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Elizabeth Cresswell (c. 1625 – c. 1698), also known as Mother Creswell and Madam Cresswell of Clerkenwell, was one of the most successful prostitutes and brothel keepers of the English seventeenth century. Starting with houses in Bartholomew Close, in the City of London and St Leonard's, Shoreditch, she built a widespread network of brothels across London, supplied with girls and women from across England. Her employees included the wives of soldiers pressed into service for Charles II and gentlewomen who had supported the Cavalier cause during the English Civil War and had since fallen on hard times. Her bawdy houses were favoured by King Charles and his court as well as powerful figures in government and city guilds. This position gave her a measure of immunity from prosecution and added to her profile as a caricature of iniquity and corruption. During the Bawdy House Riots of 1668, apprentices smashed up brothels across London, including those belonging to Cresswell. She is listed as one the addressers of the satirical ''Whores' Petition'', sent to Lady Castlemaine, the King's courtesan. The letter requests help for the "sister" prostitutes who have had their livelihoods destroyed, asking that the brothels be rebuilt with money from the national tax coffers. Supporter of the prominent Whig, anti-Catholic, and anti-Carolean Thomas Player, Cresswell financed his political campaigns. In her final years she was attacked by both Protestants and Catholics: by Protestants for providing the royal court with whores, and by Catholics for financing Player's political rebellion. Cresswell occupied a rare position in seventeenth-century England, as a person of common birth who rose to a position of high status as an independently wealthy, unmarried woman running a substantial business enterprise. She figures in a wide assortment of contemporary literature and songs, in ballads, poems, broadsides, novels and party pamphlets, often portrayed as a caricature of vice, a satirical figure of street commentary, sexual theatre and political bawdry. == Life and career == Elizabeth Cresswell was born in about 1625, probably in the small village of Knockholt in Kent, England. Her middle-class Protestant family were influential, with strong connections to the powerful Percival family, favoured by King Charles I. By July 1658 Cresswell is recorded as a bawd "without rival in her wickedness", running a brothel in Bartholomew Close, a small street off Little Britain in the City of London. That month she was brought to trial in Hicks Hall, where constable John Marshall gave evidence that "Elizabeth Cresswell living in Bartholomew Close was found with divers Gentlemen and Women in her House at divers times". Marshall notes that some of the women were "sent to Bridewell", a notorious London prison. She subsequently attempted to bribe the police to avoid publicity for the court case. She was living two miles to the northeast of Bartholomew Close in St Leonard's, Shoreditch, by October 1658, when a mass of angry locals gathered at Westminster Court to give evidence against her and the prostitutes she ran from her "house". They stated that she:
The amassed neighbours told of further infamies such as when whores "in the habit of a Gentlewoman began to propose a Health to the Privy Member of a Gentleman ... and afterwards drank a Toast to her own Private Parts". They complained that, such was the proliferation of bawds in the area around the house that the daughters of local families were assumed to be prostitutes by the men visiting the brothel. For her iniquities, Cresswell was "sett to Hard Labour" in prison. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Elizabeth Cresswell」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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