Les was very understanding when I’d first broached the idea of this trip back home in Manhattan.
“So it’s a young man’s erotic journey from Milan to Minsk?”
“What?”
“It sounds great. But I’m coming too. And so are the kids.”
I’d clutched my map of Europe, with my route carefully zigzagged in red marker, and began to stammer out the many logical objections to the idea. Dragging both the boys around Europe would be—what was le mot juste?—excruciating. We’d be better off going up the Empire State Building and tearing up $100 bills.
“Well, we can’t stay here!”
She did have a point. We were staring down the barrel of another brutal New York summer. The city would soon be stewing in its own fetid juices, and the boys would be ricocheting around the walls like Ping-Pong balls. Leaving the three of them in our tiny apartment would resemble some sinister Nazi experiment.
I pulled out my trump card: “You know, the material I’m researching is not exactly kid-friendly…”
But even as I said the words, I knew it was a lost cause. In today’s uncensored era, Henry, at age ten, had probably seen more sexual imagery than I had by age thirty-five—and that’s just from watching The Simpsons. He shrugged it all off with one furrowed eyebrow. And growing up in the East Village isn’t the most protected environment on earth. His best friend’s dad is a celebrated New York pornographer. Visiting the brothels of Old Paris or Pompeii is simply an historical approach to sex ed.
Sam, meanwhile, was only four years old, so would be less interested in randy Roman satyrs than the flavors of Italian gelato.
Before I knew it, our “family vacation” was settled. I tried to be philosophical: If nothing else, the next generation would have a broader view of the past than I did.
But now, in London, as I surveyed the wreckage of our first hotel room, the wisdom of the plan was difficult to recall. We were supposed to be traveling for three months, to the most sophisticated corners of Europe, on singular missions that were as delicate as an eighteenth-century timepiece. How, precisely, was I going to stay sane?
At least I could take refuge in my feverish visions of history. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, every gentleman needs a Secretum of his own.
Chapter One
HELLFIRE HOLIDAYS
The Great British Sex Club Tour
We’d only been traveling for a week when I told Lesley I’d been fondling another woman’s pubic hair.
Her eyes lit up. “Cool,” she said. “Whose?”
A buxom British aristocrat’s, I said. Quite possibly a Marchioness. A high class prostitute, at the very least.
We were climbing along the ramparts of St. Andrews castle in Scotland, buffeted by a fierce sea wind. Seagulls hovered above us as Henry and Sam flung themselves about the ruined walls, thrashing one another with the wooden swords we’d bought them in the ubiquitous museum gift store. It was a terrifying sight: Cherubs gone berserk.
Naturally, Les pressed me for details.
“Well, it wasn’t the most romantic setting …”
In fact, I’d had the encounter in a fluorescent-white room in the Museum of St. Andrews University, where a curator had handed me a pair of latex gloves to protect their treasured relics from my bodily oils. The item looked like a typical antique silver snuff box, oval in shape and delicately engraved. It was only when I popped the lock that I discovered its true curiosity value.
Locket containing the pubic hairs (under parchment) of a royal mistress, circa 1822. (Reproduced courtesy of the University of St. Andrews.)
Inside, a delicate piece of parchment concealed a tightly packed clump of hair, now turned silver, although I thought I detected a tinge of remaining ginger. These, the parchment explained in florid script, were in fact the pubic hairs trimmed from “the mons Veneris [mound of Venus] of a Royal Courtesan of King George IV.”
This all-too-personal connection to the past had me breaking out in a sweat; now you wouldn’t see that in Antiques Roadshow. And the snuff box had been just the foreplay, I enthused to Les. The museum had archived a whole cache of raunchy curios that had somehow survived from what must qualify as the kinkiest sex club in European history, the oddly named Beggar’s Benison. To me, it was the most vivid reminder so far that the fun-loving Georgian era could be more brazen than today. Such intimate curls, snipped from one’s amorous conquests, were a popular form of souvenir; lovers exchanged them as tokens of affection, and rakes wore them like cockades in their hats as tokens of potency.
In this particular case, the famously randy George IV had become a member of the Beggar’s Benison while he was still a dandyish young prince in cravat and lace cuffs. Years later, while visiting Edinburgh as king in 1822, he provided this token to the club as a gesture for old times’ sake. It’s impossible to know from whom the curls truly originated, but his consort at the time was Elizabeth, the Marchioness of Conyngham, a feisty and alluring gold digger (“beautiful, shrewd, greedy, voluptuous,” rejoiced one historian) who listed the future Czar Nicholas I among her many paramours.
For me, this was more thrilling than finding King Arthur’s helmet. It was for moments like this, I told myself, that tourism in Britain is alive and well. And this was even before I saw the erotic toasting glasses or the pewter masturbation props.
SEXY BEASTS
Les was relieved that my hunt for lewd relics was finally showing some success; the road to Lady Conyngham’s unmentionables had not been an easy one. Back in London, she had even suggested we skip Scotland entirely, thereby avoiding the gloomy veils of rain that sweep down from the North Sea. But I’d insisted that any self-respecting tour of historical sin has to commence in the phantasmagoric wonderland of sex that was Georgian Britain, the era from 1714 to 1837.
Few historians have described that golden age without a tangible pang of nostalgia. Long before the unbridled heyday of Mick Jagger and Austin Powers, debauchery proliferated up and down these sodden islands, fueled by prodigious amounts of alcohol and reckless moral abandon. “There was a gusto about 18th century vice unmatched before or since,” writes Fergus Linnane in wistful tones in his London: the Wicked City. The ruling classes led by decadent example, as a fabulous influx of wealth from the budding empire provided them with the freedom to indulge their every fantasy without restraint. To modern eyes, the most striking feature of that crescendo of abandon is the proliferation of sex clubs. Today, they are generally referred to as Hellfire clubs, after one licentious group that operated in London in 1721. (The evocative term is still used by the dozens of s&m clubs in operation around the world; one Hellfire Club operated in New York’s Meatpacking District beginning in the 1970s.) The British had long displayed a passion for bibulous societies—visiting foreigners would marvel at the plethora of clubs for artists, writers, scientists, beef eaters, bird-watchers—so clubs for carnal pleasure were a natural addition. Many of their rites were shaped by the era’s newfound curiosity in science and world religions, not to mention the pleasant Enlightenment ideal that sex could be pursued for pleasure rather than procreation.
Although Georgian club activities have long been swathed in legend and rumor, historians agree that the most respectable intellectuals of the age cavorted alongside its most profligate rakes. They were joined by the era’s liberated women, including successful actresses, opera singers, and the rebellious daughters of noble families who had been married at an early age to philanderers or dullards. Each club developed its own unique formalities and rituals. Members often wore outrageous fancy dress and used special regalia, which could take the form of wicked drinking vessels or medals; in one, voting ballots would go into a wooden box modeled on an inverted human torso, with yea or nay votes going into respective orifices. Meetings were held in the private wings of taverns, where, after a high-cholesterol buffet—beef, more beef, eel pie, and peaches in port—there would be ribald toasts, readings from pornography, and visits from comely young “posture molls”
who were paid to pose suggestively on a table, the Georgian version of lap dancers. Special rooms were generally provided so members could retire with companions, and even ladies of fashion might unwind with handsome rent boys. Afterward, the more energetic gents might continue carousing in upscale commercial venues such as Miss Falkland’s Temple of Love on St. James Square, where one could sip champagne in damask-lined parlors before using the “elastick beds,” spring-loaded to provide new heights of pleasure, much like the vibrating beds of Vegas hotels.
At first, one could only find such adventurous clubs in London. There was a women-only club on Jermyn Street offering discreet lesbian encounters, the Mollies Club that welcomed gay members, and the Flagellant’s Club, for those who favored a little birching (a habit so popular that it was known in brothels throughout the Continent as “the English vice”). But as the eighteenth century progressed, even more creative sex clubs began to emerge in the remoter corners of Britain, where the most peculiar rituals could be conducted away from prying eyes.
Sadly, in the prudish Victorian era, most traces of the Hellfire clubs were scratched from the historical record. The horrified grandchildren of the rakes burned many of the most embarrassing letters and club artifacts. In modern London, even the locations of their meeting places have mostly been erased or transformed. But I was delighted to discover that the Victorian purges did not reach the remotest corners of the British countryside. In fact, the homes of two legendary Hellfire clubs could still be tracked down today. In no time, I’d mapped out a road trip that was based not on ye olde castles and countryside but the hidden remains of Britain’s wildest partygoers.
Les was thrilled by the news that I had hired a car for a road trip. Oxford, perhaps? Bath? Stonehenge? She had a cousin somewhere in Somerset.…
“Nope.” I pointed triumphantly to our first stop on the map. “West Wycombe!”
SODOM-ON-THAMES
The tiny village of West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire would be typical of any rural English outpost, except for one compelling twist: It was home in the 1750s and ’60s to a blasphemous club which went by the innocuous name of the Order of the Friars of Saint Francis of Wycombe. It was the brainchild of the era’s most colorful rake, Sir Francis Dashwood, patron of the arts, humanitarian landowner, and shameless debauchee. (“Rapist, sodomite,” condemns one historian. “Gentleman, scholar,” notes another.) Membership of the order included some of the highest peers of the British realm, who, according to popular tradition, indulged in sacrilegious orgies, human sacrifice, and devil worship. Modern scholars discount the more rabid rumors of Satanism. But legends about the brotherhood have been embellished through the generations, inspiring a string of Victorian pornographic novels, pop culture films such as the 1961 Peter Cushing movie The Hellfire Club, and cult episodes of The Avengers. A version of the sinister club even turns up in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, when Tom Cruise stumbles onto a remote rural manor filled with masked aristocrats indulging in unspeakable acts.
To untangle the sordid truth about the club, I first needed to find a base to stay in West Wycombe—and these days, the most terrifying thing about the village may be the Tripadvisor guest reviews of its sole hotel, the George and Dragon pub.
“A real letdown!”
“Skip it!”
“Oh dear!”
“Never again!”
“One to avoid.”
But we couldn’t avoid it. Apart from its being the only accommodation, the George and Dragon was the perfect historical setting—a three-hundred-year-old carriage inn that lurks in the very shadow of the Dashwood family estate. So I decided to prepare Les for the worst by giving her a printout of the reviews to look over as we drove along the M5. (“Boy, how disappointing!” “Food and service was a joke!” “Take earplugs!”)
She was quiet for a while, pondering the horror that lay ahead. “How many nights are we staying?” she finally asked.
“Oh, three, maybe five. Remember, we’re researching sordid Georgian history. We don’t want a Holiday Inn with kitchenettes.”
“As long as it’s not too squalid. Remember what we agreed regarding the boys. No food poisoning. No vermin.”
Henry chimed in from the back seat. “Does it have a pool?”
He hadn’t traveled a lot in Europe. “It’ll have beds.”
“Oh, man.”
Sam, thankfully, had passed out in his booster seat.
I explained that West Wycombe was an essential stop on any self-respecting Hellfire journey. Sir Francis Dashwood’s tenth-generation descendent, Sir Edward, was alive and well in the ancestral mansion. He was even operating the family’s secret tunnels as a tourist attraction called the Hellfire Caves. If we stayed in the village, I reasoned, I could surely pay him a visit.
West Wycombe turned out to be little more than a cluster of miniature dwellings buried like a frightened hedgehog in the rolling green countryside. The George and Dragon seemed innocent enough at first, with whitewashed walls and exposed beams typical of its days as a coaching inn, and a cobbled driveway worn with ruts. I stooped under a low doorway and entered the darkened pub, savoring the whiff of ancient beer soaked into decaying carpet. A couple of orange bulbs gave off less light than candles.
West Wycombe Park, an enclave of Italian taste designed by the most notorious debauchee of 18th century Britain, Sir Francis Dashwood.
“Hello,” croaked a voice from the gloom. “Fancy a pint, mate?”
I looked at my watch—10:00 a.m. Well, might as well ingratiate ourselves.
Two figures were hunched at the bar like gargoyles, with tobacco-yellow skin, greasy long hair, and eighteenth-century dentistry; one of them turned out to be the cook. Well, nobody can say that traveling in rural England isn’t exotic. Just a few miles from the bright lights of modern London, the Hogarthian stock was hardly diluted. In hushed tones, they told me stories of Sir Edward, the modern scion, who lives on the splendid estate but once came into the pub. “He’s a regular bloke,” they said. “He drinks, you know.”
Henry watched wide-eyed from a corner booth, looking like a ripe candidate for kidnapping to Fagan’s lair. Sam was playing with the silver condiment tray, quietly mixing teaspoons of sugar to the salt then spreading it over the table.
As I lugged our bags up the stairs, the George and Dragon creaked and groaned as if it were alive. The room was a bit frayed and airless, perhaps, but not quite the desperate rat hole depicted by the reviews. From our window, I could see the tiny hilltop church, instantly recognizable for a very strange addition to its architecture. A gilded wooden sphere the size of a weather balloon was mounted on top of its steeple, gleaming in the sun like a Dr. Who device or antique Orgasmatron. In 1763, Sir Francis himself had devised this ball so that he and a few friends could sit inside it, knee-to-knee, and enjoy panoramic views of his estate. Sounds harmless enough, but these were not your average rural views. According to village lore, Dashwood had invited the vicar up to his new golden orb to enjoy the vista. The man of the cloth was horrified to discover that Dashwood’s garden had been landscaped to mimic the female form, with two hills topped with pink flowering shrubs at one end and a tightly cropped triangle of forest at the other. On a prearranged signal, fountains erupted at each of the garden’s erogenous zones, causing the vicar to collapse in shock. He was only revived with “strong liquor.”
Sir Francis Dashwood’s golden ball, the Georgian era’s strangest party venue, mounted on St. Lawrence’s Church, West Wycombe.
In the hallway, I picked up the black rotary phone the size of a bread box and dialed Sir Edward’s office. A secretary with a fine accent explained that the squire was away for the day “on business” but would be returning to his estate soon.
“Business,” I thought—a code word for mischief if ever there was one.
Back in the bar, I found Henry examining a small engraving of a maiden about to be ravished by an energetic monk.
“Dad, is he one of the club people?”
It was time to visit the boiled lolly shop.
“Come on, creatures!” I said, using one of my fond names for the boys, although it drew an appalled expression from the publican’s wife.
“They’re not creatures,” she said. “They’re human beings!”
I also liked to call them Thing One and Thing Two but decided not to explain.
The order’s notorious clubhouse was the medieval abbey of Medmenham (pronounced Med-num). It is now a private mansion, but you can see it on the opposite bank of the Thames by hiking for a mere two hours through brambles and cowpats. In 1750, when he was an up-and-coming, thirty-two-year-old member of Parliament, Sir Francis Dashwood renovated the abandoned ruins into a private rumpus room for theatrical and carnal misbehavior. Members included fellow scions of the British government, such as the Earl of Sandwich and radical John Wilkes, and it was visited by celebrities like the writer Laurence Sterne, artist William Hogarth, and Benjamin Franklin, who became Dashwood’s close friend. From the few surviving reports of members and guests, there is no doubt that a dozen randy “apostles” would gather in monks’ robes for twice monthly bacchanals beneath the Abbey’s stained-glass windows and erotic frescoes. Women of fashion would travel from London to join the frolics dressed as nuns, and saucy local “nymphs” were paid to lie naked on his altar so the monks could lick holy wine from their navels—a mere aperitif before the real festivities began. But the precise nature of the ensuing entertainment has been a matter of feverish speculation by scholars ever since.
Medmenham Abbey, scene of depraved Hellfire club meetings in the mid-18th century.
In 1765, after fifteen years of club life, the highest-ranking members of the order fell out over politics. Dashwood retreated from his abbey to an even more secret venue. An old chalk mine existed in the hillside of West Wycombe, so Sir Francis had workers expand the tunnels into an elaborate network of passageways and caverns going down three hundred feet. The torch-lit underworld evoked the pagan catacombs of Rome, with alcoves to house suggestive statues and even a bridge built over a subterranean stream, dubbed the Styx. Benjamin Franklin was impressed with the effect when he stayed with Dashwood in 1772: “His Lordship’s imagery, puzzling and whimsical as it may seem, is as much evident above the earth as below it,” he wrote. Long after the club activity ended, local school children and Victorian tourists would explore the site by candlelight. Then, in 1951, the Dashwood family realized the caves could be a genuine money spinner. They cleared the fallen debris and opened the tunnels as the Hellfire Caves. Publicity was unwittingly provided by the local vicar, who denounced the unholy project from his pulpit and complained to the Daily Mirror that “my tummy wobbles like a jelly every time I pass the entrance.”
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