When I could say, without a crime

  I am not thine, but Thee209

  There were many interlinked passionate friendships at the Stuart court: Anne Killgrew, a maid of honour at the court, wrote a series of passionate poems to ‘Eudora’ that were explicitly love poems but so respectable as to be published after her death by her father. A contemporary, Countess of Winchilsea Anne Finch, who wrote as ‘Ardelia’, composed an erotic love poem to Anne Tufton, Countess of Salisbury, claiming to be a white mouse that might be caressed, creep into her ‘brown tresses’ and be admitted to her bosom.210 Anne Finch was friend to Elizabeth Singer Rowe, who was in turn the passionate friend of poet Frances Thynne, Countess of Hertford. All these elite women poets wrote sensual love poetry to women.

  In the court of the first Duchess of York, Anne Hyde, wife to the future James II, there were scandalous reports of flirtations between ladies-in-waiting. Her daughters, both royal princesses and heirs to James, had openly passionate relationships with women friends. Princess Mary, wife of William of Orange, who would become Queen Mary II, was intimate with Frances, Lady Bathurst, for 20 years, the two writing to each other under pet names and referring to each other as husband and wife. In 1678, Mary described her pregnancy with her husband as if she had betrayed their love: ‘Though I have played the whore a little, I love you of all things in the world.’211

  Mary’s sister and successor, Queen Anne, was openly in thrall to Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, who was only supplanted by a new favourite, Abigail Masham. Shocking reports that the queen was spending her nights with women were carefully framed to avoid a legal challenge.212 But the press spoke of ‘the disagreeable expression of the dark deeds of the night’. The rejected Duchess of Marlborough claimed that Queen Anne had ‘Noe inclination for any but of one’s own sex’.213

  Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, seems to have been confident that accusing the queen of a same-sex attraction to a lady-in-waiting would not raise questions over their own previous relationship. She may have thought that she was protected from gossip about her intimacy with the queen by her own love-marriage and she was also protected from scandal by her political allies and her aristocratic status – far higher than that of her poor-relation successor.

  A working-class woman poet wrote passionate poetry about female friendship. Elizabeth Hands, who worked as a domestic servant, described ‘Maria’s friendship, more to me than love’.214

  Jane Barker, attached to the court of James II, made it clear that female friendship was not only a purifier of feelings, but of a higher order than other earthly relationships. The fictional heroine of Patchwork Screen for Ladies (1723) lived as a single woman, supported herself and enjoyed women-only friendships. She wrote in praise of female friendship:

  Friendship is that mysterious thing alone

  Which can Unite and make two Hearts but one;

  It purifies our love and makes it flow,

  In the clearest stream that’s found in Love below.

  It sublimates the Soul and makes it move

  Towards Perfection and Celestial love.215

  The sentimental friendships were described by the women as ‘love’. Constantia Fowler wrote of her sister-in-law in 1630: ‘For never creature was more fortunate than I in gaining affection from her. For I believe I am blest with the most perfectest and constant lover as ever woman was blest with.’216

  In a poem by Anna Seward, one friend feels complete despair when her best friend is engaged to marry and she foresees their cold future encounters:

  When thou shalt pass me with averted eyes,

  Feigning thou seest me not, to sting and grieve,

  And sicken my sad heart, I could not bear

  Such dire eclipse of thy soul-cheering rays

  I could not learn my struggling heart to tear

  From thy loved form, that thro my memory strays;

  Nor in the pale horizon of despair,

  Endure the wintry and the darken’d days.217

  Marriage to a man became known as the ‘funeral or grave of friendship’ by the 1700s.218 But some married women continued intense relationships with women after marriage. The early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who would go on to have two scandalous love affairs with men, fell in love with her friend Fanny Blood at their first meeting. Wollstonecraft encouraged her sister Eliza to desert her husband to live with her, and urged Fanny to join them in a male-free household, teaching at a school. When Fanny left the household, to marry, Wollstonecraft declared, ‘The world is a desert to me.’ She followed her friend Fanny to Portugal to attend her in childbed, and was there at her death.219

  Mary Astell, the pioneer educator, proposed an all-women’s academy for women and girls living together. It never opened, because of the hostility to a ‘convent’ structure. Mary Astell promised that scholars and staff would enjoy ‘Noble, Vertuous, and Disinteresst’d friendship’, but confessed that she had a ‘weakness for loving women’.220 She surrounded herself with women friends throughout her life, sometimes troubled by the intensity of her feelings, which were not always reciprocated. Some biographers suggest that she turned to the love of women after a proposal of marriage collapsed. This is a traditional belief that suggests that women seek the company and love of women when they cannot get a man. It is more likely that Mary Astell saw the failure of the betrothal as a lucky escape. In later life, she was openly critical of marriage – she called it a ‘tyranny’ and a ‘slavery’ – and made a satisfying attachment with a woman friend, Lady Catherine Jones (1672–1740), who lived with her till her death.221

  Lady Catherine Jones went on to live with Mary Kendall (1677–1710) – a relationship so highly regarded that it was celebrated by the church authorities and Kendall’s cousin, who installed a marble statue of her in the chapel of St John the Baptist in Westminster. The inscription celebrates: ‘That close Union and Friendship, In which she lived, with the Lady Catharine Jones; And in testimony of which she desir’d That even their Ashes, after Death, Might not be divided.’222

  Anna Maria Garthwaite, the silk designer, moved in with her married sister Mary when their father died. Mary called her ‘my loving sister’ and at her husband’s death left her house in York to join Garthwaite in her London house and workshop, where they lived together in an all-female household, with two female servants and their ward.223

  Mary Kendall (1677–1710) monument, St John the Baptist Chapel, Westminster Abbey. Her ashes were later mingled with those of Lady Catherine Jones

  [And Cover] The monument to Mary Kendall and Lady Catherine Jones, 1710, St John the Baptist Chapel, Westminster Abbey (Dean and Chapter of Westminster)

  The playwright Catherine Cockburn, née Trotter, a philosopher and moral theologian, was deeply involved with women and maintained a passionate relationship with her patron Lady Sarah Piers. Cockburn wrote the play Agnes de Castro for the London stage in 1795. The hugely successful drama tells of a woman who has an equal love for her husband and her woman friend. The story ends tragically, but not before the wife has specifically said that the love of her woman friend is equally precious as her husband’s love. There were other plays celebrating aristocratic sentimental women friendships.224

  The author of Clarissa, Samuel Richardson, collected a circle of women friends who praised the passionate female friendships in his novels and engaged in intense sentimental friendships with each other. Elizabeth Carter, the classical scholar and translator of the Greek poet Epictetus, called Catherine Talbot ‘my passion, I think of her all the day, dream of her all the night and one way or another introduce her into every subject I talk of.’225

  Although elite women’s loving friendships were sometimes hailed as a higher love, free of lust and typical of their refined nature, scandalous and amused references to women having sex with women started to appear in scandal sheets, plays and pornography. Coded accusations were printed in the scandal sheets, usually referring to corrupt aristocrats or foreign royalty. A so-called ‘history’ by the Seigneur de Brantome, Lives of Gallant Ladies, uses the word ‘lesbienne’ and describes ‘fricarelle’ (rubbing) as the sexual activity of women lovers, who are only driven to each other by the absence of men and who ‘loathe’ the practice, once they are able to get a man.

  A mock-epic poem The Toast by William King first used the phrase ‘lesbian loves’ meaning sexual intimacy between two women, in 1732; and later the words ‘tribadism’ and ‘sapphic passion’ were used to describe sexual intimacy between women. But a ‘tribade’ could also mean a hermaphrodite – now diagnosed as a medical condition – and it could mean a man or woman who had lovers of both sexes. The practice of same-sex love for women was sufficiently well known for it to enter into slang; it was called ‘A game of Flats’ and lesbians were called ‘tommies’, perhaps matching the slang word for homosexuals, ‘mollies’, or perhaps short for ‘tom-boys’.226

  Under increased scrutiny and more critical commentary on single women and their friendships from the early 1700s, women’s passionate expressions of friendships became more subdued, women more discreet in courting other women. In 1724, an anonymous pamphleteer describes English ladies ‘Kissing and Slopping each other in a lascivious manner and frequently repeating it’. By the end of the century, women who lived flamboyantly and openly together, especially the less respectable actresses, singers and artists, came under serious scrutiny.227 All female friendships had to be firmly defined as asexual, and named ‘sentimental friendships’.

  The belief that all lower-class women were sexually active meant that working class women friends were suspected of sexual activity, and from 1700 single women friendships came under scrutiny and suspicion. Working-class women living and working together could be separated by the labour laws, which allowed magistrates to rule how and where women worked. Four women at South Milton, Devon, who had been self-sufficient in a spinning house together, were ordered to go into domestic service, where they would almost certainly be separated. Quaker women who lived communally faced prosecution, such as Jane and Anne Wright, who were separated and taken from their home even though they were sisters.228

  A medical tract described the differences between a healthy sexual working-class girl and a delicate young lady. Another, from 1725, Supplement to Onania, a warning against masturbation, explains that ‘EN’, an upper-class girl, was taught to masturbate by a servant: ‘EN, of a tender make and naturally inclin’d to be weakly, developed a number of disorders as a result.’ On the other hand, the female servant who had initiated the young lady ‘ails nothing, is a strong wench of twenty seven’.229

  Those medical texts that mentioned upper-class female sexuality at all described it as an aberration. All discussion was intended to discourage female sexuality, not to diagnose. Women who touched genitals with other women were said to be likely to die from diseases of the womb. M. Tissot’s book, translated by A. Hume, Onanism: Or, A Treatise upon the Disorders produced by Masturbation; Or the Dangerous Effects of Secret and Excessive Venery, has only one generalised chapter on women: ‘Women have been known to love girls with as much fondness as ever did the most passionate of men, and conceive the most poignant jealousy when they were addressed by the male sex upon the score of love.’230

  Novelist Henry Fielding concludes his account of a ‘female husband’ with a plea against same-sex love, which though it is ‘Viciously and Equally detestable in both Sexes’, it is worse in women: ‘Nay, if Modesty be the Peculiar Characteristic of the Fair Sex it is in them most Shocking and Odious to Prostitute and Debase it.’231

  By the end of the 1700s, both the enthusiasm for women’s passionate friendships and the later panic about women’s sexual intimacy were over. Fewer texts appeared complaining of women’s excessive love for women. The repression of upper-class female sexuality meant that women’s friendships, also appeared to be non-sexual. The earlier alarm over the general fashion for friendships between women became avid curiosity about the exceptional few and comment on them became harsher.

  Female Husbands

  Popular ballads and plays about women marrying women usually showed the women motivated by greed and ending in despair. The ballad ‘She-Wedding or a Mad Marriage at Deptford’ (1684) tells of a fraud played on a family by a pregnant maidservant. Another, ‘The Scornful Damsel’s Overthrow’ (1685), depicts a woman rejecting male suitors who get their revenge when she is seduced by a cross-dressing woman. The bride kills herself when she discovers her husband is a woman.232

  In 1680, Amy Poulter, the wife of Arthur Poulter, dressed herself as a man and named herself James Howard, to woo 18-year-old Arabella Hunt, a famously beautiful professional singer and musician at the court of Queen Mary. Their summer-long courtship was approved by Arabella’s mother and James married Arabella before witnesses, at St Marylebone parish church on 12 September that year. The young couple lived together in Arabella’s mother’s house in the capital’s Haymarket for six months.233 A witness to the wedding, Sara Cunningham, aged 24, told the London consistory court that James ‘went most in womanish apparel and especially when she went into the City pretending there were very great reasons and circumstances for her going so’.234

  Six months after the wedding, Arabella applied for an annulment to the marriage at the consistory court, claiming that her husband James was ‘one of a double gender, an hermaphrodite’.235

  Amy Poulter was widowed by the death of her husband Arthur in January 1681, four months into her marriage to Arabella. She told the court that she had been ‘Seduced by some evil company and counsel’, and that she had courted Arabella dressed both as a man and as a woman – ‘not seriously but rashly and unduly and in a frolic jocular and faceitious manner . . . made suit to Arabella Hunt in a way of marriage’.

  Amy said that as soon as Arabella understood she was a woman, ‘they did forthwith forsake . . . the company of each other . . . and they have ever since lived, and do now live apart from each other, as they ought to do, this respondent well knowing . . . that she was in error, and that she then was, and still is a woman and a perfect woman . . . and no man, and no hermaphrodite or person of double gender’.236

  The court called a jury of five midwives, who examined Amy Poulter and announced that she was a woman – ‘perfect . . . in all her parts’.

  This was an advantage to Amy Poulter. If she had been declared a hermaphrodite by the court, or even declared as a man, she might have lost her annual widow’s dower from her Poulter marriage, and been publicly shamed.237

  The court ruled the marriage null and void not because it was undertaken by two women – there was no specific law against same-sex unions238 – but because Amy Poulter had already been married at the time of the wedding. The court annulled the bigamous union, reported the midwives’ account that Amy was a ‘perfect’ woman, and noted that both women were free to marry in future. There was no other charge to answer.

  Arabella continued her career as a highly regarded court musician, and died single in 1705; but only five weeks after the court annulled her marriage as a ‘female husband’, Amy Poulter died and was buried at Cottered in Hertfordshire.

  Theirs was not the only female marriage recorded in this period. In 1694, a young woman (unnamed) was accused of marrying a young maid for her marriage portion and planning a second marriage with another woman. Her love letters were read aloud to the amusement of the criminal court. She was ordered to be whipped and kept at Bridewell until the court should decide her punishment.

  In 1719, Catherine Jones appeared before the criminal court of the Old Bailey in London charged with bigamy for making a second marriage when her husband of six years, John Rowland, was abroad. Her defence was that her marriage to Constantine Boone was no real marriage as Boone was a hermaphrodite.

  According to the less-than-reliable record of the Newgate Calendar, a witness told the court that Constantine Boone had been raised as a girl and taught needlework until she ran away to sea as a 12-year-old boy. Catherine Jones said in her defence that Constantine Boone had been exhibited as a hermaphrodite at Bartholomew Fair and other places. Constantine Boone confirmed that this was true, and other witnesses said that Constantine Boone tended to be more female than male. The jury accepted the defence – that there was no marriage since Constantine Boone was a hermaphrodite, and released Catherine Jones from the charge of bigamy.239

  In 1720, Sarah Kerson, calling herself John, tried to marry Anne Hutchinson – the court assumed the motive was to defraud Anne of her money. Like most same-sex marriages for women, the case reached court only when there was a criminal complaint attached to the wedding. Marriage between women was not a criminal offence of itself, and there may have been many female husbands and wives who never attracted the attention of the authorities. One female marriage was recorded without comment, by the clerk to the church in Taxal, Cheshire, in 1707: ‘Hannah Wright and Ann Gaskall, Parish of Prestbury, 4th September 1707’. And a year later, in Prestbury church: ‘Ane Norton and Alice Pickford, Parish of Prestbury, 3rd June, 1708’.240

  A few decades later, in 1734 in London’s Soho, the clergyman would not issue a marriage certificate to John Mountford (tailor) and Mary Cooper, a spinster, making a note that he ‘Suspected two women no Certif’.241 Which suggests that he did not marry them – but only because they had no licence for their marriage.

  A clergyman in 1737 officiated at the wedding of John Smith and Elizabeth Huthall, and later recorded his doubts: ‘By Ye opinion after matrimony my Clark judged they were both women. If ye person by name John Smith be a man, he’s a little short fair thin man not above 5 foot.’242 But apparently the wedding went ahead, and the authorities were not alerted.

  In 1747, a newly married couple – John Ferren and Deborah Nolan – were discovered to both be women after the wedding, but the marriage was not challenged: ‘The supposed John Ferren was discovered after ye ceremony were over, to be in person a woman.’243