Yet for all the legal prohibitions, the writings and preaching of theologians, and the warnings of medical men, Englishmen and Englishwomen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seem to have been by no means inhibited sexually. The lower middle classes were undoubtedly prudish; but the views of the upper classes were reflected in the pronouncement of Mrs Manley who described sexual pleasure as an inestimable delight, ‘the greatest that human nature is capable of enjoying’. Erasmus Darwin considered it the ‘chef d’ oevre, the masterpiece of nature’.
Now that you know what’s what, and the best and worst that man can do unto you, you will give me leave to wish you joy [Lord Monmouth wrote to his niece shortly after her wedding, adding, for the benefit of her unmarried sister who was ill], you may tell her that such an ingredient as you have had of late would do her more good than any physick she can take. But she is too good and too handsome to lack it long if she have a mind to it … But you will be better to preach this doctrine to her now that you have tried it yourself.14
It was generally agreed that the illnesses which afflicted unmarried girls were dispelled by copulation, and that the female orgasm was an aid to conception; while for men sexual activity was often deemed essential to health and the retention of semen deleterious. ‘I was afraid I was going to have an attack of gout the other day,’ Lord Carlisle once said. ‘I believe I live too chaste. It is not a common fault with me.’15 All but the severest Puritans believed that provided it was performed at appropriate times and without immoderate lust, there was nothing sinful about marital sex, ‘whatever hypocrites’, in Milton’s words, ‘austerely talk’.16 The medieval phrasing of the marriage service – ‘with my body I thee worship’ – was adopted in the Protestant Prayer Book of 1548, and, while attempts were made to alter it at the Savoy Conference between Anglicans and Presbyterians in 1661, it has continued into our own day.17
The open freedom with which Englishwomen greeted visitors with kisses had long delighted foreigners. ‘Wherever you come you are received with a kiss by all,’ Erasmus had written in 1499. ‘When you take your leave, you are dismissed with kisses; you return, kisses are repeated. They come to visit you, kisses again; they leave you, you kiss them all round. Should they meet you anywhere, kisses in abundance; in fine, wherever you move, there is nothing but kisses.’ It was a habit that persisted. In 1620 it was said that saluting strangers with a kiss was considered immodest in a foreigner, but merely civil in England, and at the end of the eighteenth century it was still considered ‘the form of salutation peculiar to our nation’.18
As Samuel Pepys’s diaries strongly indicate, women in the late seventeenth century rarely raised a strong objection to more intimate contact than kissing. Pepys was fascinated by the prostitutes that he saw at their doors in Fleet Alley, Long Acre, Drury Lane and in Moorfields, but tempted though he was to enter their houses, he resisted the impulse; and when he did once go into one, the ‘jade’, thinking, so he supposed, that he would not give her enough money, ‘would not offer to invite to do anything’ and he was glad ‘to escape without any inconvenience’. Numerous other women, however, he kissed and fondled and stroked, and if he was not always permitted to do everything that he wanted to do, he was never, it seems, very firmly rebuffed except on Sunday 18 August 1667 when he went to St Dunstan-in-the-West to hear a sermon by the vicar and stood by ‘a pretty, modest maid whom [he] did labour to take by the hand and the body’.
But she would not [he recorded]; but got further and further from me, and at last I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again, which seeing, I did forbear, and was glad I did espy her design. And then I fell to gaze upon another pretty maid in a pew close to me, and she on me; and I did go about to take her by the hand, which she suffered a little.19
Pepys was then thirty-five years old and had been married twelve years, and for most of that time he had found other women as irresistible as they were accommodating, and quite prepared to take advantage of his desire for them to ask for posts or promotion for their husbands. He pursued Mrs Bagwell, the wife of a ship’s carpenter, with whom he went to dinner at Deptford, and after dinner he ‘found occasion of sending [her husband] abroad’: ‘And then alone,’ he continued in the mixture of foreign languages and code he employed to describe such adventures, ‘elle je tentoy à faire ce que je voudrais, et contre sa force je le faisoy, bien que pas à mon contentment. By and by, he coming back, I took leave and walked home.’
Pepys also made advances to Mrs Daniel, wife of a naval officer, who wanted ‘to help her husband to the command of a little new pleasure-boat building’: ‘And here I had opportunity para besar elle and tocar sus mamelles, so as to make mi mismo espender with great pleasure.’ He seduced Betty Martin, a linen draper in Westminster Hall whose husband, a would-be purser, was ‘a sorry little fellow’. With her on first acquaintance he was ‘exceeding free in dallying, and she not unfree to take it’. He afterwards took her to a Rhenish wine house where he bought her a lobster:
And I do so towse her and feel her all over, making her believe how fair and good a skin she has; and indeed, she hath a very white thigh and leg but monstrous fat. When weary, I did give over, and somebody having seen some of our dalliance, called aloud in the street, ‘Sir, why do you kiss the gentlewoman so?’ and flung a stone at the window – which vexed me – but I believe they could not see me towsing her; and so we broke up and went out the back way, without being observed I think; and so she towards [Westminster Hall] and I to Whitehall, where taking water, I go to the Temple.
Later he made love to her at ‘the cabaret at the Cloche in the street du roy’ – where ‘after some caresses, je l’ay foutée sous de la chaise deux times’ – at ‘the old house at Lambeth-marsh’, where he ate and drank and had ‘pleasure of her twice’, and at the Trumpet Tavern, King Street, Westminster, where he had pleasure of her again: ‘And she, like an impudent jade, depends upon my kindness to her husband; but I will have no more to do with her, let her brew as she hath baked.’
There was also Mrs Burrows, widow of a naval officer, ‘a mighty pretty woman and very modest’, who came to him ‘to get her ticket paid for her husband’s service’ and who was persuaded to go out with him into ‘the fields of Uxbridge way: I had her lips as much as I would’. And one Sunday in 1666 when he met her at Betty Martin’s house, despite her modest demeanour, she allowed him to tumble her and another of his friends, Doll Powell, ‘all afternoon as [he] pleased’. There was also Diana Crisp, the daughter of a woman with whom he once lodged; and Betty Mitchell, wife of the keeper of a strong-water house, who did ‘hazer whatever I did’. And there was the actress, Mrs Knepp, with whose breasts he played both in a coach and when she was in bed; and then, having the opportunity to be bold, put his hand ‘abaxo de her coats and tocar su thighs and venter – and a little of the other thing … and tocar her corps all over’. And there were the two sisters, Frances and Sarah Udall, serving maids at the Swan, New Palace Yard; and Jane Welsh, ‘a very pretty innocent girl’, maidservant to his barber, Richard Jervas, who vexed him much by supplying him with a periwig infected with nits; and there was his wife’s maid and companion, Deb Willet, of whom he had ‘a great mind for to have the maidenhead’. She was combing his hair one night, ‘which occasioned the greatest sorrow to [him] that he ever knew: For my wife, coming up suddenly, did find me imbracing the girl con my hand sub su coats; and endeed, I was with my main in her cunny’.
A dreadful row followed upon this discovery, and Deb was dismissed. Pepys, however, tracked her down at her new employer’s:
And there she came into the coach to me … and at last yo did make her tener mi cosa in her mano, while my mano was sobra her pectus, and so did hazer with grand delight. I did nevertheless give her the best counsel I could, to have a care of her honour and to fear God and suffer no man para haver to do con her – as yo have done – which she promised. Yo did give her 20s. and directions para laisser sealed in
paper at any time the name of the place of her being, at Herringman’s my bookseller in the Change – by which I might go para her.
The next day Pepys recorded the sequel in his diary:
Up, and at the office all the morning, with my heart full of joy to think in what a safe condition all my matters now stand between my wife and Deb and me; and at noon, running upstairs to see the upholsterers, who are at work upon hanging my best room and setting up my new bed, I find my wife sitting sad in the dining-room; while inquiring into the reason of, she begun to call me all the false, rotten-hearted rogues in the world, letting me understand I was with Deb yesterday; which, thinking impossible for her even to understand, I did a while deny; but at last did, for the ease of my mind and hers, and for ever to discharge my heart of this wicked business, I did confess all; and above-stairs in our bed-chamber there, I did endure the sorrow of her threats and rows and curses all the afternoon. And which was worse, she swore by all that was good that she would slit the nose of this girl, and be gone herself this very night from me … So, with most perfect confusion of face and heart, and sorrow and shame, in the greatest agony in the world I did pass the afternoon … But at last I did call for W. Hewers [his clerk in the Navy Office] and … he obtained what I could not, that she would be pacified upon condition that I would give it under my hand never to speak with Deb while I live … So before it was late, there was, beyond my hopes as well as desert, a tolerable peace; and so to supper, and pretty kind words, and to bed, and there yo did hazer con ella to her content.20
A hundred years later Boswell found maidservants as compliant as Pepys found the girls at the Swan, New Palace Yard. On his way from Edinburgh to meet Samuel Johnson at Ashbourne in 1777, he took pleasure in fondling the maids, ‘licentiously loving wenches’, at every inn where he stopped. At Liverpool he played with the chambermaid both in the evening and when she was taking the sheets off the bed the next morning, though she would not allow him to enter her fully. At Leek he was allowed to fondle the chambermaid as well as the serving-maid who brought him his tea. There is no reason to suppose that the women he and Pepys encountered were peculiarly accommodating; nor apparently were those enjoyed by William Hickey who attributed his abiding ‘attachment to women of loose and abandoned principles’ to his childhood experiences with his nurse, ‘a wanton little baggage’, who took him into her bed every night until dismissed from the household, having already been dismissed from that of the Duchess of Manchester for having seduced her thirteen-year-old son.21 Indeed, it seems, that most women in their day took pleasure in sex and were, like men, unselfconsciously intrigued by all its manifestations and quite ready to regard with indulgence the results of its illicit practice. Illegitimate children were accepted quite casually both in the upper and in the professional classes. Lady Oxford had so many children by different husbands that they were known as the Harleian Miscellany, while the two bastards of Erasmus Darwin, the physician and grandfather of the naturalist, were treated just as they would have been had he been married to their mother. ‘I often dined with him,’ wrote Horace Walpole of Lancelot Blackburne, Archbishop of York. ‘His mistress, Mrs Cruwys, sat at the head of the table, and Hayter, his natural son by another woman, and very much like him, at the bottom, as chaplain.’
Homosexuality was generally still more severely frowned upon than it had been in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and still savagely punished on occasions, much to the satisfaction of the mob. Yet it seems, among the upper classes at least, there was a growing tendency to regard homosexuality as no more than an unfortunate predilection which appears to have been more openly admitted by the time William Beckford was despatched on the Grand Tour in 1777 after his emotional entanglement with a young boy. Certainly, despite the activities of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, there remained several homosexual clubs and brothels, or ‘molly houses’, in London and they seem to have been quite as well patronized as the more conventional brothels of Covent Garden. One of them had been frequented in the earlier years of the century by the corrupt, homosexual City Marshal, Charles Hitchen, who took his young assistant there one night, telling him that ‘he would introduce him to a company of He-Whores’.
The man, not rightly comprehending his meaning, asked him if they were hermaphrodites. ‘No, ye fool you. They are sodomites such as deal with their own sex, instead of females.’… No sooner [had they entered] but the Marshal was complimented by the company with the title of Madam and Ladyship … a familiar language peculiar to the house. The man was not long there before he was more surprised than at first. The men calling one another ‘my dear’, and hugging, kissing, and tickling each other, as if they were a mixture of wanton males and females, some telling others they ought to be whipped for not coming to school more frequently. The Marshal was very merry in this assembly and dallied with the young sparks with a great deal of pleasure.22
Dildoes were used by upper class women in the eighteenth century, and could be bought at a shop in St James’s Street by whose proprietor they were imported from Italy; and most courtesans had birches as part of their equipment, as does the prostitute in one of the plates of Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress.
‘Where are the instruments of pleasure?’ asks the man of his mistress in Thomas Shad well’s The Virtuoso. ‘I was so used to it at Westminster School I could never leave it off since … Do not spare thy pains. I love castigation mightily.’23 There was a celebrated flagellants’ brothel in Charlotte Street, another one in Tavistock Court, and flagellants’ clubs in Jermyn Street.
Pornography was extremely popular. In Pepys’s day most pornographic books were imported from France which continued to supply them until the middle of the eighteenth century. Pepys himself came across one, L’Escholler de Filles, in the shop of John Martin, a bookseller at Temple Bar, and finding it ‘the most bawdy, lewd book’ he ever saw, was ‘ashamed of reading in it’. However, he soon afterwards bought a copy in plain binding from a bookseller in the Strand and the following night read it in his chamber, persuading himself that it would do him ‘no wrong to read for information sake’. But ‘it did hazer my prick para stand all the while’, he recorded, ‘and una vez to decharger’.24
After Pepys’s death pornographic books in English became available in large quantities. So did pornographic prints and sex manuals like Aristotle’s Masterpiece; while models of female reproductive organs could be examined in waxwork shows. John Cleland, a former pupil at Westminster School who had left employment in the East India Company after a quarrel with members of the Council at Bombay, produced Fanny Hill, or the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure in 1750. This was so successful that the bookseller, who bought the manuscript from him for twenty guineas, was said to have made the enormous sum of £10,000 out of it. Cleland followed Fanny Hill with Memoirs of a Coxcomb but, after being summoned before the Privy Council, he was offered a pension of £100 provided he made ‘a worthier use of his talents’, and no more pornography from his pen appeared. There were numerous other writers to supply the demand, however; and several pornographic magazines were published, including The Covent Garden Magazine, or Amorous Repository and The Ranger’s Magazine, or the Man of Fashion’s Companion. There were also directories such as Jack Harris’s The Whoremonger’s Guide to London and his List of Covent Garden Ladies, the 1786 edition of which described, in a list of over a hundred tempting prostitutes, one of seven years’ experience whose ‘coral-tipped clitoris still forms the powerful erection’.25
There were immense numbers of prostitutes available. Von Archenholz estimated that there were at least 50,000. Some were extremely smart, elegant and as rich as Kitty Fisher who was said to have once shown her indifference to money and scorn of the men who paid her by eating a thousand-pound note in a sandwich. A few courtesans married their lovers, like the Gunning sisters who married respectively the Earl of Coventry and the Duke of Hamilton. Many were as fresh-faced and young as the ‘so called light girls, all with fine blooming f
igures, well dressed and true to their name’ whom Sophie von la Roche saw in a box at Sadler’s Wells. ‘Not one of them looked older than twenty, and every one so made that the best father or husband would be proud of having a virtuous daughter or wife with such stature and good features.’26 Many more were as unappetising as the twelve who were produced for Casanova’s inspection at the Star tavern and dismissed, one after the other, with a shilling.27 Some were grasping and ill-natured; others as generous as the ‘very pretty little girl’ who accosted the young William Hickey ‘under the Piazza of Covent Garden’, conducted him to her ‘dirty, miserable bed’ in a ‘very indifferent-looking apartment up three pairs of stairs in a dark, narrow court out of Drury Lane’ and then refused the half guinea he offered her, insisting on going out for change, and then declining to accept more than five shillings, though Hickey subsequently discovered that ‘she had not at that time a single sixpence in her possession’.28
37 Theatres and Shows
One of King Charles II’s first public acts after his Restoration to the throne had been to issue a royal warrant granting two of his friends, Sir William D’Avenant, the poet and playwright, and Thomas Killigrew, an indifferent dramatist who was groom of his bedchamber, the exclusive right to revive the theatre in London by forming two separate companies of players. Killigrew’s was to be known as the King’s Company, and D’Avenant’s as the Duke’s, since it was under the patronage of the king’s brother, the Duke of York. As the only licensed theatrical entrepreneurs in London, D’Avenant and Killigrew were free to present ‘tragedies, comedies, plays, operas, music scenes and all other entertainments of the stage whatsoever’. They could charge whatever they deemed ‘reasonable’; they could build theatres wherever they chose; and they were permitted to employ actresses in their respective companies. Despite their monopoly patents, however, the king’s two favoured friends found it difficult to enforce their rights. Other companies declined to walk quietly off their stages. Indeed, the king himself attended a performance given by the Red Bull company under the management of Michael Mohun; and Pepys’s first visit to a theatre after the Restoration was to John Rhodes’s company which, with Thomas Betterton in the cast, gave performances at the Cockpit Theatre in Drury Lane. Pepys also attended a performance at the Salisbury Court Theatre by a company of players under the direction of George Jolly who had been acting on the Continent during the Interregnum.1 The two principal companies soon established their preeminence, however, the King’s at the Vere Street Theatre, then at the Theatre Royal in Bridge Street and finally at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane; the Duke’s at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, then at the Dorset Garden Theatre and ultimately at Covent Garden.
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