The Sexual History of London (13 page)

And Rochester could also write from a female perspective, as in this witty and sentimental declaration from ‘A Young Lady to her Ancient Lover':

Sadly, the Earl of Rochester never lived to be an ancient person of anybody's heart. He was dead by forty, his constitution and talent destroyed by alcohol and disease. But he was not without redemption, as this observation from the playwright George Etherege illustrates. ‘I know he is a Devil,' said Etherege, of this brilliant, conflicted man, ‘but he has something of the Angel yet undefac'd in him.'
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Like Rochester, the diarist Samuel Pepys enjoyed London's low life to the full. But Pepys lacked the flamboyant Earl's self-destructive streak. He also lacked Rochester's patrician generosity and sexual charisma, arguing the toss with street whores and shamefully chronicling his many sexual failures. Pepys exemplified the middle-class approach to sex in Charles II's London. When not molesting the servants, such as Mary Mercer, who allows him to touch her breasts, ‘they being the finest that I ever saw in my life; that is the truth of it',
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or visiting his mistress, Betty Lane, with a bottle of wine and a lobster for dinner, Pepys was patronizing the dockyard brothels of the Ratcliffe Highway and singing along to bawdy ballads with lyrics such as ‘Shitten-come-Shite the Way to Love is!'
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An earthy attitude towards bodily functions is exemplified by a diary entry in which Pepys records that he was ‘struck with a looseness of the bowels', dashed into a tavern, paid a groat for a pot of ale and defecated in the fireplace.

Pepys does not emerge as heroic or exemplary in his accounts of his sexual experiences, but, as his biographer Claire Tomalin has commented, his honest accounts of sexual failure and unrequited lust make him a sympathetic figure to modern readers. These exploits are written up with refreshing frankness, from an ‘experiment' when he lay down on the floor of his boat while being rowed up the Thames and, by fantasizing about a beauty he had spotted at Westminster Hall, came to orgasm ‘without use of my hand'
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to a confession that he was so aroused by the queen and her retinue at Mass on Christmas Eve 1666 that he masturbated during the service.

Although Pepys was occasionally successful, as when he persuades young Betty Mitchell to touch his ‘thing' on the pretext of securing promotion for her husband, he confesses that he is at a loss to emulate the sexual confidence of his colleagues and is shocked by the outrageousness of court life. The civil servant in him takes over as he is horrified not by Charles's affairs but by his lack of discretion about them, and views Charles's court as vicious, negligent and badly governed. King Charles plays with his dog or fiddles with his codpiece during meetings; chronic financial mismanagement means that on one occasion Pepys turns up to a meeting to find that there are no paper agendas on the table, because Charles has failed to pay an outstanding stationery bill for over £3000. On the same night that the navy is battling the Dutch fleet in the Medway, Charles and Barbara Villiers are more preoccupied with chasing ‘a poor moth' around the dining room.

While living vicariously through the king's sexual excesses, Pepys deplores his lack of management skills. But, as Tomalin states, this is what makes Pepys such a credible witness; his sexual encounters and fantasies take place between committee meetings and home improvement schemes designed to pacify his wife. Relations with his wife, Elizabeth, were difficult, which explains why Pepys felt the need to look outside their marriage for companionship and sexual release. Elizabeth suffered with a genital abscess three inches deep,
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which she found shameful and humiliating, and Pepys worried that he had infected her. This put a strain on their sex life; it was fourteen years into their marriage before Pepys could bring himself to put his finger ‘into her thing, which did do her much pleasure'
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but he confides in his diary that he hopes she does not get a liking for it. He had difficulty in accepting that women actually enjoyed sex, despite encounters with his robust mistress, Betty Lane, who brought ‘an unabashed enthusiasm' to their love-making.
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Where Rochester was the ruthless rake, Pepys is a comical figure, lacking the self-confidence to woo the fine ladies he drools over, chasing the servants, finding fleeting satisfaction in a stolen kiss or slipping his hand under a petticoat, but not always with success:

While Rochester and Pepys may have had very different degrees of sexual success, there is one item to which both had recourse, and that is the condom, attributed to the apocryphal Colonel ‘Condom' who promoted it in 1665, though he could scarcely be said to have invented it as condoms in some form or another have been with us for centuries as a method of preventing pregnancy and as disease control. While the Romans made them out of leather, the Egyptians preferred linen, the Chinese carved them out of tortoiseshell and the Japanese rolled oiled silk around the penis to prevent disease.

In his treatise on syphilis,
De Morbo Gallico
(1564), the Italian anatomist Gabriello Fallopio claimed to have invented a linen sheath which, when dipped in a solution of salt and herbs, formed a protection against the disease. The sheath fitted over the glans and under the foreskin, and appears to have been impractical and highly uncomfortable, but it was superseded by a larger sheath, still made of linen, that covered the entire penis.

Condom's breakthrough consisted of manufacturing sheaths out of animal gut. This process involved soaking sheep's intestines in water for a number of hours, then turning them inside out and macerating them again in a weak alkaline solution, changed every twelve hours. The intestines were then scraped carefully to remove the mucous membrane, leaving the peritoneal and muscular coats, and exposed to the vapour of burning brimstone. Next they were washed in soap and water, inflated, dried and cut into eight-inch lengths. Finally, the open end was finished with a ribbon that could be tied around the base of the penis, and the condom had to be soaked in water to make it supple before use. After use, it could be washed out and hung up to dry, ready for another excursion. Despite this laborious procedure, gut condoms soon proved hugely popular, and were celebrated by Rochester in his 1667 ‘Panegyrick Upon Cundums' which hailed this breakthrough as a protection against the horrors of venereal disease: ‘happy is the man who in his pocket keeps a well-made cundum, nor dreads the ills of shankers or cordes or buboes dire' and as contraceptive, ruling out the appalling prospect of an ‘unknown big belly and the squalling brat'. This development, he assures the reader, would rule both the chaste marriage bed and the filthiest stews, ensuring endless sexual pleasure without unhappy consequences and no need to have recourse to the mercy baths of Leather Lane, where victims underwent painful and protracted treatment for venereal disease.

While Charles II's court gained a reputation for profligacy, Restoration London proved its equal by offering an extraordinary catalogue of sexual pleasures. The sex trade, driven underground by Cromwell's Protectorate, flourished more vigorously than ever, offering something for every man, from the glamorous, top-drawer Venetian girls to the ‘ambulant whores' who roamed the streets in the distinctive white aprons which indicated that they were available for business. The Venetian girls were so expensive that they catered only to the aristocracy, as may be seen from this itemized receipt from John Garfield's series of satirical pamphlets, ‘The Wandering Whore':

Summa Totalis & Bill of Charges	Â
FOR Broaching a Belly unwemmed and unbored	£1.0.0
ITEM For the Magdalena's Fee	10.0
ITEM For the Hectors Fee	2.6
ITEM For providing a fine Hollands Smock	10.0
ITEM For Dressing, Perfuming and Painting	5.0
ITEM For occupying the most convenient Room	5.0
ITEM For Bottles of Wine	£1.0.0
ITEM For Pickled Oysters, Anchoves, Olives	10.0
ITEM For Sweet Meats, Sugar-cakes, Peaches, Walnuts	10.0
ITEM For Musicke	£1.0.0
Â	Summa Totalis £5.12.6d 41

This does not include the courtesan's own fee, which would have been at least £5, and the Holland smock would have been a present. But this represented the top end of the market with the best available girls, managed by a redoubtable circle of madams known as ‘the bawds'. These women, extraordinary characters in their own right, were quick to exploit their gullible clients and profit from the rich pickings available in the sex trade. The lives of the bawds are best illustrated by the stories of three forgotten women – Damaris Page, Elizabeth Cresswell and Priss Fotheringham – who met in prison and created an informal bawds' guild, supporting one another through the trials and vicissitudes of the sex trade.

Damaris Page was born into a life of abject poverty in the East End, around 1620. She first enters the record books in 1655, charged with assaulting Eleanor Pooley, ‘she being with child, with an instrument from which the said Eleanor died'.
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This ‘instrument' was described as a fork or prong with two tines, which had been thrust four and a half inches into Eleanor's belly. In other words, Damaris had attempted to perform an abortion, and she was charged with manslaughter and sentenced to be hanged. Damaris pleaded for clemency on the grounds that she was herself pregnant. She gave birth to a stillborn child whilst in Newgate, before being pardoned by the Lord Protector, Richard Cromwell. Once freed, Damaris went back to the life and developed her own speciality, running brothels for sailors on the Ratcliffe Highway. There had been brothels in this location since Roman times, when the first galleys landed at Londinium and Damaris's premises continued this ancient tradition, earning her the accolade of ‘The Great Bawd of the Seamen' from none other than King James II. Damaris's brothels offered basic fare of the sort enjoyed by Samuel Pepys: four girls on duty, taking each man as he came in on a ‘first cab off the rank' basis and offering ‘a sturdy cunt for two shillings'. Damaris died peacefully in 1669 in her own bed, leaving a handsome estate, a testimony to her long-held belief that ‘Money and Cunny are the Best Commodities!'
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Elizabeth Cresswell was neither an aristocratic courtesan like Barbara Villiers, mistress of Charles II, nor a humble streetwalker like Damaris Page, and her origins come as something of a surprise. Despite being born into a comfortable middle-class household in Aldgate in around 1625, Elizabeth inexplicably embarked on a career as a street prostitute, operating in Aldersgate, Clerkenwell and Shoreditch. As her looks began to fade, she became a bawd without rival in her wickedness, using all her diabolical arts of seduction to entice young women into the trade, and exploiting her family connections to set up an upmarket brothel.
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Discretion was not Elizabeth's strongest suit, however, and she ended up in court and in prison several times for keeping a disorderly house. On one celebrated occasion her brothel was raided on a Sunday when the constables found a group of a dozen reprobates drinking wine on the Lord's day, the women stripped to the waist, and one young lady ‘proposing a health to the privy member of a gentleman' and later ‘drinking a toast to her own private parts'.
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Once the Lord Protector, Richard Cromwell, had been replaced by Charles II, Elizabeth was free to pursue her career in an atmosphere of benign tolerance. Her most successful establishment was in Cripplegate, now the site of Moorfields underground station.