Act Three: At Work and At Play Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: A 17th Century History for Girls

On 29th May, 1660, King Charles II returned from exile

to reclaim his throne.

Everyone believed the Stuart dynasty had lost power forever.

His father, Charles I, had been publicly executed

only 10 years previously and England had been firmly in the grip

of Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth,

but now the monarchy was back in business.

The Restoration was a turning point in British history.

It marked the end of the Medieval and the beginning of the modern age.

It affected the life of every single person in the country.

In this series I'm looking at the lives of women

in the late-17th century.

This is a really exciting time to be a woman.

For centuries they've been lurking about in the footnotes of history

but now they come to prominence.

Some of them have such modern attitudes and ambitions

and we see them coming up against a world

that was still pretty male and misogynistic.

'Over three programmes,

'I've been exploring their lives at the newly liberated Royal Court...'

The King without a doubt would have been completely delighted.

-If all my clothes had suddenly fallen off?

-Yes, I'm sure he would.

'..at home behind closed doors...'

Oh!

'..and now in public, at work and play.'

She dominated the theatre. She had more plays put on than anybody.

Not any woman, any man.

You might have thought that Britain was swinging in the 1960s,

but it was the 1660s that really shook things up.

APPLAUSE

In this final programme I'll meet a band of female pioneers,

mavericks who made names for themselves

in new and unprecedented ways.

Now, the one Restoration woman you'll have heard of was Nell Gwynn.

Famously she was an orange seller, and an actress

and then the mistress of Charles II,

but she wasn't alone,

there were other extraordinary women in her age.

There were explorers and scientists

and business women and writers, and even female spies.

All of them were defying convention at a time when most women

were expected to be spinsters, wives, widows,

or, if they were unlucky, a prostitute.

Now, my question is, was this just a group of

extraordinary, exceptional individuals

or was there something about the new world of Restoration England

that allowed these women to take centre stage?

In the summer of 1698, travellers up and down the country

might have encountered a most unusual figure on the road.

This was Celia Fiennes,

a remarkable noble woman

who travelled the length and breadth of England

from Penzance in the south to Newcastle in the north,

virtually alone.

Celia's account of her travels is an amazingly detailed survey

of a nation on the brink of modernity.

Celia's always been a heroine of mine because of her independence.

She stayed single, really unusual for a Restoration woman,

and this gave her control of her own fortune.

She used it to go travelling.

She travelled 3,000 miles over her life time.

This was extraordinary, even for a contemporary man.

Celia toured the country

well before travel had become a fashionable pastime.

In fact, she's the first woman recorded to have visited

every different county in the kingdom.

She travelled on roads largely unaltered since Roman times,

but the country she surveyed was changing fast

and Celia was fascinated by every last detail of its transformation.

No portraits of Celia survive but here at the Fiennes' family seat,

Broughton Castle in Oxfordshire,

they've still got her original journal.

There's her signature.

-She's signed it.

-A beautiful hand, that's clearly Celia's own hand.

-Yeah.

-She was inquisitive. She wanted to know practical things,

she wanted to know the price of fish and where you got coal from

and why they built dams over rivers, and so on.

She says that both ladies and gentlemen

should make observations of the pleasant prospects, good buildings,

-different produces and manufactures of each place.

-Yes.

So that's saying, they should go like industrial spies really,

recording all the products of the nation.

One feels about her, she very much didn't lie on the beach, did she?

She does go on and on and on, very long sentences.

-I don't know what sort of education she'd had.

-Well, obviously not bad.

-Hmm.

-Although I have to tell you, she doesn't really get punctuation.

Perhaps Celia's urge to explore lay in her Fiennes' family genes.

After all, the polar adventurer and conqueror of Mount Everest,

Sir Ranulph Fiennes is her descendent.

She must have been very courageous, I think,

because it's an equivalent, if you like,

to somebody going to the North Pole or something now,

it was a great adventure.

So in her own way she really is a pioneer, isn't she?

Yes, I wonder if they'd peered her from the villages and said,

"What's that woman doing on a horse?"

Yes, it must have been unusual, I think.

Celia was a first-hand witness to the country's evolution

from an overwhelmingly rural society

to a far more urban one,

built on the profits of flourishing trade and manufacturing.

She sets off from London, and as she's travelling

she is interested in seeing great houses

and touristy things like natural wonders,

but what really interests her

are the economically important parts of Britain,

places where they're making money.

She goes up to Liverpool.

Liverpool, records Celia, "was just a few fisherman's houses

"and is now grown to a large fine town, there be 24 streets in it."

Now she comes over to Newcastle.

"Newcastle, upon a high hill, two miles from the city,

"I could see all about the country which was full of coal-pits,

"the sulphur of it taints the air."

She comes through Bristol,

a very important port in the late-17th century.

"Bristol, a very great trading city. I saw the harbour was full of ships

"carrying coals and all sorts of commodities."

She was the first traveller since William Harrison

over a 100 years before to make such a complete tour

and this means she was the first traveller really to tour

the earlier stage of industrial Britain.

Nowhere was the country's modernisation more dramatic

than in the capital.

The benchmark by which Celia measured every other town.

Charles II's Restoration caused a real boom in London.

When it was finished, the new cathedral of St Paul's

would tower over a really thriving city, full of opportunities

for people to work and play, and there is a population explosion.

Nearly 600,000 people now living in London,

making it bigger than Paris and well on its way

to overtaking the biggest city in the world, which was Constantinople.

With the city growing so fast, it soon burst out of its boundaries

and it flowed beyond the old city walls to the open fields westwards.

Here sprang up stately new squares

and avenues and public parks to create the West End.

Covent Garden, built 30 years earlier,

became the home of London's reopened theatres.

Nearby, St James's Park was reinvented by Charles II

as an elegant new public space devoted to leisure.

The graceful squares and wide streets of the new West End

became the most desirable places to live.

It was here that the greatest transformations took place

in the lives of our Restoration women.

Whether they were actresses, servants, shopkeepers

or even street walkers.

In the park and on the streets of the West End,

women were more visible than ever before.

By 1700, they outnumbered the capital's men

by a pretty staggering 25%.

London was now becoming a city of women.

-We're going to see a lot of women, aren't we, wandering around?

-Yes.

This is a great new era for single women.

It's a great era for women's work.

What jobs did they come for?

Most of them were coming in to come into domestic service.

They're not going to be servants their whole lives.

We're still in a period when service is something

that you do for that interim period

between your late teens and your mid-twenties.

People marry, most people marry very late,

so you've got a time in which you need to earn some money,

set yourself up as ready to have a household of your own.

So this crowd of young women in particular coming into London,

it has such an effect, by the end of the 17th century,

you've got four women for three men.

There's a lot more women now than men in fact.

-Yeah. The sex ratio has completely warped.

-Changed.

I guess that the park is just one of the new sort of public spaces

for women to be, you know,

they weren't at home all the time any more.

-They can go to...the theatre.

-The theatres.

-They can go shopping.

-Covent Garden.

-Covent Garden.

They can go to all the city squares that are appearing.

Visitors to England frequently comment that, um...

-English women have a peculiar freedom.

-Hmm.

In some ways, they have more constraints than anywhere else

and, in other ways, like their activities outside the home,

they seem to have more freedom.

'These new freedoms were tightly linked

'to the country's growing prosperity,

'as women became ever more important players in the national economy.'

By the time of the Restoration,

England had established itself as a great trading nation,

and exotic new imports, from coffee to calicos,

flooded into the capital.

When the traveller Celia Fiennes' tour of the country

brought her to Greenwich, she was suitably impressed.

She describes coming here to Greenwich one day

and standing here and looking out to the Thames

twisting and turning itself up and down and covered with ships.

She said that, "of a morning,

"you could see 100 sails of ships passing by

"and that is one of the finest sights that is."

The goods they were unloading were new and exotic.

They were bringing tobacco and sugar from the West Indies,

and silk and spices from the Middle East.

From India, it was calico and black pepper.

And from China, it was tea and porcelain.

By the end of the 17th century,

there were £10 million worth of goods

coming through London every year.

It seemed like there were more and more luxuries than ever before,

and the city was getting richer than ever before.

'Many of these new imports were targeted specifically at women.

'And Restoration London's elegantly appointed new arcades

'were designed to appeal directly to this new female market.'

You're looking at the wrong gloves. These are the ones.

'This was the moment the shopping mall came of age.'

I quite fancy these.

-Such choice, amazing.

-And I like this. This is the capitalist glove.

-Yeah.

-With the fur around the bottom.

And the slightly punk glove here.

-That's horrible, that one is.

-I'm not sure about that.

So, Helen, we're spending the afternoon with a lot of other people

wandering up and down and looking in shop windows.

Is this a new Restoration form of behaviour?

Yes, it is, and I think

it would have been a much more pleasurable experience

than in previous generations,

where you went into dark pokey shops

that had window shutters made of wood.

For the first time, you've got window displays in the shop window

and you have glass so that you can see in,

and see the goods that are on offer.

And it becomes a kind of leisure activity in its own right.

The owners and managers of these arcades could actually specify

what goods were sold there

so that you weren't going and buying your lovely lace in one booth

and next door there was a butcher doing horrible things.

It was all supposed to be very polite and clean and genteel.

That's still the case here in the arcade. No potatoes on sale here.

-Absolutely no potatoes, just pearls.

-Just pearls.

A few tiaras thrown in for good measure.

The women who flocked to these smart boutiques

soon made a name for themselves.

They were called "the silk worms."

Addison in the Spectator talks about these women

who go from shop to shop in their carriages

and they drive the haberdashers mad

because they just go into the shops

and they're unravelling lengths and lengths of silk

but they're not actually buying anything.

They're just there to gossip with their friends.

And that's the one I fancy.

-This, gems on it.

-Beautiful.

Ooh, it's £19,500.

Have you brought your credit card?

'The Restoration shop keepers were quick to spot this new market

'and went out of their way to win women over

'with surprisingly modern marketing techniques.'

One trick which the Spectator talks about is employing handsome young men

-to entice women in and to flirt with them.

-Like gigolos.

Kind of, and er, yes, they flirt with them and they draw them in.

'Well before the invention of the joint bank account,

'some of these ladies even found cunning new ways

'to exploit an old-fashioned legal system.'

Tremendous advantage in a patriarchal society,

where married women who have no legal personality of their own,

-is that they're not liable for the debts that they run up.

-Oh, I like it!

So they can go around saying to the shopkeeper,

"Well, go on and give me those goods and my husband will pay you later,"

and, um, of course, he's obliged to do it.

And this really goes too far in some cases.

And what we find actually is some intriguing newspaper advertisements

where a shopkeeper will have handed over a lot of goods

and the husband's been appalled

and he actually puts an advertisement saying,

"Mrs Worsley, my wife, is a petite blonde woman,

"please don't give her any more credit because I won't pay her bills."

I love the idea of these ladies having a high old time in the shops.

Absolutely, and it can go to court,

you know, the husband ends up in the dock

because women and children have no actual responsibility

for debts that they accrue.

Give them an inch and they'll take a mile.

'But, of course, some women's credit rating was unimpeachable.'

Now, right at the top of the fashion food chain,

we've got the Queen, Mary II.

She was quite a shopper.

This bill was for just six months in 1694

and it's full of lovely clothes.

She's getting a nightgown with green flowers.

And another one with white and gold flowers.

She's buying buttons,

gold flowered wadded nightgown

and a silver chain, silk wadding, underwear,

a pair of gold tissue stays, stitched with silver.

They sound splendid.

Now, an important thing about a lot of this fabric

is that it's the new, exotic, imported stuff.

Look, it's from India. It comes from the East.

Right down at the bottom we've got,

"For lining a morning gown quite through

"with white Indian damasque."

This is going to be the start of a new trend.

Everybody's going to want something like that.

'And for the fashion-conscious shopper without a royal budget,

'a new industry was born,

'producing cheap English imitations

'of these luxurious fabrics from India and China.'

-Isn't that lovely?

-It's just glorious. It hasn't faded at all.

The colours are so fresh and bright.

This isn't an actual proper Indian fabric, is that right?

No, that's right. This was made in England.

It's much cheaper than buying,

with the fabrics that are coming in from India.

-Crazy colours, aren't they?

-Yes, and they're often a lot brighter

than we might associate with,

you know, historical clothing.

They're really vibrant and luminous.

After the sober shades and restrained styles of the Commonwealth period,

no wonder the Restoration saw a steep rise

in dedicated followers of fashion.

Look at this lovely conical shape that's really, um,

typical of the late-17th century.

So the jumps is the informal,

comfortable, soft version

-of the stays?

-Yeah.

It sucks you in a little bit, but it's like wearing your track suit.

From top to toe, a host of new accessories

left no extremity unadorned.

'Towering head-dresses made the most of expensive continental lace.'

-Fabulous!

-You can only make about an inch and a half of this per day.

'Wielding a fan showed off

'your lovely white forearms.'

What I really want is this pair of shoes.

'And ingenious slap-soled shoes

'got you along muddy streets in style.'

-It's like a wedgie.

-It's a wedgie, exactly.

'And now, you could get hold of up-to-the-minute fashion prints.'

So this lovely fontage style

that was all the rage in the French courts...

'These allowed women outside the world of the court

'to copy what the beautiful people were wearing.

'They were the 17th century's answer to Vogue.'

It's a way into high-end fashion, I suppose,

for the normal folk at home.

Absolutely and, in a sense, it's almost the trade in the luxury goods

that allows a wider proportion of people to use it

because it's the wives of the people

making their fortunes from importing these things.

I mean, how better to get it

than to be married to someone who imports it? Easy.

SHE LAUGHS

You get it at cost-price.

-So the merchant classes start to grow.

-Yeah.

And the wives of the merchant classes

are, are wearing more ostentatious clothing

and, um, creating a huge demand. They've got the money.

With the birth of these modern consumers fashion

became a serious business.

For a long time, there'd been criticism, particularly of women,

for having too many and too fancy clothes,

but now, people began to realise

it was an important part of the economy.

A 17th-century statistician called Gregory King calculated

that, in the single year of 1688,

the English people purchased 79 million separate garments.

They were spending a quarter of their income on clothing.

One commentator, called Nicholas Barbon, says,

"Ladies, fashion is good!

"It occasions the expense of new clothes

"before the old ones are worn out.

"It is the spirit and life of trade."

For a growing number of women,

it wasn't just a case of looking the part.

They had to act it too.

For all the new freedoms that women enjoyed,

their behaviour was still very tightly prescribed.

The 17th century saw a rash of conduct books

aimed at female readers.

These set out the distinctly old-fashioned codes

of meek and modest behaviour

still demanded of any respectable woman.

If you did venture out into St James's Park as a lady,

it was very important to follow the rules for female behaviour,

set out by Hannah Woolley in her book of 1675,

called A Guide To The Female Sex.

Hannah was Restoration England's favourite agony aunt.

Her work was part cook-book, part indispensable guide to everything,

from courtship to managing servants and, above all, to female etiquette.

First of all, she says, don't talk to any gentlemen

cos they might take the opportunity to tell you a smutty story.

She says that you should stick to sucking up to people

who are better than you,

don't speak to anyone who's inferior to you.

Your walk is very important.

She said that a light carriage shows that you've got a light mind.

And I guess that means you've got to walk very sedately and soberly.

And finally, take care what you do with your eyes.

Don't send forth any tempting glances.

This will reveal that you have a light character.

Instead, you should just send your eyes up to heaven.

'Women out and about in London didn't only run the risk

'of a social faux pas.

'The West End streets and squares may have looked elegant and refined,

'but many of the people you encountered on them definitely weren't.

'By night, the area attracted

'both cheeky thieves and committed criminals.'

This is way before the invention of street-lighting

and if you wanted to get home, you'd hire a link-boy,

who'd run in front of you with a flaming torch to show the way,

if you were lucky.

If you were unlucky, he'd lead you up a blind alley

and all of his friends would jump on you and rob you.

This is 150 years before the invention of the police

and it's said that a gentleman walking home alone at night

needed to arm himself to the teeth with a sword and a blunderbuss.

'If it was dangerous for men, imagine what it was like for women.'

Women out at night probably felt particularly vulnerable

because of their clothes, which were surprisingly accessible.

They had this low bodices,

a groping hand

could make its way down there

and, although I look well protected,

actually, these layers just lift up.

And here's my outer skirt,

here's my under skirt.

Underneath that, I've got my linen smock or shift.

Then, here are my stockings,

but they stop just above the knee

and that's it.

Women's knickers haven't been invented yet.

Women's vulnerability was often exploited,

even by apparently civilised gentlemen,

like the diarist Samuel Pepys,

whose behaviour now seems pretty shocking.

Samuel Pepys' diaries often mention him

following pretty women down the street

and literally having a squeeze, seeing what he could get away with.

On one occasion, he even had a go at a lady in church,

but he bit off more than he could chew,

because she opened up her pocket.

Now, it was a tie-on pocket,

of the kind that Lucy Locket lost and Kitty Fisher found,

and out she got a huge, great pin

and she threatened to prick him with it

and, after that, he left her alone.

Pepys' victim was well able to look after herself

but many of the women who came to the capital in search of work

found it a cruel and unforgiving place.

'Far from home, they could end up penniless,

'without support and very alone.'

This is not very secure employment, is it?

They might find themselves out of a job, on the streets.

If it went wrong, they had a problem, they had a problem

because they didn't have many family and friends about,

so they could quickly fall on very hard times.

They would probably, they would not be settled in London

so they wouldn't get parish relief, so they could quickly turn

to any source of income that they could find.

'For those desperate enough,

'the West End provided one final job opportunity -

'the world's oldest profession.'

And then, they were coming to Covent Garden, weren't they?

This was the centre of the vice business.

Yes, it was. It, it was conveniently located between the City of London

and the more wealthier parishes, er, west of here.

Is it at all possible to estimate

just how many brothels there were on the streets round here

and how many women were working as prostitutes?

Well, you can only really make an estimate, but we would,

I would estimate that there were certainly dozens of brothels,

maybe more, and thousands of, of women, er, walking the streets.

How could you spot a prostitute?

Did she come and give you a little poke with her fan?

I don't think it was difficult.

They were quite aggressive in terms of propositioning men.

It's pretty clear at the lower end of the trade,

at the higher end of the trade,

probably the transaction would have been a little more subtle.

The West End teemed with thousands of prostitutes

openly plying their trade.

By night, the area was regarded as a sink of sin.

'Even those parts owned by the Crown

'gained a reputation for debauchery.'

The park at night was a very different place.

It wasn't flirtation and ogling going on in there,

it was assignations of prostitutes and muggings too.

You might wonder how this could be,

cos the gates were locked at ten o'clock every night.

The answer was - authorised key holders.

6,500 of them.

And who knows how many illegal, unauthorised keys

were floating around London too.

'When Charles II handed out the keys to his new park,

'he must have known exactly what his favourite courtiers

'would be getting up to in it.

'Their behaviour seemed to get the royal nod.'

The Earl of Rochester wrote one of his typically salacious poems about the park.

He called it A Ramble In St James's.

He described the park at night

being teeming with men and women of all ranks,

all of them up to no good.

He said that nightly, beneath the trees' shades,

buggeries, rapes and incests are made.

The location of the park, handy for the court

and the West End, was really convenient.

No wonder they all came here for their liaisons.

'The quarter century of Charles II's reign had seen an explosion

'in prostitution and public lewdness and licentiousness.'

To the Puritans, who'd been the guardians

of the nation's morality under Cromwell,

it seemed the country was sliding into debauchery.

They believed that the numerous disasters which had beset the nation

were the expressions of God's anger.

Plague, Dutch attacks on the fleet,

and the Great Fire of London

were the consequences of this immoral age.

'But in 1688, a much less merry monarch came to the throne.

'The Puritans were to gain a powerful ally

'in the staunchly protestant new King, William III.'

So in the 1660s and '70s, you've got lots of vice.

Everybody enjoying themselves. But it all changes in 1688.

Yes, with the arrival of William III,

they decide that they're going to justify this new regime

by creating a godly monarchy which is going to lead

a kind of second protestant reformation.

The scale and fervour of this anti-vice crusade were astonishing.

An organisation called the Society For The Reformation Of Manners

was founded to halt the country's moral decline.

Its volunteers patrolled the city's streets,

zealously pursuing women suspected of prostitution.

How did the Society For The Reformation Of Manners actually work?

It had to rely on informers,

so informers were people who were religiously motivated

or perhaps financially motivated, er,

to go out and arrest, er, prostitutes in particular.

It's not fair, is it?

Well, no, it isn't fair.

And I don't think that many of the prosecutions that the Reformers instigated

would, would match any kind of standards of evidence that we would expect.

They used to do naming and shaming, didn't they?

Yes, we have here a Black Roll which the, er, the Society's published,

which is basically a published list of all the offenders

that they've prosecuted in the past year.

So, after what you've said,

we can't really be sure

that all of these women were guilty.

Some of them could have been, you know, walking in a street where prostitutes were known to work.

They could have been tarred by association.

I think that's quite possible.

Er, there was a great distrust of young, unmarried women at the time

and I think anyone who was acting at all suspiciously

was quite, er, likely to be arrested.

'This backlash wasn't directed at prostitutes alone.

'Almost any ordinary woman

'might find herself a victim of the morality police.'

'Sometimes, just being in the wrong place at the wrong time was enough.'

The impact of the Society's campaign was considerable.

Every week, 40 or 50 so-called "night walkers" were packed off

to the infamous Bridewell Prison, many on decidedly dodgy evidence.

Once in jail, the women were set to hard labour, beating hemp.

Members of the public could even come in and watch them,

stripped to the waist and whipped in a positively medieval punishment.

This was still a deeply misogynistic society,

profoundly suspicious of women,

what they wore, where they went, how they behaved.

At the same time, though,

the Restoration did offer incredible opportunities for women.

None greater and yet more provocative than in the theatre.

It was here that women were to experience

a whole new level of freedom.

Theatres had been outlawed under the Commonwealth.

Charles II re-opens them on his Restoration in 1660

and they were to become the symbol of his age.

'There's one surviving theatre in the country,

'the small but perfectly formed, Theatre Royal

'in Richmond, North Yorkshire,

'which provides our best guide

'to the world of the Restoration playhouse.'

Ooh, this is pretty good up here. What's this part of it?

'After 18 years of closure under the Puritan regime,

'theatres weren't simply re-opened in 1660,

'they were totally reinvented.'

This is a completely new thing of the 1660s, isn't it,

-having the curtain between the back and the front?

-Yes.

-Shakespeare wouldn't have known what we were doing here?

-No.

Da-dah! Ooh, it's great down here on the stage, isn't it?

Tell me how this scenery works. This was new.

You have four sets of flats here.

They're angled in a "V" shape

to give you perspective up towards the back.

Whoa!

Arrg! Arrg!

'With the newly introduced footlights blazing,

'and occasionally burning down the theatre,

'a visit to the playhouse in the 1660s

'would have been a thrilling experience.'

For women in particular,

the theatre offered more than mere entertainment.

This was a new space,

in which they were welcome on equal terms with men.

Is the opening up of the theatre going to be really important

for letting women come to the fore in society?

I think it is

and I think what...you know, Restoration society

is a very much more open society.

If we think about one of the other new inventions,

social inventions at the time, the coffee house,

where men go to drink coffee and to talk about politics,

women are not allowed in coffee houses

so the theatre is the other great sort of public space

where culture can be discussed, political arguments can be voiced,

so theatre opens up a whole set of opportunities

for women connecting with that broader public.

In Shakespeare's time, the upper crust stayed away

from the rough and tumble of London's playhouses.

But now, encouraged by the King's patronage,

they flock to the theatre.

The auditorium is divided up on class lines,

so you get higher, lower people sitting in different areas.

Down here in the pit,

this is perhaps the most lively and exciting area,

this is where all the young, single men and gallants would want to come

so they could be really up close to the actresses.

Sitting amongst them you might find the odd female,

she was likely to be a high-class prostitute.

You could spot her by her black masque or vizard.

These are the boxes, the most expensive seats,

and here you would have got respectable gentlemen

bringing their respectable wives,

even to see some fairly unrespectable plays,

cos this is where the fashionable world would sit to see and to be seen.

And if there were any Royal visitors in the house,

this is where they would have sat.

So these are the cheapest seats up here, in the gallery.

This is where you'd have got all the booing and the cat-calling

and the drumming of the feet on the floor.

Up here, it was pretty cheap and cheerful.

You're a long way from the stage, but the big advantage is

you can drop your orange peel down onto the heads of the people below.

Charles hadn't just reinstated the theatres in 1660,

he'd also ordered that the female roles must now be taken by women.

Previously the girls had always been played by boys.

The first generation of women

to take to the public stage became stars

and invented an entirely new profession - that of the actress.

These women were real pioneers in lots of senses, weren't they?

They're very much pioneers and they're real risk takers as well,

because, when you think about it,

this is an incredibly dangerous thing to do.

There had been no professional actresses before this in England.

How did they know it was going to work,

that they were going to make a living?

Well, I'm here on the stage, just here,

and you're in the auditorium,

but we're in the same space effectively, aren't we?

There's none between us and there is accounts which suggest

that in fact this, what we're doing now, happened during shows.

What, how did that happen then?

For example, if something happened they didn't like,

the audience would boo and shout, and the actors might kind of adlib

and extemporise and kind of change it.

-It's all very fast and loose.

-Oh, yes.

-They're making it up as they're going along.

So the actresses will have to pretend

that they're somebody they're not,

but also they had to be really good at crowd control, don't they?

The skills of an actress in the Restoration

are akin to the skills of, for example, a stand-up comic now.

You know, you've got to be able to deal with hecklers,

you've got to be prepared to extemporise and make things up

to go with the flow of it.

In the Restoration,

it was a much more dramatic, riskier thing to be doing.

You know, plays could completely collapse. They could fall to bits,

because you just didn't know how the audience were going to react.

In the most daring innovation of the Restoration theatre,

'the so-called breeches role,

'women were now literally wearing the trousers.'

Now, today you'd only see a woman in this kind of get up

on the stage in a pantomime, but it was really common in the 1660s

and these breeches roles were...

Yes, OK, they were about looking

at a lady's lovely legs and titillation.

But also, it's a real sense that when women put on the men's clothes,

they were somehow released.

They could say and do all sorts of new things,

which even included a little bit of masculine violence and fighting.

The real importance of the breeches role

was the opportunity it gave the actresses

to launch a devastating critique of Restoration men.

You know, a very masculine society in some ways, Restoration, hmm,

culture, Restoration theatre,

Restoration theatre's full of these really rather unpleasant men

-who just go round seducing hundreds of women.

-Hmm.

You know, and that's very funny.

Er, so there's something

about having women on stage wearing trousers,

parodying men, parodying the way men behave when they're in courtship,

the way men behave when they're all being mates together.

Making fun of men when they all get their swords out

and start hitting each other.

There's something, I mean, there is a kind of extend

to which it does give a space or allows a space for women

to resist aspects of Restoration culture, I think.

MUSIC AND APPLAUSE

But the women taking these outrageous liberties on the public stage

wouldn't always get away with it.

The theatre was at the very heart of Restoration's society's ferocious culture wars.

To outraged Puritans, actresses treading the boards

were just as bad as prostitutes walking the streets.

And what did those old Puritans really have against women actors?

Why did they get so offended by them?

In general, er, Puritans don't tend to like women very much at all.

They, they're the origins of most sin in human society, hmm,

so Puritans are very anxious about sexuality,

they're very anxious about the discipline of the godly family

and women on the stage represent just about everything that would be wrong.

You can almost hear the sort of

17th-century Mary Whitehouse's saying, you know,

"This is just unacceptable. Turn it off!"

They called them notorious strumpets and objectionable whores

and all that sort of thing.

Some fine language, the most peculiar, I think,

is, er... "buttered buns."

-They're buttered buns?

-Buttered buns.

Buttered buns, er, er, whores on the stage who've,

who've been over used, shall we say?

Despite the Puritans' best efforts,

within 30 years of the Restoration,

there were almost 100 professional actresses

and it was in the theatre

that arguably the most famous person of the century

was to make her name.

This is Nell Gwynn.

She wasn't the first female to appear on a London stage

but she is the most celebrated.

From the top, you could think she was a court lady

with the languid eyes and the pink cheeks

and all of these very expensive looking pearls,

but lower down, you can sense

that Nell is treading that fine line

between respectability and raunchiness.

Her clothes are only just clinging onto her.

In fact, we do have a hint of nipple.

Witty, independent,

unafraid to express her desires and speak her mind.

Nell embodied a new breed of woman,

both in real life and on the stage.

In his play Secret Love,

John Dryden created a character especially for Nell.

Florimel was a wild mistress who only accepted marriage

when guaranteed freedom within it.

The part was to make Nell a bone fide star. Pepys was bowled over.

He declared it impossible to have Florimel's part

"ever done better than it is by Nellie."

Nell was custom-made for the bawdy, vigorous world of the theatre

and, in many ways, she's the complete Restoration woman,

who really couldn't have existed at any moment before the 1660s.

Nell is a very, very fine actress and she's stunningly beautiful

and Dryden comments that she's really designed for the stage.

-She's so beautiful. She's only good at comedies though.

-Yeah.

And that's one of the things, she's not very good at the tragedies.

And, and a lot of the playwrights

actually make prologues for women like Nell

to sort of address the audience directly

and, and you can think of those prologues as er, as Nell saying,

"Look at me, you know, I'm pretty good,

"if you're impressed by me, come and have a chat afterwards, you know,

"if you want to give me some money or land, that would be excellent."

It's, he wants his testimony to her brilliance and the only,

the brilliance of the other women hmm, but they are so popular

that the theatrical companies know they can make money out of them being there.

On the back of her stage career, Nell became rich,

famous and ultimately the mother of the King's children.

She triumphed in the face of her numerous Puritan critics.

Do you think it's going too far for us to imagine Charles II

and Nell Gwyn having a bit of a laugh

at the expense of the Puritans,

teasing them, if you like?

It's difficult for us to really recapture

quite how horrified they were...

SHE CHUCKLES

..if, if the King was encouraging this sort of degeneracy

and was clearly part of it.

Er, I think if, if we think especially about some of the plays

that they might have performed in the comedies,

the figure of the rather dry, boring, hypocritical Puritan

is one that both Charles and Nell

would have had a jolly good chortle about.

By sheer force of personality,

Nell made her way to the very pinnacle of the Restoration world.

'But it wasn't just on stage that women were taking men's roles.'

By the end of the century, a small but growing band

of fiercely independent women had made their mark.

Some of them in the most masculine profession of all.

'And Restoration's society now seemed just about ready to recognise

'and even to celebrate their achievements.'

The Royal Hospital in Chelsea was founded by Charles II in 1681,

to care for old and infirm soldiers

and its archives reveal the story

of one of the most remarkable of these women.

This is a list of old soldiers entitled to a pension

as administered by the Royal Hospital at Chelsea here.

As well as their names, you get their physical characteristics.

For example here, we have John Woods,

who is "a black man, shot by the left eye."

You get the descriptions of the wounds, so you don't give the money to the wrong guy.

Underneath John Woods, we have Christian Welsh.

Now, here's a surprise.

Christian Welsh is in fact

"a fat, jolly woman who has received several wounds in the service."

And here's the amazing part - "in the habit of a man."

In 1691, the 26-year-old Christian was running a pub in Dublin.

One day, her husband Richard disappeared.

When she discovered that he'd joined the army,

'she decided to track him down by enlisting herself.'

Now, what I'm dying to know is how on Earth

did she get away with it for 12 years, living as a man?

Christian Welsh says in her memoir very simply

that she just put on

her husband's clothes

and, luckily, they were the same size.

She says that her breasts were quite small

so they didn't need to be bound and she also wore a quilted waistcoat.

The other thing she did was that she had what she called

"a silver painted urinary instrument."

-A urinary instrument?

-A urinary instrument.

-So I'm thinking that's so that she can wee...wee standing up?

-Pee.

-Yes, yes.

-Golly.

Christian fought her way across the mud of Flanders

with the Duke of Marlborough's troops as they took on the French.

She was captured and exchanged and wounded several times.

She fought and won a duel and looted and pillaged with the best of them.

But after 12 years living as a man, the game was up.

How did she finally get found out

because she is discovered to be a woman in the end, isn't she?

Yeah, well, she's on the battlefield.

She's wounded and I think she says that there's a bullet

-that goes into her groin so er, there's no disguising that.

-Yeah.

The urinary instrument isn't going to...

isn't going to cut the mustard there.

So she's taken off to a hospital and er, her disguise is, is,

I mean, her identity is found out.

But this wasn't the end of Christian's story.

The tale of the female soldier disguised as a man,

captured the public imagination.

Far from being condemned for her deception, she was celebrated.

When her memoirs were published, they became an instant hit.

"A Corporal belonging to Brigadier Panton's regiment

"attempted to steal my booty;

"he drew and I had the sinew of my little finger cut in two,

"so with the butt end of my pistol, I struck out one of his eyes."

Do you think that the reason that her book is so popular

is that it's wish fulfilment for these stuck-at-home women thinking,

"Wow, Christian! I want to be like you."

I certainly think they did.

I mean, I could imagine women reading that

and actually being inspired themselves to go off and do what she did or, in other ways,

to feel that they could break gender boundaries of the period.

I think all of that kind of adds to this idea

that there might be something else I could do

and I think that she probably was very inspirational for women.

Christian didn't just win public acclaim.

She also received the ultimate royal seal of approval.

Queen Anne personally granted her a military pension

and she ended her days at the Royal Hospital.

Christian broke boundaries, refusing to allow her sex to hold her back.

'But other women went even further.

'Taking on men with brains as well as brawn.'

In 1666, at the height of his war with the Dutch,

King Charles II needed a trusted agent

to report back on enemies plotting against him in Holland.

'The choice of spy was a surprising one.

'A young woman from a relatively humble background'

at the margins of court society was dispatched to Antwerp

to gather vital intelligence.

She had code names for this.

Sometimes she was called Agent 160, other times Astrea.

She'd run up expenses and the government hadn't paid her back,

so she wrote to a friend saying,

"Please lend me money or I'm going to jail tomorrow."

Just a couple of years later, though, she'd really turned things around.

She'd started writing plays for the London stage

and she was earning good money.

She wrote some of her plays under her spy name of Astrea

but her real name was Aphra Behn.

Through her talent and tenacity,

Aphra forced her way

into the utterly male-dominated literary world.

She became the first woman in English history

to make her living from writing.

'And she was fearless in demanding equality with her male peers.'

'She's buried here at Westminster Abbey,

'though not quite where you might expect.

'Poets Corner is the literary holy of holies

'with memorials to Chaucer and Shakespeare,

'to contemporaries of Aphra's like Dryden and Milton,

'and to other female authors like George Eliot and Jane Austen.'

'But there's no sign of Aphra here.

'The obscurity of her grave mirrors the sad neglect of her work.

'For over 200 years, she was simply way ahead of her time

'and it wasn't until the 20th century

'that her reputation was finally resurrected.'

This is the grave of Mrs Aphra Behn, died 1689

and Virginia Woolf said that every woman ought to come and lay flowers

on the grave of Aphra Behn

because she gave them the right to speak their minds.

And she did, but I think she also gave them

the right to speak their bodies.

-To talk about their bodies?

-Yes.

And this was new. It hadn't happened before?

It's very new and it wouldn't happen for a long time again.

So she is really something.

She dominated the theatre.

She had more plays put on than anybody. Not any woman, any man.

-Any man as well?

-Yes.

She had a lot of successes, um,

and when the theatres seemed to fail, she turned to fiction.

She wrote some of the best fiction of the period.

She wrote poetry, she was a court poet.

She was a woman of great distinction.

She's the first woman who makes her whole living like this.

But, but then she's one of the first people,

-you don't have to gender it.

-Right.

I mean, this is the first generation

in which people made a living solely out of writing.

For a woman as enterprising as Aphra,

the recently re-opened theatres presented a real opportunity.

The time is right for a professional writer

and the time is certainly right for a professional woman writer

because women at that stage would not know

that they were supposed to write differently from men.

Later they were told they had to, and they did.

Unconstrained, Aphra told the truth above love and marriage and sex.

Even today, her most notorious poem still retains its power to shock.

I'm dying to ask you about the poem called The Disappointment.

-Oh, yes.

-What's that one about?

Ah, well, now, that is naughty.

That is all set in a little pastoral theme of shepherds and shepherdesses.

The shepherdess is dying for it,

she's there, all ready for the sexual act

and she gets herself ready

and lays herself out for...precisely for that.

The man comes and it's going to be a hot erotic moment

but, at the very climax, he finds he has premature ejaculation.

-It's a disappointment.

-It is a disappointment to her and she runs away

and he is left cursing his fate.

It's hilarious. Who would have thought it?

It's hilarious and nobody, no woman

in the 18th or 19th century could have written like that.

The Restoration provided the perfect conditions

for Aphra's openness and brutal honesty to flourish,

but she was a fierce critic of the inequalities of the age.

Hellena says in The Rover,

"What would I get from sex before marriage?

"Well, a cradle full of noise and mischief."

-A baby and that's not going to do you any good at all.

-A baby, yes.

This is the, the double standard is absolute.

Aphra was acutely conscious of her position as a pioneer

and made a remarkably modern sounding call for equality.

In the introduction to one of her plays, Aphra Behn says

she's not doing it for the money.

She says, "I am not content to write for a third day only,"

by this she means the third day of the performance,

when the playwright gets to take home the profits of the theatre.

"This is not enough.

"I value fame," she says,

"as much as if I had been born a hero."

Not a heroine.

This sounds like someone in the 20th century, doesn't it?

Saying I'm a woman, I want the same recognition as a man.

And I believe there must have been something special

about the Restoration to allow women to start saying these things,

because Aphra Behn isn't the only one.

'These remarkable women took advantage of a nation in flux,

'a new King, a new city and a new culture,

'to stake their claim to equality.'

'Buried not far from Aphra, in the Abbey,

'is a woman who demanded her part

'in the most ground-breaking and the most defiantly masculine development

'of the Restoration - the scientific revolution.'

This is the tomb of my heroine, Margaret Cavendish,

the Duchess of Newcastle.

At first sight, she looks like a proper 17th-century wife,

lying demurely next to her husband, and it says down here

that she was "virtuous and loving"

but, actually, she could be here in her own right,

and the clue to why is the book that's in her hand.

Margaret was a prolific writer.

Her material was always challenging and often subversive.

It covered everything from romance to philosophy

and, most radically of all, she was the first woman in the country

to publish scientific works.

She came into confrontation with some of the leading thinkers of the day

and she made statements that you can only describe as feminist

and that's where I think she's the most controversial woman of the whole Restoration period.

As a woman, Margaret was denied a university education,

but that didn't hold her back.

She learnt her science at home.

She published six books on the subject

and took on her male peers in many of the current debates.

On everything from matter and motion to the nature of magnetism.

Her reputation was so great that, in May 1667,

she secured an invitation

to the ultimate bastion of scientific endeavour,

the newly founded Royal Society.

Was it quite unusual that they allowed a woman

to come into their meeting?

Yes, unprecedented.

She was the first woman to visit the Royal Society.

These were...a society of gentlemen,

"gentlemen free and unconfined," they called themselves.

So Margaret was very special in that respect.

Well, we know that she saw the air being weighed in Boyle's pump,

she saw a piece of roast mutton being turned into blood,

-we don't know how they did that, do we?

-No, I don't.

And we also know that she saw a louse down Hooke's microscope.

And here is a huge louse.

Look at that.

-That's holding a human hair.

-Isn't that wonderful?

-Ughh.

It's in Hooke's book, called Micrographia.

Yes, recently published.

Which is all about the use of the microscope

-and what you can see, isn't it?

-Indeed, yeah.

And what you can see, and also what you understood about what you saw.

'Robert Hooke's best seller, Micrographia,

'had publicised and popularised the Royal Society's work.

'Pepys declared it the most ingenious book ever,

'but Margaret begged to differ.'

This is her own book and she's saying, "Well, you know,

"microscopes are all very well, but what's really the point of them?"

"A louse by the help of a magnifying glass appears like a lobster."

That's not really what it looks like.

-It's deceptive, in some way.

-Well, yeah.

-It's distorting it.

-Yeah.

-She's, she's questioning the value, I suppose.

-That's true.

And Margaret says that very clearly - by investigating nature

through these artificial instruments, you're distorting the truth.

How can you possibly say that you're getting closer to the truth

by using an instrument that you know is illusory?

The instrument is deceptive,

so how can you possibly believe what it's telling you in other respects.

So the point that she makes there is in many ways a valid one.

Though it wasn't a point the Royal Society were keen to hear.

Her views were largely ignored and she was branded "mad Madge".

'But Margaret wasn't prepared just to watch from the sidelines.

'She found a brilliantly original way to question the work

'of these male scientists and make a bold statement

'of her own radically different view of the world.'

She published one of the very first works of science fiction.

In parts, this was a description of an incredible parallel universe

with futuristic technology like submarines

and ships powered by wind cannons.

But this is more than mere fantasy.

It was also a satire on the established world of science.

In Margaret's utopia, her own scientific theories carried the day.

'Women had the upper hand and men were their intellectual inferiors.'

So this book of Margaret's, called The Blazing World,

is really the first science fiction novel

and the new world that she imagines is a very feminine place.

It's ruled over by an Empress,

and Margaret herself appears in the story

and she really stakes her claim.

This is what she says,

"Though I cannot be Henry V or Charles II,

"yet I endeavour to be Margaret I

"and, although I have neither power,

"time nor occasion to conquer the world,

"I have made a world of my own."

For a 17th-century woman, that's an extraordinary statement.

350 years after the Restoration,

Margaret is now regarded

as one of the most original thinkers of the age

and Aphra's plays are celebrated as some of the 17th century's finest.

And, as for Nell Gwyn,

she was and has always been the ultimate Restoration woman.

Nell and Margaret and Aphra were extraordinary women.

No-one can deny their brilliance,

but they did live in an extraordinary age.

It was the liberated atmosphere of the Restoration

that allowed them to sound so much like modern women.

We have to admit that the Restoration was a blip.

As the status quo returned and things settled down again

after the wars and the revolution,

doors did begin to close

but that's what makes our Restoration women so admirable,

so inspirational and so utterly memorable.

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