Queer City

by Peter Ackroyd

  It was believed that too much beating in boyhood led inexorably to adult vice and as Ned Ward put it in the London Spy (1703), those ‘in the black-school of sodomy are call’d by learned students in the science of debauchery, flogging-cullies’. The ‘flogging cully’ was supposed to be an old rogue or fool who liked to whip or be whipped. Judging by the references in fiction and drama there must have been many such ‘cullies’, but the historical and judicial records bear little trace of their presence. They were part of the unknown aspect of queer London. They were perhaps part of its mythology.

  A case came before the magistrates of the Old Bailey in the winter of 1667, where an apprentice of fifteen years had been accused of running away from his master. But the boy spoke out and said, in the words of the transcript, ‘that his said master, Thomas Rivers, did one time when his mistress was forth, invite him the said Henry Wells into bed to him and asked if he were cold, which he said he was, and then and there he buggered him, and entered his body; and after that he took him in the cellar, and tied him up by the two wrists, and there abused him; and also that upon a Sunday after, the said master took him out into the fields, and did the like unto him after he had bound him’. He swore that he had been buggered eight times. But he was lying. His mother had coached him in his testimony, and she was seen to whisper to him whenever he was interrogated. When the halter was put around the neck of Thomas Rivers at Tyburn, the boy cried out that he had wronged his master and sworn falsely against him. Rivers was saved at the last moment. There is no moral to this story, except for the fact that it was relatively easy to lay a false charge of sodomy.

  Foreigners, who were thought to swarm through the London streets, were always suspect. Lorenzo in Aphra Behn’s play The Amorous Prince (1671) remarks to himself that ‘’tis a fine lad, how plump and white he is; would I could meet him somewhere i’ th’ dark, I’d have a fling at him, and try whether I were right Florentine’. He asks the boy how long he had ‘been set up for thyself’, plying his trade as a prostitute; he tells him not to chase women because it will ‘spoil a good face and mar your better market of the two’. John Dryden’s An Evening’s Love (1668) made a similar allusion:

  MASKALL: I imagined them to be Italians.

  LOPEZ: Not unlikely, for they played most furiously at our backsides.

  Sodomy could also be blamed on the French as well as the Italians. In his epilogue to The Duke of Guise (1683), Dryden described sex between men as ‘a damned love-trick new brought over from France’ in which men ‘club for love’; this suggests specific meeting places rather than the walking of streets or parks. The name for participants was often ‘Neuters’. John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1696) has the virtue of presenting the first fully formed English queer on the London stage.

  COUPLER: Ha, you young lascivious rogue, you! Let me put my hand in your bosom, sirrah!

  FASHION: Stand off, old Sodom!

  Yet some odd couples still managed to achieve a monumental stillness. Two men can stand beside each other in funereal statuary. A memorial of 1619 in Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, celebrates the union between Thomas Legge and John Gostlin; it displays a heart in flames with a Latin inscription which, translated, reads ‘Love joined them living. So may the earth join them in their burial. O Legge, Gostlin’s heart you have still with you.’ A monument of 1684 to John Finch and Thomas Baines in the chapel of Christ’s College, Cambridge, contains a knotted cloth in token of the connubium, or marriage, between the two men. These memorials, between men and men or women and women, have already been noted from previous centuries. Yet they continued well into the early modern period and are an indication that even the established Church spotted no fault in these unusual same-sex relationships.

  10

  Arsey-Versy

  In 1691 the Society for the Reformation of Manners began its activities, some of them designed to put an end to the ‘scourge’ of sodomy that was said to have polluted the streets of London. It was assisted by a subtle change in the law with the new charge of ‘assault with intent to commit unnatural crimes’; if one man ‘laid hands’ on another, he could be accused of assaulting him.

  These measures were in part derived from a rise of public consciousness concerning what became known as ‘molly houses’, havens in which queer men could meet and drink, dance with each other, and bugger each other, with what they considered to be impunity. In this they were mistaken.

  The references to same-sex love among males may have been heated by rumours about the new king, William III, who had been given the crown in 1689. He was a successful military commander who, among other feats, had hustled James II from the throne; but many successful soldiers were known for their interest in sodomy. William himself had been attached to William Bentinck, ennobled as the Earl of Portland, and the gossip about the two men reached the public in satires and ballads. The king was accused of buggering Bentinck and the favourite was called a ‘catamite who rules alone the state’ or, more unusually, a ‘bardash’ or the equivalent of the French ‘bardache’, meaning man-woman or passive male prostitute. One satire put it this way:

  In love to his minions he partial and rash is,

  Makes statesmen of blockheads and earls of bardashes.

  When the king seems to have transferred his affections to another Dutchman, Arnold Joost van Keppel, Bentinck threw up all his public offices in a fit of pique. William remonstrated with him, and Bentinck replied that ‘the kindness which your majesty shows to a young man and the manner in which you appear to authorize his liberties and impertinencies make the world say things I am ashamed to hear’. The king’s friend, Bishop Burnet, remarked in his History of His Own Time (1723) that William ‘had no vice, but of one sort, in which he was very cautious and secret’, to which Swift responded in a marginal handwritten entry that ‘it was of two sorts – male and female – in the former he was neither cautious nor secret’.

  In a later supplement to the History, Burnet concluded that ‘if he has been guilty of any of the disorders that are too common to princes, yet he has not practiced them as some to whom he is nearly related have done, but has endeavoured to cover them; though let princes be as secret as they will in such matters, they are always known’. He wrote only one more thing of relevance in his supplement. He alluded to ‘another particular, that is too tender to put in writing’ which might affect the king’s reputation.

  Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland, was also the victim of much rumour. A Scottish reverend, Robert Wodrow, lamented in his diary the prevalence in London of ‘the abomination of sodomy’. He went on to say that ‘the earl of Sunderland was the first who set up houses for that vile sin, and when this was like to break out, poisoned himself, to prevent the discovery’. A packet of letters was published in 1723 with the title of Love-Letters Between a Certain late Nobleman and the Famous Beau Wilson. Wilson was an army captain, as handsome as he was vain, who in 1693 was overflowing with money from some mysterious patron. In one copy of the Love-Letters, now in the British Library, a written entry identifies this ‘late Nobleman’ as the Earl of Sunderland who had died a year before its publication. The last document of this case has the name of The Conspirators: Or, The Case of Catiline (1721), written by ‘Britannicus’ and dedicated to Sunderland. It alludes to a sodomitical club, catering to higher ministers and courtiers, some of whom dressed as women for their visits; this would indeed be described as a ‘conspiracy’ at the time, but, if it did exist, any other evidence for it has disappeared. The Love-Letters may have been entirely a work of fiction and several identifications of the ‘late Nobleman’ have been suggested. The whole episode might mean anything or nothing. But it does at least bear witness to the overheated sexual atmosphere of the time. A letter to the Duke of Shrewsbury from James Vernon, secretary of state, written at this time of moral outrage among Londoners, claimed that ‘the City as well as the Court is full of such sparks, and that they are all in the offices’; by which he meant the offices of state. Could i
t be that, for a while, the country was run by a cabal of queers?

  The wife of one of the king’s most notoriously queer relations, ‘Monsieur’ or the Duke of Orléans, had no doubt about the English attachment to same-sex unions. The duchess, Liselotte, wrote that the new English king had no fondness for women and ‘he is believed to have very different inclinations’; he was part of ‘that brotherhood’ and in the year before his death she wrote of those men ‘who share the inclinations of king William’. She was once asked whether the English court had become a ‘château de derrière’, or arse castle. She added that ‘nothing is more ordinary in England than this unnatural vice’. For England, she meant London.

  An anonymous writer posing as a procuress and brothel-keeper, ‘Jenny Cromwell’, composed a pamphlet entitled Jenny Cromwell’s Complaint Against Sodomy (1692) which associated the London court with its queer inhabitants. Among the elite circle of the sodomites she mentioned ‘Bardash’ or Bentinck and the king; another candidate for inclusion was the Earl of Scarsdale who was wont ‘to skulk about the alleys / And is content with Bettys, Nans and Mollys’. ‘Jenny Cromwell’ rose to a final condemnation against William III: ‘Till you came in and with your Reformation / Turn’d all things Arsy Versey in the Nation.’

  James Stanhope, one day destined to become another earl, entered the House of Commons in 1701 at the start of an illustrious career both as soldier and statesman. But the stories about him were already circulating and in 1703 a satirical squib named him as one ‘Who thinks no pleasure like Italian joy / And to a Venus arms prefers a pathic boy’. In the same year the Earl of Huntingdon wrote to him from Paris pledging friendship. ‘What would I not give you to tell you this my wicked Stanhope over a glass of champagne in Paris with two or three pretty smiling unthinking fellows that know nothing and do everything.’

  Another bevy of courtiers were accused:

  Thinking they must be mimics to the crown

  They to each other put their breeches down

  If Wentworth one of these with bum will bless

  He’s not a little proud of his success.

  Thomas Wentworth was an intimate of the king. It might seem that everybody was doing it. At a later date, a general in the British Army, Sir John Cope, was believed to have earned his promotion as a result of his ‘prolific bum’.

  The temperature of the time was further raised with the case of Captain Edward Rigby. On 5 November 1698 Rigby approached a young man, William Minton, nineteen years old, in St James’s Park where the youth had gone to watch the firework display; he squeezed the boy’s hand before taking out his erect penis and giving it to him to fondle; then he kissed the boy, and put his tongue in his mouth. The boy ran off but Rigby caught up with him; they arranged an assignation for two days later in the George Tavern on Pall Mall. He was to ask for ‘number four’. But Minton, having changed his mind about this tryst, informed his master who in turn approached Thomas Bray, a representative of the Society for the Reformation of Manners. This was the kind of opportunity for which the members of the society yearned. It may even have been Bray who set up the trap.

  It was laid for Rigby in the George. The constables, in hiding until the moment of arrest, overheard Rigby trying to lure the boy. He raised a toast to him, he kissed him, and pushed the boy’s hand into his breeches. Then the captain sat on the boy’s lap and kissed him some more.

  ‘Should I fuck you?’ Rigby asked him.

  ‘How can that be?’ Minton asked him.

  ‘I’ll show you, for it is no more than was done in our forefathers’ time.’ He cited some eminent examples, including a French king and a Russian tsar, before uttering ‘most blasphemous words’ no doubt concerning Christ and his favourite disciple. He embraced and kissed Minton again and confessed that ‘his lust was provoked’ to the point where he had ejaculated in his breeches. But he was still ready for more and took Minton into a corner where he took down his breeches and stuck his finger into Minton’s ‘fundament’. He then put his erect penis against the boy and in his testimony Minton stated that ‘feeling something warm touch his skin, put his hand behind him and took hold of Rigby’s privy member’.

  The time had come. Minton made for the door, stamped his foot on the floor and called out ‘Westminster!’ This was the code word to alert the constables, who now rushed into the room and arrested Rigby. At the eventual trial the judges found Rigby guilty of the heinous crime of sodomy; he was fined one thousand pounds, given a year’s imprisonment, and consigned to the pillories at Pall Mall, Charing Cross and Temple Bar on three successive days between eleven and one. The last punishments might have been the worst, since the pillory was sometimes a death sentence. But Rigby had friends in high places. He dressed as a beau and was required only to stand beside the pillory and not to be held down by it; he was also surrounded by constables and beadles to ensure that no interested bystander could throw anything at him. Conveniently he escaped from confinement and absconded to France.

  It was not unusual for boys or young men to be propositioned in this manner, especially in London. In the same month of 1698 Richard Kirby made a play for his barber’s servant, Joseph Thomas. When the boy went down into the cellar, for the purposes of nature, Kirby followed him to indulge in a bout of mutual masturbation. He then asked Thomas to turn his back, but when the boy refused, he ‘put a finger up his fundament and the nail of his finger under the foreskin of his yard’. The operation may not have been entirely satisfactory since in the spring of the following year Kirby tried again. He took out the boy’s penis and then masturbated himself until ‘he spent his nature on the boards’; still he was not satisfied and he put his penis between the legs of the boy ‘and rubbed himself until he spent his seed into [Thomas’s] breeches’. The boy made a formal complaint on 16 June, but the case was not brought to trial. It was lost in the turmoil of London. Sexual assaults upon children were both more common and more disregarded than in the twenty-first century.

  11

  Continually wet

  By the beginning of the eighteenth century the queer culture of London was coming under more sustained attack than before. The notion of the effeminate homosexual was now prevalent. A play of 1703, Thomas Baker’s Tunbridge-Walks, satirises the queer coxcombs in the delicate shape of Mr Maiden describing his acquaintance.

  Oh! The best creatures in the World; we have such diversion, when we meet together at my chambers. There’s Beau Simper, Beau Rabbitsface, Beau Eithersex, Colonel Coachpole, and Count Drivel, that sits with his mouth open … Then we never read Gazettes nor talk of Venlo and Vigo [battles], like your coffee-house fellows; but play with fans, and mimic the women, scream, hold up our tails, make curtsies, and call one another, Madam …

  Many of them went around London ‘strolling and caterwauling’ or, in other words, looking for sex. Such a man would talk of fans and masques and pretty gloves; he understood as much about silk and ribbons as any milliner, and knew all about beauty washes and the essences of perfume. That, at least, was the popular image.

  An article, under the assumed name of ‘Mrs Crackenthorpe’ (aka Thomas Baker) in the Female Tatler of 1709, records the conversation of a milliner on Ludgate Hill. ‘This, madame, is wonderful charming. This, madame, is so diverting a silk. This, madame – my stars! How cool it looks.’ Mrs Crackenthorpe bids only ten shillings a yard. ‘Fan me you winds, your ladyship rallies me! Should I part with it at such a price, the weavers would rise upon the very shop! Was you at the park last night, madame? Your ladyship shall abate me sixpence. Have you read the Tatler today?’ Et cetera.

  Joseph Addison wrote in 1711 of a young gentleman who is ‘a wonderful critic in cambric and muslins, and will talk an hour together upon a sweet-meat’. (It might be mentioned that Alexander Pope described Addison and Steele as ‘a couple of hermaphrodites’, which meant no more than that they were queer. The suggestion cannot be confirmed.) In Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), the heroine scorns male milliners as ‘so finical! S
o affected! They seemed to understand every part of a woman’s dress better that we do ourselves; and they recommend caps and ribbons with an air of such importance, that I wished to ask them how long they had left off wearing them!’

  It was generally acknowledged that certain places of public resort were of interest to the queers of London. A German traveller, Zacharias von Uffenbach, noted ‘the great quantity of Moors … hawking their bottoms round the Strand and Covent Garden’. Among other favoured spots were the ‘houses of office’ available in taverns or inns. The ‘bog-houses’ of Savoy, the Temple and Lincoln’s Inn Fields were also popular. Holes were sometimes made in the partitions to facilitate intimacy. The London Post of 20 June 1701 reported that ‘on Thursday, between 10 and 11 at night, a person sitting in Lincolns-Inn house of office, a young man happened to go into the same box, whom the other welcomed, and afterwards entered into a discourse with him, pretending great kindness for him etcetera. But at last discovered his intention, to commit the filthy sin of sodomy with him, and made an attempt to force him. But the young man crying out, some of the porters and watchmen of the Inn, as well as some of the young gentlemen, came to his assistance and soon cooled the spark’s courage, by ducking him in the said house of office, and afterwards left him to shift for himself.’

  Such enclaves were generally known as ‘the markets’ where men might ‘pick up trade’. The language of commerce, so vital to London in this period, had entered the speech of the streets. To be involved in casual sex was ‘to bite a blow’ after ‘making a bargain’, while a male prostitute might ‘put the bite’ on a customer. That could include blackmail, extortion or physical violence. The members of the Society for the Reformation of Manners were of course interested in these transactions, and their agents went to great lengths to snare and entrap the unwary. Those who were caught faced the prospect of fines, or imprisonment, or a ducking in the Thames almost until death, or the pillory set up wherever they had been caught in the act.