On 9 May 1726, five men were hanged at Tyburn for the crime of having committed homosexual sex acts, which became punishable by death in Henry VIII’s reign (under the Buggery Act 1533) and would remain a capital offence until 1828.
The men had been some of the 40 individuals arrested during a raid on Mother Clap‘s molly house in London few months earlier, thanks to the self-loathing and loathsome former “molly” turned police informant and “queer-bait”, named Mark Partridge. (For an excellent history of Mother Clap’s establishment and the trials, check out Rictor Norton’s website on 18th century homosexuality. It is brilliant.)
Mollies and molly houses didn’t disappear despite the routine raids and judicial murders, of course. Homosexual men and women have been around since the dawn of our species and they WILL, like almost all humans, risk everything for a chance at companionship, love, and acceptance … or even the profound sexual satisfaction of having one’s needs actually met. And be assured they really were risking everything. Not only had criminals learned it was lucrative to hustle and then blackmail the man with whom one dallied, but the police (under pressure from moral arbiters) had began to use officers to entrap unsuspecting mollies. Even if a man was able to bride his way out of arrest, or at least out of the jail and away from the gallows, his life was often hardly worth living after exposure. To be known as a molly would ruin both the man and his family, cast suspicions on all his acquaintance, and doom him to ostracization.
There were many would pay the ultimate price for their sexuality, condemned to die by a culture that turned a blind eye to young girls – girls not even in their teens yet — working in brothels or becoming the mistresses of prominent men.
Although Jane Austen would probably cut off her hand than write about such doings, the Regency era was rife with sexual scandal of the homosexual kind. It became almost routine for Regency politicians (or their supporters) to accuse one another of being sodomites, among other slurs.
In 1810 there was a very famous case, regarding the so-called Vere Street Coterie, that was reported in every paper in the country, and Austen would have almost certainly heard of it. Police raided a molly house called The White Swan, arresting 27 men but only prosecuting 8 of them. Six men were convicted of “attempted sodomy”, and were subsequently pilloried. Humans being what they are — as much ape as angel — there were crowds who gathered to enjoy the humiliation of these known mollies. According to eyewitness, the gathered gawkers quickly turned violent, and began “throwing various objects (including rotten fish, dead cats, “cannonballs” made of mud, and of course, vegetables) at the convicted men.”To give the government of London’s its due, the city did provide 200 armed constables “to protect the men from even worse mistreatment.”
Two other men, a adult named John Hepburn (age 46) and a teenager named Thomas White (who was only 16), were convicted of sodomy; not merely attempted sodomy. These two were hanged at Newgate Prison on 7 March 1811. The death of Thomas White is particularly appalling, since he was just a boy and had not even been present at the White Swan on the night it was raided.
Hot on the heels of the Vere Street scandal, a coachman named James Byrne, accused Percy Jocelyn, Lord Bishop of Clogher, of committing ‘unnatural’ acts with another man in 1811. The Lord Bishop (of course) denied any such doings. Moreover, Clogher brought a counter-suit against Byrne for false charges. Clogher, as well as being high up in the Anglican church, was the third son of 1st Earl of Roden and a grandson of a former Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and thus he was both wealthy and well-connected, so of course his suit against his brother’s lowly coachman was successful:
Byrne was tried and convicted, and sentenced to two years in prison, preceded by three floggings. He nearly died as he was severely whipped at cart’s tail through the streets of Dublin on the first two occasions. The third flogging was rescinded when he agreed to withdraw his accusation.
It should surprise no one to learn that Byrne was telling the truth all along. However, Bishop Clogher seems to have been happy to have let the man be whipped to death rather than be revealed as a homosexual. Clogher was, after all, an active and outspoken member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, so his railing and condemnation of mollies would have been less effective if everyone knew he WAS one. (This hasn’t changed much in the ensuing centuries.)
Happily, karma was coming for the good bishop. Eleven years later, on 19 July 1822 the Bishop was caught in the act of sodomy with a young soldier named John Moverley. Soon, everyone in the country was in the know about the Buggering Bishop, and the scandal was so immense that “it was not safe for a bishop to show himself in the streets of London” for fear of being jeered at and pelted with refuse. There was a slew of pamphlets, broadsides, caricatures, and newspaper articles circulating in condemnation of Clogher. One of the most popular epigrams of the time was:
The Devil to prove the Church was a farce
Went out to fish for a Bugger.
He baited his hook with a Frenchman’s arse
And pulled up the Bishop of Clogher.
The Bishop, being a rich son of a peer, got away with it of course. Only poor homosexuals were pilloried and hanged! The hypocritical clergyman scarpered off to France, where he could be seen “strolling the Boulevards and dining at Very’s the Restaurateurs in the Palais Royale” in full bishops regalia. He was able to move freely in French society, but he was homesick enough that he eventually moved to Scotland, where he lived under the assumed name of Thomas Wilson and worked as a butler, dying at the ripe old age of 79.
Meanwhile, mollies and molly houses continued to proliferate and the public continued to shriek about their deviant behaviour. Any molly without the wherewithal to buy his way out of trouble under the table continued to be prosecuted throughout the Regency period and beyond. Even though the death penalty was no longer a threat by the Victorian era, a charge of sodomy still meant jail time and a ruined life — as renown playwright Oscar Wilde discovered to his dismay in 1895.
Did you know that oral/anal sex between married and/or heterosexual couples was still illegal in Texas until 1974, and in Tennessee until 1989? And that the laws against homosexual intercourse of any kind were not overturned until the The United States Supreme Court ruled that banning consenting acts between adults was unconstitutional in 2003? Seriously, it was illegal to be gay in parts of the USA until the 21st century.