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