Dressing as men for sex or convenience?

How many women dressed as men during the Civil War? We’ll never know for sure. But what is certain is that, by the summer of 1643, Charles I had become so concerned about the phenomenon that, in a draft proclamation designed to regulate the conduct of the forces under his command, he included a FKTGEVKXG URGEK ECNN[ HQTDKFFKPI that practice. “Because the confounding of habites appertaining to both sexes… is a thing which nature and religion forbid and our soule abhors,” the king wrote, “[and] yet the prostitute impudency of some women have thus conversed in our army, therefore let no women presume to counterfeit her sex by wearing man’s apparall, under payne of the severest punishment.”

Charles’s claim that it was a sense of “prostitute impudency” that led some of the women in his camp to adopt male “habites”, suggests the king regarded female cross-dressing primarily as a cover for the sale of sex. It’s true that a few of the female camp-followers who accompanied the royalist army may indeed have swapped their dresses for breeches in order to make it easier for them to ply their trade as prostitutes. However, it seems probable that most of the women who adopted male attire would have done so for reasons of simple convenience: it made it easier for them to stride alongside their menfolk as they marched across the country on campaign.