The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (79 page)

In the 1660s Frances Jennings, she whose face reminded one of the dawn, and another Maid of Honour, Goditha Price, decided to disguise themselves as orange-girls in order to consult a fortune-teller anonymously.
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It was easy to disguise the rather swarthy and distinctly stumpy Mrs Price; but Frances, just because of ‘her brilliant fairness’ and her particular grace of manner, was rather more difficult. All the same the two girls purchased some oranges, and thus equipped hired a hackney-coach. It was a night on which their mistress the Duchess of York had gone to the theatre (Frances pleading illness) and somehow it was irresistible for the two girls to stop there and begin to sell their oranges under the very noses of the court. Mrs Price accosted Henry Sidney, looking more of an Adonis than ever and even more splendidly dressed than usual; Frances tackled the famous libertine Harry Killigrew (Anne Killigrew’s cousin).

Seeing two women together, one older and rather plain and the other very pretty, Killigrew made the assumption, natural to the time and place, that one was the other’s bawd or manager. Asked if he would like to buy some oranges, Killigrew replied. ‘Not just now but if you like to bring me this little girl tomorrow, it shall be worth all the oranges in the shops to you.’ His hand, which he had kept under Frances’s chin, began to stray downwards towards her bosom. Frances furiously rebuked him.

‘Ha! Ha!,’ exclaimed Killigrew, ‘but this is strange upon my honour! A little whore who tries to raise her fee by being ladylike and unwilling!’

Only one man present recognized them and that was Henry Brounckner, known as the best chess-player in England, who combined this hobby with that of keeping a house of pleasure near London, stocked with ‘several working-girls’. Brounckner’s attention was caught by the good quality of the girls’ shoes, as well as Frances’s ‘prettiest imaginable leg’ (which originally he fancied would merit her inclusion in his harem). Brounckner however kept his peace, hoping to have material with which to twit Frances Jennings’s fiancé later.

Prostitutes in an infinite variety of forms were omnipresent in seventeenth-century England, something taken for granted even
by a Puritan counsellor like William Gouge, who suggested that a husband might be driven to visit them if a wife did not perform her marital duties. Cases of prostitution and scandalous lewdness, having been in the control of the church, gradually developed into indictable offences under the common law as the century progressed. It was felt that the church’s administration was inefficient and corrupt, while the punishments meted out by the ecclesiastical courts to those presented to them were inadequate. Local ordinances for the suppression of brothels were founded in the doctrine that such places constituted a breach of the peace, a view promulgated by Coke, who described bawdy-houses as ‘the cause of many mischiefs’.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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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’.
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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.
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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.’
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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’.
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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’.
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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 gallantries, 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’.
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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.
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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.