Normal Women, page 17
Dressing as the wrong class was probably as provocative as dressing as the wrong sex, and highly erotic for people in a rigidly class-bound society. According to a fifteenth-century playscript, and reports in the courts, sex workers in brothels or ale houses might entertain clients with a dance in which they dressed as men in breeches, as ‘matrons’ – respectable elite women – or naked.
The London courts recorded frequent accusations.82 A German or Dutch woman dressed in men’s clothing was caught having sex with a man named ‘Charles of Tower Hill’ in September 1471, and in the same year a man named Thomas a Wode in the parish of St Peter Westcheap was reported for giving a German or Dutch woman a man’s silk doublet to wear. No punishment was recorded for either of these two women; but in 1473, ‘Trude Garard’ was recorded as a ‘common strumpet’, street-walking in men’s clothing. The court ordered that she be marched by minstrels to the pillory, carrying a white rod and wearing the striped hood that identified a prostitute, and that after standing in shame, she be expelled from the city for life.
Thomasina, a corse-weaver, was accused in March 1493 of taking a woman dressed as a man to her rooms and holding her there. The Latin of the court record calls the woman Thomasina’s ‘concubine’ but it is not clear whether she was kidnapped or was visiting by choice. Thomasina was not charged – she could produce three witnesses to her good character, and she only had to pay a fine. In 1495 in the Parish of St Mary, a woman named Alice was arrested for dressing as a man to follow her lover to Rochester, where she lived with him ‘for a long time’. The man was a priest, and Alice was cited in court as a common prostitute who specialised in sex with priests. There was no punishment as the fine was paid.
Elizabeth Chekyn, who had been seen in bed with two priests in 1516, was arrested for walking around in a priest’s gown and her punishment was to wear a picture of a woman in a priest’s gown on her shoulder and a yellow ‘H’ to make it clear that her offences were both ‘Harlotry’ and dressing as a priest, as she was led through the streets from the prison at Newgate to the pillory at Cornhill. She had to stand there in shame, and then go to Aldgate, to be expelled from London for life. In July 1519 – as part of a general sweep of the ‘idle vagrant and suspicious persons’ in the capital – four women were arrested as strumpets and common harlots. Three of them – Margery Brett, Margery Smyth and Margery Tyler – were said to have ‘Cut their here like unto mennys hedes to theunt [the intent] to goo in mennes clothing at tymes whan their lewde pleasure is’. The three women, wearing both men’s bonnets and the striped hoods of prostitutes, were led by minstrels to the pillory, where they stood holding white rods, before being expelled from the city.
In March 1534, a woman named Alice Wolfe was arrested, disguised as a man, escaping from the Tower of London the night before her execution for murder, with the help of her jailer John Bawde. She was caught when a watchman identified her as a woman. Her execution, along with her husband John Wolfe, for the murder of two Italian merchants went ahead – the couple were chained on the bank of the Thames and drowned by the rising tide, the usual punishment for pirates and sea-robbers, suffered by Alice Wolfe perhaps because her accomplice-husband was a Hanseatic merchant and their victims had been merchants.
In 1537, Agnes Hopton was punished in Hertfordshire for dressing as a man and living with her male lover, John Salmon, who ‘kept her in manne’s rainment’. Their punishment was like that of a skimmington ride, a public denouncing. They were both seated on a horse. John Salmon was dressed as a minstrel playing an instrument and forced to ride facing the tail of the horse, so that he was face to face with Agnes, to the amusement of the neighbourhood. They were banished for a year.
In 1576, Margaret Bolton and her daughter went abroad in men’s clothes, and Dorothy Clayton wore men’s clothes for her work as a prostitute, and Alice Young aged only 17 disguised herself ‘lewdly’ in men’s apparel. Jane Trosse was arrested in 1577 for wearing clothes ‘more manlike than womanlike’.
Margaret Wakeley was charged with giving birth to a bastard and going about in men’s apparel in 1600; Helen Balsen, a prostitute, dressed as a man to please a client in 1601. Elizabeth Griffin was punished for lewdness and going about in men’s apparel in October 1601, and in June 1602 a vagrant couple, Rose Davies and John Littlewood, were both arrested for dressing as the opposite sex.
‘Moll Cutpurse’ – real name Mary Frith – became widely known, thanks to a sensational biography published about her in 1662. She was born in the 1580s to an artisan family – her father was a cobbler – and while she was still a girl, her uncle, a minister, tried to send her to New England, probably as an indentured worker sworn to serve a master for a number of years without pay. Before the ship sailed, she jumped overboard and swam to the shore and went into hiding. Mary became Moll and made her living from thieving, earning her name ‘Cutpurse’ as a pickpocket, cutting the strings that tied the wallet or purse to the victim’s belt. In August 1600, she was found guilty in a Middlesex court for stealing 2s 11d. It was the first of several arrests, and she was branded on the hand as punishment for thieving. She gained fame in 1610 when John Day wrote a play, The Madde Pranckes of Mery Mall of the Bankside. A second play in 1611, by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, celebrated her under the title The Roaring Girl.
The playwrights made their heroine a single woman and though dressed in men’s clothes she was chaste. But the real-life Moll Cutpurse was known as a ‘libertine’ – a sexually active woman. She worked as a highwaywoman and held up General Fairfax, on Hounslow Heath outside London, stealing a huge sum of 250 jacobuses (each worth 25s). According to the Newgate Calendar, a scandal sheet based loosely on the court hearings at Newgate Prison, Moll shot at the Cromwellian general, killed two horses under his servants and rode away. Fairfax reported the attack at Hounslow and a party of military officers chased her for six miles, until Moll’s horse failed her at Turnham Green. Some histories recorded her as being a Royalist soldier, attacking Fairfax as a last stand for the king; however, she was arrested not for warfare, but for a criminal attack and condemned to die. She escaped the gallows by buying a pardon, paying General Fairfax £2,000 – a fortune.83
In public she wore a man’s doublet and breeches and smoked a pipe, and she once won a bet to ride from Charing Cross to Shoreditch in London dressed as a man carrying a banner and blowing a trumpet. She appeared with the famous horse trainer William Banks and his ‘counting horse’ Marocco.
The title page of Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s play The Roaring Girl, based on and starring Mary Frith – also known as ‘Moll Cutpurse’
[And Cover] Title page from Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl, Thomas Archer, 1611 (Bridgeman Images)
Mary Frith took to the stage as herself in 1611 at the Fortune Theatre, in London, where, dressed as a man, she sang songs, played the lute and exchanged jokes with the audience, one of the earliest women on stage, the first recorded stand-up comedienne. She was charged with indecency of her dress in December that year and accused of being involved in prostitution. A few months later, in February 1612, she was also ordered to perform a public penance, wearing only a sheet, during the Sunday morning sermon at St Paul’s Cross, when according to a witness she wept bitterly and was very penitent.
Despite her reputation as a cross-dressing bawdy single woman, she married Lewknor Markham in 1614, perhaps to gain the legal invisibility of being a wife. But by 1620 she admitted receiving stolen goods and procuring sexual partners: young women for sex with men, and male lovers for middle-class women. She may have been taken into Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam) diagnosed as insane. There is a record that she was released from the hospital in 1644. She died in Fleet Street of dropsy in 1659.
A woman who sometimes identified as a man, Thomasina Hall, lived as a woman in London until 1595 when, dressing as a man and going by the name of Thomas, Hall joined the expedition to Cadiz. Surviving the disaster of the expedition and returning to London, Hall assumed the name Thomasina again and became a seamstress, then took ship to Virginia as ‘Thomas’, but on arrival in the colony took work as a chambermaid. Summoned by the General Council of Virginia and accused of being a man dressing as a woman, Thomas/Thomasina told the council: ‘I go in women’s apparel to get a bit for my cat.’
The court ruled that Thomas/Thomasina could wear men’s clothes but must wear a woman’s apron over the breeches and a woman’s headdress.84
Katherine Jones was arrested in Fleet Street in January 1624 dressed as a man, ‘for merriment’; Margaret Willshire, armed with a dagger and a pikestaff, her sister, her female employer and her woman neighbour all dressed in men’s clothes and went out into the streets of Chaceley in Worcestershire, at Christmas in 1610, and gave a constable a written message to raise the hue and cry. The offence, so like the old tradition of ‘misrule’, was brought to court in a sign that the practice – dressing in the wrong clothes for class and sex, partying with a superior and teasing the authorities – was no longer accepted.
Three young women like Katherine Jones, dressing up for fun, were taken to a church court in Essex, accused of going ‘a-mumming’ and dressing as men in 1596. But it was their father who had to answer for allowing the girls to dress as men.85 The eccentric Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), wore both theatrical costume and male clothing. In her writing she sometimes used a male authorial voice, and sometimes female.86
Anxiety about women dressing as men escalated into moral panics, one lasting a decade from 1620. It was believed that women who cut off their hair and wore men’s clothes were challenging the authority of men, leaving their sex and changing their nature. Exceptional ‘manly’ women had been explained away, but women disguising as men, women living as men, women becoming men, not only disrupted the control of women but made it impossible to define them.
Since the Norman law of inheritance ruled that a man should inherit, it was essential to know the sex of an heir and that sex must be unchanged throughout life. Sir Edward Coke, the Elizabethan law expert, ruled that legally there were three sexes: everyone was either male or female or hermaphrodite. Hermaphrodites must choose the sexual identity ‘that prevaileth’87 and retain it permanently, for fear of having sex with the ‘wrong’ gender and so fall into sodomy.88 If someone chose to be a man, and inherited property, he could not then change sex, as that would disrupt patrilineal inheritance and put a woman in charge of a man’s true inheritance. If someone chose to be a woman, they would not inherit in the male line.
An Unkingly King
The inheritance of a male monarch – James I – succeeding Elizabeth after 50 years of female rule was expected to mark a return to normal authority: a king leading the country, a man leading his household; male authority dominant in public and private, kingdom and hearth. But James I of England proved little help in restoring virile male authority.89 James’s wife, Anne of Denmark, defied him by converting to Roman Catholicism and refused to attend Protestant communion – even at her own coronation in England. She smuggled priests into her royal household and celebrated mass with her Roman Catholic ladies. The royal couple lived apart, separated.90 She refused to give James control of their first son, Henry, and defied his specific order by travelling with Henry from Scotland to their new kingdom of England.91 Queen Anne’s study of architecture, her patronage of artists and her love of the masque were criticised by James as extravagant, and his verdict that she was ‘stupid’ was repeated by gossips and then historians.92 James’s own preference for handsome young men led to murderous rivalry and corruption at his court. The king indulged his second son Charles, who was in turn besotted with his father’s favourite, the dashing George Villiers.
Everyone knew that the greatest buttress against female disorder was a dominant male head of the household, and James clearly failed. He was blamed for the disorder, extreme favouritism, sex scandals and law-breaking at his court.93 But his dislike of educated assertive women showed itself in a pushback against female power and education. The eulogy he ordered for Elizabeth’s tomb praised her as learned ‘beyond her sex’.94
James encouraged a rising suspicion and fear about women that peaked in a frenzy of witch-hunting in his first kingdom of Scotland, and imported it to England. The return of male rule to the throne of England became a disaster for the women of England – especially the poor and friendless.
The understandable absence of the cultured and educated Anne of Denmark from her husband’s court left a gap where a queen should be. When their son Charles I took the throne with his wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, her love of the masque and courtly love presentations restored the image of a woman as a passive object of male admiration95 – and invigorated courtly love in the court masques and imagery. It was only when the civil wars broke out that Henrietta Maria dropped the ‘beautiful lady’ act and emerged as a formidable leader and an aggressive soldier, typical of many of the elite women who took up arms to defend their own homes, smuggled and spied on both sides of the conflict, and kept their lands safe through years of war. After the defeat and execution of Charles I, Henrietta Maria led the royal court into exile, but she could not maintain a coherent opposition nor threaten a return. Many of her former subjects despised her and – as a Roman Catholic widow dependent on the king of France – Henrietta Maria could not be a model for female power for many English women.
She-soldiers
Mary Ambree adopted men’s clothes to be a soldier in Belgium in 1584, fighting against Spain, as recorded in a popular later ballad:
When the captain courageous whom deeth could not daunt
had roundly besieged the City of Gaunt
and manly they marched by two and by three
but the foremost in battle was Mary Ambree.96
Long Meg of Westminster also wore men’s clothes to serve as a soldier against the French at Boulogne, returning to petticoats after the war was over – she was said to have been a tall woman who married an exceptionally tall man, promising obedience in her marriage vows.
Put mee on [a] man’s attire,
Give mee a Souldier’s coat,
‘I’ll make King Charles’s foes,
Quickly to change their note!97
So sang the heroine of a popular royalist ballad, as she signed up to be a she-soldier, a woman recruit for the army of King Charles. How many women marched as recruited soldiers for each side was difficult to calculate for commentators at the time, but several reports survive. A soldier captured at Evesham who proved to be a woman said: ‘her selfe and three more sufficient men’s daughters came out of Shropshire, when the King’s forces commanded there, and to get away, came disguised in that manner, and resolved to serve in the Warre for the Cause of God’.98
Sir Thomas, Lord Fairfax, claimed to have captured a ‘regiment’ of Royalist women in January 1644 in Cheshire. A woman named Jane Ingleby rode in the Royalist cavalry charge at Marston Moor. Another Royalist woman, serving under General Lindsey in the cavalry, was captured by Parliament forces; and Oliver Cromwell himself, who thinking he had captured a young Royalist soldier, was surprised to hear a woman’s soprano voice when he ordered the youth to sing. At least one of the Royalist corporals was known to be a woman in 1645; Charles I believed that ‘she-soldiers’ were so numerous in his army that he issued an edict against women taking up arms, saying it was contrary to tradition and God.99
A woman named ‘Molly’ survived the wars to run the Mad Dog pub at Blackheath and was said to have been a she-soldier. ‘Mrs Clarke’ was celebrated in a ballad when she took up arms and wore breeches to accompany her husband into battle. A female gunner’s mate was blamed for the loss of the frigate Duncannon.
Women of Lyme Regis defended the port from a Royalist siege in April 1644. Prince Maurice of the Rhine brought his army of 6,000 men against the town’s militia of 4,000 – which included Lyme Regis’s women, who dressed as soldiers in hats and jackets to fool the besieging force into thinking that there were more men under arms. Local vicar Reverend James Strong of Bettiscombe celebrated their courage in a poem entitled: ‘Feminine valour; eminently discovered in Western women; as well by defying the merciless enemy at the face abroad, as by fighting them in the Garrison towns, sometimes carrying stones, anon tumbling of the stones over the Works on the enemy, when they have been scaling them, some carrying powder, others charging pieces to ease the soldiers, constantly resolved for generality, not to think any one’s life dear, to maintain that Christian quarrel for the Parliament.’100
Prince Rupert met the same sort of female opposition when he set siege to Bristol. Dorothy Kelly, the midwife-preacher, Mistress Joan Batten and others blocked the Frome gate with woolsacks and earth, repaired the walls with sandbags and stood behind the gunners, reloading and maintaining the fire.101
Women were the principal defenders of their own communities in the absence of men. Some women organised themselves and reproduced the discipline and rituals of male troops. In Coventry, companies of women marched behind a drum led by ‘Goodwife Adderley with a Hercules club on her shoulder and drew off from work by one Mary Herbert with a pistol in her hand that she shot off when they were dismissed.’102
The mayoress of Coventry mustered her own troop of women and led them out of the town, to pursue and capture the baggage train of a local Royalist troop.103 Parliamentarian and writer Lucy Hutchinson said that the wife of the mayor of Nottingham in the besieged city was ‘a woman of great zeal and courage and more understanding than women of her rank usually have’.104
At the siege of Worcester, 400 women citizens served as cannoneers and some as snipers; at the siege of Pontefract, a woman was shot bringing ale to the sappers who were repairing the town walls. Chester women shot the guns from the ramparts of their besieged town. At Leicester in 1645, Parliamentary women did not surrender when the town fell, but continued fighting from street to street.105
