CHAPTER TWENTY

Wanton and Free

In the late seventeenth century what is sometimes described (on no particular evidence) as the oldest profession was not necessarily the most disagreeable one for a woman to adopt – provided she was able to adopt it at an economically high level. The King – Charles II followed by his brother James II, equally lecherous but more neurotic about it – constituted the apex of the social pyramid; it was a pyramid which any audacious pretty woman might aspire to scale if she caught the monarch’s eye.

A handsome upstanding young man in the reign of Elizabeth with a taste for poetry and adventure might dream of catching the old Queen’s eye; the same young man’s son might dream of catching the eye of old King James twenty years later. Let us imagine this cavalier’s granddaughter, the fortune culled from the immoral earnings of her ancestors lost in the Civil Wars. In her turn she might dream of catching the eye not only of the King himself but of any of the rich and famous protectors who aped his behaviour; she might become what a character in one of Aphra Behn’s plays described as ‘that glorious insolent Thing, That makes Mankind such Slaves, almighty Curtezan’. When Richard Allestree in The Ladies Calling of 1673 expatiated on the unhappy lot of harlots (‘Their most exquisite deckings are but like the garlands on a beast designed for sacrifice; their richest gowns are but the chains, not of their ornament but of slavery’) he was protesting against the luxury in which such women so evidently lived.¹

There was a universal truth expressed by Margaret Duchess of Newcastle: ‘Some Men are of that Humour, as they hate Honest. Chaste Women … they love the Company and Conversation of Wanton and free Women.’² This truth was a positive advantage at this period to the women concerned if the men were powerful enough, and the women sufficiently bold, cynical or just plain desperate.

After all, it was not as if the economic alternatives for women of all classes who had to provide for themselves were really so very enticing. Not everyone was as high-minded as the poet Jane Barker, who described herself in 1688 as indifferent to the charge of being an ‘Old Maid’. (The phrase was probably first used in the pejorative sense in The Ladies Calling: ‘An Old Maid is now thought such a curse.’) She was content to lead the existence of a good (single) woman:

More than one gentlewoman without a portion found herself able to sacrifice the much-vaunted respectability of being a waiting-woman or housekeeper for the pleasanter if less moral life of being a kept woman – a ‘Miss’ or mistress. The exquisite Jane Roberts, mistress to Rochester amongst others, was a clergyman’s daughter. She died young (in 1679) with ‘a great sense of her former ill life’, but there is no suggestion that this was anything more than a deathbed repentance;³ if Jane Roberts, to whom Aphra Behn dedicated The Feign’d Curtezans, had lived, she would undoubtedly have continued to pursue her career among the other ‘insolent Things’.

If there was a shortage of husbands, it appears there was no shortage of protectors. Mary Evelyn in Mundus Muliebris, laying down the rules by which a gallant should conduct his courtship, took it for granted that he had a choice ‘whether his Expedition be for Marriage or Mistress’. The Womens Complaint against their Bad Husbands, a satiric piece of 1676, complained that in ‘this frivolous Age’ many preferred the novelty of the mistress however painted her face, to the established wife, although the writer (unlike the more worldly Margaret Duchess of Newcastle) could not see what ‘temptations or allurements’ were couched in ‘the Monosyllable Miss’ which were not also to be found in the word ‘wife’. Palamede, in Dryden’s play of 1672, Marriage-à-la-Mode, complained that ‘all Mankind’ was setting up with mistresses, so that the demand was beginning to exceed the supply; as a result ‘poor little creatures, without beauty, birth or breeding, but only impudence, go off at unreasonable rates: and a man, in these hard times, snaps at ’em’.⁴

It was not a purely literary conceit. Francis North, Lord Guilford, was seriously advised to ‘keep a Whore’ because he was being frowned upon ‘for want of doing so’. The playwright Mrs Mary Manley used the form of a novel Rivella, to give a true account of her own early romantic life. At the age of fourteen she was ‘Married [bigamously], possessed and ruined’ by her perfidious guardian. He finally abandoned her. Mrs Manley then went into the service of Charles II’s erstwhile paramour Barbara Duchess of Cleveland; here a former admirer surfaced with the proposition that she should live in the country as his mistress, an offer which ‘could no longer do her an Injury in the Opinion of the World’ because of her disgrace.⁵ In rejecting the offer on the grounds that she needed to feel herself in love with the protector (she subsequently lived for love as the mistress of another much less well-off man, a lawyer named John Tilly), Mrs Manley showed herself for the first, but not the last time, to be a highly eccentric woman by the standards of her time.

The characters in Aphra Behn’s play of 1676 The Town-Fop included Betty Flauntit, a kept woman or ‘a Person of Pleasure’ as she was termed. While Betty Flauntit complained that ‘a Miss has as painful a life as a Wife; our Men drink, stay out late, and whore, like any Husbands’, for those who could not find husbands the conditions of life, like those of marriage, were not disagreeable unless the protector chose to make them so.⁶ The children of such unions were often mentioned quite openly and publicly in the father’s will, and in general provision was made for them.

Henry Sidney, always said to be the handsomest man at the Restoration court, was exceptional in that when he died unmarried in 1704 he left numerous illegitimate children for whom he refused to provide. The brother of Dorothy Countess of Sunderland (but born almost a generation later), he showed none of her charm of character, especially when dealing with Grace Worthley, his mistress of twenty years’ standing. Mrs Worthley was a widow, but a poor one, her husband having been killed at sea in 1665 during the second Dutch War. She was gently born, living originally at Stoke Hall in Cheshire. The role of kept mistress to Henry Sidney was therefore an opportunity for support for one who might not otherwise have found it easy to survive; she bore Sidney a son. But it is clear that Mrs Worthley also adored her debonair protector for his own sake. Writing to him in 1689 she referred to herself as ‘a poor, deluded woman, that hath loved you above myself, nay, above heaven or honour’.⁷

The trouble was that Sidney had acquired a new mistress at the beginning of the 1680s: Diana Countess of Oxford, wickedly attractive, one of the almighty courtesans of the court. By 1682 Grace Worthley was lamenting her dismissal after so many years, at the orders of one whom she described as ‘the common Countess of Oxford’ with ‘her adulterous bastards’. Her son by Sidney was no longer acknowledged: ‘all this to please his great Mistress’. Desperate for lack of money, Grace Worthley threatened to shoot Sidney.

Sidney’s reaction was to depute his servant to pay Mrs Worthley £12. 10s a quarter. If there was any more fuss, he threatened her with a warrant for arrest, which as a Privy Councillor he assured her he would be able to secure.

A few years later the discarded mistress heard that Sidney might be visiting her old neighbourhood in company with the new King William III. The news provoked a pathetic letter of nostalgia for country innocence: ‘That I might once before I die make a visit to the good old wooden house at Stoke … where I was born and bred … I wish your Lordship would do what is reasonable by me, that I might go into Cheshire and there end my days. I should enjoy more happiness in one month in Cheshire than I have done in all the twenty-five years I have mis-spent in London.’ Two years later Grace Worthley was still pleading for money to return to Stoke Hall, having in the meantime been escorted away from her lover’s door by a constable and a beadle. Part of this petition of 1694 consisted of a pathetic list of Grace Worthley’s relatives to prove that she had originally come of a respectable family.

While a measure of such tragedies was inherent in the insecurity of the situation (although wives as well as mistresses were deserted) Henry Sidney was rated at the time to be specially hardhearted as well as handsome. Betty Becke, the mistress of Lord Sandwich, had an altogether jollier time, either because her own nature was more resilient or because his was more susceptible. In the spring of 1663 Lord Sandwich, Pepys’s patron, while recovering from a serious illness, lodged at the house of a merchant’s wife named Mrs Becke in Chelsea. Mr Becke was a merchant who had come down in the world; Mrs Becke, acting as a landlady, had the reputation of being a good and gracious manager, with her food well dressed and presented. Other comforts were provided by her daughters.

By the August of 1663, Pepys heard that his patron doted on one of the Becke girls; his days were spent at court but he passed all his evenings with her, as well as dispensing a great deal of money. Lord Sandwich was at this point a man approaching forty, in a powerful official position; although Pepys was in a sense not surprised that Lord Sandwich should show himself ‘amorous’ when everyone else at court was busy doing so, in another way he was deeply shocked to see his patron ‘grossly play the beast and fool’. Lord Sandwich’s ‘folly’, he was horrified to discover, included taking Betty Becke out in public, playing on his lute under her window ‘and forty other poor sordid things’.⁸

At this point Pepys was convinced that Lord Sandwich was dabbling with one who was ‘a Common Strumpet’. Another report spoke of Betty Becke as ‘a woman of very bad fame and very impudent’. In November therefore Pepys was moved to write his patron a magisterial letter of reproof on the subject: how the world took a grave view of Lord Sandwich’s continued sojourn in a house of ‘bad report’ when his health was clearly mended; Betty Becke was charged with being ‘a common Courtesan’ there being places and persons to whom she was all too well known; the notorious wantonness of ‘that slut at Chelsea’, as Pepys assured his patron Betty Becke was commonly known, was causing scandal to adhere to the name of Lord Sandwich.⁹

The following June Lord Sandwich did try the well-known adulterous expedient of using his daughters as a cover for visiting Mrs Becke; unfortunately the girls in question were well able to ‘perceive all’. In consequence they hated the place, and complained that their father’s one aim was to ‘pack them out of doors to the park’; while he stayed behind with Betty Becke.¹⁰

The next move – on the part of Lord Sandwich’s wife – was an equally time-honoured one in the great game of adultery. Lady Sandwich was suddenly inspired to go down to Chelsea herself in order to pay a call upon Mrs Becke the landlady. As Lady Sandwich told Pepys: ‘And by and by the daughter came in …’. By some extraordinary chance – ‘for she never knew they had a daughter’, let alone more than one – Lady Sandwich found herself feeling very troubled, and ‘her heart did rise as soon as she appeared …’ As for Betty Becke, by another surprising coincidence, she seemed ‘the most ugly woman’ that Lady Sandwich had ever seen. As Pepys commented tersely, all this, if it was true, was very strange; ‘but I believe it is not’.¹¹

However when the Becke family – invited by Lady Sandwich – came to call upon the Sandwiches in London, Pepys found that his own view of Betty was radically altered. She was neither ‘a Common Strumpet’ nor remarkably ugly. Although she did not have one good feature, Betty was nevertheless ‘a fine lady’, with a good figure, altogether ‘very well carriaged and mighty discreet’. Pepys made a point of trying to draw her out in the company of Lord Sandwich’s hostile young daughters. When she did contribute to the conversation, as she did from time to time, she spoke ‘mighty finely’. Pepys reversed his verdict. Betty Becke was now ‘a woman of such an air, as I wonder the less at my Lord’s favour to her’; he saw that Betty’s true charm lay in her intelligence – ‘she hath brains enough to entangle him’. Two or three hours were spent in her company, Pepys and the rest of the ladies adjourning to Kensington where, in the famous garden with its fountain where Anne Conway had played as a little girl, now belonging to her elder step-brother, they all enjoyed some ‘brave music’ and singing. All in all, Pepys was delighted with the day’s work: ‘Above all I have seen my Lord’s Mistress.’¹²

Five years later, as the intimate record provided by the diary draws to a close, Pepys reported that one of Lord Sandwich’s daughters was recovering from sickness in her turn in the Becke house in Chelsea. Lord Sandwich intended to visit her; but Pepys still suspected that it was ‘more for young Mrs Becke’s sake than for hers’.¹³

Economics apart, there was the subtler question of independence for the mistress. When the Duchess of Newcastle referred to the allurements of women who were wanton and free, she had in mind their conduct rather than their status. Nevertheless it was true of the seventeenth century as people imagined it had been in ancient Rome: it was possible in theory at least for a courtesan to enjoy a measure of independence denied to her married sister, for whom security and adherence to the social norm were accompanied by the need for absolute subordination to her husband, legally and in every other way. Courtesans were sympathetically and even admirably treated in Restoration plays: Otway’s Aquilina in Venice Preserv’d – ‘Nicky Nacky’ scornfully trouncing her elderly admirer at his own request – or Aphra Behn’s much courted Angelica Bianca in The Rover who vowed that ‘nothing but Gold shall charm my Heart’. (Although even the spirited courtesan Aquilina received a sharp put-down from her lover Pierre when she attempted to discuss politics: ‘How! A woman ask Questions out of Bed!)¹⁴

In 1695 Rachel Lady Russell wrote a long letter of maternal advice to her nineteen-year-old daughter Katherine Lady Roos, interesting because it reveals such a very low expectation of female happiness even for a nice young lady married to a highly eligible young man. ‘Believe me, child,’ wrote Lady Russell, ‘life is a continual labour, checkered with care and pleasure, therefore rejoice in your portion, take the world as you find it, and you will I trust find heaviness may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.’¹⁵ (Admittedly Lady Russell had endured an exceptional sorrow, but then she had also been granted an exceptionally happy marriage.) For most women of this time life was indeed a continual labour – literally as well as metaphorically so. Even so, there were deep springs of strength and independence within the nature of certain females in this as in every other age, which would continue to bubble inextinguishably forth whenever the circumstances were propitious. For some of these, taking the world as they found it meant something a good deal more high-spirited, if less moral than the noble but essentially passive course advocated by Lady Russell. For such a woman, the life of ‘that glorious insolent thing … almighty Curtezan’ brought rewards beyond the merely financial.

For this reason Catherine Sedley is the most personally fascinating among the numerous royal mistresses because as an heiress, the alternative of a good marriage was open to her in youth. Instead of the ‘dull manage of a servile house’ in Anne Countess of Winchilsea’s phrase, she chose the more testing career of mistress to James II, when Duke of York. Moreover the weapons at her disposal included neither beauty nor any other form of attraction evident to the outward eye; even in youth Catherine Sedley was not reckoned to be pretty. She had a long nose and an unfashionably big mouth at a time when the ideal was a delicate rosebud; her complexion was too pale, lacking the carmine tint which made the approved beauties a contrast of ‘white and red’; a cast in her eye enabled her enemies to describe her gleefully as squinting. Above all, she was considered much too thin at a time when the contemporary taste ran to the luscious: ‘Fubbs’ – for chubby – was Charles II’s tender nickname for Louise de la Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth. ‘D’une extrême maigreur’, wrote the French envoy Barillon of Catherine, although he admired her vivacity.¹⁶ Skinny as a girl Catherine Sedley became positively gaunt as the years passed.

Catherine Sedley conducted her campaign for a place – and a high place too – in society through her wits. In an age when both sexes combined to praise the dulcet female voice expressing softly modest feminine sentiments, Catherine Sedley triumphantly made herself feared by an exceptionally sharp tongue.

This strong vessel was born on 21 December 1657, the only child of the poet, playwright and Restoration Wit Sir Charles Sedley and Lady Catherine Savage, the heiress daughter of Earl Rivers. The mother was wealthy but she was also unstable; a few years after Catherine’s birth she was mad enough to be placed under the care of a doctor – a Catholic because she herself, unlike her husband and daughter, was a Catholic. Catherine’s mother began to suffer from delusions that she was the Queen, having to be addressed by those who attended her as ‘Your Majesty’. She was finally confined in a Catholic convent abroad.¹⁷

What was to become of Catherine, her father’s sole legitimate heiress and, in the conditions which made divorce and remarriage virtually impossible, likely to remain so? It was decided to place the girl at court as a Maid of Honour; after an unsuccessful attempt to enter the Queen’s household, Catherine was placed in that of Mary of Modena, then Duchess of York. Catherine seems to have made her mark early on along the path on which she intended to travel; in June 1673, when she was still only fifteen, Evelyn described her when she visited him at home as ‘none of the most virtuous but a wit’.¹⁸

Still, the witty Catherine did have a portion of £6,000, according to popular repute, and a further £4,000 at her father’s death; there would have been more but for her father’s liaison with Ann Ayscough. Catherine Sedley’s arms when she reached the age of twenty-one described her as ‘sole daughter and heir’ of her father.¹⁹ Yet after a series of affairs Sir Charles had formed a permanent liaison with Ann, the penniless daughter of a Yorkshire gentleman, which resulted in the birth of an illegitimate son. Catherine’s mother outlived her husband but Sir Charles firmly termed his relationship with Ann Ayscough a ‘marriage’ and called the boy his heir. In his own words:

All the same £10,000 was no small sum as a portion. In 1677, for example, Sir Winston and Lady Churchill were interested in the prospect of Catherine as a bride for their son John (later first Duke of Marlborough), to the disgust of his sweetheart and eventual wife Sarah Jennings. Barillon described Catherine then as very rich and very ugly; but Sarah, after Marlborough’s death, called her a ‘shocking creature’.²⁰ This however being eminently an age when cash counted more than scandal, such a wealthy young woman, however provocative, could easily have secured a husband had she so wished.

Instead, Catherine Sedley remained unmarried. When she did eventually take a husband nearly twenty years later, it was as a mature woman approaching forty with a remarkable past behind her; she also had a further sizeable fortune to accompany her, as a souvenir of that past. As an unmarried girl she was entitled to keep her post as Maid of Honour to the Duchess of York and that was certainly a position of which Catherine Sedley, unlike those other more sensitive plants in the same household, Anne Killigrew and Anne Countess of Winchilsea, made full worldly use. By the time she was twenty ‘Dorinda’, as she was nicknamed in satiric verse, was a celebrated if not popular character at court.

wrote the poet and Wit Lord Dorset, playing on her alleged squint. Dorinda’s personal Cupid was said to be no ‘wingéd God’ but ‘a Black-Guard Boy’ – one of the troop of insolent urchins loosely attached to the lower ranks of the royal household.²¹

Most important of all, at the beginning of 1678, Catherine Sedley became the mistress of the Duke of York, supplanting Arabella, the sister of her proposed suitor, John Churchill. The mistresses of the Duke became a legend for their ugliness, once King Charles II had ventured the sly opinion that they must have been prescribed for his brother by his confessors. In fact several of those favoured by the Duke gave the lie to the joke: Susan Lady Belasyse was an acknowledged beauty, while the doe-eyed Elizabeth Countess of Chesterfield (she whom her jealous husband carried off to The Peak) was one of the loveliest women ever to be painted by Lely. It was a combination of the King’s wit with Catherine Sedley’s own which gave rise to the legend. For Catherine was one of those clever women who created a style out of her own lack of conventional attractions. Dorset hammered the point of her plainness in verse (Dorset’s especial venom towards Catherine Sedley was probably due to the fact that she rejected his advances, hell having no fury like a satirist scorned):

But Catherine made the same joke herself with more economy: ‘We are none of us handsome,’ she declared of the Duke’s harem, ‘and if we had wit, he has not enough to discover it.’²²

The crudity of some of the Wits’ printed attacks on women of the court who had incurred their displeasure make them literally unprintable: Sir Carr Scroope, merely describing Catherine as being ‘as mad as her mother and as vicious as her father’, was using language which under the circumstances was comparatively mild.²³ A vein of morose dislike for womankind – ‘the silliest part of God’s Creation’ in Rochester’s words – except during the act of sexual congress, runs through their works, including poetry as well as lampoons. And if it can be argued that the maddening feminine silliness referred to earlier (see p.401) provoked some of it, it is noticeable that Catherine Sedley, an undeniably intelligent woman, provoked even more.

None of this prevented James Duke of York from falling passionately in love with his wife’s Maid of Honour. Sir Charles Sedley once inquired of a new arrival at court whether she would turn out to be ‘a Beauty, a Miss, a Wit, or a Politician’. Catherine Sedley triumphantly combined the activities of a Miss and a Wit without the helpful attribute of being a Beauty. Sometime before March 1679 she was known to have borne a daughter, known as Lady Catherine Darnley, whose paternity was officially ascribed to the Duke. Mary of Modena, Duchess of York, was said to be ‘very melancholy’ at this news, especially as the Duke was presently being obliged by the course of Exclusionist politics to leave England. The satirists too marked the event: ‘little Sid, She who lately slipped her Kid’.²⁴

Catherine was to bear several other children to the Duke, including a son, James Darnley; none of them survived infancy. There seems however some doubt as to whether the Duchess’s melancholy over the arrival of little Catherine Darnley was fully justified. To Colonel James Grahame, another member of the Duke of York’s household – he was Keeper of the Privy Purse – was also ascribed the honour of her paternity; in later years Lady Catherine Darnley bore a strong physical resemblance to his legitimate daughter. As the wife of John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave and in 1703 created Duke of Buckingham, Lady Catherine Darnley was so haughty as to be nicknamed ‘Princess Buckingham’ but according to Walpole there were still those who muttered that she was nothing but old Grahame’s daughter.²⁵ Grahame, who was Catherine Sedley’s confidant in her intrigues and remained so, was almost certainly also her lover. However, Mary of Modena never displayed any of that kindly tolerance towards her husband’s mistresses which so signally marked the wise character of Charles II’s wife Catherine of Braganza. Perhaps it was because she was so much younger than her husband – nearly twenty-five years – or perhaps it was because Mary of Modena was herself a very pretty young woman. By the summer of 1680 she was declared to be once more ‘very melancholy’ on the subject of Mrs Sedley by her women: ‘She prays all day almost.’²⁶

Alas, piety was not necessarily the best way for an ‘Honest, Chaste’ woman to combat the attractions of a ‘Wanton and free’ one. It was said of Catherine Sedley that ‘there was no restraint in what she said of or to anybody’.²⁷ Like Nell Gwynn, she was a licensed jester, wit in their mistresses being one taste the two Stuart brothers had in common. As a Protestant herself, she regularly made jokes about the Duke’s Catholic priests which one suspects secretly delighted the middle-aged royal roué, torn between guilt and concupiscence.

The death of Charles II in early February 1685 transformed the lives of James and Mary of Modena, now King and Queen of England. A few days later a message to Catherine from the new monarch broke the news that her life too was to be transformed: warned by his brother’s example, King James had decided to lead another kind of life. It was to be a life without Catherine Sedley. She should therefore either go abroad or depart for the country; he would provide for her ‘but he would see her no more’.²⁸

Catherine however refused to go. Her emaciation at this point struck all observers; there was nothing else frail about her. In the end a compromise was reached by which Catherine was installed in a house which had belonged to the King’s former mistress Arabella Churchill, and for which he now paid £10,000: No. 21 St James’s Square. (The locality was considered sufficiently removed from the royal palace at Whitehall.) She also received a pension of £4,000 from the Privy Purse. Armed with this, Catherine, who had a taste both for music and the arts, proceeded to employ the finest sculptors and painters to adorn her new residence.²⁹

It is not known precisely how long the King’s good resolution lasted. Little James Darnley, born the previous September, died on the eve of the King’s coronation. One story connected the King’s resumption of the affair with his remorse at the child’s death. James Darnley was certainly given a royal burial. He was placed in the vault at Westminster Abbey created for Mary Queen of Scots, where the King’s many legitimate dead infants were already buried, along with such august personages as Elizabeth of Bohemia and Rupert of the Rhine; the plate on his coffin described him as ‘natural son to King James the second … Aged about eight months.’³⁰ At any rate before very long Catherine Sedley was being conducted up that notorious Privy Staircase leading to the King’s apartments in Whitehall which had more than justified its existence during the previous reign.

Was Catherine Sedley also ‘a Politician’ as well as ‘a Wit’ and ‘a Miss’? At one point the Protestant faction were accused by Lord Sunderland of using her to forward their interests with the King just because Catherine was a ‘Protestant whore’, as Nell Gwynn had once insouciantly termed herself. But the allegation was unfounded, according to James II’s biographer, John Miller.³¹ The next real drama in Catherine’s life concerned rank rather than politics. In mid-January the King took the decision to make his mistress Countess of Dorchester and Baroness Darlington in her own right. (Henry Pierrepont, the irascible Marquess of Dorchester who was the father of Lady Anne Roos, had died in 1680 without male heirs – his second wife, Katherine Stanley, daughter of the heroic Countess of Derby, had no children – and the title was extinct.)

There was uproar at the court. The rumour that Catherine would also be granted the convenient apartments which had once belonged to Louise Duchess of Portsmouth, maîtresse en titre of Charles II in his last years, did nothing to allay the Queen’s fury. On 19 January, shortly after ‘Mrs Sedley (concubine to—)’, as Evelyn discreetly called her in his diary, was officially created a Countess, the diarist noticed that Mary of Modena neither spoke nor ate during the course of two dinners.³² King James was weakly astonished when his wife threatened to enter a convent if Catherine was not compelled to quit the court.

Catherine for her part had very different plans for herself. She was determined to be received by the Queen in her new rank as a countess. She was in fact already dressed to attend the formal royal reception known as the Drawing-room, when a message came saying that she was refused admittance. ‘The hearts of all virtuous ladies and honest wives were filled with inexpressible joy,’ wrote a contemporary. The King’s act generously attested ‘their matrimonial privileges’.³³ The King had once more bowed his head to the pressures of his wife and his priests; he indicated that Catherine should go, and did not even grant her that final interview which she had once made him promise would precede any final parting.

Passivity under stress was as alien to Catherine’s nature as discretion in triumph. Once more she declined point-blank to move, posing as a martyr to the machinations of the Jesuits because she was a Protestant. A joke went the rounds that Catherine was taking her stand on her rights under Magna Carta and was refusing to be deported without her consent. Meanwhile ‘L’Affaire de Mademoiselle Sidley’ as the French envoy called it, continued to preoccupy not only the court Wits, but also the King’s various advisers who, even if Catherine had played no political role, saw in her departure ‘a trial of their interest with their great Master’.³⁴

At one point Catherine either suffered or pretended to suffer a miscarriage to delay matters. She also clamoured loudly against the prospect of being exiled to any Catholic country, saying that Hortense Duchesse de Mazarin had warned her against all convents, and she feared to spend the rest of her life among nuns. (Her mother’s fate must have played some part in heating up her imagination on this subject.) Lastly she discovered a neat way of circumventing another proposal to send her to Holland: if she went there, Catherine said, she would insist on being received there at court by James’s married daughter, Mary Princess of Orange.³⁵

In the end the lot fell upon Ireland. Here Catherine did have some friends and she also had some lands granted to her by the King. This made Ireland in her opinion ‘the less invidious as well as the more obscure part of the world’. Catherine left on 17 February in a retinue of four coaches-and-six; by March she was installed in Dublin, posing a problem for English officials. They feared to receive her too courteously lest they incur the Queen’s displeasure (as it was, even their sketchy greetings offended Mary of Modena).³⁶

It was not long, however, before rumours of the volatile Countess’s imminent return, fuelled by the refurbishment of her St James’s Square house, were causing the Queen’s ‘pious mind’ to be thoroughly ‘discomposed’. Catherine wondered aloud in letters to her English friends why the Queen worried so much over her supposed powers of fascination: ‘She thinks much better of me than I deserve.’ All the same Catherine pined for England and good English gossip: ‘Send the news true or false, I care not. I love an English lie …’ As for Ireland: ‘The English have generally a humour I do not approve of, which is affecting to like nothing but their own country; so were it possible, I would commend this place.’ Unfortunately she found it intolerable. ‘I find them not only senseless, but a melancholy sort of people,’ she wrote tartly, ‘and speak all in the tone of the cripples of London.’³⁷ (Many of whom were of Irish origin and thus begged in an Irish accent.)

November 1686 saw the Countess back at court once more, taking her place unchallenged and with her usual aplomb. She also bought Ham House near Weybridge from the widow of the sixth Duke of Norfolk. Although her influence with James was considered to have declined, Mary of Modena at Windsor could still be relied upon to weep if the King was late returning, convinced that he had been with the Countess of Dorchester.

The revolutionary events of 1688 and 1689 which resulted in the displacement of King James by his son-in-law William and daughter Mary placed Catherine, at least in theory, in an extremely awkward position. Catherine herself was certainly frank enough about it: ‘Nothing curbs me in wishing well to the present king [William] but the fear his success may turn to my rueing.’ It was true. On the one hand her royal protector had vanished; on the other hand the new Queen Mary was liable to look but coldly on her father’s erstwhile mistress. Meanwhile the fact that Sir Charles Sedley was a prominent supporter of William of Orange gave a joyous opportunity to the Wits:

‘Never anybody, sure, was so unfortunately misunderstood as me,’ wrote Catherine. The trouble was that Catherine’s letters to King James abroad, asking for money for herself and her daughter, were liable to be misunderstood as Jacobite plotting; especially as she was obliged to use the Jacobite conduits to dispatch them, including the network headed by Lord Preston, brother of her confidant Colonel Grahame. No evidence has been found that she took a more active part in the Jacobite conspiracies than seeking money; and the counter-suggestion that she was placed among the conspirators as a Williamite spy is equally unproven.³⁹ What is clear is that Catherine’s prime instinct was for survival, that instinct which had already carried her along successfully on her somewhat perilous course for fifteen years. ‘My lord,’ she wrote to the Williamite Earl of Nottingham in September 1689, whose aid she implored, ‘I can’t travel with a bundle under my arm tho’ the King [William] is pleased to use me like a woman of that rank.’ By December 1689 she was desperately refuting any suggestion that she had meddled in politics: ‘knowing myself very unfit for it’.⁴⁰

Admission to court in view of Queen Mary’s hostility was once more the problem, as it had been during the previous reign, with the previous Queen Mary (of Modena). ‘I believe the Queen thinks legion [i.e. the devil] is my name,’ wrote Catherine. She was indignant to hear that every day ladies were being admitted whom Catherine ‘would be very sorry to be compared to’. She instanced Hortense Duchesse de Mazarin, Barbara Duchess of Cleveland, Diana Countess of Oxford (Mrs Worthley’s successful rival) and Susan Lady Belasyse. Full of injured innocence, Catherine told Lord Nottingham that ‘the jury might possibly acquit me that would whip [for being whores] every one of the ladies afore mentioned’.⁴¹ In the end Catherine Countess of Dorchester did secure admission.

Where the Queen’s icy looks were concerned, Catherine proved herself equal to the occasion. Queen Mary’s Regan-like indifference to her ageing father’s sufferings was the talk of London at the time; even those who had supported King James’s ousting were taken aback by her lightheartedness, her lack of filial honour for her father as prescribed in the Ten Commandments. Catherine told Queen Mary blandly that she was much surprised at her disapproving demeanour towards her adulterous self. ‘For,’ she said, ‘if I have broke one commandment, you have another; and what I did was more natural.’ It was left to King William to give her a more sympathetic audience, not out of passion but because he ‘feared the lash of her tongue’. He also granted her a pension of £1,500 a year. That left Catherine unable to decide where her political sympathies lay: ‘for both the queens us’d her badly, and both kings, she said, were civil to her’.⁴²

As well as the wit, the spirit was also undiminished in Catherine. Some of Catherine’s lands in the reclaimed Fens, granted to her in 1683 by the Duke of York, were granted after the Revolution by King William to the Earl of Torrington, more out of confusion than malice. Catherine took the case to the High Court of Chancery and won, but Torrington brought in a Bill by leave of the House of Commons to confirm his grant. At which Catherine ‘prayed’ the House of Commons in her turn, appearing on her own behalf at the Bar of the House. She was, however, not successful. Although the House added a clause to Torrington’s Bill granting the Countess of Dorchester £4,000 arrears in rents, and an annuity of £600, the bill was in the end ‘passed in the negative’; so Catherine never got her rents.⁴³

Finally in August 1696, when she was thirty-eight years old, Catherine married Sir David Colyear, a veteran Scots soldier who had served under William III in Flanders. The Wits had a field-day: ‘Proud with the Spoils of Royal Cully’, they called her, adding: ‘The Devil and Sir David take her.’ The thick paint now applied to the appearance of the ‘Wither’d Countess’ was also the subject of much comment, nor did Catherine’s sharp tongue escape censure:

Sixteen years before, Dorset had already gloated over her decline:

But Dorset was premature in his rejoicing. Sir David was later created Earl of Portmore; Catherine bore him two sons, one of whom inherited the title. It seems that her style as a mother was no more hypocritical than her style as a mistress had been, for she told the boys: ‘If any body call either of you the son of a whore you must bear it for you are so: but if they call you bastards, fight till you die; for you are an honest man’s sons.’ At the court of Queen Anne, Dorinda was still to be seen sparkling away in ‘great splendour’, covered in diamonds. At the coronation of George I, when the Archbishop of Canterbury, according to custom, went round the throne formally demanding the consent of the people, it was Catherine who was heard to say: ‘Does the old Fool think that Anybody here will say no to his Question when there are so many drawn Swords?’⁴⁴

Catherine was still tottering round Bath in her finery in 1717, and finally died in the October of that year. If a mis-spent life by most standards, hers could hardly be termed a wasted one.

The life of Mrs Jane Myddelton, like that of Catherine Sedley, was founded on masculine support in return for sexual favours, although of Sir Charles Sedley’s categories Jane Myddelton was regarded as ‘a Beauty’ rather than ‘a Miss’. She performed the functions of a mistress, it was true, to a variety of eligible men – men eligible to keep a ‘great Mistress’, that is. But the role of a beauty, which Jane Myddelton was so admirably fitted by nature to play, somehow elevated her beyond anything contemptible in the popular esteem; her affairs were seen more as a tribute paid to her great beauty, as the affairs of certain very beautiful and essentially passive women have been seen all through history.

The daughter of Sir Robert Needham, Jane married Charles Myddelton of Ruabon in June 1660 when she was fifteen. He was ten years her senior and a widower, a man of good family but small fortune, being the sixth son of Sir Thomas Myddelton Kt. Jane bore her husband two daughters: another Jane, born the following year, and Althamia. At first the newly-married pair lived with Sir Robert Needham in Lambeth. There seems to have been some plan for settling in Plas Newydd or New Hall in the parish of Ruabon with the help of Sir Thomas Myddelton; in 1664 Charles Myddelton wrote to his father: ‘I long for nothing more than to be with you.’ But at Easter 1668 the Myddeltons settled in Charles Street, in the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, where they were still living nearly twenty years later.⁴⁵

It was the court which was the centre of the Myddeltons’ life. Jane soon won a reputation as ‘the most beautiful woman in England – and the most amiable’, one which she preserved for the rest of her life: in 1683 when she was approaching forty, Evelyn was still able to write of her, the ‘famous and indeed incomparable beauty, Mrs Myddelton’.⁴⁶ Jane never amassed a great fortune as did some of the avaricious royal mistresses, but the indisputable asset of the wife’s dazzling appearance enabled both Myddeltons to enjoy an agreeable life at the court, without any official position, quite beyond their normal financial expectations.

In Jane Myddelton’s features, in total contrast to those of Catherine Sedley, were to be found the ideal of seventeenth-century beauty as laid down in the rules of the time. Here was the perfect oval face with the lofty smooth forehead – ‘the high temples’ of The Ladies Dictionary – completed by a neat little chin. Here was the nose neither too big nor too small, the little mouth with its cupid’s bow upper lip, the well-marked arched brows. Here too was the well-rounded figure, the milky white décolletage above the plump round high breasts – ‘two little worlds of beauty’ – which caused Pepys, admiring her from afar at the theatre, to rate her as having ‘a very excellent face and body, I think’.⁴⁷ Above all Jane Myddelton was blonde.

Although men of course continued to fall passionately in love with dark women as they had always done, there was no doubt that the spectacle of a blonde beauty aroused a particular poetical reverence in observers, as though some extraterrestrial being, the Venus of the Aeneid perhaps, was passing that way: ‘a tint of rose glowed on her neck and a scent of Heaven breathed from the divine hair of her head’. This was the language used about the lovely blonde Maid of Honour Frances Jennings (sister of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough) by Anthony Hamilton: ‘To sum up in a few words – her face reminded one of the dawn, or of some Goddess of the Spring …’⁴⁸ Dark ladies had to contend with the conviction that saturnine looks concealed a saturnine temperament: Sir Henry Cholmley of Scarborough was proud that his blonde mother had brought about ‘the whitening of black shadows’ in his family’s physical inheritance, while of Henry Oxinden of Deane’s intended bride Elizabeth Meredith it was written that her outward fairness was ‘a fair ambassador of a most fair mind.’⁴⁹

Equally Hamilton wrote of Jane Myddelton that she was all ‘white and golden’, and that she was magnificently made. Her thick blonde ringlets surrounded a face which Lely loved to paint. ‘Fair and foolish’, wrote Margaret Duchess of Newcastle angrily of blondes in general (she was not one); Henrietta Maria Blagge, Margaret Godolphin’s sister, another blonde Maid of Honour, was accused of being ‘whey-faced’ and ‘yellower than a quince’ by the Comte de Gramont, who reserved praise for those ladies who accepted his advances. For all these jealous carpings, contemporary handbooks were full of recipes for dyeing the hair blonde as well as whitening the complexion. And from the point of view of Jane Myddelton’s lovers, the warning of The Ladies Dictionary that yellow hair had been since the time of the Danes a sign of lustfulness – ‘golden Flames’ sparkling without might indicate similar flames burning within – was no doubt enticing rather than the reverse.⁵⁰

All the same it must be said that a look of cow-like complacency stamps Jane Myddelton’s fair face, even at the deft hands of Lely. Despite her famous amiability, her air of redolent languor was not to everyone’s taste. Her refinement and her pretensions to intelligence irritated everyone not madly in love with her, and even a few who were – ‘she was the most tiresome when she wished to be most brilliant’ – being one of those who larded her talk with French expressions. A rival beauty also told Pepys (who was always fascinated to hear such details about the belles of the court) that Jane Myddelton gave off ‘a continued sour base smell’, especially if she was a little hot. Nevertheless her protectors included Ralph Montagu, that notable ladies’ man, who finally married another blonde beauty, but a wealthy one, Elizabeth Countess of Northumberland; Richard Jones, later Viscount Ranelagh, reprobate son of the esteemed Katherine Viscountess Ranelagh; and Francis Russell, brother of William, fifth Earl of Bedford, who took her to visit Evelyn at Sayes Court. She was after all, as Saint-Evremond’s epitaph declared of her, ‘illustre entre les belles’. She died in 1692 at the age of forty-seven. It was said of her decease that she died gracefully, as though she had studied how to do it; and so in a sense the ‘incomparable’ beauty had.⁵¹

For the women of the poor, the career of the common prostitute certainly promised the possibility of what the great Irish historian Lecky in his sonorous passage on her suffering figure – ‘the most mournful, and in some respects the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell’ – described as ‘disease and abject wretchedness and an early death’. Compared to this, the style of Mrs Myddelton – all white and gold – was shimmering and luxurious indeed. Yet to be realistic the lives of ‘your common jilts who will oblige everybody’ should be contrasted not with that of Mrs Myddelton but with the daily round of their social equals. Women who supported themselves as manure-gatherers, salt-spreaders and the like⁵² (not the pleasantest of jobs) might well envy the financial rewards of prostitution, even if their superior morals prevented them from turning to it.

The figures for these financial rewards are of course so infinitely variable, and also obtained in such a random fashion from the records and literature of the time, that it is difficult to be precise. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, 6d a ‘bout’ – Pepys’s word – was quoted in the country, and up to 20d in the city. In 1649 Ann Morgan of Wells was overheard being offered 1s by a client to ‘lie with thee’; she proceeded to demand 18d because he had torn her coat and ‘hindered me the knitting of half a hose’. But Ann Morgan was known to charge 2s 6d, double the usual fee, to soldiers. Robert Hooke, picking up a ‘call girl’ as he termed her, at a coffee-house in Change Alley, Cornhill, in the 1670s, paid her 5s. If an average rate for a female weeder or spinner of between 2d and 4d a day is borne in mind, or for a domestic servant between £2 and £4 a year, it will be seen that under certain circumstances prostitution was at least financially tempting. Most tempting of all economically was the prospect of trade in the New World: when conditions were bad (the Fire of London, for example, had a most depressing effect on the market and the whores had to lower their prices) enterprising ladies set off for Barbados or Virginia where the general shortage of women aided business.⁵³

Returning to Lecky’s picture, it must be said that disease and abject wretchedness and an early death at this level were not solely the fate of the prostitute, nor indeed of the female sex as a whole. Venereal disease was so widespread – having been spreading since the late fifteenth century – that the dreaded ‘pox’ received a certain amount of social tolerance. After the Restoration the poet and courtier Dorset wrote a good-humoured letter on the subject to one of his ‘Misses’ – probably a well-known prostitute called Moll Hinton – enclosing a small sum of money: ‘a Little Advice’, he wrote, ‘and a great deal of Physick may in time restore you to that health I wish you had enjoyed a Sunday night instead of – your humble suffering servant’. Remedies and recipes against the pox would be given where in the same publication measures against conception were not mentioned.⁵⁴

Furthermore, for the harlot there was always the possibility of upward social mobility, another prerogative following her traditional one of power without responsibility. Nell Gwynn, for example, was the daughter of old Madam Gwynn, who kept something very close to a bawdy-house. Her original profession, that of an orange-girl at the theatre, was one distinguished from prostitution more by its additional duties of fruit-selling than anything else; but her son by Charles II was created a duke. (And from pretty witty Nelly, who towards the end of her life could barely manage the two letters E.G. as a signature,⁵⁵ an English ducal house descends today.) This was an encouraging story, if not to the chaste.

In 1660 a list of common whores in London mentioned Orange Nan and Mrs Watson an orange-seller, as well as Betty Orange, prepared to do business at home at Dung Wharf. Where Nell was concerned, it was relevant that the orange-girls at the theatre needed a good deal of natural wit and spirit to ply their trade. There was considerable competition: from the women known as ‘vizard masks’ for example, from the accoutrement which became the badge of their calling, who also used the pit to pick up their clients; to say nothing of the actors on the stage, whose spectacle generally took place in competition with, rather than as an alternative to the activities of the orange-girls. Disease apart, the profession was not without its dangers: in 1679 the playwright Thomas Otway challenged the young John Churchill to a duel for ‘beating an orange wench’ in the Dorset Garden Theatre; ‘and both were wounded, but Churchill most’ (we do not learn the fate of the orange wench). At the Theatre Royal, however, few would have ventured to tackle the regular orange-girl, ‘Orange Betty’ Mackarel, alluded to as ‘the Giantess Betty Mackarela’ and a byword not only for her strength and her promiscuity but also for her impudence: the Wits jostling with her in the pit would be ‘hot at repartee with Orange Betty’.⁵⁶

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.⁵⁷ 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’.⁵⁸

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’.⁵⁹

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’.⁶⁰ 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.⁶¹

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.⁶²

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.)⁶³

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’.⁶⁴ 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.⁶⁵

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.’⁶⁶

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’.⁶⁷

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’.⁶⁸

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’.⁶⁹

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.⁷⁰

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:

In Restoration society Bess Morris had her place as well as Phillis and Chloris, and was well aware of it. When ‘a great woman’ named Bess to her face as Dorset’s whore, Bess Morris answered that she was proud of the fact that she pleased at least ‘one man of wit’; let ‘all the coxcombs dance to bed with you!’ she retorted.⁷¹