The Sexual History of London (9 page)

The two accounts differ wildly. Coke's version rings with moral indignation and has the weight of Church and state behind it: ‘that Humphrey Stafford, Knight, a known
paederastes
(lover of boys) on 12 May 1606 in the parish of St Andrew, High Holborn, led astray by the instigation of the devil, did with force and with arms assault a certain R B a lad of about 16 years of age and at that time he did wickedly and in a manner diabolical, felonious and contrary to nature have sexual relations with R B and at the same time had sex with R and did perpetrate with R that detestable and abominable sin of sodomy'.
²⁴

The pamphleteer goes for a more factual approach, noting that Stafford was charged with raping two youths at once, which must have been difficult particularly as Stafford's defence was inebriation. But the pamphlet provides more information about the boys themselves, naming them as Richard Robinson and Nicholas Crosse, aged seventeen and between thirteen and fourteen years respectively. According to the pamphlet, their parents complained to the law because the boys' injuries were so severe that they ‘were forced to use the help of a surgeon for their care', in other words needed to have their anuses sewn up. The parents would have been keen to claim that the boys had suffered injury, as otherwise they would have faced the death penalty for buggery themselves.

Once again, one is left wondering what really happened. In the absence of witnesses, one can speculate that if Stafford was as drunk as he claimed, how did he manage to control two fit and able young men, let alone assault them? Stafford maintained his innocence and argued that ‘if he had offended, it was in wine' and that he had been too drunk to penetrate either boy: ‘I acknowledge that I have deserved death, but yet I could not perform mine intention,' he claimed. His real crime, if anything, was making the boys drunk. It will never be known whether Stafford was a harmless homosexual who fell out with a pair of rent boys, or a dangerous rapist. Whatever the truth, his defence did not serve Stafford well. He was hanged in front of a huge crowd in June 1608. His death also marks a period when public attitudes towards sexual morality were changing, and punishment becoming harsher.

Female homosexual activity remained almost invisible at this time, at court and in the street. Although the modern reader will detect lesbian connotations in plays such as
As You Like It
and
Twelfth Night
, where young women fall in love with other girls, these episodes of gender confusion are always resolved in the last act, when it transpires that these ‘girls' are actually boys in disguise and the heroines are revealed as reassuringly heterosexual.

A classical precedent for the love between women certainly existed in the poems of Sappho, the Lesbian writer whose native Greek island, Lesbos, gives this form of sexuality its name. Sappho's poetry was translated by Renaissance scholars and inspired French poets such as Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85) and Pontus de Tyard (1522–1605), author of the 1573 ‘Elegy for One Woman Enamoured with Another'.
²⁵
Sappho was also introduced to an English audience through Turbeyville's translations of Ovid, although in some accounts her biography was tweaked to appease male sensibilities. Although the poet was originally believed to have committed suicide on account of a female lover, the Renaissance chose to portray her as a woman finally driven over the edge, in Sappho's case the edge of a cliff, for love of a young boy, Phaon. However, the poet John Donne, during his early, erotic phase, gives Sappho her due in the following lines. It is tempting to dismiss ‘Sappho to Philaenis' as conventional girl-on-girl action pandering to the voyeuristic appetites of heterosexual men, but nevertheless Donne effectively conveys the power of same-sex desire:

‘Sappho' then proceeds to tell her lover that they are so alike that making love to her is like looking in a mirror:

Beyond the world of the court and neoclassical poetry, the nearest to anything approaching a recognizable lesbian role model is Mary Frith, or the ‘Roaring Girl', immortalized in the 1611 play of the same name by Middleton and Dekker. (‘Roaring' in this context meant a well-born but uncouth person, similar to today's ‘Hooray Henrys'.) Mary was a boisterous ladette who dressed like a man, carried a weapon and embarked on a career as a petty criminal in direct competition with her male counterparts. This gloriously swashbuckling dyke was fêted in a number of broadsheets and dramas, turning the tables on the men and on one occasion even ‘getting the girl' by marrying the female lead, who does not raise any objections when she discovers Mary's true identity. Mary Frith was fortunate to be so celebrated; other cases of women caught cross-dressing resulted in a whipping or a spell in Bridewell, the assumption being that they were whores.

Mary Frith, aka Moll Cutpurse, 1589–1663, a notorious thief who dressed as a man.

Back at court, heterosexual sex flourished, behind closed doors. Whether Queen Elizabeth I enjoyed the benefits of sex, recreational or otherwise, will remain one of the great mysteries, but Elizabeth did take the precaution of branding herself as ‘The Virgin Queen', an inspired piece of spin. Elizabeth was a political survivor, driven to extreme self-preservation following the fate of her mother, Anne Boleyn, and the constant reminder of mortality in the form of other noblewomen either murdered or killed by childbirth. Elizabeth's actual virginity must be a matter for conjecture. Henry IV of France joked that there were three things that nobody believed: that Archduke Albert was a good general; that he, Henry, was a good Catholic; and that the Queen of England was a virgin. Elizabeth certainly experienced a series of passionate crushes on courtiers such as Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. How close these encounters came to consummation cannot be determined, but the fact remains that Elizabeth always slept alone.

Queen Elizabeth's celibacy did not extend to the rest of her circle. While every man at court had to profess adulation for Elizabeth (or face the consequences), her admirers enjoyed tumultuous, indiscreet affairs. One such was Sir Walter Raleigh, whose company Elizabeth enjoyed because he was graceful and lively. As Aubrey tells us, ‘he was no Slug, without doubt he had a wonderful waking spirit'. Raleigh was popular with the ladies, and ‘he loved a wench well'.
²⁸

On one occasion, ‘[Raleigh] got one of the Maids of Honour up against a tree in a wood. This was his first Lady' – as opposed to commoners, presumably. Initially, the young woman had reservations, and wished to preserve her honour. ‘Sweet Sir Walter,' she exclaimed, ‘what do you ask of me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter!' But Raleigh proved a skilful seducer, and ‘as the danger and the pleasure at the same time grew higher, she cried, in the ecstasy, “Swisser Swatter, Swisser Swatter!”'
²⁹

Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621), came perilously close to infringing the Buggery Statute with her particular fetish. This noblewoman, a ‘beautiful Ladie with a pretty sharpe-ovall face' whose ‘haire was of a reddish yellowe', was very salacious. Her favourite activity took place during the springtime of the year: ‘when the Stallions were to leap the Mares, they were to be brought before such a part of the house, where she had a
vidette
(a hole to peepe out at) to looke on them and please herself with their Sport; and then she would act the like sport herself with
her
stallions'.
³⁰
There were also rumours that Mary had an incestuous affair with her brother, Sir Philip Sidney. ‘There was so great love between him and his faire sister that I have heard old Gentlemen say that they lay together, and it was thought the first Philip Earle of Pembroke was begot by him, but he inherited not the wit of either brother or sister.'
³¹

Mary Herbert is a fine example of the type which Alan Haynes has described as ‘the privileged wanton' in his fascinating study,
Sex in Elizabethan England
. Mary's independent wealth and raft of supporters at court rendered her impervious to criticism. Although even this degree of freedom had its limits, as can be seen from the life of Venetia Stanley, who arrived at court at a slightly later date, during the reign of James I.

Venetia Stanley (1600–35), a ‘most beautiful and desireable Creature' according to Aubrey, was a young beauty from Oxfordshire with a sweet face, brown hair and, most importantly, a strong constitution, an essential requirement for surviving life at court. When she arrived in London, Venetia caught the eye of the Earl of Dorset and they had at least one child together, for which he settled an annuity of £500 on her. Venetia soon developed something of a reputation, but this did not deter Sir Kenelm Digby, who married her secretly in the spring of 1625, against the advice of his mother, who insisted you could not make an honest woman out of a whore.

But, to all intents and purposes, the marriage was a happy one. Kenelm celebrated his wife's beauty by commissioning portraits from Van Dyke and his contemporaries and having her face, hands and feet cast in plaster. Ben Jonson immortalized Venetia in verse, ‘sitting, and ready to be drawne…in Tiffany, silks, and lawne'. In return, Venetia provided Kenelm with three children and appeared to be a reformed character, even restraining herself when they dined with her old lover, the Earl of Dorset, who would stare at her passionately across the table but manage to restrict himself to kissing her hand. Aubrey's own cousin Elizabeth stated that Venetia had redeemed herself by her strict living.

And then, at thirty-five years of age, Venetia was found dead in bed. Some people suspected she had been poisoned. ‘When her head was opened,' Aubrey tells us, ‘there was found but little braine', a condition which Kenelm put down to Venetia drinking ‘viper-wine', which he believed would preserve her beauty. This is when the rumours started. Although Venetia might quite legitimately have been taking viper wine, a popular restorative made from adders and recommended for a range of ailments including hair loss, Venetia's friends were convinced that Kenelm had murdered her with this substance, because he was ‘a viper husband who was jealous of her that she would steale a leape' (have extramarital sex).

There is a sad little postscript to this story. Around 1667, Aubrey was walking through Newgate Street when he saw the bust from Venetia's tomb for sale on a second-hand stall. It was in a wretched condition, the gilt ravaged by the flames of the Great Fire a year previously. Aubrey commented on the sight to his companion, but they never saw it again. Like Venetia, the bust suffered an ignoble fate. ‘They melted it downe,' Aubrey noted, sadly. ‘How these curiosities would be quite forgot, did not such idle fellowes as I am putte them downe.'
³²
A sad end to the life of a beautiful and sophisticated court lady.

But what of the world beyond the court? For a taste of this, let us venture out into the streets of London.

During the reign of the Tudors, London was the fastest-growing city in the world. By 1600, it had become the world's greatest metropolis, establishing its lead in overseas and domestic trade and setting itself up as the economic centre of Western Europe. Writers professed themselves awestruck by its glory: ‘London is a place both for the beautie of buyldinge, infinite riches, varietie of all things, that excelleth all the Cities in the world: insomuch that it maye be called the Store-house and Marte of all
Europe
,' declared John Lyly;
¹
while Daniel Lupton marvelled that London is ‘the great Bee-hive of Christendom' and praised the Thames, which, with its swans and its bobbing vessels, was ‘the glory and wealth of the City, the high way to the Sea, the bringer in of wealth and Strangers'.
²
This was the ‘Sweet Thames!' which Edmund Spenser implored to ‘run softly, till I end my song'.

But London had a less glamorous side. Orazio Busino, an Italian ambassador, observed that London was the filthiest city in the world: ‘Its Italian name,
Londra
, should be changed into
Lorda
, or filthy, which would be well merited by the black, offensive mud which is peculiar to its streets, and furnishes the mob with a formidable missile whenever anything occurs to call forth their disapprobation.'
³

This was a London of two halves, the affluent and the abject. In the most prosperous areas, streets had been widened and roads paved with cobbles; water was being piped into the city from an arch under Old London Bridge, courtesy of the Dutch engineer Pieter Mauritz, who had persuaded the City Corporation to install his water engines so that thousands of households had access to fresh water. The population had expanded and its citizens now numbered over 200,000; the city's boundaries spread north, west and south, while south-east London became home to thousands of Dutch and European Protestants seeking asylum from Roman Catholic persecution. These immigrants brought with them trades and skills, and a strict work ethic.

This was the London that so delighted a German traveller around 1602 that he commented that ‘England is a paradise for women, a prison for servants, and a hell for horses'
⁴
where ‘the females have great liberty and are almost like masters, whilst the poor horses are worked very hard'.
⁵
Another visitor, the Swiss physician Thomas Platter, was impressed with the
joie de vivre
of Englishwomen, and their habit of frequenting London's many taverns in an Elizabethan equivalent of a girls' night out: ‘they count it a great honour to be taken there and given wine with sugar to drink; and if one woman is invited, then she will bring three or four other women along, and they gaily toast each other'.
⁶

Englishwomen were considered particularly desirable, with foreign commentators remarking upon their beauty and easy manner, and their habit of greeting guests with kisses on all occasions. Others were impressed by the way English girls dressed, in tight-fitting gowns with deep cleavages, ‘laying out their naked breastes after a whorish manner to be seene and touched', some even displaying their nipples, which were tipped with rouge for the purpose.
⁷
The women of London had a reputation for disrepute; just as in certain holiday destinations today, English girls are regarded as being ‘up for it', so the girls of Tudor London were notorious creatures of appetite, ‘more hotte than goates' and ‘more desirous of carnall luste thane man'.
⁸

An Elizabethan woodcut showing the interior of a whorehouse.

This is the London of ‘Merrie England', where buxom wenches raised a frothing tankard to their gallants, and jolly whores in the tradition of Shakespeare's Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly happily plied their trade. Southwark and the Bankside were still the dominant areas for the sex trade, but by this period there were plenty of others, named in the literature of the time. Henry Savile refers to: ‘Milford Lane, near to St Clement's Steeple, [where] lived a nymph, kind to all Christian people', while a ballad provides a useful guide to other areas of London:

Lying alongside this version of London was another London, a shadowy parallel universe of narrow, badly paved lanes, darkened by overhanging houses, and rendered insanitary by the citizens' tendency to fling their garbage, from cabbage leaves and chicken carcasses to the contents of their chamber-pots, straight out into the street. This was the London of ‘small chambers, cottages and lodgings for sturdy beggars, harlots, idle and unthrifty persons, whereby beggary, vagabondcy, unthriftyness, theft, pox, pestilence, infections, diseases and infirmities do ensue and daily grow to the defacing of the beauty of the said city'.
¹⁰

The population had been swollen by a vast army of beggars consisting of disenfranchised peasants. In an early form of the enclosures, entire villages disappeared as wealthy landowners fenced off their estates and kicked out the locals, meaning that the peasantry no longer had common land upon which to graze their animals and raise crops. Robbed of their livelihood, and in many cases their homes, these ‘vagabonds' descended on London desperate for work, drawn, as ever, by the promise of the bright lights and the good life. According to Sir William Periam (1534–1604) there were around 30,000 ‘idle persons and masterless men' in the city, ‘the very scum of England, and the stink of iniquity'.
¹¹

While some would have found employment as unskilled labourers, working on the docks or as porters, carrying goods about the city, many ended their days as vagrants. In 1587, one citizen observed that the streets of London ‘swarm with beggars, that no man can stand or stay in any church or street, but presently ten or twelve beggars come breathing in his face, many of them having the plague sores and other contagious diseases running on them, wandering from man to man to seek relief'.
¹²

But not all these vagabonds were male. Young women, unwanted at home where they were a drain on their poverty-stricken parents, streamed into the capital in their hundreds every day, on carts, in boats, most commonly on foot, all in search of a fresh beginning and a new life. Some were fortunate enough to find jobs as servants, but many gravitated to the one profession where they could be certain to find employment: prostitution. Just as it led the world in every other form of commerce, London dominated the sex trade, and there was an insatiable demand for new blood.

Imagine the fate of one such new arrival. Let us call her Kate, a fresh-faced country girl. Growing up on a farm, surrounded by animals, sharing a one-roomed cottage where she has frequently overheard her parents having sex, Kate is scarcely naive. But she is shortly to be appalled by the harsh realities of the sex trade. Unable to find work as a lady's maid, starving and footsore, she has been enticed by an ageing bawd into what appears to be an inn, with an offer of work in return for a roof over her head.

At first glance, this ‘inn' seems reassuringly familiar, with a gateway leading into a stable yard, where horses can be fed and watered. The entrance, on the ground floor, leads to a reception area, attached to a dining room, with the kitchens at the rear. Downstairs, the rooms are full of men, gambling or drinking with flirtatious, giggling young women. Upstairs, she finds a bedroom overlooking the stable yard (and the dunghill). The floors are strewn with rushes and infested with fleas and other vermin but the room is pleasantly decorated, with a comfortable bed, pictures on the wall and little bottles of potions and powders. It is only once Kate flicks through the books and glimpses the illustrations that she realizes where she is. These amorous pamphlets are here to revive the jaded appetites of her clients. Kate is in a brothel.

To be honest, conditions here at the ‘trugging-house' are better than those of the tiny cottage she left behind. As well as a clean white smock, she sees a ‘groaning chair' or commode, and two piss-pots, his and hers. She will learn that her task is to hold the pot for her client to urinate into, in the belief that this served as a protection against gonorrhoea or ‘the clap'. She will then use the other one, as graphically described by one ex-whore, urinating ‘till I made it whurra and roar like the Tyde at London Bridge to endangering the breaking of my very Twatling-strings with straining backwards for I know no better way or remedy more safe than pissing presently to prevent the French Pox, Gonnorhea, the perilous infirmity of Burning or getting with Childe which is the approved Maxim amongst Venetian Curtizans'.
¹³

Pressed into service in this trugging-house, Kate learns that everyday life mirrors the hierarchy of a more conventional middle-class household. At the head of the house is the madam, or ‘pandarelle', who supervises the ‘apple squires', or male employees, whilst the whores are at the bottom of the food chain, even referring to their own genitals as ‘the commodity', as this is what they are trading.
¹⁴

After the enterprising bawd has auctioned off Kate's virginity to the highest bidder, and Kate has been initiated into the sex trade, she is granted clothes and victuals in exchange for a gruelling workload satisfying the lusts of London's men. The work is harder because she is expected to be available day and night, entertaining all companions, sitting or standing at the door in her bright taffeta dress to entice the clients in, refusing nobody, drunk or sober, diseased or vile.
¹⁵

Kate runs the constant risk of sexual violence, and has to pander to every requirement, from the lusty young lad to the ageing
roué
with whom she must be particularly tactful, offering aphrodisiacs such as asparagus, coriander seeds steeped in white wine, saffron boiled in red wine, and lettuce, the Viagra of its day.
¹⁶
If this is not enough to stir the ageing member, Kate must resort to one of the popular male fetishes, very likely flagellation, as in this epigram by the satirist Sir John Davies:

In addition to all this, Kate is expected to be polite, friendly, to keep herself ‘free from all vicious diseases and all ill-smells from breath or under the arms or elsewhere'.
¹⁸
Her bed must be clean and so must she in her ‘Holland's Smocke' or fine linen night-gown. Any spare time the poor young woman has left is to be spent leafing through volumes of pornography to brush up her technique; illiterate as she is, she can still look at the pictures. If she chooses to leave, it will be with nothing but her smock, but there is little incentive to do so.

After a short period, the irregular hours, the heavy drinking, the need to be constantly obliging to large numbers of clients will take its toll on her mental and physical health. Some girls find a way out: they are fortunate enough to meet a rich protector or marry a forgiving man who understands why they were driven into the trade in the first place.

The more enterprising girls embark upon a career as bawds or madams themselves, but most sink into menial work when they lose their charms, or become broken-down wretches scraping a living in Gropecunt Lane. This is, if they do not end up in Bridewell prison or the madhouse of Bedlam or die prematurely through suicide or murder. And yet, as will be revealed in the remainder of this history, generation after generation of young Kates flock to London, searching for romance and adventure, and there is never any shortage of customers.

Many contemporary writers, such as Dekker, Middleton and Greene, frequented the stews, and wrote about them, providing us with a rich seam of anecdotes about Elizabethan low life, whilst these dens of iniquity were also a constant source of inspiration for Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe and one author who rejoiced in the name of Shakerley Marmion. The most famous dramatist of all, William Shakespeare, lived close to the White Boar, one of the most notorious Bankside brothels, overhearing many phrases and scenarios which provided a rich source of material for his plays. These writers also demonstrated some sympathy for the whores, seeing in these women's lives a parallel with their own precarious efforts to live by the pen, embracing the life of near-vagabonds despite their elevated birth and university education, throwing in their lot with the strolling players, the tumblers and the minstrels who performed in taverns and the yards of inns.