Queer City

by Peter Ackroyd

  The February raiders had been preceded by the agents of the Society for the Reformation of Manners who had come to spy and report. They must themselves have posed as queers in order to gain access. One of them, Samuel Stephens, testified that ‘I have seen twenty or thirty of them together, kissing and hugging and making love (as they called it) in a very indecent manner. Then they used to go out by couples into another room and, when they came back, they would tell what they had been doing, which, in their dialect, they called marrying.’ The room with a bed in it was known as ‘the chapel’. They could be heard talking. ‘Pray, sir – Dear sir – Lord, how can you serve me so – I swear I’ll cry out – You’re a wicked devil – And you’ve a bold face – Eh, you dear little Toad! Come buss.’

  Mother Clap ran a coffee house; to procure liquor for her customers she went next door to the Bunch of Grapes, making a large profit on the transactions with her befuddled gentlemen. No doubt she also pimped for male prostitutes. In her defence she stated that ‘I hope it will be considered that I am a woman, and therefore it cannot be thought that I would ever be concerned in such practices’. Nobody believed her. She was sentenced to two years in prison, and was consigned to the public pillory in Smithfield where she was treated so roughly that she twice fainted; she died in Newgate.

  Before Mother Clap’s was raided there had been some sensational or notorious trials. In 1721, at the Old Bailey, one young witness, Nicholas Leader, testified that George Duffus had embraced and kissed him, calling him ‘my dear’. Duffus told him that he meant ‘no harm, nothing but love’. Then he ‘forcibly entered my body about an inch, as near as I can guess; but in struggling I threw him off once more, before he had made an emission, and having thus forced him to withdraw he emitted in his own hand and, clapping it on the tail of my shirt, said Now you have it!’ The evidence may have saved Duffus from more severe punishment, since the charge of sodomy demanded proof that emission occurred during anal intercourse. Duffus himself was highly religious, and used to encounter his young men at the meeting houses of dissenters where he engaged in devout conversation before inviting them home. Another young man was snared in this manner, and admitted Duffus to bed when it was too late for him to return home. ‘I readily consented, as I not at all suspecting his design; but we had not been long in bed before he began to kiss me and take hold of my privities. How lean you be, says he. Do but feel how fat I am!’ Once again no ‘spermatic injection’, as it was called, could be proven and so Duffus escaped hanging and was consigned instead to prison and the pillory. The actual sperm or seed was believed to be the token of male identity, and was therefore too precious to be wasted or abused.

  Other men were less subtle. John Dicks immobilised his potential partner with hot ale and gin at alehouses in Chancery Lane and Fetter Lane, close enough to carry the inebriated boy from one to the other. ‘The prisoner unbuttoned my breeches,’ the witness said, ‘and turned me on my face, and tried to enter my body, but whether he did or not, I was not sensible enough to be certain.’ The fact that the boy was not ‘certain’ may have saved Dicks from hanging.

  Three constables were given a special warrant ‘to apprehend sodomites’. They decided, after drinking at an alehouse in Moorfields, to try a little entrapment. One of them, Thomas Newton, took his position on a walk in Upper Moorfields by the side of a wall. ‘So I takes a turn that way, and leans over the wall. In a little while the prisoner passes by, and looks hard at me, and at a small distance from me, stands up against the wall, as if he was going to make water.’ Slowly the solitary man, William Brown, edged closer and closer to Newton until they were standing together. ‘It is a very fine night,’ Brown said. ‘Ay,’ Newton replied, ‘and so it is.’ The man guided Newton’s hand to the bulge in his breeches, whereupon Newton grabbed hold of his penis and called out for the other two constables. When asked why he had taken ‘indecent liberties’, the prisoner gave a very interesting response. ‘I did it because I thought I knew him, and I think there is no crime in making what use I please of my own body.’ That was a libertarian sentiment which would not be heard again in public discourse for 250 years. How the man came to deliver this astonishing plea is not known.

  His defence was not successful. A contemporary wrote that ‘the other day, passing by Moorfields whilst Brown, the sodomite, stood in the pillory, I could not help making some reflections on the shower of rotten eggs, dead cats and turnip tops that the gentlemen of the mob were pleased to compliment him with on that occasion’.

  It is not curious that witnesses to the act or acts could often be found. Sometimes they lived and slept in the same chamber, suggesting a degree of familiarity or unconcern. It was revealed that Charles Banner, accused of attempting sodomy on a boy of fifteen, kept a school in Smithfield. ‘A school?’ the judge asked. ‘Does anybody trust their children with him?’ It seemed that many did, and their testimony led to his acquittal.

  At other times the witness could hear and see what was happening in the next room; it might have been no more than a slit in the partition, or small hole, or a crevice in the door, but it was enough to suggest that this was a far more public world. On one occasion a servant in a tavern off Drury Lane heard two men kissing one another in an upstairs chamber. With a colleague he took a ladder into the yard of the tavern and climbed it so that he could look into the chamber window; there he ‘saw such actions as was very unseemly for men to offer’. The use of the ladder was ingenious. Another man, Thomas Doulton, was obliged to fill the pillory ‘for endeavouring (to use the canting term) to discover the “windward passage” upon one Joseph Yates’.

  The raid on Mother Clap’s was followed by other raids on molly houses in the capital. Soon after, ‘seven small-sized rogues were seized at a house of evil repute’ in the notorious White Cross Place. They may have been children. It was said that ‘God never made White Cross Place’. A gang ‘of haunchmen, alias endorsers’ was arrested in Westminster; an endorser, in legal terms, was one who made an entry on the back of something. In July Robert Whale and York Horner, otherwise known as Peggy and Pru, were arrested for keeping a molly house in King Street, Westminster. Mr Mugg, known as Aunt Mugg, was prosecuted for a molly house in Windmill Street.

  Thomas Wright had managed a molly house in Christopher’s Alley, Moorfields, before moving his establishment to Beech Lane. One secret agent reported that ‘I went to the prisoner’s house in Beech Lane, and there I found a company of men fiddling and dancing and singing bawdy songs, kissing and using their hands in a very unseemly manner … in a large room there we found one a-fiddling and eight more a-dancing country dances making vile motions and singing “Come, let us bugger finely”. Then they sat in one another’s laps, talked bawdy, and practiced a great many indecencies. There was a door in the great room, which opened into a little room, where there was a bed, and into this little room several of the company went.’

  Molly houses might also be situated in the private rooms of taverns or alehouses. In Soho the Red Lion accommodated rooms at the back, as did brandy shops in Drury Lane. The Three Shoes in Moorfields and the Three Tobacco Rolls in Covent Garden had many molly customers. Clusters of similar venues could be found at Charing Cross, Moorfields and Smithfield. A ‘club of pederasts’ met at the Bunch of Grapes in Clare Market. The Royal Oak, at the corner of St James’s Square, was also well known; a neighbour testified that ‘I have seen men in his back room behave themselves sodomitically, by exposing to each other’s sight what they ought to have concealed. I have heard some of them say, “mine is the best, yours has been Battersea’d.” I do not know what they meant by that expression.’ ‘Battersea’d’ meant to be enamelled, after the enamel produced at York House, Battersea. It may have been some kind of preparation or mixture to deal with venereal infection.

  Individuals were of course found beyond the setting of the molly houses. Churches were popular. Two men were caught with their trousers down in the porch of the parish church at Stepney one night, and the subsequ
ent jury concluded that ‘they were no better than two of those degenerated miscreants from the race of men called sodomites’.

  One of the tour guides for St Paul’s Cathedral in 1730 heard noises in the great church. ‘I looked through the light of the Newel Stairs,’ he reported and ‘discovered [two men] in a very indecent posture.’ He added that ‘Huggins was stooping very low, so that I could not see his head, his breeches were down, his shirt was turned upon his back, and his backside was bare. Holliwell was standing close by, with his fore parts to the other’s posteriors, and his body was in motion.’ The guide locked them in a side aisle and ran for the clerk of the works and the dean. Huggins and Holliwell were eventually taken away and met with the familiar penalty of the pillory, soon after which they both died from their injuries.

  The cathedral was more than a monument. It was a convenience. At a later date two men were found having sex in the courtyard behind the chapter house. They were surprised by a constable, with the name of Obert Pert, who called out ‘in the name of God, what are you doing? Who or what are you?’ One of the two men, Blair, said that he went to the place ‘to ease Nature’.

  ‘It is in a very odd way,’ the constable replied.

  Blair lost his composure. ‘Damn you, sir, if I must tell you, I was at shite.’

  The other man, Deacon, testified that he had gone to piss. He said to the constable that he was doing ‘no ill’.

  ‘What,’ Pert answered, ‘you are two buggerers I suppose?’

  Deacon gave an odd reply. ‘There is no such thing.’

  Both men were found guilty as charged.

  Churches and churchyards were fully employed for furtive sexual encounters, perhaps with some folk memory of the uses of churches for sanctuary. Another favoured spot was the area, close to St Clement Dane’s, where Fleet Street and the Strand meet. Thieving Lane by Westminster Abbey and the immediate neighbourhood of the church of St Giles in the Fields were other ports of call. A clergyman complained from the pulpit of St Dunstan’s, Fleet Street, that his church was used by males ‘who wanted but convenience to perpetrate the most detestable of crimes’.

  A molly house by Newgate and the Old Bailey, not far from St Paul’s, arranged a ball where a witness reported men ‘calling one another “my dear” and hugging, kissing and tickling one another … assuming effeminate voices and airs, some telling others that they ought to be whipped for not coming to school more frequently’. These gay balls were never decorous. One masquerader threw a box of snuff on the back of another’s dress to give the impression that he was ‘offensively besmeared’ with shit. In 1728 nine men were arrested at a house in Black Lion Yard, Whitechapel, belonging to Jonathan Muff, known as Miss Muff, and taken to Newgate or Bridewell. At the subsequent trials of these and other mollies, the slang of the streets surfaces once more. One man accosted a foot soldier in St James’s Park and offered to provide him with ‘a green gown upon the grass’, or to have sex with him in the open air. One drummer boy, Rowley Hanson, ‘became as common as the night’. The police were informed that a group of sodomites had their ‘tail quarters’ in an empty house off Marylebone.

  Similar actions were reported at the trials – thrusting hands into another man’s breeches, feeling his private parts, sticking his own penis into another’s hand, forcible kissing with his tongue, wriggling in his lap for the purpose of causing ejaculation. The size of the penis was a subject of speculation in the courtroom. John Marten’s Gonosologium Novum (1707) contained the information that ‘in short men it is generally observed to be longer than in tall men. In half-witted people it is generally pretty large, the length of the largest being commonly, when erected, nine inches long and four inches in circumference.’ Marten would have known. He was a surgeon.

  In the same period Charles Hitchen was the under-marshal of the City, responsible for policing part of the capital. He was an active member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners and had to keep an eye on mollies; but he himself was queer. He had as his assistant Jonathan Wild who became notorious as the ‘thief-taker general’, engaged in fencing stolen goods. So Hitchen was part of a murky world where the unruly ruled. It is not surprising that he took bribes from the managers of molly houses to avert their prosecution. Hitchen had a fancy for the group of mollies near the Old Bailey and took Wild to their ‘house’. He told Wild that he was about to meet ‘a company of he-whores’. Wild asked if they were ‘hermaphrodites’. ‘No, you fool, they are sodomites, such as deal with their sex instead of females.’

  On arriving at the molly house Hitchen was addressed as ‘madam’ and ‘your ladyship’; he ‘dallied with the young sparks’, but the dalliance came to an abrupt end when a party of gentlemen, no doubt with ready money, entered. Hitchen was abandoned by the mollies for more savoury meat. He was mortified, and threatened revenge on the whole pack of them. He took exception to the fact that the young mollies rejected his advances, and so he set a trap. As they came back from a ball in Holborn, he arrested them in all their finery. They were dressed as milkmaids, shepherdesses, or ladies of fashion with hoops and petticoats; their faces were liberally decorated with plaster, patches and paint. Once taken, they were paraded through the streets of London before being dispatched to the workhouse; one of their number, however, threatened to provide evidence against Hitchen himself, and the charges against the mollies were dropped by the lord mayor.

  Yet the fall of Hitchen came soon after. In the spring of 1727 he took a young man, Richard Williamson, to bed at the Talbot Inn, where he was a well-known customer. He would often bring a soldier to the inn, and disappear with him into a private apartment. But Richard Williamson was not a willing partner; he told the incident to a relative, and together they concealed themselves behind a door until through a keyhole they spied Hitchen in flagrante with another young man.

  When he was eventually led to the pillory, his friends and colleagues put up a screen of carts and carriages to prevent him from being attacked by the mob, and a great battle ensued. After half an hour Hitchen himself was so severely beaten that he was taken down. Consigned to Newgate for the next six months, he was stripped of his office as under-marshal. He died soon after. It is a case of the biter bit, or the molly-taker mollied, but it is also an interesting example of the ways in which the criminal underworld and sexual underworld met in eighteenth-century London. They were all essentially outcasts.

  James Dalton was a street thug of the familiar type, part pickpocket and part highway robber. In his gang were two professional blackmailers who specialised in ‘putting the bite’ on London queers. It was also known as ‘the common bounce’. John Mitchell, alias Nurse Mitchell, sat down on a bench in St James’s Park and told the man beside him that ‘he could show nine inches’ and asked him whether he could do the same. The victim made his excuses and left. But Mitchell followed him and said that ‘if he did not give him a guinea he would swear sodomy to him’. Mitchell was eventually charged with extortion. Another of Dalton’s associates, James Oviat, or Miss Kitten, also pursued an unfortunate gentleman for money, ‘saying, if he would not give it to him, he would swear sodomy against him’. The records only report the blackmailers who failed. Any number of them may have been able to apply pressure to unsuspecting victims. Some of those unfairly accused might have have seemed effeminate, so that their defences were already down, and others may have been so nervous that in the phrase of the time they were ‘known to pay’ simply to avoid controversy and confrontation. Others may just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time of day. This is a world of bullying, intimidation and terror about which nothing is really known. We can only suspect that it was an intrinsic part of the queer world of London. The moral seemed to be that it was wise to avoid parks or other well-known rendezvous.

  Mollies were not at all like the fops or beaux on the stage. They were from the lower classes, typically manual workers or labourers who liked to become women. James Stevens was a waterman on the Thames, a strenuous occupat
ion, but his neighbours testified that he caused a commotion ‘by going about in women’s apparel in a very impudent and insolent manner, insulting the neighbourhood’; he may not have been a molly at all, but a compulsive cross-dresser. One of those arrested was a milk-man and another a wool-comber. Theirs was of course a parody of the female, rather like the ‘drag’ acts of more recent periods. Nor were they anything like the pretty boys who ‘knew nothing and did everything’. They were rough, and their language was not choice.

  They were called by various names, among them Miss Betty or Miss Nancy, Plump Nelly or Primrose Mary. In certain notorious trials of 1726 some were named as Garter Mary, ‘a man who sells garters about the streets’, Fish Hannah, a fishmonger, Mary Magdalen, Mademoiselle Gent or Orange Dib together with various other Misses and Mademoiselles. Aunt England was a soap-boiler, and Aunt May an upholsterer. Lucy Cooper was a strapping coal-heaver and Kitty Cambric was a coal merchant. Some had puzzling names, including Susan Guzzle and Johannah the Ox-Cheek Woman. They screamed familiar insults at each other. ‘Oh, you bold pullet, I’ll break all your eggs!’ or ‘Oh, I will beat the milk out of your breasts, I will so!’ or ‘Where have you been, you saucy queen?’ They called each other ‘she’ or ‘her’. Many of them were for some reason called ‘Sukey’. Anal sex was known as ‘the pleasant deed’, while the active partner was said ‘to do the story’.

  John Cowper, aka the Princess Seraphina, was described as a ‘mollycull’, one of those ‘runners that carried messages between gentlemen … going of sodomitical errands’. At Cowper’s trial, Mary Poplet, landlady of the Two Sugar Loaves, was called to testify. ‘I have known her Highness a pretty while … she commonly used to wear a white gown and a scarlet cloak with her hair frizzled and curled all around her forehead; and then she would so flutter her fan and make such fine curtsies that you would not have known her from a woman: she takes great delight in balls and masquerades.’ Cowper was a butcher by trade. Butchers and bakers, orange-sellers and barbers were an integral part of the fraternity or, rather, sisterhood. Many molly establishments may have been family concerns. One eighteen-year-old servant and male whore told a client, ‘I suppose I am not handsome enough for you but, if you don’t like me, I have got a pretty younger brother.’ Some young men aspiring to the trade would wear trousers with tears or holes in them to advertise their availability.