The Marriage Act of 1753, which required the calling of banns in local parishes or the issuing of special marriage licences, and the recording of all weddings, was intended only to prevent entrapping weddings by fortune-hunting grooms. The act was not against same-sex weddings for women, which continued throughout the eighteenth century. Indeed, female marriages may have quietly grown in popularity through this period. Certainly, the numbers of individual reports increase and the phrase ‘female husband’ is used without explanation as an everyday event.244

  One woman who had lived as a man, a husband and a soldier was only discovered during a visit to hospital in Edinburgh in 1759. Another wife loved her female husband so dearly that when they were exposed by an old acquaintance, she travelled to York ‘in great affliction begging that they might not be parted’. In the same year, a female husband, Samuel Bundy born Sarah Paul, was arrested for fraud upon her wife, Mary Parlour, who reported them to the authorities. When the case came to court, the wife Mary refused to appear against her female husband and the case was dropped.245 In 1764, a female husband, John Chivy, died after living as a farmer and a husband for more than 20 years.

  Another woman who tried to live as a man and married not one, but three women, was fictionalised by Henry Fielding, the magistrate-novelist. He claimed his account was drawn from court papers, but it was published as a novel titled The Female Husband in 1746.

  Nothing sentimental about this novel! The voice is from the Age of Enlightenment, not the Romantic movement: the novelist adopts a hard-hearted, cynical approach and takes a forensic interest in the heroine and her downfall. Fielding claims that Mary Hamilton was born on the Isle of Man in 1721 to a well-off widow and a retired army sergeant and was seduced by an older woman who had herself been corrupted by Methodists. Mary Hamilton fell passionately in love with her seducer and was heartbroken when she was rejected as the other woman chose to marry a man. Fielding makes the traditional claim of the superiority of heterosexual intercourse over female intimacy, with Mary’s former woman lover urging her: ‘Follow my example now, as you before did my temptation and enter as soon as you can into that Holy state into which I was yesterday called. In which, tho’ I am yet but a fellow Novice, believe me, there are delights infinitely surpassing the faint endearments we experienced.’246

  Instead, Mary Hamilton took ship to Dublin, claimed to be a Methodist minister, and courted and married a wealthy older widow, who discovered that Mary was a woman on the wedding night. Mary fled to the West Country and courted and married two other women, each time discovered as a woman and running away. Her final marriage lasted three months and the bride was deeply attached to Mary, who now claimed to be a doctor of medicine named George Hamilton and lived with the bride in her family home. A chance encounter with someone who had met George during a previous marriage led to gossip, and a magistrate issued a warrant for arrest – not for same-sex marriage, not even for bigamy, but for a criminal vice that was not described. A search of Mary/George’s possessions revealed ‘Something too Vile, Wicked and Scandalous in Nature’.

  This is all that Fielding says about the discovery that was perhaps some sort of fake penis with which to mislead the final two brides, who were said to be virgins on their wedding night. If a dildo was used to penetrate the brides, it would have been a criminal offence of sodomy. But Hamilton was not accused of sodomy. She was committed to Bridewell and charged under the Vagrancy Act for ‘having by false and Deceitful practices endeavoured to impose on some of His Majesty’s subjects’.

  The judges handed down a verdict on Hamilton without ruling on whether they were male or female: ‘That the he or she, prisoner at the bar is an uncommon, notorious cheat, and we, the Court, do sentence her, or him, whichever he or she may be, to be imprisoned six months, and during that time to be whipped in the towns of Taunton, Glastonbury, Wells and Shepton Mallet, and to find security for good behaviour as long as they, the learned justices aforesaid, shall or may, in their wisdom and judgment, require.’247

  Hamilton was publicly whipped in four market towns and imprisoned for months. Fielding alleges that on the night of the worst beating, she tried to bribe the jailer to bring a young woman into the prison for sex – a development almost certainly fictional, designed to show the moral corruption of a female husband. Until then, even Fielding’s own account describes Hamilton as neither predatory nor promiscuous, but only persistently trying to create a marital home with a specific beloved woman, for profit, love and sex. In fact – just like a male husband.

  Cross-dressing Women

  There was no law against women dressing as men, but the biblical injunction remained, and cross-dressed women could be prosecuted for being disorderly. Even when women dressed as men for their own safety, like on long journeys, they felt the frisson of social anxiety about a woman not conforming to her social place.

  The theatre, back in business after the shutdown of the Cromwell years, not only allowed women on stage, but created ‘breeches’ parts in which the actresses wore men’s breeches and showed silk-stockinged legs and garters for the enjoyment of the mixed audience. Cross-dressing women proved popular with all audiences, and would be specifically requested on ‘ladies nights’ by the all-women audiences. They remained hugely popular with audiences until the 1700s rise of unease about ladylike behaviour and anxiety about same-sex female eroticism. Some historians suggest that breeches plays were discouraged when it became clear they were favoured by women audiences; breeches parts signalled female independence, female sexuality and female preference for other women – and were phased out.248

  A woman who played herself on stage, dressed as a man, and occasionally passed as a man in real life, was the so-called German Princess, Mary Carleton (1634–73). Born Mary Moders, the daughter of a Canterbury musician, she first married a local shoemaker before running away to Barbados. She then married a surgeon, Thomas Day – leading to an unsuccessful trial for bigamy.249 On her release she went to Cologne, where she was ‘mistaken’ for another woman, and adopted the identity of Maria de Wolway, returning to London as a German countess. She was tricked by a lawyer’s clerk into marriage, and when he discovered she had no fortune, his father sued her for bigamy.

  She claimed to have trained as a male lawyer at the Inns of Court and conducted her own successful defence, released by a jury to public acclaim. She wrote her own account of her life, which was dramatised as A Witty Combat, or, The Female Victor, and played herself on the London stage; the diarist Samuel Pepys attended a performance. Carleton continued with criminal deceits until she was arrested in 1671 for stealing a silver tankard. The death sentence was commuted to exile to Jamaica, but she returned early, to continue with more deceits and a theft, and was once again arrested. She dressed very fashionably at her trial and on her last journey to the gallows. She was hanged at Tyburn on 22 January 1673.250

  An actress who wore breeches on stage and in real life, Charlotte Charke (1713–60) published a fictionalised version of her life story in 1755, and described being raised as a tomboy, being unhappily married and forced by poverty onto the stage, where she played both women and breeches parts. When travelling she dressed as a man, calling herself Mr Brown and flirting with women, declaring that she was incapable of conventional female skills and behaviours. She lived for much of her life with her woman friend and manager, and they travelled as husband and wife. Charlotte’s cross-dressing led her into a courtship with an heiress and the possibility of a profitable marriage to a wealthy woman – but she withdrew from the relationship as she said she did not feel she could be a ‘female husband’.251

  A woman of African descent who refused to be confined to conventional female behaviour in conventional female clothes disguised herself as a man, calling herself John Brown and volunteering as a soldier in the Royal Africa Company – the slaving company. Perhaps she was trying to get to Africa – it is possible that she had been slaved from the Guinea coast and was trying to get home. If anybody asked her what she intended, they did not record the answer. But she succeeded in making the voyage. The captain of The Hannibal of London, Thomas Philips, explained in his ship’s log in November 1693 how she was discovered:

  This morning we found out that one of the Royal African Company’s soldiers, for their castles in Guiney, was a woman, who had enter’d herself into their service under the name of John Brown, without the least suspicion, and had been three months on board without any mistrust, lying always among the other passengers, and being as handy and ready to do any work as any of them: and I believe she had continu’d undiscover’d till our arrival in Africa, had not she fallen very sick, which occasion’d our surgeon to visit her, and ordered her a glister: which when his mate went to administer, he was surpriz’d to find more sally-ports than he expected, which occasion’d him to make a farther inquiry, which, as well as her confession, manifesting the truth of her sex, he came to acquaint me of it, whereupon, in charity, as well as in respect to her sex, I ordered her a private lodging apart from the men, and gave the taylor some ordinary stuffs to make her woman’s cloaths; in recompence for which she prov’d very useful in washing my linen, and doing what else she could, till we deliver’d her with the rest at Cape-Coast castle. She was about twenty years old, and a likely black girl.252

  An entire genre of popular writing described women passing themselves off as soldiers. In 1692, the Gentlemen’s Journal told the story of a beautiful English woman who passed as a male soldier for two years with the French army, promoted to ‘the Governor of Pignerol’s Gentlemen of the Horse until she was discovered as a woman playing with another of her sex’.253

  An Irish woman, Christian Cavanagh (1667–1739), ran a Dublin inn with the help of her husband Richard Welsh who disappeared, probably pressed, into the British army. Aged 26, ‘Kit’ Cavanagh dressed as a man and enlisted as an infantryman to find her husband in 1693. She was captured by the French at the Battle of Landen and released – still undiscovered – to Captain Tichborne’s company in a prisoner exchange. A quarrel with a company sergeant over a woman led to a duel, when Kit Cavanagh killed the sergeant and was discharged from the army.

  She enlisted again with the Scots Greys and fought with them until the Peace of Ryswick, re-enlisting with the Greys in 1701 for the War of the Spanish Succession. She continued fighting even when wounded at the Battle of Blenheim. In the aftermath she found her long-lost husband, who was with another woman. Kit Cavanagh agreed that she and her husband should pass as brothers and continued in the army until the Battle of Ramillies, when she fractured her skull and was discovered as a woman.

  From The Girl’s Own Annual, 1904, Kit Cavanagh (Christian Davies, 1667–1739), who served with the British Army and was buried with full military honours

  [And Cover] Kit Cavanagh from The Girl’s Own Annual, 1 October 1904 (duncan1890/Getty Images)

  The Scots Greys brigadier Lord John Hay ordered that she should continue to draw her pay until she was formally discharged as a trooper and taken on as a cook. Her unfaithful husband was killed at the Battle of Malplaquet in 1709 and she searched for his body and buried him. She married another dragoon Hugh Jones, and then lived with Captain Ross of the Scots Greys, taking the name Mother Ross.

  When the Greys were demobbed in 1712, Kit Cavanagh was presented at court to Queen Anne, who granted her £50 and a pension of a shilling a day for her extraordinary military service. She married for the third time and finally retired to the Royal Hospital Chelsea as a pensioner, where she was interviewed by writer Daniel Defoe, who published her story. She died aged 72 and was buried with full military honours at the hospital.

  Several women were known to have passed as men to serve in the army and navy, according to the Gentleman’s Journal: ‘We have had but two years ago a young lady on board the Fleet in man’s apparel, who show’d all the signs of the most undaunted valour. Several others are still living, and some of them in this town, who have served whole campaigns, and fought stroke by stroke by the most manly soldiers.’254

  Another woman recruit to the British army was not celebrated for her courage, but arrested, whipped and put to hard labour in 1704. Elizabeth Morris had dressed as a man and enlisted as a soldier in Lt General Steward’s regiment.255 Perhaps she drew such condemnation because she was not following a husband, but pursuing her own wishes.

  Two notorious cross-dressing women became female pirates: Mary Reid and Anne Bonny, whose story was published as A General History of the Pirates in 1724. Born around 1700 in Ireland, Anne Bonny was dressed as a boy and named ‘Andy’ in the hope he would become a lawyer’s clerk. The family emigrated to Carolina, where Anne married a pirate named James Bonny against her father’s wishes. After the couple moved to the Bahamas, Anne became the lover of pirate Jack Rackham, ran away with him on his ship and disguised herself as a male member of his crew, which already included Mark/Mary Read (or Reid), who had dressed as a boy from early youth to win an inheritance and later to join the British army. Mark/Mary had married as a woman and moved to the West Indies with her husband, but when he died she joined Rackham’s crew, as a man – Mark. Rackham was jealous at first of the friendship between Anne Bonny and Mark Reid – until Mark/Mary revealed herself as a woman, when he allowed them to be loving woman friends.256

  Anne Bonny (c.1697–?1721) in A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, 1724, by Captain Charles Johnson, possibly a pen name for Daniel Defoe

  [And Cover] Anne Bonny from Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, T. Warner, 1724 (The Picture Art Collection/Alamy)

  Anne Bonny married Jack Rackham at sea and he, Anne and Mark/Mary stole the ship William, recruited a new crew and worked as pirates until October 1720, when they were attacked by a sloop commissioned by the governor of Jamaica. The crew were said to be too drunk to fight and were taken to Jamaica, where they were hanged. Anne Bonny’s last words to her husband were: ‘Had you fought like a man; you need not have been hanged like a dog.’257

  Mark/Mary and Anne both pleaded their bellies, and execution was delayed. Mark/Mary died in prison and Anne disappeared from the record.

  An illustration of pirate Mary Read (1695–1721) in ‘The Adventures and Heroism of Mary Read’, The Pirates Own Book, 1837

  [And Cover] Mary Read from Charles Ellms, The Pirates Own Book, Sanborn & Carter, 1837 (Science History Images/Alamy)

  Nottinghamshire has a well-told story (probably a fiction) of a highwaywoman: Joan Phillips, the daughter of a wealthy farmer who was persuaded by her lover to dress as a man and hold up a stagecoach on Loughborough Road. She was said to have been tried at the Lenten Assizes in Nottingham and hanged in April 1685 on a gallows erected at Wilford Lane, close to where she had been captured.258

  Hannah Snell (1723–92) took her brother-in-law’s name, James Gray, and dressed in his suit of clothes, to search for her deserting husband. Discovering he had been executed for murder, she decided to continue in a male identity and joined John Guise’s 6th Regiment of Foot when they marched against the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, in 1745. However, she deserted after a brutal whipping from her sergeant, and joined the Marines instead, sailing for India.

  She was wounded in the legs and groin – but had the bullet taken out by a local woman so that the regimental surgeon should not discover her sex. On return to England in 1750, she revealed that she was a woman and appealed for a pension. She published her story as a book, The Female Soldier, and created a theatrical act: showing military drill and singing songs in uniform. She was honourably discharged and granted her pension.

  Hannah Snell (1723–92) in full military uniform, painting by Richard Phelps, engraved by John Young, engraver to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales

  [And Cover] Hannah Snell, painted by R. Phelps, engraved by J. Young, 1750, British Museum (Public domain)

  On retirement, she married twice and had two children from each husband, and at her death was buried at the Chelsea Hospital, a gesture of respect to her military service.

  A popular genre of ballads celebrated women who went to war in the army or navy dressed as men. Mostly, the ballads celebrated the women’s adventure, and their return to civilian life and womanhood – but the possibility of a successful life as a man was publicised and popularised.259

  Some women dressed as men to be freed from the conventions of ladylike behaviour. Sally Salisbury did it to go out with rowdy male friends. There is a record of an affray in a pub in Gateshead, where one of the drinkers was found to be a woman dressed as a man. Catherine Meadwell, an estranged wife, wore men’s clothes and used the name of Captain Clark to meet her lover. Perhaps the most surprising story of all is that of a coachman, in service for 16 years to the aristocratic Harvey family, who was only discovered to be a woman when she gave birth.260

  The seventeenth-century accounts of cross-dressing women’s lives were mostly a narration of a woman’s adventure, not a condemnation. Literature advising on appearance focused on dressing appropriately for social status, as if class mattered more than sex. But at the end of the century, writers began to urge women to dress as women and identified cross-dressing as a social problem, a moral failing, or even a symptom of madness.261 The new unease developed, as women cross-dressed in public, taking a stage costume into everyday life.262 Assuming men’s clothing, not as a joke or a performance, was seen as a threat by women who might want to assume men’s authority too.

  Although commentators increasingly insisted there were two sexes, and only two sexes, there was a continued awareness of people known as ‘hermaphrodites’. A 1718 pamphlet on hermaphrodites mostly discussed women changing into men, since it was still thought – as the Greek philosophers – that a physical body would change to improve, that a woman would become a man. What was the benefit of going in the opposite direction? Anyone of indeterminate sexuality was most likely to be a women turning into a man.263