So that the devil will be doing still,
Either with public or with private ill.
As Bishop Latimer put it in a sermon preached before Edward VI in 1549: ‘Ye have but changed the place, and not taken the whoredom away . . . there is now more whoredom in London than ever there was on the [South] Bank’.21 By the late 1570s there were at least one hundred ‘houses of salary sensuality’ in the city, where men could ‘have harlots as readily and commonly as men have vittles honestly in vitteling houses for their money’.22
Africans had lived in Westminster since at least 1571, when ‘Margrueta, a Moore’ was buried at St Martin in the Fields.23 Between 1586 and 1624, eleven other Africans were buried in Westminster’s four parishes, three of them in Cobbie’s parish of St Clement Danes. Five Africans were baptised in Westminster between 1620 and 1634. While many were not recorded as belonging to a particular household, some worked for courtiers, including Fortunatus, servant to Sir Robert Cecil. Mary was a maid to William Stallenge, the former MP for Plymouth and the Keeper of the King’s silkworms. She was buried in 1609, the same year Stallenge published his treatise Instructions for the Increasing of Mulberie Trees, and the King employed him to set up a mulberry garden in Westminster.24 The Crown sought to establish a native production of the silk that, as Reasonable Blackman could attest, was so fashionable and profitable at this time.
Some of the Africans in Westminster were brought there from southern Europe by members of the nobility or gentry. In 1621 a five-year-old child named Maria was baptised at St Martin in the Fields. She was ‘valde nigra’, (very black). Born in Barbary, she’d been taken to London from Spain by the courtier Endymion Porter.25 With a Spanish grandmother and an uncle in the Spanish diplomatic service, it was only natural for the young Endymion to spend time in Spain. He served as a member of the Duke of Olivares’s household from 1605 to 1607, and returned to the country at least twice in the following two decades.26 Another African girl was brought to Westminster in July 1623 by Aletheia Howard, Countess of Arundel. The letter-writer John Chamberlain reported the event to Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador to the Netherlands:
The Countesse of Arundel is now upon her return for she hath sent some forerunners before, three Italian massaras [female servants] (whereof one is a blackamore) and a Gondola, which I doubt will not so well brook our river, where there is commonly so much wind.27
To Chamberlain, the idea of a gondola being blown about the Thames was far more incongruous and noteworthy than the arrival of an African servant at Arundel House, one of the stately mansions that lined the Strand. Like the gondola, she hailed from Venice, where the Countess had lived since 1620, spending most of her time collecting art.28 As we saw in Chapter Two, there had been Africans in Venice for more than a century by this time. For visiting English aristocrats, they were literally part of the picture: Anthony Van Dyck included African attendants both in his portrait of the diplomat George Gage, a friend of the Arundels, and in The Continence of Scipio, featuring the Duke of Buckingham.29 He painted both these works during Lady Arundel’s sojourn in Italy, where he was part of her circle.
Few women voluntarily chose prostitution as a career. Many recounted that they had been tricked into it by ‘fair words and great promises’. Some had received guarantees of marriage that proved as worthless as the men who gave them once the deed was done, leaving them with little choice but to turn to prostitution.30 Others were preyed upon by ‘women-brokers’ who were said to visit households, ‘demanding of... Maid-servants if they do like of their services: if not, then they will tell them they will help them to a better service, and so allure them’ to abandon their employment. The maids who left boarded with one of these brokers and while awaiting their new, better job, ‘they be oftentimes made Harlots’ by ‘lewd young men that resort to those houses ... to their undoing, and the great hurt of the Common-wealth’.31
Unscrupulous masters and mistress sometimes forced their servants into the trade. In April 1605, Eme Finch said ‘her mistress would often times force her to go up into a room to be naughty with divers men who resorted to the house’.32 Being ‘naughty’ had a far stronger sexual connotation then, as ‘naught’ or ‘nothing’ was slang for the female genitals, which lacked a ‘thing’.33 Hence, when Ophelia says ‘I think nothing my lord’, Hamlet’s response is ‘That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs’.34
Some women were the victims of their own parents. Judith Hill, a widow, pimped out her own daughter in 1603, and James Baron, a tailor of St Margaret’s Westminster, was accused in June 1627 of ‘procuring his daughter and a gentleman to meet together whereby she was got with child’.35 The Bankes themselves may have abused their daughter Frances in this way. Although one lodger described her as ‘a modest civil maid’, another asked ‘hath your mother sold your maidenhead?’ Frances was supposedly so upset at this suggestion that she died of grief.
In the grip of extreme poverty, some women thought it better to prostitute their bodies than to steal. Young women who arrived in London from the countryside could not always find the respectable work they sought. Bawds haunted the typical drop-off points and preyed on new arrivals, enticing them to work in their brothels: in 1612, the Clerkenwell madam Katherine Fuller took ‘country wenches from the carriers’ and ‘put them into gentlemen’s apparel’ to ‘play the whore’.36
Anne Cobbie ‘often’ frequented the Bankes’s house, but she didn’t live there. She may have been one of the women who worked at various bawdy houses, such as Anne Smith, who had ‘layen at Wattwood’s, Marshall’s, Jane Fuller’s, Martyn’s, Shaw’s, and other naughty houses’.37 At least eight other women worked from the Bankes’s house at this time, but most of them resided elsewhere. Only two actually lived there: Anne Edwards, a minister’s wife, and a young woman named Mary Hall. This fits with the average number of women lodged in a bawdy house, which was two or three.38 Some lived nearby on the Strand: Margaret Hammond lived near the White Hart and Mary Etherington at the Windmill. Elizabeth Ratcliffe was also close at hand, lodging at a broker’s house near Scroope’s Court in Holborn. Further afield were Elizabeth Hales, in Cloth Fair by Smithfield, and Sara Waters, near the Three Tunnes at Ratcliffe. Both Elizabeth and Sara lived with their mothers. Sara’s sister Jane had previously boarded with the Bankes, but by February 1626 she had died. Another woman named Mary, of unknown address, ‘resorted daily’ to the Bankes’s house.
John Bankes was a tailor by trade, but by the 1620s he and his wife were making quite a substantial amount on the side by keeping a bawdy house. It may have been Mrs Bankes who masterminded the business, as the majority of bawds were women, though some houses were kept by husband and wife teams.39 The Bankes would have had connections with several pimps who supplied them with women, such as the ‘broker’ who lived near Scroope’s Court in Holborn, where Elizabeth Ratcliffe lodged. They needed a regular supply of fresh recruits. One of their workforce, Jane Waters, had died recently and another, Thomasine Greene, was very ill from ‘the pox’. And if their late daughter Frances had worked for them, then she too needed to be replaced.
Mary Hall had heard Anne Cobbie herself, and various men, say that ‘they had rather give her a piece to lie with her than another five shillings because of her soft skin’. A piece was a gold coin worth 22 shillings. In the eyes of these men, Cobbie was worth almost five times more than other women. The ‘set price of a strumpet’s soul’ varied enormously. In the 1590s Thomas Nashe spoke of ‘sixpenny whoredom’ in the same breath as he declared the normal fee to be half-a-crown (two shillings and sixpence).40 In Dekker’s 1630s comedy, The Honest Whore, Part II, a bawd is asked ‘how many twelve-penny Fees, nay two shillings Fees, nay, when any Ambassadors have been here, how many half-crown Fees hast thou taken?’41 High-class courtesans commanded the steepest prices, while streetwalkers could be considerably cheaper. Elizabeth Compe, ‘a very lewd quean and a notorious whore’, was said to be ‘naughty with anyone’ for two pence in 1609.42
Anne Cobbie and the other women of the Bankes’s house would have been dressed in ‘gorgeous attire’. The Bridewell court books are full of descriptions of sumptuous costumes of silk, satin, velvet, tufted taffeta and fur, decorated with gold embroidery or pearls. Mistress Hibbens kept a wardrobe full of ‘silk gowns of several colours, as also silk rash gowns and other stuffe gowns, petticoats of durance with two or three yards velvet as also smocks of Holland’ for use in her bawdy house. The heroine of Thomas Cranley’s 1635 poem, Amanda: or the Reformed Whore, has gowns, jewels, ruffs, muffs, fans and perfume in abundance:
Now in the richest colours maybe had,
The next day, all in mourning blacke, and sad . . .
The next time, rushing in thy Silken weeds,
Embroyder’d, lac’t, perfum’d, in glittering shew,
Rich like a Lady, and attended so.
Mistress Frances, of Thomas Nashe’s Choice of Valentines (c. 1593), appears ‘in her velvet gowns / And ruffs, and periwigs as fresh as May’, and confounds the ‘hero’ Tomalin with her ‘rattling silks’.43 Such dress was par for the course, especially for women like Anne Cobbie who aimed to attract a higher class of clientele.
Cobbie’s occupation was less salubrious than Reasonable Blackman’s but, like his, it made her financially independent. There is no suggestion that she was directly employed by the Bankes, nor that she was any more dependent on them than the other women who worked from their house, all of whom would have given Mrs Bankes half their takings. Katherine Jones ‘had to do carnally with many men’ in Jane Fuller’s house on St John Street in Clerkenwell, ‘and she had her half always of the money for her whoredome’. Lodging and food cost another four to six shillings per week, but as Cobbie didn’t live at the Bankes’s, she may have paid less to use of one of their rooms.44 Her popularity allowed her to demand higher rates, which could have proved quite lucrative over time. If, like the Clerkenwell prostitute Elizabeth Kirkham, she entertained up to four clients a day she could have made hundreds of pounds a year, and even after losing half to Mrs Bankes, she would still have made a tidy profit.
Working in St Clements Danes put Anne Cobbie in a good position to attract well-to-do clients. A constant flow of gentlemen came to Westminster to attend Parliament, to attend the royal court at Whitehall in search of preferment, to pursue legal suits, or even simply to shop, especially after James I opened the New Exchange shopping centre that he called ‘Britain’s Burse’ in 1609. Well-to-do visitors often rented accommodation from men such as John Cleeves of St Clements Danes, who kept a large and ‘fair’ house ‘by the sign of the Black Boy’ to lodge gentlemen during term-time for thirty years from 1605. In the 1620s, large houses with gardens intended for ‘the use of some great person’ were built in Drury Lane. In the following decade, the Earl of Bedford continued this trend, with his development of Covent Garden. St Clements Danes was also one of the two main churches attended by the gentry.45 Despite what they might hear from the pulpit, gentlemen in town for business, and away from home, might be tempted to visit women like Anne Cobbie, who just happened to be very close by.
The Bankes’s house was also well placed for the Inns of Court and Chancery, especially St Clements Inn, which was, as the name suggests, close by the church of St Clements Danes. In Thomas Dekker and John Webster’s Westward Ho! (c. 1604) Luce boasts of Inns of Court men amongst her long list of clients. She has so many that she can ‘suffer one to keep me in diet, another in apparel; another in Physic; another to pay my house rent’.46
Not only gentlemen and lawyers called. One sample of 219 Elizabethan clients whose status can be identified from the Bridewell records shows that 39% were apprentices and servants, 12% craftsmen and tradesmen, 11% gentlemen, 11% foreign merchants, 7.8% ambassador’s retinues, 5% servants of bishops and aristocrats, 3% young men of the Inns and 2% aristocrats.47 There were 20,000–30,000 thousand unmarried apprentices in seventeenth-century London. Such was their propensity for visiting prostitutes that every Shrove Tuesday they rioted and pulled down bawdy houses, to remove temptation during Lent.48 In the 1612 ballad, Whipping Cheer, the prostitutes sing: ‘If the London Prentices, / And other good men of fashion / Would but refrain our companies, / Then woe to our occupation’.49 Thomas Nashe said that servants and apprentices stole money from their masters in order to purchase sex, though of course he blamed the women: ‘Prentices and poor servants they encourage to rob their masters’.50
Cobbie’s customers were not necessarily all Englishmen; there is more evidence of African men visiting prostitutes in this period than of African women working as prostitutes. In May 1577, ‘Peter Peringoe, a blackamore’ confessed before the Bridewell Court that he’d had ‘the use of the body of one Margery Williams here present ... in one Sawyers house in Clerk Alley in Bishopsgate on Mondaye last’. Although she denied it, Richard Dobson, Beadle of the Ward, testified that ‘they were taken a bed together’. In December of the same year, ‘Jane Thompson a harlot’ was whipped because ‘she consented to commit whoredom with one Anthony a blackamore’. They were also caught in bed together, with ‘the door locked to them’. In her evidence to the Bridewell court in January 1578, Elizabeth Kirkham testified that Rose Brown, a ‘common bawd’ and a ‘whore of evil fame’, had ‘divers serving men blackamores and other persons resort to her house whilst this Elizabeth dwelt there’.51 Elizabeth and Rose were both prostitutes; they worked for Gilbert East, who ran a brothel in Turnbull Street, and Lucy Baynham, who ran another brothel in Clerkenwell. So, some of Anne Cobbie’s encounters may also have been with African men who did not lack the wherewithal to pay for sex.
* * *
Contemporary evidence of what went on behind locked doors is hard to come by, especially from a woman’s point of view. Nashe’s Choice of Valentines provides a man’s account. Despite the romantic title, it is so explicit that it went unpublished until 1899, and even then was only available to private subscribers. Nashe describes a young man named Tomalin’s visit to a ‘house of venerie’. He is met by ‘a foggie three-chinned dame / That used to take young wenches for to tame’. She insists he pays in advance, only unlocking the door after Tomalin has handed over the money. ‘Dame Bawd’ leads him ‘by blind meanders and by crankled ways’ until they come to a ‘shady loft / where Venus’ bouncing vestals skirmish oft’. There he is seated in a leather chair and introduced to a pair of women, ‘To choose of them which might content mine eye’. He rejects both, insisting he must ‘have fresher ware’. Eventually the bawd produces Frances, the young woman he came to see, all the while warning him that her charms will come at a higher price. What follows seems more the product of Nashe’s feverish imagination, designed for what Pepys called ‘one-handed reading’, than an accurate report.52 The poet’s ‘hero’ suffers premature ejaculation at the sight of Frances’s ‘lofty buttock bared with azure veins’, and although she is able to raise his ‘silly worm’ from its ‘swoon’, he is unable to keep it up for long, and all too soon ‘life forsakes his fleshly residence’ once more.53 At this point she whips out a dildo, which ‘stands as stiff, as he were made of steel’ and ‘plays at peacock twixt [her] legs right blithe, /And doeth [her] tickling swage with many a sigh’. Nashe’s harlot is a woman who enjoys sex:
With Oh, and Oh, she itching moves her hips,
And to and fro, full lightly starts and skips.
She jerks her legs, and sprawleth with her heels,
No tongue may tell the solace that she feels.54
We cannot know exactly what Anne Cobbie did with her clients or how she felt about it. However, Peter Lowe, a Scottish surgeon who worked for Henry IV of France, commented that ‘common women take not so great pleasure, because they are accustomed night and day to exercise venerie’.55 His words sound much closer to the truth than Nashe’s fantastical verse.
Anne Cobbie said herself that men were prepared to pay above the odds for her soft skin; they don’t appear to have been put off by its colour. Indeed, in one p
lay of 1658, a ‘wencher’ boasts that he has ‘tasted ... of all complexions / From the white flaxen to the tawny-moor’.56 Not everyone shared this character’s attitude. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1595), Lysander rejects Hermia with the line: ‘Away you Ethiop!’57 In Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness and its sequel, the Masque of Beauty, performed by Queen Anne of Denmark and her ladies at court in 1605 and 1606, the black daughters of Niger seek beauty and become white, thanks to the rays of the British sun, which represented King James.58 To render herself unattractive to other men, Pamphilia of Mary Wroth’s 1621 sonnet cycle, ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’, wishes to be a ‘Black-moore or any thing more dreadful’.59 However, these very same texts also include references to black beauty. Jonson’s Niger praises his daughter’s looks, ‘their beauties conquer in great beauty’s war’, which ‘no age can change’; a seventeenth-century precursor to the modern phrase ‘black don’t crack’.60 In the end, Wroth’s Pamphilia marries the noble and heroic Rodomandro, King of Tartaria, whose skin is dark.61
Ambiguous attitudes to skin colour also appear in poetry. In one of his Dark Lady sonnets Shakespeare proclaims ‘now is black beauty’s successive heir’ while in another he speaks of a ‘woman colour’d ill’. Some critics have argued these verses should be renamed the ‘black woman sonnets’. Not only are the Lady’s breasts ‘dun’, but ‘black wires grow on her head’ and her eyes are ‘raven black’.62 New evidence of African women living in Shakespeare’s London only strengthens this proposal. Other seventeenth-century poets certainly contemplated the beauty of black women, in verses such as On an Ethiopian Beauty, One Enamour’d on a Black-moor and Sonnet of Black Beauty.63
On the stage, Cleopatra, who has a ‘tawny front’ like Cobbie and is ‘with Phoebus’s amorous pinches black’, is so desirable that Antony is tempted to leave Rome, and ultimately to die for her. As his friend Enobarbus comments: ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / her infinite variety. Other women cloy / the appetites they feed, but she makes hungry / where most she satisfies’. There are even literary echoes of the emphasis on Cobbie’s soft skin. In Lust’s Dominion (1600), the Queen of Spain talks of her lover as the ‘soft-skinned Negro’. The Frenchman Montferrat of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Knight of Malta (1616–18) tells the black maid Zanthia or Abdella: ‘thou art more soft / And full of dalliance than the fairest flesh, And farre more loving’. He calls her his ‘black swan, silk’ner then Signet’s plush’. Anne Cobbie’s skin may have attracted similar compliments. And, like Zanthia, she might well have replied ‘I ... know ... I am as full of pleasure in the touch / As ere a white-fac’d puppet of ‘em all’.64
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