QI The Book of the Dead

then forced to beat the stalks of hemp plants to make fibres for rope. But if this was intended tomake her see the error of her ways, it failed abysmally. After three months, she re-emerged and took up where she left off. On Christmas Eve, 1611, she was arrested again for exactly the same offence, ‘to the disgrace of all womanhood’.
    This time she was hauled up in front of the bishop of London, charged with prostitution as well as cross-dressing. The bishop pressed her to confess that she was ‘sexually incontinent’, but Mary would have none of it. She cheerfully admitted to being a foul-mouthed, drunken thief, a gambler and a bear-baiter, but she strongly objected to the accusation that she had sold her body. Though she looked like a man, she told the assembled clerics, a visit to her lodgings would show she was every bit a woman. This saucy response outraged the judge. She was sentenced to public penance (dressed in a very unmanly white shift) at the cross outside old St Paul’s. Mary turned it into a command performance, drinking herself insensible on six pints of sherry first and then weeping so piteously that the authorities released her to preserve the peace.
    Mary had a very modern instinct for making money from fame. By the time she was thirty, she was a major player in the London underworld. Her days as a thief and her hours spent in the bear-gardens and taverns had built up an unrivalled network of contacts on both sides of the law. As far as her manor was concerned, she always knew who was doing what, and where. This made her the perfect broker for stolen goods. If a purse or awatch went missing, a visit to Moll Cutpurse would usually see it restored on the same day, provided a decent cash reward was produced. It was a protection racket, tolerated by the authorities because it kept the mean streets of Southwark under control, and welcomed by the theatres and sporting rings because it allowed them to turn a profit unmolested.
    In 1614 Mary married Lewknor Markham, scion of a well-off, upper-class family from Nottinghamshire. Mary’s new father-in-law, Gervase Markham (1568–1637), was an astonishingly industrious author, churning out poems and treatises on everything from forestry, agriculture and military training to veterinary medicine, archery and wildfowling. The booksellers were swamped with his works. In 1617 he had five different books on horses all in print at the same time. This exasperated the Stationers’ Company, who forced him to sign an unprecedented agreement in which he promised ‘never to write any more book or books to be printed of the deseases or Cures of any Cattle, as Horse, Oxe, Cowe, Sheepe, Swine, Goates etc.’ His best-known work is The English Hus-wife (1615), a kind of early Mrs Beeton, full of recipes and handy hints on running a successful household. Quite what drove his son to marry a cross-dressing, bear-baiting gangster is a mystery.
    In any event, it seems to have been a marriage of convenience rather than passion, as there is no evidence of them ever having lived together. From Mary’s point of view, having a husband brought respectability, which was good for business. She invariably referred to herself as Mrs Mary Markham from then on, although she failed to mention her husband at all in her autobiography. In fact, other than the marriage, there is no mention of Lewknor Markham in any historical records. Thecouple married at St Mary Overbury, now Southwark Cathedral, at that time the actors’ church, so it’s possible he was involved with the theatre. Why did he marry Mary? Perhaps he was gay? That wouldn’t have been unusual in the Southwark of the day. Or, given that the subtitle to The English Hus-wife was ‘Containing the Inward and Outward Virtues Which Ought to Be in a Complete Woman ’, it might have just been two fingers up to his annoyingly successful father. But the most likely reason is money, Lewknor taking a cut from Mary’s business in return for use of the Markham name. That would have been worth hard cash to her.
    Mary’s sex life is another mystery. There’s no record of her having had sexual relationships with anyone, male or female. However scary Moll Cutpurse may have been in public, the private Mary Frith sounds rather nice, and her house in Fleet Street, full of dogs and parrots, surprisingly feminine. It was always immaculate – kept spotless by no fewer than three maids – and the walls were covered with looking glasses,