The Sexual History of London (14 page)

This was a house catering to the aristocracy, filled with girls of superior education, many of them the daughters of Cavalier families ruined in the Civil War. Known as ‘Countesses of the Exchange', as they lived near the Royal Exchange, it was said of them that ‘they master your britches and take all your riches'.
⁴⁶
One commentator, Richard Head, an Oxford-educated conman, visited this establishment in 1663, and turned down the first girl he met there for being too expensive, even though she did touch his ‘needle' and bartered with a second, bringing her price down to half a guinea, a considerable amount to pay for sex when two shillings was the going rate for a Ratcliffe Highway whore.

Elizabeth Cresswell's establishments survived the Great Plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of 1666. What they did not survive with impunity was the Shrovetide riots of 24 March 1668. This was the occasion when thousands of London's apprentices rioted and attacked the city's brothels in an excess of moral zeal later referred to as the ‘Bawdy House Riots'. Such attacks were a typical feature of Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, but on this particular occasion they also constituted a form of political rebellion against Charles II's decadent court and represented a growing public unease with the economy; the soldiers and sailors went unpaid while public money was siphoned into the excesses of court life – or even embezzled. The troops were mustered and the riots went on all night, with the crowd roaring slogans such as ‘Reformation and Reducement', which, according to Pepys, made the courtiers apprehensive, because ‘among the Rioters were many Men of Understanding that have been of Cromwell's Army!'
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Ten years after Cromwell's death, the aristocracy were still unnerved at the mention of his name.

By daylight, Pepys was able to record the damage: ‘a great many brothels have been destroyed or damaged', including the one belonging to Damaris Page, while two houses belonging to the Duke of York had been pulled down, which especially upset the duke as he had received £15 a year from each one for their liquor licences. As for the apprentices, their only regret was that they had attacked small brothels and not the great bawdy house at Whitehall: Charles II's palace.

Charles did not take these attacks lightly; eight of the apprentices were subsequently executed. One particular target for public rage was Charles's principal mistress at the time, Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine, who was hated for being a Roman Catholic. Surveying the wreckage of the brothels, Elizabeth Cresswell took it upon herself to sponsor a seditious pamphlet directed at Barbara Villiers entitled ‘The Poor Whores' Petition to Lady Castlemaine'.

This pamphlet, which may have been written by the diarist John Evelyn (who also hated Barbara Villiers), and was co-authored by Elizabeth's lover, the anti-Catholic MP Sir Thomas Player, begs Lady Castlemaine to help the poor whores, her less fortunate sisters from Dog and Bitch Yard, Lukener's Lane, Saffron Hill, Moorfields, Chiswell Street, Rosemary Lane, Nightingale Lane, Ratcliffe Highway, Well Close, Church Lane and East Smithfield, whose homes have been destroyed by the apprentices, calling on her for support as a fellow whore who should show some feeling for her sisters.

Unfortunately, this pamphlet infuriated Barbara Villiers, who was horrified at being compared with London's common whores. It also catapulted Elizabeth into the limelight, the last place any self-respecting madam wishes to find herself. Elizabeth had bankrolled her MP lover, and suddenly all his debts were called in. Her girls were persuaded to give testimony against her by the authorities. As Elizabeth had been a cruel employer, this did not prove a hard task. After thirty years in the business, she was sentenced to Bridewell, where she died, aged sixty, in 1684. Elizabeth's last request was that a sermon be preached at her funeral, for which the preacher would receive £10, but only if he could say nothing bad about her. Eventually a preacher was found who managed to deliver the following lines:

The most notorious of our three bawds was undoubtedly Priss Fotheringham. Born in Scotland around 1615, Priss found her way to London and is first glimpsed in the records of Newgate gaol, after stealing some garments from a widow, Elizabeth Cragg. Already a prostitute, and scarred by smallpox, Priss was not without her charms. One acquaintance described her when young as ‘a cat eyed gypsy, pleasing to the eye in her finery'.
⁴⁹
Priss was also a highly resilient young woman: after being released from jail she set up as bawd of ‘The Six Windmills' in Moorfields, which was to become known, infamously, as ‘Priscilla Fotheringham's Chuck Office'. This is where Priss performed her
pièce de résistance
, an ‘abominable practice' dating back to the days of ancient Rome, whereby the prostitute stood upside down with her legs spread apart, allowing customers to throw coins into her vagina. This was known as ‘chucking' and was a real money-spinner. It also required considerable gymnastic ability on the part of the whore, although clients could be relied upon to secure the girl's legs.

In her early days, Priss could perform this feat several times a day, standing on her head with ‘naked breech and belly while four cully-rompers chuck'd in sixteen half-Crowns into her Commoditie'.
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The Six Windmills drew a considerable clientele and proved wildly popular. As Priss grew weary with age and increasingly more disabled, she trained up new talent to perform, such as the Dutch prostitute known as ‘Mrs Cupid', described here by Garfield:

This episode led Garfield to conclude that ‘A Cunny is the deerest Peice of Flesh in the World!'
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A speciality of another kind was available at the ‘Prick Office' over in East Smithfield. This brothel, also known as the ‘Last & Lyon', was run by a pimp called Hammond, and his speciality was fellatio. He employed a number of women and his interview technique consisted of a request for oral sex: any girl who wanted to work for him ‘must buss the end of his Trapstick, as he lies naked upon his bed with his
Tarse
standing upwards'.
⁵³
According to Burford, this is the only reference to fellatio to be found in contemporary writing.

Priss Fotheringham died around 1668, worn out by age and disease, but wealthy, having made a small fortune from her exploits as a bawd and her extraordinary party trick. By this time, London's oldest profession was in transition. After the depredations of the Great Plague of 1665, the Great Fire the following year and the destructive apprentices of 1668, the landscape of London was shifting and changing, and inevitably so was its sex trade. The days of the old brothels of Moorfields and Clerkenwell were numbered, and the trade was heading west, to the fashionable new district of Covent Garden.

In 1630, the Duke of Bedford commissioned Inigo Jones to develop his land at ‘Convent Garden and the Long Acre' west of the City. The architect responded by creating an imposing square or ‘Piazza' in the Italianate style, inspired by Palladio. ‘Covent Garden', as it became known, thanks to the Cockney glottal stop, swiftly appealed to the ‘quality', who moved into the elegant two-storey houses and flocked to the newly built church of St Paul's on the west of the Piazza. After the Great Fire of 1666, London's street markets were relocated here and Covent Garden market became the most important in the country. Exotic items were carried up the Thames by boat and put up for sale, and taverns and coffee houses opened alongside the Piazza. Inevitably, sex soon joined the list of goods for sale, and the Piazza became London's premier flesh market, ‘that great square of Venus'.
¹

As early as 1709, the
Tatler
was telling readers that every house in the district was inhabited by ‘nymphs of different orders so that persons of every rank can be accommodated'.
²
By 1749, the keen student of vice could take a tour through London's illicit heartlands, like this anonymous author who walked up from Fleet Street, past Charing Cross, and on through Drury Lane to Covent Garden. Charing Cross, he declared, had ‘little else but Concubines in all the Lodgings, and nothing but
Lascivious Looks
seen in the Chamber-Windows, from one end of the Verge to the other'.
³
The ‘lodgings' were the rented rooms where the poorer whores took their pick-ups. The scene gets even worse as he makes his way through Drury Lane,

This is an author who would have agreed with William Blake that ‘the harlot's cry from street to street shall weave Old England's winding sheet', and echoed the same poet's sentiment that the harlot's curse would blight with plagues the marriage hearse, a reference, of course, to venereal disease.

The keen student of human depravity would then arrive at the Piazza in Covent Garden, where there were enough lewd women to form a colony, and where ‘the front windows of the Piazza are filled from seven at Night until four or five o'clock in the Morning with Courtezans of every description, who in the most impudent Manner invite the Passengers from the theatres into Houses where they are accommodated with Suppers and Lodgings, frequently at the expense of all they possess'.
⁵
These ‘courtesans' were out in all weathers, at all seasons, ‘sallying out' at dusk, dressed in the most gaudy colours, thronging the streets. While the more sedate whores contented themselves with walking around until they were addressed directly, the more desperate girls accosted every man they saw, offering to take them home, even standing around potential punters in a crowd, overwhelming them with ‘caresses and entreaties'.
⁶

A young German, Baron Zacharias von Uffenbach, was struck by the number of black women and men he saw ‘hawking their bottoms round the Strand and Covent Garden, the females in European dress, with uncovered black bosoms'.
⁷
The majority of these black prostitutes had arrived in England as slaves, and been sold or abandoned by their white masters. Black girls were familiar enough on the scene for Hogarth to include a black prostitute in Plate 3 of
The Rake's Progress
, where Tom Rakewell is carousing the night away in the notorious Rose Tavern.

Another notable feature in this teeming den of vice was child prostitution. In 1777, ‘Mother' Sarah Woods, a well-known bawd, was charged with ‘harbouring young girls from eleven to sixteen, for the purpose of sending them nightly to parade the streets'. The charges came after the Watch had picked up a girl of twelve and the servant ‘parading with her' to stop her running away with her clothes. Sarah Woods, it transpired, kept the girls hard at work all day cleaning her house, then sent them out as prostitutes at night, some half-naked and drunk.
⁸

Given the desperate living conditions of the time, these children were easily coerced into prostitution. The writer George Alexander Stevens noted that he often saw young girls of twelve and thirteen lying on stalls outside shops,

It was a desperate world of vicious cruelty for girls and boys alike. Those children who did not end up in the sex trade were forced into other criminal activities such as begging, stealing or working in sweatshops. Many were pressed into service as pickpockets, since Covent Garden was a den of vice. Criminals, big-time and small, from fraudsters and footpads to highwaymen, lived in the alleys off the Piazza, drawn to the area by the prospect of rich pickings. Their favourite haunt was the aforementioned Rose Tavern, near Drury Lane Theatre in Russell Street.

The Rose was notorious even by the standards of eighteenth-century London. Patronized by the most dissipated characters in town, from aristocrats to street whores, and from poets and playwrights to conmen and quacks, its clientele included Samuel Pepys (who enjoyed the excellent food) and the actors David Garrick and Sarah Siddons. It was a riotous venue, with bar-room brawls involving members of both sexes. Women would wrestle with each other, stripped to the waist, while customers placed bets on the likely winners.

The Rose was described by Thomas Brown as ‘that black School of SODOM' where men paid a fortune to be flogged by a contingent of women known as ‘posture molls'. These women, who were not prostitutes and were greatly offended if they were asked for sex, consented to flog and be flogged in public. They demonstrated their charms by stretching out naked on the floor, or performing a variation on the ‘chuck office' trick pioneered by Priss Fotheringham. Plate 3 of
The Rake's Progress
joins our rake just as this variation is about to begin. In the background, the porter, Leathercoat, is carrying in an enormous pewter plate and a candle. In the foreground, a posture moll is stripping off in readiness. When the plate has been placed upon the table, the posture moll will dance naked, then lie down on her back with her hands clasped under her thighs, and simulate sex with the (lighted) candle as the customers crowd around; finally, she will snuff out the candle in a highly obscene and hazardous manner, to roars of approval from her audience.
¹⁰

Although taverns were the traditional haunts of prostitutes, coffee houses had become a rival attraction since the late seventeenth century, when they had been introduced by the Puritans as an alternative to pubs, where men could meet to drink coffee and chocolate and share the news of the day. This new beverage was bad news for wives. In ‘The Women's Petition Against Coffee!' a complaint is raised against the ‘heathenish abominable liquor, the Puddle-Water' which it was believed turned their husbands into eunuchs. ‘Men come home with nothing Stiff except their Joints!'
¹¹

Whatever the effect of caffeine upon potency, coffee houses offered great potential for whores, particularly the ambulant variety who, tired of traipsing through the streets on a bitterly cold day, could sit instead before a steaming cup of coffee and appraise the potential clients in this male preserve. ‘The unfortunate strumpet who had been starving in a garret all day long while washing her only and last shift, upon making appearance here, might probably meet with a greenhorn apprentice boy who could treat her with a mutton chop and a pot of porter.'
¹²

One of the most famous coffee houses in Covent Garden was Moll King's. Moll, or Mary, King opened her first coffee house around 1717, with her ‘husband' Tom King, a Cambridge graduate who found the demi-monde of Covent Garden far more to his liking than the respectable professional career his parents had intended. The coffee house, initially a wooden shack along the side of the Piazza, soon proved so profitable that a second and then a third shack had to be built alongside, and even then business was so successful that it was difficult to accommodate all their patrons. Moll herself was a draw, ‘a fat priestess' with an attractive voice and a jolly personality, and crowds flocked to admire ‘Tawny Betty', her attractive black waitress. At Moll's insistence, there were no beds, apart from hers and Tom's in the attic. Moll had dabbled in prostitution in the past and the last thing she wanted was a visit from the law and a spell in Bridewell.

But curiously enough Moll King's was equal, if not superior, to the adjacent brothels in terms of takings. The coffee house was a magnet for young rakes and their mistresses, who could rendezvous there; it was said that ‘every swain from the Star & Garter' (the aristocracy) ‘could find a
Nymph
there'. It was here that one might meet anybody, high life or low, from the top whores, ‘dressed up fine and pretty and elegantly as if going to a Box at the Opera', who were joined, after the performance, by the ‘Bucks and Bloods' (Hellraisers and Hooray Henrys) the ‘All-Night Lads' and the ‘Peep o' Day Boys',
¹³
and the actress-whores who were known as the ‘Toasts of the Town'. The theatre still represented a successful method of social climbing for clever, attractive women, a showcase where they could display their ample charms to capture a rich husband or long-term lover. One successful ‘toast' was Kitty Fisher, ‘indebted to nature for an uncommon portion of beauty, judgement, and wit, joined in a most agreeable and captivating vivacity'.
¹⁴
Kitty, who posed for Sir Joshua Reynolds as Cleopatra, was well aware of her value: she charged a hundred guineas a night and she was never without admirers, including the Duke of York, who left £50 on her dressing table one morning, a tip she found so derisory that she refused to see him ever again, then stuck the banknote between two slices of bread and butter and ate it for breakfast.
¹⁵
As for Lavinia Fenton (1708–60), she was a social climber
extraordinaire
. Born a bastard and raised in a pub, she became the mistress of a nobleman at the age of seventeen and then took to the stage, which proved the making of her. In 1725, Lavinia secured the role of Polly Peachum in John Gay's
The Beggar's Opera
at Rich's theatre. The show was an overnight success, making ‘Gay rich and Rich gay' and propelling Lavinia into the highest ranks of the ‘toasts of the town'. By 1728, she had become the mistress of the Duke of Bolton and finally married him in 1751, when his wife died, becoming Duchess of Bolton and ending her days wealthy and respectable.
¹⁶

Lavinia's was a success story; other ‘toasts' were not so fortunate. Take the case of Sally Salisbury, born the daughter of a bricklayer in 1692. A beauty of considerable intelligence and wit, Sally was also a ‘madcap', with a violent temper which was to prove her undoing. She was apprenticed to a seamstress at the age of nine, but ran away to be an orange girl in the Garden. By fourteen, she was working as a whore for the pious Mother Whyburn, a high-class bawd who had been seduced while at finishing school in Italy and completed her education in a more unorthodox fashion, by working in a seraglio. Mother Whyburn selected girls when they were little more than children and coached them in the social graces necessary to pull the gentry, dressing up her ‘kittens' with paint and patches and claiming they were all parsons' daughters or young milliners.
¹⁷

Sally soon became Mother Whyburn's star attraction, and her lovers included the Duke of Richmond, the Duke of St Albans (Nell Gwyn's son by Charles II), the poet Matthew Prior and the Prince of Wales (later George II). Sally's charges were so high that ‘shee made Folks pay vastly Dear for what they had but they paid the greatest Price for the Greatest Pleasure'.
¹⁸
After a riot at Mother Whyburn's, Sally ended up in jail, but not for long: her judge, Mr Justice Blagney, not only fell in love with her and secured her release, but was so infatuated he set himself up as her personal slave. When Mother Whyburn died in 1719, Sally went to work for the ill-famed Mother Needham. It was here, in 1722, that Sally stabbed her lover, Lord Finch, in a fit of temper. Convinced that he was about to die in her arms, his Lordship whispered, ‘I die at pleasure by your hand,' although he later recovered. Sally was arrested and sent to Newgate, and, despite his injuries, her lover did all he could to console her with legal help and hampers of food. However, Sally developed ‘brain fever', presumably as a result of venereal disease, and died in 1724. She was thirty-two years old.