After Henry VIII closed down the last legal brothels in 1546, prostitutes lived with the constant threat of arrest and punishment. One of Dekker’s ‘whores’ was ‘burnt [deflowered] at fourteen, seven times whipt, sixe times carted, nine times duck’d, search’d by some hundred and fifty Constables’.65 Much of the blame for the existence of the sex trade was laid at the door of the women involved: they were lustful creatures who lured poor innocent men into their clutches. In July 1614, Sir Thomas Myddelton, the Lord Mayor of London, wrote to the Lord Chamberlain, that he ‘had informed himself, by means of spies, of many lewd houses, and had gone himself disguised to divers of them, and finding these nurseries of villainy, had punished them according to their deserts, some by carting and whipping, and many by banishment’.66 One wonders why exactly he felt the need to go in person, and indeed how he disguised himself on these visits. When it came to the punishments, however, he was absolutely sincere. Many prostitutes were sent to the London Bridewell, which had been established as a ‘house of correction’ in 1553. For women who worked in Westminster, ‘lewd and disorderly behaviour’ was also dealt with at the Westminster Quarter Sessions, which met in Westminster Hall from 1618.67 As the Lord Mayor said, punishments included being taken through the streets of London in the back of a cart, flogging, a fine, banishment from the city, or imprisonment in Bridewell prison, where inmates were forced to beat hemp and spin flax. In the 1612 ballad Whipping Cheer, Or the woeful lamentations of three Sisters in the Spittle when they were in new Bridewell the women sing:
Gold and silver hath forsaken,
Our acquaintance clearly:
Twinned whipcord takes the place.
And strikes t’our shoulders nearly.
‘If the wheel leave turning’, they are whipped. If they stop thumping the hemp, they are whipped. Their hands are blistered and the eldest sister ‘cannot endure the labour / which is thrust upon her’.68
By the early 1630s, some prostitutes were being banished to Virginia. In Massinger’s The City Madam (1632) ‘Strumpets and Bawds’ are ‘shipp’d thither’, ‘For the abomination of their life, / Spew’d out of their own Country’.69 Some thought this wasn’t enough. In 1583, the Puritan pamphleteer Philip Stubbes had proposed a return to the medieval practice of facially branding women found guilty of prostitution. The clergyman Donald Lupton called for nothing less than the death penalty.70
Bawds such as the Bankes took precautions to avoid detection. Their houses had ‘back-doors to come in and out by undiscovered; sliding windows also, and trap-boards in floors, to hide whores behind and under, with false counterfeit panes in walls, to be opened and shut like a wicket’71 But no one could evade suspicion forever. In March 1624 the Provost Marshal, Daniel Powell, accused Mrs Bankes of ‘supposed misdemeanours’ before the Westminster Sessions.72 Although the marshals were meant to police the ‘houses of persons notoriously suspected . . . for lewd and incontinent life’, they were not always particularly effective. In 1602, one commentator complained that ‘there be more notorious strumpets and their mates about the city and the suburbs than ever were before the [Provost] Marshall was appointed’.73 So it proved for Jane Bankes; Powell failed to ‘manifest’ his accusations, and she escaped punishment.
Only when a private citizen pursued the Bankes, with the collusion of one of their own lodgers, were they were brought to justice. Towards the end of June 1625, Clement Edwards, a Cambridge graduate and former rector of Witherley in Leicestershire, came to London in search of his wife, Anne.74 He found her lodging in the Bankes’s bawdy house, where she was ‘suspected to live incontinently’, and on 24 June, he lodged an indictment before the Westminster Sessions.75 The formal Latin of the document is punctuated with the English phrase ‘keeping a common brothel house’. The Latin word used to mean brothel was lupanum, derived from the word lupo for wolf. The Italians used the related word Lupanerie to describe ‘those secret chambers of harlots wherein they filthily prostituted their bodies to sale . . . because they after the manner of ravening she-wolves catch hold of silly wretched men and pluck them into their holes’.76 Edwards’s indictment complained that the Bankes’s house contained:
divers persons of evil behaviour and manners committed adultery and fornication by day as by night, to the great displeasure of Almighty God, the corruption and destruction of youth, the great disquietude of the neighbours dwelling near the aforesaid house and to the evil and perilous example of others in the like delinquent.77
It seems the court was very busy that year, as the case was not mentioned again until the February 1625 Epiphany Session, presided over by Dr Roger Bates, chaplain to Charles I.78 By this time, Clement Edwards had found an ally in Mary Hall, the other woman who, like his wife, permanently lodged at the Bankes’s house. No doubt Hall blamed Mrs Bankes for luring her into the business. According to the written information she supplied to the court, Mrs Bankes had sold her maidenhead twice, first to ‘one Master Freake’ and ‘the second time to one Master Waferer’. She may have been particularly put out by how much of the money found its way into Mrs Bankes’s pockets and how little of it into hers. Mr Freake had paid Mrs Bankes ten ‘pieces’ (£11) and Hall £2 2s. Her cut from Mr Waferer’s visit had been £1 7s, while Mrs Bankes had received £7 14s. Both instances were a long way from the usual 50/50 split between bawd and prostitute.
Mary Hall’s testimony was taken before Roger Bates on 23 February 1626. As well as recounting the two instances where Mrs Bankes had sold her virginity, and describing Anne Cobbie, she provided the names and addresses of nine ‘whores’ who ‘resort. . . daily to the said Bankes his house’. In the same session, recognisances (bonds) were taken for the key individuals – Mr and Mrs Bankes, Anne Edwards and Mary Hall – to appear at the next sessions, to be held in the Trinity Term. Their neighbours promised to ensure their appearance, on pain of a financial penalty if they did not. In the mean time, all were enjoined to be ‘of good behaviour’.
The Trinity session was presided over by Dr Peter Heywood. Heywood was one of those who had discovered the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. He was supposedly the man who seized Fawkes’s lantern in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament. He met his end on 21 November 1640, when a Catholic assassin stabbed him in Westminster Hall as he showed a friend a list of local ‘suspected and notorious Papists’.79 Clement Edwards himself appeared before the court on 4 June 1626, after which the Grand Jury committed the case for trial at the next Quarter Session.80 John and Jane Bankes were placed on remand. Their names appear on the list of ‘prisoners remaining in the custody of the Keeper of the Gatehouse since the last sessions’, dated 23 June 1626. It was of the Gatehouse Prison, close to Westminster Abbey, that the poet Richard Lovelace wrote: ‘Stone walls do not a prison make, / Nor iron bars a cage’.81 It was a real enough prison for the Bankes. In July they were summoned by the court to formally deny the charges made against them, but even though they were to ‘appear at the next sessions’ there is no mention of them in Michaelmas 1626, nor thereafter, and they do not appear on the next list of prisoners in October.82 As for Anne Cobbie, it seems that the Westminster authorities took no interest in pursuing her, in spite of Mary Hall naming her as a prostitute.
Venereal disease was as much of a danger to prostitutes as the law. Another regular at the Bankes’s house had succumbed; Mary Hall reported that Thomasine Greene ‘now lies sick of the pox in Turnbull Street and is almost consumed with them’. The ‘pox’ was a general term for sexually transmitted diseases, but most likely referred to gonorrhoea or syphilis.
The blame for the pox was always placed elsewhere. The English called it ‘the French pox’, in France it was ‘the Spanish pox’ or ‘the evil of Naples’, while others thought it originated in the New World. Wherever it came from, syphilis was widespread in England by this time. The surgeon William Clowes called it ‘the pestilent infection of filthy lust... a sickness very loathsome, odious, troublesome and dangerous, which spreadeth itself throughout all England and ove
rfloweth as I think the whole world’. It was all the result of ‘the filthy life of many lewd and idle persons, both men and women, about the city of London’.83 Young men were warned to avoid brothels for fear of infection:
Breathe, breathe awhile, my over-heated Muse,
Before you enter their accursed Stews;
Where Aches, Buboes, Shankers, Nodes and Poxes,
Are hid in Females Damn’d Pandora’s Boxes.84
Prostitutes were blamed for incubating the disease, and one part of their body in particular was described as the site of infection: ‘the mixture of so many Seeds does occasion such a Corruption in the Passage of the Matrix, that it degenerates into a proper virulent Ferment’.85 The disease could result in unsightly ulcers, paralysis, blindness, madness and ‘saddle nose’, where the bridge of the nose collapses entirely. Sir William Davenant – poet, playwright and godson (and, as he would have it, actual son) of William Shakespeare – ‘got a terrible clap of a Black* handsome wench that lay in Axe-yard, Westminster . . . which cost him his Nose’.86
There was no effective cure, but plenty of suggested remedies. These ranged from mercury treatment – hence ‘A night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury’ – to stewed prunes, which were often served in brothels.87 In 1615 Gervase Markham’s The English Huswife included a recipe for an ointment made with grains of paradise, which could have come from River Cestos.88 It was also thought that ‘hard pissing’ immediately after coitus would flush out the disease and to this end, two chamber pots were kept under each bed.89 Most thought on prevention and cure focused on the male victims, with little concern spared for the women, who were thought of as disease carriers. The prevailing wisdom was that women couldn’t easily contract syphilis, because the uterus was supposedly cold, dry and dense.90 In reality, many women died of venereal disease, and prostitutes were at high risk. If Anne Cobbie did contract such a disease, even if did not kill her, it would eventually have left her unable to work.
Sex work was hard work, and it took its toll, as many contemporary commentators noted. John Taylor ended his poem on ‘A Whore’ with the lines: ‘And so I leave her ... To mend or end, when age or / Pox will make her / Detested, and Whore-masters all forsake her’.91 ‘Ere they come to forty, you shall see them worn to the bare bone’, Thomas Nashe wrote, ‘At twenty their lively colour is lost, their faces are sodden & parboiled with French surfeits [syphilitic sores]’.92 The playwright Henry Chettle estimated that most women were broken after seven years of such work. Barnabe Rich wrote in My Lady’s Looking Glasse (1616) that ‘the harlot that is once past thirty-five years is fitter to furnish a Hospital then to garnish a bed chamber’.93 Had Anne Cobbie required medical treatment for venereal disease, she could have sought help at St Thomas’s or St Bartholomew’s hospitals, which both treated such cases. From 1622 ‘foul women’ were sent to Kingsland Hospital in Hackney, but there were only twenty beds and the care was expensive, not to mention mostly ineffective.94
Another consequence of having regular sex was that Anne Cobbie might have become pregnant. On 3 July 1626, shortly after the Bankes were imprisoned in the Gatehouse, an abandoned child was found in Somerset yard, a large stable to the west of Somerset House. This palace, situated at the western end of St Clements Danes, had been built by Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, during Edward VI’s reign, but by 1626 it was in royal hands; the architect Inigo Jones was in the process of remodelling it for Queen Henrietta Maria. The child was baptised ‘Elizabeth’ at St Mary Le Strand, Westminster. It was noted ‘the father [was] supposed to bee a blackmore’ as contemporary medical theory credited the male seed with determining a child’s physical characteristics.95 The ancient Greek doctor Galen, who still held currency in sixteenth-century England, had written that ‘the female semen is exceedingly weak and unable to advance to that state of motion in which it could impress an artistic form upon the foetus’.96 African women giving birth to dark-skinned children fathered by Englishmen would have confused Tudor doctors. It’s impossible to know if this child was Anne Cobbie’s, but she could have been.
Cobbie wouldn’t have been the only African woman in England with an illegitimate child. There were at least twenty-six such children, born to black mothers, recorded between 1578 and 1640. Sixteen of these were baptised or buried in Devon, six in London, two in Bristol, the rest in Cornwall, Dorset and Kent. Edith, the daughter of Katalina ‘a blacamore’, was a typical case. On her baptism at Sherborne Abbey, Dorset, in January 1631, the parish clerk summarised the circumstances of her birth with the Latin word ‘spuria’ (from which we derive the word ‘spurious’).97 Illegitimacy was common enough, regardless of ethnicity; 4% of children were born illegitimate in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. While Tudor and Stuart society disapproved of sex outside marriage, communities were used to dealing with it.98 The parish authorities were always keen to establish the identity of the father because if they didn’t they became responsible for the child’s maintenance. To this end, they put pressure on midwives to do their best to extract this information during the throes of labour. If the supposed father failed to support his child, the courts could pursue him, even if the child hadn’t yet been born. We know the names of about half of the fathers of illegitimate children born to African mothers in this period. Some are known to us because they were held to account for their misdemeanours, just as other men were in cases involving Englishwomen. For example, in Poole in 1609–10, the town authorities received £1 15s from Francis Kent:
for releasing him of his punishment, inflicted on him at the quarter sessions, the which he was adjudged unto for begetting a bastard on the Blackmore Elizabeth Ferdinando which was given towards the reparacon of the Church.99
Anne Cobbie’s liaisons with the men of Westminster were one extreme of a spectrum of inter-racial relationships that existed in this period: from prostitution, via fornication, where no money changed hands, to long-term relationships and the occasional marriage. The church courts policed the moral crime of fornication alongside offences such as drinking during divine service, slander and failing to pay church tithes. The worst sentence that could be passed by the English church courts was excommunication. From 1563, adulterers in Scotland could be given the death penalty, in line with the thinking of Protestant reformers including John Knox, Luther, Calvin and Zwingli. In reality, the sentence was rarely carried out.100
Both African men and women were punished by the church courts for having sex outside marriage. In February 1593, Joanna Bennett of Grays Thurrock, Essex, was brought before the Church court at West Ham and charged with ‘having carnal knowledge and abusing her body with a certain blackmore now dwelling in the town’. The following January one Agnes Musby did penance for ‘fornication with Paul, a blakemore’ in Aldingbourne, West Sussex. Paul himself didn’t respond to the court’s summons and in so doing he risked being banned from entering church.101 These relationships show a very physical acceptance of Africans into Tudor and early Stuart society.
As the popularity of family history and genealogy soars, and the accuracy of DNA tests increases, more and more people are discovering they have African ancestry. A man named Peter Bluck, living in Wales, recently traced his family tree back to Henry Jetto, who as we learnt in earlier chapters was the gardener to Sir Henry Bromley in Worcestershire, before he left to establish his own household some time before he died in 1627. Other Jetto descendants are currently living in Birmingham, Bristol, Cheshire, Durham, Manchester and Surrey, as well as in Australia and in the USA.102 The North Carolina descendants of Adam Ivey (1640–1710) of Virginia have been found through DNA testing to have Mandinka genes, from Western Gambia, and are investigating whether this could have come via Gylman Ivie, an African who lived in Gloucestershire in the 1570s.103 When West African DNA was found in seven Yorkshiremen with the surname ‘Revis’ in 2007, it was assumed they had a shared ancestor who had come to England as a slave in the eighteenth century. Our new-found knowledge of the Black Tudors means tha
t their shared genes could be traced back to Anne Cobbie’s time or earlier.104 Generations of intermarriage later, modern descendants of the Black Tudors and Stuarts bear no visual markers of African identity. There may be hundreds of residents of Britain and her former colonies walking around oblivious of this genetic inheritance, but modern science has the power to render these connections visible once more.
If Anne Cobbie survived the perils of punishment, pox, and pregnancy, she might have gone on to become a bawd with her own establishment. In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Mistress Overdone, now a ‘powdered bawd’, was once a ‘fresh whore’. In Thomas Cranley’s Amanda: or the Reformed Whore, ‘The Mistress of the house where thou dost lie / Hath formerly been of the self-same trade: / One that long since hath sold her honesty, / And now is turn’d from Whore unto a Bawd’.105 Or Cobbie might even have left the bawdy world behind and married. Just as some women fell into prostitution having received false promises of marriage, some wed and left it behind them.106 There is a record at St Clements Danes for the marriage of an Anne Cobbie and Richard Sherwood on 11 June 1626. He may have been the haberdasher of that name who took on an apprentice in 1629.107 We can’t be sure this was the same woman, but the timing of the wedding fits well with the dates of the Westminster Sessions case. The Bankes were called to appear before the court in the first few days of that month, and were imprisoned by 23 June. It certainly would have been an opportune moment for Cobbie to move on with her life.
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