By A. L. Lloyd, From London.
IF criminals pay homage to any "patron saint" then they should bow their heads to the memory, of Moll Cutpurse.
This queen of all rogues and hilarious paragon of wickedness raised herself from the humblest condition to lasting
infamy. She has achieved the doubtful honor of having named after her the consorts of criminals for the 300 years
since her heyday.
Moll Cutpurse-her real name was Mary Frith-was born in 1584. Her father was an honest cobbler in the City of London,
and he had nothing but trouble with his daughter from the first. Tradition has it that she came into the world with
her fists doubled and fought the midwife like a wildcat.
Reports of her childhood are severe: "A very tomrig and rump scuttle she was, and delighted and sported only in boys'
play and past time, not minding or companying with the girls," was one ancient description of her.
While her mates were in school, Moll was at the Bear Garden. When she might have been sewing sampler?, she was cracking
skulls. "Why finger a distaff," she later wrote, "when a quarterstaff comes more aptly to your hand?"
Two things she loved above all a good mastiff and an astonishing oath. Tough street traders feared her as a great striding
termagant, who would capsize their stalls at the drop of a hat.
At 15 she knew the underworld intimately, from the fortune-tellers, pedlars and thieves who were her friends of the
Bear Garden. She knew half the rogues, pickpockets, thieves and vagabonds in town. She was a girl who kept the best
of bad company and prized it highly.
Prints of the time show her as a buxom creature in jerkin and galligaskins, with a sprig of mistletoe in her hat, a
huge club in one hand and a pipe in the other. It was her pride that she was the first of all English women to smoke.
She started her life of crime at an unpropitious moment, and only her indomitable character permitted her to triumph.
The world was changing and the ways of criminals were changing with it.
An age was coming to an end and a new age was beginning. It was a time of tension and unease in the underworld no
less than in the royal court.
Moll's verv nickname is significant. The cutpurse was a fellow who had been much admired in the past. He had brought
his art to such per fection that it was no longer safe for citizens to carry their money in the old way, in a bag
hanging from the belt, and so the pocket was invented. and the dav of the cutnurse faded.
The whole technique of petty thieving began to change. The new thief was the pickpocket with his long, delicate fingers.
He had his accomplices, the "bulk" who dis tracted the victim by jostling, and his "rub" who received the loot and made
off with it before the crowd collected.
Moll was never suited for this new and dainty trade. In her own words, "the best signs and marks of a happy industrious
hand is a long middle finger equally suited with what they call the fool's or first finger." But alas, her fingers were
not made that way, her sturdy hands were better suited for felling a rival than picking a pocket.
She had more wicked friends than any other woman of her time. Her word was law with London's underworld* A couple of
misadventures put into her the fear of Tyburn with its gallows, and by the time she was of age she had retired from
pocket-picking.
She had always astonished her wicked friends by her Quick grasp of events and her intimate knowledge of the underworld's
secrets. Now she began to give full play to her vast powers of organisation by becoming the planner and politician of
crime, no longer the crude servant hand but the fine master brain.
Now began what might be called the classical period of her career. Ben Jonson must have known her at this time, for while
he and his friends talked the night away in the Apollo Room of the Devil Tavern, Moll was lording it over her tribe
in the taproom below.
From her trinket-shop next door to the Globe Tavern in Fleet Street she controlled a great gang of bullying cheats - she
called them "the Boyes"-who obliged her slightest whim and acted as her bodvguard so that every daytime stroll was a
triumphant procession, and every night walk a commando-raid.
She told the thieves where to rob and whom to rob, and the booty was brought to her to sell. In return, the thieves got a
share of the prize, and Moll's powerful protection.
Let a robbery be carried out in London overnight, Moll had news of it by early morning, and before mid day the inventory of
stolen goods was in her hands.
To belong to Moll's court was a matter of prestige and privilege, but if one of her gang was insubordinate or idle, or tried
to cheat her by withholding some of the plunder, Moll's action was swifter and more dreadful than the hangman's.
A criminal under Moll's protection belonged to her body and soul, and in all her long life there were few who ever dared to
cross this furious and indomitable woman.
Day and night her fertile brain was busy with plans of plunder. It has been said that "if her hands were idle, her direction
emptied half the pockets of London."
She was a woman with a large view of life and a Falstafian sense of style. At the sound of her stupendous laugh-on a clear
day it could be heard from Charing Cross to Blackfriars - nervous citizens took cover. She was courted by half the toughs
of Bankside and that wild region called Alsatia that lay on the river's edge behind the Temple. But while she liked her
company rough, she liked it witty, too.
Among the favored visitors to her parlor were the spirited highwayman Captain Hind, the wry and reckless chimney-sweep
Mulled Sack who once robbed Cromwell himself as he walked down The Mall, and the mock-bishop Crowder who padded the highway
in clerical clothes and threatened his rich victims with hell fire unless they changed their greedy ways.
Mulled Sack - his real name was Jack Cottington - seems to have been Moll's foreman thief. He held the title of King of the
Beggars, ran a school for robbers, and was much respected for his subtle disguises and his neat ways of work. He was a quiet
and doleful man, an ideal listener to another's sorrows.
For instruction, imagine him sitting in a back room with a friend, listening for hours while a prosperous stranger, half sees over,
tells the story of his life down to the most trivial detail.
Mulled Sack's patience is inexhaustible, but at last, on his nod, the friend interrupts the recital by going behind the stranger's
chair and clapping his hand over the narrator's foolish mouth.
At the same time, Mulled Sack grips his throat. And so the trio remains motionless, if necessary for minutes, until the victim agrees
to hand over his belongings voluntarily, without more ado.
Like many gangster empires since, Moll's dominion was based on the connivance of the law. It was said that "her secret influence in
Newgate was more powerful than the hangman and a whole bench of judges." Every gaoler was in her pay her special darling was the crafty.
Once or twice novice officers of the law made the mistake of summoning Moll to the courts. The first time, Moll was returning from one
of her deadly night-romps around town, bellowing down Ludgate Hill with a lantern carried ceremoniously before her.
The constable questioned her got insults for answers, and straightway arrested her for "unreasonable and suspicious walking." The next
morning she was released, on the hasty intercession of the Lord Mayor himself. The trick she played to revenge herself on the rash constable
reads like the plot of a Jonson play.
She faked the death of his rich uncle, and sent the constable hotfoot for Shropshire to collect his inheritance, and so worked it that she
brought him to penury and despair, to the uproarious admiration of the underworld.
Another occasion was more serious. One of her gang, working in Chancery Lane, had lifted the watch of a rich farmer, and this gentleman,
seeing his property hanging in the Roaring Girl's shop, had called the constable and had her arrested for a fence.
It was a hanging charge, and the underworld watched the affair with concern. But when the trial came on and the constable was asked to produce
the vital piece of evidence, he could not find it. for the watch had been picked from his pocket in the very court itself, by one of Moll's
devoted Boyes.
Moll was great in a time of greatness: but the time passed, the glory went down, and she with it. The raffish aristocratic order, personified
by King Charles, was already in difficulties with the new order of the merchants, represented by Parliament.
Like the rest of her ruffian comrades, the Roaring Girl was fiercely loyal to the king. On Charles' return from Scotland in 1638, Moll paid for
the Fleet Street conduit to run with wine.
When the struggle between Throne and Parliament came to an end with the swing of the executioner's axe, the underworld was plunged in mourning.
The old order had meant rich confusion and riot and profitable disarray, but the Roundheads were all for sobriety, civic order, and the rigorous
clean-up. Newgate was not the same place any more, new judges were on the bench, new officers on the beat.
Doggedly true to her martyred king, Moll was among the leaders of the private war the thieves and highwaymen waged on the Round head order.
Time and again she sent her cleverest pickpockets to rob the Parliamentary elite. But the old spark was missing, the splendid rowdy days were over.
Moll Cutpurse, an illustrious woman in an illustrious age, went into retirement among her pampered pets, her mastiffs with counter pained cradles,
her parrots that perched in a wilderness of stolen trinkets, her baboons at whose indecorous antics she let loose her thunder-clap of a laugh.
So she passed her last years in peace, smoking her pipe and sewing in the company of female thieves, and talking over the great days long gone
Enormous as she was, she grew bigger day by day, till at the age of 74 she died of dropsy. "I expect not," she wrote, "nor will I purchase a Funerall
Commendation, but...let the Sexton mumble Two or Three Dusty Clay words and put me in, and there's an end."
Notes
From the NSW Newspaper The Worlds News 8 Nov 1952 Page 7.
A.L.Loyd's articles quite often found their way into Australian Newspapers long after he'd retuned to England, this one in 1952.
Top