the ‘opera’ The Siege of Rhodes. (Later, conveniently, The Siege of Rhodes turned out to be a play, and a very popular one too. Mrs Betterton made the part of Ianthe so much hers that she was generally referred to under that name rather than her own.) The conception of the court masque, so beloved of Queen Henrietta Maria and King Charles I, was also preserved during the Protectorate, because in that too music played its soothing part. At the wedding of Mary Cromwell a masque, with pastorals by Marvell, graced the protectoral court in which the young bride appeared; Cromwell himself may have played a non-speaking part.4 However, a masque – for all Margaret Godolphin’s megrims – was not a professional theatrical performance and nor was an opera – by protectoral decision.

  It was a few months after the warrant – sometime in November or December 1660 – that one young Englishwoman actually stepped on to the London stage as the first swallow to signify the long hot summer of the English actress. We do not and shall presumably never know her name, although we know the play – The Moor of Venice – and the part – Desdemona. (Before that, as it was wittily said, with men of forty or fifty playing wenches of fifteen, when you called Desdemona: ‘enter Giant’.)5 Two companies had been given the monopoly of the London stage by the King’s warrant, following the Restoration: The King’s Company under Thomas Killigrew and The Duke’s Company under Davenant. Although on balance of probability the claim of The King’s Company to provide the first actress has been allowed, both companies actually claimed it; which means that the honour lies between Anne Marshall, Mary Saunderson (Mrs Betterton) and Katherine Corey, who became a specialist in old women’s roles, famously creating that of the Widow Blackacre in Congreve’s The Double Dealer. If Katherine Corey is ruled out as an unlikely Desdemona for this reason, the choice lies between Anne Marshall and Mary Saunderson.6

  Mary Saunderson, who married the great actor-manager Thomas Betterton in 1662 when she was about twenty-five, would be a worthy founder of her profession; since she was the famous exception to the rule that all actresses of this period were to be considered potential prostitutes. ‘Having, by nature, all the accomplishments required to make a perfect actress,’ wrote Betterton’s biographer Charles Gildon, ‘she added to them the distinguishing characteristic of a virtuous life.’ So wondrous was her virtue that she was actually engaged to coach the young Princesses Mary and Anne in Calisto, a task for which those participants Mrs Knight and Moll Davis would certai
nly not have been held suitable. Shortly before Mrs Betterton’s marriage Pepys was ravished by her performance in the title role of The Duchess of Malfi (Betterton played Bosola), the play itself being one of the most popular tragedies in the repertory of The Duke’s Company. A long career in the theatre at her husband’s side ended with the admirable Mrs Betterton training up other younger actresses, including Anne Bracegirdle.7

  Most of her colleagues presented a very different image to the public. By 1666 Evelyn was finding the professional theatre increasingly distasteful, because audiences were abused by an ‘atheistical liberty’, to wit, ‘foul and indecent women, now (and never till now) permitted to appear and act’; he much preferred the special court performances. In the 1680s the word actress was virtually synonymous with that of ‘Miss’ or kept woman, at least in the expectations of the public.8 The burden of proof otherwise fell upon the individual actress, but there were very few who essayed to make the point. The trouble was that those ‘useful and instructive representations of human life’, the kind of new plays inspired by the opportunity of putting women on the stage, might be brilliant comedies of manners or turgid tragedies of emotion or some combination of the two, but in general they were extremely frank in their depiction of promiscuity. Inevitably and excitedly, the public merged the personality of the actress with that of her character on stage.