Sex and the Stuarts: inside 17th-century London's most notorious brothel

Among the Stuart-era ‘stews’ of London’s seedy Southwark district, one “house of obscenitie” became renowned as the most luxurious – and notorious. Jacky Colliss Harvey charts the rise and ignominious fall of Bess Holland’s brothel

A stylised illustration of two figures in historical clothing set against a patterned purple background. One sits on a wooden chair, wearing a long robe and tall hat, holding a flask in one hand and pointing with the other. The other stands with hands on hips, dressed in an ornate gown with a crown‑like headpiece.

Published: July 27, 2026 at 4:00 PM

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The fearful residents of Southwark must have heard the Shrove Tuesday rioters before they saw them. Charging across London Bridge on 22 February 1631, the enraged throng surged west through streets snaking along the south bank of the Thames, armed with fists and sticks and stones – no doubt terrifying people living on these thoroughfares. But on this day, they had a specific target in mind: a moated, semi-fortified manor house near the river, known as Holland’s Leaguer.

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This was far from the first such attack in London, and it would certainly not be the last. These mobs were to be taken very seriously – indeed, 10 years later, one would drive Charles I from his capital altogether. And the core of the swarm comprised a volatile community.

The apprentices of Stuart London were a notoriously rowdy bunch. Perhaps it was understandable: barely paid, hardly fed, indentured to his master for the whole of his adolescence, the life of an apprentice was a repressed, restrictive one. Just about his only pleasure was riot and disorder – an activity into which he threw himself with gusto on every public holiday.

Shrove Tuesday was a particular favourite, because it provided a plausible excuse for violence. An apprentice might claim that he set upon only places that represented sources of wicked temptation during Lent – theatres, taverns and, above all, London’s brothels, from which these penniless lads must have felt themselves most cruelly excluded. In 1614, rioting apprentices had attacked and totally destroyed the Shoreditch brothel run by Joan Leake.

A black‑and‑white illustration of a person in period clothing standing beside a large cannon on a wheeled carriage. The cannon is aimed toward a fortified building with towers and walls in the background.

A woodcut illustration from Newes from Holland’s Leaguer depicts an attack on that infamous brothel

On Shrove Tuesday 1631, their target was Holland’s Leaguer. On this occasion, the house did not fall: the drawbridge was raised, and the apprentices were repulsed. But the seeds of its downfall had been sown. The days of perhaps the largest, most notorious and most luxurious brothel in Southwark – if not all of London – were numbered.

Inspiring iniquity

What do we know of this infamous “house of obscenitie”, as Nicholas Goodman described it? To begin with, this brothel – or, rather its destruction – inspired three ballads, an extravagant pamphlet by Goodman, and a play by Shackerley Marmion that enjoyed what was, for the times, a record-breaking London run.

We also know that Bess Holland was its bawd, or madam. We also know where Holland’s Leaguer would have stood: where the southern end of Blackfriars Station now makes landfall on the bank of the Thames – a mere flounce of the petticoats from where Holland Street runs today.

We have a good idea of what it looked like. In Hollands Leaguer: or, An Historical Discourse of the Life and Actions of Dona Britanica Hollandia, published the year after the Leaguer’s demise, Goodman tells us that Bess set up shop in an old moated manor house, complete with a drawbridge.

This pamphlet is basically a diatribe against the state of England, so one should take much of what Goodman says with a hefty pinch of salt. But it’s true that, on the 1633 version of the ‘Agas map’ of London (a section of which is shown below), a moated manor house is marked exactly where the Leaguer would have been, in Southwark’s Old Paris Gardens.

A monochrome map‑style illustration showing fields, small houses, grazing cows, fenced pastures and scattered trees near a body of water. A few people walk along the paths, and the upper right area is labelled “Paris Garden.”

A map of London shows a substantial property in Paris Gardens, Southwark – possibly the well-defended manor house in which Bess set up her Leaguer in c1603 | Credit: Getty Images

Goodman describes the house as a “Citadell… so fortified… neither the Turkes wealth, nor the Traytors wit could ever have betrayed it”. At the time, ‘leaguer’ was a term for a fortified camp. In that conflict-bedevilled age – the bloody Thirty Years’ War raged in western Europe, and civil war loomed in England – dreadful puns were popular, as was likening amorous conquest to the military kind. But if even half of the defences Goodman described surrounding the Leaguer did exist, it’s clear why the name stuck.

Before reaching the drawbridge, you had to make your way along a narrow path “betwixt two dangerous ditches”, passing through palisades and barricades and between “strong ramparts”. And on finally crossing the drawbridge, you would be met at the door by a “Ruffian… monstrous both in shape and condition”. There he is in the woodcut illustrating Goodman’s pamphlet – reproduced on the opposite page – armed with a halberd, standing beside the Leaguer’s intimidatingly fortified front door. At the window to his right, hands on hips, is a female figure – could this be Bess Holland herself?

Clearly, those enraged apprentices came up against a well-defended target, with its moat and barricades and ramparts – but is that the only reason the attack failed? Did Bess’s neighbours band together on her behalf? Southwark was then a morass of taverns and theatres, of bull- and bear-baiting arenas, as well as brothels, so there could have been a sense that an attack on one was an attack on all. Or did Bess pay the mob to leave her in peace?

A woman of her times

Much of what we know about the Leaguer’s madam comes from Goodman’s pamphlet, though other clues can be found. He states that Bess was born in the country to virtuous and respectable parents, whom she manipulated into allowing her to move to London. There she became the mistress to a wealthy man, Goodman says, describing him as “Ignatius, a Puritane Jesuite” and also using a pun that might identify him as the lawyer Alberico Gentili. Bess was no common hussy, then, but a sophisticated courtesan with “a fayre Eye, full of strong inchauntment” – though “such a wicked spirit”, and “so masculine in her disposition” (my italics) that “all goodness became to her an utter stranger.”

A black‑and‑white illustration of a person in elaborate historical clothing, wearing a high lace collar, a richly decorated gown with puffed sleeves, and a feathered headpiece. They hold a small bouquet of flowers and face forward against a plain background.

This woodcut from A Common Whore (1635) illustrates how elaborately dressed and coiffed Bess’s sex workers would have been to entice discerning clients

Bess may have been surprisingly well connected. Records reveal that she leased the house from John Carey, the 3rd Baron Hunsdon. (Intriguingly, his father, Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon, had been the patron of Shakespeare’s Lord Chamberlain’s Men.) That may be relevant because one of the frequently repeated factoids about the Leaguer is that James VI & I was among its clients, as was the Duke of Buckingham.

Peter Ackroyd wrote of London’s “strange oscillation between freedom and restraint” in this period, when decorum and decadence weren’t mutually exclusive. The Bishop of Winchester owned the land on which many of Southwark’s ‘stews’ (brothels) stood – the women working in them became known as ‘Winchester Geese’ – and the court of James VI & I had a reputation for hedonism. Bess, then, was a product of her times, clearly aware of the tastes of her more discerning potential clients. When establishing her Leaguer, Goodman tells us, she ensured that it “wanted nothing for State, nothing for Magnificence, nothing for Delight, nothing for Beauty”.

There were gardens in which to carouse. The Dona Britanica woodcut shows two couples enjoying the gardens’ delights, one of them canoodling in an arbour. Rather charmingly, such flirtatious foreplay was known as ‘embroidery’.

Inside the house lay a warren of rooms: “doors, to come in and out by undiscovered, sliding windows also, and trap-boards in floors to hide whores behind and under, with false counterfeit panes in walls, to be opened and shut like a wicket”.

That’s how Thomas Nashe described such houses in his 1593 Christs Teares Over Jerusalem, another outburst against the state of England in general and London in particular. In such a place a man might indeed “kisse… Minions w[i]thout shame”, as the pamphleteer ‘Tom Tell Troth’ wrote in 1622.

A black‑and‑white woodcut‑style illustration of a tall building with lattice windows, two chimneys and a large arched door. Two figures stand on a small balcony, one holding a long staff, while another figure appears at a window. Wavy lines suggest water around the building, with a small boat nearby, and two more people walk among rectangular shapes in the background.

The title illustration for Nicholas Goodman’s pamphlet about the Leaguer depicts a moat, drawbridge, daunting door and halberd-armed guard, as well as pleasure gardens

Bess had three “household Officers, a Cooke-wench… and a Girle-Scullion”. Her kitchen, says Goodman, was “ever flaming” – a comment usually taken as evidence of gourmet dining, but which might also be another pun: a woman’s ‘kitchen’ could also mean her nether regions, and a reference to heat or flames could hint at symptoms of gonorrhoea or other sexually transmitted diseases. (Bess also employed a surgeon.)

But the true art went into the entertainments. For a previous establishment near Puddle Dock in Blackfriars, Bess had, wrote Goodman, recruited “petulant, painted, and halfe guilt Mimicks [actors]” to amuse her clients. At the Leaguer, a “Tyre [attire] woman” was responsible for the “phantastical ornaments” of the sex workers, and there was a “Laundry-Lasse”, a “Sempster” (seamstress) “for Ruffes”, and a “Taylor”.

Such an emphasis on costume suggests that the entertainments laid on in her houses were as elaborate as court masques – though no doubt more erotic. If King James or Buckingham did indeed pay the Leaguer a visit, they would not have been disappointed in what they encountered.

A black‑and‑white woodcut‑style illustration of a person standing beside a large hearth. They tend a pot hanging over tall, rising flames. A small table with a loaf of bread sits to the left, and the person wears historical clothing.

A 17th-century kitchen. In Bess’s brothel this was “ever flaming” – clients could enjoy food and drink as well as sex | Credit: Bridgeman Images

The price of love

Goodman names four of Bess’s sex workers: “Beta Breslonia, a huge Bona-Roba [young woman seen as sexually available]… impudent above measure”; Eliza Caunce, apparently a redhead, “yong, little, but a wondrous wanton”; “Longa Maria, a wench of a good handsome carriage, not so Rampant as the rest”; and “Maria Petit, a small handfull of woman… all Motion, and Action”. You would need deep pockets to enjoy their favours: a common ‘trull’ might ask one or two shillings, but a top-class 17th-century courtesan would charge 5 guineas a night – more than two months’ wages for a skilled tradesman.

“If you on sport be eager, Go unto Holland’s Leaguer,” as one ballad, ‘The Kind Believing Hostess’, put it:

For Wenches she can get yee

And of all sorts can fit yee,

Most bravely clad,

As may be had,

If leasure but permit yee

A Girle, attir’d in Sattin,

Can speake both French and Latine;

If you have gold

You may be bold

And have a fine roome to chat in

Who were these women? Southwark hosted a sizeable community of Dutch and Flemish immigrants at that time, and a 1605 drama, The Dutch Courtesan, presents such a woman as the height of licentiousness and desirability. A link has also been suggested between Holland’s Leaguer and another famously luxurious 17th-century brothel in Brussels, the ‘Lovely Little Maiden’.

The fictional Bess, Goodman’s ‘Dona Britanica’, supposedly brought her girls to London from the country – rural girls were reputed to be more free from disease. If so, these were no country mice. Bess Holland dealt with Baron Hunsdon as a business equal, and it was from his class of men that the Leaguer’s clients would have been drawn. So the women who entertained them knew – or learned – how to present. They must have had a sense of themselves and of their value.

Washed and scented top to toe, painted and powdered and attired in their exotic costumes, these women must have looked like every gallant’s fantasy. Once the theatres opened in late afternoon, and Southwark began to come alive, they would have tempted clients with anchovies and oysters, sugar-cakes and peaches to make the wine “go merrily down”. Perhaps they sang or played music, and must have been amusing companions. A piece of contemporary pornography, ‘The Wandering Whore’, gives a sense of just how bawdy their conversation might have been, with no entendre undoubled. (It also details ‘entertainments’ that would not be out of place in a particularly exotic modern strip club.)

A monochrome illustration of a circular theatre with tiered seating surrounding a central performance area. Columns and a roofed stage building sit at the back, and small human figures appear on the stage. Latin labels mark different architectural sections, including entrances, seating and the orchestra.

A drawing of Southwark’s Swan theatre in 1596. In the early modern era, playhouses were strongly associated with sex work | Credit: Alamy

Immense fortune

A bawd such as Bess might make £10 a month from each of her ‘damsels’, wrote Sir William Vaughan in a moralising tract from the early 17th century. She charged not only for entrance and food but also to access successive rooms. No wonder her fortune grew immense. “Her baggs were so many, and so massy, that she had scarce chests enowe to containe them,” Goodman tells us.

The narrator of contemporary ballad ‘The Joviall Broome Man’ – a veteran who served with everyone from Tamburlaine to Sir Francis Drake, according to that verse – comes to Holland’s Leaguer and finds that there “the service provd too hot”, leaving this unlucky soldier “naked, hungry, cold and dry” – a nod to syphilis, or to the effects of the mercury used to treat it. At this high point in its fortunes, the Leaguer was sufficiently well known for everyone to get the joke. But the curtain was already rising on its final act.

Charles I was a very different character from his father, James VI & I. Some of Charles’s earliest ordinances, issued in 1626, proscribed such “immodest lascivious and shameless women” who “both in the day and the night time sit at the doors of such houses exposing themselves”. In 1629, he began his precarious Personal Rule, and could not tolerate riot, disorder or their causes. Sometime in the winter of 1631, perhaps as a result of the apprentices’ riot, the Leaguer came to the notice of the authorities who, Goodman wrote, despatched a corporal and “a stoute band of Halberd[i]ers” to close it for good.

A pink‑tinted engraving showing three figures in a domestic interior. The central figure wears long hair, a hat and a wide collar. To the left, another person with long hair and a bare shoulder leans toward them. In the background, a third figure in a hooded covering raises a small pouch or object. Drapery and faint outlines of additional figures fill the scene.

A 17th-century engraving of a sex worker. Charles I was far less tolerant of prostitution than his father, James VI & I, had been | Credit: Getty Images

Though titled Holland’s Leaguer, Marmion’s play sets only one part of its comic subplot in the brothel. But in the character of the Bawd, with her defiance of “any man” and her “Pox on the Marshal!” we may glimpse some of Bess’s real character. The apprentices had underestimated her; now the soldiers did, too. Raising the Leaguer’s portcullis to lure them on, Bess waited until her persecutors had filled the drawbridge, then raised that as well. The corporal and his men plunged into the moat; to describe “how they lay plunged in mud and myre, how one to helpe another, became worse and worse incumbred… would make a Tracte double this volume”, says Goodman.

Bess and her “shee-furies” knew that defying the corporal and his men, even if only to win a little time, was worth the effort. Once in the hands of the authorities, they could expect to be carted – heads shaved and exposed to public humiliation – to Bridewell to be flogged, then brought back to Newgate and imprisoned there. Bess had been in Newgate before; in that instance, her protector had got her out, but now she had no one to rely on but herself.

At that moment, though, a second force under a provost marshal appeared and laid siege to the Leaguer, seeking to starve out the women. Here Goodman ends his account, and Bess’s fate seems to have been sealed.

“Elizabeth Holland, a woman of ill reporte” was summoned to appear before the court of High Commission in January 1631 – 1632 in the Gregorian calendar – but didn’t attend. (A mysterious husband ordered to appear also didn’t show.) She was summoned again on 9 February, and again did not attend, despite fines that jumped up by £100 for each non-appearance.

The Leaguer’s new leaseholders, Felix Hunt and Robert Rogers, learned that the apprentices were planning another attack. So they petitioned the court to have Southwark’s streets patrolled for “Shrovetyde”. Their plea reveals that Bess had quit her house and not been seen in weeks.

A colourful memorial fence covered in ribbons, fabric strips, flowers and small decorative objects. Several people stand nearby looking at the display. A yellow sign with a skull‑and‑crossbones symbol reads “This is still the Crossbones Graveyard.” Buildings and a street sign sit in the background.

Colourful tributes left at the gates of Cross Bones Graveyard, unconsecrated burial place of thousands of ‘outcast dead’ in Southwark – including countless ‘Winchester Geese’, or sex workers | Credit: Getty Images

What became of her? Some years later, in March 1637, one Ursula Babthorpe was accused of fraud and of having once been “a common prostitute [in] Holland Leaguer”, but of Bess herself there is no mention. Did she disappear into wealthy retirement? Did she set up elsewhere? Perhaps she suffered the same fate as another 17th-century “woman of pleasure” described in John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, who “grew common and infamous and gott the Pox, of which she died”.

Ulcerated to the bone

As for Ursula’s other co-workers, nothing is known for sure. But a 10-minute walk from the site of the Leaguer is Cross Bones Graveyard, likely the “plot of ground called the Single Woman’s churchyard” mentioned by John Stow in his 1598 Survey of London. From the late Middle Ages until its closure in 1853, this was the resting place of an estimated 15,000 paupers, including generations of women from the Southwark stews.

During the 1990s, part of the Cross Bones site was excavated during work on the London Underground, removing some 148 skeletons. In 2008, the Wellcome Collection published its analysis on the remains of a young woman aged between 18 and 25 when she was buried in this unconsecrated ground during that era of dissolution in Southwark. It revealed that she had suffered the ravages of full-blown syphilis, and was ulcerated to the bone. Was her fate representative of that of the residents of Holland’s Leaguer? We can only guess – but such might well have been the end of Bess and of any of her girls, and Cross Bones their final destination.

Jacky Colliss Harvey is a writer and editor. Her latest novel, The Wanton Road (Allen & Unwin), is out now in paperback

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This article was first published in the August 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

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