Queer City

by Peter Ackroyd

  D’Eon travelled back to France in 1777 but then returned to London eight years later dressed as a woman, the role retained until his death in 1810. The atmosphere of London may have seemed to be more sympathetic. Bets about his sex, amounting to thousands of pounds, were taken in the London clubs and in the Stock Exchange. He was offered large sums to submit to physical examination, but he always refused. ‘Man or woman?’ d’Eon asked. ‘I am none the better nor the worse.’ It may be that d’Eon did not believe in two sexes at all, and that the concept of one sex was of more consequence. Is it possible that this figure comprised both sexes in some primordial mingling? Or did d’Eon live 230 years too soon for the transgender future?

  Pressed for money, d’Eon eventually took up the role of female fencer, performing all over the country. The Annual Register remarked that ‘it must be acknowledged that she is the most extraordinary person of the age’, having been a spy, a diplomat, a soldier and an author of more than fifteen books. The French historian Jean de Lacretelle described d’Eon’s life as one ‘of much labour and suffering, mixed with very little repose’. D’Eon may have the last word, however. ‘I have been the plaything of Nature … I have gone through all the strange vicissitudes of the human condition.’

  When the body was laid out after death, it was discovered to be that of a man.

  Of course d’Eon, Gray, Walpole and others were in a privileged position; they were not of the same rank as the subjects of scorn in Satan’s Harvest Home (1749) which excoriated effeminate or effete young men for advancing the cause of sodomy. The anonymous author inveighs against ‘vile catamites’ who ‘make their preposterous addresses, even in the very streets’. ‘Instead of the pillory,’ he writes (and one can only presume that it is a he), ‘I would have the stake to be the punishment.’

  But a spell in the pillory was often punishment enough. Women were generally part of the crowd that swore at and stoned the accused. Such women were given drink to refresh their strength, and were granted the best positions to take aim. A woman at one of these ritual stonings ‘mounted the pillory, cut his breeches off, and flogged him until the blood came, and his head was broke in several places’. Two queer blackmailers, standing at Crutched Friars, ‘were so severely treated by the mob, that it is thought they cannot recover’.

  When in 1761 one man was placed in the pillory for attempting to have sex with a London apprentice, the mob grew so tumultuous that a child was killed in the crush. He had been surrounded by officers of the courts, but the crowd overpowered them before setting on the victim. In another incident of the same year, a victim was hauled ‘round in the pillory so violently that, had not the board over his head been loose, his neck must have been broken. He fell down and lay for some time as dead; but they reared him up and set him on again where, covered with filth of all kinds, he remained some time, and then jumped down amongst the mob, who presently lifted him in again’.

  The latter half of the eighteenth century was a harsh time. The Public Advertiser noted that ‘a bugger aged sixty was put in the Cheapside pillory. The mob tore off his clothes, pelted him with filth, whipped him almost to death. He was naked and covered with dung. When the hour was up, he was carried almost unconscious back to Newgate.’

  In the autumn of 1762 the master of a china shop, Mr Shann, asked to be transported for life rather than endure the punishment of the pillory. But his request was refused. When he was put on the wooden contraption at the upper end of Cheapside ‘the populace then fell upon the wretch in the pillory, tore off his coat, waistcoat, shirt, hat, wig and breech, and then pelted and whipped him in a most severe manner’. A ballad was printed for the occasion, in which the women were portrayed as saying ‘flog him!’, ‘here’s a fair mark’, ‘cut it off’; one of them, hurling a piece of ripe fruit, called out ‘take this buggume pear’. The victims sometimes died of their injuries before being taken down. Some were blinded. In the spring of 1780, after a particularly vicious episode, Edmund Burke rose in the House of Commons to lament this cruel punishment during which ‘the poor wretch fell down dead on the stand of the instrument’. He had been too short to stand upright and therefore hung from the pillory by his neck. Burke added that the other man in the pillory ‘was so maimed and hurt by what had been thrown at him, that he now lay without hope of recovery’. There were some attempts to bring the local officials to justice, but of course to no avail.

  It was widely believed that the punishments fitted the crime. In William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1675–9) the jurist remarks that same-sex activity was ‘of so dark a nature that the accusation if false deserves a punishment inferior only to the crime itself’; the crime was ‘not fit to be named’. But it was named, not least in the courts. In a political journal, Old England (1750), it was stated that ‘the Abomination is now notorious: our courts of justice have had it before them’. A great earthquake shook London in February 1750, and it was widely believed that it had been provoked by divine wrath against sodomitical sin.

  It was considered to be contagious. When in 1760 a labourer attempted to assault a sixteen-year-old pupil of Dulwich College, the Crown counsel suggested that, had he been successful in committing ‘this horrid and most detestable crime, he would have infected all the others’. It is not clear what the lawyer meant, other than to allude to the general anxiety that sodomy provoked. It was part of the urban darkness, as a witness testified in 1761. ‘I am a butcher, my shop is in Leadenhall market; as I come home from Leadenhall market, I come through the Cross-keys, there is a very dark passage. I have frequently run against men there, and I never could tell the reason for it.’ He discovered the reason on the night of 28 July when ‘I saw two bad men in a very indecent posture’. They were whispering. He entered his own house and beckoned to his servant. ‘Do not go to bed, John. Follow me down. I believe there are a couple of very bad fellows in the alley.’ The butcher and his servant ‘laid hold’ of the men until the watch was called. Another male couple were arrested for having sex in a coach along the Strand after dark; one of them, John Gill, was known locally as Miss Beasley. He had been dressed in a petticoat, satin shoes and silk stockings when he was taken. It cannot be known how many of these men were mistaken for women in the heat of the moment. ‘Mollies’ in this period also became known as ‘madge mulls’.

  Two eminent queers were given extraordinary publicity in 1772 in a number of London newspapers, from the Daily Advertiser to the General Evening Post. Thomas Jones, of the Royal Regiment or Artillery, was a figure in what was then known (albeit in a different sense) as ‘the gay world’. He enjoyed appearing in masquerades. It can be inferred that masquerades were also occasions for the amorous male to seek out another of his kind. They were also the venue for male tranvestites such as Princess Seraphina and Miss Beasley.

  Francis Hay, thirteen years old, lived opposite ‘Captain’ Jones in St Martin’s Court. Jones often noticed the boy, and gave him halfpence. One day in the summer of 1772 Jones came up to him and told him that he had a knee-buckle to be mended. He took the boy into his chambers where, as the boy testified, ‘he pulled down my breeches and then his own … he set me in an elbow chair; he set me down and kissed me a little; then he made me lay down with my face on the chair, and so he came behind me; he put his cock into my bunghole’. The following day the boy reappeared and Jones ‘made me rub his cock up and down till some white stuff came again’. Young Francis Hay was too ashamed to speak out, but was eventually convinced to do so. When he was asked why he had not protested sooner he replied that he thought his uncle would ‘get business’ out of it. The imperatives of trade were very strong in eighteenth-century London.

  Jones was eventually sentenced to death, a verdict changed to transportation much to the disgust of the London crowd who were looking forward to a good hanging with all the trimmings. His case had become so well known that female prostitutes would call out ‘Captain Jones! Captain Jones!’, taunting any potential client who had scutt
led off after rejecting their advances.

  Another ‘monster’ or ‘horrid wretch’ or ‘detestable and obnoxious beast’, who shared the obloquy of 1772, was Samuel Drybutter. He was called in the press ‘the celebrated toyman’, by which was meant that he kept a stall selling watches and trinkets. But he was also believed to be the leader of the Macaroni Club. He was reported previously to have offered Jones a ‘back room’ on the first floor with ‘a convenient back door’. After the commutation of Jones’s death sentence some of the public prints published an advertisement saying that ‘Mr Dr-b-tt-r’s club are desired to meet at the Gomorrhah, tomorrow evening, to consider of a proper address of thanks to the throne for the respite of brother Jones. The Macaroni, Dilettanti, and other Italian clubs will bring up the rear of the cavalcade, all dressed in white linen breeches.’

  This juvenile humour spilled over in the street. It was now considered inadvisable to wear white trousers. Drybutter was now so well known that he was recognised, and became the object of public revenge. He had written that Jones should not have been condemned to death ‘for his particular taste’. In one coffee house a customer poured chocolate over him, saying that this was ‘his particular taste’; at another eating house he was basted with dripping, rolled in sawdust and covered in sauce. Eventually he moved to Paris to escape the mob.

  ‘Suspicion gave birth to watchful observation,’ the Public Ledger affirmed, ‘and from a strict observation of Macaroni tribe … Take warning, therefore, ye smirking group of TIDDY DOLLS.’ Macaronis were walking fashion plates who spoke and ate in an excessively fastidious manner; their hair was fashioned into beehives and pillars, which gave them a perpendicular Italian air. The Oxford Magazine of 1770 described the macaroni as ‘neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender lately started up among us. It is called a macaroni. It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.’ It was very queer indeed. The ‘tiddy doll’ was a junior version of the same tendency, perhaps derived from the phrase ‘to tiddle’ or to treat fondly. The supposed model was a gingerbread salesman who wore a gold suit, a laced hat with ostrich plume, a ruffled shirt and silk stockings. He also had a ready and caustic wit. Such overdressed eccentrics, bordering on queerness, were part of the panoply of London.

  Other men were pursued by what might be known as vigilantes; the call went up in the streets of ‘suck prick!’ or ‘cocksucker’. There are some cases of fellatio in the court records, but they are less frequent than references to sodomy or attempted sodomy. In The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases (1838), a pencil portrait of an alert if wary individual has a caption: ‘Portrait of J.T.D., aged forty … he was a day labourer, he had been insane for four years before his death, and was so much addicted to this unnatural vice that it was necessary to seclude him from other patients, who he continually annoyed; on one occasion the mouth of an idiot boy was the recipient: he died a few months ago of phthisis pulmonalis.’

  It was a time, also, when disaffected servants might accuse their masters of attempted sexual abuse. Samuel Foote, a theatrical manager and comic performer, was in 1776 accused of assaulting his coachman, John Sangster, ‘with an intent to commit buggery’. According to Sangster, Foote had recited all the benefits that his servant had received from him, including treatment for the measles, and added that ‘the best recompense you can make is to let me have a fuck at you’. Fortunately for the accused, Sangster had muddled up his dates, and it was proved beyond doubt that Foote was not in town on the alleged occasion. Foote was acquitted but the strain of the trial may have been partly responsible for the stroke that killed him less than a year later. It should be mentioned that his noble and gentlemanly friends rallied around on the grounds that ‘no man who kept male servants in his house would be safe from calumny’. How often, and how many, masters and servants were compromised is open to question.

  It was still quite usual, however, for travellers to sleep with one another in the inns along the route of their journeys. One verse of the 1770s pointed the moral:

  Observe this rule – ne’er pull your breeches off,

  From health-restoring slumbers strive to keep,

  Or ten to one you are buggered in your sleep.

  Richard Read was sharing a bed with Roger Sweetman in the Crown of Lad Lane, when Sweetman tried to penetrate him. Read gave him ‘two or three good pelts over the head’ and said to ‘take care for the future, never offer any such thing any more to any man, if you do you will get into a hobble’. ‘Hobble’ is no longer used, but its meaning is perfectly clear.

  Better-natured encounters were recorded. William Procter, grocer, approached Thomas Readshaw, undertaker, with a question.

  ‘What do you think of a good prick?’

  ‘I don’t do much in that way, but when I do, I have five guineas. But as I have taken a liking to you, I’ll oblige you with two.’

  They were caught in flagrante.

  Of course rumour flourished at Whitehall and the court. Few politicians, especially those who remained unmarried, escaped without a verbal or pictorial whipping in the public prints. It was said of Pitt the Younger, for example, that he was ‘stiff to everyone but a lady’. But the records suggest that the principal victims of the law were poor and unmarried. Sodomy was often associated with luxury and effeminacy but it could also be the companion of degradation and misery.

  15

  Rump riders

  Public opinion in England seems to have turned against queers, male and female, by the 1790s. The German traveller Johann von Archenholz remarked that ‘in no country are such infamous pleasures spoken of with greater detestation’. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, another traveller noted that ‘the kiss of friendship between men is strictly avoided as inclining towards the sin regarded in England as more abominable than any other’.

  This might perhaps have been the result of increasing numbers or increased visibility or, more likely, the consequence of that strict division between the sexes that became more and more prominent in the years leading to the Victorian ascendancy. Whatever the cause, male and female cross-dressing became much rarer by the late eighteenth century, as did the fashion for masquerade. Women should be women, and men should be men. It was possible to consider same-sex passion as a pathological condition pertaining to the individual. Where once it had been a question of acts that might or might not be prosecuted, now it was a question of persons with a distinct tendency to sin which might corrupt the neighbourhood.

  Executions for sodomy reached a peak in the first decades of the nineteenth century, when over eighty men were hanged for the offence between 1806 and 1835. They were not all dispatched in London, since some of them were in the navy, but the city bore the brunt of prosecution and death. This was precisely the time when hanging for sodomy came to an end on the mainland of Europe and when in certain countries sexual relations between men were decriminalised. On the Continent no executions for the offence were carried out after 1791. In England they carried on with more vehemence. Its more ferocious penalties may in fact have been prompted by an effort to separate the country from Europe and, in particular, by moral panic at the prospect of a French invasion. The queers were the enemy within, upon whom public fears and anxieties could be directed. Homosexuality was a foreign vice. It was un-English. By 1810 many queers had been arrested, and the number was such that it led to openly expressed fears that the contagion was spreading out of control. The truth was that police surveillance had been increasing, leading in turn to more prosecutions, and to a clamour for further preventive measures. In 1810 the prisons were segregated between sodomites, apprentices and soldiers.

  In 1808 Lord Liverpool, then the home secretary, ordered that the gates of Hyde Park and St James’s Park be locked at night to ‘prevent those scandalous practices in such a way that the public is kept ignorant of the disgrace of them’. This was a nineteenth-century variant of the medieval edic
t that sodomy was not to be named among Christians. The Vagrancy Act of 1824 had much the same purpose as the edict of Lord Liverpool. The police were allowed to arrest anyone ‘wandering in the public streets or public highways, or in any place of public resort, and behaving in a riotous or indecent manner’. This could mean anything or nothing. It was a catch-all provision, very useful for those officers who suspected everything but could prove very little. The prosecutions for queer ‘misdemeanours’ now increased, and of course it was not unusual for the police to lure or entrap the unwary out of misplaced zeal or in the expectation of a bribe.

  Patrick Colquhoun, stipendiary magistrate in Queen Square, had already taken preventive measures in 1806. He wrote to the magistrates urging them to keep special watch upon James Samuel Oliver Massey, or Miller, or Millwood, who ‘had long been in the habit of seducing drum boys belonging to the King’s Guards’. He was described as having ‘something of the appearance of a decayed gentleman, wears a silver mounted eye glass suspended by a black ribbon round his neck … His greatest amusement is to attend military parades, where he never fails to use his glass in examining the appearance of the young men and drum boys.’ The boys who succumbed to such advances were known as ‘butterflies’. Some of these butterflies had eager admirers. William Beckford wrote to a friend in the autumn of 1807, ‘if it is at all possible, go to see an angel called Saunders who is a tight-rope walker at the Circus Royal, and the certain captivator of every bugger’s soul’.