Читать книгу Roaring Girls - Holly Kyte - Страница 21

After all the brazen merriment and gleeful mayhem that has gone before, the diary culminates in an oddly remorseful end for Mary Frith, with the 74-year-old lying on her deathbed, weak and enfeebled and repenting her life of sin. She has fallen prey to a ‘dropsy’ – an excess of fluid – and as her body swells, she begins to see her condition as some kind of divine retribution for her life of vice, as every afflicted limb seems to ‘point out the wickedness every one of them had been instrumental in, so that I could not but acknowledge the justice of my punishment’. Her hands, however, remain unaffected – proof, she maintains smugly, that they were the ‘most innocent’ part of her body, because she never cut a single purse herself.

This tacked-on repentance scene may be incongruous, but it was vital to the acceptability of The Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith as a work of public entertainment. The authors claim to have published Mary’s story not just because of the ‘strangeness and newness of the subject’, but for ‘the public good’. And if a celebration of criminality is to masquerade as morally instructive, rather than gratuitously sensational, then by the laws of storytelling it must culminate either in reform or condemnation.

In literature then, at least, Mary Frith recants at her death, claiming ‘with a real penance and true grief to deplore my condition and former course of life I had so profanely and wickedly led’. It’s a nice try, but coming from a woman who had so consistently revelled in her wrongdoing and smirked at disapproval, this dramatic moral conversion feels rather too neat to have occurred in real life.

More convincing is Mary’s appeal for us not to judge her too harshly, for, ‘If I had anything of the devil within me, I had of the merry one, not having through all my life done any harm to the life or limb of any person.’ Besides, she jokes, her illness is punishment enough, as it has finally accomplished ‘what all the ecclesiastical quirks with their canons and injunctions could not do’: made her abandon her doublet. Too swollen and sore to wear anything constrictive, she is grudgingly forced to ‘do penance again in a blanket’ and revert to her ‘proper’ female habit. Thus, in a moment sodden with symbolism, Mary’s ‘redemption’ is complete – she is a Roaring Girl no more.

In the diary’s final words, our heroine receives an unceremonial send-off, with Mary giving characteristically blunt instructions to be ‘lain in my grave on my belly, with my breech upwards’ so that she may be as ‘preposterous’ in death as she was in life. In reality, Mary’s burial was somewhat more dignified. Despite another dud claim in the diary that Mary made no will, on 6 June 1659, just a few weeks before she died on 26 July, she did just that – and it reveals that she was a prosperous woman. Under her married name of Mary Markham, she left £20 to a relative named Abraham Robinson – a substantial legacy given that a labourer might earn £10 in a year and a house could cost under £30[68] – and the remainder of her estate to her niece and sole executrix Frances Edmonds. Her bequests made provision for a decent funeral, and so on 10 August, as per her wish, she was given a Christian burial at St Bridget’s Church in Fleet Street – an end reserved not for the preposterous, but for the respected and well-to-do.

Mary Frith had died just a year shy of the Restoration – a new age of freedom and exuberance that would have suited her down to the ground. The Roaring Girl had fallen silent, and the play she had inspired had fallen out of fashion, yet her spirit would linger in the decades to come.[69] Her faux diary, published two years into Charles II’s reign, would reignite her legend, casting her as a fervent Royalist for a renewed Royalist era, but she was also present in more nebulous forms. She was there, for example, in the actresses who would walk the stage legally for the first time, and be applauded, not punished, for donning men’s clothes. She was there at the birth of the novel, in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, who early in the next century would be ‘as impudent a thief, and as dexterous as ever Moll Cut-purse was’.[70] And she was there in the new craze for criminal biographies that would perpetuate her myth still further – by adding highwaywoman to her list of misdeeds.[71] By the mid-eighteenth century she had taken her place in the rogues’ gallery of famous dare-devils – from Robin Hood to Jack Sheppard – whose lawless lives have always strangely enchanted us and whose crimes we can’t help but romanticise.

But when all the tall tales, exaggerations and embellishments are stripped away, what is left? We’ll never know exactly what measure of the legend of Moll Cutpurse was present in the real Mary Frith, but despite all the sanitisation, decriminalisation and simplification, the teasing snippets of the living, breathing Mary captured in court transcripts and eyewitness accounts bear a striking resemblance to the Mary of myth. What we find in every version of her is an audacious, idiosyncratic, irreverent woman who used her own brass and ingenuity to rise through the ranks, from common cutpurse to famed entertainer to entrepreneur to folkloric heroine, causing shock, anger and amusement along the way. In the misfits’ paradise on the peripheries of society, she found acceptance, safety, power and influence. She angered the authorities, captivated the playwrights, confused the biographers and divided the public. Hers was a life of constant peril and nagging insecurity, lived permanently on the edge – of respectability, legality, even sanity – and her strategy for survival was to hide in plain sight, wriggling and shape-shifting to exploit the loopholes, outfox her accusers and, whenever possible, get away with it altogether. This was a woman who wanted to be talked about but didn’t want to be caught, and by manipulating her fluid persona and feeding her own glorified myth, she made sure that the character who endured was not a hardened criminal but a lovable rogue. If this virtuoso of evasion slips through our fingers now, it’s probably because that’s exactly what she wants.