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COPYRIGHT 2005 Indiana University Press
This is an essay about a failed polemic. In 1662, bookseller William Gilbertson offered his patrons the anonymously written Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith. Commonly called Mal Cutpurse. Exactly Collected and now Published for the Delight and Recreation of all Merry Disposed Persons. In this work, readers found a shocking transformation. Mary Frith, alias Moll Cutpurse, had metamorphosed from the rebellious imp of Renaissance stage and street culture to a royalist heroine and counterrevolutionary whose life emphasized the perils of public interactions voided of principles of obligation and duty. Not only did the late Stuart period produce the majority of biographies on Frith, but all three of the extant biographies emphasize Frith's royalism. As late as Alexander Smith's version of her life, published as part of his A Complete History of the lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Shoplifts, and Cheats of Both Sexes (1714), Moll appears as a cavalier champion in contrast to Oliver Cromwell, the "Arch-traitor" (149). Smith even embellishes the earlier biographies' presentations of Frith's royalism by fabricating an episode in which she is "known" to have accosted and robbed the Parliamentarian general Thomas Fairfax on the road to Hounslow Heath (142-43). The emphasis on Frith's political disposition, however, proved not to be enduring. For by 1722, just eight years after Smith's work, Daniel Defoe used Moll Cutpurse as shorthand for Moll Flanders' deft pick pocketing, describing her as "dexterous, as ever Moll Cut-Purse was," without any apparent reference to her political reputation (175). The question is why did late Stuart loyalists undertake this peculiar transformation in the first place?
I argue here that Mary Frith emerged in 1662 as a Royalist heroine because her life as a member of the "meanest of the Commonality," focused key aspects of the ongoing debate about political rights and the public sphere in ways that few other figures could (Lilburne). In the end, Frith's social status, her notorious outlawry, and her sojourn as a bawd--three things that should have eliminated her as a candidate for cavalier champion--were vastly overshadowed by her devotion to preserving a traditional sense of property as movable wealth and the homosocial circuits of exchange along which that property circulated. For these are the features of Frith's life that the Gilbertson biography (the longest of the 1662 versions) consistently offers as evidence of Moll's devotion to king and country. In so doing, the Gilbertson biography offers us rare insight into the political stakes underlying the late Stuart period's use of sexual satire.
To say that The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith surmounts its heroine's social status and various unsavory occupations is not to say that those biographical features failed to pose challenges to the work's writers, however. Indeed, that Frith's biographers managed to cut from the cloth of her life a cavalier heroine is truly remarkable. So much so that we can really only understand how and why they may have undertaken such a project by turning to the biography's "deep" cultural context in the 1640s and 1650s, when public debate about government and civic relations reached an unprecedented din. (1) For among the obstacles Frith's biographers faced was a widespread antipathy, entrenched over two decades, to accepting plebeian participation in public political debate. As English political life erupted in the civil wars, individuals from virtually every social station felt authorized to exhort, cajole, plead, inveigh, or otherwise persuade those who held the reigns of power. For many, this appropriation of ancient aristocratic privilege raised serious questions about whether England could sustain both a plebeian public sphere and stable government. Political radicals and sectarians typically viewed such participations as part of the "natural" liberties with which every Englishman was endowed (Macpherson 137-59). Royalists and constitutional conservatives like Henry Ireton and Oliver Cromwell, on the contrary, viewed public debate as cacophonous and a dangerous usurpation of the very foundations of property on which stable government inevitably rested (Macpherson 138). For the duration of the Commonwealth, the views of Ireton and Cromwell carried the day as a series of censorship measures were put in place. However, by the Commonwealth's waning years the "machinery of enforcement had broken down" (Potter 4), and Stuart polemicists resurrected the old rhetoric of the conflict, vilifying this democratized public sphere as one organized by acquisitiveness and social ambition--an "Envy" that "One should have what All desire" (A Worthy Panegyrick on Monarchy; Written Anno MDCL VIII).
Significant generic obstacles compounded this ambient social bias. For although several biographies of cavalier outlaws had been published prior to The Life and Death, there were no narratives of cavalier bawds on which Frith's biographers could model their efforts. On the contrary, mass culture indictments of radical and sectarian political claims about public space and personal rights were far more likely to take the form of sexual satire--pornography (Hughes 175), in which bawds like Frith often figured as the chief villains. (2) It was this subgenre against which Frith's biographers had to work most strenuously.
Seventeenth-century political pornography is a difficult genre to decipher. Although it was used predominantly by loyalists, parliamentary sympathizers also deployed sexual satire to undermine the legitimacy of radicals and sectarians. Oftentimes, radical women like Mary Overton bore the brunt of these polemics. But more moderate women like Elizabeth Cromwell also were singled out for scurrilous attack (Gillespie), as were women petitioners who occasionally included royalists, and radical men like Henry Marten. The orthodox interpretation of these sexual satires, as Ann Hughes and others have pointed out, has been that they registered genuine alarm over real "assertion [s] of female rights" (174). Thus, James Grantham Turner has suggested recently that loyalists focused on sectarian women because their belief in "free love" seemed to offer material proof of the axiomatic relationship between radical politics and "heterodox" sexuality (80-81). Similarly, Sharon Achinstein has argued that loyalist political pornographies were popular because they imagined for readers the ways in which Parliament's usurpation of crown authority would likewise result in women usurping familial authority in the home--a world turned upside down (131). Certainly, seventeenth-century England was anxious both about the more prominent role women were accorded in the most radical of the sects and the way women of varying political stripes used parliamentary petitions to sway public policy. Yet neither of these interpretations of seventeenth-century pornographic satire sufficiently explains why loyalists deployed these scurrilous portraits so persistently. Even a casual glance at the evidence indicates that most satirists were not responding to a "historical change in women's agency" (Turner 76). (3) Not only was petitioning an "ancient right" often encouraged by Parliament itself (Lee 243), but women petitioners also typically couched their pleas in terms that made it abundantly clear they sought patriarchal protection rather than a disruption of the status quo (246-47).4 Even Elizabeth Lilburne, often coached by her husband (Hughes 170), petitioned to have John released from Newgate on the grounds that she and her children were "very nigh ruine and destruction" (To the Chosen and Betrusted Knights, Citizens, and Burgesses, Assembled in the High and Supream Court of Parliament). Moreover, the radical sectarians who served as polemicists' favorite target hovered on the fringes of mid-century political life after the 1649 purges, never constituting much more than a nuisance. If political pornography's deployment of what Frances Dolan has elsewhere described as "inverse couverture" (127) functioned primarily as a metaphor rather than a transparent representation of "real" changes, what specific social/political claim did it seek to undermine?
In fact, mid-century polemicists turned to pornography's distopic visions of inverted gender hierarchies, amazonian whores, and monstrous bawds because these images reified fears of the radical claims that property is primarily public insofar as every person has property in himself. Non-aristocratic women and their sexuality inevitably focused these concerns because of a long-standing cultural elision between the identities of women of the commons and "common women," the traditional colloquialism for prostitutes. For the term "common women" conceptualized early modern sex workers' identities in terms of public property (Karras 3). Already understood as public property themselves, the expressions of such common women could not be seen as other than public property, as well. Both royalists and constitutional conservatives, then, feared the political specter raised by petitions and other forms of public expression not because they made a specific plea for women's suffrage, but rather because they seemed to instantiate the radical belief that political rights were founded on the "natural" right to ownership in oneself (Macpherson 140). Indeed, Lilburne's 1646 petition to have her husband freed from Newgate argued for her right to address Parliament on the grounds that the "Meanest of the Commonality, may enjoy their own birth-right, Freedome, and liberty of the...
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