Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (30 page)

Castlehaven was especially affectionate toward his page, Henry Skipwith, to whom he had already given a house and much money. It was revealed that he had forced Skipwith on his twelve-year-old stepdaughter Elizabeth (who had, in fact, been betrothed to James when they were both children, making her the earl’s daughter-in-law as well). The girl testified that Castlehaven had wanted her to bear Skipwith’s offspring as opposed to James’s, in order that the servant’s descendants could inherit Castlehaven’s property. The girl resisted as long as she could, but was ultimately forced to submit. While Castlehaven watched, the court heard, Skipwith inserted himself into Elizabeth’s tiny body using oil that his master had supplied. The process was repeated several times, always with Castlehaven in attendance.

Castlehaven inflicted similar brutality on Elizabeth’s mother, his second wife, Anne Stanley. He ordered his servant Giles Broadway to rape Stanley in her bed while Castlehaven held her down. Stanley testified that she had tried to kill herself with a knife immediately afterward. (This display of Lucretia-like virtue was in all probability a dramatic ploy, though the crime was ghastly enough. Stanley herself was no innocent, and would take many lovers in the coming years—including Skipwith himself as well as a house page who had also had sex with her husband.)

The jury’s vote against Castlehaven for abetting rape was almost unanimous, with just one dissenting vote. For the charge of sodomy, “a crime not to be named among Christians,” the vote was closer (15–7), but the majority was enough for him to die. In May, after Charles I refused to pardon him (this Charles being far less open-minded than his son), Castlehaven was brought to the chopping block on Tower Hill in London, where his grave had already been dug. Led to the execution site behind twelve men carrying a black velvet coffin, he ascended the scaffold, proclaimed his innocence for the last of many times, and addressed the assembled crowd: “I beseech you all, when you shall see the axe falling to separate my head from my body, that you will accompany my soul with your prayers to the Kingdom of Heaven where I hope to rest for ever.” He took off his collar and laid his head down. With a single blow, the executioner’s blade severed his head, which fell into a scarlet cloth held by servants. The head and body were then put into the ground. The fate of his soul is not known.

Castlehaven died for sex crimes, but his legal troubles had begun over money. The case began when James complained to the king that his father was squandering his inheritance on a male servant. James’s letter to his father explaining the charges focused on the money rather than morality. He accused Castlehaven of being ready to “sacrifice [their] ancient family to another,” and begged his father not to “strike out the difference between a servant and a son.” As Castlehaven later correctly pointed out, it was not illegal for him to give property to a servant, but that point was lost amid the storm of sex charges.

The prosecutors pulled no punches. Castlehaven’s treatment of his wife was likened to the cruelty of Rome’s worst emperors. It was deemed “in the highest degree against the bonds of nature for a husband to consent unto, nay to procure, and assist in the ravishment of his own wife in his own bed.” While Castlehaven technically had authority over his wife’s body, no one would agree that this prerogative included the right to serve her up for rape by a servant. “[I]t has been reputed one of the miseries of war [for] men to see their wives and daughters ravished and deflowered before their faces,” argued the prosecutor, “yet [Castlehaven] esteems this hap a pleasure; he desires it, procures it, en[joys] it, and delights in it.”

As for his buggeries, the prosecutor evoked the abominations of Sodom and Gomorrah. The crimes were of such a “pestiferous and pestilential nature,” he argued, “that if they be not punished they will draw from heaven heavy judgments upon this kingdom.” The king himself was “amazed” at the charges against Castlehaven, the prosecutor reported, and hoped that the “throne and people might be cleared from the guilt of such abominable impieties.”

Elizabeth, Stanley, and six servants testified against the vicious earl, painting a detailed picture of a household gone completely mad. Castlehaven’s defense strategy made matters worse: He refused to answer any questions put to him on cross-examination. When he did speak, he denied the sodomy, but had no proof other than his own word that it did not occur. His arguments that his son only wanted his money and that his wife was promiscuous herself both backfired, as they reinforced his own lack of control over his household.

Broadway and another servant were also under indictment, and gave the most damning testimony against Castlehaven—they had been promised a deal to help convict their master. The servants kept up their end, but were double-crossed: After Castlehaven was convicted, their testimony was used against them, and they were found guilty and executed. The king pardoned Stanley for her “adulteries, fornication, and incontinency,” though, and later granted clemency to Elizabeth. Castlehaven’s property went to James after all; the boy became head of the family and the third Earl of Castlehaven.

Castlehaven’s case shows the extra element of sin that had to come into play before English courts used their heavy weaponry against same-gender sex. No person of Castlehaven’s high rank had been executed for anything other than treason in nearly a century. Moreover, given that the jurors were his social peers and that many of the witnesses against him were merely servants, the result was extraordinary, but the case had become too notorious, and Castlehaven’s conduct too outrageous, to let pass. Rather than protecting one of their own, the jury of aristocrats had him killed in an effort to cleanse their ranks. Castlehaven was worse than a rapist, after all: He had encouraged a servant to rape his own family. He represented a dangerously inverted world where servants were favored over sons and noble females forced to yield to the lowborn. Under these circumstances there was no possibility of mercy, whereas if Castlehaven had been guilty only of same-gender, same-class sex, he would probably not have been prosecuted.

A similar principle held in central Europe, where same-gender sex was most likely to bring capital punishment only when it was leavened with some combination of bestiality, witchcraft, and heresy.
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BUGGERERS, BAKERS, AND BEASTS IN GERMANY AND THE SWISS CONFEDERACY

Nine years before England made buggery a capital crime, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V signed a law proclaiming: “If anyone commits impurity with a beast, or a man with a man, or a woman with a woman, they have forfeited their lives and shall, after the common custom, be sentenced to death by burning.” That said, few of the empire’s law enforcement units spent their resources chasing down homosexuals. Rather, their efforts were devoted to searching out and punishing adulterers, fornicators, and prostitutes. The city of Frankfurt sentenced just two men for sodomy between 1592 and 1696, but both cases are the exceptions that prove the rule. The sexual habits of the defendants were well-known for years before their trials, with no one trying to put them away.

The first case would not have been brought had the defendant, a Frankfurt baker named Ludwig Boudin, not poached profits from a rival baker named Thomas de Fuhr. Some time before the case was filed, Boudin had hired away de Fuhr’s maid, who claimed that de Fuhr had been beating her. The maid convinced many of de Fuhr’s customers to transfer their business to Boudin. Only after de Fuhr lost a business competition lawsuit against Boudin did he file sodomy charges. De Fuhr lined up thirteen witnesses against his accused, many of whom repeated long-standing rumors about Boudin’s predilections. A few said he had made direct sexual advances on them, and one alleged that he and Boudin had touched each other. There was no issue as to the illegality of Boudin’s homosexual conduct, but the townspeople seemed rather tolerant of it. The baker had been groping, propositioning, and jumping uninvited into men’s beds for twenty years with no formal complaints, while his business only seems to have grown. Until the trial, most of Boudin’s sexual targets were satisfied merely to rebuff him and remind him that he had a wife, not to report him to the authorities.

Neither the unconcerned attitude of Boudin’s neighbors nor de Fuhr’s economic motives in bringing the case mattered once the prosecution was under way. The law had to be enforced. In Frankfurt, that meant securing a defendant’s confession through torture and having witnesses testify in secret. Boudin was never permitted to cross-examine them; he was only allowed to confirm or deny what they had said. If his denials seemed implausible, his interrogators literally turned the screws until he changed his story. When Boudin refused to confirm certain witness accounts, his legs were repeatedly pressed in a rotating torture device and his body hoisted on a rack. Each time the pain was applied, he admitted to no more than being a nuisance while drunk. Under torture, he also demanded: “Why had all these witnesses been quiet for so many years—was it not their duty to report bad deeds to the authorities?” The city’s advocates seem to have concluded early on that he was guilty, but they nevertheless tortured him eight more times, to the point where he begged his torturers to kill him. Ultimately he was pilloried publicly and banished from Frankfurt.

The charges brought against Frankfurt shopkeeper Heinrich Krafft were graver than those against Boudin. In 1645, he was accused of targeting animals and boys for sexual pleasure. The most that could be gotten out of witnesses was that Krafft was sexually aggressive with men when drunk, especially when he hosted parties in his basement. Krafft agreed that he had touched men, but denied that his advances had been unwelcome. The case should have ended there; his admission of sex with men was enough to convict him. But the presence of animals in the story made the prosecutors especially aggressive. Krafft was tortured repeatedly while being questioned about the goats he kept in the countryside, and whether or not he had visited a peasant who kept goats. His denials of bestiality in the face of extreme pain probably saved his life. Had he admitted to having sex with goats he would likely have been executed. Instead, he was taken from prison to the city gates and told never to come back.

Religious zeal made authorities in Geneva unusually vigilant in their prosecution of sodomites. From about 1450 to 1540, before John Calvin established a Protestant theocracy in the city, only six known sodomy trials were held there. In the 125 years after Calvin there were sixty, half of which ended in burning, beheading, hanging, or drowning. The Geneva courts also prosecuted lesbianism. In 1568, a woman admitted to having sex with both men and women, for which the judges sentenced her to be drowned. They were so shocked by her confession that they refused to describe her crimes to the crowd at the execution. The official sentence said merely that she had committed a “detestable and unnatural crime, which is so ugly that, from horror, it is not named here.”

As time passed, sodomy prosecutions in Geneva focused on cases involving bestiality. Sex with animals was seen as a violation of biblical edicts and, especially when goats were involved, a link to witchcraft. Most jurisdictions had laws on the books condemning bestiality, and these were vigorously enforced. “There is hardly a tribunal in Europe which has not condemned to the fire some miserable ones convicted of this turpitude,” Voltaire would later write, although the great philosopher and snob added, rather too carefully: “Young peasants . . . are alone guilty of this infamy and . . . scarcely differ from the animals with which they couple.”

In 1601, a sixteen-year-old French girl named Claudine de Culam was charged for carnally knowing a dog, although she passionately denied the accusation. The court came up with an innovative method for uncovering the truth. The girl and the dog were taken to a chamber adjacent to the courtroom, where Claudine was told to undress. The dog immediately leaped up and attempted copulation with her, “which he would perhaps have accomplished had we not prevented him.” Both Claudine and the animal were strangled and their bodies burned. Their ashes were “thrown to the winds” to leave no trace of them or their crimes. The execution of animals along with their human lovers was common. Also in France, in 1606, a dog that had scampered away after suffering sexual indignities with a human was condemned and hung in effigy. A few decades later, in Britain’s Massachusetts Bay Colony, a teenage boy who was put under arrest was forced to reveal all his sexual partners. The list included a mare, a cow, two goats, two calves, five sheep, and a turkey. The animals were all killed and their carcasses thrown away, and the boy went to the gallows. Occasionally, European courts gave animals the right to confess their crimes, though this took some rather harsh prodding. Their squeals of pain while being held over fires were taken as admissions of guilt.

Scotland had no antibestiality laws as such, so its courts relied directly on the biblical commandment that when “a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death” (Leviticus 18:23, 20:15). In 1654, John Muir confessed that he had committed the “land-defiling sin of bestiality” with a mare on six separate occasions. (The fact that he was spotted copulating with the unfortunate horse on the Sabbath did not help his case.) He and the horse were strangled and burned at the stake. Executed at the same time was William MacAdam, who was made to perish with the cow he had violated.

There was little that accused animal lovers could do to defend themselves if they had been witnessed in the act. When in Scotland one David Malcolm was caught in 1718 by a James Grey while copulating with an animal, Malcolm fell to his knees and begged for mercy. Grey replied that bestiality had become a troubling habit for Malcolm, which Malcolm denied. Oddly, Malcolm said he had tried several times to have sex with animals, but was unable to do so until that very occasion. Like many others so accused, Malcolm also claimed that Satan had forced him to lie with the beast. This last excuse rarely succeeded in getting people mercy in court, but it may have been genuinely believed by some defendants. Animal sodomy was associated at all levels of society with witchcraft.