The frustrations of Sapphic love, according to 'Cheat upon Cheat', 1680's.

This week, a piece of mild Restoration era smut, delivering something rather less strong than the title promises. The ballad deals with a marriage contracted between two women, Susan, who dresses like a man to woo Sarah, who is delighted to have such a beautiful gallant as her suitor, marries in haste, and then is disappointed on the wedding night. 

More comment below the text, which I have slightly tidied up in spelling and punctuation.

Cheat upon Cheat, OR, The Debaucht Hypocrite.

Being a True Account of two Maidens, who lived in London near Fish Street, the one being named Susan, the other Sarah. Susan, being dressed in Man's Apparel, Courted Sarah, to the Great Trouble of the deceived Damsel, who thought to be pleasured by her Bridals Night's Lodging, as you may find by the sequel.

          When Maidens come to Love and Dote.
          And want the use of man,
          Against their wills they needs must shew't
          Let them do what they can.

To the Tune of, ‘Tender hearts of London City’.

Come and hear the strangest Story, 
Ever Fortune laid before ye, 
of a wedding strange but true, 
For such a one was never known, 
as I will now declare to you. 

There was two maids in London City 
One was wanton, t'other witty; 
Sue and Sarah were their Names, 
It doth appear they married were, 
and Sarah tasted Cupid’s flames. 

A Gentleman that lived nigh 'um, 
Had a mighty mind to try 'um, 
and this Susan did engage, 
That she would go and court her so, 
that she her passion might assuage, 

Disguised went she, and fell to wooing 
Sarah she would needs be doing, 
so she quickly gave consent, 
They soon agreed to match with speed, 
but now poor Sarah doth lament. 

Susan strangely was disguised, 
Sarah’s heart was soon surprised, 
so that she did condescend, 
She ne'er denied to be a Bride, 
but her young Lover did commend. 

While her joys were thus completed, 
Sarah was extremely cheated, 
which did make her vitals fail, 
To bed they went with joint consent, 
and she found a cat without a tail. 

Now is Sarah much concerned, 
But by this some wit she learned, 
though she for it paid full dear, 
For from her eyes, with fresh supplies, 
down trickles many a brackish tear. 

Sarah thought love her befriended, 
Tho’ but mark what this attended, 
and twill make you much admire, 
That Susan she, so arch should be, 
to set poor Sarah’s heart on fire. 

With sword and wig was Susan dressed 
Sarah thought that she was blessed, 
with a gallant none more fair, 
But pity 'twas, a wanton lass, 
should be so much mistaken there. 

Now is Sarah discontented, 
Her misfortune much lamented, 
Maidens then pray have a care, 
Lest Susan comes with sugar plums, 
to bring poor damsels into a snare. 

Quoth Sarah ‘Why would you abuse one, 
Whom you loved, deceitful Susan, 
why would you me thus betray?’
‘Oh’ then quoth she, 'twas jollitry, 
that made me thus the antic play. 

Let no one know how you miscarried, 
How mistaken when you married, 
for twill make the world to laugh, 
You walked your round, and then you found 
a constable without a staff.’ 

      Wonder not why this I write you, 
      To be merry I invite you, 
      and to none I harm do think, 
      Let Sarah grieve, Sue did deceive, 
      which made poor Sarah’s heart to sink. 

      To all Maids let this be a warning, 
      All are wise that still are learning, 
      Beauty is a mere decoy, 
      Then have a care, least Cupid's snare, 
      do make you curse the blinking Boy. 

Printed for J. Blare, at the Looking-Glass in the New-Buildings on London-Bridge.


Not a sophisticated performance, and written for unsophisticated readers - men, men who want to feel part of the libertinage and sexual knowingness of the era. The narrative stutters badly over the wooing/wedding night, which one would have thought a simple sequence to describe.

The superfluous parts of the narrative are revealing: that the inception of Susan's deception comes from a man, glancing at the literary motif of 'trying' a potential partner before making a final choice to commit. But this third party is quickly forgotten, once he has served his function of removing the possibility that one woman might want to try sex with another woman.


The message of the rest of the ballad is to reassure the reader that women may indeed be beautiful (so a woman dressed as a man makes a very winning gallant). But, lacking a penis, such a wooer will only disappoint a woman, being a cat without a tail, a constable without a staff, etc.

Who would have predicted that? Susan is a cheat because she's not a man; Sarah, surely cheated rather than cheating, can only be another cheat because she deserts true masculinity (ugly-faced but virile) with such rapidity in her haste to marry her (female) gallant. Imaginary female readers, 'Maids', are solemnly warned that Susan may still be out there, alluring young women with sugar plums rather than testicles.

I suppose pornography, smut anyway, must always have a large element of the naive about it.

Bringing bobbing and hey ho to meet

I was attracted by this woodcut (quite unfamiliar to me) to read Heywood’s play to find out what is going on in the picture.

I suppose there must be discussion of the play in McLuskie’s book. Certain plays by Heywood are getting lots of critical attention (always A Woman Killed with Kindness, The Late Lancashire Witches, while The Fair Maid of the West has had a good run of late because of Bess’s travels to the eastern end of the Mediterranean). But A Mayden-head Well Lost, which no-one seems to have devoted an article to, has plenty to be said for it. Heywood had written in his Golden-Silver-Brazen-Iron Ages sequence the raunchiest dramas of the early English stage. But there he had the excuse of classical antiquity. This play’s bold title shows that the old boy was up to his old tricks.

In the picture the chaps sitting round the dinner table have just had an illegitimate baby served in them in a covered serving dish (though the artist - to use the term loosely - has made it look like a portrait picture with hinged side-panels). The mother of this baby, Princess Julia of Milan ought to be at the table with her father and his followers. The father is for the moment off-stage; in the right hand-panel is a mild illustration of the kind of hanky-panky that leads to these little moments of family embarrassment. On the right of the main group, in his motley coat, is the play’s clown (and he’s not a bad example of the type). The Duke of Milan had been unable to have his errant daughter killed when she confessed to him that she was pregnant, but the baby boy had been abandoned by a roadside (where it was instantly taken up by its father the Prince of Parma, who has bedded Julia on the usual grounds of verbal agreement to marry afterwards. Julia reminds him “Yet ere I yielded, we were man and wife, / Saving the Churches outward Ceremony”).

Urged on by the villain of the piece, Sforsa, the Duke of Milan presses his errant daughter into an urgent match with the Prince of Florence. But this potential bridegroom has heard enough about Julia (for Parma writes to him anonymously) to make threatening stipulations that she must prove to be an intact virgin. He is anyway in love with the other girl in the play, Lauretta, but she is only the daughter of a general who has died of grief at Milan’s ingratitude in regard to his greatest victory.

The inevitable bed-trick has to be played (Heywood seems to have been following Middleton closely). Sforza has learned where Lauretta and her mother are in impoverished exile, and he has 500 gold pieces for her if she agrees to act as the substitute bride.

So, here’s the central melodrama. Lauretta is in love with the Prince of Florence, and he loves her, though he faces the dynastic marriage to her morally doubtful rival. Along comes Sforsa to persuade her to go to bed with the man she loves:

Sforsa Ever rejoice faire Virgin, for I bring you
Gold, and Enlargement; with a recovery
Of all your former loss, and dignity,
But for a two hours labour: Nay, that no labour
Nor toil, but a mere pleasure.

Lauretta hears what the conditions are, and hangs tough:

Lauretta.
Doe you not blush, when you deliver this
Pray tell the Duke, all Women are not Julia ,
And though wee bee dejected, thus much tell him,
Wee hold our honour at too high a price,
For Gold to buy.

Her Mother backs up her apparently firm resolution: “If thou consentest to this abhorred fact, / Thy Mothers curse will seize on thee for ever”. Sforsa, like Vindice, is not abashed, and continues his argument, and in one of those special Heywood moments, Lucetta performs a complete volte-face:

Lauretta.
Sir bee answered,
If Julia bee disloyal: Let her be found
So by the Prince she weds: Let her be branded
With the vile name of strumpet: She disgrac’d
Me, that ne’re thought her harms; publicly struck me,
Nay in the Court: And after that, procur’d
My banishment: These Injuries I reap’t
By her alone, then let it light on her.

Sforsa.
Now see your error,
What better; safer, or more sweet revenge,
Then with the Husband? what more could woman ask?

Lauretta.
My blood rebels against my reason, and
I no way can withstand it: 'Tis not the Gold
Moves me, but that dear love I bear the Prince,
Makes me neglect the credit and the honour
Of my dear Fathers house: Sir, what the Duke desires
I am resolved to doe his utmost will.

Mother.
Oh my dear daughter.

Lauretta, like Shakespeare’s Helena, will get from the Prince of Florence an array of tokens (rings, the indenture for Julia’s marriage dowry). The Prince of Florence will discover that he has been in bed with the woman he really loves; and Lucetta can explain that she did it only to save him from marrying the unchaste Julia:

“Only the love I ever bare your honour,
Made me not prize my own. No lustful appetite
Made me attempt such an ambitious practice,
As to aspire unto your bed my Lord.”

And so through to the final couplet of the play: “And let succeeding Ages, thus much say: / Never was Maiden-head better given away.” Lauretta skates through to a complete victory, Julia and Parma settle down together, and the villain is left to reflect on the error of his ways: “Who would strive, / To bee a villain, when the good thus thrive?”

So, a pleasingly racy play (for its time). The clown is occasionally allowed to point out what underlies the fine sentiments:

Lauretta.
Oh let me lie
As prostrate at your foot in Vassallage,
As I was at your pleasure.
Prince
Sweete arise.
Clown.

Your Lordship hath bin up already, when she was down: I hope if the thing you wot of go no worse forward then it hath begun…

Reading the play made me wonder if there was any connection between two ‘faults written on the body’ sentiments. In early modern plays, no man, no matter how inexperienced with women, can be deceived about her virginity; the knowledge is inescapable. And if he discovers that his new bride is not a virgin, he acquires cuckold’s horns, the invisible signs that all men can somehow see.

I took a quick read through of a set of maidenhead ballads too. This was my favourite:

The loyal maids good counsel to all her fellow-maids. To be careful of wanton young men, They'll promise they love you again and again: But if they get their will of you before you are wed You may look a new sweetheart and a new maiden-head: And believe no false young men that will dissemble and lye, Lest they send you away with salt tears in your eye. To the tune of, Come hither my own sweet duck 1685-1688.

It is a warning about the lies men will tell so as “to bring bobbing and hey ho to meet”. The final stanza is very strange: it professes to be a personal testimony by the author, a woman, about chastity till marriage as the best course in life:

“She was a Maid that did set out this Song,

she was thirty before she was Wed,

She had great care of every one,

to save her Maiden-head

At last their came an honest Man

and made her his own dear Wife

If she had yielded to some that came before

she had been undone all the days of her life.”

Was this meant seriously? To persuade? Till thirty?

The devil puts in an appearance: 1655 and 1663

Two supernatural ballads to the same (incongruous) tune: the full synoptic titles give the narratives. I will simply offer a rational reading of each, to show how easily we can make the devil disappear (or conversely, how easily they could write him in).

1.

The devils conquest, or, a Wish obtained: Shewing how one lately of Barnsby-Street, in Leg-Ally, in St Olaves Parish, Southwark, one that Carded Wooll for Stockings, carried home some work to her Mistris, living on Horsly-Down, who asked her how much shee owed her for; the Maid answered eight pounds; her Mistris said 'twas but six whereupon the Maid began to Swear and Curse, and wisht the Devil fetch her, if there was not eight pounds owing for; the Mistris loving quietness, paid her for eight pound: the Maid, with two of her Companions, walking over Horsly-Down, she having a Childe in her arms, one came and throwed her down, and presently took her up again, which caused her to say, Thou Rogue, dost thou fling me down and take me up again, and suddenly he vanished away, neither she, nor the two women with her, could discern which way he went, which caused them to say, it was the Devil, which for all this, nothing terrified the Maid, who went boldly home, and to bed, and the two women with her; at midnight she heard a voice, which called her by her name very often; she answered, I come, I come; but the voice still continuing, she swore she would come, and being got out of the bed, fell down upon her face, and was taken speechless, yet her body moving in most terrible manner, manifesting her inward pangs; her Mistris was sent for, who freely forgave her, and wisht God might forgive her too, and then shee departed, and her body was found as black as pitch all over; and all this was for no more than the value of eleven pence, which was done on the 6^th of this instant May, 1665. and was written for a warning to all, to avoid the like course. The tune is, Summer Time.

2.

Strange news from Westmoreland. Being a true relation of one Gabriel Harding, who coming home drunk, struck his wife a blow on the breast and killed her out right; then did he forswear the evil deed which he knew himself guilty of. Likewise how a stranger did come to the house cloathed in green, the people that were eye witnesse said it was an angel. Likewise how the stranger or angel did give sentence upon the man for killing of his wife. Also how Satan did break the mans neck that did forswear himself; and the stranger or angel did command Satan to hurt none else, and to vanish: which being done, there was a pleasant harmony of musick heard to sound: then did the stranger cloathed in green, take his leave of the people; whereof the chiefest in the parish desired it might be put in print, and have hereunto set their hands. To the tune of, In summer time.

The story about Margery Perry (in The Devil’s Conquest) gives a glimpse of the lives of a group of low income single women in a poor parish of 17^th century London. With her companions, Perry carded wool:

http://www.joyofhandspinning.com/hand-carding.shtml

The three women lodge and sleep together. The notion of ‘joy’ in their place on the bottom rung of the stocking-making process would have seemed far away. One day, Perry makes her false claim to her ‘Work Mistress’ to have carded eight pounds weight of wool, having only done six:

She wisht the Devil fetch her straight
If that she had not done eight pounds,
Ah woman! Caught with such a bait,
That came not to half a crown.

Perry was not made penitent by the warning attack on the way home, so she then succumbed to the devil at the proper hour of midnight. I suppose that Perry had a heart condition: the quarrel with her forewoman brought on her first attack as she walked home agitated, but in triumph; the AMI from which she didn’t recover came later. Yet in her extremity, she had the additional misery of believing that this was the devil come for her soul, and seems, as far as her condition allowed, to have acted as if she were complying with a supernatural summons.

Gabriel Harding was a wealthy alcoholic from Tredenton in Westmorland (the ballad says his rents came to £500 a year). The ballad tells how, in a drunken rage, he struck his wife, who died on the spot. Their children rushed into the street, and their cries alerted the neighbours. Harding was detained in his own house by his neighbours, but he denied the killing. They decided to summon the coroner. But instead, a knocking at the door heralds the arrival of a splendid angel:

His eyes like to the Stars did shine,
He was cloathed in a bright Grass green;
His cheeks was of a Crimson red
Of such a man was seldom seen…

He tells them that they should not send for the coroner, but to bring him ‘the man that did the deed / And boldly hath deny’d the same’.

The angel then gives Harding a brisk lecture. It contains a lot of local knowledge (or local ill feeling):

Thy full delight was drunkenness,
And always griping on the Poor:
Beside thou hast murdered thy Wif[e]
Alack what salve will cure thy sore.

Thy family within the house
Food thou wouldst grudge continually
O wicked man, thy self prepare!
A fearful death thou’rt sure to die…

The angel tells the neighbours not to be frightened about what will happen next: and the devil duly appears, first like ‘a brave Gentleman’, and then dancing round the hall in an ‘ugly shape’ after being given the charge to ‘Do no more then thou hast command’:

The Devil then he straight laid hold
On him that had murdered his Wife,
His neck in sunder then he brake,
And thus did end his wretched life.

The Devil then he vanished
Quite from the people in the Hall…

Yes, I am sure that is precisely what happened: a group of morally-revolted neighbours had after all been trying to deal with a drunken, angry and frightened man, aiming to keep him restrained in the hall of his own house. In the melee, they broke his neck. Afterwards they might have felt exactly as the ballad accidentally puts it – the devil had for that moment got into them. But, well, Harding was a drunk, a miser, they all hated him, and he had just killed his own wife. They just needed a story about why they hadn’t called the coroner: an angel told them not to, and that angel summoned up a devil to do his dirty work, before disappearing to a pleasant melody.

To authenticate itself, the ballad ends with a list of “the Names of some of the chiefest men that live in the Parish. Christopher Rawly, Esquire, James Fish, Gent. William Lisle, Gent. Simon Pierce, Ambrose Whir, Oliver Craft, Robert Ford, Thomas Clifford, Yeomen. George Crawly, Peter Vaux, Pilip Cook, Francis Martin, George Horton, Abraham Miles, Husbandmen.”

I surmise that among them were the men who accidentally killed the murderer Harding, and also those who concocted this spectacularly moral cover story, and maybe passed on the details to some passing Autolycus.

(I like the way that this ballad was reprinted as almost 30 years later, around 1690, but still as ‘News from Westmorland’.)

The images of the priapic devil decorate both ballads. It seems to be the same design. The later ballad probably uses the older block. For the 1663 ballad, it looks as though the old design had been stamped onto a new block, and been used as the basis of a re-cutting, so producing the crisper reversed print (devil on the left in my composite image).

I couldn’t exactly locate Margery Perry’s address on it, but I did find the promising new online Map of Early Modern London that is in development:

http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/index_site.php

I might have to volunteer myself to help fill up their information boxes.

Two broadside ballads, 1652

It is always stimulating to come across an early modern text that feels (as we say) transgressive. In the mid-seventeenth century, press censorship temporarily lapsed, and the printing presses were numerous and nimble enough to let all sorts of voices speak. Broadside ballads had always allowed a broad range of robust sentiment, these two texts both have a transgressive spirit, stronger and truer than in most of the elite writing from which we so carefully refine it these days.

The Last News From France purports to tell a story of how the future Charles II escaped after the Battle of Worcester. The gender switchings are harder to keep in mind than those in As You Like It: in the main, Charles dresses as a servingman, whose Lady, ‘Mistress Ann’, is actually a young gentleman in disguise. You only learn this fact from the ballad’s heading: in the ballad itself, the speaker has effectively become female. At one point in the ballad a maximum of reversal is enjoyed: ‘He of me a service did crave / and often-times to me stood beare / In womans apparel he was most brave / and on his chin he had no hare’. First, the ‘King of Scots’ stands bare-headed to his Master-Mistress, the next moment, he is dressed as a woman. That ‘Womans’ adds such confusion that one half wonders if it was a misprint (but, say, a ‘servingman’ could not dress up ‘most brave’ without Charles starting to look like himself again, even if without a Cavalier’s Van Dyke beard). During the historical Charles's escape, the main problem was his distinctive height: forces were searching for 'a tall black man, over two yards high'. But the ballad writer isn't troubled by plausibilities of disguise, and pops him into 'womans apparel'.

Anyway, in the ballad, the two pass (most implausibly) through London, visit (and weep at) the place of the execution of Charles’s father, take a boat from Queenhithe, and reach France. And all the way through, the refrain line is ‘And the King himself did wait on me’. The ballad ends with the speaker wishing well to the King, who has (the ballad blithely announces) been invited to Denmark to take up the throne there: and the little flurry of subversion ends with a perfect example of ‘containment’: ‘But as for my part / I’m glad with all me heart / That my man must now my master be’. In a different country, everything will be as it should be.

But even so, in this defiantly, even cockily Royalist ballad (it was written to be sung to the tune ‘When the King enjoys his own again’, Matthew Parker’s definitive ballad for the Stuart cause), there is this heady, even sexy pleasure in the King becoming a servingman. During the romance of escape, he even becomes a woman. See, though, a kind of delicacy: to enjoy this kind of royal servitude to him, the speaker has had to become ‘Mistress Ann’. As the son of his courtly father, Charles can (it seems) with more seemliness ‘serve’ a woman. ‘Where ever I came / My speeches did frame / So well my Waiting man to free’: if, as a necessity to set the King ‘free’, the King has to be made subject, and ordered around, well, a woman can just about permissibly do this.

The Wanton Wife of BATH is an absolute ripper: ‘In Bath a wanton wife did dwell / As Caucer she doth write’ (it begins). And you might think that, once you have got over this casual re-gendering of Chaucer, things will settle down a bit. In fact, they get wilder and wilder. The Wife of Bath dies, and her soul goes a knock-knock-knocking on heaven’s door. The first to answer is Adam, who tells her that there is no place for a sinner like her there. She gives it to him straight: ‘Thou wast the causer of our woe / our pain and misery / And first broke Gods commandements / in pleasure of thy wife’. Adam reels away, and in comes Jacob to tell her to go to Hell: she tells him he was a ‘false deceiver’. Lot tries, and is roundly told off for his drunkenness and incest, Judith arrives to see if she can do any better, is denounced as a murderess, and departs blushing, King David had adultery and trouble-making hurled at him, while King Solomon, in the Wife’s unflinching view a whoremaster and idolater, never stood a chance. Jonah, Thomas and Mary Magdalen are scolded away for their various turpitudes, nor has she forgotten the persecutions of Paul, ‘Then up starts Peter at the last / and to the gate he hies / Fond fool, quoth he / knock not so fast / thou weariest Christ with cries’, but this gets a searing rejoinder about her never having denied Christ ‘as thou thy self hast done.’

I suppose that only in bits of medieval drama do you hear this voice of outrageous commonsense response to the Bible and its gallery of doubtful customers. It has been biting pretty close to the bone: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is fighting her corner all too well, establishing herself as the moral equal or superior to a mixture of patriarchs, biblical kings, and disciples. The raunchiest voice in the Canterbury Tales seems ready to instate the text from which she comes - when it comes to teaching morality - ahead of the Bible.

Of course, all this subversion ends with containment, in its perfect form: Christ himself comes to hear what the fuss is about. Of him, she craves mercy, she repents, agrees humbly to all his charges about her lewd life and not living to his teachings, but still has the courage to cite the precedents: the thief on the cross, the prodigal son forgiven, the strayed sheep. And Christ forgives her soul, and lets her enter into joy.

I can only imagine a clergyman biting his lip at this gleeful invention, in which the unruliest woman in an English book denounces the Bible as a rogues’ gallery, and makes an unanswerable case for mercy based on precedents, not morality. Maybe quite a few copies of both these ballads were torn up by vexed readers, but it is pleasant to imagine a folded up copy being taken out of an apron pocket, and somebody starting to sing either ballad to listeners that she knew would approve.