A Whiff of Brimstone: the Original Hell-fire Club

Tags

Bishop Wake, blasphemy, Duke of Wharton, eighteenth century history, England, George I, Georgian clubs, hell fire, Hell-fire Club, hellfire, jacobites, Lucy Loftus, Philip, satanism, secret societies

London 1721:  The King uncovers Satanism in High Society

On the 28 April 1721 the London Gazette reported on the Governments attempts to quash the nefarious activities of a group of young persons, both men and women, drawn from the cream of society, whose outrageously irreligious behaviour was thought to be causing moral anarchy and endangering the very fabric of society.  Although not named directly, the main target of the King and the government’s legislation was the notorious Hell-Fire Club.

His Majesty have received Information, which gives great Reason to suspect that there have lately been and still are, in and about the Cities of London and Westminster, certain scandalous Clubs or Societies of young Persons who meet together, and in the most impious and blasphemous Manner insult the most sacred Principles of Holy Religion, affront Almighty God himself, and corrupt the Minds and Morals of one another;

London Gazette, 28th April 1721

A Tabloid Drama unfolds

As soon as the activities of the Clubs became public knowledge, moral panic and prurient interest walked hand in hand and the flames of public interest were fanned enthusiastically by the press.  The early eighteenth century was a time of coffee houses and clubs where newspapers were widely circulated, read and re-read, often read out loud to those who could not themselves read.  The news that there was a blasphemous secret society or club, right in the heart of London’s high society was a sensation.  People clammered for details of the clubs membership and activities.  It was even rumoured that one of the Queen’s Ladies in Waiting was a member – leading King George I to order an investigation of his own household.

The Club was alleged to have met in Westminster, Conduit Street and Somerset House and the illustration below published in 1721 in a pamphlet entitled ‘The Hellfire Club: kept by a society of Blasphemers’ shows an imagined meeting of the Somerset House Hellfire club.

‘The diabolical maskquerade, or the dragons-feast as acted by the Hell-Fire-Club, at Somerset House in the Strand’. 1721 © Trustees of the British Museum

According to Appleby’s Journal, reporting after the club had come to public attention, the Hellfire club comprised about 40 persons of whom, scandalously, 15 were ladies of quality.  Appleby’s also reported that members routinely dressed up as Biblical characters, took the names of patriarchs and sought to mock Christianity.  They imbibed ‘Hellfire punch’ and dined on Holy Ghost Pie (an imitation host made with angelic root), Devils Loins and Breast of Venus. It was also claimed that if a member died they became the club’s ‘Ambassador in Hell’.  One can almost imagine Appleby’s Journal as the ‘Daily Mail’ of its day – with stolidly respectable readers being at once shocked, outraged and titillated by these antics.

A Touch of Brimstone, Avengers, 1966, produced by Brian Clemens and Julian Wintle

From Blasphemy to Satanism

The most damning accusation levelled at the Hellfire club was of mocking the Trinity: nibbling on Holy Ghost Pie while dressed as a patriarch and fornicating with the Lady Hellfire was pretty much guaranteed to get the Establishment frothing at the mouth…. Mists Weekly Journal from 20th February 1720 referred to the Hellfire club as having:

“transcendent Malignity: deriding the forms of Religion as a Trifle.  By a natural Progression they turn to Substance; with Lucifer they fly at Divinity”  concluding that “Ladies shield their faces because of the whiff of brimstone when they pass” (Lord p52)

Baphomet, Public Domain image via Wikimedia

Actual reliable evidence about the activities of the club is extremely scarce, as Evelyn Lord points out in her book ‘The Hell-Fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies’. Most of the alleged activities reported above appeared in Journals well after the club’s existence was exposed.  And, even in their lurid and oh so very tabloid accounts, evidence of actual Devil Worship seems limited to toasting the devil and generally misbehaving.  So why then, did the Hell-fire club(s) gain a reputation for Satanic practices?

The answer seems to lie in the mind of Bishop Wake the Bishop helped to draft the Bill against the Hell-fire club(s).  His main aim was to uphold Anglican Orthodoxy and the settlement of 1688 against the rise of Jacobitism and the perceived Catholic threat following the failed Jacobite uprising in 1715.  He considered that anyone denying the Trinity must ipso-facto be in league with the Devil.  Hence the Hell-fire Club’s activities fell by default into the category of not only blasphemy, but effectively Satanism as well.

But was there more to the suppression of the Hell-fire club than upholding the state religion and protecting the morals of the nation?  It would seem so…

The man behind the Diabolical Maskquerade

Philip, The 1st Duke of Wharton, public domain image via Wikipedia

Enter Philip, Duke of Wharton.  Brilliant, charming, charismatic, rebellious, debauched, rake-hell and libertine extraordinaire.  The dyspeptic Alexander Pope described him as: “The scorn and wonder of our days” (Cruikshank p390)

Philip was born in 1698 the grandson of a Puritan (!), son of the author of the Lillibularo and Lucy Loftus (a lady whose beauty had been the toast of the famous Kit Cat Club).

Philip was given a vigorous education, ranging from maths to metaphysics, the classics to Shakespeare.  He also excelled at languages and was a talented mimic.  Destined for a fast-track career as a statesman, his family were horrified when at 17 he eloped with the daughter of a penniless Major-General.  It was rumoured that his father was so distraught that the marriage could not be annulled that he died only weeks later.  No doubt a sad event, but one that left the wild-child heir free of paternal control.

In order to reign in the wayward heir, he was packed off by his trustees on a Grand Tour of the continent.  Not the usual fun places like France and Italy where a good time could definitely be had; but to the austerely protestant Holland, Hanover and Geneva.  However this dull itinerary did not suit the wayward Duke, he ditched his tutors in Geneva in 1716 and headed directly for the epi-centre of sophistication and the heart of the Jacobite court in exile – Paris.  Here an anecdote relating to his meeting with a Jacobite exile named Gwynne, living in a Parisian garret, which reveals his already outrageous personality:

“Philip said he hoped the stairs didn’t lead up to heaven, because if they did he would go down again, and invite Gwynne to join him in Hell, where he was to be the Devil’s lord of the bed-chamber”  (Ashe p52)

After various other brushes with the Jacobite court in exile, including a meeting with the Old Pretender himself, Philip returned via Ireland to England.

Perhaps concerned by this prominent figure’s Jacobite exploits, George I gave Philip a Dukedom in 1718. If he hoped it would cement his loyalty, George was wrong.  Taking up his role as statesman Wharton soon became a vociferous critic of Robert Walpole, the de-facto Prime Minister of England and representative of Whig party interests.  In his opposition to Walpole and the Whig parties hold over politics Geoffrey Ashe, in his book ‘The Hell-Fire Clubs’, credits Philip with political importance as being the first to see opposition to the Whig ‘stranglehold’ on eighteenth century politics and patronage as crucial.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu by Jonathan Richardson the Younger public domain , via Wikimedia

Given his unconventional and rebellious nature it is unsurprising that Philip was the founding member and creator of the original Hell-fire club.  As noted above Clubs were all the rage in the very sociable eighteenth century – and not all of them were as respectable as the Kit Cat Club. In 1712 the Mohocks, a gang of gentlemen, terrorised London with their violent antics; and Daniel Defoe wrote of “a pagan circle, near Old Charing, where God was owned, sworn by, imprecated, blasphemed, and denied all in one breath”. (Lord p47). 

Wharton appears to have started the Hell-fire Club at sometime in 1720.  Evelyn Lord notes that his son died at about the same time, Wharton had left his wife and began associating with the unpleasantly nick-named ‘Rape Master General’: Colonel Charteris.  Perhaps the two of them dreamt up the Hellfire Club as the ultimate rebellion against the solidly mercantile respectability promoted by Georgian Society. 

Members were said to include Viscount Hillsborough and Sir Edmund O’Brien.  It was rumoured the famous Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was also a member. Evelyn Lord comments that Lady Mary first met and became friends with Wharton when he was living in Twickenham in 1722 – a year after the club folded.  Lady Mary appears to have written about a later club called the Schemers ( an orgiastic club set up by Lord Hillsborough) and this reference has become conflated with that of the Hellfire club. Her evident friendship with the scandalous duke added fuel to the fire and her name became linked to the Hellfire club.  (Lord p58).

Sedition and Secret Societies

The reasons that the Government feared clubs such as the Hell-fire club was that they could be hot-beds of sedition.  England in the first quarter of the eighteenth century wasn’t the bucolic fantasy of Fielding’s Tom Jones. Ever since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the protestant William of Orange had supplanted the Catholic James II, the Anglican’s had been edgy.

The Old Pretender Lands in Scotland, 1715. Public Domain via Wikimedia

The Government needed a tame clergy but not one with pretensions to Catholic style priestly interventions with the divine.  Hence the Convocation of the Church of England (who favoured this  view) was suspended in 1717.  The remaining clergy became pluralistic ‘yes-men’.  Nevertheless maintaining the illusion of their moral authority was still important to the Establishment – especially after the failed Jacobite rebellion of 1715.  Add to this the disastrous South Sea Bubble Speculation that bankrupted everyone from Dukes to housemaids and the stability of early Georgian Society comes seriously into question.  Many people genuinely believed that the nation was being punished by God – so in the popular mind having a society of blaspheming Devil Worshipper’s at large in the capital might have been seen as a symptom of the declining morals of the nation and further anger God.

Neither could the government risk having possibly seditious secret societies such as the Hell-fire Club, run by a suspected Jacobite sympathiser, remain unchecked as they felt it could risk political instability and moral anarchy.  Add to this the personal enmity between Wharton and Walpole (who was the prime mover behind the Act) and it becomes clear that the Hell-fire Club’s days were numbered.

Spawn of Hell-fire

The Club, which had run for less than a year, was finished by 1721.  Banned by an Act of Parliament – although nobody was ever prosecuted.  The Duke of Wharton eventually left England and died in debt at the age of only 33 after a characteristically eventful exile.  He was eventually immortalised in fiction as the anti-hero Lovelace in Samuel Richardson’s novel ‘Clarissa Harlowe’.

The Hellfire club however, did not disappear from memory.  As well as the Grub Street Hacks who did much to create its infamy, many respectable persons wrote of it in their memoirs:  Mrs Delaney, William Whiston and others.  And it spawned many other Hellfire groups – particularly in Ireland (Wharton had spent some time in Ireland – even charming the notoriously misanthropic Dean Swift, of Gulliver’s Travels fame).  Many of those Irish clubs had much more claim to a Satanic reputation than Wharton’s club of blasphemers.

One final legacy left by the original Hellfire Club was that Wharton, in his will bequeathed what was left of his estate to the Lord Treasurer, one George Doddington.  ‘Bubb’ Doddington would later become infamous due to his association with perhaps the most famous Hell-fire club of all: The Monks of Medmenham.  But that is a tale for another day!

Sources

Ashe, Geoffrey, 2005, The Hell-Fire Clubs, Sutton
Cruikshank, Dan, 2010, The Secret History of Georgian London, Windmill
Lord, Evelyn, The Hell-Fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies, 2008, Yale

George Selwyn – The Gentleman Sadist

Tags

blasphemy, Eccentrics, eighteenth century history, Engish History, Friars, George Selwyn, hangings, Hellfire club, Horace Walpole, Maria Fagiani, Mie Mie, Monks of Medmenham, necrophilia, tyburn

George Selwyn by Joshua Reynolds

“It is actually possible to become amateurs in suffering. I have heard of men who have travelled into countries where horrible executions were to be daily witnessed, for the sake of that excitement which the sight of suffering never fails to give, from the spectacle of a tragedy, or an auto-da-fe, down to the writhings of the meanest reptile on whom you can inflict torture, and feel that torture is the result of your own power. It is a species of feeling of which we never can divest ourselves.” (1)

So wrote Charles Maturin in his 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer – and the inspiration for this insight into the darker side of human nature?  George Selwyn (1719 -1791), heir to a fortune, kicked out of Oxford for Blasphemy, MP to a rotten borough (or two), rake, wit and notorious necrophile.

Drunken japes or bloody blasphemy?

George Selwyn, second son of a Gloucestershire gentleman farmer, was sent to Eton and Oxford as befitted his rank in society.  Here he met his lifelong friend the renowned wit and inveterate letter-writer Horace Walpole.  Although Horace Walpole would eventually become famous for his novel ‘The Castle of Otranto’ a novel that was the fore-runner of many a famous Gothic novel, at this early stage Selwyn seems to have had the edge on the darker-side of human nature.

In fact George’s Oxford career was cut rather short one drunken evening in July 1745.  Having somehow successfully blagged a local silversmith into to handing over a sacred chalice that was being repaired for a church, George set out to parody the Christian Holy Communion.  Gathering together his chums he filled the chalice with red wine and then “made signs as though he was blooding at one of his arms, did apply the neck of the bottle of wine into the said arm…”(2) Following this he uttered the blasphemous words “Drink this in remembrance of me.”(3)

In 1745 that was enough to have you drummed out of Oxford however drunk you claimed to be.  Even pandering to the anti-Catholic feelings of the day – by claiming to have been mocking transubstantiation – did not save Selwyn’s university career.  Not that he seemed to mind very much.

A Clubbable Man

White’s Club London, sited here since 1778. Image by Paul Farmer 2009 [via Wikimedia]

In the eighteenth century it was important for a man to be ‘clubbable’.  To be able to socialise amongst his peers with poise, elegance and wit.  Despite, or perhaps because of, the somewhat sleepily affable persona that Selwyn exuded he was a hit.  He soon became a well-known figure at clubs such as Brookes’ and White’s (White’s was so notorious for gambling that Hogarth satirised it as a club where if a man collapsed outside, his body would be dragged into the club so bets could be laid on whether he was dead or not). Like most of his peers he was a keen gambler (and the aforementioned wager would no doubt have appealed to Selwyn’s macabre side) and he also had a ready wit.  His Bon Mots were the talk of the town, and many a time ‘Selwyn’s last‘ was recorded for posterity by Horace Walpole.  One of my favourites is the following slightly saucy retort:

Princess Amellia, by Jean Baptiste Van Loo

“Asked if Princess Amelia would have a guard, he replied with some indelicacy ‘now and then one, I suppose'”  (4)

Wraxall described his style as: “eyes turned up, his mouth set primly, a look almost of melancholy on his whole fact.” (5) One can just imagine this lugubrious delivery just adding to its comedic effect.

He didn’t just restrict his membership to the more usual gaming and drinking clubs.  Selwyn was, according to Geoffrey Ashe, one of the fully paid up members of Sir Francis Dashwood’s Monks of Medmenham – otherwise know as the Hellfire Club.  (Of which more in future posts).

Selwyn didn’t let his political career get in the way of pursuing his favourite pass-times – in fact in 40 years as an MP he is not credited with a single political speech and his main contribution seems to have been in amusing his fellow MPs by ‘Snoring in unison with Lord North’(6)

However witty his Bon Mots were, and however uneventful his political career was, George Selwyn has come down through posterity as a necrophile and the model (along with Algernon Swinburne) for Edmond De Goncourt’s ‘Gentleman Sadist’ in his novel La Faustin – why was this?

A connoisseur of the macabre

The idle prentice hanged at Tyburn by Hogarth.

It was an age when it was not unusual for people to look forward to attending public hangings (even children were hanged).  So popular was this gruesome spectator sport that you could even buy premium ‘grandstand’ seats at Tyburn in  the so-called ‘Mother Proctor’s Pews’ – Roy Porter notes that for the hanging of the infamous Lord Ferrers (no relation to Katherine Ferrers of Wicked Lady fame) the pews raked in £500 in profit.  Yet despite this, George Selwyn’s well-known predilection for executions and death was considered somewhat extreme even in his own day – Walpole relates the following tale that illustrates Selwyn’s pre-eminence in the subject:

“[Selwyn] told him, as a most important communication, that Arthur Moore had had his coffin chained to that of his mistress. ‘Lord! how do you know?’ asked Horace. ‘Why, I saw them the other day in a vault at St. Giles’s.’ ‘Oh! Your servant, Mr. Selwyn,’ cried the man who showed the tombs at Westminster Abbey, ‘I expected to see you here the other day when the old Duke of Richmond’s body was taken up.'” 

The Wharton’s, in their book ‘The Wits and Beaux of Society’, point out that Selwyn was in some ways a man of contradictions – one minute the toast of polite society with his bon mots, the next rooting about in coffins and extorting confessions from criminals remarking of him that: “George Augustus Selwyn famous for his wit, and notorious for his love of horrors”

Lord Lovat, image Wikimedia

This mixture of wit and gloom came to the fore following the execution of Lord Lovat the captured Jacobite rebel.  Some ladies objected to his having witnessed the execution to which he replied:

“‘I made full amends, for I went to see it sewn on again.’ He had indeed done so, and given the company at the undertaker’s a touch of his favourite blasphemy, for when the man of coffins had done his work and laid the body in its box, Selwyn, imitating the voice of the Lord Chancellor at the trial, muttered, ‘My Lord Lovat, you may rise.'” (7)

Selwyn hated to miss an execution and often got friends to give him full reports of any that he was unable to attend – however he did have some scruples.  On being asked why he did not attend the hanging of a criminal named Charles Fox (the same name as his friend the Whig statesman Charles James Fox) he is reported to have said:

“I make it a point never to attend rehearsals.” (OUCH!)

The most famous and likely apocryphal story attached to George Selwyn is that he was mistaken for an executioner on a busman’s holiday when he was spotted at the execution of Damiens in 1757.  Damiens made a pretty feeble attempt on the life of King Louise XV of France and was sentenced to a gruesome death:  torture with red-hot pincers before being slowly ripped limb from limb by horses.  The whole process took hours (with the unfortunate Damiens being alive for a considerable part of it).  A sentimental lady is reported to have objected to the barbarity of the proceedings – because the horses were whipped. Who said only the British are animal lovers!

Selwyn was spotted pushing his way to the front of the crowd to get a ringside view of the torture when a gentleman spotted him.  He asked Selwyn if he was himself an executioner come to observe proceedings.  Selwyn made the unforgettable reply:

“No Monsieur, I have not that honour: I am but an amateur”

Damiens before the judges. 18C via Wikimedia

For all of his charm, wit and affable nature, there is something chilling in his love of watching the suffering of others and in his fondness for watching corpses exhumed.  It is likely that this particular story has simply attached itself to his legend (it is also told of others) and he was often the butt of fanciful tales spread about by his friends (and rivals) in wit.  Lord Chesterfield and Sir Charles Hanbury Williams have been cited by the Wharton’s as possible sources of this tale, and of the rumour that Selwyn sometimes dressed as a woman in order to attend executions incognito. Nevertheless it does not seem too far out of character for Selwyn that – given the chance – his connoisseurs palate would not have relished such a scene of horror as presented by Damien.

A slightly more amusing anecdote has Lord Holland, on his death-bed, advising a servant that:

“If Mr. Selwyn calls, let him in: if I am alive I shall be very glad to see him, and if I am dead he will be very glad to see me.”

Sometimes his friends were able to use his love of the death-bed and corpses to their own ends – one story associated with Selwyn’s time at Whites Club relates to the election of Sheridan as a member.  Selwyn did not want Sheridan, a mere theatrical, elected to a gentleman’s club.  The only way to stop him repeatedly black-balling Sheridan was for Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, in cahoots with Charles Fox, to trick him out of the club with the promise of a juicy death-bed to attend!

The twilight years

Mie Mie by George Romney

Although friends such as Walpole, the Duke of Queensberry and Lord Carlisle seemed to have esteemed Selwyn and thought him of good heart despite his foibles, one of his passions might seem a little off-putting to the modern reader.  Selwyn never married and claimed to have only slept with women seven times in his entire life, the last being when he was 29.  Instead he transferred his affections to children.

Two little girls were the focus of his attention:  Anne Coventry daughter of one of the beautiful Gunning sisters, and more lastingly Maria ‘Mie Mie’ Fagniani daughter of the high living Marchese Fagniani and the Duke of Queensberry.   Despite there being no question that he was not the father, he was so obsessed with Mie Mie (right from her infancy) that he succeeded in persuading the Marchese to leave her child with him when she returned to the continent.  By the late 1770’s she and Selwyn were embroiled in a bitter dispute over custody.  Eventually Selwyn seems to have won and spent the rest of his life fussing over Mie Mie, despite her eventual disdain for him.  In his will he left the girl £33,000 (which along with the £150,000 left to her by Queensberry made her a very eligible heiress).

George Selwyn was a feature in society long after it had come to view him as a bit of a relic.  His good friend the Duke of Queensberry provides this description of him at a society dinner:

“George Selwyn, (who lived for society and continued in it till he looked  really like the waxwork figure of a corpse)”

It seems a fitting epitaph for a man who loved death so much.  Selwyn finally succumbed of that most upper class of diseases: Gout, in 1791.

George Selwyn, (standing), and friends by Henry Graves

George Selwyn’s legacy

George Selwyn was a wit and a necrophile.  He didn’t participate in any major events, he was hardly a mover and a shaker.  Nevertheless he did leave a legacy.  A somewhat unenviable one, based on his love of the macabre and his membership of the notorious Hellfire Club.  It is in literature that he is still remembered:  from Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, to Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal, Or the Adventures of a Guinea; to Edmond de Goncort’s La Faustin where he is fused with that other reputed sadist Algernon Swinburne. Although it is worth noting that despite selwyn’s love of  torture and executions this seems to have been a voyeuristic pleasure, and though this does seem to qualify him as a sadist there is at least no evidence to suggest he was a sexual sadist.  (Small mercies perhaps…?)

Whatever the modern take on George Selwyn, it is apparent that his willing embrace of the darker side of human nature holds an enduring fascination – whether we like to admit to ourselves or not.

I will leave the final words to a contemporary of Selwyn, a poet who thought that Selwyn would be a suitable successor for the Devil should Old Nick ever need a day off….

“The murmurs hush’d – the Herald straight proclaimed
S-l-n the witty next in order name’d
But he was gone to hear the dismal yells
Of tortur’d ghost and suffering criminals.
Tho’ summoned thrice, he chose not to return,
Charmed to behold the crackling culprits burn
With George all know ambition must give place
When there’s an execution in place” (8)

Finis Gloria Mundi by Juan de Valdes Leal c1670 via Wikimedia

Notes

1.  Maturin, Charles, Melmoth the Wanderer, 1820
2. White, T.H., The Age of Scandal, 1950
3. Ibid
4. Ibid
5. Wharton, G and P, The Wits and Beaux of Society Vol2
6. ibid
7. ibid
8. Combe, William, The Diaboliad, 1777

Sources

Ashe, Geoffrey, The Hellfire Clubs, Sutton, 2005
http://www.bartleby.com/344/357.html
Gothic Labyrinth http://omni.sytes.net/selwyn.htm
Porter, Roy, Engish Society in the Eighteenth Century, Penguin, 1982
Wharton Grace and Philip, Ed Justin Huntley Mccarthy MP, The Wits and Beaux of Society Vol2, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10797 2004 ed
White, T.H, The Age of Scandal, Folio Society, 1993 ed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Augustus_Selwyn_%28politician%29