LGBTQ Georgian Britain: Mary East

An interesting case popped up in the courts in mid-eighteenth century England. Mary East appeared at a court in The Angel in Whitechapel, London, to pursue a case against a Mrs Bently for blackmail and extortion. At the root of the proceedings was the revelation that Mary had been living the last three decades as a man.

Jan Punt, 1739, Rijksmuseum, Public Domain

Mary East was born in 1715 in the east of England. In her teenage years she fell in love with a young man who was later convicted as a highway robber, and sentenced to death. The punishment was however reduced, and he was instead transported to one of the colonies overseas. Frustrated and mourning for her lost love, Mary was said to have promised herself that she would remain single forever, until, at the age of sixteen, she met a woman who would change her life.

Mary's partner's name is not known to us today, although I've had a good look through the sources to try and find it. We know that she was one year older than Mary, and they lived together for many years. Chamber's Edinburgh Journal, reporting the case in 1838, stated that, fed up with the traditional fate of women in Georgian society, they decided that they would live as husband and wife to experience a fuller and fairer life, or as the Journal states, 'a sort of protection for them both'. It was said that the decision as to who would 'wear the trousers' was made by tossing a coin. The coin came down in favour of Mary.

Combining their individual wealth, the women came up with £30, approximately £3,500 in modern equivalent worth for the time. Mary assumed the name James How, and as man and wife they took over the running of an inn in Epping, in Essex for their livelihood. While there, James had a run in with a local man, resulting in a long-term injury to James' hand. The couple were granted £500 in the case, something near to the equivalent of £59,000 today to help place it in its financial context. 

With this boost in income (it was said that James never regained the full use of the hand), the pair moved to a larger property in Limehouse Hole, a riverside area in London heavily frequented by watermen, and painted in 1910 by Charles Napier Hemy. Hemy's painting, although painted years after Mr and Mrs How would have known it, gives us some clue as to how the area might have looked.

Charles Napier Hemy, 1910, Glasgow Museums Resource Centre GMRC, CC

Soon afterwards, the pair moved once again, to manage the larger White Horse Inn in Poplar, London. Living together without any major suspicions, James wearing male fashions and assuming roles in the parish and attending as a juror in court causes, both positions that at the time were not held by women. James was due to be created churchwarden too, another role assumed by trusted members of the community, and all men. 

They lived a quiet life, never employing servants at their properties, instead taking care of all the work of the inn and the household themselves. Those who knew James did comment on his 'effeminacy', although no other doubts seem to have been expressed publicly. However in 1751 Mrs Bently, a resident of Garlick Hill in London who recognised James from his earlier teenage days as Mary East, threatened to go public with his true identity. She requested £10 (around £1,000 equivalent worth today) to remain silent and James, worried about the effects this would have on the couple's life, paid it. Nothing was heard from Mrs Bently again until 1764 when she once again blackmailed the couple and was paid another £10, and then later, a further payment of £5.

Around this time James' partner fell ill and died while visiting her brother. In her illness she called for James, but it was too late for the couple to meet before her death. On her death-bed, she revealed everything to her brother, who chose not to confront James about their life, but instead requested his sister's half of their assets which was paid. James now alone, Mrs Bently appeared for the last time, asking now for a staggering payment of £100, enlisting two burly male friends, one of them named William Barwick, to bully James into handing over the cash, or at least, into drawing up a legal draft that promised payment would be made. James instead called on a friend named Williams, who interceded with Bently's demands. James and Williams reported the blackmail to officials and a court date was set.

Striding into the court at Whitechapel that day, shocked onlookers stared in wonder at a confident woman wearing a riding jacket and a feather in her hat. Mary East attended not as James, her male alter-ego, but as herself, as she would have appeared before her relationship with her partner. She was now in her fifties, and had lived as a man since the age of sixteen. The reaction of the crowds is recorded in one statement in The Annual Register for that year, dressed 'so that her acquaintance could hardly believe her to be the same person... having generally appeared in an old man's coat, woollen cap, blue apron, etc'. Onlookers remarked that Mary appeared 'an affable, well-bred woman, and agreeable in conversation'. The court pondered the evidence in the case and ruled in favour of Mary. Bently and her conspirator were punished, Barwick serving four years in prison and standing four times at the local pillory. He was also made to find security for his behaviour. One account mentions that Mary was 'accompanied by a gentleman to settle her affairs', and this may have been William, who helped her during the altercation with Bently. Mary East lived the rest of her life as a woman, selling off the assets she had amassed with her partner and retiring in Poplar. She died at the age of 65, on 6 June 1780.

Mary's story is proof that women dressed as men in Georgian Britain to experience a fuller and more active life than their birth gender allowed. We see other examples of this in the records, of women who dressed as sailors and served on war or merchant ships or embarked on other careers at the time only open to men. Elizabeth Dunham in 1819 used the accumulation of leverage as reason for stealing keys from important buildings, hoping to achieve favours from influential men in the city that she would otherwise not be able to command. Their tale has also attracted comment relating to their private feelings for one another. Did Mary identify as male? Was their partnership a lesbian one? Was Mary bisexual? Attempts to place Mary in the LGBTQ community as identifying as male might not maintain weight, particularly as she attended the court proceedings in her birth gender. We will never know the true nature of their relationship, but they lived together convincingly for 36 years, moving from place to place and running multiple businesses together. Running inns, they would have come across people from all walks of life and as far as we know, no one seriously voiced their concerns about the pair, except to say that James seemed 'effeminate'. 

Of course it is also possible that their relationship was purely platonic and based on friendship, as accounts reported the following century stated. It may have been engineered to simply protect the two women legally and socially. As a result, they were equals at home, sharing a life in the higher levels of the local community, running businesses and amassing a great deal of wealth together that might not have been achieved in a traditional man-woman marriage of the age. Contemporaries commented on their wealth, and when James' identity was discovered, the women would have stood as examples of capable businesswomen and respected high-profile members of society. In many ways, an assessment of the private nature of their relationship is not needed. They stand above others in the age as potential early feminists. They expressed frustration with the patriarchal nature of Georgian society, and had a desire for women to achieve more than gender roles of the time allowed. They enjoyed a great deal of success. Whatever the life they led for 36 years, it gave them access to a full and rewarding experience based on trust, friendship, complementary traits and equality, at least in private.

Liked this? You might also like Elizabeth Dunham, The Woman Who Stole the Keys from the Bank of England and The Women of Bedlam.

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Notes and Sources
Chamber's Edinburgh Journal 1838, vol 7.
Bram Stoker, Famous Imposters, 1910.
Bowen, Abel. The Life and Sketches of Curious and Odd Characters, Boston. 1840.