4

The Suburbs of Sin

‘A Cunny is the deerest Peice of Flesh in the World!’

During the reign of the Tudors, London was the fastest-growing city in the world. By 1600, it had become the world’s greatest metropolis, establishing its lead in overseas and domestic trade and setting itself up as the economic centre of Western Europe. Writers professed themselves awestruck by its glory: ‘London is a place both for the beautie of buyldinge, infinite riches, varietie of all things, that excelleth all the Cities in the world: insomuch that it maye be called the Store-house and Marte of all Europe,’ declared John Lyly;¹ while Daniel Lupton marvelled that London is ‘the great Bee-hive of Christendom’ and praised the Thames, which, with its swans and its bobbing vessels, was ‘the glory and wealth of the City, the high way to the Sea, the bringer in of wealth and Strangers’.²This was the ‘Sweet Thames!’ which Edmund Spenser implored to ‘run softly, till I end my song’.

But London had a less glamorous side. Orazio Busino, an Italian ambassador, observed that London was the filthiest city in the world: ‘Its Italian name, Londra, should be changed into Lorda, or filthy, which would be well merited by the black, offensive mud which is peculiar to its streets, and furnishes the mob with a formidable missile whenever anything occurs to call forth their disapprobation.’³

This was a London of two halves, the affluent and the abject. In the most prosperous areas, streets had been widened and roads paved with cobbles; water was being piped into the city from an arch under Old London Bridge, courtesy of the Dutch engineer Pieter Mauritz, who had persuaded the City Corporation to install his water engines so that thousands of households had access to fresh water. The population had expanded and its citizens now numbered over 200,000; the city’s boundaries spread north, west and south, while south-east London became home to thousands of Dutch and European Protestants seeking asylum from Roman Catholic persecution. These immigrants brought with them trades and skills, and a strict work ethic.

This was the London that so delighted a German traveller around 1602 that he commented that ‘England is a paradise for women, a prison for servants, and a hell for horses’⁴ where ‘the females have great liberty and are almost like masters, whilst the poor horses are worked very hard’.⁵ Another visitor, the Swiss physician Thomas Platter, was impressed with the joie de vivre of Englishwomen, and their habit of frequenting London’s many taverns in an Elizabethan equivalent of a girls’ night out: ‘they count it a great honour to be taken there and given wine with sugar to drink; and if one woman is invited, then she will bring three or four other women along, and they gaily toast each other’.⁶

Englishwomen were considered particularly desirable, with foreign commentators remarking upon their beauty and easy manner, and their habit of greeting guests with kisses on all occasions. Others were impressed by the way English girls dressed, in tight-fitting gowns with deep cleavages, ‘laying out their naked breastes after a whorish manner to be seene and touched’, some even displaying their nipples, which were tipped with rouge for the purpose.⁷ The women of London had a reputation for disrepute; just as in certain holiday destinations today, English girls are regarded as being ‘up for it’, so the girls of Tudor London were notorious creatures of appetite, ‘more hotte than goates’ and ‘more desirous of carnall luste thane man’.⁸

An Elizabethan woodcut showing the interior of a whorehouse.

This is the London of ‘Merrie England’, where buxom wenches raised a frothing tankard to their gallants, and jolly whores in the tradition of Shakespeare’s Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly happily plied their trade. Southwark and the Bankside were still the dominant areas for the sex trade, but by this period there were plenty of others, named in the literature of the time. Henry Savile refers to: ‘Milford Lane, near to St Clement’s Steeple, [where] lived a nymph, kind to all Christian people’, while a ballad provides a useful guide to other areas of London:

In Whitecross Street and Golden Lane

Do strapping lasses dwell,

And do there do in every street

’Twixt that and Clerkenwell.

At Cowcross and at Smithfield

I have much pleasure found,

Where wenches like to fairies

Did often trace the ground.⁹

Lying alongside this version of London was another London, a shadowy parallel universe of narrow, badly paved lanes, darkened by overhanging houses, and rendered insanitary by the citizens’ tendency to fling their garbage, from cabbage leaves and chicken carcasses to the contents of their chamber-pots, straight out into the street. This was the London of ‘small chambers, cottages and lodgings for sturdy beggars, harlots, idle and unthrifty persons, whereby beggary, vagabondcy, unthriftyness, theft, pox, pestilence, infections, diseases and infirmities do ensue and daily grow to the defacing of the beauty of the said city’.¹⁰

The population had been swollen by a vast army of beggars consisting of disenfranchised peasants. In an early form of the enclosures, entire villages disappeared as wealthy landowners fenced off their estates and kicked out the locals, meaning that the peasantry no longer had common land upon which to graze their animals and raise crops. Robbed of their livelihood, and in many cases their homes, these ‘vagabonds’ descended on London desperate for work, drawn, as ever, by the promise of the bright lights and the good life. According to Sir William Periam (1534–1604) there were around 30,000 ‘idle persons and masterless men’ in the city, ‘the very scum of England, and the stink of iniquity’.¹¹

While some would have found employment as unskilled labourers, working on the docks or as porters, carrying goods about the city, many ended their days as vagrants. In 1587, one citizen observed that the streets of London ‘swarm with beggars, that no man can stand or stay in any church or street, but presently ten or twelve beggars come breathing in his face, many of them having the plague sores and other contagious diseases running on them, wandering from man to man to seek relief’.¹²

But not all these vagabonds were male. Young women, unwanted at home where they were a drain on their poverty-stricken parents, streamed into the capital in their hundreds every day, on carts, in boats, most commonly on foot, all in search of a fresh beginning and a new life. Some were fortunate enough to find jobs as servants, but many gravitated to the one profession where they could be certain to find employment: prostitution. Just as it led the world in every other form of commerce, London dominated the sex trade, and there was an insatiable demand for new blood.

Imagine the fate of one such new arrival. Let us call her Kate, a fresh-faced country girl. Growing up on a farm, surrounded by animals, sharing a one-roomed cottage where she has frequently overheard her parents having sex, Kate is scarcely naive. But she is shortly to be appalled by the harsh realities of the sex trade. Unable to find work as a lady’s maid, starving and footsore, she has been enticed by an ageing bawd into what appears to be an inn, with an offer of work in return for a roof over her head.

At first glance, this ‘inn’ seems reassuringly familiar, with a gateway leading into a stable yard, where horses can be fed and watered. The entrance, on the ground floor, leads to a reception area, attached to a dining room, with the kitchens at the rear. Downstairs, the rooms are full of men, gambling or drinking with flirtatious, giggling young women. Upstairs, she finds a bedroom overlooking the stable yard (and the dunghill). The floors are strewn with rushes and infested with fleas and other vermin but the room is pleasantly decorated, with a comfortable bed, pictures on the wall and little bottles of potions and powders. It is only once Kate flicks through the books and glimpses the illustrations that she realizes where she is. These amorous pamphlets are here to revive the jaded appetites of her clients. Kate is in a brothel.

To be honest, conditions here at the ‘trugging-house’ are better than those of the tiny cottage she left behind. As well as a clean white smock, she sees a ‘groaning chair’ or commode, and two piss-pots, his and hers. She will learn that her task is to hold the pot for her client to urinate into, in the belief that this served as a protection against gonorrhoea or ‘the clap’. She will then use the other one, as graphically described by one ex-whore, urinating ‘till I made it whurra and roar like the Tyde at London Bridge to endangering the breaking of my very Twatling-strings with straining backwards for I know no better way or remedy more safe than pissing presently to prevent the French Pox, Gonnorhea, the perilous infirmity of Burning or getting with Childe which is the approved Maxim amongst Venetian Curtizans’.¹³

Pressed into service in this trugging-house, Kate learns that everyday life mirrors the hierarchy of a more conventional middle-class household. At the head of the house is the madam, or ‘pandarelle’, who supervises the ‘apple squires’, or male employees, whilst the whores are at the bottom of the food chain, even referring to their own genitals as ‘the commodity’, as this is what they are trading.¹⁴

After the enterprising bawd has auctioned off Kate’s virginity to the highest bidder, and Kate has been initiated into the sex trade, she is granted clothes and victuals in exchange for a gruelling workload satisfying the lusts of London’s men. The work is harder because she is expected to be available day and night, entertaining all companions, sitting or standing at the door in her bright taffeta dress to entice the clients in, refusing nobody, drunk or sober, diseased or vile.¹⁵

Kate runs the constant risk of sexual violence, and has to pander to every requirement, from the lusty young lad to the ageing roué with whom she must be particularly tactful, offering aphrodisiacs such as asparagus, coriander seeds steeped in white wine, saffron boiled in red wine, and lettuce, the Viagra of its day.¹⁶ If this is not enough to stir the ageing member, Kate must resort to one of the popular male fetishes, very likely flagellation, as in this epigram by the satirist Sir John Davies:

When Francus comes to solace with his whore

He sends for rods and strips himself stark naked

For his lust sleeps, and will not rise before,

By whipping of the wench it is awakened.

I envie him not, but wish I had the power,

To make myself his wench but one half hour.¹⁷

In addition to all this, Kate is expected to be polite, friendly, to keep herself ‘free from all vicious diseases and all ill-smells from breath or under the arms or elsewhere’.¹⁸ Her bed must be clean and so must she in her ‘Holland’s Smocke’ or fine linen night-gown. Any spare time the poor young woman has left is to be spent leafing through volumes of pornography to brush up her technique; illiterate as she is, she can still look at the pictures. If she chooses to leave, it will be with nothing but her smock, but there is little incentive to do so.

After a short period, the irregular hours, the heavy drinking, the need to be constantly obliging to large numbers of clients will take its toll on her mental and physical health. Some girls find a way out: they are fortunate enough to meet a rich protector or marry a forgiving man who understands why they were driven into the trade in the first place.

The more enterprising girls embark upon a career as bawds or madams themselves, but most sink into menial work when they lose their charms, or become broken-down wretches scraping a living in Gropecunt Lane. This is, if they do not end up in Bridewell prison or the madhouse of Bedlam or die prematurely through suicide or murder. And yet, as will be revealed in the remainder of this history, generation after generation of young Kates flock to London, searching for romance and adventure, and there is never any shortage of customers.

Many contemporary writers, such as Dekker, Middleton and Greene, frequented the stews, and wrote about them, providing us with a rich seam of anecdotes about Elizabethan low life, whilst these dens of iniquity were also a constant source of inspiration for Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe and one author who rejoiced in the name of Shakerley Marmion. The most famous dramatist of all, William Shakespeare, lived close to the White Boar, one of the most notorious Bankside brothels, overhearing many phrases and scenarios which provided a rich source of material for his plays. These writers also demonstrated some sympathy for the whores, seeing in these women’s lives a parallel with their own precarious efforts to live by the pen, embracing the life of near-vagabonds despite their elevated birth and university education, throwing in their lot with the strolling players, the tumblers and the minstrels who performed in taverns and the yards of inns.

John Marston, in particular, favoured an honest whore: in The Dutch Courtesan (1605), he claimed that if you pay your women regularly, ‘they shall stick by you as long as you live. They are no ungrateful persons; they will give you quid for quo.’¹⁹Unable to provide the financial stability or regular hours required by a traditional wife, these men found sympathetic partners among the prostitutes, and there was an inexorable link between the theatre and the oldest profession, not least geographical.

The great theatres, the Globe Playhouse, the Swan, the Hope and the Rose, were located on Bankside, adjacent to the famous brothels such as the Cardinal’s Cap, making Bankside the Elizabethan equivalent of Soho. The influential actor-managers all owned brothels as well as theatres. Take Edward Alleyn, manager of the Rose Theatre. An actor who also flourished as a property speculator, he began his career running a bear garden at Bankside and ended his days as the founder of Dulwich College, the public school. Alleyn’s own wife, Joan Woodward, was ‘carted’ (driven around London and publicly humiliated) for prostitution in 1593, probably because she had inherited a number of brothels from her father, Philip Henslowe, and had failed to close them during an outbreak of the plague.

Enjoyment of the theatre was often the precursor to another form of entertainment, as many of the most popular plays were unabashedly bawdy. Once one’s appetite had been whetted by the spectacles on show, repairing to the nearest brothel was an inevitable consequence. Playgoers could stroll out of the Globe and into Maiden Lane (an ironic name, clearly, as maidens were in short supply there) or take one’s chances across the road in Rose Alley. Far from being an innocuous botanical reference, ‘rose’ was a euphemism for a harlot: going to ‘pluck a rose’ meant visiting a prostitute.²⁰

For those who sought their entertainment alfresco, sexual release was also available in the shady streets nearby, such as Horse Shoe Alley, Unicorn Alley and Bear Gardens Alley, or in the appropriately named ‘pleasure gardens’ which sprang up around the theatres. The poet Everard Guilpin tells us of one citizen who, ‘coming from the Curtain’ (a London theatre which opened in 1576), ‘sneaketh in to some odd garden, noted house of sin’.

According to the puritanical Stephen Gosson, writing in 1579, the Curtain was little more than a warm-up for the brothel and served as a general market of bawdry. Whores cruised the crowded auditorium as the plays unfolded, making it clear that they were available, often without saying a word. ‘Not that any filthiness in deed is committed within the compass of that ground, as was done in Rome, but that every wanton and his paramour, every man and his mistress, every John and his Joan, every knave and his queen, are there first acquainted and cheapen [bargain for] the merchandize in that place, which they pay for elsewhere as they can agree.’²¹

The pleasure gardens were particularly popular with the new contingent of amateurs who had entered the scene, a group who proved very unpopular with the seasoned prostitutes. According to a balladeer of the time:

The stews in England bore a beastly sway

Till the eight Henry banished them away.

And since the common whores were quite put down

A damned crew of private whores are grown.²²

These women had a variety of motives, ranging from the housewife ‘that, by selling her desires, buys herself bread and clothes’²³ to the highly sexed wives and widows offering their favours in exchange for the excitement of tasting forbidden fruit.²⁴ In Ben Jonson’s play Bartholomew Fair the prostitute Punk Alice berates Judge Overdo’s wife for just such behaviour: ‘A mischief on you, they are such as you that undo us and take our trade from us, with your tuft-taffeta haunches! The poor common whores can ha’ no traffic for the privy rich ones; your caps and hoods of velvet call away our customers, and lick the fat from us.’²⁵

Boys, too, were drawn into prostitution, then as now. There is little record of organized male brothels, although John Marston accused Lord Hunsdon of running a male brothel in Hoxton. Gigolos were always in demand; opportunistic and charming young men frequented the bath houses where women congregated, picking off available older women, and enjoyed a better quality of life than their female peers, or at least those women at the rough end of the market.

Not only was the sex trade a wretched way of life for most women, but the threat of punishment was ever present, in the form of the ‘Clink’ prison and other establishments. The ‘Clink’ prison, administered by the Bishop of Winchester, was conveniently locatedunderneath his notorious stews, so that at least the poor girls did not have far to go. We have already learned, in the previous chapter, of the various stocks and pillories which were employed as a means of public humiliation for these unfortunate women.

During the reign of Mary Tudor (1553–8), another form of punishment became popular. ‘Small houses’ were set up in every ward of London, with one installed on London Bridge. ‘Small house’ was a deceptively bland euphemism for what can only be described as a method of public torture. Derived from the Near East, the ‘small house’ originally consisted of a cage where the victim was locked up like an animal, and put on show on the city walls, for all to see. Its first use in the British Isles appears to have been when Edward I (1239–1307) hung Isobel, Duchess of Fife and Buchan, in a wooden cage on the walls of the City of Berwick, as a punishment for her part in crowning Robert the Bruce King of Scotland. Isobel was incarcerated for four years, a hardship which hastened her early death.

But London’s city fathers devised a further refinement, by placing a pillory inside the cage. Men, as well as women, were locked in tiny pens, too small to lie down or turn around in, condemned to wallow in their own faeces, while the mob jostled and flung rubbish and insults at them. Many went mad; others suffered a merciful early death.²⁶

Before going to the stocks, or the house of correction, prostitutes were publicly humiliated, stripped to the waist and their heads shaved bald, before being carted around London while a jeering crowd threw rotten vegetables and clattered barbers’ basins, to create a mocking ‘rough music’. Given the high number of prosecutions for prostitution, London’s barbers had a profitable sideline hiring out these basins.²⁷ Particularly unlucky prisoners were tied to the cart’s arse and whipped. But this was as nothing compared with Bridewell, which is where their troubles really began.

Bridewell, or the ‘Palace of Bridewell’ as it was originally known, became a prison during the reign of young Edward VI, and was soon anything but palatial. Located on the banks of the River Thames between what is now Fleet Street and Blackfriars Bridge, Bridewell had been rebuilt by Henry VIII for the reception of the Emperor Charles V. The origin of its name lay in its proximity to the Church of St Bride’s. Remaining images show a magnificent red-brick palace in the style of Hampton Court, with imposing turrets and bay windows seventy feet wide, resting in landscaped gardens that sloped down to the river.

Like so many of London’s grand houses, Bridewell must have been the perfect home for an embassy. Nevertheless, in 1552, Edward VI agreed to donate Bridewell to the city as a workhouse, in an attempt to abolish London’s vagrancy problem by providing accommodation and training. The aim was laudable: orphaned children could be apprenticed to various trades while the sick and infirm were set to making mattresses and bedding. Stubborn and unregenerate low-lifes, meanwhile, would learn blacksmiths’ skills in the smithy and grind corn, while women would card wool and spin yarn.²⁸

The change of use, from royal palace to beggars’ workhouse, meant that structural alterations were necessary. The eighty-foot Long Gallery, with its long windows, was partitioned, to make cells. Workshops were equipped, and all the inevitable trappings of prison life were delivered – the stocks and manacles, a treadmill and a block, upon which women beat out hemp with heavy mallets.²⁹

This regime, whilst harsh, was humane by the standards of the time; which is more than can be said for the punishment meted out to prostitutes. The process of ‘correction’, designed to make the women repent, consisted of repeated whippings. These whippings were a very ceremonial affair, conducted before the board of governors. The hypocrisy, not to mention the connotations of sexual sadism that attended such events, reminds one irresistibly of King Lear’s outburst:

Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!

Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back;

Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind

For which thou whip’st her.³⁰

Other forms of ‘correction’ included regular beatings, starvation and gang rape. There were no sentences, as such. Unless someone appeared to bail them out, these women could be detained indefinitely. Bridewell was enough to make a shiver run down a girl’s spine, a chilling prospect to any young whore. But so was death by starvation. These women had little choice but to regard Bridewell as an occupational hazard, in the same category as syphilis. ‘Bridewell’ eventually became the generic term for ‘houses of correction’ throughout England, and lives on today as police terminology for a custody suite.

Southwark was already famous for its low life, from the functional shacks where whores serviced the Roman garrisons to the medieval stews. But, over the years, Southwark had its high-quality brothels, too, such as the Manor House of Paris Gardens, located on the wonderfully entitled ‘Nobs’ Island’.

Paris Gardens, referred to in the Domesday Book as ‘Widflete’, had not always been salubrious. In 1380, it was known as a rubbish dump, where butchers tipped their offal. Part of the land was given over to kennels for the Lord Mayor’s dogs and the whole area stank, particularly in the summer. But it was ripe for investment. In 1542, William Baseley, the King’s Bailiff of Southwark, bought the lease for the Manor House of Paris Gardens and turned it into a casino, with ‘cardes and dyze and tabells’. There was already a bowling green outside, and it was from this period that the Manor House began to acquire an infamous reputation.

Elizabeth I granted the Manor to her cousin, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the ‘golden lad’ who so appealed to Christopher Marlowe. In turn, Hunsdon rented it out to pimps and madams. But these were no ordinary stews: this was a high-class club, catering for the nobility, the gentry, and the emerging affluent middle class, offering sex, gambling, wine and food.

At this period, the legendary ‘Long Meg’ of Westminster, an Amazonian Lancashire lass cast in the same mould as the ‘Roaring Girl’ Mary Frith, stepped in and ran the Manor House as a brothel. The house then changed hands several times until it was acquired by one Donna Britannica Hollandia, whose typically preposterous nom de guerre testified to the fact that she was an experienced madam.

Donna Hollandia had impeccable credentials: she had already worked the ‘Italian quarter’ in Cripplegate, as a whore, then promoted herself to the role of madam at St Andrews-by-the-Wardrobe. Arrested and sent to Newgate gaol, she soon escaped thanks to her contacts at court. A few words threatening to expose the sex secrets of the royals was enough to ensure Donna was smuggled out of prison, and once she had paid off the judiciary, she started to look around for pastures new, free from the restrictions of the city fathers. At length, Donna was directed to the Manor House of Paris Gardens, where she would find ‘a place fit for her purpose being wonderous commodiously planted for all accomodations [sic]: it was oute of the cite onlye divided by a delicate river’ and boasting ‘an abundance of naturall and artificiall entrenchements’.³¹

The Manor House itself was securely fortified. Not only was there a gatehouse and a deep moat, but the surrounding pastureland had an elaborate system of ditches which filled with water according to the ebb and flow of the Thames. ‘Ere any foe could approache it, hee must march more than a musket shotte on a narrow banke, between two dangerous ditches’, according to one contemporary. And that foe would then have to contend with ‘a drawbridge and sundry pallysadoes’ (earthworks, from the Portuguese ‘paliçadas’).³² The gardens were elaborately landscaped, with pleasant walks and shrubberies and fine views across the river. A contemporary sketch depicts the front door of the Manor House secured by a guard armed with a musket, while the ladies of the house amuse themselves in the garden. Donna wasted no time. This suburban paradise was the ideal location for a discreet, high-class gentlemen’s club, with the judiciary persuaded to turn a blind eye in return for a fresh young whore.

Donna soon became one of the most famous madams in London, with a host of celebrity patrons, including King James I and George Villiers. Regardless of their alleged homosexual relationship, they loved to disport themselves among the whores. James was a notorious libertine who enjoyed all the pleasures of the Bankside from theatres and horse-racing (which he is credited with inventing) to whores, and brothels such as Paris Gardens flourished during his reign. Luxuriously furnished and offering every comfort known to man, it was also staffed by girls who were experts in squeezing every penny out of their clients. But those men got what they paid for: they left exhausted and satisfied, well fed and entertained. Donna offered nothing if not value for money. A small woman but with a strong character, she ran her house with great efficiency, backed up by draconian security.

As with any private club, membership was stringently enforced. Potential punters had to present their credentials at the gatehouse, then face further questioning before being escorted across the drawbridge to the Manor. Donna greeted each client personally, to ask him his requirements and size him up. The safety of her girls was paramount: nobody was allowed to shout at or ill-treat them. Any wild or unruly behaviour meant instant and permanent expulsion, whatever the rank and station.

By the same token, Donna did not allow anyone in without money. There was no credit, no matter how famous the client. This policy ensured that the Manor House remained exclusive, as only the most affluent could afford to enter. As the years went by, so the coffers in Donna’s basement filled up with gold. She had started out with just four girls, hand-picked for their special talents and much in demand: ‘Beta Brestonia’, a fiery beauty, ‘impudent and insolent’; tiny Eliza Caunce, who was regarded as a nymphomaniac; Longa Maria, a gentle beauty with a sympathetic manner; and Maria Pettit, considered to be a real livewire.³³ As Donna’s business expanded, so she took on more girls, and decorated the house in an ever more lavish style. Donna hired extra staff, including a doctor to look after the girls, and ensure that they were fresh and clean. The kitchen was run by professional cooks and the food and wine were abundant.

But, as the years passed, Donna’s empire began to flounder. She had a high turnover of whores since she ran a strict house and many young women tired of the discipline. Standards started to slip. Lowlifes from the Globe, the Hope and the Swan were admitted. Instead of being a discreet suburban brothel, the Manor House became widely known for drinking and gambling and the subsequent noise which these activities produced. However carefully Donna may have screened her clients in the past, certain nobles enjoyed ‘whore-bashing’ which led to some bad publicity. In 1630, the pamphleteer Daniel Lupton produced a damning broadsheet in which he lambasted Paris Gardens as more of ‘a foule Denne than a Faire Garden’, filled with roaring boys, swearing drunks, rotten bawds and cunning cheats.

Donna remained safe while James I was still alive. But Charles I’s first Parliament was committed to cracking down on prostitution, leaving her vulnerable to blackmailers and informers. She could no longer rely on bribing the local constabulary to leave her in peace, and rival madams were only too happy to see her brought down. Donna’s luck was running out. Eventually, in December 1631, the authorities decided to intervene and dispatched a corporal and a stout band of pikesmen to arrest Donna and her girls. But it was at this point that Donna really showed her true colours. Thirty years as a madam had made her an excellent strategist and she greeted the law with defiance. When they demanded entry, she allowed them as far as the drawbridge, then let it fall down, tipping the soldiers into the stinking moat; as they floundered about in the freezing muddy water, the girls jeered at them and pelted them with missiles, including chamber-pots and their contents, while the Southwark mob, which had gathered to watch the fun, cheered them on. The soldiers attempted to regroup but all efforts to gain entry to the premises were repulsed. Eventually, they limped away, wet and exhausted, bested by a pack of whores.

A second attempt was made, and met with a similar lack of success. This ‘beleaguering’ of Donna Hollandia’s house eventually gave it a new name: it gained immortality as ‘Holland’s Leaguer’, a title which subsequently appears in conveyancing documents.

Eventually, the authorities triumphed, and two individuals bought the lease to the house, which was then scheduled for demolition. No more is known of the fate of Donna Hollandia, but ‘Holland’s Leaguer’ passed into history. Shakerley Marmion’s drama of the same name played to packed houses in 1631, the topical theme making it irresistible to London audiences, and Madame Hollandia’s achievements were celebrated in a bawdy ballad.

The passing of ‘Holland’s Leaguer’ heralded a dramatic change in London’s landscape of sin. The sex trade was about to suffer a brutal backlash at the hands of the Puritans. It was as if Malvolio himself, the humiliated Puritan of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, had appeared to shake his fist at the assembled drunkards, bawds and whores and repeat his terrible prediction: ‘I’ll have my revenge upon the whole pack of you!’