The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review

When highwaywom­en ruled our roads

From Moll Cutpurse to Jenny Diver, British history is full of female rebels who refused to follow the law

- By Philippa GREGORY Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History by Philippa Gregory (William Collins, £25) is out now; Renegade Nell is streaming on Disney+ from Friday

The new television show Renegade Nell, written by Happy Valley’s Sally Wainwright, tells the tale of a woman framed for murder in the 18th century, who becomes the most feared highwaywom­an in the land. But this imaginary outlaw (played by Louisa Harland) and her adventures in a dramatised version of late-Stuart England – with additional magic and spirits – will have to gallop some distance to match the true stories of women criminals in early-modern Britain. These real-life bandits struck terror in the hearts of travellers, stalked their victims on city streets, and ran large profession­al criminal gangs for a successful living.

My personal favourite is an early adopter of chloroform. Who could not love a woman who proudly answered in the courtroom to her nickname of “Fat Beth”? Her real name was Elizabeth Smith and she was working as a street-walking prostitute when she came across the new liquid anaestheti­c. Queen Victoria was a prominent early user of the drug – when giving birth to Prince Leopold in 1853 – but Smith beat her to it by three years, and found a profitable use for it. Smith accosted a young solicitor, Frederic Jewitt, in London’s Spitalfiel­ds, and while he paused to consider her offer, she pressed a chloroform-soaked handkerchi­ef over his mouth and nose. The indecisive young gentleman collapsed unconsciou­s. When he finally came to, he was stark naked in a lodging house in Thrall Street, missing his fine clothes, watch, ring and money. After Jewitt raised a hue and cry (I imagine him shrieking, wrapped up in a blanket), a crowd pursued Smith and found her hiding in a notorious brothel in George Street.

She was arrested and sentenced for theft, earning the dubious honour of being the first recorded criminal to use chloroform.

Smith was not the only woman to use the latest advances in technology for the purposes of crime. In the 1680s, Nan Hereford favoured a sedan chair as a nifty getaway vehicle. She started her career as a fraudster: persuading a rich apothecary that she was an heiress. Hereford borrowed £250 from him for their wedding-day expenses; but on the morning after their marriage, when the bridegroom went to meet Hereford’s rich uncle and claim her fortune, he discovered he’d been conned – and Hereford was nowhere to be seen.

She continued her life of crime. Her modus operandi was to enter a shop, pick up an item and stroll back to the open doorway, jump into her waiting sedan chair and order the chairmen to run. She was caught by a linen draper, who refused her bribe of 100 guineas, and taken to Newgate prison. Even then, she did not give up, making a dramatic escape attempt by setting fire to her cell. After that, she was kept in handcuffs and fetters until her hanging in December 1690.

Perhaps the most famous highwaywom­an is Mary Frith, immortalis­ed in Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s play of 1611 as The Roaring Girl. She was born in the 1580s to a family of shoemakers, and proved so unruly that her family tried to banish her to New England. Frith either bribed her kidnappers or jumped overboard and swam for shore. She went into hiding in the dark streets of London and emerged as “Moll Cutpurse”, earning her new

name as a pickpocket (by cutting the strings that tied a wallet to its owner’s belt).

Sometimes, Frith dressed in men’s clothing and smoked a pipe. She worked as an all-singing, all-dancing entertaine­r in alehouses and performed public stunts, too – taking a bet that she could not ride from Charing Cross to Shoreditch, dressed as a man, carrying a banner and blowing a trumpet. She won the bet, causing a mini-riot among her admirers as she rode through the boroughs on the famous performing horse Marocco (a horse so renowned that it was mentioned in Shakespear­e’s Love’s Labour’s Lost).

The success of The Roaring Girl may have prompted Frith to take to the stage as herself in 1611 at the Fortune Theatre, London, where, dressed as a man, she sang songs, played the lute and exchanged jokes with the audience. She was one of the earliest women to appear on stage – the first recorded standup comedienne making “immodest and lascivious speeches”, according to the ecclesiast­ical court that charged her with indecency. She served time in Bridewell prison and was ordered to make a public penance: standing naked but for a sheet during a Sunday-morning sermon at St Paul’s Cross in February 1612, when, according to a witness, she wept bitterly. (Another witness said she was “maudlin drunck”.)

Real or not, her penitence did not last long. She establishe­d a licensed brokerage for stolen goods, where thieves could deposit their gains and victims of robbery could buy back their treasures, and she married Lewknor Markham – the son of the author Gervase Markham – in 1614, perhaps to gain the safety of being a wife, whose husband would have to answer for her crimes. Her attempt to vanish into the legal invisibili­ty of marriage did not work. A few years on, her latest business idea – pimping male lovers out to middle-class women – led to criminal charges.

When the Civil War broke out, Frith was said to have joined the Royalist army, and continued a private vendetta against the Commonweal­th general Thomas Fairfax – she held him up in a daring attack on Hounslow Heath, outside London. According to the scandal sheet reporting on the court hearings at Newgate prison, Frith shot at the Cromwellia­n general, killed two horses from under his servants and rode away with 250 jacobuses – worth about £50,000 in today’s money. Fairfax, though a man of proven courage, did not pursue her; a party of military officers chased her for six miles, until Frith’s horse failed her at Turnham Green. She was condemned to die; but the general accepted a massive payment, and she was pardoned. So Frith died not on the gallows, but, after a spell in Bedlam for insanity, in her own bed in her 70s – a good age for a woman of her times.

Even threats of hanging or exile were not enough to deter more entreprene­urially-minded women. One climbed the ranks of the criminal underworld in early-18thcentur­y London to become a notorious gang leader. When Mary Young could not make a living as a seamstress, she joined a gang of pickpocket­s near St Giles and specialise­d in stealing watches off their chains and even a ring from a gentleman’s finger as he took her hand to help her into church.

Nicknamed “Jenny Diver” for her skill in delving into pockets, she soon began choreograp­hing mass thefts. On several occasions, she pretended to fall dramatical­ly ill in the street and picked the pockets of the people who helped her to her feet, while her pretend servants picked the pockets of those nearby, and the rest of the gang moved through the crowd who had gathered to stare.

But her most creative fraud was on a young man who propositio­ned her when she was dressed as a wealthy lady at the theatre. She invited him to a rented house, claiming it was her marital home, and they stripped naked and got into bed. A gang member, pretending to be a housemaid, knocked on the door, whispering in panic that the master had come home. Young scooped up her frightened lover’s clothes, the contents of his pockets, his jewellery and his gold-topped cane and locked him naked in the bedroom, promising to keep him safe from her imaginary jealous husband, while the gang cleared all the furniture out of the rented house and got away.

Young was a considerat­e boss, arranging sick pay for her criminal gang: if any were unable to join a thieving trip because of illness, the others paid them 10 per cent of the profits until they were well again. She enjoyed a long career in crime: transporte­d twice to the Americas, she escaped both times; but finally she was caught pickpocket­ing and executed in 1741.

Transporta­tion to the New World was not necessaril­y the end, as Young showed – many criminals completed their time of servitude and came home, some of them sneaked back into the country while still officially exiled. Elizabeth Harriet Greeve, a swindler active in Georgian London, was transporte­d twice before disappeari­ng from the record. She pretended to be an aristocrat­ic lady and conned hopeful clerks into believing that her connection­s could get them well-paid offices in government. The Newgate Calendar claimed: “With one of the dupes of her artifice she was first cousin to Lord North; with another, second cousin to the Duke of Grafton; to a third, nearly related to Lady Fitzroy: on some occasions she affected great intimacy with Lord Guilford; and had the young Premier then ruled the State she would, without much doubt, have boasted the patronage of Mr Pitt.”

She was arrested in November 1773 for promising a coachcarve­r that she would get him the place of a clerk in the Victuallin­g Office, in exchange for his life savings of £36. She was transporte­d to the Americas and came right back, only to be transporte­d again.

One woman even made a success of her transporta­tion, just as she had succeeded as a criminal and as her own defence lawyer. Charlotte Walker was always a charming presence in court. Standing only 4ft 11in tall, she was so petite and pretty that juries released her 11 times, beginning with her first appearance at the Old Bailey, charged with assault in 1777, at the age of 23. She spoke in her own defence, and even cross-examined the men who complained that she had robbed them, painting a picture of them as immoral drunkards, and picking on the inconsiste­ncies in their evidence against her.

Her demolition of Joseph Bowman, who said she had attacked and mugged him in French Horn Yard, was irresistib­le. She told the court: “He said… I held him together by both his arms, and so robbed his Worship: I said I must have three hands to rob him when I had hold of both his arms.”

At the age of 46, Walker’s quick wits failed to save her in a trial for theft. She was found guilty and sentenced to death. But even then her luck had not run out. Her death sentence was commuted to transporta­tion to New South Wales, in Australia, where she set up house with a time-served shoemaker, a valuable skill in the new colony. Her partner was 14 years her junior and she lived with him until her death in 1806.

We think of the women of Jane Austen’s novels and of Victorian England as well-mannered, self-discipline­d, “naturally” maternal, and spiritual. But such self-sacrificin­g domestic saints are a long way from the true-crime stories of Fat Beth and Moll Cutpurse.

In the research for my history Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History, I found thousands of women who refused to moderate their behaviour and defied convention­s and the laws of the land, sometimes to make a living, sometimes to express themselves, sometimes – gloriously – both. The tales of these rebel women and law-breakers are just as thrilling to us now as they were to the scandal-loving public of their own day. Then and now, they show us the range of possibilit­ies open to women who take to the open road, and take life in their own hands.

‘Fat Beth’ knocked out a solicitor and left him stark naked, robbed of his jewels and watch

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 ?? ?? i Stand and deliver: from top, Margaret Lockwood in
The Wicked
Lady, 1945; and Helen Mirren as Moll Cutpurse in the RSC’s 1983 staging of The Roaring Girl
i Stand and deliver: from top, Margaret Lockwood in The Wicked Lady, 1945; and Helen Mirren as Moll Cutpurse in the RSC’s 1983 staging of The Roaring Girl
 ?? ?? g Coach trip: left, Louisa Harland in Renegade Nell, a new TV series written by Happy Valley creator Sally Wainwright
g Coach trip: left, Louisa Harland in Renegade Nell, a new TV series written by Happy Valley creator Sally Wainwright

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