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

A woodcut illustration from Newes from Holland’s Leaguer depicts an attack on that infamous brothelOn Shrove Tuesday 1631, their target was Holland’s Leaguer. The days of perhaps the largest, most notorious and most luxurious brothel in Southwark – if not all of London – were numbered. When establishing her Leaguer, Goodman tells us, she ensured that it “wanted nothing for State, nothing for Magnificence, nothing for Delight, nothing for Beauty”. A link has also been suggested between Holland’s Leaguer and another famously luxurious 17th-century brothel in Brussels, the ‘Lovely Little Maiden’. Was her fate representative of that of the residents of Holland’s Leaguer?