The fame of the adventure spread abroad, and that the scandal should not be repeated Moll was summoned before the Court of Arches to answer a charge of appearing publicly in mannish apparel.  The august tribunal had no terror for her, and she received her sentence to do penance in a white sheet at Paul’s Cross during morning-service on a Sunday with an audacious contempt.  ‘They might as well have shamed a black dog as me,’ she proudly exclaimed; and why should she dread the white sheet, when all the spectators looked with a lenient eye upon her professed discomfiture?’ For a halfpenny,’ she said, ’she would have travelled to every market-town of England in the guise of a penitent,’ and having tippled off three quarts of sack she swaggered to Paul’s Cross in the maddest of humours.  But not all the courts on earth could lengthen her petticoat, or contract the Dutch slop by a single fold.  For a while, perhaps, she chastened her costume, yet she soon reverted to the ancient mode, and to her dying day went habited as a man.

As bear baiting was the passion of her life, so she was scrupulous in the care and training of her dogs.  She gave them each a trundle-bed, wrapping them from the cold in sheets and blankets, while their food would not have dishonoured a gentleman’s table.  Parrots, too, gave a sense of colour and companionship to her house; and it was in this love of pets, and her devotion to cleanliness, that she showed a trace of dormant womanhood.  Abroad a ribald and a scold, at home she was the neatest of housewives, and her parlour, with its mirrors and its manifold ornaments, was the envy of the neighbours.  So her trade flourished, and she lived a life of comfort, of plenty even, until the Civil War threw her out of work.  When an unnatural conflict set the whole country at loggerheads, what occasion was there for the honest prig?  And it is not surprising that, like all the gentlemen adventurers of the age, Moll remained most stubbornly loyal to the King’s cause.  She made the conduit in Fleet Street run with wine when Charles came to London in 1638; and it was her amiable pleasantry to give the name of Strafford to a clever, cunning bull, and to dub the dogs that assailed him Pym, Hampden, and the rest, that right heartily she might applaud the courage of Strafford as he threw off his unwary assailants.

So long as the quarrel lasted, she was compelled to follow a profession more ancient than the fence’s; for there is one passion which war itself cannot extinguish.  When once the King had laid his head ’down as upon a bed,’ when once the Protector had proclaimed his supremacy, the industry of the road revived; and there was not a single diver or rumpad that did not declare eternal war upon the black-hearted Regicides.  With a laudable devotion to her chosen cause, Moll despatched the most experienced of her gang to rob Lady Fairfax on her way to church; and there is a tradition that the Roaring Girl, hearing that Fairfax