This new fashion of actresses was a French fashion, and the mode being imported from France, a French Company, with women among them, came over to London. Hoping for the sanction of their countrywoman, Queen Henrietta Maria, they established themselves in Blackfriars. This essay excited all the fury of Prynne, who called these actresses by very unsavoury names; but who, in styling them "unwomanish and graceless," did not mean to imply that they were awkward and unfeminine, but that acting was unworthy of their sex, and unbecoming women born in an era of grace. "Glad am I to say," remarks as stout a Puritan as Prynne, namely, Thomas Brand, in a comment addressed to Laud, "glad am I to say they were hissed, hooted, and pippin-pelted from the stage, so that I do not think they will soon be ready to try the same again." Although Brand asserts "that all virtuous and well-disposed persons in this town" were "justly offended" at these women "or monsters rather," as Prynne calls them, "expelled from their own country," adds Brand, yet more sober-thinking people did not fail to see the propriety of Juliet being represented by a girl rather than by a boy. Accordingly, we hear of English actresses even before the Restoration, mingled, however, with boys, who shared with them that "line of business." "The boy's a pretty actor," says Lady Strangelove, in the "Court Beggar," played at the Cockpit, in 1632, "and his mother can play her part. The women now are in great request." Prynne groaned at the "request" becoming general. "They have now," he writes, in 1633, "their female players in Italy and other foreign parts." Davenant's "Siege of Rhodes" was privately acted[19] by amateurs, including Matthew Locke and Henry Purcell; the parts of Ianthe and Roxalana were played by Mrs. Edward Coleman and another lady. The piece is so stuffed with heroic deeds, heroic love, and heroic generosity, that none more suitable could be found for ladies to appear in. Nevertheless, when Rhodes was permitted to reopen the stage, he could only assemble boys about him for his Evadnes, Aspasias, and the other heroines of ancient tragedy.