The Sexual History of London (19 page)

Three days later, husband and wife parted by mutual consent, allowing Lady Lucian the opportunity to enjoy the society of her dear castrato without molestation.
³⁰

Flagellation had always been popular, particularly among the nobility – and with women as well as men. Queen Catherine de' Medici was said to enjoy placing her maids of honour over her knee and whipping them like little children, and pages often found themselves upon the whipping block as well. Flagellation, as we know, constituted one of the standard services of brothels. In
The Virtuoso
(1678) Thomas Shadwell portrayed an elderly gentleman who ‘loves castigation mightily'
³¹
whilst the
Treatise on the Use of Flogging
(1718) established this fetish firmly in the public consciousness, and led to a flogging boom, with specialist brothels opening all over London. Mother Burgess, one of many bawds who specialized in flagellation, was immortalized in ‘The Paphian Grove' (1738):

‘Paphian', derived from Aphrodite, the goddess of love, referred to any act of illicit love.
³²

One of the best-known flogging brothels was Mary Wilson's, originally opened around 1777 in New Road, St Pancras, then moving to larger premises at nearby Tonbridge Place. Wilson published
The Exhibition of Female Flagellants
, praising the benefits of being whipped by women, before moving to fashionable Bond Street, then St John's Wood. An erudite woman, who translated and published European erotic novels, she noted that there were three types of client who enjoyed flagellation:

1. Those who like to receive a fustigation, more or less severe from the hands of a fine woman, who is sufficiently robust to wield the rod with vigour and effect.
   
2. Those who desire to administer birch discipline on the white and plump buttocks of a female.
   
3. Those who neither wish to be passive recipients nor active administrators of birch discipline, but derive sufficient excitement as mere spectators of the sport.
   ³³
   

She also recognized that flagellation had considerable appeal:

When Wilson moved on for good to Paris, her brothel went to Theresa Berkeley, one of the most famous experts in flagellation. In 1787, Berkeley took control of a house of assignation known as the ‘White House' at 21 Soho Square. This was a grand mansion with opulent decor, and featured the Gold Room, the Silver Room and the Bronze Room – all equipped with mirrors, so that the girls and their clients could view their performances. There was also a Painted Chamber, a Grotto and a Coal Hole, but the
pièce de résistance
was the ‘Skeleton Room', fitted with a cupboard from which a human skeleton emerged, a subtle
memento mori
for older punters.

Mrs Berkeley, or ‘The Governess' as she came to be known, moved to new premises at 28 Charlotte Street in 1828. She made it a habit to find out ‘every idea, every caprice, every wish of her clients', no matters how recherché, as long as she got paid.

On the second floor, clients who so wished could be strung up via a hook and pulley attached to the ceiling, by which she could draw a man up by his hands. ‘For those whose lech it was to flog a woman, she would herself submit to a certain extent; but if they were gluttons at it, she had women in attendance who would take any number of lashes the flogger pleased, provided he forked out an ad valorem duty. Among these were Miss Ring, Hannah Jones, Sally Taylor, One-eyed Peg, Bauld-cunted Poll, and a black girl, called Ebony Bet.'

‘The Governess' also invented the ‘Berkeley Horse' in the spring of 1828. According to the pornography expert Henry Spencer Ashbee, this contraption was

It certainly did. ‘The Governess' made £10,000 at her Charlotte Street establishment between 1828 and her death in 1836. Her fortune went to her brother-in-law, a missionary, who rejected it because he disapproved of the manner in which it had been made.
³⁷

A Mrs Collet ran a similar establishment in Covent Garden, known to have been patronized by the Prince of Wales (later George IV), although ‘it is not known whether the Royal Wrist wielded the whip, or the Royal Buttocks submitted to it'.
³⁸
The craze for flagellation was so great at this period that one old roué, Chace Pine, devised a machine which could whip forty persons at a time although many enthusiasts would argue that this approach lacks the human touch.
³⁹

The notorious Berkeley Horse invented by Theresa Berkeley. Enthusiasts were bound to this apparatus and whipped.

The public appetite for books about flagellation fuelled the emerging pornography industry, which was to take off during the nineteenth century with the development of mass-production printing. Eighteenth-century readers were catered for with titles such as Jacques Boileau's
Histoire des flagellants
(Amsterdam, 1701), which inspired many sequels and parodies. The pornographer Edmund Curll translated the 1718 edition of John Henry Melbonius's
De usu flagorum
(first published 1639) or
A Treatise of the Use of Flogging
and defended his publication with spurious medical claims, arguing that ‘the rods' represented a cure for impotence and venereal disease, and reading about such topics offered comfort for men and women unable to obtain sexual satisfaction by more conventional means. ‘There are Persons who are stimulated to
Venery by Strokes of Rods, and worked up into a Flame of Lust by Blows
,' he reminds us, ‘and that the Part, which distinguishes us to be Men, should be raised by the Charm of invigorating Lashes.' He supports his argument with classical quotations and the observation that old lechers use flogging to ‘re-inflame the cold parts'.
⁴⁰

Flogging appealed particularly to the nobility, perhaps because, as Mary Wilson suggested, they had been aroused by early experiences of flagellation at their public schools. One popular anecdote concerned an elderly aristocrat who rented a house in St James's Place and hired an attractive elderly woman as his housekeeper. One day each week, she had been instructed to lay out scrubbing brushes, mops, and every other item necessary to clean a room, and to engage two women to meet him there on that day. One of these women was to ‘role play' a housekeeper and the other a chambermaid. The nobleman would then dress himself up as a parish girl and begin scrubbing the room. Afterwards, either one or both of the women would scold him for doing a poor job and then whip him, just as many parish girls were whipped by their mistresses.

‘Amorous strangulation', or auto-erotic asphyxiation, was not unknown in eighteenth-century London, as illustrated by the peculiar case of Franz Kotzwara (1730–91), a Bohemian musician.
⁴¹
This celebrated double bass player and composer of ‘The Battle of Prague' (which commemorates the Prussian victory in 1757 over the Austrians at Prague) had a taste for wine, women and kinky sex. On 2 September 1791 he visited the brothel at 5 Vine Street in St Martin's, where he met with the prostitute Susannah Hill. Following dinner, Kotzwara demanded that she cut off his testicles, a service which she refused to perform. Kotzwara then strangled himself on a rope hooked to the door, ostensibly while having sex with the girl. This led to a spectacular trial at the Old Bailey, where Hill was charged with murder. But once testimony was produced which documented Kotzwara's eclectic sexual tastes, Hill was acquitted. Kotzwara's is the first documented case of auto-erotic asphyxiation.

The final player in this account of sexual perversity is Sir Francis Dashwood (1708–81), proprietor of the Hellfire Club, although it must be admitted that the most infamous behaviour associated with this establishment occurred outside London. The original Hellfire Club had been founded by Philip, Duke of Wharton in 1719, when Dashwood would have been too young to be a member. Lord Wharton was a prominent politician with two separate lives; the first as a man of letters, and the second as a drunkard, a rioter, an infidel and a rake. Members of the club were assumed to include Wharton's immediate friends, the Earl of Hillsborough, the Earl of Lichfield and Sir Edmund O'Brien. This Hellfire Club was a typical early eighteenth-century club in that it was formed for one specific purpose: in this case, to ridicule religion and conventional morality – hence its name. While its supposed president was the Devil, and members referred to themselves as ‘devils', there was no actual devil worship in evidence. Instead, activities included mock religious ceremonies, and dinners to which members turned up dressed as characters from the Bible, and ate dishes such as Holy Ghost Pie and Devil's Loin, washed down with Hell-fire punch. The club met on Sundays at different locations around London, with one popular venue being the Greyhound Tavern. However, it was unusual in that it admitted women as members, and, since respectable ladies could not frequent taverns, meetings were also held at members' houses.

From these relatively innocuous origins, the Hellfire Club took a different turn under the presidency of Sir Francis Dashwood, a rake who had fornicated his way across Europe on his Grand Tour.
⁴²
Dashwood was alternately fascinated and repelled by Roman Catholicism – it was said that at one moment Dashwood would be jeering at the rituals and vestments and at the next sobbing and praying on his knees – as well as Freemasonry and Satanism. On one occasion, he produced a whip in the Sistine Chapel and beat those kneeling in prayer. Dashwood returned to England and was elected MP for New Romney. His private life, meanwhile, was increasingly devoted to decadence and dissolution.

In 1746, Dashwood founded his Order of the Knights of St Francis, which initially met at the George and Vulture tavern in the Cornhill. The Knights convened in a room dominated by ‘an everlasting Rosicrucian lamp', a large crystal globe encircled by a gold serpent with its tail in its mouth. The globe was crowned with a pair of silver wings and was suspended in chains in the form of twisted serpents. The Hellfire Club proved so popular that the George and Vulture became too small for its devotions, so proceedings moved to Dashwood's extravagant country house at West Wycombe. This neo-Gothic fantasy included a west wing which was a replica of a temple to Bacchus. The first meeting of Dashwood's ‘brotherhood' was held on Walpurgis Night 1752. Walpurgis Night is a pre-Christian festival, celebrated on 1 May, and reflected Sir Francis's obsession with paganism. But the event was not a success, perhaps because of objections raised by his long-suffering wife, the ‘pious prude' Mary Ellis, and he did not hold parties at home again. Instead, in 1751, Dashwood leased Medmenham Abbey from a friend, Francis Duffield. On the Thames near Marlow, about six miles from West Wycombe, the house had originally been a Cistercian abbey before being rebuilt as a Tudor mansion. Dashwood had the abbey rebuilt in Gothic Revival style, and the motto
Fais ce que tu voudras
(‘Do what thou wilt', an injunction later taken up by Aleister Crowley) was placed above a doorway in stained glass.