All posts tagged cheapside

Radical Joe: A life of Joseph Chamberlain by Denis Judd (1977)

‘The great problem of our civilisation is still unsolved. We have to account for and grapple with the mass of misery and destitution in our midst, co-existent as it is with the evidence for abundant wealth and teeming prosperity.’
(Joseph Chamberlain in 1885, quoted on page 122)

Joe Chamberlain was to become the only politician in British history to split two parties and destroy two governments of which he was a member.
(The Edwardians by Roy Hattersley, page 105)

Joseph Chamberlain (1836 to 1914) shot like a charismatic meteor across the late-Victorian and Edwardian political scene.

Chamberlain made his name as a Liberal reforming mayor of Birmingham, where he cleared the slums and introduced municipal control of gas, water and electricity supplies, rousing loyal support and bating entrenched interests with his fire-breathing, radical oratory. He entered the House of Commons in 1876 at the relatively advanced age of 39, as a Liberal Party MP for his home turf, Birmingham. He rose quickly and after just 4 years the Liberal leader, Gladstone, gave him a cabinet position as President of the Board of Trade in 1880.

What is enjoyable and interesting about Judd’s biography is he takes you right into the nitty-gritty of the local administration of a dirty, polluted but relentlessly growing late-Victorian city like Birmingham, and then into the knotty detail of Chamberlain’s Parliamentary career. He gives you a powerful sense of how difficult it is to get into any position of power, how challenging it is to formulate meaningful policies, and then of the struggle to co-opt support and create coalitions ready to take on often very entrenched interests, if you want to change and improve things.

Reforming acts

Take, for example, the acts Chamberlain supervised as President of the Board of Trade, 1880 to 1885:

  • a Grain Cargoes Bill for the safer stowing of cargoes
  • a Seaman’s Wages Bill for fairer wages
  • an Electric Lighting Bill which enabled municipalities to set up electricity supplies either themselves or through private companies
  • a Bankruptcy Bill which created a body of official receivers in order to investigate and speed up bankruptcies, where necessary
  • a Merchant Shipping Bill designed to stop owners sending to sea unworthy ships, known as ‘coffin ships’, in the expectancy that they would sink and the owners claim the insurance money; due to the resistance of big business, the Bill failed (pages 106 to 108)

Radical Joe

Although Chamberlain rose to prominence as a crusading, reforming mayor of Birmingham, the opening chapter of the book details the surprising fact that he was born and bred in London, first in semi-rural Camberwell, then in smart Canonbury. His father was a successful merchant with a shop in Cheapside and Chamberlain didn’t go to university but left his private school at 18 and went to work for his father’s firm. It was only when a business opportunity arose in Birmingham, to invest in a new firm being set up to exploit a new technique to mass manufacture pointed screws, that his father dispatched him to England’s second city to look into the opportunity.

Chamberlain was by all accounts an extremely effective businessman or, as his enemies put it, relentless and ruthless. But he was from the start interested in local politics, active as a counsellor and then elected mayor in 1873 where he set new standards for slum clearance, clean water and sewage facilities etc. With the same ruthless efficiency he had brought to business, Chamberlain now embarked on a systematic programme of municipal improvement; this included the building of branch and central libraries, raising money for the art gallery and other public collections to be augmented, founding public swimming pools, new parks and gardens.

Judd liberally quotes from Chamberlain’s speeches and letters which are very enjoyable, pithy, clear and forceful. (Many contemporaries testified to what Beatrice Potter called his ‘energy and personal magnetism… [that he possessed] masculine force in a superlative degree.’ p.76.)

These letters, articles and speeches show how, right from the start of his career, Chamberlain really understood the misery and poverty of many in Victorian cities. Take this excerpt from an article in The Fortnightly Review, the Liberal periodical edited by his friend and political ally, John Morley:

We are compelled occasionally to turn aside from the contemplation of our virtues and intelligence and wealth, to recognise the fact that we have in our midst a vast population more ignorant than the barbarians whom we profess to convert, more miserable than the most wretched in other countries to whom we attempt from time to time to carry succour and relief. (p.72)

And he had, right from the start, a firm belief in the ability of local and national government to physically improve the environment of the poor and, by so doing, significantly improve their lives, as expressed in a speech he gave when opening Highgate Park in Birmingham:

‘It is simply nonsense to wonder at the want of refinement of our people when no opportunity is given to innocent enjoyment. We are too apt to forget that the ugliness of our ordinary English existence has a bad influence on us.’ (quoted page 67)

It was this kind of straight-talking support of the poor, and his acts and bills which aggressively took on entrenched interests, which quickly earned him the reputation as a radical – a socialist or even a communist – although Judd makes clear he was neither. Chamberlain is quoted in numerous contexts clarifying that he thought the improvement of the lot of the poor was not only a moral good in itself but was a form of social insurance which would ensure the ongoing survival of the wealthy, propertied classes, classes which he never seriously threatened (p.117).

Nonetheless the accusation that he was a fire-breathing republican led to much popular entertainment, for example the rash of humorous cartoons when he was obliged to kiss the Queen-Empress Victoria’s hand upon taking his Cabinet post (p.102).

In July 1885 Chamberlain wrote the preface to a pamphlet titled the ‘Radical Programme’, the first campaign handbook in British political history. The Programme proposed:

  • free elementary education
  • land reform, including measures to help people buy land, taxes on unoccupied or unused land, provision of allotments and smallholdings by local authorities
  • higher rates for big landed estates
  • progressive income tax on land owned
  • an increase in direct as opposed to indirect tax
  • encouragement of local government and housing schemes
  • as well as free public education
  • the disestablishment of the Church of England
  • universal male suffrage
  • more protection for trade unions

He also proposed to separate the goal of free education for every child from the religious groups which wanted to maintain their stranglehold over it. His policy was rejected by groups on all sides, who continued to use education as a political weapon, including the National Liberal Federation, Nonconformists, Catholics, and the Church of England-supporting establishment.

The Radical Programme earned the scorn of Whigs and Conservatives alike. Chamberlain had written to his friend, John Morley, that with Radical solidarity ‘we will utterly destroy the Whigs, and have a Radical government before many years are out.’ But in the event nothing came of it. Gladstone’s Liberal government was defeated on an amendment to its budget and Gladstone resigned, to be replaced by a minority administration led by Lord Salisbury (who had replaced Benjamin Disraeli as leader of the Conservative Party when Disraeli died in 1881; Salisbury led the party from the House of Lords, with a deputy in the Commons, still a possibility in those days).

Insults and abuse

Chamberlain established from the start of his career a reputation for plain speaking which sometimes overstepped the boundaries of decorum. Before he’d even been elected as an MP, soon after being nominated to stand, he rashly denounced the then-Prime Minister Disraeli, as ‘a man who never told the truth except by accident; a man who went down to the House of Commons and flung at the British Parliament the first lie that entered his head.’ (p.75). He was quickly forced to apologise.

During the intense period of manoeuvring between the various factions of both the Liberal and Conservative Parties which led up to the 1884 Reform Act, Chamberlain notoriously declared in a speech that Salisbury was ‘himself the spokesman of a class – a class to which he himself belongs, who toil not neither do they spin’ (p.118). In response, Salisbury branded Chamberlain a ‘Sicilian bandit’ and his deputy in the Commons, Stafford Northcote, called Chamberlain ‘Jack Cade’.

1. Home Rule

Chamberlain’s first big contribution to history was to split the Liberal Party in 1886 over Home Rule for Ireland. In early 1886 a new Liberal administration was elected and Gladstone made widely known his determination to push through a bill permitting home rule for the Irish. Chamberlain vehemently objected, on the basis that it would weaken the power of the British House of Commons and introduce fractures into the foundations of the wider British Empire. Chamberlain’s alternative was a plan for a federal system for not only Ireland but Scotland too, which would create an Irish devolved administration with powers over internal affairs. It was a masterpiece of compromise which satisfied none of the parties involved.

After a lot of manoeuvring, Chamberlain led a group which came to be called the Liberal Unionists out of the Liberal Party proper and into independent existence, thus severely weakening Gladstone’s Liberal government. There then followed years of complex machinations, but Chamberlain’s Liberal Unionists as they came to be known, by their very nature, came into closer tactical alliances with the Conservative Party and eventually merged with them.

2. Liberal Imperialism

Chamberlain’s second massive contribution was to become the cheerleader for British Imperialism during the peak of jingoistic enthusiasm from the mid-1890s to the middle Edwardian years. (The British Empire didn’t reach its geographic peak until after the Great War when Britain awarded itself various colonies belonging to the defeated Germans and also adopted ‘mandates’ in the Middle East.)

Secretary of State for the Colonies

When a Conservative government was returned after the 1895 general election with the help of Chamberlain’s bloc of 50 or so Liberal Unionists, the new leader, Lord Salisbury, offered Chamberlain a cabinet position. To many people’s surprise, Chamberlain turned down more senior departments and chose the Colonial Office, becoming Secretary of State for the Colonies, an office he held for the next eight years.

It is fascinating to read about how the British Empire was actually administered. In modern cultural discourse it is dismissed as one big evil monolith but, of course, it was a lot more complicated than that, run, like most British affairs, in a ramshackle, amateurish way. The Indian Empire was run by a separate office, the Secretary of State for India and, anyway, Chamberlain never showed much interest in it. His responsibility was for 11 self-governing colonies of white settlement with a European population of 11 million, and a jumble of crown colonies, protectorates and chartered territories, with a population of around 40 million (p.187).

Chamberlain’s Liberal Imperialism was an extension of the Radical reforming approach he’d brought to Birmingham. He thought that by wise investment, the disparate territories clumped together as ‘the Empire’ could be made more economically efficient and productive, its people educated and provided better jobs, housing, amenities, infrastructure and so on. He was a hard-working and diligent colonial secretary (notably unlike many of his predecessors) but his tenure is remembered for two policies which were out and out failures.

1. The Boer War

Chamberlain encouraged the ill-fated and derided Jameson Raid of December to January 1895, a force of 500 British soldiers led into the Boer-held Transvaal in expectation that the large number of British labourers working in its gold mines would rise up, join them, and together the Brits would seize government from the properly constituted Boer government. Not only was this a shameful attempt at a coup, but a shambles and dismal failure. How much exactly Chamberlain a) knew about it b) encouraged the conspirators, is unclear to this day. But the fact that establishing his role was one of the aims of the subsequent British government enquiry shows there was widespread belief that he was involved.

His continued support of the parties who wanted to take on and conquer the Boer republics (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State) so as to absorb them into an unambiguously British country of South Africa, meant that when the Boer War commenced in October 1899, many critics saw it as ‘Joe’s War’. Thus his name became associated with the military disasters of the first six months of the war, with the humiliating failure to end it, with its long drawn-out two years of guerrilla fighting, with the shameful policy of rounding up Boer farmers’ wives and families into concentration camps which were so appallingly run (by the shambolic British army) that some 28,000 died of hunger and disease. Not a good look for someone who had once been a radical, reforming politician, always on the side of the poor.

What makes the Boer War all the more of a pitiful shambles was that, within a few years, the Boers were restored to full power over their own republics. It need never have been fought at all.

2. Tariff reform

As to tariff reform, Judd details the complexities of Chamberlain’s decisions, first to commit himself wholeheartedly to trying to create a tariff or customs union between the nations of the empire, and secondly, once he’d made this decision, the very complicated negotiations with Arthur Balfour, who had taken over leadership of the Conservative Party in 1902. These led Chamberlain, ultimately, to resign from the Conservative cabinet and to set up a well-funded and well-organised national campaign for tariff reform.

Judd shows in sad detail how it was doomed, for at least two reasons. Chamberlain, like plenty of other British politicians, businessmen and commentators, had realised that British business was being out-performed by its international rivals, America and Germany. His solution was to unite the white imperial nations – Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand – into a customs union to encourage mutual trade and create a powerful economic and agricultural bloc which could hold its own against competitors. The only problems were:

a) Economic reality

  • Experts showed him that trade between the colonies and Britain had been steadily declining i.e. we did more trade with the rest of the world and that percentage was increasing.
  • There was no getting round the fact that, if we imposed extra tariffs on goods entering the union from outside, that would increase the cost of food, seeing as most of the UK’s foodstuffs were imported. Hence the slogan developed by the Liberal opposition, ‘Big loaf, little loaf’, meaning big loaf under the Liberals, little loaf under the tariff reforming Tories.

So Chamberlain was forced to abandon hard facts in preference for rhetoric about the Empire as a civilising force and the power of the Anglo-Saxon peoples when united, and so on. Although he started from Radical roots, he ended up sounding as pompous as the windiest Conservative. But this kind of rhetoric about the great British Empire and the great Anglo-Saxon peoples was extremely popular. His movement distributed posters and banners and badges and placards, and held countless meetings, and was widely supported by leading newspapers of the time. It was wildly popular and it was a complete failure.

b) Political reality

Unfortunately, the other ‘white’ colonies (or the dominions, to give them their technical name) weren’t all that interested in Chamberlain’s rhetoric. A meeting was held of all the dominion leaders in London at the time of Queen Victoria’s jubilee (1887), another one was held (in Ottowa) in 1894, then Chamberlain organised another one in 1897, and arranged for them to be held at regular intervals thereafter. And so they were: 1902, 1907, 1911, 1917, 1918, 1921 and so on, being replaced, after the Second World War, by the Commonwealth Prime Ministers meeting.

But at those early meetings Chamberlain was disappointed to discover that the colonial governments were very hard bargainers indeed, cared nothing for his imperialist rhetoric, and were only prepared to negotiate tough deals to their own advantage.

The 1906 Liberal landslide

Balfour’s Conservative government was plainly running out of steam during 1905, and Chamberlain’s aggressive tariff reform campaign did it a lot of damage by attacking Balfour’s refusal to commit to it wholeheartedly. The election held in January 1906 proved a devastating defeat for the Conservative and Unionist Party, leaving them with the fewest seats in the party’s history (156), and the Liberal Party with a record landslide victory which kept them in government till the middle of the Great War.

Summary

So it’s a fascinating story, fascinating in the detail of Chamberlain’s youth and young business success, and how he parlayed that into a dazzlingly successful career in local politics leading to him becoming the superstar mayor of Britain’s second city. Fascinating to learn how, when he entered Parliament then government, he continued his radical approach with bills and acts designed to help the poor and exploited. And then fascinating to watch the distortion of these early principles when he came to apply them as Colonial Secretary, the man who had once been feared as a communist revolutionary ending up encouraging the Boer War and trying to create an entirely impractical policy of imperial union which ended up dividing the nation.

When I picked up this book second-hand I didn’t realise it was quite so old (1977). Partly because it comes from the era before critical theory became widespread in the humanities, it is a wonderfully readable account, short on politically correct carping and long on a sympathetic understanding of the Unitarian, non-conformist origins of the Chamberlain family. The older reader such as myself is perfectly capable of recognising the racism and the sexism prevalent throughout the age and often found in Chamberlain’s attitudes, without having it made the centre of the account to the neglect of the other important aspects of his political theory and practice. The sympathetic way Judd handles Chamberlain’s non-conformist origins makes it all the more poignant when we read the letters in which he confessed to close friends how the death of his wife in childbirth had made him question and then completely reject his native religion.

The art of the possible

More interestingly, like the Richard Shannon book I read recently only more so, Judd’s account takes you deep into the nitty-gritty of real, actual politics, which is the art of the possible and how this, in practice, comes down to endless number-crunching – how policy-makers are mainly concerned with: a) how many people will vote for them at a general election; b) what number of MPs they will gain in the election; and then c) how to mobilise these numbers in order to get actual bills passed into law.

(It was, apparently, Bismarck who said that: ‘Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best’.)

It is eye-opening to read so many accounts of the back-room horse-trading and negotiations, of the creation of coalitions, of the offers and counter-offers and endless behind-the-scenes negotiations which were required to get even the simplest piece of legislation passed through Parliament.

It makes you realise the immense distance between, on the one hand, the grand and rousing rhetoric of politicians’ speeches and articles and party manifestos and the broad hopes of commentators and critics on the Left or Right for sweeping social change, for Noble Principles and Grand Visions – and, on the other hand, the extremely cramped and narrow room for manoeuvre most actual governments and politicians in power have to operate within.

Immersing yourself in the clotted realities of the politics of this faraway era, and studying Chamberlain’s brilliant but ultimately frustrated career, really helps you understand why politics so consistently ends in disappointment. Chamberlain’s sorry career suggests that the high hopes of all commentators, of both left and right, are always going to be disappointed.

Remember the high hopes which greeted the election of Tony Blair and New Labour in 1997? How is he regarded now? Remember the high hopes of Gordon Brown’s supporters that, when he assumed the leadership, we would finally have a proper democratic socialist government. How did that pan out? Remember the Liberals going into coalition with the Conservatives telling their supporters how it would allow them to implement lovely Liberal policies? How did that end up for them?

And then the past five years of Brexit mayhem, 2016 to 2021, including the hilarious decision of Theresa May’s advisers to go for a snap general election in April 2017, promising it would lead to ‘strong and stable’ leadership – but which in fact led to a hung parliament in which she was entirely dependent on the support of the tiny Democratic Unionist Party to stay in power? And then faced a series of no confidence votes until she was replaced by Boris Johnson, the same Boris Johnson who sacked all his moderate MPs and bulldozed through the worst possible Brexit deal, which we will all now have to live with for a generation?

Politics = disappointment.

In fact it was in an essay precisely about Joseph Chamberlain that Enoch Powell MP wrote his often-quoted judgement:

‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.’

So Chamberlain is not just a disappointing politician but, in Powell’s view, the epitome of the politician who had all the gifts, who worked hard, who had deeply held principles and yet… whose political career fizzled out in failure and disappointment.

Two divorces

The book features two high-profile divorces from the period.

Dilke and the Crawford divorce

Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, Second Baronet (1843 to 1911) was an English Liberal, Radical politician and good friend of Chamberlain’s. He helped the passage of the Third Reform Act and supported laws giving the municipal franchise to women, legalising labour unions, improving working conditions and limiting working hours, as well as being one of the earliest campaigners for universal schooling. In July 1886 the MP Donald Crawford sued his wife, Virginia, for divorce, citing Dilke. At the trial in February 1886, the judge found in Crawford’s favour.

Two months later, determined to clear his name, Dilke reopened the case but was subject to a withering cross-examination from which he emerged much worse off. Virginia alleged that Dilke had introduced her to every type of French vice and even that he had introduced a serving girl into their bed. The result was that Dilke’s name became a byword for lurid sexual scandal and he became the butt of music-hall songs. Dilke lost his seat in the 1886 general election, the Queen demanded he be stripped of his membership of the Privy Council and his career as a high-flying politician was over.

What is, in a way, most striking about the whole story is that modern historians now think Dilke was actually having a long-term affair with Virginia’s mother, and it was this fact which made so many of his answers during the cross-examination evasive or contradictory – and that he knew the family in the first place because his younger brother, Ashton, was married to one of the other Crawford daughters. In other words, Dilke was accused of having an affair with his brother’s wife’s married sister, but made a hash of denying it because he was in fact having an affair with his brother’s wife’s mother! (p.142)

Parnell and the O’Shea divorce

Charles Stewart Parnell (1846 to 1891) was an Irish nationalist politician who was Leader of the Home Rule League from 1880 to 1882, then leader of its successor, the Irish Parliamentary Party, from 1882 to 1891.

It is vital to an understanding of the politics of the period to realise just how much the issue of Irish Home Rule dominated British politics from, say, 1880 right up to the outbreak of the Great War, and the fact that the bloc of 80 or so Irish MPs who sat in the House of Commons often held the balance of power. Parnell rose to become leader of this bloc and the decisive figure in Irish nationalism, the man who Gladstone and all English politicians had to negotiate with.

Parnell was at the peak of his power when, in December 1889, one of his most loyal lieutenants, Captain William O’Shea, sued his wife, Katharine O’Shea, for divorce and named Parnell as co-respondent. In fact, political society had known that O’Shea and his wife had been separated for years and that Parnell was her lover. In 1886 he moved into her home in Eltham and had three children with her (!). Political leaders knew all about the situation and accepted it; Mrs O’Shea even acted as liaison in 1885 with Gladstone during proposals for the First Home Rule Bill. However, the wider public, and the devoted members of Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party knew nothing.

Parnell assured his followers that he had nothing to hide and would be exonerated in the divorce proceedings, and loyal supporters, not only in Ireland but in faraway America, held meetings, passed resolutions, created posters and leaflets and bullishly supported their Chief. So it came as a devastating shock to all these people, many if not most of them devout Catholics, when the full details of Parnell’s living in sin with a married woman came out in the divorce case in November 1890. Supporters were dumbfounded and heart-broken. The Catholic hierarchy in Ireland condemned him. Gladstone, as always having to cater to the very strong nonconformist faction of the Liberal Party, was also forced to abandon Parnell as his negotiating partner.

The crunch came at a committee meeting in Whitehall where senior figures in his party tried to expel him, he refused to go, and so the majority of anti-Parnellites left to form the Irish National Federation. The bitterness of the split tore Ireland apart, set back the cause of Irish independence by decades, and resonated well into the next century (p.145).

The record from Charles Parnell to Matt Hancock shows that: a) politicians are just normal people like you and me, with messy complicated private lives, and b) how rubbish British society, or political and media society, has always been at dealing with fairly straightforward relations between the sexes i.e. how ‘scandalous’ the Press still find the crushingly banal idea of a politician having an affair. Compared to how badly they’re screwing the entire country, who cares who they’re screwing in their private lives.

Credit

Radical Joe: A life of Joseph Chamberlain by Denis Judd was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1977. All references are to the 1993 University of Wales Press paperback edition.

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on August 25, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, Books, British Empire, History, imperialism, Politics
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on August 25, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/08/25/radical-joe-a-life-of-joseph-chamberlain-denis-judd/

Executions @ the Museum of London Docklands

For over 700 years London was the scene of public executions, a practice which wove itself into the city’s history and popular culture. This excellent and imaginatively designed exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands explores all aspects of public executions in London, using a combination of artifacts, letters, informative videos, songs and voices, paintings, engravings and caricatures, and some really gruesome exhibits.

Above all, it is amazingly comprehensive – it touches on all the aspects of the subject I’d expected beforehand but goes on to explore all kinds of nooks and crannies I’d never have thought of. I’d never thought about the effort some condemned prisoners put into being well dressed for their trip to the gallows. Well, the exhibition tells the stories of condemned men and women who went to great lengths to look their best on their death day, and even has the fine dress and fancy suit worn by a female and male executionee:

  • on the left, the ‘white muslin gown, a handsome worked cap and laced boots’ worn by Eliza Fenning who was hanged for attempting to poison her employers
  • to the right, the ‘superb suit of white and silver, being the clothes in which he was married’ worn by Laurence Shirley, Earl Ferrers, was hanged on 5 May 1760 for the murder of his steward John Johnson, whom he shot in a rage

Final clothing section in the ‘Executions’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

(The door on the right of this photo is one of the three doors you had to pass through to enter Newgate Prison. The architect George Dance thoughtfully positioned swags of chains and shackles over the main entrance door at Newgate to terrify and intimidate new prisoners.)

I’d never thought about what happened to the bodies of the hanged after their execution. Turns out that from the mid-16th century the bodies of executed criminals were given to the Company of Barber-Surgeons and the Royal College of Surgeons for dissection and medical research. The thought of being dissected filled the condemned with horror. Fights could break out at executions as friends and family of the deceased would attempt to stop the surgeons claiming bodies. In the same spirit I had no idea that life sized casts of the heads of the executed were often made – there’s a selection of them on display here, which, as the nineteenth century progressed, were used to study ‘criminal’ physiognomy. Alternatively, the casts of notorious criminals were kept in a special display at Newgate where they could be viewed by visitors, who included Charles Dickens.

Death masks at the ‘Execution’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

I knew that broadsheets and leaflets were often sold at executions which claimed to give the last speech of the condemned man, along with a ballad poem describing his fate – but I’d never had the opportunity to read some of these before. Ditto the last letters condemned men wrote to their loved ones. There’s not only letters but rings and coins sent by those condemned to transportation instead of execution in the mid-nineteenth century.

I knew that prisoners in gaol were often shackled but I don’t think I’ve seen a collection of the different types of handcuffs, shackles and ‘waist belts’ used for this purpose on display before. Apparently the weight of shackles prisoners were manacled with sometimes meant they could barely move. As well as direct punishment of the prisoner, the sound of all this metalwork clanking through the echoing vaults of the grim prisoner had a demoralising and terrifying psychological effect on other inmates. The practice of routinely keeping prisoners shackled in irons ceased in the 1820s.

Shackles and handcuffs used in Newgate Prison at the ‘Executions’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

I’ve certainly never seen a real actual gibbet before and I didn’t know that they didn’t come in a standard size, but that a gibbet ‘tailor’ took the corpse’s measurements and built the gibbet to perfectly fit. In line with the state of the art interactivity of the exhibition, the display of this real-life gibbet had a gruesome audio soundtrack with the noise of flies buzzing round the rotting corpse.

Wrought iron gibbet cage from ‘Executions’ at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

I was at first puzzled why the gibbet was so elaborate but realised that a lifeless body would flop in all directions unless its limbs were very strictly compassed and controlled. The effect can be seen in this illustration of the body of the notorious pirate Captain Kidd.

Captain Kidd, gibbeted near Tilbury in Essex, following his execution in 1701

More criminals were gibbeted in the greater London area than elsewhere in the country. The bodies of murders and highwaymen were gibbeted on heaths located on the outskirts of London and main highways into the capital, especially on the wide open Hounslow Heath which became famous for the number of gibbets.

Capital punishments

Between the first recorded execution at Tyburn in 1196 and the last public execution in 1868, there were tens of thousands of executions in London. Nobody knows the precise number because records weren’t kept before the 18th century.

Right at the start there’s a wall-sized video which shows a scrolling list of all the offences which carried the penalty of capital punishment. By the end of the 18th century some 200 crimes were punishable by death in a list which became known as the ‘Bloody Code’. London’s courts condemned more people to die than those in the rest of the country combined.

Scrolling list of capital offences at the ‘Executions’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

Types of execution

Most ordinary criminals were hanged. More florid ways of being despatched were reserved for VIPs.

1. Drawing, hanging and quartering

An ancient punishment for treason, the prisoner was ‘drawn’ or dragged from prison to the execution site, hanged until they were nearly dead, then castrated, disembowelled, beheaded and cut into quarters. Thee practice continued into the 19th but by then prisoners were hanged first and then beheaded.

there’s a vivid engraving of the fate of the Gunpowder Plotters who, after being found guilty in 1606, were publicly executed over two days in St Paul’s Churchyard and Old Palace Yard, Westminster, where they were dragged by horses through the streets, hanged, castrated, disembowelled and cut into pieces.

2. Burning

In 1401 an Act of Parliament made burning the punishment for heresy. It aimed to ‘strike fear into the minds’ of people who questioned the teachings of the church. Women convicted of murdering their husbands or counterfeiting could also be burned to death. By the 18th century they were strangled first.

The exhibition features illustrations of the Protestant martyrs burned at the stake at Smithfield. Over 280 religious dissenters were burned at the stake during the five-year reign of Mary I, known as ‘Bloody Mary’. Besides Smithfield others were burned to death at Stratford-le-Bow, Barnet, Islington, Southwark, Uxbridge, Westminster and throughout England.

Woodcut depicting John Rogers, the first of the ‘Marian martyrs’, being burned at the stake in Smithfield (1555)

3. Boiling

Death by boiling was a rare punishment. In 1531 a cook named Richard Roose poisoned the porridge of the household of Bishop John Fisher, causing two deaths. Henry VIII was so disgusted he declared this crime treason and Parliament passed the ‘Acte for Poysoning’ ordering those who murdered by poison to be boiled to death. Roose was boiled at Smithfield. Eleven years later Margaret Davies suffered the same fate for poisoning four people. Edward VI abolished this execution method in 1547.

4. Beheading

Members of the nobility condemned for treason were often beheaded out of respect for their high status, rather than suffering the agony and humiliation of drawing, hanging and quartering. Most beheadings took place in public on Tower Hill before a large crowd.

5. Hanging

Most ordinary criminals were executed by hanging. There appear to have been two methods. Initially the condemned were placed under a gallows (in the very early period just a tree) standing on a cart. A rope was noosed round their neck and the cart slowly pulled away by horses or oxen till the condemned fell off the back of it and was left dangling. This could be a fairly slow, excruciating death. Laster the ‘short drop’ method was introduced, where the condemned stood on a raised platform and, with the flick of a handle, a trapdoor opened underneath them, dropping them through and making it more likely their neck would snap with the sudden ratchet of the noose. But both methods were far from foolproof and family members or the executioner often pulled the legs of the hanged person to speed up their death.

Places of execution

In the City of London you are never more than 500 metres from a former place of execution. London was packed with them. Early on in the exhibition there’s a useful wall-sized video, with a bench to sit and watch it, which shows maps of London from early medieval times onwards, showing not only ow its street plan grew and developed (interesting in itself) but where the ever-growing number of places of execution were sited (indicated on the maps by entertaining ochre blotches of blood).

1. Smithfield

In the medieval and Tudor periods Smithfield was used for various public purposes, including a livestock market, fairs and executions, as in the burning of the Protestant martyrs mentioned above.

2. Tyburn

Tyburn stood slightly to one side of the current position of Marble Arch at the north-east tip of Hyde Park. It served as London’s principal site of execution for around 600 years. The earliest account records the execution of William FitzOsbert in 1196. Until the late 18th century it was a semi-rural location, easy to get to and easy for crowds to assemble and watch the spectacle.

A huge amount of popular tradition and iconography grew up around the public hanging of criminals at Tyburn. The exhibition contains umpteen engravings and pictures, stores and facts, not least about the carnivalesque atmosphere which reigned along the route of carts transporting convicted criminals from Newgate Prison, via St Giles’s-in-the-Fields church and then along what is now Oxford Street. Many of the condemned went to their execution drunk, in fact it became customary for the cart to stop off at a pub at St Giles where the executioner and victim shared a last pint of beer. This became known as ‘the St Giles Bowl’.

Bernard Mandeville wrote that ‘all the way from Newgate to Tyburn, is one continued Fair, for whores and rogues of the meaner sort.’

In 1961 construction began on new pedestrian subways by Marble Arch and the excavators found large quantities of human bones around the site of the Tyburn gallows which archaeologists presume are the remains of the executed who were buried where they died.

Execution at Tyburn by Thomas Rowlandson (1803)

A lot of slang and catchphrases grew up about the place. The scaffold was known as ‘the Tyburn tree’. To ‘take a ride to Tyburn’ (or simply ‘go west’) was to go to one’s hanging. The ‘Lord of the Manor of Tyburn’ was the public hangman while ‘dancing the Tyburn jig’ was the act of being hanged because of the wriggling, dancing movement of the hanged in their last moments.

The last execution at Tyburn was of John Austin, a highwayman, on 3 November 1783.

3. Newgate

With the closure of Tyburn London’s public executions moved to the open space in front of the rebuilt Newgate Prison. This was to be London’s principal site of public execution for the next 85 years until public executions were discontinued in 1868.

The move meant the end of the great public procession from Newgate to Tyburn. It was an assertion by the authorities of their control over the timing and atmosphere of the executions. The Newgate scaffold featured two beams with capacity for up to 12 hangings.

Newgate Prison itself closed in 1902. The demolition of one of London’s most iconic buildings aroused considerable public interest and relics of the prison were sold at auction. A keystone from the main doorway is on display here, as is one of the heavy wood-and-metal doors (see first photo).

4. Horsemonger Lane

Public executions at Horsemonger Lane in Southwark took place on the roof of the gatehouse, making them highly visible to spectators.

5. Tower Hill

A small number of noble men and women, soldiers and spies were privately executed within the walls of the Tower of London. Many more – at least 120 between 1388 and 1780 – were executed in public on Tower Hill. Beheadings and hangings, were common enough for the ‘posts of the scaffold’ to become a landmark. It was here that Thomas, Earl of Strafford, a key ally of Charles I, was executed on 12 May 1641, as part of the political divisions which opened up before the outbreak of civil war the following year.

6. Execution Dock

On the Thames near Wapping, Execution Dock was used for more than 400 years to execute pirates, smugglers and mutineers who had been sentenced to death by Admiralty courts. The ‘dock’ consisted of a scaffold for hanging. The last executions there took place in 1830. Just up the river at Blackwall Reach where it bends bodies of convicts were gibbeted so as to be more visible to boats entering the city.

7. Charing Cross

Public executions took place at Charing Cross in the 16th and 17th centuries. A pillory that locked the head and hands of a criminal into a wooden frame for public humiliation was later erected at the site.

8. New Palace Yard and Westminster Hall

The area around the Palace of Westminster was used for public executions, the display of body parts and pillorying criminals.

9. Kennington Common

From at least 1678 until 1800 Kennington Common was the principal execution site for the county of Surrey.

The execution and embowelling of Jacobite rebels on Kennington Common mid to late 18th century)

10. Cheapside

Temporary gallows were erected on several occasions at Cheapside between the 14th and 17th centuries. They were in place for over 100 days in 1554 following the execution of two rebels involved in a Protestant uprising against Mary I.

Ordinary criminals and reprieves

The exhibition contains the story of what feels like 50 or so ordinary criminals, whose names are preserved for some or other aspect of their crime or their trial or their plea for pardon or the way they died. One by one their pitiful stories build up into an upsetting profile of the generally poor and wretched who committed often petty crimes and went to their deaths miserably.

As the number convicted of capital offences rose in the later 18th century the number of reprieves increased, if only to manage down the number of executions which threatened to swamp the system. The exhibition features letters written by the condemned, their friends and relatives and influential contacts. I like the story of the Dane Jørgen Jørgenson, who was convicted in 1820 of robbery but managed to get a letter to the Duke of Wellington for whom he had worked as a during the Napoleonic wars. The exhibition includes a letter from the Duke pardoning Jørgenson on condition he ‘transports’ himself out of the country.

The most famous victim: Charles I

Probably the most famous execution ever to take place in London was not of a common criminal or aristocratic traitor but of the king himself, namely Charles I, brought to trial by the Puritan junta and found guilty of treason against his own people. The exhibition devotes a large case to his execution, on 31 January 1649, with several contemporary illustrations and a number of artefacts said to be linked to it, namely a pair of royal gloves he was said to have taken with him, and even the silk undershirt he insisted on wearing to prevent him shivering with cold (it was January in London) which, he told his attendant, Sir Thomas Herbert, might be misinterpreted as fear.

Later on in the exhibition there are several objects pertaining to the punishment of his killers. 59 leading Puritan generals and MPs signed the king’s death warrant and so came to be known by their enemies as the ‘regicides’. On his Restoration in 1660, Charles II had special agents arrest any of the regicides living in England and track down those who had fled abroad and assassinate them.

Three of the leading regicides, Oliver Cromwell, John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton, had already died of natural causes and been buried at Westminster Abbey, but in 1661 Charles’s Cavalier Parliament ordered their bodies to be exhumed, executed and decapitated. Their heads were displayed on poles outside Westminster Hall. Cromwell’s head remained there until 1685.

The most famous criminal: Jack Sheppard

John ‘Jack’ Sheppard was convicted of robbery in 1724, aged 22. Sheppard was one of London’s greatest criminal heroes. Notorious for escaping multiple times from Newgate, he became a symbol of freedom for London’s working classes. An apprentice carpenter, Jack fell into a life of thieving, reputably led astray by ‘bad company and lewd women’. Although eventually executed at Tyburn at the age of 22, his effrontery and skill in challenging authority ensured his story was recounted in popular books and plays for generations. The artist James Thornhill paid one shilling and sixpence to visit him in his cell to draw this portrait.

Portrait of Jack Sheppard by Sir James Thornhill (1724)

In the 1850s the campaigning journalist Henry Mayhew discovered that ‘chapbooks’ recounting Sheppard’s exploits were hugely popular in low lodging houses, where they were read aloud to illiterate youths. He interviewed 13 boys who confessed to thieving in order to pay for a theatre ticket for the  current play about Jack’s life.

The most famous executioner: Jack Ketch

In 1685, the Duke of Monmouth, illegitimate son of Charles II, led a rebellion to seize the throne from his uncle, James II. The rebellion was defeated, Monmouth was captured, condemned for high treason and beheaded on Tower Hill. Despite asking to be killed with one clean blow, Monmouth’s executioner, Jack Ketch, made a right monkeys of the procedure, failing to despatch the Duke after two strikes with an axe and being forced to resort to a knife to cut through the neck while the Duke made a grim effort to rise from the block to the horror of onlookers. As a result of this heroic failure Ketch’s name became infamous and, eventually, became a byword for public executioners, who, by and large preferred to keep their identities secret.

Transportation

A final section of the exhibition explains how crimes which had previously resulted in execution were amended to ‘transportation’ to the colonies, generally meaning Australia. In fact the first convicts transported out of England had been despatched as long ago as 1718, when they were sent to America to supply plantations there with labour. Thus Moll Flanders, heroine of Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel, is convicted of a capital offence but gets it commuted to transportation to British America.

Transport to America ended when that country became independent in 1776 but, as luck would have it, just a few years earlier (in 1770) Australia had been discovered and provisionally mapped by Captain James Cook. Between 1788 and 1868 over 160,000 convicts were sent to Australia from England and other parts of the Empire.

The exhibition includes a few paintings of the first settlement, which are fairly predictable – but I had never heard about ‘convict tokens’ before. Apparently, convicts awaiting transportation presented loved ones with smoothed coins engraved with messages of affection. Often created by prisoners skilled in metalwork, for a fee, the tokens could be highly decorative and became known as ‘leaden hearts’. Half a dozen examples are on display here.

A convict’s love token from the ‘Executions’ exhibition at the Museum of London Docklands © Museum of London

The campaign to abolish public executions

The advent of Queen Victoria to the throne in 1837 marked a sea change in social attitudes. The young queen consciously rebelled against the louche morals of her rakish predecessor, William IV. She wanted a chaste, sober court and her high moral tone and sincere Anglicanism set the style for the new reign among the aristocracy and aspiring upper middle classes. There was a general wish to make all aspects of public life more respectable and, in time, the new mood extended to the utterly disreputable practice of public executions, with all their opportunities for immorality of every description which this exhibition has chronicled.

In 1840 William Makepeace Thackeray attended the execution of the Swiss valet François Courvoisier, executed for murdering his master, Lord William Russell. He wrote that ‘I feel myself ashamed and degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight…I came away…that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for the murder I saw done.’

In 1849 Charles Dickens had attended the execution of Maria and Frederick Manning and wrote a furious letter to The Times criticising the ‘inconceivably awful behaviour’ of the crowd. Describing public execution as a ‘moral evil’, he doubted communities could prosper where such scenes of ‘horror and demoralisation’ could take place.

Prison reform had been an issue since the start of the nineteenth century and combined with the campaign to abolish public executions. The exhibition cites the MP Thomas Hobhouse in 1866 arguing that the spectacle, instead of instilling fear of crime and respect for the law, resulted in the crowds who became ‘hardened and literally acquired a taste for blood.’

The exhibition features a powerful satirical cartoon published in Punch magazine mocking the commercialisation of state executions. The scaffold is a theatrical stage with a sign for ‘opera glasses’ and a booth selling tickets while the mixed crowd is worked by hawkers and costermongers. ‘Ere’s lots o’ the rope which ‘ung the late lamented Mr Greenacre, only a penny an inch!’

The Trial for Murder Mania, illustration for Punch, 1850

After several attempts to move a bill in Parliament, the Capital Punishment Amendment Act was finally passed in 1868 public executions in Britain were officially banned. The last person to be publicly executed in London was the Irish republican Michael Barrett, on 26 May 1868. Three days later the practice was outlawed.

But it wasn’t the abolition of the death penalty, though. Another century was to pass before that occurred. Only in 1965 was the death penalty for murder in Britain suspended for five years and in 1969 was this made permanent. And it wasn’t until 1998 that the death penalty in Britain was finally abolished for all crimes. The last people executed in the UK were Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans on 13 August 1964.

Amnesty International

Things take a very earnest turn at the end of the exhibition with a large video screen showing an interview with Paul Bridges from Amnesty International. He reminds us that 55 countries still retain the death penalty (although, admittedly, many have not used it for some time). Nonetheless, Amnesty International recorded 579 executions in 18 countries in 2021.

Summary

This is an outstandingly interesting, comprehensive, thought-provoking, sometimes funny, but mostly grisly and gruesome exhibition, beautifully staged, with absorbing interactive elements. You have two more weeks to catch it.

Related links

Related reviews

More seventeenth century reviews

More eighteenth century reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on April 5, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Exhibition, History
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on April 5, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/05/executions-the-museum-of-london-docklands/

The Roaring Girl, or Moll Cutpurse by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker (1611)

‘Perhaps for my mad going some reprove me:
I please myself and care not else who loves me.’
(Moll Cutpurse, the Roaring Girl)

According to Elizabeth Cook, editor of the New Mermaid edition of The Roaring Girl, The Elizabethan playwright Thomas Middleton was for centuries dismissed as just another member of the flock of playwrights who swarmed in London between about 1590 and 1630 and who collectively produced over 600 plays of all styles, shapes and sizes.

It was T.S. Eliot’s 1927 essay about Middleton, which made a solid claim for him being second only to Shakespeare among the playwrights of the era – not least because he wrote enduring plays in both the major genres, of tragedy (The Changeling and Women Beware Women) and comedy (The Roaring Girl and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside) – which began the 20th century rise of his reputation.

The Roaring Girl stands slightly to one side of Middleton’s comedies, firstly because it was a collaboration (with Thomas Dekker). (It is fascinating to learn that the majority of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays were collaborations, because of the furious demand of theatres which often only staged new plays for a week or two before requiring yet more audience fodder.)

It is also slightly unusual because it is based on contemporary fact, namely the life of Mary Frith, a notorious character of the time, widely known as ‘Moll Cutpurse’, who had gained a reputation for wearing men’s clothes and behaving like a young tough. Contemporary accounts describe her as ‘wearing men’s clothes, appearing on the stage, drinking, swearing, making “immodest and lascivious speeches,” prostitution, pick-pocketing, forgery, and highway robbery’. Frith inspired numerous contemporary accounts, including a chapbook written by John Day titled The Mad Pranks of Merry Moll of the Bankside (1610) and appearing in Nathaniel Field’s Amends for Ladies (1611).

Cast

Moll, the Roaring Girl

The posh men

Sir Alexander Wengrave
Young Sebastian Wengrave, his son – the ‘hero’
Neatfoot, his servant
Gull, his page
Ralph Trapdoor, his spy
Sir Adam Appleton
Sir Davy Dapper
Jack Dapper, spendthrift son to Sir Davy
Sir Guy Fitzallard
(Mary Fitzallard, his daughter, in love with Sebastian Wengrave – the ‘heroine’)
Sir Beauteous Ganymede
Goshawk, a deceiving gallant
Laxton, another deceiving gallant
Greenwit, assistant to Laxton in some scams

Curtilax, a Sergeant
Hanger, his Yeoman (both commissioned by Sir Davy Dapper to arrest his spendthrift son, Jack)

City merchants and their wives

Tiltyard, a Feather-seller
Mistress Tiltyard
Openwork, a Sempster
Mistress Rosamond Openwork – Goshawk tries to seduce her
Hippocrates Gallipot, an Apothecary
Mistress Prudence Gallipot – Laxton tries to seduce her

Act 1

Oddly, Moll, the star of the play, doesn’t appear for the entire first act. Maybe one aim was to make her eventual arrival onstage that much more ‘dramatic’. Instead both scenes of act one are set in Sir Alexander Wengrave’s grand house where he is grandly entertaining guests.

Scene 1

Set in the chambers of his son, Sebastian, into which is shown a young woman dressed as a disguise. This is quickly revealed to be Mary Fitzallard who Sebastian is in love with. Why, she asks, has he been ignoring her? Because, he explains, his father is grand and ambitious and is demanding a huge dowry from her parents. But Sebastian has a plan which he now explains: he has not seen Mary for a while because he is pretending to be in love with the notorious man-dressing, roaring girl, Moll Cutpurse. His father will be so worried about that match that he will see marriage to Mary as the preferable alternative.

Scene 2

Introduces us to Sebastian’s father, Sir Alexander, who is grandly hosting a party of posh friends who he proceeds to share his sadness that his son is driving him to an early grave by being in love with a ‘man-woman’, Moll Cutpurse. Father and son have a flaring row in front of everything and Sebastian stomps out and the guests leave. At which point a new servant presents himself, one Ralph Trapdoor who has been recommended to Sir Alexander. This is handy. Sir Alexander orders Trapdoor, and to find Moll, inveigle himself into her good books and find some way to destroy her.

Act 2

Scene 1. The three shops

The gallants who had been Sir Alexander Wengrave’s guests in act 1, are now seen drifting between three London shops, chatting to the shopkeepers, flirting with their wives and ribbing each other. We see Laxton flirting with Mistress Gallipot of the tobacco shop, borrowing money from her and telling the audience, aside, that he doesn’t like her much but strings her along with promises of a sexual dalliance, meanwhile borrowing money from her to spend on other women.

Finally, enter Moll Cutpurse, chatting and joshing with the shopwomen. Laxton – who has emerged as the randiest and most cynical of the gallants – pesters her to make a date with him and eventually she gives in and agrees to meet him at Gray’s Inn Fields at 3 that afternoon.

Trapdoor then enters, spots Moll, and quickly offers to be her servant, flirts and fawns over her. She’s suspicious but agrees to meet him, also, in Gray’s Inn Fields between 3 and 4. The gallants go off to chase a duck with spaniels on Parlous Pond!

Scene 2. A street

Sebastian makes a soliloquy about love during which his father enters, unseen, and spies on him. Sebastian notices this (‘art thou so near?’) and steers his speech round to indicating he is in love with Moll Cutpurse, to his father’s predictable dismay. Moll herself enters, accompanied by a porter carrying a large viol on his back (?) and Sebastian woos her. She is polite but rebuffs him – “I have no humour to marry: I love to lie a’ both sides a’ th’ bed myself” – saying she is chaste and will never marry.

Enter a tailor and there’s some crude joking about him taking her measurements for a pair of breeches, an item of clothing normally worn only by men, which Sir Alexander watches with predictable horror.

Sir Alexander comes forward and rebukes his son, saying that Moll will disgrace him because she is a whore and a thief, throwing in the fact that all the worst women in London are called Moll. Sebastian defends her against these general slurs – ‘Would all Molls were no worse’ and exits.

Sir Alexander is genuinely upset and, on this reading, I began to feel sorry for him. But he resolves to pursue and shame Moll. In a final soliloquy, Sebastian decides that he must share his plan with Moll in hope that she will help him and Mary.

Act 3

Scene 1. Gray’s Inn Fields

Laxton is hanging round waiting impatiently for Moll to keep her appointment. When she arrives, dressed as a man, he doesn’t at first recognise her. But when he does, she delivers a brilliantly impassioned speech in defence of women and attacking all lecherous men like Laxton who think that just because she smiles and jests and drinks a toast a woman is hot for sex, whereas she is just being human, and Moll draws her sword and forces him to fight, ferociously wishing Laxton was all men who think like him, so she could punish the entire sex.

LAXTON: Draw upon a woman? Why, what dost mean, Moll?
MOLL: To teach thy base thoughts manners: th’ art one of those
That thinks each woman thy fond, flexible whore
If she but cast a liberal eye upon thee;
Turn back her head, she’s thine, or amongst company,
By chance drink first to thee. Then she’s quite gone;
There’s no means to help her, nay, for a need,
Wilt swear unto thy credulous fellow lechers
That th’ art more in favour with a lady
At first sight than her monkey all her lifetime.
How many of our sex by such as thou
Have their good thoughts paid with a blasted name
That never deserved loosely, or did trip
In path of whoredom beyond cup and lip?

‘Have their good thoughts paid with a blasted name?’ It’s a rousing speech that rings down the ages and is still true. Moll cuts Laxton, he refers to the blood running and needing a surgeon and runs off shocked. — He has demonstrated his lack of manliness, his lack. He lacks stones i.e. testicles.

Enter Trapdoor enters. Moll, still dressed as a man, bumps rudely into him, flicks his face and taunts him to attack her. It’s only when he refuses, that she reveals her identity and he immediately fawns and asks to be her man. She calculatingly agrees, promises to pass on to him her hand-me-downs and they exit off to St Thomas Apostle’s, east of St Paul’s. — Trapdoor also shows himself to be all mouth and no trousers, when he refuses to fight with Moll-as-man.

Scene 2. Master Gallipot’s house

And now to another unmanly man, the nagged ‘apron husband’ Gallipot, whose wife despises him for being weak and feeble. This, we realise, is why she wishes an affair with Laxton (although in act 2 we saw how Laxton, in reality, despises her and only strings her along to extract loans from her).

Laxton has smuggled her a letter in which he blethers her with sweet words before coming to the point that he needs £30. She is just agonising over how to get this for him (and her anxiety about money, pawning some belongings but maybe being found out – in a flash reminded me of Madam Bovary and the horrible mess of debts she gets into 250 years later) when her husband comes in, wondering why she’s left the dinner party they’re hosting for friends.

Gallipot spies his wife reading but as he calls to her (‘Pru’) she tears up the letter and invents a sob story on the spot, saying that she and Laxton were engaged to be married, but he went off to the wars, she heard he was dead, and so she married Gallipot, but now Laxton is back and wants to claim her as his wife. Gallipot is horrified as he loves his wife and has had children by her which us why, when she cunningly suggests buying Laxton off with thirty pounds, he readily agrees.

The dinner party guests come out and comment on Mistress Gallipot’s unhappy appearance with much bawdy and obscene double entendres, some of them guessing that Master Gallipot is having an affair, that’s why she looks so upset. They say their goodbyes.

Whereupon Laxton himself enters, complaining about apothecaries (remember we last saw him being cut and slashed by Moll). In what is presumably a comic scene, Mistress Gallipot quickly conveys the lies she’s told her husband (that she and Laxton were engaged), Laxton picks it up quickly, and they both smile as Master Gallipot begs him to accept £30 to make all right between them. Gallipot goes into his house to organise the money and Laxton genuinely praises her for her quick-witted deceitfulness.

Scene 3. Holborn Street

Sir Alexander with some of his grand friends. Enter Trapdoor who silkily tells him that Sebastian and Moll plan to meet at 3 o’clock in his (Sir Alexander’s) chamber to have sex. So. They will trap the pair. To give a cover to their meetings, he instructs Trapdoor to behave as an angry debtor, and so the spy leaves.

His friends, Sir Adam Appleton and Sir Davy Dapper come over to talk to Sir Alexander and the latter reveals that his own son, Jack, is far worse than young Sebastian, he spends a fortune whoring, drinking, and gambling. Sir Davy explains he has decided to teach young Jack a lesson: he will arrange to have Jack arrested, hoping a few days in the Counter (the debtor’s prison) will make him realise the value of money and hard work.

Alexander and Appleton exit, and two officers enter, namely Sergeant Curtilax and Yeoman Hanger. Sir Davy gives them their commission to arrest young Jack and indicates the pub he’s drinking in, just over there, and leaves the pair to capture him.

Just at this moment Moll and Trapdoor stroll up and, spying Curtilax and Hanger in hiding, realise they’re about to arrest someone, Moll decides to save whoever it is. And so when Jack Dapper and his servant Gull emerge from the pub, and just as Curtilax and Hanger move in, Moll and Trapdoor run forward, holding the officers off and telling Jack and Gull to leg it, which they promptly do. Moll’s thoughts: ‘A pox on ’em! Trapdoor, let’s away.’

Act 4

Scene 1. Sir Alexander’s chamber

Sir Alexander and Trapdoor await Moll and Sebastian. Sir Alexander gets Trapdoor to place various valuables around the room, confident that Moll will steal them and, when they bring constables to catch her with them later, it will guarantee she’s thrown into prison, if not executed. They hide.

But instead, Sebastian enters not only with Moll, but with his true love, Mary Fitzallard, dressed as a pageboy. Moll comments wryly as Sebastian kisses Mary, in a boy’s outfit, and then expresses her gratitude to Moll for helping them. Moll observes the valuables laid out as if on purpose to tempt a thief but says that, since she is no thief, they do not tempt her. Instead Sebastian invites her to play on the viola de gamba which she turns out to be skillful on, and accompanies herself singing a couple of songs.

Sir Alexander steps forward and interrupts the playing but it has no great dramatic effect at all. None of the three seem surprised or worried to see him. The conversation carries on, whereby Sebastian appears to have been securing the money – forty shillings – to pay her (I think; I didn’t understand this passage). His father quizzes Moll who claims to be a music teacher and Sir Alex asks her to play the ballad about the witch.

Then Sir Alexander gives his son four ‘angel’s’, being gold coins worth ten shillings each. He has marked them somehow, maybe pierced them. His Cunning Plan is Sebastian will give the marked coins to Moll and, later, Sir Alex will get the constables to arrest her saying they were stolen.

This is act 4 and, for me, absolutely none of this love plot intrigue is working in the slightest. The Roaring Girl feels less engaging than any of the Restoration comedies I read.

Scene 2. Openwork’s house

Two of the merchants’ wives we’ve meant moan about how pathetic their menfolk are. Mistress Openwork laments that Goshawk told her a pack of lies about her husband being in Brentford with a whore, and told her he’d take her there to prove it. It was all lies, as Openwork discovered when she confronted her husband who is now standing in the shop waiting for Goshawk to arrive so he can give him a beating.

For her part, Mistress Gallipot laments that Laxton turned out to be a lying, unmanly deceiver, ‘a lame gelding’. Men get it in the neck in this play. It’s like a feminist manifesto.

This morphs into a long and really unfunny scene. Goshawk now arrives and wants to hurry Mistress Openwork into the boat he’s got waiting but first she insists on bringing Mistress Gallipot with them, which he reluctantly agrees to, then Master Openwork comes up and she furiously accuses him to his face of having an affair with a whore at Brentford. Master Openwork is vehement that this is a lie and then starts demanding who told her this lie and – to cut a really long story short – she admits it was the (now terrified) Goshawk. Enraged, Master Openwork draws his sword and Goshawk piteously begs for forgiveness.

Now, I suppose this is intended as one more proof that sweet-talking gallants are full of ****, but it took pages to get there and I found none of it either funny, or particularly well written. Master Openwork has a little soliloquy opining that the world is a rotten place full of cheats and liars. Well spotted, mate.

In part two of this scene, a young man dressed as a summoner enters and delivers a summons to Master Gallipot. It claims to be a legal document summonsing the Gallipots to court for breach of contract. This has been arranged by Laxton. We learn that after the thirty pounds he was given a few scenes ago, he asked for a further £15. Now Master and Mistress Gallipot threaten the summoner with violence who quickly takes off his wig and reveals himself to be one of the gallants’ associates, Greenwit.

Mistress Gallipot had gone along with the deceit earlier, but now snaps at the size of the sum being extorted. She turns to her husband and confesses everything – that Laxton led her on, but this was all a lie, she was never betrothed to Laxton. Furious, Gallipot now turns to Laxton who is trembling with fear.

With surprising chivalry, Laxton quickly makes up a version of a ‘confession’ which completely exonerates Mistress Gallipot, claiming he set out to seduce her as a challenge, when she claimed to him and his friends that women were virtuous, but she stood solid and unflinchingly loyal to her husband etc etc, and thus Gallipot is mollified and calmed down.

In fact so calmed down that he promptly forgives Laxton and invites him in for a celebration feast (!?).

So, by the end of Act 4, two merchants’ wives – citizens’ wives – have had their virtue assailed by two upper-class ‘gallants’ – Laxton and Goshawk – who both turn out to be lily-livered eunuchs. The women are smarter than the men and their husbands are made of finer stuff, loving and forgiving. And, it feels like half the play is over, as the forgiving merchants invite the foolish gallants in for a feast – something which generally only happens at the very end of a play.

Act 5

Scene 1. A street

Enter Jack Dapper, Moll, Sir Beauteous Ganymede and Thomas Long. Moll tells Jack how it was she who saved him from the sergeants and he thanks her. As a sidenote she explains she spotted Trapdoor was a spy and has disposed of him as a player shoves a halfpenny across the board. They are joined by Lord Noland.

At which point Trapdoor enters, like a poor soldier with a patch over one eye, accompanied by a sidekick, Tearcat, all in tatters. They approach Moll and her friends and, at first, pretend to be poor, maimed soldiers from the wars and beg for money. But the account they give of their foreign fighting and travels is so obviously garbled that Moll and her friends realise they are fakes.

Moll tears to eyepatch off Trapdoor’s face – the kind of stylised gesture which is taken to transform someone’s appearance in these plays and suddenly render someone in disguise, recognisable. Then, in a peculiar passage, Trapdoor shows off his skill at using canting terms, and Moll interprets his stream of canting for the benefit of her educated friends (Jack Dapper, Moll, Sir Beauteous Ganymede, Thomas Long, Lord Noland) so much so that they egg the couple on to a canting duel, telling Trapdoor they’ll give him some alms if he performs for them, and this eventually leads into Moll, Trapdoor and Tearcat singing a song entirely in canting language.

Paradoxically, this was one of the few parts of the play I really understood, because the situation – educated, well-off people patronise beggars – is easily graspable, and because the posh people’s dialogue is remarkably and unusually lucid. Thus after Trapdoor uses the term ‘niggling’, Jack says: ‘Nay, teach me what niggling is; I’d fain be niggling’ and a moment later Sir Beauteous comments: ‘This is excellent.’

Trapdoor is paid off and departs. I rather liked him, he was an honest rogue.

Now enters a gallant cutpurse and four or five followers, who threaten to attack our chaps, but brave Moll a) interprets all the cutpurses are saying in their slang and b) outfaces them i.e. intimidates them into abandoning their plan to rob our chaps. They are scared of her and her swaggering reputation. In fact, they truckle to her. Moll declares a particular purse was recently stolen from a man attending the Swan theatre and demands it be returned. The leader of the cutpurses meekly says he’ll see what he can do and they all exit.

The real-life Mary Frith was, apparently, known for righting wrongs and returning stolen purses (sounds a bit too Robin Hood to me) and this encounter prompts the other characters to say how she has been unfairly criticised by society. Now she gives a long speech declaring her innocence of all crimes, saying she merely is acquainted with criminals and knows their cant and tricks solely to help innocent victims. It is a speech in support of all people calumniated by society, not just her but all the women called whores and men called cuckolds who are entirely innocent. People call her Moll Curpurse and blacken her name because she dresses, does and says what she likes – the implication being that people resent and are jealous of her freedom.

MOLL: Good my lord, let not my name condemn me to you or to the world.

If Mary Frith had commissioned this play it could hardly give a more favourable portrait of her!

And so after this long scene of canting and cutpurses leading up to Moll’s second Great Speech, they all head off to the pub.

Scene 2. Sir Alexander’s house

The love plot of the play is resolved, namely Sebastian and Mary’s Cunning Plan works. Sir Alexander is still under the misapprehension that Sebastian is madly in love with and planning to marry Moll Cutpurse. He is at home with some of his friends and advisers when a servant comes in to tell them Sebastian and Moll have been seen landing at the Sluice on the Lambeth side of the Thames. But just as they’re planning to go and intercept them, Trapdoor (so we get a bit more Trapdoor) arrives to say the couple have been seen alighting at the Tower i.e. in the opposite direction. Sir Alexander is stung with indecision.

At this moment enters Sir Guy Fitzallard, mother of Mary Fitzallard that Sebastian is in love with. From the start he is aggressively angry towards Sir Alexander, telling him his (Guy’s) daughter wasn’t good enough for him, he blocked his son and Mary’s romance, well much good it’s done him and he hopes he’s happy that his son is now marrying one of the most disreputable women in London, ‘that bold masculine ramp’, Moll Cutpurse. He mocks him, saying he will soon be grandfather to a ‘fine crew of roaring sons and daughters’ who will stock the suburbs with crime.

Well, Sir Guy says – what would tortured Sir Alexander give if he – Sir Guy – could intervene and prevent it happening? He goes on to say, in front of the other nobles present as witnesses, that bets his entire wealth that he can prevent this marriage and, caught up in his enthusiasm, Sir Alexander, accepts the bet, saying he will immediately give Sebastian all those lands he had planned to, if he simply doesn’t marry Moll.

The authors really drag these final scenes out. Enter Moll (dressed as a man) for just a minute or so, just enough time for Alexander to berate her and her to mock him for his greed and short-sightedness, then exits.

So I wasn’t amused but irritated when the authors drag out Alexander’s and our agony even further by having Sebastian enter, accompanied by Sir Guy as if this is the final version of the wedding, and hand in hand with… Moll… wearing a mask. Sir Alexander is delighted his son has married anyone but Moll… but then she takes off her mask and he collapses prostrate that all his plans lie in ashes. God, get on with it!

Moll delivers a comic speech, telling him how lucky he is to have a roaring girl as a daughter in law, men will fear him, crooks will avoid him, and so on. Sir Guy asks Sir Alexander if he will hold to his bet (all Sir Guy’s estate against half Sir Alexander’s) but Sir Alexander insists – now he’s won the bet (the bet that Guy would be able to prevent the marriage of Sebastian and Moll, and it looks like he’s failed), at which point….

Moll steps aside and Sir Guy introduces the real bride who is, God be praised, Mary Fitzallard after all, ceremonially accompanied by Lord Noland and Sir Beauteous Ganymede, and followed by all the London merchants and their wives, so that all the characters are on stage for the happy finale.

Sir Alexander is in flights of ecstasy and in heroic verse praises his son and gives him half his wealth and lands – as promised – and then his beautiful new daughter-in-law, and they graciously accept. Moll points out that she has done everyone a favour organising this happy outcome and Sebastian says she will be rewarded. Sir Alexander apologises for misjudging her.

Enter Trapdoor (hooray, the only character I really like) who kneels before Moll and abjectly apologises for scheming against her, explaining that he laid out the valuables in Sir Alexander’s chamber, hoping to snare Moll, and that he also gave Moll the four marked gold coins (angels) as part of a scam to have her arrested. Moll is surprised, the onlookers are shocked, Sir Alexander abjectly humiliated, and apologises.

I found Sir Alexander’s explicit and clear statement that he has learned from his experiences not to judge people by their reputations and not to listen to rumour, more effective than the savage punishments which conclude Ben Jonson plays:

Forgive me; now I cast the world’s eyes from me
And look upon thee freely with mine own:
I see the most of many wrongs before thee,
Cast from the jaws of envy and her people,
And nothing foul but that. I’ll never more
Condemn by common voice, for that’s the whore
That deceives man’s opinion, mocks his trust,
Cozens his love, and makes his heart unjust.

Sir Alexander ends the play by saying this happy day will be celebrated every year, and he hopes all who have watched it will go away as pleased as he is.

Thoughts

Not funny

Maybe I read it on an off day, but I didn’t find The Roaring Girl at all funny. It contains scenes which are theoretically humorous, but failed to raise any smile to my lips. It lacks the delightful whimsy of The Shoemaker’s Holiday or, at the other end of the spectrum, the savage farcicality of Ben Jonson and his scheming grotesques.

It inhabits an odd no-man’s-land, in which everyone is a gull or crook of one kind or another but none of them really inspire entertainment. Moll’s speeches about how easily women are calumniated were the only things which really woke me up, that and the character of Trapdoor who I warmed to as the nearest thing to a Jonsonian imp, like Mosca in Volpone.

Overall I felt there was something too clever, calculating and rather mechanical about it, and kept returning to T.S. Eliot’s words:

The comedies are long-winded; the fathers are heavy fathers, and rant as heavy fathers should; the sons are wild and wanton sons, and perform all the pranks to be expected of them; the machinery is the usual Elizabethan machinery; Middleton is solicitous to please his audience with what they expect; but there is underneath the same steady impersonal passionless observation of human nature. (Thomas Middleton by T.S. Eliot)

Gender etc

Clearly ‘gender’ is a major theme of the play insofar as Moll is a woman behaving as men are supposed to, and not just men generally, but roistering, swaggering, canting, drinking, fighting men. And the play goes to some lengths to demonstrate how feebly unmasculine just about every other man in the play is, compared to her.

Feminist art and literary critics long ago developed a rhetoric about neglected women artists or authors and female characters who rebel, buck the trend and subvert the patriarchy, which make them all sound the same. They make ‘the patriarchy’ sound as if it was the same thing in 1603 or 2003, and rebel women all sound as if they had the same ‘smash the patriarchy’ mindset as contemporary gender studies professors. In other words, they make the past boring by being so predictably and narrowly ideological about it.

Obviously the figure of Moll is striking but what’s a bit more interesting is the way she was not suppressed by The Patriarchy for wearing men’s clothes and swearing etc. What is hiding in plain sight in the simple existence of this play, is the fact that, far from being in any way suppressed or silenced – as feminists love their heroines from the past to have been – Mary Frith was in fact lionised, widely written about and – in this play at any rate – praised to the heavens, depicted as a moral exemplar, teaching true Christian morality (judge people by their deeds not their reputations).

Feminist critics like to write about Moll ‘subverting gender norms’ and ‘transgressing gender-based rules of clothing and behaviour’ as if it was a thrilling conspiracy which only you and I, paid-up members of the feminist gang, can understand. And yet here she was up on stage in a play written to unstintingly praise her, to the applause of a fee-paying audience, in a play which was widely reprinted through the ages.

In other words, if she was ‘subverting’ anything, that ‘subversion’ was very comfortably accommodated in a best-selling play performed to approving audiences.

In other words, Moll entirely conforms to the deeply entrenched stereotype of the rebel-with-a-heart-of-gold figure which dates from at least Robin Hood through to any number of 20th century ‘rebels’, and which Hollywood has made billions of dollars carefully crafting and presenting to audiences who, for a happy couple of hours, can thrill to the ‘subversive’ exploits of James Dean or Bruce Willis or whoever the rebel-with-a-heart-of-gold figure of the hour happens to be, before going back to their suburban homes and their workaday world.

Yes, the figure of Moll may well ‘transgress’ half a dozen easy-to-list rules of Jacobean England – dresses like a man, swaggers like a man, drinks like a man, familiar with the criminal underworld like a man and this ‘daring audacity’ may well give feminist critics multiple orgasms – but at a meta-level I’d have thought it’s pretty obvious that Moll entirely conforms to the enduring stereotype of the naughty boy or naughty girl whose exploits we love sharing for a couple of hours at the theatre or cinema, before the entertainment ends.

And in a really deep sense, maybe that’s what entertainment – of all types – actually consists of: whether at the circus or a funfair or the cinema or a theatre – it’s entering into a world of excitement and thrills and kings and queens or cops and robbers or thrilling rides – all of which we pay for because, by definition, they are outwith the reality of our boring everyday lives, shopping, cooking, eating sleeping, and commuting to boring jobs in shops and factories and offices.

So when feminists rhapsodise that Moll ‘subverts’ the social norms of her day, all they’re really saying is that she’s in a play. Macbeth subverts the values of the time by being a king killer. Othello subverts the values of the day by murdering his wife. Volpone subverts the values of the time by being an outrageous crook. All the tricksters in hundreds of these city comedies ‘subvert’ the values of the time by virtue of being crooks and criminals. Is there a play from the period where the lead characters do not subvert one or other ‘social norm’ of the time?

Feminists just valorise and prioritise one among the many, many types of ‘subversion’ which occur in almost all these plays, because it is the one dearest to their heart, the only issue which counts for them, the issue of gender, the ‘issue’ which justifies their existence.

But, not being feminists, we are not constrained and blinded by their ideology, and so can read everything they have to say, assimilate it, take it on board, add it to our perspective, but still see that the play contains many other non-gender ideas and themes and images, as did the society of its day.

One of the most obvious is the language of crime…

Canting

Canting was one of the contemporary words used to describe the prolific growth of slang and argot used by thieves and cozeners. There was a very rich literature describing these, even at the time. Indeed, whenever there was a periodic outbreak of plague, such as in 1603 and the theatres went into lockdown, writers like Dekker and Middleton switched to writing satirical or descriptive pamphlets about London life, mostly concentrating on lowlife and criminals.

Dekker wrote a number of pamphlets about contemporary events, but his ones focusing on criminals or ‘cony-catchers’ include The Belman of London (1608), Lanthorne and Candle-light, Villainies Discovered by Candlelight, and English Villainies and he gives an often-quoted definition of ‘canting’:

‘It was necessary that a people, so fast increasing and so daily practicing new and strange villainies, should borrow to themselves a speech which, so near as thy could, none but themselves could understand; and for that cause was this language, which some call pedlar’s French, invented…. This word canting seems to be derived from the Latin verb canto, which signifies in English to sing, or to make a sound with words, that’s to say, speak. And very aptly may canting take his derivation a cantando, from singing, because amongst these beggarly consorts that can play upon no better instruments, the language of canting is a kind of music, and he that in such assemblies can cant best is counted the best musician…’
(Lanthorn and Candlelight by Thomas Dekker)

Anyway, the point is that this play is stuffed with canting terms and street argot, so much so that not only does the Mermaid edition feature notes at the bottom of each page explaining key words, but also (and unusually) a seven-page appendix devoted to canting terms. Highlights include:

  • darkmans = the night
  • lightmans = the day
  • shells = money
  • stamps = legs
  • curbers = thieves who hook goods out of open windows using a long stick with a hook at the end
  • cheats = the gallows
  • bing = to go
  • nip a bung = steal a purse
  • Rom-ville = London

And Act 5 scene 1 is a festival of canting – it contains the canting exchanges between Moll and Trapdoor-as-beggar, who drops entirely into canting terms to impress and/or confuse his educated interlocutors.

TRAPDOOR: My doxy? I have, by the salomon, a doxy that carries a kinchin mort in her slate at her back, besides my dell and my dainty wild dell, with all whom I’ll tumble this next darkmans in the strommel, and drink ben, and eat a fat gruntling cheat, a cackling cheat, and a quacking cheat.

Before Moll, Trapdoor and Tearcat then deliver a canting song! The footnotes again say that one of the best explanations of the profession or trade of cutpurse is again given by Dekker, who provided a neat explanation of key roles and terms, in this clip from The Bellman of London:

He that cuts the purse is called the nip.
He that is half with him is the snap, or the cloyer.
The knife is called a cuttle-bung.
He that picks the pocket is called a foist.
He that faceth the man is the stale.
The taking of the purse is called drawing.
The spying of this villain is called smoking or boiling.
The purse is the bung.
The money the shells.
The act doing is called striking.

You can look up these and numerous other obscure terms in the online version of the play, linked to below.

Related links

More Elizabethan and Jacobean reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on September 23, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Comedy, Play, Theatre
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on September 23, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/09/23/the-roaring-girl-thomas-middleton-thomas-dekker/