I
MOLL CUTPURSE
THE most illustrious woman of an illustrious age,Moll Cutpurse has never lacked the recognition due to her genius.She was scarce of age when the town devoured in greedy admiration the first record of her pranks and exploits.A year later Middleton made her the heroine of a sparkling comedy.Thereafter she became the favourite of the rufflers,the commonplace of the poets.Newgate knew her,and Fleet Street;her manly figure was as familiar in the Bear Garden as at the Devil Tavern;courted alike by the thief and his victim,for fifty years she lived a life brilliant as sunlight,manycoloured as a rainbow.And she is remembered,after the lapse of centuries,not only as the QueenRegent of Misrule,the benevolent tyrant of clyfilers and heavers,of hacks and blades,but as the incomparable Roaring Girl,free of the playhouse,who perchance presided with Ben Jonson over the Parliament of Wits.
She was born in the Barbican at the heyday of England's greatness,four years after the glorious defeat of the Armada,and had to her father an honest shoemaker.She came into the world (saith rumour)with her fist doubled,and even in the cradle gave proof of a boyish,boisterous disposition.Her girlhood,if the word be not an affront to her mannish character,was as tempestuous as a windblown petticoat.A very `tomrig and rumpscuttle,'she knew only the sports of boys:her warlike spirit counted no excuse too slight for a battle;and so valiant a lad was she of her hands,so well skilled in cudgelplay,that none ever wrested a victory from fighting Moll.While other girls were content to hem a kerchief or mark a sampler,Moll would escape to the Bear Garden,and there enjoy the sport of baiting,whose loyal patron she remained unto the end.That which most bitterly affronted her was the magpie talk of the wenches.`Why,'she would ask in a fury of indignation,`why crouch over the fire with a pack of gossips,when the highway invites you to romance?Why finger a distaff,when a quarterstaff comes more aptly to your hand?'And thus she grew in age and stature,a stranger to the soft delights of her sex,her heart still deaf to the trivial voice of love.Had not a wayward accident cumbered her with a kirtle,she would have sought death or glory in the wars;she would have gone with Colonel Downe's men upon the road;she would have sailed to the Spanish Main for pieces of eight.But the tyranny of womanhood was as yet supreme,and the honest shoemaker,ignorant of his daughter's talent,bade her take service at a respectable saddler's,and thus suppress the frowardness of her passion.Her rebellion was instant.Never would she abandon the sword and the wrestlingbooth for the harmless bodkin and the hearthstone of domesticity.Being absolute in refusal,she was kidnapped by her friends and sent on board a ship,bound for Virginia and slavery.There,in the dearth of womankind,even so sturdy a wench as Moll might have found a husband;but the enterprise was little to her taste,and,always resourceful,she escaped from shipboard before the captain had weighed his anchor.
Henceforth she resolved her life should be free and chainless as the winds.Never more should needle and thread tempt her to a womanish inactivity.As Hercules,whose counterpart she was,changed his club for the distaff of Omphale,so would she put off the wimple and bodice of her sex for jerkin and galligaskins.If she could not allure manhood,then would she brave it.And though she might not cross swords with her country's foes,at least she might levy tribute upon the unjustly rich,and confront an enemy wherever there was a full pocket.
Her entrance into a gang of thieves was beset by no difficulty.
The Bear Garden,always her favourite resort,had made her acquainted with all the divers and rumpads of the town.The time,moreover,was favourable to enterprise,and once again was genius born into a golden age.The cutting of purses was an art brought to perfection,and already the more elegant practice of picking pockets was understood.The transition gave scope for endless ingenuity,and Moll was not slow in mastering the theory of either craft.It was a changing fashion of dress,as I have said,which forced a new tactic upon the thief;the pocket was invented because the hanging purse was too easy a prey for the thievish scissors.And no sooner did the world conceal its wealth in pockets than the clyfiler was born to extract the booty with his long,nimble fingers.The trick was managed with an admirable forethought,which has been a constant example to after ages.The file was always accompanied by a bull:,whose duty it was to jostle and distract the victim while his pockets were rifled.The bung,or what not,was rapidly passed on to the attendant rub,who scurried off before the cry of STOP THIEF!
could be raised.
