The Sexual History of London (11 page)

As with any private club, membership was stringently enforced. Potential punters had to present their credentials at the gatehouse, then face further questioning before being escorted across the drawbridge to the Manor. Donna greeted each client personally, to ask him his requirements and size him up. The safety of her girls was paramount: nobody was allowed to shout at or ill-treat them. Any wild or unruly behaviour meant instant and permanent expulsion, whatever the rank and station.

By the same token, Donna did not allow anyone in without money. There was no credit, no matter how famous the client. This policy ensured that the Manor House remained exclusive, as only the most affluent could afford to enter. As the years went by, so the coffers in Donna's basement filled up with gold. She had started out with just four girls, hand-picked for their special talents and much in demand: ‘Beta Brestonia', a fiery beauty, ‘impudent and insolent'; tiny Eliza Caunce, who was regarded as a nymphomaniac; Longa Maria, a gentle beauty with a sympathetic manner; and Maria Pettit, considered to be a real livewire.
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As Donna's business expanded, so she took on more girls, and decorated the house in an ever more lavish style. Donna hired extra staff, including a doctor to look after the girls, and ensure that they were fresh and clean. The kitchen was run by professional cooks and the food and wine were abundant.

But, as the years passed, Donna's empire began to flounder. She had a high turnover of whores since she ran a strict house and many young women tired of the discipline. Standards started to slip. Lowlifes from the Globe, the Hope and the Swan were admitted. Instead of being a discreet suburban brothel, the Manor House became widely known for drinking and gambling and the subsequent noise which these activities produced. However carefully Donna may have screened her clients in the past, certain nobles enjoyed ‘whore-bashing' which led to some bad publicity. In 1630, the pamphleteer Daniel Lupton produced a damning broadsheet in which he lambasted Paris Gardens as more of ‘a foule Denne than a Faire Garden', filled with roaring boys, swearing drunks, rotten bawds and cunning cheats.

Donna remained safe while James I was still alive. But Charles I's first Parliament was committed to cracking down on prostitution, leaving her vulnerable to blackmailers and informers. She could no longer rely on bribing the local constabulary to leave her in peace, and rival madams were only too happy to see her brought down. Donna's luck was running out. Eventually, in December 1631, the authorities decided to intervene and dispatched a corporal and a stout band of pikesmen to arrest Donna and her girls. But it was at this point that Donna really showed her true colours. Thirty years as a madam had made her an excellent strategist and she greeted the law with defiance. When they demanded entry, she allowed them as far as the drawbridge, then let it fall down, tipping the soldiers into the stinking moat; as they floundered about in the freezing muddy water, the girls jeered at them and pelted them with missiles, including chamber-pots and their contents, while the Southwark mob, which had gathered to watch the fun, cheered them on. The soldiers attempted to regroup but all efforts to gain entry to the premises were repulsed. Eventually, they limped away, wet and exhausted, bested by a pack of whores.

A second attempt was made, and met with a similar lack of success. This ‘beleaguering' of Donna Hollandia's house eventually gave it a new name: it gained immortality as ‘Holland's Leaguer', a title which subsequently appears in conveyancing documents.

Eventually, the authorities triumphed, and two individuals bought the lease to the house, which was then scheduled for demolition. No more is known of the fate of Donna Hollandia, but ‘Holland's Leaguer' passed into history. Shakerley Marmion's drama of the same name played to packed houses in 1631, the topical theme making it irresistible to London audiences, and Madame Hollandia's achievements were celebrated in a bawdy ballad.

The passing of ‘Holland's Leaguer' heralded a dramatic change in London's landscape of sin. The sex trade was about to suffer a brutal backlash at the hands of the Puritans. It was as if Malvolio himself, the humiliated Puritan of Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night
, had appeared to shake his fist at the assembled drunkards, bawds and whores and repeat his terrible prediction: ‘I'll have my revenge upon the whole pack of you!'

In order fully to understand the relaxing of sexual morals during the Restoration, we need to put this remarkable period in the context of the fifty, often tumultuous, years which preceded it, years which witnessed a decade of civil war, the beheading of King Charles I and the enforcement of puritanical sex laws under the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector.

To see how this course of events unfolded, let us visit the court of King James, one of the most outrageous courts in English history. James I was an enthusiastic visitor to Holland's Leaguer, as we already know. His regular trips to the Manor House of Paris Gardens reflected just one aspect of his appetite for life and the venal culture of his court, although in his defence it should be remembered that under his rule there was comparative religious tolerance (except in Ireland, where his legacy still proves turbulent today), and the lives of ordinary people were relatively calm and secure.

After a frugal and thankless period as King of Scotland, James arrived at the English court to inherit a wealthier and more organized kingdom. His response to this was to demand a higher level of personal attendance and service from his lords. The courtiers expected plenty of entertainment in return. James's court became ‘extravagant and disorderly, frivolous and indecorous, with hard drinking common and immorality winked at'.
¹
It was also filthy; one lady complained that she always returned home from court lousy. James himself drank heavily and gambled, and was often to be seen at the Bankside theatres and bear gardens, his arm around George Villiers, his incompetent administrator, best friend and, so rumour had it, lover. As for those with a taste for women, they were spoilt for choice. ‘For concubines we need not travel as far as the Turk's Seraglio' wrote Heywood in his
Gynaikeion.
‘And to find such as we call Sweet Hearts, Friends or Good-wenches should we but search any citizen's garden houses and find plenty sufficient.'
²

Under James's rule, London's sex trade expanded at a phenomenal rate, as the records indicate. Here are accounts of infamous characters such as Emma Robinson, who, in 1608, was described as ‘a notorious Common Queane' and who sat outside her front door until midnight entertaining ‘lewd persons'; Ellen Allen was fined for being a ‘bad woman' and seducing a Dutchman while her maid stole his dagger. One Elizabeth Basse was charged with keeping ‘a notorious bawdy house' where murder was likely to be committed. By 1613, the bulging casebooks of the Middlesex Sessions show that prostitution had spread beyond the walls of the city as far as Enfield and Barnet.

Even the Sabbath day was no exception. One Robert Cutler of St Bride's ‘had the use of Isabella Sowth's bodie' one Sunday, while Alban Cooke of Hoxton was indicted for buggery with a man under twenty years of age and Richard Walker of Castle Baynard was taken late in the night, ‘abusynge himself in an alehowse'.
³
London became so scandalous that even the tolerant James was forced to issue an ordinance on 4 December 1622, ‘Touching on Disorderly Houses in Saffron Hill'. Saffron Hill, between Holborn and Clerkenwell, was particularly corrupt, teeming with ‘divers immodest lascivious and shameless women' who sat outside their houses alluring and calling to passers-by, whom they would entertain in return for base and filthy lucre.

James also included a clause ‘for the prevention of connivance' designed to prevent beadles being bribed by the prostitutes, but this ordinance made no difference. Despite mass raids, the situation deteriorated further and, in 1624, James was compelled to issue another ordinance. The extent of the red-light district is illustrated by the names of the areas which were raided: Cowcross, Cock's Lane, Smithfield, St John Street Clerkenwell, Norton Folgate (now Bishopsgate), Shoreditch, Wapping, Whitechapel, Petticoat Lane, Charterhouse, Bloomsbury and Ratcliffe Highway. Curiously, there is no mention of the Bankside, or Paris Gardens here: presumably because of the extent of provision for lecherous Londoners without having to go south of the river.
⁴

The following year Charles I became king. A man of high moral character, Charles made an attempt to address the issue during his first Parliament as an extract from the journals of the House of Commons on 9 July 1625 illustrates:

By 1641, the Long Parliament ruled that prostitution was no longer to be classified as a crime but as a public nuisance, or gross indecency if committed in public. By enforcing Common Law, Parliament abolished a raft of medieval tortures and punishments for prostitution, which was an enlightened move, but times were about to become difficult indeed for London's whores, thanks to the new Member of Parliament for Cambridge, one Oliver Cromwell.

There had been nothing like this since the days of John Ball and Wat Tyler. Southwark was a hotbed of revolutionary fervour, with various sects meeting clandestinely in the inns and taverns. The essential aspect of this conflict was that it was a war of ideas, where taking sides was a matter for one's own conscience. Sir John Oglander reflected: ‘thou would'st think it strange if I should tell thee that there was a time in England when brothers killed brothers, cousins cousins, friends their friends, when thou wentest to bed at night thou knewest not whether thou shouldest be murdered before day'.
⁶

When the Civil War broke out in late 1642, Southwark supplied thousands of men for the New Model Army and routed Prince Rupert and his Cavaliers when they attempted to enter London. Rupert withdrew to Oxford, never to return. On 30 January 1649, the day that King Charles was executed, life in the city continued as usual; the shops were open and the king had few mourners.
⁷

Cromwell's ascent proved disastrous for the sex trade. The Commonwealth's attitude towards ‘sin' was decidedly intolerant, as exemplified by William Prynne's observation: ‘it hath evermore been the notorious badge of prostituted strumpets and the lewdest Harlots to ramble abroad to plays and to Playhouses wither only branded whores and infamous adulteresses did usually resort'.
⁸
There was no understanding of the conditions which drove thousands of women into prostitution every year, or condemnation of the men who were their clients. The only concession to the view that prostitution provided a public service was the suggestion of one Dr Chamberlen who proposed to Parliament in 1649 that state-regulated bath houses with registered whores should be opened throughout the country.
⁹
But this pragmatic solution was overlooked as the Puritans set about the destruction not only of London's brothels but of all other forms of pleasure.

Parliament closed all the theatres and gaming houses and the actors were whipped at the cart's arse. Seven bears were shot dead near the Hope Theatre, and the theatre itself was torn down in 1655. Heavy fines were introduced for swearing. Maypoles were felled on the grounds that they were ‘a heathenish vanity' and ‘a stynkynge idoll'. Nude statues had their genitals covered with fig-leaves, and anything that profaned the sanctity of the Sabbath day was banned. The stews of Southwark, described as ‘church lands', had already been sold off to developers for more than £4000. The whorehouses were being turned into warehouses by a rising affluent middle class, while the alehouses and taverns which had always been a favourite haunt of whores and their clients were frequently raided by the army. An honest whore found it difficult to make a living. The ‘doves of Venus' and ‘birds of Youth' who had flocked around the watering holes and enjoyed £20 suppers before the Commonwealth were now forced to make do on a diet of cheese and onion. ‘The ruination of Whoring was why the London Bawds hated 1649 like an old Cavalier.'
¹⁰
One or two brothels remained open, discreetly, such as ‘Oxford Kate's' in Bow Street, chiefly because of their powerful and influential clientele.

As for the sexually promiscuous amateurs, they faced the death penalty. In 1650, the Commonwealth made adultery and incest felonies for which (on a second conviction) the penalty was death. To gain some idea of how sexual mores have changed, one has only to look at a conviction from the period: in 1653, a man of eighty-nine was tried and executed for adultery (these days he would be selling his story to the highest bidder). Eventually, even Puritan juries revolted against this draconian legislation, and subsequently refused to convict.
¹¹
For all his efforts to police the morality of his citizens, Cromwell himself was no killjoy: he permitted ‘music and frivolity and mixed dancing' at his daughter's wedding in 1657.
¹²
And far from taking a hair-shirt approach to his own private life, Cromwell had a mistress in the form of Bess Dysart, a Scottish beauty and self-confessed harlot, who survived political intrigue to end her days as Duchess of Lauderdale.

Puritan interference in the lives of ordinary people bred resentment; the populace were force-fed religion until it sickened them. Far from being a wholesome new Commonwealth of God-fearing fundamentalists, the Puritans created a groundswell of popular opposition against state intervention in private morals. When Charles II arrived in London to claim the throne on Tuesday 29 May 1660, the city erupted into one giant party which was to last for the rest of his life. The festivities and prevailing mood of anti-clericalism were such that it was said that if Cain, the first murderer, had returned from the grave and arrived in London, he would have received a hero's welcome. The most obvious manifestation of Swinging London was the erection of a giant maypole in the city. The draconian laws against prostitution and fornication were repealed and the court of Charles II and his entourage became one enormous brothel. There is no better summary of the decadence of court life than the Earl of Rochester's poem ‘The Debauchée':

Charles II had been reared at the French court and was accustomed to the frivolous entertainment and constant debauchery considered appropriate to his royal birth. As a king, he deserved nothing less. To quote Rochester, Charles II was ‘a merry monarch, who never said a foolish thing or ever did a wise one'.
¹⁴
To discover just how merry Charles was, we should read more of Rochester's satire, which earned him a temporary ban from court.

Charles was a compulsive womanizer, and his pathological appetite for sex saw him rolling from the most exquisite court lady to the commonest whore. William Chiffinch, the royal pimp, supplied him with a constant stream of girls plucked from the theatres and brothels, while his high-profile mistresses included the aristocratic Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, the coy Frances Stewart, the French courtier Louise de Kéroualle, and her famous rival, Nell Gwyn.
¹⁶

On one occasion, Barbara Villiers and the Earl of Rochester tricked Charles into visiting a whorehouse in Hosier Lane, arranging for the king to have his pockets picked while he was enjoying himself with the girls. Rochester departed, leaving Charles to discover that he was penniless. When Charles asked the bawd for credit, she understandably refused. So the king pulled a ring off his finger and told her to send for a jeweller and have it valued. She accepted it reluctantly, but when the jeweller arrived and examined the ring he gasped that there was only one man in England who could afford this ring, and that was the king himself! The jeweller and the bawd fell to their knees, trembling with fear. After all, they could have faced the death penalty for treason. But Charles retained his good humour, and left, although history does not relate what he said to the Earl of Rochester, or Barbara Villiers, when he eventually got home.
¹⁷

Charles's affairs took up as much of his time as his affairs of state. As a result he often received his ministers while holding court with his whores, an arrangement which all parties had no choice but to accept. Charles's example meant that a mistress was the latest must-have; any courtier without arm candy risked ridicule and derision. Once Charles's philosophy was unleashed on the English court there was no vice or sexual peccadillo which was not encouraged. Chastity and virtue were considered to be hypocrisy: every man and every woman had their price.