QI The Book of the Dead

‘so that I could see my sweet self all over in any part of my rooms’. Self-esteem was clearly not the problem. On rare occasions she did admit to finding a man attractive – one such was Ralph Briscoe, the clerk at Newgate Prison, who was ‘right for her tooth’ and whose life she saved by pulling him out of the ring when a bull had him by the breeches. But sex just seems to have been too much bother, except as a source for humour. Coming across a worse-for-wear neighbour late one night, she called out to him cheekily: ‘Mr Drake, when shall you and I make Ducklings?’
    To which he responded ‘that I looked as if some Toad had ridden me and poisoned me into that shape’, that he was altogether for ‘a dainty Duck, that I was not like that Feather, andthat my Eggs were addle. I contented my self with the repulse and walked quietly homeward.’
    Good humour, self-deprecation, vulnerability are all there. Perhaps she was happier alone with her dogs and parrots, who loved her unconditionally.
    The lusts of others were a different matter. Hovering between the criminal underworld and polite society, Mary was perfectly placed to offer more intimate services than the sale of stolen property. And she had spotted a gap in the market: wealthy women looking for male companions. With the single-mindedness she brought to all her business ventures, she ‘chose the sprucest Fellows the Town afforded’ and turned her house into an escort agency. One of her most audacious coups was to get the male lovers of a woman who had been (with Mary’s help) serially unfaithful to her husband to contribute to the maintenance of her children after she’d died of the clap.
    Busy as she was with fencing and pimping, Mary still found time to play Moll for the occasional public performance. The vintner and showman William Banks bet her £20 that she wouldn’t ride from Charing Cross to Shoreditch dressed as a man. Of course, she did so in style, flaunting a banner, blowing a trumpet and causing a riot in the process. Part of the excitement was due to the fact that the horse she was riding was Banks’s ‘Morocco’, the most famous performing animal in London. Shod in silver, it could dance, play dice, count money and generally astonish an audience with its intelligence and dexterity. Its most famous trick was climbing the hundreds of narrow steps to the top of the old St Paul’s and dancing on the roof, watched by thousands below. In the annals of popular entertainment, Moll Cutpurse riding Banks’s horse would have been the Jacobeanequivalent of the Beatles reforming and playing on the same stage as the Rolling Stones.
    Even at four centuries’ distance, it is this irrepressible side to Mary’s character that seems as fresh as ever. If the idea of ‘bawdy’ has fallen victim to endless over-the-top costume dramas, full of ale-swigging wenches in low-cut dresses, it’s worth remembering the word originally meant ‘joyous’. The joy that Mary brought to others with her unconventional life was borne out by the people who knew her. ‘She has the spirit of four great parishes,’ wrote Middleton and Dekker, ‘and a voice that will drown all the city.’ She was a show-off – even sometimes a bully – but the dens and alleyways of south London were a brighter place for her presence. One can imagine her getting on well with Mary Seacole. Both rose from poverty and lived their lives as independent women, on their own terms, in a man’s world.
    After the Civil War, the Puritans banned bear-baiting. Though Mary outlived Cromwell, she didn’t quite live long enough to see the monarchy restored and her beloved bear-garden re-opened but, in any case, the Southwark of old was never quite the same again. Mary Markham died wealthy enough to be buried inside St Bridget’s Church in Fleet Street. Her final request was to be laid face down in her coffin because ‘as I have in my Life been preposterous, so I may be in my Death’ – but whether it was carried out, we’ll never know.

     
    One person who would have appreciated Mary’s last wish was the great twentieth-century physicist Richard Feynman (1918–88). Tall, handsome and funny, he was also an eccentric prankster with a huge appetite for the preposterous. His own last wordswere in the same spirit: ‘I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.’ For Feynman, to be bored, in life, work or death, was the ultimate sin.
    He was born into a tight-knit New York Jewish family