Queer City

by Peter Ackroyd

  The love for boys was often deemed to be sexually and morally superior to the love for women. It might be youthful infatuation among contemporaries, it might be Platonic idealism encouraged by a Renaissance humanist education, or it might just be lust. It could of course be a blancmange of all three. Many reasons were given at the time, pre-eminently in the English translations of Greek and Latin fables where the love of boys was prominent. The boys were prettier than women. They did not wear perfume or make-up. They were more natural and more artless in lovemaking; they did not make such a fuss about it. There were fewer unfortunate consequences in the nursery way.

  And in any case there were other possibilities. As Sir Voluptuous Beast in Jonson’s epigram explained to his new wife: ‘And how his Ganymede mov’d, and how his goat’. This is supplemented by Donne’s account of the court in the 1590s where is it is not difficult to discover ‘who loves whores, who boys and who goats’. The goat may be more of a satirical topos, however, than a reality.

  By certain signs you may know them. Many physiognomical treatises, published in the sixteenth century, are very clear about the characteristics of the queer. His eyebrows are very straight, demonstrating weakness and femininity; small nostrils are the signs of a small penis, and if his nose is turned upwards a little you may suspect him. His chin is round rather than, as it should be, square; his knees are loose and turn outwards; so do his hips. If he has a mole on his ankle, he will take the passive part. He breathes deeply and rapidly. He trembles. His face and eyes move at the same time. If he is to be cured of his deplorable condition he must reside in a hot and windy place, and eat hot rustic foods.

  Notorious cases made for profitable reading. In 1580 Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, accused two Elizabethan courtiers, Francis Southwell and Henry Howard, of treasonable activities. They in turn accused Oxford of sodomy ‘by buggering a boy that is his cook and many other boys’. He was alleged to have said that ‘when women were unsweet, fine (young) boys were in season’. You could turn your hand to one or the other according to the weather or the time of day. It was not a question of either/or but of both. It was performing an act, not affirming an identity.

  Sodomy, therefore, was known to be part of the human condition, which is not to say that it was well understood. It was sometimes blamed on drunkenness. It could be laughed off. It could be overlooked or dismissed as tittle-tattle. One minister, accused of the act, said that he had committed it in his sleep. Even as he did it, he may not have known what he was doing. The bewilderment might have been equally genuine among many other people. They could not conceive of themselves as ‘sodomites’, a charge equivalent to treason or heresy. They were just doing what had always been done. It could be that same-sex activity often went unrecognised and undeclared, or was simply ignored.

  7

  Soft and slippery

  By the first years of the seventeenth century homoeroticism had become a distinct flavour both in public and in private life. It had come to the point that, according to the notebook of an early-seventeenth-century official, Sir Thomas Wilson, ‘some men will be apt to think that any man uses it [sodomy] that has but a young boy or man to serve him, or that he uses his servants in his chamber’. So once more it was a question of power. In 1609 a London merchant, Richard Finch, was charged with the abuse of his servant and of ‘correcting him unreasonably with whipcords, being quite naked’. It is not clear whether master or servant was naked, but common sense suggests the latter. It was believed that sodomy was everywhere. There seems to have been little need for reticence or concealment; a queer language, with pointed allusions, became the mode; vulgarity and obscenity were commonplace, and nowhere more so than at the newly established court of James I.

  The king enjoyed the presence of male companions and, according to reports stronger than rumour, favoured certain male lovers. A disapproving witness, Lucy Hutchinson, stated that the court had been full of ‘fools and bawds, mimics and catamites’. It might have been the court of William Rufus strangely revived. The king’s hunting lodge at Royston was staffed entirely by men. He liked them smooth-faced and young. He cuddled them and ‘pressed’ them; sometimes he literally drooled over them. He was in many respects uncouth, and was observed to fiddle with his codpiece.

  One of the first of James’s favourites was Robert Carr, created Earl of Somerset, to whom the king once complained of ‘your long creeping back and withdrawing yourself from lying in my chamber, notwithstanding my many hundred times earnestly soliciting you to the contrary’.

  His last and greatest favourite was George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, who signed himself to the king as ‘Your Majesty’s humble slave and dog’. ‘Dog’ could, as we have seen, be used as a slang word for catamite. In one letter, Buckingham asked the king whether he loved him as much as the time ‘at Farnham, where the bed’s head could not be found between the master and his dog’. It is a tricky allusion, to be deciphered as you will. Some of this may indeed have been a great game, a sport of wild and wilder innuendo, with no realistic basis. Buckingham once referred to James’s ‘large bountiful hand’, for example, and went on to explain that ‘there is this difference between that noble hand and heart, one may surfeit by the one, but not by the other, and sooner by yours than his own’. This may suggest in an indirect way that their pleasures went no further than mutual masturbation, thus skirting the shores of sodomy.

  Other letters are not so sportive. In the months before his death the king wrote, in his own hand, a remarkably intimate missive to Buckingham in which he pledged to make with him ‘a new marriage, ever to be kept hereafter, for, god so love me, as I desire only to live in this world, for your sake, & that I had rather live banished in any part of the world with you, than live a sorrowful widow’s life without you, & so god bless you my sweet child & wife & grant that you may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband’. Scholars have argued over the purport of the letter, with some suggesting that it is part of the rite of ‘sworn brothers’ with no sexual content. Others, noting ‘wife’ and ‘widow’ and ‘husband’, have suggested something more. The king himself seems to have been defiant. ‘Jesus Christ did the same,’ he is reported as saying, ‘and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had his John, and I have my George.’ He was overheard when he visited Buckingham lying sick from a toothache. ‘Begott man never loved another more than I do you and let God leave me when I leave you.’

  The debate about the exact nature of their relationship is now of little moment. It can confidently be stated, however, that the letter from king to duke is a queer letter indeed. It is queer because it is unfastened from sexual and social categories and has drifted into some formless space where innuendo and meaning can multiply. This is the context in which it was observed that the women at the court of James I adopted more masculine clothing, and that the male courtiers were more effeminately dressed than in the previous reign. A contemporary observer and memoirist, Francis Osborne, noted that the king’s affection for his favourites ‘was as amorously conveyed as if he had mistaken their sex, and thought them ladies; which I have seen Somerset and Buckingham labour to resemble, in the effeminateness of their dressings’. Osborne added that the king’s love, ‘or what else posterity will please to call it’, was not ‘carried on with a discretion sufficient to cover a less scandalous behaviour; for the king’s kissing them after so lascivious mode in public, and upon the theatre, as it were, of the world prompted many to imagine some things done in the tyring house [where the actors changed their dress]’. A mock-tribute to the king, Corona Regia (1615), so enraged James that he instituted a hunt for the author and publisher; their crime had been to detail the succession of young men whom he had once favoured under the guise of ‘advancing the beautiful’.

  An anonymous tract complained that ‘he must have the public to be witness of his lascivious tongue licking of his favourites’ lips … and his hands must be seen in a continual lascivious action’. It is fairly clear, therefore, that
his homoeroticism was on open display. John Oglander, knighted by the king, remarked that ‘I never saw any fond husband make so much or so great dalliance over his beautiful spouse as I have seen King James over his favourites, especially the Duke of Buckingham’.

  This was indeed a complaisant court. Another observer, Sir Simonds D’Ewes, noted that the ‘boys were grown to the height of wickedness to paint’. He recorded in 1622 that he discussed with a friend matters that ‘were secret as of the sin of sodomy, how frequent it was in this wicked city’. He followed this observation with a story of an usher in a school, a Frenchman, who had buggered a knight’s son and was brought into the Guildhall ‘and had surely received his just punishment, but that [Sir Henry] Montague then chief justice was sent to save him, and by the king, as it was thought’. Why should the king wish to save an obscure French teacher from the charge of buggery?

  Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England by 1618, is another queer case at court. A historian in 1653, Arthur Wilson, noted that Bacon’s favours to his ‘young, prodigal, and expensive’ servants ‘opened a gap to infamous reports’. They were a tribe of Ganymedes and he was their Zeus. In his Brief Lives John Aubrey reports that Bacon was ‘a paiderastes’; his favourites took bribes but he himself was notably impartial in his judicial dealings. His own mother had her doubts, which she expressed to another of her sons, Anthony. ‘I pity your brother,’ she wrote in 1593, when Bacon was thirty-two, ‘yet he pities not himself but keeps that bloody Percy … as a coach companion and bed companion – a proud profane and costly fellow, whose being about him I truly feel the Lord God does mislike and does the less bless your brother in credit and otherwise in his health.’ Anthony Bacon himself was also suspected of sodomy with his servants but once again the case was never pressed against him.

  In 1603 Bacon had written a philosophic and educational treatise entitled The Masculine Birth of Time, at the end of which he implores an unknown reader ‘my dear, dear boy … from my inmost heart, give yourself to me so that I may restore you to yourself’ and ‘secure an increase beyond all the hopes and prayers of ordinary marriages’. ‘Masculine love’, the preliminary to ‘masculine birth’, was well-known shorthand for same-sex intimacy. In 1619 a sermon was preached against Bacon’s ‘catamites’.

  The accusation or suspicion of sodomy did not lead to his expulsion from the court, but in 1621 charges of bribery and malfeasance proved to be his ruin. He spent two or three days in the Tower before being released, but he never enjoyed public service again. Simonds D’Ewes reported that, despite his disgrace, Bacon

  would not relinquish the practice of his most horrible and secret sin of sodomy, keeping still one Godrick, a very effeminate faced youth, to be his catamite and bedfellow, although he had discharged the most of his other household servants: which was the more to be admired [wondered at] because men after his fall began to discourse of that his unnatural crime which he had practiced for many years … which caused some bold and forward man to write these verse in a whole sheet of paper, and to cast it down in some part of York House in the Strand, where Viscount St Alban [Bacon] yet lay:

  ‘Within this sty a hog does lie

  That must be hanged for sodomy.’

  So his inclinations were widely known in the city. The hog that sizzles becomes bacon. In his diary Bacon records his methodical use of enemas to cool his blood.

  The records of the Middlesex Sessions testify to the fact that there were more cases of sodomy in London than anywhere else in the kingdom, even though it was still exceptional. It was difficult to prove that ‘carnal knowledge’ had ever taken place if the two parties were consenting; they could not testify against one another without implicating themselves. There also had to be two witnesses for the offence. Any accused was granted trial by jury, and could refuse to testify. Emission without penetration was no crime; that is why male intimacy sometimes only took place between the thighs. There may have been blows, and beatings, and bullying in the streets, for those suspected of sodomy; but nothing happened in the courts. It was not considered to be sufficiently dangerous. In any case the judges seem to have been more interested in disorder between men and women.

  Some allusions of the period, however, are entirely specific. It was widely reported that the Duke of Buckingham had married off one of his female relations to Sir Anthony Ashley ‘who never loved any but boys’. Alban Cooke, from the parish of Hoxton, was indicted for buggery with a male below the age of twenty; he was acquitted. Richard Walker of Castle Baynard was arrested for ‘abusing himself in an ale-house’. Edward Bawde was accused of buggery, but it was determined that it was a malicious prosecution by those who wanted to blackmail or to injure him. A Puritan tradesman, Nehemiah Wallington, reported he had just heard of a group of married men in Southwark ‘who had “lived in the sin of buggery and were sworn brothers to it” some seven years, committing this sin on Sabbath mornings “at sermon time”’.

  An informer, William Reynolds, denounced one Captain Edmonds for unnatural acts. ‘He dwells in London. He was corporal general of the horse in Ireland under the Earl of Southampton. He ate and drank at his table and lay in his tent. The Earl of Southampton gave him a horse which Edmonds refused a hundred marks for him. The Earl of Southampton would coll [embrace] and hug in his arms and play wantonly with him.’

  One sexual practice was often mentioned indirectly. Thomas Nashe agrees that if he is proved to be a rhymer and a railer ‘he will give his tongue to wipe [his opponent’s] tail with’. Another hack of the period, Anthony Nixon, describes his enemy as one ‘who wipes vice’s tail with his tongue, and that is the reason why his words are so unsavoury’. A flatterer is described by Richard Nicholls as ‘he whose tongue the tail of greatness licks’.

  The violent rape of a boy under age was the most heinous of offences and, if proven, incurred death. Sir Edward Coke, the jurist, noted that ‘Humphrey Stafford, a known paederastes, on 12 May 1606 in the parish of Saint Andrew, High Holborn, led astray by the instigation of the devil, did with force and with arms assault a certain K.B. a lad of about sixteen years of age and at that time he did wickedly and in a manner diabolical, felonious and contrary to nature, have sexual relations with K.B. and at the same time had sex with R and did perpetrate with R that abominable and detestable sin of sodomy’. Coke noticed, too, that sodomy derived from pride, excess of diet, idleness and contempt for the poor.

  A contemporary pamphlet alleged that Stafford had raped both boys at once. He had been so violent that the parents claimed ‘they were forced to use the help of a surgeon for their care’. For his part Stafford pleaded only to drunkenness and said that ‘if he had offended, it was in wine’; he also confessed that ‘I acknowledge that I have deserved death, but yet I could not perform mine intention’. Nevertheless he was tried and sentenced to death; his execution in 1608 entertained ‘a great throng and mass of people’.

  So at court the act was covered or concealed by the use of allusion or euphemism; in public, in the streets of London, it was still punishable by death. Two lines from Jonson’s Epicoene (1609) may complete the picture.

  BOY: I am the welcomest thing under a man that comes there.

  CLERIMONT: I think, and above a man too, if the truth were racked out of you.

  Jonson, Marston and others single out sodomy for the particular objects of their attack. This unease about sexual roles, in the early part of the seventeenth century, was perhaps generated by the possibility that the king was a sodomite.

  The ‘womanish men’, taking their cue from the court of the king, were also on display. They were ‘womanly’, they were ‘childish’; they were ‘delicate’ and ‘nice’. They were ‘sweet smelling’, ‘comely arrayed’, ‘wantonly dressed up’ and ‘smug’. They were ‘soft’, ‘pliant’ and ‘loose’ but were also ‘fearful, unconstant, wavering’ and ‘slippery’. This is perhaps the setting in which James I ‘the peacemaker’ may most profitably be found. He was well known for an aversion to wea
pons flourished in his presence, not at all an unreasonable attitude after his violent and threatened adolescence. He was also opposed to war, and was sometimes criticised for his pacific nature. His son, soon to become Charles I, tried to bully him into war with Spain. But his final hours came too soon. It is reported that he died holding the head of Buckingham. He remained soft and slippery to the end.

  8

  The rubsters

  The story of same-sex love among women was bequeathed another chapter with the rediscovery of the clitoris by anatomists of the mid sixteenth century. It had been known to the Greeks but then disappeared from view. It could not have come as a surprise to women themselves that some organ or other was capable of arousal, but finally it had been named. A medical compendium of 1615, Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia, announced that the clitoris ‘comes of an obscene word signifying contrectation [touching or fingering] but properly it is called the woman’s yard [penis]. It is a small production in the upper, forward … and middle fatty part of the share [genitals] in the top greater cleft where the Nymphs [labia] do meet and is answerable to the member of the man.’ The member of the man need have nothing to do with it, however, and the reintroduction of the clitoris heralded the rise in public awareness of the tribade, the fricatrix, the rubster. These were the women who knew how to manipulate ‘the seat of women’s delight’ with a hand, a dildo or a massively enlarged clitoris.