Читать книгу Roaring Girls - Holly Kyte - Страница 20

There follows a gap of some 20 years before the records mention Mary Frith again, and when they do, it’s to reveal another dramatic development that the diary fails to mention. Although perhaps this omission isn’t so surprising either, because by the summer of 1644, when she was approaching 60, Mary was an inmate of the madhouse. On 21 June that year, the governors of Bridewell Prison and Hospital decreed that she, along with several others, ‘be delivered & discharged out of the Hospital of Bethlem’, as they were now ‘recovered of their former senses’ and well enough to be looked after elsewhere.[59] Bethlem Hospital, or Bethlehem, commonly known as Bedlam, was the notorious asylum then situated in Bishopsgate, where London’s pauper lunatics were sent to be ‘cured’ of their madness.

The record gives no further details of why Mary was committed, and although there were doubtless plenty of her contemporaries who thought her mad, there was more than one way to end up in Bedlam. London’s teeming, poverty-stricken slums, for example, were considered dire enough to send the city’s inhabitants mad if they weren’t already; the scholar Robert Burton, who had himself suffered from depression, observed in 1621 that England was a country that ‘must needs be discontent’, for it ‘hath a sick body’.[60] But Mary Frith had always thrived in this world before. She was a formidable businesswoman, a shrewd criminal, a hardy Banksider. Now, as old age encroached, had a lifetime of hard drinking, tough talking and wild living taken its toll on her mental health? Had the stress of keeping up multiple personalities and swatting away run-ins with the law pushed her to the brink?

The very notion of the robust Mary Frith having any kind of breakdown seems so incongruous that some have argued she may not have been mad at all but shamming madness to escape the war.[61] After all, in 1644, when Mary was released, England was a country riven by political division. The Civil War had been rolling on for two years already: divine-rights monarchy was facing an existential threat; King Charles I was at war with his own parliament, and up and down the land people were taking sides and falling into factions: Royalists versus Republicans. English society was floundering – any sane person might wish to avoid the unrest – and, performer as she was, Mary might have found it easy to play mad when she had to. But we shouldn’t be so quick to assume. Even the most extrovert characters can be laughing in the dark, and the truth was that in Mary’s day and beyond, women could find themselves carted off to lunatic asylums with alarming ease, thanks to the dangerously common belief that they were physiologically predisposed to insanity.

Doctors’ casebooks across the country testified to the scores of women in Britain who were apparently ‘mad’. Somerset physician John Westover, for example, treated three times as many women for mental disorders than men. Perhaps it was indicative of their restrictive, stultifying, frustrating existence, but the majority of those women were diagnosed with ‘melancholy’; the others ‘hysteria’ or ‘distraction’.[62]

The fault in these diagnoses lay with the archaic ideas that seventeenth-century medicine had inherited from Hippocrates and Galen, who had spouted the toxic theory that a woman’s body was fundamentally unstable, prone to debilitating diseases of the mind and at the mercy of overwrought emotions. The cold, wet elements that supposedly comprised her body were believed to soften and weaken her brain, while her ‘wandering womb’, which roved around her body causing all kinds of havoc, would drive her to hysteria the moment it reached her head. Nervousness, depression, anxiety, hormonal mood swings and sexual desire might all be interpreted as madness in women, with virgins, widows and spinsters thought to be particularly susceptible. (The best cure, unsurprisingly, was believed to be sex and pregnancy.)[63] As a childless woman famed for her love of drink and her volatile, masculine behaviour, Mary fitted the template all too well. Perhaps it was always inevitable that her ‘mad pranks’ would one day land her in Bedlam.

If Mary wasn’t mad when she went in, however, she may well have been by the time she came out. Conditions at Bethlem Hospital at the time were notorious. Corruption, abuse and neglect were rife, and from its cold, dank cells harrowing reports emerged of ‘cryings, screechings, roarings, brawlings, shaking of chains, swearings, frettings, chaffings’.[64] The complexities of mental illness were so little understood that physicians used ‘madness’ as a woolly, catch-all term to cover every kind of affliction. Consequently, the ‘lunatics’ languishing within Bethlem’s walls might include those plagued by voices, delusions, melancholy, rage, poverty or drink, as well as those with learning difficulties, epilepsy, dementia and anxiety. Among them, too, were those who were merely eccentric. The ‘treatments’ they were subjected to were invariably punitive rather than therapeutic, with inmates chained, starved and beaten, and often left to wallow in filth and excrement.[65] To complete the degradation of the inmates, come Sunday mornings, members of the public could pay a few shillings to stroll in and gawp, taunt the poor souls and even ply them with drink. No doubt there were many who queued up to see the famous Moll Cutpurse chained up in her cell, though what state they found her in will have to remain a mystery.

Mary’s ‘madness’ was yet another inconvenient detail that didn’t fit the Moll Cutpurse brief, and as a result, her later years look very different in the pages of her diary. Far from depicting a woman who was fading away and losing her mind, her biographers suggest she was now at the top of her game, operating at the highest levels of the criminal world as boss to even the most eminent male criminals. According to their account, Mary masterminded the feats of the famous highwaymen James Hind and Richard Hannam in the 1640s and ’50s, and like them, she is portrayed as a highly vocal Royalist, who hosts a street party in honour of Charles I and stages a public protest against his enemies in the form of an allegorical bull-baiting, in which the Parliamentarians are cast as the ravaging dogs.[66]

Most scholars suspect this political subplot to be grafted on – a bit of Royalist propaganda on the part of the writers to savage Oliver Cromwell and his puritan protectorate and endear Mary Frith to the Restoration audience for whom her story was published.[67] Indeed, it’s hard to imagine an irreverent, insubordinate character such as Mary supporting the absolute authority of King Charles I. At the same time, however, a character less puritan than Mary – whose life revolved around thieving, carousing, performing and cross-dressing – is even harder to imagine. Whatever her genuine political allegiance (if indeed she had one), the last ten years of her life coincided with the strange decade after the country had executed its king, when Britain was ruled by a puritan republican regime. How Mary coped with the prohibition of everything she loved most, from the theatres to drinking to swearing, we’ll never know; nor can we know her true feelings about her lost king. Come the Restoration of his son in 1660, however, the politic decision was made by her biographers to ensure that, whether true or not, this renegade woman would be safely remembered as a loyal subject of the Crown.