Her voice and speech were suited to the galligaskin.She was a true disciple of Maltre Fran<c,>ois,hating nothing so much as mincing obscenity,and if she flavoured her discourse with many a blasphemous quip,the blasphemy was `not so malicious as customary.'Like the blood she was,she loved good ale and wine;and she regarded it among her proudest titles to renown that she was the first of women to smoke tobacco.Many was the pound of best Virginian that she bought of Mistress Gallipot,and the pipe,with monkey,dog,and eagle,is her constant emblem.Her antic attire,the fearless courage of her pranks,now and again involved her in disgrace or even jeopardised her freedom;but her unchanging gaiety made light of disaster,and still she laughed and rollicked in defiance of prude and pedant.
Her companion in many a fantastical adventure was Banks,the vintner of Cheapside,that same Banks who taught his horse to dance and shod him with silver.Now once upon a time a right witty sport was devised between them.The vintner bet Moll <Pd>20that she would not ride from Charing Cross to Shoreditch astraddle on horseback,in breeches and doublet,boots and spurs.
The hoyden took him up in a moment,and added of her own devilry a trumpet and banner.She set out from Charing Cross bravely enough,and a trumpeter being an unwonted spectacle,the eyes of all the town were clapped upon her.Yet none knew her until she reached Bishopsgate,where an orangewench set up the cry,`Moll Cutpurse on horseback!'Instantly the cavalier was surrounded by a noisy mob.Some would have torn her from the saddle for an imagined insult upon womanhood,others,more wisely minded,laughed at the prank with goodhumoured merriment.Every minute the throng grew denser,and it had fared hardly with roystering Moll,had not a wedding and the arrest of a debtor presently distracted the gaping idlers.As the mob turned to gaze at the fresh wonder,she spurred her horse until she gained Newington by an unfrequented lane.There she waited until night should cover her progress to Shoreditch,and thus peacefully she returned home to lighten the vintner's pocket of twenty pounds.
The fame of the adventure spread abroad,and that the scandal should not be repeated Moll was summoned before the Court of Arches to answer a charge of appearing publicly in mannish apparel.The august tribunal had no terror for her,and she received her sentence to do penance in a white sheet at Paul's Cross during morningservice on a Sunday with an audacious contempt.`They might as well have shamed a black dog as me,'she proudly exclaimed;and why should she dread the white sheet,when all the spectators looked with a lenient eye upon her professed discomfiture?'For a halfpenny,'she said,`she would have travelled to every markettown of England in the guise of a penitent,'and having tippled off three quarts of sack she swaggered to Paul's Cross in the maddest of humours.But not all the courts on earth could lengthen her petticoat,or contract the Dutch slop by a single fold.For a while,perhaps,she chastened her costume,yet she soon reverted to the ancient mode,and to her dying day went habited as a man.
As bear baiting was the passion of her life,so she was scrupulous in the care and training of her dogs.She gave them each a trundlebed,wrapping them from the cold in sheets and blankets,while their food would not have dishonoured a gentleman's table.Parrots,too,gave a sense of colour and companionship to her house;and it was in this love of pets,and her devotion to cleanliness,that she showed a trace of dormant womanhood.Abroad a ribald and a scold,at home she was the neatest of housewives,and her parlour,with its mirrors and its manifold ornaments,was the envy of the neighbours.So her trade flourished,and she lived a life of comfort,of plenty even,until the Civil War threw her out of work.When an unnatural conflict set the whole country at loggerheads,what occasion was there for the honest prig?And it is not surprising that,like all the gentlemen adventurers of the age,Moll remained most stubbornly loyal to the King's cause.She made the conduit in Fleet Street run with wine when Charles came to London in 1638;and it was her amiable pleasantry to give the name of Strafford to a clever,cunning bull,and to dub the dogs that assailed him Pym,Hampden,and the rest,that right heartily she might applaud the courage of Strafford as he threw off his unwary assailants.
So long as the quarrel lasted,she was compelled to follow a profession more ancient than the fence's;for there is one passion which war itself cannot extinguish.When once the King had laid his head `down as upon a bed,'when once the Protector had proclaimed his supremacy,the industry of the road revived;and there was not a single diver or rumpad that did not declare eternal war upon the blackhearted Regicides.With a laudable devotion to her chosen cause,Moll despatched the most experienced of her gang to rob Lady Fairfax on her way to church;and there is a tradition that the Roaring Girl,hearing that Fairfax himself would pass by Hounslow,rode forth to meet him,and with her own voice bade him stand and deliver.
One would like to believe it;yet it is scarce credible.If Fairfax had spent the balance of an ignominious career in being plundered by a band of loyal brigands,he would not have had time to justify the innumerable legends of pockets emptied and pistols levelled at his head.Moreover,Moll herself was laden with years,and she had always preferred the council chamber to the battlefield.But it is certain that,with Captain Hind and Mull Sack to aid,she schemed many a clever plot against the Roundheads,and nobly she played her part in avenging the martyred King.
