In the same way a really bad man is one who has frankly said, ’Evil, be thou my good.’  Like the good man, though for a very different reason, the bad one has ceased to make war with the devil.  Finding a conspiracy against goodness going on, the bad man joins it, and thus, like the good man, is at peace with himself.  The bad man is bent upon his own way, to get what he wants, no matter at what cost.  Human lives!  What do they matter?  A woman’s honour!  What does that matter?  Truth and fidelity!  What are they?  To know what you want, and not to mind what you pay for it, is the straight path to fame, fortune, and hell-fire.  Careers, of course, vary; to dominate a continent or to open a corner shop as a pork-butcher’s, plenty of devilry may go to either ambition.  Also, genius is a rare gift.  It by no means follows that because you are a bad man you will become a great one; but to be bad, and at the same time unsuccessful, is a hard fate.  It casts a little doubt upon a man’s badness if he does not, at least, make a little money.  It is a poor business accompanying badness on to a common scaffold, or to see it die in a wretched garret.  That was one of my complaints with Mr. Seccombe’s Twelve Bad Men.  Most of them came to violent ends.  They were all failures.

But I have kept these twelve ladies waiting a most unconscionable time.  Who are they?  There are amongst them four courtesans:  Alice Perrers, one of King Edward III.’s misses; Barbara Villiers, one of King Charles II.’s; Mrs. Mary Anne Clarke, who had to be content with a royal Duke; and Mrs. Con Phillips.  Six members of the criminal class:  Alice Arden, Moll Cutpurse, Jenny Diver, Elizabeth Brownrigg, Elizabeth Canning, and Mary Bateman; and only two ladies of title, Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset, and Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston.  Of these twelve bad women one-third were executed, Alice Arden being burnt at Canterbury, Jenny Diver and Elizabeth Brownrigg being hung at Tyburn, and Mary Bateman suffering the same fate at Leeds.  Elizabeth Canning was sentenced to seven years’ transportation, and, indeed, if their biographers are to be believed, all the other ladies made miserable ends.  There is nothing triumphant about their badness.  Even from the point of view of this world they had better have been good.  In fact, squalor is the badge of the whole tribe.  Some of them, probably—­Elizabeth Brownrigg, for example—­were mad.  This last-named poor creature bore sixteen children to a house-painter and plasterer, and then became a parish mid-wife, and only finally a baby-farmer.  Her cruelty to her apprentices had madness in every detail.  To include her in this volume was wholly unnecessary.  She lives but in George Canning’s famous parody on Southey’s sonnet to the regicide Marten.

With those sentimentalists who maintain that all bad people are mad I will have no dealings.  It is sheer nonsense; lives of great men all remind us it is sheer nonsense.  Some of our greatest men have been infernal scoundrels—­pre-eminently bad men—­with nothing mad about them, unless it be mad to get on in the world and knock people about in it.