The Sinner's Grand Tour

by Tony Perrottet

  Today, the Hellfire Caves qualify as West Wycombe’s only tourist attraction. In the leafy hill above the village, the entrance is still framed by Dashwood’s original flint-work facade that evoked the nave of a Gothic church. We paid our entrance fee at the gift store, and ventured gingerly into the cave’s dark maw, where a sign soberly warns that “sufferers of dizzy spells, faints, blackouts and loss of balance should not enter.” The clammy air seeped down our collars as we followed the sepulchral corridors, peered into eerily lit niches that had been decorated with mannequins in period dress. Although this was supposed to be a family-friendly attraction, the modern Dashwoods couldn’t resist a few naughty references. Les distracted Henry from reading a plaque with the juicy “Nun’s Poem,” in which a young initiate confesses to a ménage à trois with an abbot, to an induced abortion, and to “Sapphic pleasures” with her fellow convent girls.

  The highlight is the cavernous Banqueting Hall, with four cozy little Monks’ Cells radiating from its perimeter, each containing moss-covered statues. The piped-in voice of one of the Dashwoods announced in plummy tones that these cells were once furnished and “used by the club members for privacy with their ladies.” It then added that the Hellfire Caves are now available for hire—“a unique and atmospheric venue for any dinner party or disco.” The chill air made this prospect seem dubious, but an attendant, who was fixing a light, assured me that they’d just had 220 people down for a birthday party. “There are some amazing sound effects in the tunnels,” he said. “Security is excellent: You don’t get gatecrashers down here, and no matter how much noise you make, you don’t disturb the neighbors. It even gets warm during parties. It’s amazing what body heat can do!”

  Ghostly statue within the “monks’ cells,” Hellfire Caves.

  Back at the George and Dragon pub, a few other lost souls gathered for dinner. We crouched together in a foggy window seat, gnawing on mutton chops washed down with porter ale. Henry drew pictures of vampires for some reason, which attracted concerned looks from the elderly publican. When I mentioned that we were in Buckinghamshire to hunt down relics of the sordid Hellfire Clubs, he raised one bloodshot eye.

  “Quite the family trip, then,” he said, dipping into a fresh pint.

  SEX AND SENSIBILITY

  I had yet to meet Lord Dashwood—the twelfth baronet, that is, Sir Edward. After all, who else could clear up the enduring mysteries of the Hellfire Club? The next morning, when I hoisted the black rotary phone again, the secretary explained that, why, yes actually, Sir Edward would be happy for me to drop by for a chat.

  “Really?” I asked, not quite believing it. But before she could change her mind, I dropped Les and the boys by the church mausoleum—there was an exciting urn that contained the withered heart of a Hellfire Club member—and drove off to meet the lord of the manor.

  At the forbidding iron gates of West Wycombe Park, I punched in a security code, and they creaked open to reveal a tree-lined carriage path stretching into the distance. In Sir Francis’s day, the estate had been scattered with erotic “follies,” which remained so notorious in the early 1800s that Jane Austen included sly allusions to them in Sense and Sensibility. (Even her use of the name Dashwood for her characters, argues Janine Barchas of the University of Texas, created “an uneasy atmosphere of wealth, infamy, and illicit sexuality.”) As I strolled along, I tried to spot any wicked relics in the shrubberies. The air was fragrant with freshly cut grass; a lake stretched to the left, with swans regally cruising beneath a statue of Neptune. Thoroughbred horses gamboled on the sea of green, and a vast Italianate mansion hovered on the crowning hilltop.

  Dazed by the feudal idyll, I must have become disoriented on the paths and ended up in the forest, until a man in a white four-wheel drive vehicle pulled up beside me.

  “Are you Sir Edward?” I asked.

  “Wish I was!” the warden guffawed before pointing me in the right direction.

  I finally found the master sitting behind a desk in the estate office near the stables. This modern descendent of the wicked old rake had the affable, professional demeanor of a village accountant, reminding me a little of the British actor-playwright Alan Bennett. He was in his mid-forties, bespectacled, and casual in khakis and a crimson polo shirt. This Lord Dashwood is a quiet family man; instead of deflowering local virgins, he spends his time managing the family’s five thousand acres of farmland. Still, I couldn’t help but rejoice at meeting the direct descendent, who might provide clues to the true club activities.

  Over tea and biscuits, Sir Edward was quick to defend his ancestor’s reputation, arguing that the popular concentration on his sex life does him an injustice.

  “Sir Francis wasn’t crazy,” he insisted. “He was just a tremendous, larger-than-life character. And he had bloody good fun. He traveled a hell of a lot. He supported the arts. He developed the first semaphore system.” (The golden ball on the church steeple wasn’t just for boozing—apparently Dashwood used mirrors to flash coded messages as far as Oxford, about twenty miles away.) “He looked after his villagers in quite an enlightened way. There were so many facets to his life, which is probably why he got on so well with Benjamin Franklin. But, yes, he was also very self-indulgent—a bit like Richard Branson today.”

  And the order? “Oh, it was a good, fun men’s club,” Sir Edward said. “Yes, they all dressed up and drank a hell of a lot, and, yes, there were women involved. But look at the men themselves. They were very erudite; they loved the classics, astronomy, and astrology. They weren’t into black magic. The charges of Satanism are rubbish. But they were interested in exotic philosophies. Eastern mysteries fascinated them.”

  Of course, he added mischievously, the aura of sexual depravity has always been excellent for business. In fact, if it weren’t for the devilish eighteenth-century reprobate, the Dashwood family would be in dire financial straits. It was hard to believe now, but two generations ago, West Wycombe Park was bankrupt, Sir Edward admitted. The mansion was a wreck, with most of its period furniture auctioned off and many of its faux-finished walls whitewashed. But in the 1950s, income from the Hellfire Caves helped fund a recovery. Sir Edward’s father had renovated the house; he even tracked down many of the original household artworks and furniture. A deal was cut with the National Trust to allow paying visitors, many of whom are lured by the Hellfire Club’s dastardly reputation, into the lower floors of the mansion. Today, the estate is a popular film location for period costume dramas and it certainly isn’t turning down any ghost-hunting TV shows where psychics with infrared cameras overnight inside the caves, trying to capture tormented souls on film. “It brings in the crowds,” Sir Edward shrugged.

  So had any of the club artifacts survived? I asked. Were there any relics left hidden beneath the floorboards, any of the robes, skull cups, or corrupted sermon books?

  Sir Edward shook his head sadly. “The nineteenth-century Dashwoods were less enthusiastic about the club,” he said. “Any relics have vanished.”

  Afterward, I visited the Dashwoods’ Palladian mansion, a kaleidoscope of Italian marble, chandeliers, classical busts, and tapestries. The dining room boasted portraits of Sir Francis himself waving tipsily in Ottoman garb and one of his female cronies, the luscious actress Fanny Murray, exposing her left breast with an insouciant smile. In the estate grounds, I finally found Sir Francis’s Temple of Venus, where a grotto’s entrance and curved walls were designed to evoke a vagina and a pair of spread legs. The entrance is still guarded by a statue of Mercury, the god who guides travelers on safe journeys and who, incidentally, taught humankind to masturbate.

  It had started to rain, so I slipped inside the damp crevice and sat on a marble block. It was not a bad place to take stock of the evidence on the Order of St. Francis.

  The view from the cave beneath the Temple of Venus, one of the “erotic follies” on the Dashwood estate.

  In the end, historians are left to piece together what really happened at the order from the few
fragmentary and dubious sources—the club cellar book, which listed liquor consumption, and reports from former members and guests, including scurrilous verse by the poet Charles Churchill. But here in the womb of the estate, it wasn’t hard to imagine the club at its prime. On warm summer nights, guests would arrive at the abbey via luxury gondola, alight on the docks and wander through the torch-lit garden, glimpsing statues with suggestive inscriptions in Latin amid the foliage. Once inside, they would be met by the twelve hooded “apostles” in their long white habits and the chief voluptuary, Sir Francis, whose red robe was trimmed with rabbit fur. According to a 1779 account purporting to be by a female guest, Nocturnal Revels, each friar was allowed to invite “a Lady of cheerful disposition, to improve the general hilarity.” The aristocratic “nuns” wore masks until all the males had arrived, so that they could leave unrecognized if an acquaintance—or husband—was among the guests. In a candlelit dining room where a grand mantelpiece was inscribed with the words FAY CE QUE VOULDRAS (a quote from Rabelais, “Do As You Please”), a long table was resplendent with polished silver, crystal, and “food of a most exquisite kind and in gargantuan proportions.” There were plentiful mockeries of Catholicism and the Papacy. A satiric grace was recited in Latin, and fine claret was then drunk from cups that had been fashioned from human skulls. The latest pornography was read from volumes bound as sermon books. Scraps of food were tossed to the club mascot, a baboon dressed as a priest. But further details will always be vague. In the late 1800s, a Buckinghamshire historian named Thomas Langley tracked down Sir Francis’s elderly housekeeper at Medmenham and quizzed her on the specifics of club meetings. Apparently he was so horrified by her stories that he decided they “might as well be buried in oblivion.”

  The killjoy.

  “Where to next, Dad?” Henry asked as we packed up the car. I sensed a certain relief that the George and Dragon would be behind us. “Somewhere warm, right?”

  He seemed to think that if we just hit the road we could end up in Hawaii. I cleared my throat nervously. “Well … not exactly.”

  The most perverse and resilient Hellfire Club of all actually thrived in a land more often associated with bagpipes and offal than riotous pleasures of the flesh. Founded in 1732, the Beggar’s Benison lasted in Scotland for over a century, to 1836. By a stroke of good fortune, the original club minutes have been passed down through the ages, so there is no doubt that its meetings were little short of bizarre. Even more exciting to me, there were indications that the twisted club relics had also survived.

  Before leaving New York, I’d found a thin volume privately printed in Edinburgh in 1892. The frontispiece warned that the text was “Solely Intended for Antiquaries”—Victorian-speak for dirty-minded connoisseurs—and it included shadowy photographs of some quite disturbing Benison memorabilia. I pored over nineteenth-century travel guidebooks to Scotland for clues to their whereabouts. In one 1860 opus, The Fife Coast from Queensbury to Fifeness, the author, Henry Fairnie, alluded to the Beggar’s Benison’s celebrations that were carried out “with the want of refinement characteristic of the age.” Most important, he refers to a cache of artifacts “still in existence at Anstruther.…”

  “Where?” Les asked.

  “Anstruther. The original home of the Beggar’s Benison. It’s a fishing village north of Edinburgh. They met in a tavern there—and it still exists!”

  We pored over a map. Anstruther was located on the East Neuk of Fife, by the Firth of Forth, which sounded like somewhere Bilbo Baggins might hang out.

  The newspaper showed the weather forecast in Scotland—rain, rain, rain, sometimes heavy, sometimes light—but I tried to remain upbeat, playing up the Gothic atmosphere. It was in these soggy recesses of the British Isles, I explained, that the darkest secrets were best preserved. History somehow congealed in the damp.

  What’s more, I swore that we could get there in just a couple of days, if we drove nonstop, that is. Henry groaned and buried his face in his hands.

  LIFTING THE KILT

  Fifty miles north of Edinburgh, Fife’s windswept cliffs seem carved by a giant bread knife. Back in the eighteenth century, this whole coastline was a gloomy expanse of coal pits and salt pans, where villagers eked out a harsh life pickling herrings or smuggling whiskey. The East Neuk still isn’t exactly picnic territory today. Following the lead of the Scots, we bought fish and chips and ate them sitting in the car in the rain, staring out to sea. Les pressed her nose to the window: “Ooh, there’s some lovely filth down here, Dennis.”

  The Tripadvisor reviews of the Smuggler’s Inn in Anstruther made the George and Dragon sound like the Plaza.

  “The pits!”

  “Dirty and shabby …”

  “Sleep in your car! You’ll be more comfortable!”

  “An absolute disgrace …”

  “Carpets are stained, rooms smell …”

  “Aweful!” [sic]

  I was sure it must be another exaggeration. “Let’s hit the road!” I cried, with all the panache of Chevy Chase in a National Lampoon movie, and put on the Proclaimers CD for the fifth time that day.

  The tide was out when we arrived in Anstruther, leaving a lush layer of pungent seaweed. Trawlers lay on their sides like beached whales, and a forlorn web of nets was drying on the stone walls. Every so often, tiny rays of sunlight peeked through the gray clouds just long enough to remind us of what we were missing. I left the gang beachcombing. They have a mania for the beach glass in any country, and in Anstruther there was treasure everywhere, as if shipwrecks had been depositing the stuff for centuries. I happily went off on my own obsessive hunt, followed by cawing gulls.

  Nobody was peddling Hellfire Club history in Anstruther. In a salt-encrusted museum devoted to fishing, the village’s local historian, Christine Keay, gave an involuntary shudder when I mentioned the Beggar’s Benison. “Every now and then, some artifact will resurface at auction in Edinburgh or London, and there will be a flurry of interest in the club,” she said. “But, no, we’re not promoting it as a tourist attraction.”

  And the relics? She didn’t think there was anything left in Anstruther.

  I slogged back across the seaweed to inspect the foundations of Castle Dreel, where the club held its first meeting in 1732. The group’s enigmatic name—which in full was The Most Ancient and Puissant Order of the Beggar’s Benison and Maryland—was born of a story about King James V. While traveling in Scotland incognito, he asked a local wench, “a buxom gaberlunzie [beggar] lass,” to carry him across a river on her back. Rewarded with a gold coin, the delighted woman offered the king her blessing: “May prick or purse never fail you.” (In today’s terms, may you never be in need of cash or Viagra.) This beggar’s benison—that is, blessing—became the club credo.

  But club members found Castle Dreel too decrepit even in 1732, so its gatherings were moved to a discreet neighboring tavern, today called the Smuggler’s Inn.

  Anstruther, home of the Beggar’s Benison self-abuse club, with the remains of Castle Dreel visible to the left.

  With its back entrance down stone steps to a slimy canal once used for contraband deliveries, it was a contender for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. If anything, the panicked Tripadvisor reviews had understated the aura of decay. Like most pubs of its age, every wall had the skewed angles of a German Expressionist film set. A half dozen moth-eaten drunks swaying back and forth at the bar, like bachelor sea lions who had left their pride in defeat to spend their last days huddled together, breaking wind. The scent of sour bile added to the mix indicated a truly committed boozer’s venue.

  Undaunted, I traipsed upstairs and found a weather-beaten little housekeeper. She looked at me as if I were insane.

  “You want a room?” she asked. “Here?”

  The rotund owner, who was gnawing on potato chips in his office, looked me up and down suspiciously, as if he knew just what I was up to.

  “Take your pick, mate,” he said, jerking his thumb toward
the empty rooms in the rear of the establishment. I chose two small chambers with ocean views—that is, across the village graveyard.

  “There’s something sick about this place,” Les whispered, when we’d all gathered in the family lounge upstairs, which was designed like Captain Hook’s cabin. “Not just seedy—sick. It has a really weird vibe.”

  The urchins, sensing our unease, huddled together as if they might be dragged off for sacrifice.

  “Just one night,” I promised.

  We urgently needed a distraction. In a darkened annex, which had exposed stone walls from the original eighteenth-century tavern, I noticed the housekeeper was helping a technician set up a karaoke system. I asked her about the gentleman’s club and she paused long enough to tell me that a historian had once visited here and asked the same thing. This room was the oldest part of the pub, so it must have been here that any gatherings had occurred.