Elizabeth Cresswell
Her employees included the wives of soldiers pressed into service for Charles II and gentlewomen who had supported the Cavalier cause during the English Civil War and had since fallen on hard times.
[2] By July 1658 Cresswell is recorded as a bawd "without rival in her wickedness", running a brothel in Bartholomew Close, a small street off Little Britain in the City of London.
She was living two miles to the northeast of Bartholomew Close in St Leonard's, Shoreditch, by October 1658,[1] when a mass of angry locals gathered at Westminster Court to give evidence against her and the prostitutes she ran from her "house".
[1] The amassed neighbours told of further infamies, such as when whores "in the habit of a Gentlewoman began to propose a Health to the Privy Member of a Gentleman ... and afterwards drank a Toast to her own Private Parts".
She also ran an office in Millbank to organise whores for local noblemen and owned both a mansion in Clerkenwell and a "House of Assignation" where women old and young could discreetly meet their lovers.
Her increasing immunity from prosecution furthered her stature as a hate figure, particularly with the many thousands of London apprentices who could not afford her bawds, and bound by the terms of their contracts, were forbidden to marry.
Following the riot, Page and Cresswell are listed as the addressers of The Whores' Petition, sent to Lady Castlemaine, the King's lover, notorious for her own wild promiscuity.
The letter itself was so finely tuned to the political dynamics of the day that though the printer was arrested, the court censor writes that "I can fasten nothing on The Poor Whore's Petition that a jury will take notice of.
The historian James Turner identifies this event as an example of a new carnivalisation of sexuality in Restoration England, where genuine political attack, satire, street commentary and bawdy theatre came together.
[13] Two years after the riots, a mob gathered once more and again swore they would raze Cresswell's cathouse to the ground, though protection from the local beadles prevented the attack.
Cresswell attempted to distance herself from any political affiliation, but was ultimately attacked by Protestants for providing the royal court with whores and by Catholics for financing Player.
[9][17] She was regularly referenced in party pamphlets, street literature and ballads, and may have been one of the inspirations for the eponymous heroine of Daniel Defoe's satire Moll Flanders.
[18][8] Richard Head and Francis Kirkman, authors who frequented bawdy houses, wrote up and circulated graphic accounts of their encounters with "the old matron" and "her girls" in The English Rogue (1665).
Set out like a traditional text book on the ancient art of rhetoric, the adaptation featured a caricature of Cresswell as a philosopher teaching her lifetime's worth of sexual tricks and wiles to Dorethea, the fallen daughter of a ruined royalist.
[19] In this satirical parody, the madam advises her young student: "You must cloath your discourse with a meek, grave, and pious aspect, to make your sophistry pass for sincere and real".
[19][20] She recommends researching the nature of the client: [THE Whore] will find it much to her advantage, to enquire particularly into the state and quality of all her Suitors affairs, to hinder any disappointment or surprize: for if she has well informed her self of their busy hours, and when the necessities of their vocation, or the impulse of pleasure, do oblige their attendance; it will be easy to appoint times of meeting, as may give general satisfaction, and enable her to observe her particular engagements.
[20][21] "In the sentiment of my Rhetorick", she lectures "there is no music ought to sound more charmingly in a Whores Ears as the sweet melody created by the clashing of Gold in her own purse.
