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