Roaring Girl: London’s Sharp-Elbowed, Loudmouthed Mary Frith
How Mary Frith’s reputation changed from bawdy rogue to defender of the patriarchy.
Moll CutPurse smoking.
When James VI of Scotland took the English crown in 1603, it was heralded as a blessed return to normality. For the previous forty-one years, the natural order had been put on its head by the reign of Elizabeth I, a woman performing the ultimate male duty. Elizabeth’s reign had necessarily been an act of political transvestism. She presented herself as the Virgin Queen, the chaste goddess, but also as the guardian of divinely ordained power; she wore dresses from the neck down, but the crown upon her head remained inherently male. “I have the body of a woman,” she famously reminded her people, “but the heart and stomach of a king.” Elizabeth’s accession sparked a preoccupation with masculine women in England. Within twenty years of the beginning of her reign, there were reports that females had been seen strutting along the streets of London wearing men’s breeches and doublets, in brazen contravention of the law. When the writer William Harrison encountered some of these imposters in the capital he swore that it “passed my skill to discern whether they were men or women.”
For centuries, clothes had served as a marker and enforcer of one’s station in life. Yet, Elizabeth feared that the rapid growth of England’s cities, and the spending habits of an emerging class of wealthy merchants, was causing what one contemporary commentator termed “a mingle mangle of apparel
