Copyright

HQ

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London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Text copyright © Holly Kyte 2019

Illustration copyright © Becky Glass 2019

Cover images: Dorothy Jordan by John Hoppner, 1791 © National Portrait Gallery Duke of Aumale by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1846 © Bridgeman Images Lady Diana Cecil attrib. to William Larkin, c. 1614 © Bridgeman Images

Holly Kyte asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008266080

Ebook Edition © 2019 ISBN: 9780008266097

Version: 2019-11-21

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

Spellings, capitalisation and italicisation have been silently modernised throughout for clarity and consistency.

Dedication

For Mum and Dad, for everything.

Epigraph

roaring girl: (n) a noisy, bawdy or riotous woman or girl, especially one who takes on a masculine role

OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY

COVER

TITLE PAGE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

INTRODUCTION

MARY FRITH: The Roaring Girl

MARGARET CAVENDISH: Mad Madge

MARY ASTELL: Old Maid

CHARLOTTE CHARKE: En Cavalier

HANNAH SNELL: The Amazon

MARY PRINCE: Goods and Chattels

ANNE LISTER: Gentleman Jack

CAROLINE NORTON: A Painted Wanton

AFTERWORD: Unfinished Business

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION

Girls, we’re told, are not supposed to roar. We’re supposed to shut up, be quiet, stop nagging. We’re supposed to calm down, dear. If we don’t, we’re bossy, we’re aggressive, we’re nasty, we’re bloody difficult. We’re a bunch of loud-mouthed feminazis and hysterical drama queens. If our skirts are too short, we’re asking for it, but if we don’t make an effort, we should be ashamed. If we don’t speak out, how can we expect recognition? But if we do speak out, we get trolled. And that’s in the twenty-first century, after four waves of feminism, when equality has supposedly been won.

Imagine, just for a moment, that you’re a woman in the seventeenth century. In your world, feminism doesn’t exist. You’ve been born into a rights vacuum. Your life is one long list of obligations and prohibitions. Your sole destiny as a wife and mother has been preordained since day one and the feminine ideal expected of you is to be chaste, modest, obedient – and, whenever possible, silent.

But what if you don’t want to be silent? What if you want to roar?

Mary Frith was just such a woman. A notorious cross-dressing thief in Jacobean London, she was smashing up every rule in the book when she swaggered onto the stage of the Fortune Theatre in the spring of 1611, dressed in a doublet and a pair of hose, sword in one hand, clay pipe in the other, to perform the closing number of the play she had inspired. It was called The Roaring Girl.

A Roaring Girl was loud when she should be quiet, disruptive when she should be submissive, sexual when she should be pure, ‘masculine’ when she should be ‘feminine’. She was everything a woman was not supposed to be, and in a world before feminism, she was society’s worst nightmare.[1]

A WOMAN’S LOT

The eight Roaring Girls who feature in this book lived in Britain in the 300 years before the first wave of feminists fought tooth and nail for women’s suffrage in the late 1800s, and during those centuries, the political and cultural landscape of the country changed almost beyond recognition. Collectively, these women witnessed the final wave of the English Renaissance and the last days of the Tudors. They saw their country rent by Civil War, their monarch murdered and his son restored. They found Enlightenment with the Georgian kings and experienced Empire and industrialisation in the long reign of Victoria. Britain was transforming at an astonishing rate, yet throughout this period – though it was bookended by female rule – a woman’s legal and cultural status remained virtually stagnant. She began and ended it almost as helpless as a child.

The sweeping systemic changes needed to revolutionise a woman’s rights and opportunities may have failed to materialise by the late nineteenth century, but the first rumblings of discontent had long been audible in the background. By the dawn of the seventeenth century, a radical social shift had begun to creak into action that would falteringly gather pace over the next 300 years. For although Mary Frith was the original Roaring Girl, she wasn’t the only woman of the era to find herself living in a world that didn’t suit her, and who couldn’t resist the urge to stick two fingers up at society in response; the seeds of female insurrection were beginning to germinate across Britain, and the women in this book all played their part in the rebellion.

From the privileged vantage point of the twenty-first century, it’s easy to forget just how heavily the odds were stacked against women in Britain in the centuries before the women’s rights movement, and how necessary their rebellion was. From the day she was born, a girl was automatically considered of less value than her male peers, and throughout her life she would be infantilised and objectified accordingly. Her function in the world would forever be determined by her relationship to men – first her father, then her husband, or, in their absence, her nearest male relation. On them she was legally and financially dependent, and should she end up with no male protector at all, she would find it a desperate struggle to survive.

By the age of seven a girl could be betrothed; at 12 she could be legally married. Her only presumed trajectory was to pass from maid to wife to mother and, if she was lucky, grandmother and widow. Any woman who tried to deviate from this path would quickly find her progress blocked by the towering patriarchal infrastructures in her way. Denied a formal education and barred from the universities, she would find that almost every respectable career was closed to her. She couldn’t vote, hold public office or join the armed forces. The common consensus was that her opinions were of no value and her understanding poor, and consequently she was excluded from all forms of public and intellectual life – from scholarship to Parliament to the press. While the men around her were free (if they could afford it) to stride out into the world and participate in all it had to offer, she was expected to know her place and to stay in it – suffocating in the home if she was genteel; toiling in fields, factories, homes and shops if she wasn’t. Genius was a male quality, and leadership a male occupation. Even queens would have their qualifications questioned by men who assumed they knew better.

The only ‘careers’ open to a woman during this period were those of wife and mother, but even if her homelife turned out, by chance, to be happy, these roles still came with considerable downsides. Legal impotence was perhaps the most obvious. In the eyes of the law, the day they married, a husband and wife became one person – and that person was the husband. From that moment on, the wife’s legal identity was subsumed by his.[2] Her spouse became her keeper, her lord and her master, while she, as an individual, ceased to exist. Any money she might earn, any object she might own – from her house right down to her handkerchiefs – instantly became his, while all his worldly goods he kept for himself.[3] A wife could no longer possess or bequeath property, sign a contract, sue or be sued in her own right. In principle, she was now her husband’s goods and chattels, and he could treat his new possession however he liked. If she were still in any doubt about what to expect from married life before she entered it, the Book of Common Prayer made it alarmingly clear: ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.’[4]

If the marriage proved miserable, even unbearable, the wife was expected to endure it. Her husband could beat her, rape her, drag her back to his home if she fled – the law would look the other way. And if he strayed from the path of righteousness into another woman’s bed, well, that was her fault, too; it could only be because she had failed to please him.

With no effective method of controlling her own fertility, successive pregnancies were often an inevitable feature of a married woman’s life, and this brought with it not only the terrors of giving birth, which, quite aside from the pain, could so easily result in her death,[5] but also the horrifying prospect that most of her children would likely not long survive. A couple during the early modern period might expect to have six or seven children born alive, but to see only two of them reach adulthood.[6]

If the marriage should break down altogether, a wife might find herself excommunicated – not just from society, but from those children, too. Like everything else, they belonged to her husband, and he could strip her of all custody and access rights with only a word. If desperate, she might try for a divorce, though if she did, she’d soon learn that she had little or no chance of ever obtaining one. Unless she was rich enough to afford a private Act of Parliament, and could prove her husband guilty of adultery and numerous other misdemeanours, including bigamy, incest and cruelty, the likelihood was all but non-existent. A husband looking to dispose of an unwanted wife, however, might have more luck – he had only to prove adultery in the lady. If all else failed, he could have her committed to the nearest lunatic asylum easily enough,[7] or perhaps drag her to the local cattle market with a rope around her neck and sell her to the highest bidder.[8]

For all these dire pitfalls, the onus weighed heavily on women to marry and have children, yet at any one time during this period an average of two-thirds of women were not married,[9] and their prospects were often even worse. The single, widowed, abandoned and separated made up this soup of undesirables, and with the notable exception of widows who had been left well provided for (they could enjoy an unusual degree of financial independence and respect), they were particularly vulnerable to hardship, poverty and ostracisation. The stigma of having failed in some way marked most of these women. And then, as now, women were not allowed to fail.

Forever held to a higher ideal, women have always had to be better. They alone were the standard bearers of sexual morality; they alone were responsible for keeping themselves and their family spotless. And since society saw no way of reconciling the fantasy of female purity with the reality of sex, it simply divided women into virgins and whores – idolised and vilified, worshipped and feared, loved and loathed. There could be no middle ground; even in marriage a woman’s sexuality had to be strictly controlled, because left unchecked it had the dizzying power to demolish social order. All it took was one indiscretion and man’s greatest fears – cuckoldry, doubtful paternity and the corruption of dynastic lineage – could come true. To avoid this chaos, women were subject to a different set of rules that were deemed as sacred as scripture: a man could philander like a priapic satyr and receive nothing worse than a knowing wink; if a woman did the same, she was ruined. Her reputation was as brittle as a dried leaf, and a careless flirtation or a helpless passion could crush it to dust. So rabid was this mania for sexual purity that it could even apply in cases of rape – so rarely brought to court and even more rarely prosecuted, though women undoubtedly endured it, and the shame, blame and suspicion that went with it.

These pernicious double standards permeated every form of social interaction between the sexes – even the very language they spoke. The nation’s vocabulary had developed in tandem with its misogyny, resulting in a litany of colourful pejorative terms designed to degrade and humiliate any woman who proved indocile. Too chatty, too complaining, too opinionated and she was a nag, a scold, a shrew, a fishwife, a harridan or a harpy. An unseemly interest in sex saw her branded a whore, wench, slut and harlot. And if she ever dared succumb to singledom or old age, she deserved the fearful monikers of old maid, crone and hag. Terms such as these were part of people’s everyday lexicon, and they have no equivalents for men.

Such thorough disenfranchisement – intellectual, economic, political, social and sexual – was the surest way to keep women contained, but despite these desperate measures, it remained a common gripe that women didn’t stick to their predetermined codes of conduct anywhere near enough. They were sexually incontinent, fickle, stupid and useless. They gossiped, carped, prattled, tattled, wittered and accused. They had even started to write books. If they would not shut up and play the game, they would have to be forced, and in these tricky cases, ostentatious methods were called for.

A nagging, henpecking or adulterous wife who had overleaped her place in the hierarchy, for example, might be ritualistically shamed in a village skimmington or charivari – in which her neighbours would parade her through the streets on horseback, serenading her with a cacophonous symphony beaten out on pots and pans, and perhaps burning her in effigy, too. Alternatively, she might be subjected to the cucking stool – an early incarnation of the more notorious ducking stool – which essentially served as a public toilet that the offending woman was forced to sit on. And there could hardly be a more sinister or more blatant symbol of the systemic gagging of women than the draconian scold’s bridle – an iron mask fitted with a bit that pinned down her tongue, sometimes with a metal spike, to quite literally stop her mouth.[10] This unofficial punishment, which was particularly prevalent during the seventeenth century, was mostly reserved for garrulous, gobby women who had spoken out of turn (or just spoken out) and challenged the authority of men, but it might also be meted out to a woman suspected of witchcraft – if she wasn’t one of the thousands who were ducked, hanged or burned for it, that is.[11]

These elaborate tortures pointed to one simple fact: that the potential power women had – be it sexual, intellectual, even supernatural – scared the living daylights out of the patriarchy. In response, it did everything it could to suppress that power and preserve its own supremacy: it kept them ignorant, incapacitated, voiceless and dependent.

By the dawn of the seventeenth century, this sorry template for gender relations had prevailed largely unchallenged for millennia. It’s a model so deeply entrenched in Western culture that it can be traced right back to the Ancients, who set the gold standard for excluding and silencing women, not only in their social and political structures but in their art and culture, too.[12] Its justification was based on one disastrously wrong-headed assumption: that women were fundamentally inferior to men. And for that we can blame both bad science and perverse theological doctrine.

Even today, we cling to the myth that men and women’s brains are somehow wired differently – an idea that modern science is rapidly disproving.[13] But in 1600, the belief that gender differences were every bit as biological as sex differences was absolute. Ever since the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle hypothesised that women were a reproductive mistake – physically defective versions of men – it had been persistently argued in Western debate that they were mentally, morally and emotionally defective, too. It didn’t help that seventeenth-century medicine had also inherited from the Ancient Greeks the nonsense theory that the body was governed by the ‘four humours’ – blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile – which in turn were thought to be linked to the four elements: earth, fire, water and air. The belief was that a woman was comprised of cold, wet elements, while a man was hot and dry – a crucial difference that supposedly rendered her brain softer than his and her body more unstable. The catastrophic conclusion was that women had only a limited capacity for rational thought. It was no use educating them; their feeble brains couldn’t bear the strain of rigorous intellectual study. They could not be trusted to think and act for themselves, which was why they required domination. And their bodies and behaviour had to be constantly policed, because women were famously susceptible to both sexual voracity and madness – which frequently went hand in hand and were often indistinguishable.

These pernicious, ancient ideas were only reinforced by Christian doctrine. The creation myth made it abundantly clear that Eve, the first woman and mother, who had been fashioned from Adam’s rib for his comfort and pleasure, was the cause of original sin and the source of man’s woe, while early Christian writers spelled it out to the masses that it was a wife’s religious duty to bow to her husband’s authority, because ‘the head of the woman is man’[14] and to submit to him was to submit to God. By the seventeenth century, the damage had set in like rot. The message had been parroted and propagated by nearly every father, husband, preacher, politician, philosopher and pamphleteer across the land for thousands of years, until almost everyone – even women – believed it.

THE OLD RADICALS

With so many barriers in her way, so many erasures to contend with, it’s a wonder that any woman ever made it into the history books. To dismantle such deeply embedded foundations is a monumental task – so much so that we’re still working on it today. In Britain, we have at least made progress enough for this to seem an unbearable world to live in – the Gilead of our nightmares. So how did any woman cope with it? How did any woman even begin to challenge it?

The truth is, the majority didn’t even try. Browbeaten by continual put-downs and a lack of opportunity, they grimaced and bore it, most of them too poor, too ill-educated, too legally and financially dependent on men to have a means of protesting. Power and influence were not within the average woman’s grasp, and if she were anything other than white, she faced almost insurmountable odds – the lives of black and brown women in Britain are particularly absent from the historical records, though they were certainly not absent from the country.

Faced with this dead end, some women chose to take pride in their domestic roles and make the best of their lot; others were so inured to misogyny that they accepted it as normal, even became complicit in it, conned into believing that they could somehow profit from playing nicely in this twisted game.[15]

But there have always been women who refused to play by rules that had so obviously been written by men, for men. Women who couldn’t just keep quiet and carry on. Who didn’t fit the narrow criteria of what a woman ought to be, and felt instinctively that they were as valuable as any man. How did these women – the clever, the curious, the talented; those who preferred women to men, who preferred sword-fighting to child-rearing, who preferred breeches to petticoats, learning to laundry, discussion to silence, independence to marriage; who yearned for the open seas, not the scullery, and dreamed of fame, not obscurity – how did these women negotiate the hostile world around them and find the outlets they needed for all their complexities?

There was only one way: they would have to rile, unnerve, disobey and question. They would have to forfeit the title of ‘good girl’ and become a Roaring Girl instead.

This book explores how just a few of them managed it. Together, the eight Roaring Girls collected here span the full spectrum of the social hierarchy, from a duchess to a slave, and encompass a rainbow of personalities: in these pages you’ll find poets and adventurers, scientists and philosophers, actors and activists, writers and entrepreneurs, thieves and soldiers, ladies and lowlifes, wives and spinsters, mothers and mistresses, flamboyant dressers, plain dressers and cross-dressers, of every sexual preference – in short, all kinds of womanhood. Their roaring ways took various forms. Some of them used words, others action; some broke the law, others changed the law; some used their femininity, others threw it off entirely and appropriated the ways, manners and dress of men instead. All of them were playing with fire, and inevitably they sometimes got burned. For every admirer who cheered them on during their lifetimes, there were plenty more who denounced them as monsters, lunatics, freaks, devils, whores and old maids, and quickly forgot them once they were dead.

Indeed, to their contemporaries, their achievements might not have seemed particularly worth remembering. After all, they didn’t conspicuously change the world – not one of them ruled a nation, wrote a classic novel, made a pioneering discovery or led a revolution. Yet progress can come in small, surprising packages, too. That the historical records took note of these women at all suggests that they were the exceptions, not the rule, living extraordinary, not ordinary, lives, and in the pre-twentieth-century world that was quite enough to get society in a tizz. By living differently, truthfully, loudly and unashamedly, these Roaring Girls were challenging the system, and – whether they knew it or not – making a difference. The imprint they made on history may have been faint, but it’s there to be seen if we take the trouble to look. These women helped change our culture, however incrementally, and together they give a tantalising glimpse of the breadth, boldness and sheer brilliance of the legions of women who have fallen through the cracks over the centuries and tumbled headlong into the ‘Dustbin of History’.[16]

IS THIS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE?

The urge to label such extraordinary women from history as ‘feminists’ is almost irresistible. Naturally, we want to ‘think back through our mothers’, as Virginia Woolf phrased it,[17] and find inspiring heroines to admire; it’s our way of trying to bridge the gap between us, so we can all be on the same team. But to foist modern values and paradigms onto women who lived hundreds of years ago is to set ourselves a trap. If we take the dictionary definition of a feminist as one who supports ‘the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes’,[18] the majority of the women in this book don’t qualify. Most would never have spared a thought for whether women should be granted equal rights with men – that was too big a question too soon, given the scale of the obstacles; they were usually far too busy trying to negotiate their own lives to worry about anyone else’s. The human rights that women enjoy today would have been met with stunned disbelief by these women, and the word ‘feminist’ with a blank stare.[19] The women’s suffrage movement was only just beginning to coalesce in the 1850s, so any woman who spoke out in defence of her sex before then was not a spoke in the wheel of any political or civil movement, buoyed by support from like-minded allies; she was a lone voice in a din of misogyny.

When examining the lives of historical women, there’s no ignoring that their world was not our world; they lived by a different set of standards, a lower bar of expectation, and to try to force our modern concept of feminism to fit retrospectively would be foolhardy. As such, our Roaring Girls don’t always behave in the ways we might want them to or say the things we want to hear. Many of them are a mass of contradictions. With their natural instincts so out of kilter with the social conventions of their day, the result was often paradoxical characters who were both products of their time and ahead of their time. To avoid disappointment, they should always be viewed against their own historical backdrop, rather than ours.

Which is why it can only ever be anachronistic to label these women simply as feminists. And yet, the spirit of feminism was not born with the word. There was no Damascene moment when the movement burst into being, fully formed and fully armed, like Athena sprouting from the head of Zeus. It didn’t arrive with the first Suffragists in the 1860s; it didn’t even arrive with Mary Wollstonecraft in the 1790s. Its birth was slow, incremental, painful and faltering, forged over centuries and across the world, by actions great and incidental, by people famous and forgotten.

What binds these women together, then, is not that they were feminists as we would understand them today, but that they all in some way broke the heavily gendered rules of what a woman ‘ought’ to be and began the work of rewriting them, exposing ignorance, reclaiming their freedoms and overturning preconceptions as they went. They may not have realised it, but that in itself was a feminist act. If we can allow ourselves to relax the remit of the word, we might call these formidable women a fraction of the many early feminists, proto-feminists, accidental, unwitting, even reluctant feminists, who, despite every effort to suppress them, dared to be extraordinary – who, between them, struck the first sparks of what would later become a blaze.

This book is intended as a celebration of these unconventional women’s lives, in all their messy, three-dimensional wonder, in the hope of affording them a little of the gratitude and recognition they so richly deserve, and reclaiming some of the complexity that has historically been denied them. It’s time we viewed such women not as saints or martyrs, heroes or villains, virgins or whores, masculine or feminine, but as real, contradictory, compelling human beings who laughed, loved, cried and fought their way through life, making the best of it, making mistakes – and each in their own way making history. Above all, it’s a collection of stories about courage – the courage of women who, in a world that constantly told them no, stood firm and roared back the word yes.

THE ROARING GIRL

It is Sunday, 9 February 1612, and a crowd has gathered in the churchyard of old St Paul’s Cathedral to see a woman punished. Her crime is against nature; she has disgraced all womankind with her monstrous acts, and now, before the public and before God, she must admit her shame and be cleansed of guilt.

Barefoot and bare-headed, the woman walks out into the wan morning light, swathed in a white sheet and clutching a long taper. For those who can read it, a placard proclaiming her sin hangs around her neck. As she makes her way unsteadily across the cold flagstones of the yard towards the pulpit and carefully climbs the steps to the platform, the jeers from the crowd rise up and follow her.

From the pulpit stage, she looks out over her audience and sees a swarm of eager faces. They are waiting for the show to start, so when the priest begins his sermon, the woman takes her cue. She drops her eyes, suppresses a smile and does her best to cry.

The woman was Mary Frith, and six weeks before, on Christmas Day 1611, she had been arrested (not for the first time) at St Paul’s

Cathedral for walking the streets of London at night dressed in men’s clothes. The result was a charge of public immorality, and a punishment designed to humiliate, disgrace and correct her: she would do public penance in a white sheet, at the open-air pulpit of St Paul’s Cross within the cathedral grounds,[1] where all could bear witness to her forced repentance and the purification of her soul.

This symbolic ritual was a tried and tested disciplinary measure, already centuries old by 1612, but in this instance, it was a waste of time. The ecclesiastical court, which dealt with all lapses in personal morality, was attempting to shame and reform a woman who would not be shamed or reformed, and in the end, the event was more farcical pantomime than solemn ceremony. The penitent herself, it was observed, regarded her punishment with such merry disdain that she was drunk throughout the proceedings; for her, it seems, this was just another opportunity to play to the crowds. Her priest’s sermon, meanwhile – a lengthy lecture denouncing her sin and calling on her to repent – was so mind-numbingly tedious that most of the audience lost interest and wandered off partway through. Those who stayed, however, were rewarded for their patience with precisely what they had come for: a free performance by ‘Moll Cutpurse’ – one of the most famous, and infamous, women in London.

THE THREE FACES OF MARY

When Mary Frith completed her act of penance at St Paul’s Cross in 1612, her name – or at least that of her alter ego, ‘Moll Cutpurse’ – had been on the lips of most Jacobean Londoners for several years, especially those who frequented the playhouses, taverns, brothels and bear pits of Bankside, the lawless entertainment district of Southwark that lay conveniently outside the City’s jurisdiction. Whether they loved or loathed her, feared or admired her, Mary’s notorious career as a cross-dressing thief (or ‘cutpurse’[2]) and street entertainer had fascinated the public, and by the time she’d reached her mid-twenties, she had achieved cult celebrity status – so much so that several playwrights had already appropriated, refashioned and immortalised her persona as a wholly unconventional folk heroine.

Fifty years later, Mary’s legend as one of the most enjoyably outrageous and controversial women of the age was still going strong, confirmed by the arrival in 1662 of a sensationalised ‘autobiography’, The Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith, which, if it were what it pretends to be – the candid deathbed diary of a repentant sinner – would constitute an invaluable primary source for Mary’s life and an important early example of life writing by an Englishwoman. As it is, the diary is almost certainly a fake. There is no credible evidence that Mary wrote it herself; after all, she’d been dead for three years before it appeared, and although up to 50 per cent of women in London were literate by the late seventeenth century (a much higher proportion than in most parts of the country), it’s unlikely that a woman of low birth such as Mary would have been one of them.[3]

The book’s numerous factual errors and omissions point instead to another hand, and given its erratic style, maybe even several. Falling into three distinct and sometimes contradictory sections – an opening address, an introduction summarising Mary’s upbringing and a ‘diary’ of her life as a cutpurse – it comprises a string of unapologetic, entertaining, though often disjointed, anecdotes of her misdeeds, and seems to have more in common with the fictionalised criminal biographies that were popular at the time than it does with a genuine diary,[4] veering in tone from comic to defiant to political and even preachy.

This ‘diary’, then, is an unreliable account of Mary’s life, though that’s not to say it’s worthless. Plenty of the details within its pages chime with what we know to be true. It’s plausible that the authors had their anecdotes either directly from Mary when she was alive – an old woman entertaining anyone in the alehouse who would listen with tales of her outrageous youth – or from those who knew her, or, more likely, that they adapted them from the tales of her exploits that had been passed from gossip to gossip for decades. Mary had already written herself into London’s folklore with her riotous escapades, leaving the diary’s anonymous authors the task of matching, if not surpassing, these outlandish oral tales.

But herein lies the problem with Mary Frith. With the historical records frustratingly reticent on her real life (her appearances in them are few, though always revealing), much of what we know – or think we know – of her comes from the various fictionalised versions that appeared over the years, making her as slippery a character in death as she was in life. The legend who features in the ‘diary’, the character who walked the stage and the flesh-and-blood woman who left an imprint on the records don’t always agree, splitting her image into hazy triplicate. The diarists were aware of the issue. Their excuse for the ‘abruptness and discontinuance’ of their story is that ‘it was impossible to make one piece of so various a subject’.[5] This isn’t just an unwitting admission of their own fudged documentation of her life; evidently Mary’s baffling complexity made her as intangible to her contemporaries as she is to us.

Lower-class, lawless, unconventional and disobedient, Mary Frith was disturbing – but also strangely alluring; she represented an unusual kind of woman in the seventeenth century, one to whom society had no answer. By definition, such women lived a precarious life and needed cunning strategies to survive, and in Mary’s case that meant barricading herself in behind a protective wall of myth and mystique, cultivating multiple personalities and perfecting her performance of each one until the real woman became as elusive as wisps of smoke. With so many Marys before us, it’s as if she’s laid down a challenge: to find the real Mary Frith, and catch her if we can.

A VERY TOMRIG OR RUMPSCUTTLE

The mystery authors of The Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith do their best to get to the bottom of this unfathomable woman, but she is ‘so difficult a mixture’ of male and female, of ‘dishonesty and fair and civil deportment’, that they seem torn from the start between admiration and alarm. Faced with a cross-dressing thief who on the one hand must surely be morally reprehensible, but on the other was famed for her good humour and entertaining shenanigans, they delight in her one minute, sneer at her the next – sometimes all at once. Their introduction showers Mary with mock-heroic epithets: she is ‘a prodigy’, an ‘epicoene wonder’, ‘the oracle of felony’, the gold-standard bearer of thievery – a profession that is now in ‘sad decays’ without her; but she is also a ‘virago’, a ‘bono roba’ (prostitute), a monstrous hybrid of masculine and feminine, so unattractive that she was ‘not made for the pleasure or delight of man’. Such a woman made little sense to her peers; she was as much a side-show freak as she was a folkloric heroine, and needed to be explained to the uncomprehending but fascinated public.

In their attempt to do just that, the authors begin at the beginning, with Mary’s childhood, which, if the bare bones of their introduction are to be believed, served as a dress rehearsal for the role she would play in later life. With an air of surprise, they report that this natural rebel was born to perfectly ordinary, law-abiding parents – an ‘honest shoemaker’ and his wife, who lived in the Barbican area of London – in the latter years of Elizabeth I’s reign (the exact year is unclear). Tender, affectionate and indulgent, Mr and Mrs Frith offered their daughter a humble upbringing, though a happy and stable one.[6] By rights, she ought to have been just another honest, hard-working young woman who soon married and settled into her predetermined roles of wife and mother. But no.

Mary’s ‘boisterous and masculine spirit’ manifested itself early and would not be tamed. To curb her unruly ways, we’re told that her parents took particular care over her education (which by the standards of the day meant teaching her to read but not to write, as well as a few domestic accomplishments), but their efforts had little effect. Young Mary was a child of action, not academia. She was an archetypal tomboy – ‘a very tomrig or rumpscuttle’ – fizzing with energy, and resistant to every norm of female behaviour: she would ‘fight with boys, and courageously beat them’; ‘run, jump, leap or hop with any of them’, and ravage her pretty girls’ clothes in the scuffles. She didn’t care – her dresses hung awkwardly on her ungainly frame and only annoyed her.

Drawn to the places where the rabble congregated, this scrappy urchin spent most of her time at the Bear Garden, the rowdy entertainment arena wedged in among the playhouses of Bankside, where bear-baiting, bull-baiting and dog fighting kept the blood-lusty crowds amused. Here, in the fug of the bustling, stinking, noisy Southwark streets, all the vices were out on display: drunks and tavern brawlers, punters and prostitutes, cutpurses and cheats jostled along together, while down the road, above the gateway of old London Bridge, the heads of traitors sat on spikes, like gruesome lollipops in a sweet-shop window. Young Mary saw it all, and she wasn’t fazed in the least; in fact, she fitted right in.

However unladylike, this was the world where Mary Frith felt at home, for she was ‘too great a libertine … to be enclosed in the limits of a private domestic life’. As womanhood approached, she showed no interest in the feminine pursuits she was expected to learn: ‘she could not endure that sedentary life of sewing or stitching’, preferring a sword and a dagger to a needle and thimble. The bakehouse and the laundry were alien to her, and the ‘magpie chat of the wenches’ an irritation. Mary preferred a more direct form of expression. Even when she was young she was ‘not for mincing obscenity’; by adulthood, the habit had developed into ‘downright swearing’. Such profane language from a woman was unfeminine and unacceptable and, along with the rest of her behaviour, it had to be policed (as Mary would later discover – her reputed potty mouth would be listed in the court records as one of her many arrestable offences). To complete this picture of the ultimate anti-woman, we’re told that ‘above all she had a natural abhorrence to the tending of children’, and steered well clear of becoming a mother (another claim that is borne out by the records).

If this character portrait is accurate, Mary was a woman destined to offend and perplex seventeenth-century society in every way. Indeed, so far was she from the meek, mild, modest woman that custom demanded that it was doubted she was a woman at all. She had unsexed herself, become a ‘hermaphrodite in manners as well as in habit’; she was ‘the living description of a schism and separation’, combining the ‘female subtlety’ of one sex and the ‘manly resolution’ of the other – and to a society that only dealt in strict gender binaries, such a combination was profoundly unnerving.

A lower-class girl with no money, little education and scant opportunities had very few options in life even if she conformed, but if, like Mary, she either would not or could not conform, the choice was almost made for her. Such girls often found themselves tripping over into the wrong side of the law in order to survive, usually through thievery or prostitution, but even in that world there was a hierarchy to climb. If Mary wanted to live differently to most women, she would have to behave differently to most women. And if she wanted a modicum of the power and freedom that men had, then she would have to settle for power and freedom in the criminal underworld.

MOLL CUTPURSE

Too proud to beg, too wild for domestic drudgery and quite possibly too repulsed by men to contemplate prostitution, Mary Frith decided to make her living as a cutpurse. It was the most dangerous choice of all these unappealing options, for to embark upon a career of thievery automatically meant risking her liberty and her life. England in the early seventeenth century was a visibly savage place: legal punishments were reliably disproportionate to the crime and barbaric public executions were a favoured form of entertainment. With property deemed as valuable as human life – and frequently even more so – theft and burglary were among the country’s capital offences; if Mary’s fingers weren’t quite nimble enough, she could be facing a stint in Newgate Gaol, or worse, the drop at Tyburn.[7] But in a city where ostentatious wealth rubbed shoulders with grinding poverty, the temptation to pick the glittering pockets of affluent bankers, merchants, lawyers and lords was just too great. Undeterred, or perhaps just desperate, Mary joined the hordes of cutpurses who plagued Elizabethan London early – probably when she was still a child – and quickly demonstrated a knack for getting away with it.

Undoubtedly it played to her advantage that law and order was then a haphazard thing – the professional police force had yet to be established and certain areas, including Mary’s stomping ground of Southwark, fell outside the City’s jurisdiction, making them attractive dens for every kind of vice. These areas were more or less governed by underground criminal networks. Magistrates relied on local volunteer constables to keep the peace and apprehend criminals, who in turn relied on members of the public to raise a ‘hue and cry’ whenever they spotted a misdemeanour. Mary was presumably so adept at sleight of hand that she mostly managed to pilfer unnoticed, though she wasn’t always so lucky.

The records show that on 26 August 1600, when she was still a teenager, she was first charged by the Justices of Middlesex with stealing an unknown man’s purse, while working in cahoots with two other women. She wriggled out of it on this occasion but was indicted again on 18 March 1602 for stealing a purse from a man named Richard Ingles, and again on 8 September 1609, for burglary.[8] Every time, she managed to secure a verdict of not guilty and escape a trip to Newgate – or the noose – so that by her early twenties she had made quite a career for herself. And with it came a well-earned new nickname: ‘Moll Cutpurse’.[9]

The details of Mary’s subsequent life as a cutpurse are filled in by The Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith with unashamed glee. After a short preamble, Mary’s so-called ‘diary’ embarks on a chain of anecdotes about her many misadventures, tricks and petty revenges, even providing a kind of instruction manual in places on how she and her colleagues successfully plied their trade. Helpful details such as dates are absent, and psychological self-analysis doesn’t trouble her – ‘It is no matter to know how I grew up to this,’ she states dismissively, ‘since I have laid it as a maxim that it was my fate.’ She is, however, allowed the odd moment of reflection when it’s to marvel at what an extraordinary creature she is. ‘I do more wonder at myself than others can do,’ she declares in awe, with the same air of amusement with which she relates all of her history. For the purpose here, more than anything, is to entertain with her oddity. Accordingly, her crimes are softened to ‘pranks’ and, like her literary descendant Moll Flanders, she is portrayed as an honest thief and magnetic heroine, her maxim for life: ‘To be excellent and happy in villainy’, because that has always been ‘reputed equal with a good fame’.

Judging by these anecdotes, Mary’s good fame was justified. She tells of being tricked into boarding a ship for the plantations of Virginia and her subsequent escape by paying off the captain, and of how, being poor and friendless, she then joined a gang of pickpockets, who judged her to be ‘very well qualified for a receiver and entertainer of their fortunate achievements’ – or rather a receiver of stolen goods. This was a life she rather took to, for although the danger was evident, she was ‘loath to relinquish the profit’, and seems to have quickly established a unique and powerful position for herself as protectress and confidante of this coterie of thieves. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Being ‘well known to all the gang, and by my good dealing with them not a little in their favour’, Mary was offered protection and anonymity in return – a real case of honour among thieves. She would share out the profits fairly, act as ‘umpire in their quarrels’ and lend money to the most desperate, thereby preventing them from committing dangerous robberies and effectively saving them from ‘the hangman’s clutches’. By fashioning herself as the fair, magnanimous champion of lowlifes in this way, Mary earned the respect and devoted loyalty of her fellow cutpurses, ‘so that among all the thieveries they did, my name was never heard of; for they made it the chiefest of their religion to conceal me and to conceal nothing of their designs from me’. In effect, she had negotiated her way to the top of her own organised crime ring – and secured her own immunity in the process.

It was a wily strategy, though not foolproof – as we know, Mary occasionally found herself in hot water, but when she did, the pickpocket community was allegedly swift to come to her rescue. In one instance, cited in the diary, when Mary is taken up for stealing a watch, she employs one of her gang to commit the ultimate theft in front of a packed courtroom, purely to get her off the hook. Once she had pleaded not guilty, she says, ‘it came to this issue, whether that watch for which I was indicted was the gentleman’s watch or no’. The constable who had apprehended her was called forward to deliver the watch for the gentleman to identify, but just as the constable was making his way into court, Mary deployed her secret weapon: ‘one of my small officers dived into his pocket and sought out the evidence against me, and departed invisible’.

This neat trick naturally incensed the Lord Mayor, who immediately suspected her chicanery, but with no evidence to hand, there was nothing he could do. Once again, the jury were forced to acquit Mary, leaving her free to continue with her shady dealings, undiscouraged and irredeemable as ever. Before long, she tells us, she had the confidence of famous highwaymen, too, and begins to cut a figure rather like a seventeenth-century Fagin, sending off her gang of pickpockets and robbers to do their light-fingered work and bring back the spoils to their mistress.

It’s not known exactly when Mary Frith began to combine her pickpocketing with transvestism, but it seems likely to have coincided with the advent of her entertainment career – a male-dominated industry like all the others – when she was in her early twenties.

Counterintuitive though this decision seems for a thief whose life depended on anonymity, in around 1608 Mary began to see the advantage in developing her persona as ‘Moll Cutpurse’ into a public attraction; by simply donning a doublet, hat and cloak, she could become a ‘character’, who simultaneously drew the crowds to her and distanced her from them. It soon become her signature. Dressed in men’s clothes, she would walk the streets of Southwark, challenging ‘diverse gallants’ to sartorial competitions and entertaining the crowds with her ‘mad pranks’, while her gang of footpads weaved through the distracted audience, cutting purses as they went. Now a decoy as well as a fence and low-level criminal mastermind, Mary Frith had pulled off a protean magic trick: she had become Moll Cutpurse, the charming, eccentric rogue who could never be caught in the act.

Mary’s transvestism was unusual, but it didn’t occur in isolation. It was part of a Europe-wide underground trend for female cross-dressing that first sprang up in the 1570s, reached a peak in the 1620s, thrived throughout the eighteenth century and continued on into the early nineteenth, when it rapidly fizzled out. The UK was particularly prone to this phenomenon, having one of the highest incidence rates in Europe – there are at least 50 recorded cases during this period of women living as men, either to work, marry or serve their country as soldiers and sailors – and it’s easy to see the appeal.[10] A woman’s clothes were ornamental rather than practical, designed to hinder, not help her. Her rigid stays and voluminous skirts accentuated her primary functions of mother and sex object, and were as cumbersome and restrictive as the social rules that bound her. To throw them off in favour of a doublet and hose offered a long list of symbolic attractions. For some women, sidestepping the arbitrary trappings of gender was a survival strategy or simple expedient, a handy disguise when in trouble, in love or going off to war. For others, it was an expression of their complex sexuality, which, in an era before sexual categorisation, had only a one-size-fits-all model. For many more, it meant safety – from harassment, seduction, rape and prostitution, from forced marriages and unwanted pregnancy. And for the ambitious or adventurous, who, as Mary Beard puts it, had ‘no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man’,[11] it meant a sudden open door to agency and opportunity. For those who dabbled, it was pleasingly provocative. For those who went the whole hog, it was a liberation. For all of them, it was a direct challenge to the intractable social codes that governed everyone’s lives – an early feminist act of defiance.[12]

To a country that had long employed sartorial sumptuary laws to scrupulously to preserve the distinctions of rank in its citizens, this trend for female transvestism indicated their alarming lack of control over the distinctions of gender. The Bible had decried cross-dressing as an ‘abomination unto the Lord’,[13] a subversion of the ‘proper’ hierarchy between woman, man and God, as the pamphleteer Phillip Stubbes was keen to remind everybody in his 1583 Anatomy of Abuses. All cross-dressers, he wrote, were ‘accursed’. Men who did it were ‘weak, tender and infirm’, degrading themselves to the status of feeble, powerless females.[14] Women who did it were hermaphroditic ‘monsters’ and presumptuous whores, attempting to steal a man’s power and usurp his sovereignty.

It was this perceived power exchange that was key to transvestism’s ability to unsettle and enrage society. In women, not only did it smack of insubordination, but with its elements of disguise, evasion and masculine aggression, it carried an intrinsic connection to both criminality and sexual incontinency. In 1615, a fencing master named Joseph Swetnam was so incensed by this fad that Mary Frith was spearheading that he published The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women – a misogynist’s rant in which he bloviated against the ‘heinous evils’ of women. The book was so popular it went through ten editions by 1637, and the concerns it spoke of went right to the very top. King James I, another notorious misogynist, voiced his own anxieties in January 1620, when he commanded that the clergy ‘inveigh vehemently and bitterly in their sermons, against the insolence of our women’ for ‘their wearing of broad brimmed hats’ and ‘pointed doublets’, for having ‘their hair cut short or shorne’ and for carrying ‘stilettoes or poinards [daggers]’.[15] His decree then sparked a pamphlet war the following month between the anonymous authors of Hic Mulier, or, The Man-Woman and Haec Vir; or, The Womanish Man, who publicly fought out the big question: where these ‘masculine-feminines’ a monstrous ‘deformity never before dreamed of’, or emancipated slaves fighting for freedom of choice and self-expression?[16] It could not have been clearer that, even after decades of furiously debating the controversy, this new breed of woman that Mary represented encapsulated men’s fears that ‘the world is very far out of order’.[17]

Consequently, and perhaps inevitably, the panicked authorities frantically cracked down on this destabilising wave of transvestism in an attempt to stamp it out. Several women are known to have been arrested and punished for it long before Mary took it up: in 1569, one Joanna Goodman was whipped and sent to the Bridewell house of correction for dressing as a male servant to accompany her husband to war; in July 1575, the Aldermen’s Court sentenced Dorothy Clayton to stand on the pillory for two hours before sending her to Bridewell Prison and Hospital because ‘contrary to all honesty and womanhood [she] commonly goes about the City apparelled in man’s attire’; in 1599, Katherine Cuffe was sent to Bridewell for disguising herself in boy’s clothes to meet her lover in secret, as was Margaret Wakeley in 1601, because she ‘had a bastard child and went in men’s apparel’.[18]

Most of these women had been accused of sexual misconduct in connection with their transvestism and were using it as a form of disguise. Mary’s motives, however, appear to have been quite different, with her cross-dressing driven partly by a need to advance her career as a crooked street entertainer, and partly by sheer enjoyment.[19] If she was aware of the hazards before she began, she was not put off; indeed, she seems to have been intent on exploiting every one of its discomforting associations. Her outfit of choice was usually a doublet and petticoat, mixing male and female dress, which, rather than disguising her femaleness, deliberately drew attention to her man-womanness. This was not a woman attempting to blend in and disappear; it was a woman who wanted to be noticed – a natural extrovert, who couldn’t resist the overriding urge to step outside the conventional bounds of female experience and thumb her nose in a small but symbolic way at society’s assumption that she was not fit to participate in the world as fully as men. Her method would have its advantages and disadvantages, but certainly Mary Frith had achieved her end: ‘Moll Cutpurse’ had gone up in the underworld – soon there was hardly a soul in London who didn’t know her name.

THE ROARING GIRL

It was around 1610, when Mary was in her mid-twenties and had spent a good couple of years building her dubious reputation as a curious local personality, that London’s playwrights began to take notice of her. And like her biographers, they, too, would mould her image to suit their own ends.

The theatre had come of age during Elizabeth’s reign and, despite occasional closures due to the plague (in 1603–4 and again in 1606–9), it was maturing under James I. Nestled between the inns, bear-pits and brothels of Southwark, playhouses were grubby, raucous places, where ‘all around were card-sharps, dicers, con men and money lenders, roaring boys and roaring girls’,[20] and all of life, from nobodies to nobles, pooled together for their penny’s worth of entertainment. They were also places where women, though welcome in the pits and the galleries, were still categorically banned from the stage.

Mary might not have been allowed to perform herself, but now, at the height of her fame, her alias Moll Cutpurse began to make cameo appearances in several comedic works of the day, taking the lead role in at least two. The Mad Pranks of Merry Moll of the Bankside, with her Walks in Man’s Apparel, and to What Purpose was entered in the Stationer’s Register by playwright John Day in 1610, and though it hasn’t survived, the title gives a flavour of the jolly, affectionate take on her street performances that it likely contained. What has survived are two plays that both date from 1611 and feature very different treatments of Moll. One, Nathaniel Field’s Amends for Ladies, gives her the short shrift you might expect, allowing her only a brief walk-on part and branding her a ‘rogue’, a ‘whore’ and a ‘bawd’; the other would put Moll centre stage and overturn every assumption society held about her.

In the spring of 1611, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist had lately been performed at the original Bankside Globe Theatre by Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men; Shakespeare himself, now approaching semi-retirement, was preparing The Winter’s Tale for performance there in May. Across the river, between Whitecross Street and Golden Lane to the west of Shoreditch, on what is now Fortune Street, sat the Fortune Theatre, the rectangular (rather than polygonal) playhouse owned by theatre manager, brothel keeper, property dealer and pawnbroker Philip Henslowe and his son-in-law, the retired lead actor Edward Alleyn. There, the prolific dramatists Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker were presenting The Roaring Girl, a ‘city comedy’ to be performed by Prince Henry’s Men (formerly the Admiral’s Men), the second most important acting troupe after Shakespeare’s.

The play’s prologue makes it clear that Jacobean audiences were in for something new. No doubt they had turned up to watch this long-awaited piece with their own ideas of what to expect from a roaring girl, muses the speaker: she ‘roars at midnight in deep tavern bowls’; she ‘beats the watch’ and controls the constables; she ‘swears, stabs’ and ‘gives braves’, causing mayhem wherever she goes. As the female equivalent of a noisy, riotous roaring boy, who had been a stock character of English literature since the previous century, she could mean nothing but mischief. But this would be the tale of a roaring girl who ‘flies / With wings more lofty’ – a new kind of woman, never before seen, ‘whose notes till now never were’. Who could this woman be? The audience knew her name already. It was ‘Mad Moll’, of course, the actor cried, whose ‘life our acts proclaim!’[21]

The play makes full strategic use of its audience’s preconceptions, however, for its plot relies on the assumption that a woman like Moll Cutpurse – famed for wearing men’s clothes, carrying a sword, smoking a pipe and thieving – would be every father’s nightmare daughter-in-law. So when young lovers Sebastian Wengrave and Mary Fitzallard find themselves thwarted by Sebastian’s father, Sir Alexander, who prohibits the match because of Mary’s puny dowry, Sebastian’s cunning plan is to pretend that he’s in love with Moll Cutpurse instead, ‘a creature / So strange in quality, a whole city takes / Note of her name and person’.[22] She is assumed to be a woman so repugnant that his father will overcome his financial misgivings about Mary Fitzallard and see her, by comparison, as a dream alternative.

It all goes according to plan. When Sir Alexander hears that Sebastian is to marry Moll he voices his outright disgust at his son’s choice, describing her as nothing short of an aberration. She is a ‘scurvy woman’, ‘a creature … nature hath brought forth / To mock the sex of woman’. She ‘strays so from her kind, / Nature repents she made her’. His judgement is unequivocal: Moll is a ‘monster’.[23]

Panicked at the prospect of the censure and embarrassment that will surely follow if his son ends up shackled to such a creature (‘Why, wouldst thou fain marry to be pointed at?’ he asks Sebastian in disbelief),[24] Sir Alexander resolves to stop the marriage and employs a spy and trickster – the aptly named Trapdoor – to wheedle his way into Moll’s service to ‘ensnare her very life’ and remove her from the picture. The traps are duly laid: because she is a woman and therefore surely vain and stupid, the villains try to flatter, trick and con her; because she is a cross-dresser and therefore surely a whore, they then try to seduce her, and because she is a thief and therefore surely greedy, they plant a trail of jewels in her path to make her fingers twitch.

When Moll swaggers on stage, however, first in mannish riding habit and later in full doublet and breeches, sword at her side and pipe in her mouth (played, confusingly, by a man pretending to be a woman dressed as a man), all the villains’ plans – and their assumptions – are dramatically upended. Far from being the victim of this play, Moll Cutpurse is its undoubted heroine, outwitting her enemies at every turn. This is no monstrous whore; Moll is a model of chastity, wit and integrity, the moral heart of the action and (no doubt thanks to her real-life template) the most vibrant, fully formed character in the play. In her, the audience was confronted with an all-new image of female virtue: a woman who challenges her would-be seducer Laxton to a duel for impugning her honour (and wins); who protects her enemies from a gang of marauding cutpurses rather than robbing them, and who is clever enough to see through Trapdoor’s subterfuge in an instant. To defy the feminine ideal entirely, she is also staunchly anti-marriage, preferring ‘to lie o’both sides o’th’bed’ and retain her independence than to take orders from a man. If Sir Alexander knew her at all, she says, he would understand that she and Sebastian could never possibly marry – not because he could never want such a monster, but because she ‘would ne’er agree!’[25]

Sebastian, at least, has the sense to realise that Moll is in fact the only person who ‘has the art to help them’, and that if his plan is to work, he must confide in her rather than dupe her. And his trust in her pays dividends, for by the close of the play, she has bested her foes, brought the lovers together and restored order and justice. Sir Alexander is left begging her pardon for slandering and prejudging her, begrudgingly admitting that ‘Thou art a mad girl, and yet I cannot now / Condemn thee.’[26]

If we were to judge Mary Frith solely by The Roaring Girl, she would be a much easier figure to grasp, for Middleton and Dekker’s version of her is remarkably close to our idea of a modern-day feminist heroine. To give this flagrantly unconventional female character such moral goodness, to have her triumph and be the agent of peace and harmony, when to the pamphleteers, the authorities and even the King she was a harbinger of social chaos, was a radical move. She is like no other heroine in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.[27] Even Shakespeare’s most famous cross-dressing women – Viola, Portia and Rosalind – do so for the purposes of disguise, to win or save their lover, and once their task is complete, order is restored and the threat that their cross-dressing posed is removed. They all end their respective plays back where they ‘belong’: married and in their ‘proper’ clothes. Moll is very different. Like her real-life counterpart, she cross-dresses because she wants to, and at the end of The Roaring Girl she is celebrated for refusing to bow to conformity and remains entirely herself – unmarried, in breeches and in full control of the action.[28]

This was a revolutionary female character to see in the theatre. In a play littered with low comedy (smutty jokes on her hermaphroditic qualities are everywhere – she is ‘a codpiece daughter’, a ‘cutpurse drab’, ‘a monster with two trinkets’, a ‘gaskin-bride’[29]), Moll is never degraded; she is untouched by the slander and is the most powerful character on stage at all times. She also has all the best lines. The longest and most rhetorically slick speech in the play is hers, and as an impassioned diatribe against men’s objectification and predation of women and the sexual hypocrisy that so easily branded them harlots, it forms the moral nub of the play. Her words are directed at her would-be seducer Laxton, but to all men by extension:

… Thou’rt one of those

That thinks each woman thy fond flexible whore,

If she but cast a liberal eye upon thee,

Turn back her head, she’s thine …

Why, she asks, is a woman like her presumed immoral and considered fair game, and then cursed with a ‘blasted name’, just because she’s ‘given to sport’ and ‘often merry’? Is a woman not allowed to enjoy herself without inviting sexual advances? Apparently not. Nor was she always in a position to protect herself. Society preferred to ignore the unseemly truth behind its sexual politics, but here was Moll stating it plainly: that most women who ended up falling from grace did so not because they were morally corrupt, but because their circumstances were desperate. Forever at the mercy of poverty, chance and exploitative men who preyed on the vulnerable, it was all too easy for ‘distressed needlewomen’ and ‘trade-fallen wives’ to be used for pleasure and discarded as whores. Women who found themselves in dire straits would of course take all that was offered: ‘Such hungry things as these may soon be took / With a worm fastened on a golden hook.’

Fallen women rarely found a public defender, but here, in the character of Moll Cutpurse, they had a fearless one who was stepping up and placing the blame firmly where it belonged: not with women, but with the sexual assumptions that served women so ill. The notorious thief had become the woman’s champion,[30] who, despite the censure levelled at her, would always answer back and turn the gender tables: ‘I scorn to prostitute myself to a man,’ she roars in conclusion, ‘I that can prostitute a man to me!’[31] It’s an extraordinary speech for two male writers to put into a woman’s mouth in 1611 – one that spoke such enduring truths that it still resonates today.

Mary Frith’s madcap life may have been ripe for adaptation, but Middleton and Dekker took some bold liberties in their interpretation of it. Their portrayal of Mary as Moll Cutpurse is unquestionably rose-tinted, transforming her from the monster that society saw into an idealised blend of the ‘masculine’ and the ‘feminine’. In their version, she is not even a thief – a twist taken up and perpetuated by Mary’s ‘diary’, in which she insists that ‘I never actually or instrumentally cut any man’s purse, though I have often restored it.’ There is little doubt that the real Mary Frith was a thief, but for the play’s message to carry, and to please the Master of the Revels, Moll’s moral character had to be blameless – even if that meant playing down her crimes and restyling the woman herself into a more appealing package for the theatre-going public.

Not one to let truth get in the way of a good story, Thomas Middleton was blasé about his play’s inaccuracies – in an epistle to accompany the play, he simply pleads artistic licence:

Worse things, I must needs confess, the world has taxed her for than has been written of her [here]; but ’tis the excellency of a writer to leave things better than he finds ’em …

The legend of Moll Cutpurse – however romanticised – had now been enshrined in literature, but despite the airbrushing, the play still has something to say about the character of the real woman. In Mary Frith the playwrights seem to have recognised a free spirit, a merry, eccentric rogue, who they believed was not only harmless, but in a strange way heroic. This unusual woman, who was so openly disputing the status quo, didn’t give a damn what people thought of her, and when Moll proudly owns this fact – ‘Perhaps for my mad going, some reprove me – / I please myself, and care not else who loves me’[32] – it sounds remarkably like genuine admiration on the part of the playwrights.

In fact, it makes perfect sense that the theatre world should have embraced a figure like Mary. No doubt Middleton and Dekker spotted the lucrative commercial potential of such a larger-than-life celebrity, but the playhouse also occupied a liminal space on the fringes of society where, within the limits of censorship, misfits were welcomed, boundaries were pushed and the established order challenged. And with young boys in dresses playing the roles denied to women, theatre was an artform that relied on transvestism. This simple act of transformation – deemed wholly immoral off-stage – was so integral to the workings of pre-Restoration theatre that it was self-consciously worked into many of its plots, becoming a legitimate stage convention by which female characters could wrest some power and agency for themselves. These gender games could be exposed and toyed with at will by the playwright to remind audiences just how easily the divisions between masculine and feminine could be questioned and the hierarchies that relied on them overturned.[33] In the safe space of the theatre, the normal rules didn’t apply.

It was in the dramatists’ interests, then, to present cross-dressing as something exciting and titillating, but essentially innocuous, though in the real world it remained a different story. At a time when women were being whipped or sent to prison for cross-dressed misdemeanours, publicly flaunting one’s transvestism on stage was downright dangerous. Yet that’s precisely what Mary Frith now proceeded to do. As Moll recites the Epilogue to The Roaring Girl, she tells the audience that if the play didn’t pass muster:

The Roaring Girl herself, some few days hence,

Shall on this stage, give larger recompense. [34]

And so she did. One day in April 1611, at the close of the play’s performance, Mary Frith herself appeared on the stage, in full male dress before perhaps two or three thousand people, to perform an afterpiece (usually a short musical extra or jig performed after the main show). She was, it turns out, entirely complicit in this production that had so publicly appropriated her persona, and now she was taking full advantage of it for a little self-promotion.[35]

Did this appearance make Mary Frith the first woman ever to perform in a public London theatre? Very likely, yes.[36] But she was pushing the boundaries to their limits with this coup de théâtre. Women were not allowed on the stage, let alone in men’s clothes, and in striding onto that proscenium, she was usurping a man’s place, making a show of herself and blurring the distinction between make-believe and reality. It was a daring, transgressive, illegal act that would land her in big trouble.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

The London authorities didn’t look on Mary Frith’s antics with as kind an eye as the theatre world did. To them, she represented everything their king hated: she was a cross-dresser, a smoker (James I wrote a treatise against this ‘filthy custom’ in 1604)[37] and an upstart, uncouth, unbiddable woman. It’s not known whether Mary managed repeat performances at the Fortune Theatre, or whether it was a one-off, but soon after her scandalous appearance on stage in April 1611, she was arrested and charged with multiple offences to prevent it ever happening again. Unlicensed, she had ‘sat there upon the stage in the public view of all the people there present in man’s apparel& played upon her lute & sang a song’. Not only that, she had engaged in ‘immodest & lascivious speeches’ with her audience, throwing out a bawdy challenge to those in the audience who thought she was a man: that ‘if any of them would come to her lodging they should find that she is a woman’.[38]

This was unacceptable, not least because such a display would draw an undesirable crowd. Wherever Mary Frith appeared, a gang of roaring boys and girls was sure to follow. When Middlesex magistrates decided the following year, in October 1612, to ban all ‘jigs, rhymes and dances after their plays’ across England, they seemed to have Mary’s performance in mind. The reason cited was that when similar ‘lewd’ entertainments had appeared at the Fortune Theatre, they had attracted hordes of cutpurses and other ‘ill-disposed persons’ at the end of every play, who shattered the peace and caused ‘tumults and outrages’.[39] It was this, as much as her transgression on stage, that had goaded them into arresting her – Mary’s very presence on the stage was seen as a threat to public order.

Her punishment was to be committed to Bridewell Prison and Hospital – a house of correction on the banks of the Fleet River in the City where petty crooks, vagrants, persistent drunks and fallen women were briefly incarcerated and subject to hard labour (usually beating hemp) and floggings. Mary appears to have been one of those who resisted correction, however, because within a year, she had reoffended: on Christmas Day 1611, she was caught at St Paul’s ‘with her petticoat tucked up about her in the fashion of a man with a man’s cloak on her to the great scandal of diverse persons … & to the disgrace of all womanhood’.[40] She spent the festive season back in Bridewell before being hauled before the Bishop of London in the New Year, answering fresh charges for what Mary calls in the diary her ‘unseasonable and suspicious walking’.[41] She made her excuses, she says, claiming that she had been out late to attend a woman in labour, and was discharged with a small fine. Her revenge on the constable who arrested her, she tells us proudly, was sweet: having employed one of her ‘imps’ to trick him into believing he had inherited a great fortune, she enjoyed his disappointment immensely when he then learned that he hadn’t.

In reality, Mary confessed to the Bishop a litany of other ‘unwomanly’ acts: that she had ‘long frequented all or most of the disorderly & licentious places in this city’, usually dressed as a man, including alehouses, taverns, tobacco shops and playhouses. That she had ‘this long time past usually blasphemed & dishonoured the name of God’ and ‘associated herself with ruffianly swaggering & lewd company’ – namely cutpurses, drunks and dissolutes, ‘with whom she hath to the great shame of her sex often times (as she said) drunk hard & distempered her head with drink’.[42] This transcript of Mary’s confession brings us closer to her true character than anything else can: by her own account, she was a hard-drinking, pipe-smoking, foul-mouthed cross-dresser who could usually be found bantering with the ragged company of the city’s most disreputable alehouses – and occasionally picking a pocket or two. This was who she was, and this was the realm in which she ruled. But she was also a wily actress, and so before her godly accusers she launched into a dramatic apology, protesting that she was ‘heartily sorry for her foresaid licentious & dissolute life’ and giving a solemn promise that from then on she would behave ‘honestly, soberly & womanly’.[43] Perhaps in that moment, when her liberty was at stake, she even half meant it.

Before her grilling in the Bishop’s court was over, Mary’s accusers succumbed to the age-old assumption that her cross-dressing must go hand in hand with whoredom, and so there came the inevitable charge that she had also been ‘dishonest of her body’ as a prostitute and ‘drawn other women to lewdness’ as a bawd (or madam). If the diary is to be believed, Mary did indeed have a sideline as a bawd, though even then, she managed to defy convention – as well as procuring women for men, she apparently also found ‘the sprucest fellows the town afforded’ for the pleasure of ‘great women’, and in one anecdote even convinces these fellows to pay maintenance for their illegitimate children.[44] The real Mary Frith, however, ‘absolutely denied that she was chargeable with either of these imputations’, and aside from the diary anecdote, there’s no evidence to suggest she was lying. Nonetheless, the Bishop of London ‘thought fit to remand her to Bridewell … until he might further examine the truth of the misdemeanours enforced against her without laying as yet any further censure upon her’.[45] The authorities didn’t know what to do with Mary Frith, so for want of any other ideas, they bundled her off to prison for the third time.

In time, the Bishop’s court hit upon what it thought would be the perfect punishment for Mary: she must do public penance in a white sheet at St Paul’s Cross – a purification ritual that would act as a second baptism and openly humiliate her, too.[46] Public shaming was an integral part of retributive law enforcement before and beyond the seventeenth century – the stocks, the pillory, the drunkard’s cloak, skimmingtons and carting were among the standard punishments for errant citizens[47] – and though such draconian tactics may have worked on some, they seem to have yet again abjectly failed to ‘correct’ Mary. The prolific letter-writer John Chamberlain witnessed the scene at St Paul’s Cross that day in February 1612 when Mary performed her penance, and he wasn’t fooled by her act of contrition. With little sympathy for this ‘notorious baggage’, he wrote to a friend the following week that ‘she wept bitterly and seemed very penitent, but it is since doubted she was maudlin drunk, being discovered to have tippled three quarts of sack [wine] before she came to her penance.’ Her bleary-eyed speech of mock-repentance went unrecorded, but Chamberlain noted with some amusement that ‘she had the daintiest preacher or ghostly father that ever I saw’, who delivered his sermon so ‘extreme badly’ that most of the audience didn’t bother to hear the end of it. Those who did, he said, ‘tarried rather to hear Mall Cut-purse than him’.[48]

The event was nothing short of comical. And in the diary’s account of the episode, Mary’s defiance in the face of it is everything you would hope for: ‘They might as soon have shamed a black dog as me with any kind of such punishment,’ she says bullishly. For half a penny, she crows, she would have travelled to all the market towns in England in her white sheet, wearing it as a badge of honour rather than a cloak of shame.

Unrepentant, undeterred, unchanged, the Mary of the diary relishes every ripple of disruption she causes, and ensures she has the last laugh on the crowd who come to watch her: ‘without any regard to the sacredness of the place’ and ‘in revenge of this disgrace intended me’, her gaggle of trusty fingersmiths ‘spoiled a good many clothes by cutting off part of their cloaks and gowns and sending them home as naked behind as an ape’s tail’. We can only hope it’s true: that all those who came to gloat over Mary that day left St Paul’s with their bare arses exposed, even more humiliated than her.

THE QUEEN REGENT OF MISRULE

Unrepentant she may have been, but Mary Frith was not stupid. This latest brush with the law – her most serious and unsettling yet – convinced her that if she were to continue her Fagin-like career as a thief and fence, she would have to do so with a little more care and stealth. Her dalliance with the entertainment world meant that to the playwrights, players and pickpockets of London she was now a rebel heroine and a fascinating curio, but in the eyes of the law, she was a menace who was drawing too much attention to herself. In order to navigate such dangerous waters, Mary would have to negotiate this contradiction and twist her unusual position to her advantage.

Far from being the symbol of anarchy she represented to the outside world, within the confines of her netherworld, Mary prided herself on creating order out of chaos. According to the diary, she ran a tight ship and whipped the criminals of London into shape with ‘rules and orders’ to create ‘a perfect regulation of this thievish mystery’. It soon occurred to her that she could use these managerial skills to confer upon herself a degree of much-needed respectability, and so, by 1614, two years after her run-in with the Bishop of London, she was calling upon her contacts to set up her own house as a brokery – a kind of ‘lost property office’, or ‘insurance office’, where victims of theft might reclaim their stolen goods (for a price). It was a new career move that earned her another new nickname, this time ‘Mary Thrift’.

Her strategy was simple: to stay organised and in control, and to keep her house clear of ‘any unseemly or lewd action’. In doing so, she could keep a low profile and her hands ostensibly clean, so that to the casual observer she was ‘free from all manner of suspection’. With no effective law against receiving stolen goods, and no organised police force, constables would turn a blind eye to her business dealings if, in return, they could mine her network of connections in London’s criminal underbelly. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement that allowed Mary to straddle the fine line between the legal and illegal, and to assume a highly unusual position in London society. By protecting thieves who made it worth her while, but also helping the victims of theft to recover their valuables, she made herself an invaluable asset to both sides of the law.

The modus operandi of Mary’s new business is evident in her dealings with a gentleman called Henry Killigrew, who in 1621 was robbed by a prostitute while he was still buttoning up his breeches. His first port of call was Mary Frith’s office, for he had ‘heard how [by her] means many that had had their purses cut or goods stolen’ had managed to recover them. From a description of where this woman lived, Mary identified the thief as Margaret Dell, who was promptly arrested by the local constable of the parish of St Bride’s and taken to Mary to be cross-examined. The alleged pickpocket’s husband, Richard Dell, soon followed, accusing Mary of being ‘a notorious infamous person’ who was ‘well known & acquainted with all thieves & cutpurses’. He demanded that his wife be released from her clutches, but Mary had the perfect retort. She had a legitimate commission from the authorities to examine criminal suspects and advised Dell to either leave her office or receive a beating. After the Dells lodged an official complaint in the Court of Star Chamber in May of that year for wrongful imprisonment, Mary found herself in court yet again on 4 June, and, as ever, she was unyielding in her defence. She had apprehended the thief fair and square, and if the Dells gave her ‘any ill words or language’ again, she warned, she would give as good as she got – ‘in some tart or angry manner’.[49] Clearly, Mary was a woman of unusual influence, and was not one to cross.

This influence extended even to matters of life and death. Mary was careful to cultivate close ties with various lords of the court, which granted her enough authority to either save criminals from the gallows or condemn them as she deemed fit. Consequently, according to the diary, the thieves of London held her in such thrall, subjected as they were by ‘love and fear’, that they metaphorically crowned her the ‘Queen Regent of Misrule’. For a woman of low birth, little means and an eccentric demeanour, this was an impressive rise to power, though it seems Mary had long been a queen in the making. Her role as sovereign of the London underworld was acknowledged in The Roaring Girl several years before, in a speech that shows just how much sway she held over the ne’er-do-wells of the city even before she set up her brokery. ‘You do not know the benefits I bring with me,’ says Moll:

No cheat dares work upon you, with thumb or knife,

While you’ve a roaring girl to your son’s wife. [50]

In the years that followed, operating as a licensed fence and an intermediary between the thieves, the victims and the authorities, Mary would become – and remain – the undisputed ring-mistress of London’s shady demi-monde.

To complement her new reputation as a figure of some standing, albeit in the murky hinterlands, Mary continued to feed her legend as a delightful peculiarity. Several of the diary’s claims glory in her nonconformity, often concurring with other versions of her, and sometimes even outdoing them in eccentricity. The diary makes the specious claim, for example, that she was the first woman in England ever to smoke tobacco, a habit she took to with gusto, she says, ‘because of its affected singularity’, unwittingly sparking a trend in the process. In fact, women were known to have taken up this expensive new fad by 1590, when Mary was still a child.[51] That she swore like a trooper and ‘loved good liquor, especially good wine’ we know to be true, and her prowess with a sword is entirely plausible. When she boasts that she could ‘use a backsword as well as the best of them’ and once challenged an expert swordsman to a fight ‘whom I so soundly beat that he was forced to lay it down and confess me the conqueror’, she appears to be the very same Moll Cutpurse who wields one to such effect in The Roaring Girl.

Elsewhere, the diary unashamedly plays up the ‘mad spinster’ image that would have been almost as familiar to seventeenth-century readers as it is to us. Apparently, Mary’s house was a cacophonous zoo, overrun with parrots, bulldogs, baboons, apes, squirrels and parrots, while the walls were hung all over with looking glasses, ‘so that I could see my sweet self all over in any part of my rooms’. (Given the frequent assertion that Mary was no looker, one can only presume this is a snide little joke on the part of the authors.) On the flip side, she is also portrayed as a good sport: self-mocking, unconcerned, even delighted at her lack of personal charms. Indeed, according to the diary, she lacked every feminine accomplishment on the list (her singing voice, too, ‘was the untuneablest thing that ever was heard’), and she couldn’t care tuppence.

Mary’s oddball status was almost certainly exaggerated for comic effect, but her history of daring performances in drag is a matter of historical fact, which lends one of the more improbable capers in the diary an air of plausibility it might not otherwise have. The story goes that Mary accepted a bet from her ‘fellow humorist Banks the Vintner’,[52] who wagered her twenty pounds to ‘ride from Charing Cross to Shoreditch astraddle on horseback in breeches and doublet, boots and spurs, all like a man’ – a showy stunt that could easily land her back in Bridewell. Mary was undaunted – ‘I was for all such sudden whims,’ she says, and in typical fashion she upped the stakes rather than backing away. To make herself as conspicuous as possible, she decided to carry a banner and a trumpet, too, and set out on the appointed day as resplendent as a cavalry officer.

She made it to Bishopsgate without drawing suspicion, but then a ‘plaguey orange wench’ yelled out ‘Moll Cutpurse on horseback!’ and set the crowds ‘hooting and hallowing as if they had been mad’. ‘Come down, you shame of women, or we will pull you down,’ they bawled, forcing Mary to take fright and seek refuge in a friend’s victualling house. The mob only followed, chuckling one minute, cursing her the next, unsure as ever whether they were enjoying her crackpot capers or heartily disapproved. When a wedding party momentarily distracted them, however, Mary slipped away, made it to Shoreditch, won her wager and breathed a sigh of relief that she was safely ‘out of danger’. It’s no wonder she was nervous – it could have gone much worse – but her imagination was caught up in the pride and pomp of her whimsical adventure: ‘In my own thoughts …’, she says (in a literary allusion unlikely to have come from her), ‘I was squiress to Dulcinea of Toboso, the most incomparably beloved lady of Don Quixote.’

FEME COVERT

The Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith roams freely through Mary’s career as a thief, broker and professional provocateur, but there is one significant event in her personal life that it entirely neglects to mention. On 23 March 1614, when she was still in her late twenties and just starting out as a fence, Mary Frith did something wholly unexpected: she went to St Saviour’s Church in Southwark (now Southwark Cathedral) and married a man named Lewknor Markham.[53]

This staggering omission isn’t the first or only clanger to muddy the integrity of Mary’s ‘diary’ – The Roaring Girl is also not mentioned and there is a thorny discrepancy over her age[54] – yet in this instance, it’s easy to see why it might have been left out. For a woman who defied convention and resisted authority at every turn, and who, according to legend, was resolutely single and had no interest in men, marriage seems a particularly odd choice. This inconvenient detail simply didn’t fit with the image of Mary that was being cultivated in the public consciousness; it disproved all the theories that she was an unnatural man-woman whom no man would ever marry, or a scorned woman who spurned all men, as the diary variously portrays her.[55] It didn’t fit, either, with the Moll of the play, who was ‘too headstrong to obey’ a husband and had ‘no humour to marry’.[56] For here she was, conforming to all the social conventions and acting like a perfectly ‘normal’ woman.

The records shed only a glimmer of light on the real story behind Mary’s marriage to Markham, but it’s enough to reveal that this was almost certainly no sweeping love story and that, as we might expect, Mary was not being quite the conventional good woman here that she at first appears to be.

On the contrary, Mary went out of her way to confuse the world about her marital status. Her primary motive for marriage seems to have been to manipulate the gender discriminations of coverture under English Common Law to maximise her freedoms, so that she could run her own business as a single woman, while at the same time claiming the legal immunity of a married one. Coverture laws decreed that when a man and woman married, they quite literally became one. In legal terms, at that moment a woman became a feme covert and her legal existence as an individual was nullified: she could no longer hold her own property or money, nor could she sign contracts or be sued in her own right. If she remained single, however, she retained these scraps of legal rights and was referred to as feme sole. Rather than submit to the disempowerment that these laws entailed for women, Mary decided to play the law for a fool. She became an expert at exploiting its loopholes, by posing as two different women – Mary Frith, feme sole, and Mary Markham, feme covert – as and when it suited her.

As a newly established businesswoman, for example, it suited her to be single. That same year, 1614, was when Mary set up her lucrative and semi-respectable ‘lost property office’, and for that she needed her legal independence. In order to have her cake and eat it, Mary seems to have negotiated a marriage settlement of convenience with Lewknor Markham, which allowed her to run her own business and retain her own earnings, despite being married, as if she were Mary Frith, feme sole.[57]

As a woman who flirted with crime on a daily basis, however, being Mrs Markham, feme covert and legal non-entity, could be extremely helpful. It meant that in the various lawsuits she was frequently embroiled in, she was virtually invincible, because the law would always assume that a married woman was acting under her husband’s direction. Ten years later, in 1624, for example, when a hatmaker named Richard Pooke sued Mary Frith, spinster and feme sole, for some expensive beaver hats she had bought eight years before and still not fully paid for, her chief defence was that she could not be sued as a feme sole, because she was Mary Markham, a married woman, who was not legally liable for her own misconduct and therefore could not be sued. Pooke had been warned that Mary had used this trick before to overturn several previous lawsuits, but he fell into the trap anyway and, sure enough, Mary triumphed. It came out in this same trial that she and Markham had not lived together for years, and possibly never had, supporting the theory that, far from being a great romance, this was a marriage of convenience – and clever opportunism – on Mary’s part.[58]

BEDLAM

There follows a gap of some 20 years before the records mention Mary Frith again, and when they do, it’s to reveal another dramatic development that the diary fails to mention. Although perhaps this omission isn’t so surprising either, because by the summer of 1644, when she was approaching 60, Mary was an inmate of the madhouse. On 21 June that year, the governors of Bridewell Prison and Hospital decreed that she, along with several others, ‘be delivered & discharged out of the Hospital of Bethlem’, as they were now ‘recovered of their former senses’ and well enough to be looked after elsewhere.[59] Bethlem Hospital, or Bethlehem, commonly known as Bedlam, was the notorious asylum then situated in Bishopsgate, where London’s pauper lunatics were sent to be ‘cured’ of their madness.

The record gives no further details of why Mary was committed, and although there were doubtless plenty of her contemporaries who thought her mad, there was more than one way to end up in Bedlam. London’s teeming, poverty-stricken slums, for example, were considered dire enough to send the city’s inhabitants mad if they weren’t already; the scholar Robert Burton, who had himself suffered from depression, observed in 1621 that England was a country that ‘must needs be discontent’, for it ‘hath a sick body’.[60] But Mary Frith had always thrived in this world before. She was a formidable businesswoman, a shrewd criminal, a hardy Banksider. Now, as old age encroached, had a lifetime of hard drinking, tough talking and wild living taken its toll on her mental health? Had the stress of keeping up multiple personalities and swatting away run-ins with the law pushed her to the brink?

The very notion of the robust Mary Frith having any kind of breakdown seems so incongruous that some have argued she may not have been mad at all but shamming madness to escape the war.[61] After all, in 1644, when Mary was released, England was a country riven by political division. The Civil War had been rolling on for two years already: divine-rights monarchy was facing an existential threat; King Charles I was at war with his own parliament, and up and down the land people were taking sides and falling into factions: Royalists versus Republicans. English society was floundering – any sane person might wish to avoid the unrest – and, performer as she was, Mary might have found it easy to play mad when she had to. But we shouldn’t be so quick to assume. Even the most extrovert characters can be laughing in the dark, and the truth was that in Mary’s day and beyond, women could find themselves carted off to lunatic asylums with alarming ease, thanks to the dangerously common belief that they were physiologically predisposed to insanity.

Doctors’ casebooks across the country testified to the scores of women in Britain who were apparently ‘mad’. Somerset physician John Westover, for example, treated three times as many women for mental disorders than men. Perhaps it was indicative of their restrictive, stultifying, frustrating existence, but the majority of those women were diagnosed with ‘melancholy’; the others ‘hysteria’ or ‘distraction’.[62]

The fault in these diagnoses lay with the archaic ideas that seventeenth-century medicine had inherited from Hippocrates and Galen, who had spouted the toxic theory that a woman’s body was fundamentally unstable, prone to debilitating diseases of the mind and at the mercy of overwrought emotions. The cold, wet elements that supposedly comprised her body were believed to soften and weaken her brain, while her ‘wandering womb’, which roved around her body causing all kinds of havoc, would drive her to hysteria the moment it reached her head. Nervousness, depression, anxiety, hormonal mood swings and sexual desire might all be interpreted as madness in women, with virgins, widows and spinsters thought to be particularly susceptible. (The best cure, unsurprisingly, was believed to be sex and pregnancy.)[63] As a childless woman famed for her love of drink and her volatile, masculine behaviour, Mary fitted the template all too well. Perhaps it was always inevitable that her ‘mad pranks’ would one day land her in Bedlam.

If Mary wasn’t mad when she went in, however, she may well have been by the time she came out. Conditions at Bethlem Hospital at the time were notorious. Corruption, abuse and neglect were rife, and from its cold, dank cells harrowing reports emerged of ‘cryings, screechings, roarings, brawlings, shaking of chains, swearings, frettings, chaffings’.[64] The complexities of mental illness were so little understood that physicians used ‘madness’ as a woolly, catch-all term to cover every kind of affliction. Consequently, the ‘lunatics’ languishing within Bethlem’s walls might include those plagued by voices, delusions, melancholy, rage, poverty or drink, as well as those with learning difficulties, epilepsy, dementia and anxiety. Among them, too, were those who were merely eccentric. The ‘treatments’ they were subjected to were invariably punitive rather than therapeutic, with inmates chained, starved and beaten, and often left to wallow in filth and excrement.[65] To complete the degradation of the inmates, come Sunday mornings, members of the public could pay a few shillings to stroll in and gawp, taunt the poor souls and even ply them with drink. No doubt there were many who queued up to see the famous Moll Cutpurse chained up in her cell, though what state they found her in will have to remain a mystery.

Mary’s ‘madness’ was yet another inconvenient detail that didn’t fit the Moll Cutpurse brief, and as a result, her later years look very different in the pages of her diary. Far from depicting a woman who was fading away and losing her mind, her biographers suggest she was now at the top of her game, operating at the highest levels of the criminal world as boss to even the most eminent male criminals. According to their account, Mary masterminded the feats of the famous highwaymen James Hind and Richard Hannam in the 1640s and ’50s, and like them, she is portrayed as a highly vocal Royalist, who hosts a street party in honour of Charles I and stages a public protest against his enemies in the form of an allegorical bull-baiting, in which the Parliamentarians are cast as the ravaging dogs.[66]

Most scholars suspect this political subplot to be grafted on – a bit of Royalist propaganda on the part of the writers to savage Oliver Cromwell and his puritan protectorate and endear Mary Frith to the Restoration audience for whom her story was published.[67] Indeed, it’s hard to imagine an irreverent, insubordinate character such as Mary supporting the absolute authority of King Charles I. At the same time, however, a character less puritan than Mary – whose life revolved around thieving, carousing, performing and cross-dressing – is even harder to imagine. Whatever her genuine political allegiance (if indeed she had one), the last ten years of her life coincided with the strange decade after the country had executed its king, when Britain was ruled by a puritan republican regime. How Mary coped with the prohibition of everything she loved most, from the theatres to drinking to swearing, we’ll never know; nor can we know her true feelings about her lost king. Come the Restoration of his son in 1660, however, the politic decision was made by her biographers to ensure that, whether true or not, this renegade woman would be safely remembered as a loyal subject of the Crown.

THE SINNER’S PENANCE

After all the brazen merriment and gleeful mayhem that has gone before, the diary culminates in an oddly remorseful end for Mary Frith, with the 74-year-old lying on her deathbed, weak and enfeebled and repenting her life of sin. She has fallen prey to a ‘dropsy’ – an excess of fluid – and as her body swells, she begins to see her condition as some kind of divine retribution for her life of vice, as every afflicted limb seems to ‘point out the wickedness every one of them had been instrumental in, so that I could not but acknowledge the justice of my punishment’. Her hands, however, remain unaffected – proof, she maintains smugly, that they were the ‘most innocent’ part of her body, because she never cut a single purse herself.

This tacked-on repentance scene may be incongruous, but it was vital to the acceptability of The Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith as a work of public entertainment. The authors claim to have published Mary’s story not just because of the ‘strangeness and newness of the subject’, but for ‘the public good’. And if a celebration of criminality is to masquerade as morally instructive, rather than gratuitously sensational, then by the laws of storytelling it must culminate either in reform or condemnation.

In literature then, at least, Mary Frith recants at her death, claiming ‘with a real penance and true grief to deplore my condition and former course of life I had so profanely and wickedly led’. It’s a nice try, but coming from a woman who had so consistently revelled in her wrongdoing and smirked at disapproval, this dramatic moral conversion feels rather too neat to have occurred in real life.

More convincing is Mary’s appeal for us not to judge her too harshly, for, ‘If I had anything of the devil within me, I had of the merry one, not having through all my life done any harm to the life or limb of any person.’ Besides, she jokes, her illness is punishment enough, as it has finally accomplished ‘what all the ecclesiastical quirks with their canons and injunctions could not do’: made her abandon her doublet. Too swollen and sore to wear anything constrictive, she is grudgingly forced to ‘do penance again in a blanket’ and revert to her ‘proper’ female habit. Thus, in a moment sodden with symbolism, Mary’s ‘redemption’ is complete – she is a Roaring Girl no more.

In the diary’s final words, our heroine receives an unceremonial send-off, with Mary giving characteristically blunt instructions to be ‘lain in my grave on my belly, with my breech upwards’ so that she may be as ‘preposterous’ in death as she was in life. In reality, Mary’s burial was somewhat more dignified. Despite another dud claim in the diary that Mary made no will, on 6 June 1659, just a few weeks before she died on 26 July, she did just that – and it reveals that she was a prosperous woman. Under her married name of Mary Markham, she left £20 to a relative named Abraham Robinson – a substantial legacy given that a labourer might earn £10 in a year and a house could cost under £30[68] – and the remainder of her estate to her niece and sole executrix Frances Edmonds. Her bequests made provision for a decent funeral, and so on 10 August, as per her wish, she was given a Christian burial at St Bridget’s Church in Fleet Street – an end reserved not for the preposterous, but for the respected and well-to-do.

Mary Frith had died just a year shy of the Restoration – a new age of freedom and exuberance that would have suited her down to the ground. The Roaring Girl had fallen silent, and the play she had inspired had fallen out of fashion, yet her spirit would linger in the decades to come.[69] Her faux diary, published two years into Charles II’s reign, would reignite her legend, casting her as a fervent Royalist for a renewed Royalist era, but she was also present in more nebulous forms. She was there, for example, in the actresses who would walk the stage legally for the first time, and be applauded, not punished, for donning men’s clothes. She was there at the birth of the novel, in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, who early in the next century would be ‘as impudent a thief, and as dexterous as ever Moll Cut-purse was’.[70] And she was there in the new craze for criminal biographies that would perpetuate her myth still further – by adding highwaywoman to her list of misdeeds.[71] By the mid-eighteenth century she had taken her place in the rogues’ gallery of famous dare-devils – from Robin Hood to Jack Sheppard – whose lawless lives have always strangely enchanted us and whose crimes we can’t help but romanticise.

But when all the tall tales, exaggerations and embellishments are stripped away, what is left? We’ll never know exactly what measure of the legend of Moll Cutpurse was present in the real Mary Frith, but despite all the sanitisation, decriminalisation and simplification, the teasing snippets of the living, breathing Mary captured in court transcripts and eyewitness accounts bear a striking resemblance to the Mary of myth. What we find in every version of her is an audacious, idiosyncratic, irreverent woman who used her own brass and ingenuity to rise through the ranks, from common cutpurse to famed entertainer to entrepreneur to folkloric heroine, causing shock, anger and amusement along the way. In the misfits’ paradise on the peripheries of society, she found acceptance, safety, power and influence. She angered the authorities, captivated the playwrights, confused the biographers and divided the public. Hers was a life of constant peril and nagging insecurity, lived permanently on the edge – of respectability, legality, even sanity – and her strategy for survival was to hide in plain sight, wriggling and shape-shifting to exploit the loopholes, outfox her accusers and, whenever possible, get away with it altogether. This was a woman who wanted to be talked about but didn’t want to be caught, and by manipulating her fluid persona and feeding her own glorified myth, she made sure that the character who endured was not a hardened criminal but a lovable rogue. If this virtuoso of evasion slips through our fingers now, it’s probably because that’s exactly what she wants.

MAD MADGE

Samuel Pepys had been trying to catch a glimpse of the famous Duchess of Newcastle for weeks. It was spring 1667, the lady was in London on a rare visit from the Midlands and everyone was impatient for a sighting. The rumours had it that she would visit Charles II’s court on 11 April, and in the private pages of his diary, Pepys was on tenterhooks: ‘The whole story of this lady is a romance, and all she doth is romantic. Her footmen in velvet coats, and herself in an antique dress … There is as much expectation of her coming to court … as if it were the Queen of Sweden.’[1] So, along with the curious, of which there were many, to Whitehall Pepys went – only to leave disappointed, for the Duchess never appeared.

A fortnight later, on 26 April, he spied her distinctive black-and-silver coach and velvety footmen as he was travelling through London. He craned and peered and saw just enough to conclude that she was ‘a very comely woman’, dressed just as the gossips had described: velvet cap, mannish black juste-au-corps riding jacket, hair covering her ears, neck bared and a number of fashionable black patches scattered over her face.

This little snapshot wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy Pepys, so come 1 May he hastened to Hyde Park where she would be riding out along with the rest of the court in the May Day parade. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea, and the Duchess was so ‘followed and crowded upon by coaches all the way she went, that nobody could come near her’.

On 10 May they had another brief encounter as the Duchess made her way home through town to Newcastle House, in Clerkenwell. Spotting her carriage ahead of him, Pepys drove furiously in the hope of overtaking her, only to be thwarted yet again by a horde of ‘100 boys and girls running looking upon her’ who were also desperate for a peek. In the end, she arrived home before Pepys could catch up with her, but he wasn’t discouraged. ‘I will get a time to see her,’ he pronounced confidently.

And eventually, on 30 May, he did. The Duchess had boldly requested, and been granted, an invitation to the newly formed Royal Society – a Restoration temple to scientific advancement – and Samuel Pepys happened to be a member. There had been ‘much debate, pro and con’ by the fellows about whether or not a woman should be admitted at all. It had never happened before, and many were against it, some arguing that the Duchess’s reputation would expose the Society to ridicule, others that it surely set an undesirable precedent. But at length the motion was carried, the lady invited – and a fuss expected. ‘We do believe the town will be full of ballads of it,’ Pepys noted, and when the day came, he hurried to the Society’s headquarters, where he found ‘much company, indeed very much company, in expectation of the Duchess’, just like him.

At long last, Pepys had his chance to critique the woman at close quarters, and afterwards, as was his habit, he shared his impressions with his diary. His verdict, after all that, was damning:

The Duchess hath been a good comely woman; but her dress so antique, and her deportment so unordinary, that I do not like her at all, nor did I hear her say anything that was worth hearing, but that she was full of admiration, all admiration.

This lady, supposedly so learned in natural philosophy, had been shown the Society’s most innovative new experiments – ‘of colours, loadstones, microscopes, and of liquors’ – yet she’d had no insights or observations to offer whatsoever. In fact, she’d been virtually speechless. It had all been a great disappointment.[2]

Not many women could inspire such fascination on the one hand, and such scorn on the other. John Evelyn was also present that day and his diary entry was more succinct but no less scathing: ‘To London, to wait on the Duchess of Newcastle (who was a mighty pretender to learning, poetry, and philosophy, and had in both published divers books) to the Royal Society, whither she came in great pomp.’[3] And there was the truth of it: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, had trespassed on male ground. She was a ‘mighty pretender’ to scientific and philosophical learning, who’d had the temerity to publish her writings, cultivate her own eccentric style and wilfully make a spectacle of herself. Every man in that room was thinking it: How dare she?

LADY BASHFUL

It’s little wonder Pepys was unimpressed with Margaret Cavendish’s behaviour that day at the Royal Society; it was precisely the kind of public social engagement that made her inwardly squirm. From childhood, Margaret Lucas (as she was born) had been debilitatingly shy, so uncomfortable and tongue-tied among strangers that they thought her ‘a natural fool’. But Margaret was no fool; addicted ‘to contemplation rather than conversation, to solitariness rather than society, to melancholy rather than mirth’, she was a dreamer, an observer, a sensitive soul.[4]

The one place she felt at ease as a girl was with her family, and the Lucases were one of the wealthiest in Essex. Descended from generations of self-made men, her father, Thomas Lucas, was something of a cavalier figure – in 1597 he was banished by Elizabeth I for killing one of her favourite courtiers in a duel, leaving his lover Elizabeth Leighton to bear the shame of giving birth to their illegitimate son. It would be six years, on James I’s accession, before Thomas was pardoned and the couple were able to marry. They settled at St John’s Abbey near Colchester and would go on to have a happy, respectable marriage and seven more children.

Margaret was the youngest, and although she would always regard her father as honourable and courageous, she would never know him personally – he was dead by the time she was two. Elizabeth took over the management of the Lucas estate (as the legitimate heir was not yet of age) and, as it happened, found she had a talent for the job. With the estate thriving under Elizabeth’s captaincy, Margaret had an impressive role model in her mother, whose ‘heroic spirit’ and ‘majestic grandeur’ she was always quick to praise. Her glowing account paints Elizabeth as a doting, lenient mother, who raised her children with all the proper virtues – modesty, civility and respectability – though not without some snobbery; they were never ‘suffered to have any familiarities with the vulgar servants’ and were always decked out to look ‘rich and costly’.[5]

While all this made for an idyllic childhood in Margaret’s eyes, it left her ill-prepared for the adult world in one crucial respect. As was standard among the rich gentry, the three Lucas boys were all formally educated and sent to Cambridge, while the five girls were given only a rudimentary education, by an unfortunate governess whom Margaret remembered only as ‘an ancient decayed gentlewoman’.[6] Like all high-born girls, the Lucas daughters were taught a few conventional feminine ‘virtues’ – singing, dancing, music, reading, writing, needlework – but even these were ‘rather formality than benefit’.[7]

Most of these accomplishments were of little use to Margaret. She had no interest in domestic pursuits and would later write with some pride: ‘I cannot work, I mean such works as ladies use to pass their time withal … needle-works, spinning-works, preserving-works, as also baking, and cooking-works, as making cakes, pies, puddings, and the like, all which I am ignorant of.’[8] Her interest lay elsewhere. For hours on end she would wander, lost in contemplation, and soon found that she preferred to ‘write with the pen than to work with a needle’. The blank page was a safe place, where her thoughts and ideas could roam freely. Even before she’d reached her teens she’d begun to write prolifically, filling 16 ‘baby-books’ with observations, poetry and stories – though she later dismissed them as childish ramblings, which perhaps explains why they haven’t survived.

Dress was another creative outlet, for Margaret had a bold sense of style and favoured creative, sometimes odd, ensembles – ‘especially such fashions as I did invent myself’ – to ensure that she came across as a true one-off, ‘for I always took delight in a singularity’.[9] As an introvert who found it difficult to express her personality verbally, Margaret allowed her idiosyncratic outfits (which often had a masculine edge) to do the talking for her, and this, too, would set her apart from most of her sex. It was all very well to indulge her whimsy and burgeoning imagination in the cossetted environment of St John’s Abbey, but in the wider world of seventeenth-century England, which valued obedience and conformity over flamboyance and originality, it left her rather more wilful and eccentric than was deemed acceptable in a woman.

The Lucases were a close-knit family. Margaret – a self-confessed physical coward who would jump at the sound of a gun and abhorred violence of all kinds[10] – was always so anxious that ‘an evil misfortune or accident’ might befall one of them that she would wake her siblings in the night to check they were still alive. Her fears were strangely prescient, for in 1642, when the Civil War broke out, there would be no escaping the unrest for the Royalist Lucases who, by then, were deeply unpopular in the Puritan county of Essex, thanks to their close involvement with Charles I’s regime.[11] When local anger erupted into the Stour Valley riots on 22 August, mobs descended on St John’s Abbey, ransacking and looting the Lucas home. The women in the house were imprisoned for several days while Margaret’s brother, John, now head of the family, was held at the Tower for a month for raising an army for the King.

Margaret was 19 at the time and blindsided by the violence, writing later that ‘this unnatural war came like a whirlwind’,[12] but her loyalty to Charles I was unshaken, not least because she had developed an intense fascination with his French queen. In Henrietta Maria, the Parliamentarians saw only a dangerous woman whose influence over the King encouraged popery and tyranny; Margaret, however, saw the heroic queen of her dreams. Nursing a desire to ‘see the world abroad’, she offered her services to her heroine as Maid of Honour, and although her siblings worried that their gauche little sister might make a fool of herself in the worldly, sophisticated court milieu, Margaret got her way. She arrived in Oxford, where the court had been transplanted for safety, in the summer of 1643.

It didn’t take long for Margaret’s new life to pall. The daily routine at court was tedious, involving little more than waiting around in the presence chamber for orders or standing to attention for hours on end. The freedom she’d had at home to write was gone and she now found herself constantly on show, which, as her siblings had predicted, left her so crippled by shyness that she was rendered almost mute. Maids were expected to charm court visitors with their dazzling wit and conversation, but Margaret, ‘dull, fearful and bashful’ as she was, felt it safer to play dumb and ‘be accounted a fool’ than to make a poor attempt at worldliness and ‘be thought rude or wanton’.[13]

So excruciating was this experience that Margaret would later fictionalise it in her 1668 play The Presence, in which she cast herself as Lady Bashful, the novice Maid of Honour who similarly gives the impression at Princess Melancholy’s court of being ‘a clod of dull earth’. But just as Lady Bashful turns out to be more than appearances would suggest, so Margaret felt there was a goldmine of ideas beneath her own gawky exterior. No doubt she was voicing her own aspirations when her alter-ego proclaims: ‘I had rather be a meteor singly alone, than a star in a crowd.’

There was little chance of being a meteor at court, and inevitably Margaret came to feel she’d made a mistake, but her mother refused all her appeals to come home, feeling ‘it would be a disgrace for me to return out of the court so soon after I was placed’.[14] She had no choice but to stick it out. And with the war intensifying, this would have life-changing consequences for young Margaret Lucas.

EXILES IN LOVE

By 1644, the Parliamentarians were gaining strength and the Queen, now pregnant with her ninth child, was in particular danger. Parliament had put a price on her head for high treason, citing her Catholic influence on the King as the primary cause of the war, so in April that year it became imperative for her to leave not just Oxford, but the country. With Margaret and the rest of her entourage in tow, Henrietta Maria went on the run, enduring a difficult birth and grave illness along the way. The group fled to Falmouth and on 30 June boarded a boat to the Queen’s native France, where they were confident of a warm reception.

But first they had to survive the voyage. Buffeted by storm winds, they lurched over the waves, the Parliamentarian ships in hot pursuit, pelting them with shots. Henrietta Maria was as impressive as ever during the onslaught, commanding that if it should come to it, the captain should blow up the ship’s ammunition store rather than allow them to be captured. Thankfully it didn’t come to that; they reached Brittany alive, only to be faced with the dangerous coastal cliffs that stood between them and safety. A treacherous scramble to the top followed, before they eventually found asylum at a small fishing village, a ragged and far from regal-looking bunch.

This daring great escape had shown Margaret rather more of the world than she had bargained for. At 21, she was suddenly an exile and a refugee, and the harrowing experience left an indelible mark on her psyche. Time and again in the stories she would later write, beautiful, virtuous young ingénues would endure perilous voyages and find themselves shipwrecked in strange lands.

Traumatised but safe, Margaret was living an isolated, miserable life with the Queen at King Louis XIV’s court at the Louvre in Paris when, in April 1645, William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle, arrived – a fellow Royalist exile who, having fled England in despair after a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Marston Moor, was also looking for comfort. On the surface, William was everything Margaret wasn’t: a courageous soldier and renowned horseman, confident, worldly, charming and, as the former tutor of Prince Charles, highly educated. He was also a ladies’ man, a rich widower and, at the age of 52, a full 30 years older than Margaret. And yet the pair had much in common: both were deeply romantic in nature and harboured high ideals, literary aspirations and a veneration of poetry, philosophy and plays. It wasn’t long before William was wooing Margaret with passionate verses on a daily basis.

Unused to male attention, Margaret was wary at first. Marriage was not on her mind – on the contrary, ‘I did dread marriage’, she would later admit.[15] To a free-spirited woman of the seventeenth century, it meant a caged life of household management, the dangers of childbirth and unquestioning submission to one’s husband, even if he turned out to be a drunkard, philanderer or tyrant. In later life, Margaret would even argue forcefully against marriage in principle, reckoning that ‘where one husband proves good … a thousand prove bad’.[16] Had circumstances been different, she might well have chosen the shame of spinsterhood over the shackles of marriage, but as it was, she fell in love and married William in a quiet ceremony at the end of 1645.

Young, timid Margaret Lucas was now Lady Cavendish, Marchioness of Newcastle. It sounded grand, but as a prominent Royalist, William’s primary Midlands estates of Welbeck Abbey and Bolsover Castle had been sequestered by Parliament, so in truth he had little to offer his new bride but his title. Margaret, in turn, was unable to access her substantial dowry of £2,000, as her brother, John, had been branded a ‘malignant’ by Parliament and also had his property confiscated, so when the couple set up home in William’s Parisian apartments, the only option was for William to flaunt his name, reputation and continued spending in the hope of reassuring creditors that he was a safe bet. The bluff allowed them to live well enough on borrowed money, but it was a precarious existence. More than once over the next few years the creditors’ patience would wear thin and William’s steward would bring the worrying news that ‘he was not able to provide a dinner’ for them that day.[17] On these occasions, pawning their belongings and borrowing money from William’s brother, or the Queen or anyone who would help them was the only recourse left.

Still, the Cavendishes put on a good show. William and his brother Sir Charles were enthusiastic, well-connected intellectuals who played host to some of the leading scholars, writers, scientists and philosophers of the day, including Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes. For Margaret, these soirées were accompanied by feelings of gnawing inadequacy, but by listening and observing (something she had always been good at), she found she could pick up second-hand all the latest philosophical theories and technological advancements to emerge from the Scientific Revolution that was sweeping through Europe. Margaret absorbed it all, quietly nursing a passion for big ideas and a longing to grapple with the invisible workings of the world. A woman with no education to speak of was suddenly an avid pupil at the cutting-edge of new thinking, and she found it utterly thrilling.

Less enthralling were Margaret’s new domestic challenges – not least her antipathy towards home-making and the fact that, as time went by, babies stubbornly refused to appear. Given that William had fathered numerous children by his first wife, the problem was assumed to be Margaret’s, so when there was still no sign of pregnancy two years into their marriage, her physician began to prescribe spa waters and a witches’ brew of herbs to be syringed into her womb every morning and night.[18]

It’s quite possible Margaret was secretly relieved when these remedies didn’t work, for her own attitude to motherhood was ambivalent – society said it was her wifely duty to provide children and she felt that pressure, but the burning desire for them herself simply wasn’t there. She could barely even understand it in other women. Dynastic motives made no sense for a woman, she would later argue, since ‘neither name nor estate goes to her family’ when she marries; and then, of course, she ‘hazards her life by bringing them into the world, and hath the greatest share of trouble in bringing them up’.[19] Maternal instinct or affection didn’t even enter the equation. Margaret would soon find other ways of perpetuating herself and her name that appealed far more …

The couple thrived regardless. Conscious of her good luck in finding a husband who didn’t suppress her ideas or curb her ambitions, Margaret was respectful and adoring of William – the model of a loyal, deferential, dutiful wife. In this, at least, she was happy to play the conventional woman. In no other part of her life would she be so conformist.

TRAITORS TO THE STATE

Despite their happiness together, the Cavendishes would be dogged in the first three years of their marriage by horrors both personal and national. By the summer of 1647, Margaret’s sister Mary had died of consumption, and her beloved mother soon after, and by the end of 1648, the numerous Royalist uprisings of that year had all been crushed. The King had been imprisoned at Hurst Castle in Hampshire and his supporters purged from Parliament, and Margaret’s brother Sir Charles Lucas, leader of the Essex rebellion, had been summarily executed by firing squad, without trial.[20]

The young woman who had anxiously checked her sleeping siblings for signs of life had now lost three members of her family in less than two years – one of them ‘inhumanly murdered’[21] – and the following year her eldest brother Thomas would die, too. This torrent of grief left Margaret plagued by fears of ‘death’s dungeon’. With no faith whatsoever in an after-life, she would later write of life’s cruel brevity, likening it to ‘a flash of lightning that continues not and for the most part leaves black oblivion behind it’.[22] To many, this was heretical talk; to Margaret it was a perfectly rational hypothesis that only magnified her already nagging desire for immortality.

Unsurprisingly, during these years Margaret was diagnosed with ‘melancholy’ – a condition believed to be caused by an excess of black bile but what in reality must have been the cumulative effect of intense grief, financial worries and the stress of the ongoing political turmoil. With her budding interest in science, Margaret habitually self-medicated, purging herself with ‘vomits’ (emetics) and bleeds to rid her body of the ‘humours’ that she – and her physician – believed were making her ill.[23]

All the while the Civil War was building to its nightmarish crescendo. While Prince Charles had retreated to The Hague, where his sister Mary, wife of William II of Orange, could offer him refuge, the Cavendishes had settled in the affordable town of Antwerp in September 1648, where William maintained his tactic of blinding his creditors with extravagance by leasing the grand Rubens House from the famous painter’s widow. Here, he, Margaret and his brother Sir Charles would resume their favourite pastimes of engaging in philosophical discussion, tinkering with telescopes and conducting scientific experiments in the family laboratory. And here, they would learn the shocking news of their King’s fate.

On 30 January 1649, Charles I was executed for High Treason on a specially built scaffold outside London’s Whitehall Palace for waging war against his own Parliament. In that moment, England forcibly rid itself of a monarchy that had survived for nearly a thousand years by pedalling a symbolic (if not literal) image of safety, order and stability, presided over by an untouchable, divinely appointed sovereign. Now the King was dead, that image was irreparably scarred, the body politic had no head and only the unknown remained.

For the Royalists, this cataclysmic event meant quickly regrouping, focusing their attention on their theoretical new sovereign, Charles II, and, despite further defeated rebellions in 1650 and 1651, never quite giving up on plans to restore him. For the Cavendishes, it meant accepting a life of indefinite exile in Antwerp. William learned that he had been banished from England on pain of death, putting his assets further out of reach than ever, and in early 1651, starvation once again became a genuine threat. ‘I know not how to put bread in my mouth,’ he fretted to a friend,[24] his panic rising – largely because his brother, whose financial contributions had kept this small family of exiles just about afloat, had now had his estates sequestered, too. The only way Sir Charles could regain them was to return to England and petition for them, which carried the risk of imprisonment or being forced to take the oath of loyalty to the new Commonwealth, which had replaced the monarchy. Reluctantly, Charles was persuaded to go, and as William’s own estates were due to be sold off by Parliament and his wife was legally entitled to petition for one-fifth of their worth, it was decided that Margaret should accompany him. They set sail in November 1651, and on 10 December, with her brother John’s help, Margaret nervously put her case before the Committee for Compounding at Goldsmiths’ Hall in London. She wasn’t quite prepared, however, for the callousness of their response. They refused her appeal outright, said they would sell off the entirety of William’s estates, giving her no share of their worth whatsoever. William, they argued, was of the King’s inner circle and therefore ‘the greatest traitor to the State’, which excluded him – and his wife, who had knowingly married him after his political exile – from their clemency.

Appalled to the point of speechlessness, Margaret’s timidity silenced her when she longed to speak: ‘I whisperingly spoke to my brother to conduct me out of the ungentlemanly place, so without speaking to them one word good or bad, I returned to my lodgings.’ Utterly disheartened and ‘unpractised in public employments’, she didn’t attempt to petition the Committee again.[25] As a relatively non-offending Royalist, Sir Charles would eventually have more luck, but for now his petition dragged on interminably.

Margaret was miserable: she missed William, worried about him, and was in no mood, and no position, to enjoy herself. London was a changed place since the war – it had now entered an age of aggressively enforced austerity: seasonal festivities were banned, the theatres closed, the royal pageantry gone. High-profile Royalists were wise to keep their heads down, so Margaret did just that, retreating to her rooms, and finding solace – therapy, even – just as she had as a child: in writing. Only now it took on a new significance. She kept it secret even from her husband at this early stage, but Margaret Cavendish no longer wished to write just for her own amusement. Never again did she intend to be silenced by powerful men or her own timidity. She had decided to become a published author.

LET WRITING BOOKS ALONE

It’s hard to overstate how daring it was for Margaret Cavendish to even contemplate publishing her writing in mid-seventeenth-century England. Gagged by their poor education and mandatory silence, very few women had ever done so before 1640, and the handful who had were conscious of having overstepped their bounds into dangerously wanton territory and so tended to stick to ‘chaste’ and therefore ‘suitable’ feminine subjects: religious meditations and divine visions, poetry on love, friendship or God, domestic advice, recipes or cures. In the five years between 1616 and 1620, just eight new titles were published by women – 0.5 per cent of the 2,240 total.

But with the destabilising force of the Civil War came an undermining of all forms of established authority, and after 1640, during the war and Interregnum in particular, a mini-revolution took hold as women seized the opportunity created by the upheaval to publish books in increasing numbers. Between 1646 and 1650, new titles by women shot up to 69. And during the 1650s, almost five times as many books by women were printed than in the 1630s.[26] Aided by a brief lapse in the censorship laws,[27] this productivity boom hit both male and female writers, but women were the biggest gainers.

The rules of the game were slowly changing, but for women publishing remained a risky business. Even those who stuck to ‘feminine’ topics could still be attacked for disseminating their ideas. When Eleanor Davies published her prophetical visions in 1625, her husband was so enraged that he burnt her manuscript. And Elizabeth Avery, whose Scripture-prophecies Opened appeared in 1647, was publicly attacked for it by her own brother, who wrote in 1650, ‘your printing of a book, beyond the custom of your sex, doth rankly smell’.[28] Lady Mary Wroth, meanwhile, encountered such vitriolic accusations of betraying her sex on the publication of her romance Urania in 1621 (notably from Sir Edward Denny, who in an acrid satirical verse labelled her a ‘Hermaphrodite in show, in deed a monster’) that she was forced to deny she had ever intended to publish it at all and attempted to withdraw all copies.[29] These ancestral trolls, who abused or ridiculed any woman who dared to speak out, intimidated their quarry, certainly, but didn’t always succeed in silencing them. Women writers set about exploiting every loophole they could think of: some pre-empted attack with apologetic prefaces, others specifically addressed women or continued to confine themselves to modest, virtuous, ‘feminine’ subjects, while many chose to write anonymously or under a pseudonym.

When Margaret Cavendish strode into this daunting arena in 1653, however, with her first book, Poems and Fancies, she would take very few of these mitigating measures. Not only would she publish, she would do so under her own name and cover subjects that were considered exclusively male. This was a book whose dainty title belied its extraordinary contents. In lieu of the formal education she couldn’t have, Margaret had spent her married life absorbing like a sponge every topic under discussion in her scholarly household – philosophy, science, literature, politics – and it had all filtered into her work. Her poems were not about love or friendship or God: they described fairies that lived at the centre of the Earth; a microscopic world contained in an earring; the terror of hunted animals; the futility of war; the elements; the universe; light, sound, matter and motion; and, most extraordinary of all, the scientific theory of atomism – a school of thought, derived from the Ancient Greek philosophers Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius, which argued that particles of different sizes, shapes and properties comprised and governed the world. Her fancies were no less surprising: she wrote allegorical dialogues between Wit and Beauty, Earth and Darkness, Melancholy and Mirth; moral discourses on pride, humility, wealth and poverty; and fantastical prose that imagined a Royalist parliament as a diseased human body in need of a cure. It was a wildly abundant compendium of every style and subject that critiqued human nature and expounded dangerously materialist and atheistic views. Coming from a woman, this was not normal.[30]

Such an ambitious work would inevitably provoke outrage and ridicule, so Margaret also included copious prefaces, epistles and addresses in her book, designed to defend her decision to publish – the only placatory tactic she would employ. In her poem ‘The Poetresses Hasty Resolution’, she describes how her initial qualms almost prevented her from publishing at all. Reason urged her to ‘do the world a good turn, / And all you write cast in the fire and burn’,[31] but ambition made her impulsive. With a gambler’s recklessness she ‘resolved to set it at all hazards’, for she had little to lose and immortality to win: ‘If fortune be my friend, then fame will be my gain, which may build me a pyramid, a praise to my memory.’[32]

She expected censure, particularly from men, who would doubtless ‘cast a smile of scorne upon my book, because they think thereby, women encroach too much upon their prerogatives; for they hold books as their crown … by which they rule’.[33] The most obvious accusations, however – that she ought to be looking after her children and household instead of indulging her whims in writing – she could easily bat away, for she had no children and her husband’s estate had been confiscated. As for any claims that she was just another aristocratic dilettante doodling away in her idle hours, Margaret would show just how seriously she took her work: she was as fond of her book, she wrote, ‘as if it were my child’, and, like a proud mother, was ‘striving to show her to the world, in hopes some may like her’. The analogy was clever; it implied not only that her mind had achieved a lasting act of creation that her body could not, but that, far from being ‘wanton’ or ‘rude’, it was in fact ‘harmless, modest and honest’ for a woman to publish her work – as natural and virtuous as being a mother.[34]

Margaret faced one challenge even greater than public disapproval, though. She was a factory of complex, unusual ideas, yet her rudimentary home-tuition had left her without the tools to perfectly express them. In this she was nothing unusual; the state of women’s education in the seventeenth century was even poorer than it had been in the last, especially for upper-class women.[35] King James I had disapproved of intellectual women and encouraged a culture of ridiculing them at court, and the attitude had stuck. Those upstart women who did acquire learning were viewed with suspicion, as the scholar Bathsua Makin knew well: ‘A learned woman is thought to be a comet,’ she wrote in An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (1673), ‘that bodes mischief, whenever it appears.’ The scholar Dr George Hickes noted the trend in 1684: ‘It is shameful, but ordinary,’ he said, ‘to see gentlewomen, who have both wit and politeness, not able yet to pronounce well what they read … They are still more grossly deficient in orthography, or in spelling right, and in the manner of forming or connecting letters.’[36] Margaret was a prime example. Her handwriting was near-illegible, her spelling wayward, her rhymes and metre flawed, her grammar idiosyncratic and her punctuation conspicuous by its absence. She was acutely aware of it – her ‘brain being quicker in creating than the hand in writing’[37] – but was often too caught up in a frenzy of creativity to be much of an editor. Her secretaries and typesetters had to pick up this slack, resulting in skewed interpretations of her meaning and rounds of later corrections.

Bowing to common opinion, Margaret concluded that it was simply ‘against nature for a woman to spell right’,[38] arguing that originality and wit were more valuable than the technicalities of form. Yes, her writing could be indulgent and baggy, her arguments incomplete and foggy, but to her a free and artless style was best: ‘Give me a style that nature frames, not art, / For art doth seem to take the pedant’s part.’[39] It’s a convenient argument when the art is largely missing, but it ignores the real problem: her lack of education. It’s been suggested that she might even have been dyslexic.[40] But having internalised the prevailing assumption that women were undeserving of education, blaming her own natural incompetence was the only defence she had.

For those looking for a straightforward feminist heroine in Margaret Cavendish, this is a problem. Keen to present herself as a wonder of the age, as something ‘other’ than the average woman, she voices the troubling suggestion that women are not naturally suited for intellectual pursuits more than once in Poems and Fancies: ‘True it is,’ she writes in one epistle, ‘spinning with the fingers is more proper to our sex, than studying or writing poetry.’[41] And in her address ‘To all writing ladies’, despite urging them to push beyond their domestic sphere into the world of politics, religion, philosophy and poetry, she adds that ‘though we be inferior to men, let us shew our selves a degree above beasts’.[42]

At this early stage in her career, when her ideas are in their infancy, Margaret is infuriatingly inconsistent on women’s intellectual worth. With her own busy, capacious, ambitious mind fighting the remnants of patriarchal indoctrination, she flip-flops from apologist to agitator and back again. Elsewhere in the same book, she delivers a defiant ‘up yours’ to the snide world outside that’s just itching to condemn her:

Tis true, the world may wonder at my confidence, how I dare put out a book, especially in these censorious times; but why should I be ashamed, or afraid, where no evil is, and not please my self in the satisfaction of innocent desires? For a smile of neglect cannot dishearten me, no more can a frown of dislike affright me … my mind’s too big, and I had rather venture an indiscretion, than lose the hopes of a fame. [43]

This is the Margaret Cavendish that feminists adore, emerging from her chrysalis: singular, ambitious, confident of her intelligence and proudly dismissive of what others think. Over time, her ideas on women, like her ideas on natural philosophy, would develop into a much more coherent, formidable statement, but for now, she was primarily on the defensive, knowing damn well that her actions, though harmless, would be seen as provocative. With Sir Edward Denny’s famous hectoring verse to Lady Mary Wroth still ringing in Margaret’s ears three decades after it was written, she imagined men telling her, too, to go back to her sewing:

Work Lady, work, let writing books alone,

For surely wiser women nere wrote one. [44]

But Margaret would do no such thing, ‘For all I desire, is Fame.’ And fame she would get. Throughout her writing career, she would produce a staggering 23 books – accounting for over half of the total number of books (just 42) published by women between 1600 and 1640.[45] With her unabashed ambitions, and with few to rival her intrepid subject matter or prolific output,[46] Margaret would stand almost entirely alone in the century as a woman writer who could not be ignored.

MANY SOBERER PEOPLE IN BEDLAM

After nearly 18 months in England, Margaret grew impatient to return to William in Antwerp. She had sent her first book to the printers and even dashed off another (Philosophical Fancies),[47] and Sir Charles’s estates had finally been released from sequestration, enabling him to buy back the family seats of Welbeck and Bolsover (though at a greatly inflated price) and stabilise the family’s finances. So on 16 February 1653, just two months before Poems and Fancies was due to publish, Margaret set off back to Antwerp, reluctantly leaving her brother-in-law behind as he had succumbed to a fever.

With the lovers rapturously reunited, and the publication of her first two books imminent, Margaret’s secret was out, and to her relief and gratitude she found in William a rare husband who entirely supported his wife’s new career. He understood her literary ambitions because he had them himself, though he had the grace to recognise that she was the better writer. He would encourage her, write prefaces and the odd line or verse for her, praise her (blindly, some said), and together they sent out her books to their illustrious friends and waited nervously for the responses.

Anticipation was high when Poems and Fancies was due to appear in April – though not necessarily for the right reasons. Dorothy Osborne wrote excitedly to her betrothed, Sir William Temple, ‘… first let me ask you if you have seen a book of poems newly come out, made by my Lady Newcastle?’ There was a concealed barb in her enquiry, however, as she clearly intended to despise it: ‘For God’s sake if you meet with it send it to me; they say tis ten times more extravagant than her dress. Sure, the poor woman is a little distracted, she could never be so ridiculous else as to venture at writing books, and in verse too.’[48] Margaret’s reputation as an eccentric had preceded her, and for many her decision to write only confirmed their prejudices.

Once they had actually opened the book, reader responses were mixed. The 2nd Earl of Westmorland, Mildmay Fane, was an avid fan, scrawling a poem in praise of Margaret’s talent inside his copy, while friends of the Cavendishes predictably gave it a glowing review. The highly cultured polymath and Dutch diplomat Constantijn Huygens wrote to a friend that it was ‘a wonderful book, whose extravagant atoms kept me from sleeping a great part of last night’. Others were less impressed. Once she’d got her hands on it, Dorothy Osborne felt entirely vindicated in her assumptions that Margaret must surely be mad, sniping to Sir William: ‘You need not send me my Lady Newcastle’s book at all, for I have seen it, and am satisfied that there are many soberer people in Bedlam. I’ll swear her friends are much to blame to let her go abroad.’[49] Margaret was not only compromising her womanly virtue by publishing a book; she was also guilty of an ‘extravagant’ kind of literature. Her ‘free and noble style’ that ‘runs wild about, it cares not where’[50] was scatterbrained, unrefined and hard to follow – it was all far too unconventional for Dorothy Osborne.

Another worrying response came from friend and courtier Sir Edward Hyde, who offered the ultimate back-handed compliment that a woman could surely not have written so clever, so learned, so masculine a book, with ‘so many terms of art, and such expressions proper to all sciences’.[51] The humble apologia, used so commonly by male writers and taken as intended – a rhetorical show of modesty aimed at endearing the writer to his audience – were in Margaret’s case being taken as an admission that she was so inept she must be passing off someone else’s work as her own. It was yet another accusation to add to the list of defences she was compiling for her next work, which was already underway.

On arriving back in Antwerp, Margaret had eagerly returned to a collection of essays she had started before her trip to England, but when she sifted through her papers, she was disheartened by what she found. It was obvious, even to her, that they were littered with errors and sagging under the weight of stunted arguments, half-baked ideas and distracting digressions. To revise them seemed too Herculean a task, so, true to form, in late 1654, she lazily published them anyway, as The World’s Olio – a concoction of observations on all manner of subjects, literary, political, social and philosophical, that made up the rich stew or ‘olio’ of the title – and, without correcting the proofs, sent it out into the world to be assessed, warts and all.

Hampered, still, by the misconception that she was not up to the task at hand, Margaret again used prefaces to excuse her faults and lay the blame on her gender: ‘It cannot be expected I should write so wisely or wittily as men,’ she insisted, ‘being of the effeminate sex, whose brains nature hath mix’d with the coldest and softest elements’.[52] She rejected the ‘great complaints’ from women, which were evidently becoming louder, that men had ‘usurped a supremacy’ over them since Creation. In fact, she argued the opposite, that ‘Men have great reason not to let us in to their governments, for there is great difference betwixt the masculine brain and the feminine’. While men had the strength of an oak, women, she wrote, were like willows, ‘a yielding vegetable, not fit nor proper to build houses and ships’.[53] They might exceed men in beauty, affections, piety and charity, but women didn’t have the judgement, understanding and rhetorical skills of men.

There could hardly be a more depressing demonstration of the damage that systemic misogyny can do to a woman’s self-esteem. For all her bravado, every word of this sprang from her insecurities at her failings and mistakes, and she had a long way to go before she truly understood the root cause of her disadvantage. In anticipation of more accusations of intellectual theft, she added numerous epistles to her book to protest that her work was her own, that ‘my head was the forge, my thoughts the anvil to beat them out’. William was her tutor, and she his scholar, she admitted, but she had never received professional teaching from any ‘proper’ philosophers. The need to defend herself and her work would seemingly never end.

The year 1654 had been a bad one from the start: in February, the Cavendishes had received the news from England that Sir Charles had died, weakened by the fever he had caught the year before, and the effect was crushing. William had lost his brother, and Margaret a close friend, but both had lost the man they viewed as their saviour – Sir Charles had consistently lent them money and support, rescued the family estates from the Parliamentarians, even kept them from starvation. Margaret would later refer to him as ‘the preserver of my life’.[54] They owed him everything, and his loss plunged the couple into melancholy and illness.

Work was Margaret’s medicine this time, and despite the setbacks, her intellectual life was burgeoning. Friendships with scholarly types such as Constantijn Huygens allowed her to discuss her ever-expanding reading and the experiments she conducted in her laboratory, and to test her theories against other minds besides her husband’s, while every spare minute was spent writing it all down.

Her next book, Philosophical and Physical Opinions, published in 1655, expanded on earlier ideas, offering an exhaustive theory of the natural world and all its phenomena, and her prefaces and addresses reflected this growing seriousness. She dedicated the work to Oxford and Cambridge, the universities she aspired to attend but was categorically excluded from.

The publication of The World’s Olio the previous year had provoked yet more tiresome accusations that the work could not possibly be all hers, prompting Margaret to include in her prefaces increasingly irritable repudiations of the charges levelled at her by this ‘ill-natured and unbelieving age’. She was repeating herself to no effect – a woman’s word was worthless; the accusations only ceased when William weighed in on the debate in an epistle he contributed to Philosophical and Physical Opinions. It was plain to him that base prejudice was behind it all – ‘Here’s the crime,’ he stated, ‘a lady writes them, and to entrench so much upon the male prerogative is not to be forgiven’ – and at long last, Margaret was beginning to understand this too.[55] As she grew weary of the battles to gain respect and recognition for her work, her own belief in what women could achieve, and what society said they could achieve, were becoming increasingly polarised.

In her dedication to the ‘Two Universities’, she forcefully argued her new stance, asking them to accept her work ‘without a scorn, for the good encouragement of our sex, lest in time we should grow irrational as idiots’. She spoke from bitter experience when she wrote that men thought it impossible for women to acquire learning, ‘and we out of a custom of dejectedness think so too, which makes us quit all industry towards profitable knowledge’. But as her confidence in her own abilities had grown, so too had her conviction that women had ‘rational souls as well as men’, and that it was their exclusion from intellectual, civic and political life that was the source of the problem; it left women to become ‘like worms, that only live in the dull earth of ignorance … for we are kept like birds in cages, to hop up and down in our houses, not suffered to fly abroad’. Without the experience and knowledge that men had access to, it was no wonder women lacked their ‘invention’. How could they thrive when ‘we are never employed either in civil or martial affairs, our counsels are despised, and laughed at’ and ‘the best of our actions are trodden down with scorn’? And all because of ‘the over-weaning conceit men have of themselves’ and their ‘despisement of us’.[56] Well, she’d realised her mistake and found her outrage. There was no natural inferiority in women; only prejudice against them. Margaret Cavendish the proto-feminist had been born.

VIRGIN VIRAGOS

Never one to pause for breath, Margaret plunged into her next book with a newfound confidence in both herself and in women. Nature’s Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life, published in the summer of 1656, was another overwhelmingly diverse treasure chest of poems, fireside tales, animal fables, social satires and dialogues that attempted to pack in all of everyday life experience. It was her most ambitious, accomplished and visionary work yet, and the stand-out prose pieces all, in their way, offered revolutionary depictions of women.

In ‘The Matrimonial Agreement’, a woman’s powerlessness in marriage is redressed when a sceptical bride strikes a bargain with her husband: if she suspects him of adultery, she has the right to leave him and take a share of his estate with her. In ‘Ambition Preferr’ed Before Love’ the lady chooses not to marry at all, because ‘Husbands will never suffer their wives to climb [Fame’s Tower], but keep them fast lock’d in their arms, or tie them to household employments.’ And in ‘The Contract’, a morality tale in the ‘romancical’ mould, scholarly women are unashamedly celebrated in the spurned heroine who wins back her betrothed by becoming a paragon of learning and a ‘meteor of the time’.

‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ is Nature’s Pictures’ most interesting fictional offering, though – an allegorical, romance-inflected romp that illustrates the sexual hazards to which women are perpetually exposed. Featuring a gun-toting, cross-dressing, self-educated, gender-fluid heroine who finds herself shipwrecked in fantastical lands and winds up fending off a predatory Prince, outwitting some dangerous cannibals, leading an army into battle in defence of a Queen, making said Queen fall in love with her and ruling her own kingdom, it’s pretty startling stuff for its time.[57] Too timid to fire a pistol herself, Margaret was living out all her heroic fantasies by putting one in the unwavering hand of her heroine – and as the Prince advances on her with a smile, thinking it ‘a shame to be out-dared by a woman’, she shoots him without compunction. Later, when the Queen discovers her crush is a woman, Margaret even dabbles with the possibility of same-sex love – the Queen is ‘angry that she was deceived, yet still did love’. Pushing the boundaries further still, she toys with the fantasy of same-sex marriage, as the Queen concludes that ‘since I cannot marry her, and so make her my husband, I will keep her if I can, and so make her my friend’. The heroine’s revelation to her troops, meanwhile, is met with undiluted approbation and a rousing cry for equality: ‘Heaven bless you, of what sex soever you be’.

The last word, however, sadly goes to convention as the ending plucks our heroine from her boys’ clothes and puts her in a wedding dress, as the wife of her would-be rapist. It’s disconcerting to say the least, but as a woman who flirted with the tropes of masculinity herself, Margaret knew not to push the transgressive image of the warrior woman too far. Amazonian ‘virgin viragos’ had traditionally signalled social disorder and disruption – dangerous, unnatural women who rejected their femininity and threatened to throw the established order of marriage and childbearing into chaos – but Margaret had flipped the idea on its head by using her weaponised virgin not to wreak havoc, but to bring about peace and social order.[58] Behind the smokescreen of the traditional marriage plot, she could argue the subtly radical notion that breaking with prescribed gender conventions might suggest impeccable virtue in women rather than immodesty, and that masculine get-up could be a kind of armour that afforded them empowerment, freedom and safety.

These tales are significant in portraying some of the earliest fictional heroines written by a woman in English, and it’s heartening that in their intelligence, resourcefulness and courage they flouted all the tired rules of femininity and achieved a level of agency that their female audience could only dream of. And Margaret undoubtedly did dream of this stuff. She didn’t fantasise about heroes who would come along to rescue her; she fantasised about being a heroic woman who could rescue herself. With so many autobiographical details filtering into these tales – perilous voyages from home, exile in a foreign land, men whose first wives are conveniently dispatched and whose libertinism is reformed by the love of a virtuous young woman – it’s clear that Margaret was rewriting her own life as a romance adventure, and casting herself in the highly unconventional lead role.

If Margaret’s reinvention of herself as a fictional heroine was ambitious, the inclusion in Nature’s Pictures of her real-life autobiography was positively groundbreaking. Nothing quite like it had ever been published in English by a woman before. Their life writing had previously been either for private consumption or with a religious focus; ordinary, secular female existence was deemed unworthy of public attention. But Margaret begged to differ. At the age of just 33, in ‘A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life’, she set down her life story for posterity.

Aware that she was yet again straying from the well-trodden path, she had her defence ready. Vanity would be the first accusation, but others had done it without censure, so why shouldn’t she? Some readers would consider it presumptuous, and wonder why she had written it all, ‘since none cares to know whose daughter she was, or whose wife she is, or how she was bred, or what fortunes she had, or how she lived, or what humour or disposition she was of’. Her answer to this was simple and unashamed: granted, it might be of no interest or purpose to the reader, ‘but it is to the authoress, because I write it for my own sake, not theirs’. Here was a woman who freely admitted that her ambition (which ‘inclines to vain-glory’) was so great that she always had one eye on her legacy, aiming ‘to tell the truth, lest after-ages should mistake, in not knowing’.[59]

This was a fine claim, but like all autobiographies Margaret’s account was highly partial, glorifying her family as courageous, innocent victims of the Parliamentarians, and herself as a shy, melancholic writer who, despite her singularity and ambition, was a dutiful wife and loyal subject. For all her own spin-doctoring, however, here was also a prime opportunity to combat other people’s; to publicly answer some of the gossip and exaggerations that had a habit of springing up around her. She slapped down the rumours that she had stood ‘as a beggar at the Parliament door’ and ‘haunt[ed] the committees’ during her trip to England, and scoffed that ‘report did dress me in a hundred several fashions’. In producing this pioneering account of herself and attempting to set the record straight, Margaret was presciently asserting that women as well as men had a right to self-representation, to tell their own story as they wished, rather than languish at the mercy of other people’s interpretations.

THE RETURN OF THE KING

By 1656, Margaret had been writing continuously for four years, but then suddenly the stream of publications stopped. ‘My wit is drawn dry,’ she admitted later,[60] though a lack of funds may also have been to blame. Just as her writing juddered to a halt, however, the political situation began to shift. Charles II had been living in Germany, but when an offer of support came in from the Spanish government, he moved his court to Brussels and tried to rustle up some rebellions in England. None of them amounted to much; in the end, the Royalists’ plans had little impact compared with the death of Oliver Cromwell in September 1658 and the abdication of his son Richard as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth in May the following year. The Royalists had the power vacuum they needed, and in the chaos that ensued, the old stability of the monarchy began to look appealing once more. Negotiations with Charles began, and on 25 April 1660, Parliament voted unanimously for the return of the King. On hearing of the May Day celebrations, Samuel Pepys – once ‘a great roundhead’ in his youth[61] – reported dryly that there was ‘great joy all yesterday at London, and at night more bonfires than ever, and ringing of bells, and drinking the King’s health upon their knees in the streets, which methinks is a little too much’.[62]

The country’s raptures continued when Charles arrived back in England on 26 May. William was so desperate to join his king that he followed in a rickety old boat that was barely seaworthy, and was overcome with emotion on his return home: ‘Surely … I have been sixteen years asleep, and am not thoroughly awake yet,’ he gushed.[63] For the time being Margaret had to remain in Antwerp as surety for William’s debts, and in her absence England banished Puritanism and roared back to life. William hastily joined the queue of Lords who in August were presenting private bills for the reparation of their losses, and once he’d received royal assent, was finally able to borrow the money to release his wife and start paying off his debts.

When Margaret did finally return home, she wasn’t quite as delighted with what she found as William had been. Despite her relief that her exile was over, her husband was still living in reduced circumstances in London, unrewarded by the King for his loyalty, while others had been showered with honours. It fell to his children to step in with financial help this time until he managed to claw back the rest of his scattered estates in September. That same month, however, his devotion to the King was at last rewarded with a decent position at court, as Gentleman of the Bedchamber, and the important salaried role of Lord Lieutenant of Nottingham.

Finances back on track, William announced that he and his wife would be settling in his Midlands estates of Welbeck, 20 miles from Nottingham, and Bolsover Castle, in Derbyshire. Margaret, who had never felt much at ease in garrulous urban society, was happy to retire to a quiet life in the country, though she and her husband would both be in for a shock when they arrived that autumn. William’s parks had been uprooted, his livestock killed, his houses looted, and Bolsover Castle – occupied, garrisoned and part-demolished – was a ruin. Margaret later worked out her husband’s financial losses to be a whopping £941,303.

It would take more loans and a grand restoration project, but within two years Welbeck, at least, had risen from the ashes and William was finally in a position to secure Margaret’s jointure.[64] In the event of his death, he now granted his wife numerous properties, a yearly income of £1,025 and a life interest in Bolsover Castle, and over the next few years he would add even more to this inheritance – much to the consternation of his children.

In her new life in the country, Margaret tried to apply herself to housewifery, but despite an aptitude for elements of estate management (just like her mother), the lure of returning to writing became too great, and in 1662 she embarked on another publishing binge. First came a collection of plays that had been waiting patiently in her desk drawer since her days in Antwerp. Written when the English theatres were closed, and ignoring all the rules of standard drama, these plays were unlikely ever to be performed. Often long and oddly structured, chopping and changing between several plot strands, they have more in common with modern-day TV series, unifying through theme rather than time, place and action. They are particularly remarkable, though, in giving almost all roles and lines to women and exploring the far reaches of what they might desire. Their stories include warrior women who lead an army out to war in Bell in Campo, a group of ‘academical ladies’ who have rejected patriarchal society to live in a utopian all-female enclave in The Female Academy, and in her 1668 play The Convent of Pleasure, Margaret imagines another free and independent female space, established by the wealthy heiress Lady Happy, where the women declaim on why ‘marriage is a curse’ and enact a series of skits dramatising the hardships of childbirth and living with violent, drunken, profligate or philandering husbands to illustrate their point. Into this atmosphere has come a foreign Princess, of androgynous allure, ‘a princely brave woman truly, of a masculine presence’, with whom Lady Happy falls in love. ‘Why may not I love a woman with the same affection I could a man?’ she reasons – and this time Margaret allows her same-sex couple a fervent kiss before the dream is shattered.

It might seem odd that such gynocentric fantasies and anti-marriage sentiments should come from a woman so happily married, but Margaret’s own good luck didn’t prevent her from recognising the injustice inflicted on women by the institution, or from feeling the force of the oppression, loathing and derision that men routinely directed at them.[65] As in her fictions, Margaret’s renegade feminist plays are mostly brought back down to earth with a bump with awkwardly conventional ‘happy’ endings – the Princess in the Convent of Pleasure turns out to be a Prince; the Female Academy proves vulnerable to the outside world and the Amazons must return to their ‘proper’ domestic sphere when the war is over. All the same, Margaret was provoking much-needed debate about gender expectations here, and revelling in writing female characters who would surely have filled the patriarchy with dread.

She followed these plays with a book of topical orations, fulfilling her ambition of becoming a female Cicero (though she never took to the podium; for a shy, tongue-tied woman with much to say, the page was far more welcoming), but her next few projects would be retrospective in nature. Looking back on her earlier philosophical works with fresh eyes and a great deal more study under her belt, she found them seriously wanting, littered with rushed sentences, garbled ideas and misused or unexplained terminology. So in 1664 she produced revised editions of Philosophical and Physical Opinions and Poems and Fancies, swiftly followed by Sociable Letters, a collection of 221 epistles musing on ‘the humours of mankind’, which included vivid descriptions of everyday Antwerp life, social satire, analysis of her own ambitions, fears and shortcomings and the first extended critical appraisal of Shakespeare.[66]

Sticking with the epistolary form (the lack of rigid generic rules suited Margaret’s wandering style), Philosophical Letters also appeared that year, which attacked the theories of the most revered male philosophers of the day – René Descartes, Jean Baptiste van Helmont, Thomas Hobbes, Walter Charleton, Galileo and Henry More – and invited challenges to her own opinions in return. This was a phenomenally brave and revealing move. Margaret was now so confident in her own philosophical opinions that she was engaging in public intellectual debate like any male scholar might.

Amid this flurry of publishing came another twist in the Cavendishes’ fortunes. Money was still tight thanks to the expensive restoration of Welbeck, so William attempted to call in an old debt from the King, which amounted to nearly £10,000. It didn’t quite work; the King refused to pay up, but in the summer of 1664, he offered William compensation in the form of a dukedom – a fair trade to William’s mind. The decree was passed and on 16 March 1665 William and Margaret became two of the noblest (though certainly not the richest) people in the land: the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle.

THE BLAZING WORLD

Now in her early forties, Margaret was a name to be reckoned with. The Duchess of Newcastle’s next book, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, published in 1666, again skewered the works of well-known figures such as Robert Boyle and Henry Power, but particularly Robert Hooke’s Micrographia – a book that recorded in intricate illustrations his findings under the microscope. As a founder member of the Royal Society, Hooke was delivering a powerful defence of its empirical modus operandi, but Margaret took issue with this approach. She and William owned a fine collection of microscopes and telescopes and, knowing how temperamental these early instruments were, she argued that they produced ‘fallacies, rather than discoveries of truth’, distorting more than they revealed and explaining only the exterior workings. Her rejection of experimentalism in favour of pure old-fashioned reasoning hasn’t aged so well, but she was in good company at the time: philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and physician Thomas Sydenham all shared her scepticism and later produced their own attacks on the Society and its methods.

What has stood the test of time is the appendix Margaret wrote as a ‘work of fancy’ to amuse herself and her readers after all this heavy theorising. Conceived in the midst of the Scientific Revolution and in the wake of the Age of Exploration, The Description of a New World, called the Blazing World was the most imaginative, exotic, genre-busting work of Margaret’s career. A romance novella, fantasy adventure, philosophical utopia and theological debate all in one, this indefinable tale takes us to an alternate universe and makes a strong case for being one of the first examples of science fiction in English literature and – 150 years before Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – the first ever to be written by a woman.

Interplanetary flights of fancy had been imagined before in other languages, but Margaret was quick to assert her originality; hers was a world ‘not such as Lucian’s, or the French-man’s world in the moon; but a world of my own creating’. And this was key to her romantic ambitions. As an ‘Authoress’, she could attain all the power in her imaginary world that, as a woman, she was denied in her own, for ‘though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First; and although I have neither power, time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did … I have made a world of my own.’[67] If her readers liked this other world, they could elect to be her subjects, and if not, this was no tyranny: ‘they may create worlds of their own, and govern themselves as they please’.[68]

In the first part of The Blazing World, which Margaret calls ‘romancical’, she upcycles many of the plot devices and philosophical ideas that appear in her earlier writings. A young woman is carried off against her will by a predatory man but is rescued by a shipwreck that carries her into another world, joined to her own at the North Pole. It’s called ‘the Blazing World’ because its stars are so bright they light up the night as if it were day. In this fantastical paradise, the land is ‘rich, and fruitful’, the cities are made of marble, amber, coral and gold, and there is no use for guns because the inhabitants ‘had no other enemies but the winds’. Here, human and animal merge. There are men ‘like foxes, only walking in an upright shape’ or with ‘heads, beaks, and feathers, like wild-geese’; ‘some were bear-men, some worm-men … some bird-men, some fly-men, some ant-men’, their skin a rainbow of colours – ‘some of a deep purple, some of a grass-green, some of a scarlet’, and so it goes on.

Quick as a flash, the young woman is married to the Emperor and, as Empress, is granted absolute power to govern this land as she pleases. Her first priority is to embark on a course of philosophical study – much like Margaret’s own – to enable her to govern as wisely as possible. So begins the ‘philosophical’ part of the narrative, in which the Empress calls together the great thinkers of this world, its priests and statesmen as well as ‘immaterial spirits’, to question them on their system of government (a monarchy, of course) and consult them on scientific and philosophical matters, from astronomy and weather phenomena to natural history, mathematics, logic, atoms, theology and ‘the beginning of forms’. Then she begins to make changes: she dissolves the societies she doesn’t approve of and forms new ones, and even establishes her own female-centric religion, though she ensures that this world, unlike the real one, is conspicuously free from religious persecution, with the Empress keeping her subjects ‘in a constant belief, without enforcement or blood-shed’.

In the final ‘fantastical’ section, Margaret pulls off a supreme act of vanity by making a surprise cameo as the scribe whose soul is sum-moned to help the Empress set down her founding constitution. In yet another same-sex tease, the two women form a deep, lover-like bond, travelling together to Margaret’s world to observe William; their two souls inhabit his body for a time, before Margaret is appointed the Empress’s chief advisor when invasion threatens her native country.

It’s an audacious, inventive, wonderfully weird piece of fiction – the culmination of all Margaret’s long-held ambitions to cast herself as a romance heroine, where the real and unreal, fantasy and autobiography meet.[69] Here, Margaret the First, ruler of her own imaginary empire, uses her power to create a proto-feminist utopia, free from war and religious division, where there is ‘no difference of sexes’ and women can fully participate in civic life. Only in the wildest alternate reality did such things seem possible, so Margaret created in make-believe what she couldn’t find in life: power, peace and gender equality.

As if to provide an antidote to her own oddity, Margaret’s next book was far less radical and, probably for that very reason, her most respected work during her lifetime. The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, published in 1667, was a straightforward biography of her husband, whose reputation needed a little rehabilitation; his flight from the Battle of Marston Moor hadn’t been forgotten and many of his rivals now thought him too old and unfit for political involvement. Unlike many of Margaret’s previous works, it was taken seriously by most. The historian John Rushworth used it as a source for his work on the Civil War, and two women were inspired to write similar biographies defending their husband’s war records: Lucy Hutchinson from the Parliamentarian side and Anne Fanshawe on the Royalist. Clearly, celebrating the achievements of her husband was considered a far more admirable use of Margaret’s time than scribbling on natural philosophy, outlandish other worlds or indeed her own life. And it was a celebration: as well as detailing William’s daily habits and activities, his upbringing and character, the book was a highly partial account of his political and military career, glorifying his successes, glancing over the stickier moments and hitting back at his detractors. This was William as Royalist martyr, a man who had stoically endured exile and financial castration for his loyalty to the King. The result was still remarkable in its way – it was the first biography of a husband by his wife, and was produced by a female publisher[70] – but inevitably it was a romanticised portrait seen through an adoring lover’s eyes.

As such, it still drew criticism. Samuel Pepys, always quick to belittle Margaret since she had disappointed him at the Royal Society earlier that year, began reading it the following spring but soon declared it a ‘ridiculous history’ that showed her to be ‘a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman, and [William] an ass to suffer [her] to write what she writes to him and of him’.[71] William’s crime in encouraging, rather than forbidding, his wife’s writing is ranked almost equal with Margaret’s insanity in writing it in the first place. The work was so overtly panegyric, likening the Duke’s deeds to those of Caesar, and at the same time so banal (who cared what he ate for dinner, how long he took to dress or how much money he had lost?) that, for Pepys, it was rendered an undignified and vulgar exercise that made both of them look absurd and Margaret – as usual – mad.

ALL THE TOWN-TALK

During the Cavendishes’ visit to London in the spring of 1667 – when Pepys chased Margaret all around town; when scores of children trailed in her wake; when she requested, and was granted, that historic visit to the Royal Society – one thing became quite clear: mad or not, the Duchess of Newcastle was now a celebrity. Restoration London was full of wonders, both thrilling and terrible. The backlash against Puritanism had ushered in a new era of licence, entertainment, flamboyance and festivity. The theatres had re-opened and women were walking their stages for the first time. Houses, shops, public buildings, churches and gaols had been reduced to charred skeletons, consumed by the most biblical conflagration the country had ever witnessed. And the Merry Monarch, Charles II, had presided over all, attended by his harem of mistresses. Yet still, this maimed, dazed and dazzled city was left open-mouthed with astonishment at the sight of Margaret Cavendish: the eccentrically dressed duchess who wrote fantastical books on mannish subjects and made ‘legs and bows’ instead of curtseys as if she were the heroine of one of her own romances.[72] The woman was a spectacle, and with that came the fame she had so long desired. But fame, she was learning, has its drawbacks.

The invitation to the Royal Society had caused controversy not just because Margaret was a woman, but because Margaret was Margaret. The fledgling Society’s endeavours had arrogant, atheistic, revolutionary overtones, and consequently it had enemies. Margaret had even been one of them. She agreed with many of the Society’s ideas and values, but she had criticised two of its leading members, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, in print not long before, as well as its whole programme of experimental research. Protective of the Society’s reputation, many of its members had been against the admittance of a woman who attracted ridicule and criticism, and when she finally arrived, looking like ‘a cavalier, but that she had no beard’, and the ingenious remarks that this sea of men were waiting for failed to materialise, they congratulated themselves on being proved right.[73]

Pepys’s fascination with Margaret curdled instantly, but John Evelyn, who had already started paying court to the Duke and Duchess at their house in Clerkenwell, was intrigued. After his first visit, he decided her oddities were a novel kind of amusement, proclaiming himself ‘much pleased with the extraordinary fanciful habit, garb and discourse of the Duchess’.[74] His wife, on the other hand, gave a damning verdict. Mary Evelyn conceded to a friend that Margaret had ‘a good shape, which she may truly boast of’, but had little else positive to say. Her dress was ‘fantastical’, her ‘curls and patches’ overdone, her mannerisms affected, excessive and insufferable – just like her work: ‘her gracious bows, seasonable nods, courteous stretching out of her hands, twinkling of her eyes, and various gestures of approbation, show what may be expected from her discourse, which is airy, empty, whimsical, and rambling as her books, aiming at science, difficulties, high notions, terminating commonly in nonsense, oaths, and obscenity’. Her ambition was nothing more than vanity, and what galled Mary most was that even wise, discerning men were taken in: ‘I found Doctor Charleton with her, complimenting her wit and learning in a high manner; which she took to be so much her due, that she swore if the schools did not banish Aristotle, and read Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, they did her wrong … Never did I see a woman so full of herself, so amazingly vain and ambitious.’[75]

What Mary Evelyn had missed was that much of this behaviour was Margaret’s attempt at masking her own social awkwardness. Even in middle age, as a well-known author, she was gripped by shyness at society gatherings, causing her to overcompensate with overt displays of conviviality. Nerves would make her talkative, and in the wake of those accusations that her works were not her own, she chattered about her books ‘more … than otherwise I should have done’[76] and learned passages by heart to prove her authorship.

The effect was quite the opposite of the one she was aiming for. A confident, ambitious woman translated as vulgar and arrogant, antagonising more conventional women like Mary Evelyn, who, like Dorothy Osborne, thought it improper and unchaste for a woman to write books at all, let alone books like Margaret’s. Though not uncultured herself, Mary toed the patriarchal line when it came to the ‘proper’ purpose of a woman’s life: they were ‘not born to read authors and censure the learned’, but to be of service to the sick, the poor, their husbands and children.[77] She couldn’t help drawing comparisons between Margaret and the ‘matchless’ Katherine Philips, whose respectable poems on Platonic love and friendship had been published without her consent, and who therefore fitted the modest mould of femininity to perfection: ‘What contrary miracles does this age produce,’ Mary exclaimed in her letters. ‘This lady and Mrs Philips! The one transported with the shadow of reason, the other possessed of the substance and insensible of her treasure.’

So alarmed was Mary by this new breed of woman that she would quickly remove herself from Margaret’s presence for ‘fear of infection’, and hoped that ‘as she is an original, she may never have a copy’.[78] Perhaps she had heard about Margaret’s recent trip to the theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where William’s play The Humorous Lovers (thought by Pepys to be ‘the silly play of my Lady Newcastle’s’) was being performed,[79] for on that occasion she wore a special dress of her own design that exposed her breasts, ‘all laid out to view’, revealing ‘scarlet trimmed nipples’. Such an heroic, classical, barely-there costume might have been acceptable for a court masque or a portrait, but for a trip to the theatre this was a whimsy too far.[80] It was these kinds of theatrical displays that prompted Pepys to note in his diary that ‘All the town-talk is nowadays of her extravagancies’[81] and left Mary Evelyn almost dumbstruck. Like Pepys and Dorothy Osborne, she could only conclude that Margaret Cavendish belonged in the madhouse: ‘I was surprised to find so much extravagancy and vanity in any person not confined within four walls.’

It’s not altogether surprising that some of Margaret’s fiercest critics were women. This other-worldly being, who was ‘not of mortal race, and, therefore, cannot be defined’, who could only be compared with queens and romance heroines, was flouting all the rules that other women felt obliged to live by. When Margaret was around, women like Mary Evelyn were pushed to the sidelines, expected ‘not to speak, but admire’[82] – and having always been taught to view other women as rivals rather than sisters, inevitably they sometimes resorted to jealousy, judgement, spite and even fear.

However, regardless of whether they approved of her or not, the public had made a mythical creature out of the Duchess; they talked about her, wrote about her and were desperate to catch sight of her. Margaret had courted the attention, and enjoyed being a visual spectacle, but as a social misfit striving hard to impress a sceptical crowd, she was bound to disappoint occasionally. As she struggled through the hobnobbing and learned what a fickle friend celebrity could be, perhaps the lustre wore off a little, for come July 1667, the Cavendishes returned to the peace and solitude of Welbeck, where Margaret was always happiest.

MARGARET THE FIRST

Margaret got straight back to work on her return to Welbeck, and over the next few years she concentrated on revising more works to prove just how much she had matured as a philosopher and writer. Her new editions reflected her broadened reading and contained tightened, simplified and in some cases reversed versions of her earlier arguments, with clearer explanations, defined terminology and the fancies expunged. Significantly, she also removed her most apologetic prefaces, no longer feeling the need to make excuses for her lack of education or to convince the world that what she had to say was worth hearing. After years of self-doubt, public censure and lonely trailblazing, Margaret had finally found genuine confidence as a woman writer, secure in the knowledge that her words and opinions were as valuable as anyone else’s.

It was in the nick of time, as it turned out, because for all that anyone might have expected William – some 30 years older – to go first, it was Margaret who died suddenly on 15 December 1673. She’d been indefatigable to the last, but weakened by compulsive work, a sedentary lifestyle and years of self-inflicted bleeds and purges, she ‘soon too active for her body grew’.[83] She was 50 years old.

As befitted a duchess and a celebrity, Margaret was given a grand burial at Westminster Abbey, and although William, elderly and grief-stricken, was too ill to attend, he arranged all the pageantry for his beloved, and collected for publication all the poems and letters from scholars, friends, philosophers and poets that had been written in celebration of her, in life and after her death. He joined her three years later, aged 84, and the two have lain side by side in stone effigy ever since, where Margaret, resplendent in state robes, holds an open book, pen case and inkhorn perpetually at the ready.

From her own day to this, Margaret Cavendish has been a divisive character. With each century extracting the caricature version of her that has best suited its own cultural values, from indulged aristocrat and raving madwoman to pioneering genius and visionary proto-feminist, responses to her have rarely been measured. For all those among her contemporaries who saw an ‘illustrious whore’ and ‘atheistical philosophraster’,[84] or agreed with Pepys, Osborne and Evelyn that she was mad, there were plenty who praised her achievements: Cambridge University addressed her as Margareta I, Philosophorum Princeps – ‘Margaret the First, Prince of Philosophers’; the writers John Dryden, Richard Flecknoe and Thomas Shadwell dedicated works to both her and William, grateful for their patronage, while Dr Walter Charleton believed she had ‘convinced the world, by her own heroic example, that no studies are too hard for her softer sex’. Women writers, meanwhile, were inspired by her example. The astrologer Sarah Jinner published her first almanac in 1658, praising Margaret as an exemplar of the learned woman. And scholar, tutor and writer Bathsua Makin included Margaret in her catalogue of great women, alongside Elizabeth I, Christina of Sweden and Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, in her 1673 Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen. By the end of Margaret’s life, the ‘Queen of Sciences’[85] had earned her place in English literature and, to a precious few, demonstrated that intelligence was genderless.

Eighteenth-century commentators were as torn as their predecessors, however. The general feeling was kindly, but perhaps only because Margaret’s more challenging writings on natural philosophy and women’s advancement had by then faded into the background; she was now known as a writer of dramatic fanciful tales and poetry, and as a ‘perfect pattern of conjugal love and duty’, whose crowning glory was her biography of her husband.[86] The writer, art historian and Whig politician Horace Walpole, however, was not generous. In 1758, he sneered at her ‘unbounded passion for scribbling’ and remarked that ‘though she had written philosophy, it seems she had read none’. Walpole was at least egalitarian in his slights; he found both Margaret and William equally ridiculous, ‘a picture of foolish nobility’, tucked away together in state, ‘intoxicating one another with circumstantial flattery on what was of consequence to no mortal but themselves!’[87]

Walpole’s critique was harsh, but this was the image of the Cavendishes that carried over into subsequent centuries. Most nineteenth-century editors kept in line with public taste by selecting only Margaret’s more frivolous works for publication (they particularly liked her poems on fairies), omitting anything they viewed as coarse or controversial. Yet despite this bowdlerisation, it was around this time that Margaret was first dubbed ‘Mad Madge’, a title that reduced her to some kind of lovable twit and entirely dismissed her intelligence, diversity and originality.[88]

Saddled with this dubious new moniker, her reputation was at its lowest at the onset of the twentieth century. Virginia Woolf shared Walpole’s vision of Margaret as a ‘lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers’, scribbling away ‘without audience or criticism’, and her opinion was influential. Infuriated by her upper-class impunity to criticism and her informal, undisciplined, unscholarly approach to writing, she saw in Margaret a woman with all ‘the irresponsibility of a child and the arrogance of a duchess’,[89] whose imagination was allowed to run rampant, ‘as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death’.[90] In the end, half admiring, half despairing, she summed up Margaret as ‘noble and quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted’ – only perpetuating the ‘crazy duchess’ theory.[91]

But this is the twenty-first century; as the Cheshire Cat would say, we’re all mad here. The very traits that appalled our ancestors are what appeal to us today – Margaret’s raw energy; her bold, riotous mind and unbridled curiosity; her daring, originality, versatility, ambition and eccentricity; take any of them away and it would dull her brilliance. At last she can be wholeheartedly applauded for confounding every traditional notion of what a woman should, or could, be: scientist, thinker, philosopher and one of the most flamboyant and prolific writers (male or female) of her era.

True, she was no ready-made feminist icon, but if anything, her faltering journey towards enlightenment only adds to her fascination. Throughout her imperfect career, we see almost in real time the development of a woman shaking off the barnacles of patriarchal thinking, building her confidence and learning to trust her own talent until she genuinely believes in what women can do. It’s the culmination of this process, her extraordinary, genre-defying Blazing World – not her biography of her husband – that is now regarded as her greatest work; beloved by feminist scholars, it’s one of the few still available in print.

Inevitably, Margaret’s privileged social position allowed her the relative freedom to kick down barriers that other women couldn’t, enabling her to achieve a number of historic firsts. But she was acutely aware of the perils of what she was doing. A woman of wit in seventeenth-century England ‘loses her reputation’, she wrote, for wit is sometimes ‘satirical and sometimes amorous and sometimes wanton’; it strays into ‘unfeminine’ subjects and employs coarse language, all of which ‘women should shun’. Judged by such standards, she may not have fitted anyone’s definition of either a woman or a wit except her own, but it paid off in the long run – and it was the long run that mattered to Margaret. Fame and immortality were her heart’s immodest desire, and while she found them during her lifetime, it’s perhaps only now that she is gaining the reputation she both wanted and deserves. ‘I would be known to the world by my wit, not by my folly,’ she wrote. And, ‘Who knows but after my honourable burial, I may have a glorious resurrection in following ages, since time brings strange and unusual things to pass.’[92] She was right. It would take nearly four centuries, but the day would come when the world was ready for Margaret the First, Duchess of Newcastle.

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