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