A Gender Variance Who's Who

James Stuart, king of Scotland 1567-1625, and of England 1603-25, is taken by many historians to be gay because of his interest in young men. Certainly his reign was one with very few prosecutions for sodomy. He wrote a book on demonology that is quoted in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and sponsored a translation of the Christian Bible that became canonical. He had no interest in gender variance despite it being a common trope in theatre, but in 1620 he commanded his clergy to preach,

"against the insolencie of our women, and their wearing of broad brimmed hats, pointed dublets, their hair cut short or shorn, and some of them stilettoes or poinards, and such other trinckets of like moment."

This was followed by two infamous pamphlets:

• Hic Mulier: or, The Man-Woman: Being a Medicine to cure the Coltish Disease of the Staggers in the Masculine-Feminines of our Times. An anonymous pamphlet denouncing the very small increase in women wearing men’s clothing. The Latin uses the masculine form of the demonstrative pronoun jokingly applied to the feminine noun.

• Haec Vir: Or, The Womanish-Man. A response to Hic Mulier. Censured men for their effeminate dress and behaviour, while defending women in men’s garb on the grounds of freedom. The Latin uses the feminine form of the demonstrative pronoun jokingly applied to the masculine noun.

1624

3 January. Katherine Jones appeared before the Bridewell governors, after being arrested in the street by the constable of Fleet Street, in men’s apparel. She insisted that ‘she did it in merryment“. The governors accepted it was simply a New Year frolic, and discharged her.

1625

Charles Stuart

James Stuart died and was replaced on the throne by his son Charles. A few weeks later Charles married the 15-year-old French princess, Henriette Marie Bourbon.

Henriette Marie Bourbon was Catholic and openly facilitated Catholic marriages despite it being against English law. She was also fond of theatricals, and in 1626 performed in the play Artenice staged at her London residence, Denmark House – this at a time when women actors were barred from the English stage – and a number of her female attendants played male roles and dressed appropriately. Popular disquiet was voiced. (Stoyle p11)

1627-9 The Anglo-French War

In 1625 Charles Stuart had signed a secret marriage treaty with the French king that he would relax religious restrictions against English Catholics (he did not). He also loaned seven English war ships to help repress the Protestant Huguenots at La Rochelle. Two years later he had changed sides, and sent his favourite, George Villiers to capture the Île de Ré in support of the Huguenots. This held for three months, until re-inforced French forces compelled the English to withdraw in defeat.

One of the soldiers in the expedition was the female-born, Thomas Hall, 25.

Hall afterwards temporarily returned to living as a female seamstress in Plymouth. This did not suit, and a few months later, becoming aware of a ship being made ready to sail to Chesapeake in the Virginia colony, Thomas sailed with it as a male indentured servant.

In addition, Walter Yonge of Colyton in Devon, a puritan Justice of the Peace, noted in his private journal that ‘there was a woman apprehended at Plymouth in the habit of a man, by the mayor of Plymouth, at the time the Lord Denbigh and Sir Henry Martin went to sea (that is sailed with troops to the Île de Ré), Some said that she was Martin’s mistress. (Stoyle p12)

1628

The controversial puritan William Prynne published an invective against women counterfeiting their sex: “these ...unnaturall and unmanly times; wherein ...sundry of our Impudent ...Female sexe, are Hermaphrodited and transformed men ...not onely in their immodest ...and audacious carriage in the ...odious, if not whorish, cutting of their haire.” He claimed England’s foreign policy reversals to be divine punishments for such transgressions. (Stoyle p12)

• William Prynne, The Unloveliness of Lovelockes. 1628.

1629

Thomas Hall, in the Virginia colony, temporarily switched back to female, and was said to have sex with men. There was a public obsession about his sex, and the Council and General Court of Virginia ruled that he was ‘a man and a woman’ and ordered that he wear male clothing but with a female apron and head covering.

1628-31 The Western Rising

As Charles Stuart was determined to rule without Parliament, he needed other sources of income. Royal lands and forests were enclosed and sold off, depriving local people of their use. Riots ensued, some of which featured cross-dressed men using the traditional name Lady Skimmington.

1631

Mervyn Tuchet, 2nd Earl of Castlehaven, was charged both with committing sodomy with a number of servants, and with encouraging a servant to rape Castlehaven's wife. While there is little doubt that he did both these things, it is also obvious that his Catholicism played a major role in ensuring that he was tried, and that the rape and the participation of servants were more important than the charge of sodomy. He was executed in 1631 and two of his servants were hanged the following year. He was attainted, that is his titles and property in England were Forfeit, but as the Buggery Law did not apply in Ireland, his son inherited his Irish titles and property.

1632

Henriette Marie Bourbon and her attendants transvested in another play, The Shepherds’ Paradise.

William Prynne again wrote an attack on women who had the audacity to adopt quasi-masculine styles – ‘our man-women English Gallants’, as he termed them – but had also castigated the ‘women-Actors’ of antiquity, all of whom, he thundered, ‘were ...notorious, impudent, prostituted strumpets. (Stoyle p13)

• William Prynne. Histriomastix, 1632.

1633

Henriette Marie Bourbon and her attendants transvested in another play, The Shepherds’ Paradise on 9 January. the original performance lasted seven or eight hours. It required four months of rehearsal by its cast.

William Prynne

Prynne’s fulimations were taken as an aspersion on the queen; his passages attacking spectators and magistrates who failed to suppress them were seen as an attack on the king. 

William Noy, the attorney-general took proceedings against Prynne in the Star-chamber. After a year's imprisonment in the Tower of London, he was sentenced on 17 February 1634 to life imprisonment, a fine of £5,000 (over £1 million today), expulsion from being a lawyer, deprival of his University degree, and amputation of both his ears in the pillory where he was held on 7–10 May. Noy died later that year, which Prynne took as God’s punishment. He was released by Parliament in 1640, and his degree and membership of the bar restored.

1634

The Irish cleric, John Atherton, in that the Buggery Act applied only to England, pushed for the enactment of "An Act for the Punishment for the Vice Of Buggery" to be applicable in Ireland.

1630-42

Alexander Gough, actor, specialized in female roles. He continued acting until the theatres were banned, after which he acted in clandestine private productions.

1640

The trial and execution of John Atherton, Bishop of Waterford and his steward. They were charged under the law that Atherton himself had helped to extend to Ireland. The charge was probably proceeded with in that Atherton had become alienated from the large Irish landowners by trying to extend the lands owned by the protestant Church of Ireland.

Henriette Marie Bourbon and also Charles Stuart performed in another play, Salmacida Spolia. Henriette and her ladies appeared dressed in “Amazonian habits”.

1642-1651 Revolution and Civil War

Illustration from the ballad Valiant Virgin

1642

The theatres were banned.

An anonymous letter written from the Royalist camp in July 1642, and later published in a pro-royalist news pamphlet, describes a woman called Nan Ball who was ‘taken in mans cloathes, waiting upon her beloved Lieutenant’ while in the king’s army near York. A top level-investigation was launched, the lieutenant was sacked from his command and it was suggested that the woman should be shamed by whipping or pillory, although she was merely expelled. (Stoyle p14)

1643

A draft proclamation was drawn up, setting out required standards of behaviour for the royalist army. It included a hand-written memo in the margin from the king himself stating ‘lett no woman presume to counterfeit her sex by wearing mans apparall under payne of the severest punishment’. However the memo was not included in the published version. (Stoyle p18-20)

1644

2 July: The Battle of Marston Moor, is said to have included Jane Ingleby in the Royalist cavalry. (Fraser p221)

1645

March: Oliver Cromwell, in charge of Henry Percy and other Royalist prisoners, noticed one of “so faire a countenance” and asked him to sing, thereby revealing that the person was a damsel. (Stoyle p23)

December: Evesham, Worcestershire: A captain of Horse having served a year, and having obtained leave to visit family in Shropshire, went to a tailor and ordered female clothing supposedly for a sister of the same stature as himself. The tailor was suspicious, and told the Governour, which led to examination where the captain admitted that he was female, and spoke of three others from Shropshire who had taken male disguise to ‘serve in the Warre for the Cause of God’. (Story in The Scottish Dove, London, 3 Dec 1645; Stoyle p 24)

1649

Charles Stuart was indicted, accused of treason. The charge was that he "for accomplishment of such his designs, and for the protecting of himself and his adherents in his and their wicked practices, to the same ends hath traitorously and maliciously levied war against the present Parliament, and the people therein represented", and that the "wicked designs, wars, and evil practices of him, the said Charles Stuart, have been, and are carried on for the advancement and upholding of a personal interest of will, power, and pretended prerogative to himself and his family, against the public interest, common right, liberty, justice, and peace of the people of this nation."

He was beheaded in a formal execution 30 January 1649. Henriette Marie Bourbon returned to France.

1657

Stephen Evison, a soldier was discovered to be female during the Parliamentary occupation of Scotland, and was identified as Anne Dymoke, from a distinguished family in Lincolnshire. She and her lover, John Evison, having no means of support, had entered service as two brothers. They then took a sea voyage during which John was drowned. Knowing not what else to do, Stephen then enlisted giving his name as John. (Frazer p225)

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The following were consulted;

• Antonia Fraser. The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England. Methuen, 1985: 220-6.

• Mark Stoyle. “ ‘Give mee a Souldier’s Coat’: Female Cross-Dressing during the English Civil War”. History, The Journal of the Historical Association, 103, 2018

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It is Henriette Marie Bourbon for whom the Maryland colony was named.

The Wikipedia page on her says nothing at all about her thespian inclinations.

We should remember that many of the women camp followers of both armies in the Civil War had to survive. Ankle-length skirts In muddy fields are quite problematic, and the adoption of breeches was, as Fraser says, “more from convenience than from caprice”.

On why Charles Stuart’s addition to the 1643 declaration did not make it to the published version, Stoyle writes:

“Why should the king have decided to dispense with the strictures against cross-dressed female camp-followers which he had been so keen to insert into the original text? Three possible answers present themselves. First, the king’s military commanders may have informed him that the habit of donning masculine attire was so commonplace among the women who accompanied his army and so important to those women in terms of their day-to-day mobility – not only while on the march, but also while undertaking the foraging trips which helped to keep the royal army supplied with provisions – that it was simply not practicable to outlaw the practice. Second, Charles’s advisers may have pointed out to their royal master that for him to admit – in a formal proclamation – that some of the women who accompanied his soldiers were accustomed to cross-dress would only be to invite the derision of enemy propagandists, who had already demonstrated on numerous occasions – in the partisan pamphlets that spewed from the London presses each week – that they were only too ready to highlight and denounce any hint of ‘gender confusion’ in their opponents’ ranks. Third – and closely related to this latter point – Charles may have had second thoughts about incorporating a stern condemnation of female cross-dressing into his proclamation when he recalled that, just three years earlier, his own queen, Henrietta Maria, together with her ‘martiall ladies’, had appeared on stage dressed in ‘Amazonian habits’ in the court masque Salmacida Spolia.” (Stoyle p18-20)

Nzinga was the favourite daughter of her father Kiluanji, the ngola (chief or king) of the Ndongo. When her brother Mbande deposed their father, he also had Nzinga's child murdered, and she fled.

In the 1620s as the Portuguese were expanding their slaving expeditions to the area, taking out ten thousand slaves a year, and the Ndonga were negotiating for their independence and to be a supplier rather than a victim tribe. In 1621 Mbande asked his sister to return and to negotiate with the invading Portuguese, represented by João Correia de Sousa. This she did, dramatically emphasizing her equality with de Sousa by sitting on one of her minions as de Sousa took the only chair.  She was also baptized as a Catholic taking the alternate name of Ana de Souza.

However the Portuguese kept none of their promises, and Mbande either committed suicide or was poisoned by Nzinga. Nzinga became regent, but had Kaza, Mbande's son killed for impudence, and then herself reigned as ngola wearing male clothing. She renounced her Catholicism and formed an alliance with Kasanje against the Portuguese, and conquered the Jagas who were further inland.

In a book published in 1670, a Dutch sea captain by the name of Fuller describes Nzinga:

'In man's apparel ... hanging about her the skins of beasts, before and behind, with a Sword about her neck, an Axe at her girdle, and a Bow and Arrows in her hand, leaping to the custom, now here, now there, as nimbly as the most active among her attendants, all the while striking her Engema, that is, two Iron Bells'.

Nzinga was by then in her 60s. Captain Fuller was the captain of her bodyguard in the late 1640s - he is describing her preparations for ritual human sacrifice.
She kept a pool of fifty or sixty young men, instead of husbands, who were in turn allowed as many wives as they pleased. She had a smaller select group of young men whom she dressed in women's clothes. This emphasized the claim that she had been transformed by her male clothing.

Captain Fuller, after mentioning her ritual sacrifices and cannibalism, goes on to describe her as

'a cunning and prudent Virago, so much addicted to arms that she hardly uses other exercises; and withal so generously valiant that she never hurt a Portuguese after quarter given, and commanded all her slaves and soldiers alike'.

As the Ndongo had moved inland, the Portuguese followed, stretched too far and the Dutch were able to capture Luanda in 1641. Nzinga formed an alliance with the Dutch, and made an agreement with them to sell her prisoners of war. Aided by a few hundred Dutch soldiers, Nzinga's forces were able to defeat the Portuguese in 1643, 1647 and 1648. However later in 1648, the Portuguese were able to recapture Luanda.

The Ndongo retreated inland as before, but the Portuguese held Nzinga's sister and Nzinga agreed to deal with them, and to return to Catholicism. In 1659 she signed a new treaty with the Portuguese.

The modern-day statue to Nzinga in Luanda

She died at age 80, a remarkable age for the time.

After her death the Portuguese were able to seize control, and restore the shipping of slaves to Brazil.

Nzinga is honoured as a hero in modern Angola.

• Antonia Frazer. The Warrior Queens. London: Mandarin Books, New York: Anchor Books 1988: 238-46.
• Leslie Feinberg. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Rupaul. Beacon Press, 1996: 34.
  
• Jone Lewis. "Anna Nzinga". Women's History. http://womenshistory.about.com/od/medrenqueens/p/nzinga.htm.
  

EN.WIKIPEDIA PT.WIKIPEDIA

Caroline was the youngest child of Frederick Hanover, the English Prince of Wales, who died three months before her birth. Her brother George became king of the United Kingdom and Hanover in 1760 as George III.


In 1766 when she was 15, she was sent to Copenhagen to marry her cousin Christian Oldenburg the king of Denmark and Norway. Like her brother George, Christian was subject to bouts of mental instability. He also spurned and neglected Caroline Mathilde. However in 1768 they had a son, Frederick.

Later that year, Christian made a tour of Europe and returned with the Prussian doctor and philospher Johann Friedrich Struensee, who had been appointed State Counsellor and the king’s personal physician. He had a positive influence on the king, and at first reconciled Christian and Caroline Mathilde.

However the King’s mental health deteriorated. Struensee became the effective ruler and issued 1069 reforming cabinet orders (more than three a day). Struensee and Caroline Mathilde became lovers. Her second child, Louise, is taken to be fathered by Struensee, but is officially a child of the king.

Queen Caroline Mathilde was frequently seen in frock-coat and vest, leather trousers, high boots and spurs and a man's hat on loose unpowdered hair, and was often seen on horse-back so dressed. She even dressed in this manner to state occasions.

In January 1772 Caroline Mathilde and Struensee were arrested in the middle of the night after a masked ball. In April she was divorced and deported to Celle in Hanover. Struensee was executed.

Caroline Mathilde never saw her children again. She died of scarlet fever at age 24.

• Magnus Hirschfeld translated from the German by Michael A. Lombardi-Nash. Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress Prometheus Books. 1991: 374.

EN.Wikipedia.

The original Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry Tudor (known as Henry VIII) and Anne Boleyn. When she was three, her mother was executed and Elizabeth was declared to be illegitimate.

When Elizabeth was nine (or perhaps twelve), the plague was raging in London and to avoid it she was sent to Overcourt, a manor house at Bisley, a small village in the Cotswolds. There she befriended a boy of about her own age. He was her nephew, although sometimes described as her cousin: an illegitimate boy fathered by Henry Fitzroy, who was an illegitimate son of Henry VIII. The boy had been sent to Bisley to conceal his existence. Elizabeth died of the fate she had been sent to Bisley to avoid. The servants were terrified to tell the tyrannous but distant Henry VIII, who was about to visit. The illegitimate nephew was pretty, of about the same age and, most important, he rather resembled Elizabeth. It was easy to pass him off as 'Elizabeth' for a visit of Henry who was certainly not affectionate and was rather in a hurry.

However having started the imposture it proved impossible to let it go. The embarrassment of the boy's existence meant that very few questions were asked about his disappearance. An alternate version says that the boy was from the local village and had not actually met Elizabeth.

The replacement Elizabeth became Queen of England, Ireland and France in 1559 after the deaths of her supposed half-brother Edward, and her half-sister Mary. She reigned until she died in 1603 at the age of 69.

She never married; she became bald later in life and wore wigs; she left explicit instructions that there should be no post-mortem on her body; she took suggestions that she was androgynous and made a legend out of them. At Tilbury in 1588 during the crisis of the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth spoke to her troops, saying: "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King".

In Bisley itself, for over three hundred years the May Queen was always a boy in Elizabethan female costume. In the 1860s, the Rev Thomas Keble, during renovations at Overcourt, found an old stone coffin containing a girl’s skeleton in Tudor clothing. He had the remains reburied nearby, but the locations is no longer known.

The story was researched and popularised by Bram Stoker, the theatre manager and author of Dracula, who published it in his book Famous Imposters, 1909. A friend of his came across the legend while looking for a house in the area. Stoker visited the manor house himself, and going over the story point by point, became convinced of it.

The standard biographies of Elizabeth do not bother to refute this thesis, they merely ignore it.

• Bram Stoker. Famous Imposters. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, New York: Sturgis & Walton, Company, 1910: chp X.
• C. J. Bulliet. Venus Castina: Famous Female Impersonators Celestial and Human. Mew York: Covici 308 pp 1928. New York: Bonanza Books. 1956: 179-184.
• Emi Wolters. “Ein Transvestit als Königin”. Das 3, Geschlect,5, May 1932: 16-25.
• Harry Ludlam. A Biography of Bram Stoker, Creator of Dracula. New English Library. p162. 1977
  
• Chris Hunt. The Bisley boy. London: Gay Men's Press. 1995. A fictionalization of the story.
• Bisley, Gloucestershire: History. http://www.bisleyonline.net/content/view/15/55/ The web page for the village of Bisley certainly retells the story.
• Yvonne Sinclair. The Bisley Boy. yvonnesinclair.co.uk/stories/The%20Bisley%20Boy.html London Transy organizer retells the tale. 
• Christopher Stevens.  "Is this proof the Virgin Queen was an imposter in drag? Shocking new theory about Elizabeth I unearthed in historic manuscripts".  The Daily Mail, 8 June 2013.  www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2337774/Is-proof-Virgin-Queen-imposter-drag-Shocking-new-theory-Elizabeth-I-unearthed-historic-manuscripts.html.

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People have different opinions whether Jackson, Blanchett, Mirren or Richardson was the best cinematic Elizabeth Tudor, but the most appropriate was Quentin Crisp in Orlando, 1992.

Empress of all the Russias from 1741, Yelizaveta took Russia into the War of Austrian Succession, (1740 –48), and the Seven Years War (1756-63). She encouraged the foundation of the University of Moscow and the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg, and the building of fine buildings such as the Winter Palace and Smolny Cathedral. She remains popular because she excluded Germans from the government, and not a single person was executed during her reign.

Charles d'Eon de Beaumont was part of the French embassy to Russia during her reign, but the claims that he first practiced crossdressing at her court seem to be without foundation.

Ekaterina Romanova, Yelizaveta's successor, comments on life under Yelizaveta in the mid 1740s: 'In those days, there was a sort of masquerade at court every Tuesday. ... The Empress had decreed that, at these masquerades, to which only those persons had access who had been selected by her, all the men had to be dressed as women and all the women as men. I must say there could have been nothing more ugly and at the same time more laughable than most of the men so disguised, and nothing more miserable than the women in men's clothing. The Empress alone, who was best suited to men's clothing, looked really well; thus costumed, she was, in fact, very beautiful.'

While Yelizaveta's body was rather heavily built in the upper half, she had a well-shaped pair of legs, which at that period could be shown only in a male costume.

Yelizaveta was known for her intolerance of any member of the court who dressed as she did, or outdid her in any way. When the beautiful Mme Lopukhin appeared at a ball wearing a rose in her hair, exactly like the Empress, Yelizaveta not only cut off the rose, and the attached hair, but she boxed the woman's ears in front of the assembled court. It was not easy to avoid dressing like Yelizaveta for she would change her dress several times a day.

In this light it is not surprising that the courtiers did not transvest with the enthusiasm that is required for success. Success might be costly.

The Russian writer Barsukov, in his Annals de le Patrie, says that the masquerades took place twice a week. He also says that Yelizaveta decided to be the dresser at the court theatre, where all female roles were played by young men. He cites an instance in 1750 when the Empress personally dressed a young cadet who was to play a female role in a tragedy by Sumarakov.

When she died, Yelizaveta left 15,000 dresses, as well as a selection of male clothing.

• Cynthia Cox. The Enigma of the Age: the Strange Story of the Chevalier d'Eon. Longmans. 1966: 24-5

EN.Wikipedia.