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