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handsome estate, a testimony to her long-held belief that ‘Money and Cunny are the Best Commodities!’ 43
    Elizabeth Cresswell was neither an aristocratic courtesan like Barbara Villiers, mistress of Charles II, nor a humble streetwalker like Damaris Page, and her origins come as something of a surprise. Despite being born into a comfortable middle-class household in Aldgate in around 1625, Elizabeth inexplicably embarked on a career as a street prostitute, operating in Aldersgate, Clerkenwell and Shoreditch. As her looks began to fade, she became a bawd without rival in her wickedness, using all her diabolical arts of seduction to entice young women into the trade, and exploiting her family connections to set up an upmarket brothel. 44 Discretion was not Elizabeth’s strongest suit, however, and she ended up in court and in prison several times for keeping a disorderly house. On one celebrated occasion her brothel was raided on a Sunday when the constables found a group of a dozen reprobates drinking wine on the Lord’s day, the women stripped to the waist, and one young lady ‘proposing a health to the privy member of a gentleman’ and later ‘drinking a toast to her own private parts’. 45 Once the Lord Protector, Richard Cromwell, had been replaced by Charles II, Elizabeth was free to pursue her career in an atmosphere of benign tolerance. Her most successful establishment was in Cripplegate, now the site of Moorfields underground station.
    This was a house catering to the aristocracy, filled with girls of superior education, many of them the daughters of Cavalier families ruined in the Civil War. Known as ‘Countesses of the Exchange’, as they lived near the Royal Exchange, it was said of them that ‘they master your britches and take all your riches’. 46 One commentator, Richard Head, an Oxford-educated conman, visited this establishment in 1663, and turned down the first girl he met there for being too expensive, even though she did touch his ‘needle’ and bartered with a second, bringing her price down to half a guinea, a considerable amount to pay for sex when two shillings was the going rate for a Ratcliffe Highway whore.
    Elizabeth Cresswell’s establishments survived the Great Plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of 1666. What they did not survive with impunity was the Shrovetide riots of 24 March 1668. This was the occasion when thousands of London’s apprentices rioted and attacked the city’s brothels in an excess of moral zeal later referred to as the ‘Bawdy House Riots’. Such attacks were a typical feature of Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, but on this particular occasion they also constituted a form of political rebellion against Charles II’s decadent court and represented a growing public unease with the economy; the soldiers and sailors went unpaid while public money was siphoned into the excesses of court life – or even embezzled. The troops were mustered and the riots went on all night, with the crowd roaring slogans such as ‘Reformation and Reducement’, which, according to Pepys, made the courtiers apprehensive, because ‘among the Rioters were many Men of Understanding that have been of Cromwell’s Army!’ 47 Ten years after Cromwell’s death, the aristocracy were still unnerved at the mention of his name.
    By daylight, Pepys was able to record the damage: ‘a great many brothels have been destroyed or damaged’, including the one belonging to Damaris Page, while two houses belonging to the Duke of York had been pulled down, which especially upset the duke as he had received £15 a year from each one for their liquor licences. As for the apprentices, their only regret was that they had attacked small brothels and not the great bawdy house at Whitehall: Charles II’s palace.
    Charles did not take these attacks lightly; eight of the apprentices were subsequently