Sexuality, Bawdry and Prostitution

Sexual crimes and misdemeanors probably aroused more comment than any other category of moral abuse. Like all big cities, London had its share of organized prostitution. But moralists also complained of the loose sexual behavior of the city's inhabitants generally, alleging that adultery and fornication were more common in the metropolis than elsewhere. The seduction of citizen's wives by gentlemen of the court had already become a stale subject for jokes and comic plots in the reign of Charles I, while the supposed sexual sophistication of London wives figured prominently in Restoration drama. 

It is impossible to assess these charges rigorously, since most forms of sexual behavior are illuminated only by impressionistic evidence. Illegitimacy rates recorded in parish registers remained relatively low into the eighteenth century, but this cannot tell us about the prevalence of adultery or other forms of sexual contact that did not lead to pregnancy outside marriage. Samuel Pepys recorded a large amount of sexual activity that stopped short of intercourse in his diary but we have no way of knowing how typical or untypical he was of other Londoners of similar social standing. Depositions show that at least some young men and women found it easy to engage in casual social activities with strangers and acquaintances of the opposite sex. Occasionally there seem to be hints of sexual bribey, although the records are almost never conclusive: if a man bought a woman he had just met several drinks and lent her a sum of money, did he expect anything in return? One historian has argued that in addition to outright prostitution, many London women engaged in occasional bargaining of sexual favors in exchange for money or other benefits.  But we will never have the kind of detailed statistical information necessary to confirm or refute this hypothesis. 

Common sense suggests that the prevalence of unmarried young men serving apprenticeships and young female domestic servants must often have led to high levels of sexual tension. Serving maids were frequently at the mercy of their masters or their masters' sons, as recent studies have shown. Moll Flander's story of how she lost her virginity to the handsome son of the gentry family in whose house she was employed would have struck contemporaries as entirely plausible. But for the most part serving maids' behavior was rigorously overseen, if only because householders who failed to preserve the chastity of their maids might be forced to support any illegitimate children they bore. The brutal treatment meted out to young women who got pregnant while in service must have provided a powerful constraint on sexual behavior.  Especially in the first half of the century, they were sometimes evicted by their masters and left to wander through the metropolis and beyond it until they gave birth in a ditch or out building.  If the infant died they could be convicted of infanticide and hanged.  

Organized prostitution is easier to assess because, as an illegal though widely prevalent activity, it left a clearer documentary trail.  It seems to have been fairly prevalent in certain districts near the royal court, like Covent Garden, although there were also "bawdy houses" on the South bank and elsewhere, like those which fell victim to the Bawdy House riots a few years after the Restoration.   

After 1660 prostitution and sexual immorality became more closely associated with the court because of the openly promiscuous behavior of Charles II and several prominent courtiers.  By openly acknowledging his numerous mistresses the King set a tone of libertinism for court society that some of his subjects may have welcomed after two decades of puritan austerity, but that others found deeply disturbing.  For the first time in England the commercial theatre permitted actresses, several of whom rapidly became glamorous objects of sexual fantasy.  "Breeches parts," so-called because they required an actress to disguise herself as a man and therefore don breeches, were especially alluring to men accustomed to seeing women only in full skirts. Since the stage was closely associated with the court, the sexual voyeurism it encouraged further reinforced Whitehall's reputation as a center of bawdry.

These associations tarnished Charles's reputation.  Satiric poems, like a series of anonymous "Instructions to a Painter" poems that lampooned Emund Waller's panegyric of that title, celebrating a victory by the English fleet and its commander the Duke of York over the Dutch, circulated lascivious gossip about the promiscuity and venality of the King and his associates.  The Catholicism of Charles's principle mistress in the 1660s, the Countess of Castlemaine, compounded the damage.  After the Bawdy House Riots of London apprentices printed copies of a Poor-Whore's Petition circulated through London.  Ostensibly compiled by the city's common prostitutes, it asked Cleveland, as the most honorable member of their profession, to use her influence at court to ensure the protection of London's bawdy houses and the encouragement of debauchery, as sure means of spreading popery and irreligion.   

The associaton of bawdry with the court and Catholicism continued through the Exclusion Crisis, during which Shaftesbury arranged for the indictment of Charles's French mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, as a common prostitute.  But the issue lost much of its bite under William III -- never particularly known for his fondness of women -- and Queen Anne.  By the early eighteenth century economic abuses, especially the alleged manipulations of stock brokers and Whig financial magnates, had overtaken sexual misdemeanors as the abuses most commonly associated with abuses of power. But the real and alleged sexual vices of fashionable London continued to titillate observers of urban life, being recorded in ballads and engravings like several by William Hogarth.

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