The Hell Fire Club

For One Exotic Decade in the Eighteenth Century some uncommon rites were conducted at Medmenham (pronounced "Mednam") Abbey on the Thames River thirty-odd miles northwest of London. From 1753 to 1763 the rambling, redroofed Abbey, originally a Cistercian monastery, was used as a week-long retreat several times a year by an order called the Friars of St. Francis.

At dusk a bell would toll and the dozen or so communicants would assemble in the cloisters wearing white hats, white jackets, white trousers and white monkish robes. Carrying lighted tapers, they filed out into the gathering darkness and ceremoniously trooped across the lawn to the entrance of the Abbey, over which was the inscription Fay Ce Que Voudras. After a reverent pause, the leading apparition knocked three times and the Abbey door opened. On the threshold stood the Prior, dressed like his brethren except for a cardinal's red hat trimmed with rabbit fur.

"What," intoned the Prior, "is the password?"

To which the Friars of St. Francis, in unison, boomed their ritual response, a translation of the words over the doorway: "Do what you will!"

After intoning this quote from Rabelais, the monks followed the Prior into the Abbey where events took an even more unconventional turn. Entering the chapel, they passed beneath another inscription which, translated, read: "Stranger, refuse, if you can, what we have to offer." As a sample of what the monks had to offer, lying prone and very likely chilled on the black marble altar, was a naked woman from whose navel the congregation sipped the ceremonial wine. It is a moot point whether they retained the services of an exceptionally large-naveled woman, or whether one of them was assigned the job of refilling. But one thing certain is that these monks constituted a rather unorthodox religious sect.

Actually, the Friars of St. Francis were a group of high-born, high-living Englishmen who convened periodically to do some uninhibited partying and to burlesque religion and conventional morality. The Abbey was perfect for their purposes. It was near enough to London to be reached without too much traveling; it was far enough out in the country to afford privacy; and the religious trappings lent a sacrilegious zest to the orgiastic goings-on. By turning the monastic way of life inside out, they won collective immortality of a sort as The Hell-Fire Club. The group's namesake was not Francis of Assisi. It was Sir Francis Dashwood of West Wycombe. Despite his period-comedy name, Dashwood was a flesh-and-hot-blooded roué who owned a sizable estate six miles from the Abbey. To his fellow voluptuaries, the lords and politicians who shared his particular tastes in carousing, he was known as Hell-Fire Francis.

One of the Club's specialties was the Black Mass, which invoked Satan and mocked Catholic ritual in accord with the anti-Catholicism then fashionable in England. The chapel crucifix hung upside down beneath a pornographic ceiling fresco. Black drapes framed stained-glass windows showing members in poses customarily called indecent. Narcotic herbs fumed in metal receptacles and light was provided by black candles held by lamps in the form of a grotesque bat with a noticeably erect penis. The Hell-Fires toasted the Devil from a ribaldly designed communion cup. Elaborate double entendres were written into prayers and off-color limericks were substituted for hymns. The service culminated in the taking of the Host, a specially baked concoction called "Holy Ghost Pye." And, oh yes, the drinking of more tepid wine from the recumbent woman's navel.

The Hell-Fire Club represented the flowering of a long line of convivial groups devoted to providing an evening's entertainment for the jaded London rake. No band of obscure live-it-uppers, its members were among the most prominent men of the time. Dashwood himself was George III's Chancellor of the Exchequer, although self-admittedly one of the worst to hold that office. Lord Bute was no less than Prime Minister, while Lord Sandwich was First Lord of the Admiralty. Other eminent Hell-Fires included: John Wilkes, Member of Parliament, Lord Mayor of London; Thomas Potter, son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Paymaster-General, Vice-Treasurer of Ireland; George Bubb, Baron of Melcombe Regis, Cabinet Member; artist William Hogarth; novelist Laurence Sterne; satirist Charles Churchill (not an ancestor of Sir Winston). Then there were the Vansittart boys: Henry, Governor of Bengal; Robert, Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford; Arthur, Member of Parliament.

The rakes who flourished during the reigns of the three Georges were no free-lance sinners. They enjoyed debauching, but they enjoyed it best in company and usually joined a club of the similarly inclined. These Eighteenth Century versions of the Organization Man dated their genial genealogy to the Elizabethan Age's Roaring Boys. "The Roarers and Bravadors of the previous century," notes Ronald Fuller in Hell-Fire Francis, "had been, for the most part, like overgrown schoolboys, roaming the streets in shouting bands, and amusing themselves with such unsophisticated delights as the baiting of decrepit Charlies and the pursuit of elderly citizens round the Lambeth Marshes." Other interests included window-breaking, jabbing men in the buttocks with sword points, and standing young ladies wrongside-up so that skirts and petticoats tumbled down over their heads. "The members of the Rakes' Clubs... were not so easily entertained," Fuller goes on. "They tempered brutality with Elegance, debauchery with Taste." In sum, indoor activities dominated the Georgian scene.

It was not only an Age of Licentiousness but an Age of Specialization. "We find in each group," writes Louis Clark Jones in The Clubs of the Georgian Rakes, "a tendency to overindulge in some one vice – drunkenness, immorality, impiety, or gambling ..." The Hell-Fires were triple-threaters; they seem to have gone in heavily for everything but gambling – not that they had any scruples about laying wagers, but first things came first.

The founder of The Hell-Fire Club was the Johnny Appleseed of wild oats: sowing them was his lifelong occupation. Dashwood began young, at sixteen, when he came into his title and fortune. In 1730, a seasoned fleshpotter of twenty-one, he embarked on the Grand Tour. In Russia he made love to the Czarina, one of the great tourist attractions of the day; in Turkey, according to Horace Walpole, Sir Francis showed "the staying powers of a stallion and the impetuosity of a bull." But Dashwood's greatest coup came in Rome. On Good Friday he saw worshipers in the Sistine Chapel lightly tapping themselves with small, symbolic scourges. Feeling inclined to assist them in their devotions, he hid a whip under his dark cloak, and suddenly, in the midst of the worship, he lashed out strenuously on all sides. The Italians fled, shouting "Il Diávolo!"

Back home, Sir Francis did his best to make Merry England merrier. An inveterate joiner, he belonged to: the Prince of Wales' retinue; the Society of Dilettanti, cuttingly described by Walpole as "a club for which the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk"; the Divan Club, a similar group for travelers to Turkey; the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks, which held Saturday-night revels in the tavern atop Covent Garden Theatre; the board of directors of a whorehouse near Drury Lane. Between bouts of wenching and drinking, the major occupations of a Georgian gentleman, Hell-Fire Francis found time to marry a wealthy widow described by one biographer as "a poor, forlorn, Presbyterian prude." He also had his portrait painted in a friar's habit devoutly worshiping before a naked Venus; the painting was captioned "San Francesco di Wycombo."

Dashwood found a way to bring this portrait to life after his political patron, the Prince of Wales, died in 1751. Casting about for a new interest, Sir Francis discovered Medmenham Abbey, bought it, and had it remodeled in the voguish Gothic style, featuring a ruined tower, dead trees, crumbling pillars and arches covered with ivy, and a few tame owls and bats for atmosphere. There was even a gondola, imported from Venice, to taxi the monks and their abbey-followers between London and Medmenham.

Along with many of his well-to-do contemporaries, Dashwood's imagination had been caught during his Grand Tour by the ruins of classic architecture, by wild settings quite unlike England's formal landscapes, and, generally, by the relics of an older, more pagan culture. On their return to England, the young fashion-setters stirred up what one writer has called a "skull and crumble" craze, making a fetish out of disguising new structures to look like ruins. The dark Gothic passions – melancholy, violence, lust – were pushing to the forefront of English art and literature, and Dashwood had no trouble proselytizing eleven congenial souls to serve with him as apostles of the new order in his elaborately perverse utopia. Sir Francis, who took the monastic code-name of St. Francis (the others were known as St. Paul, St. Thomas, etc.), served as Prior. He was assisted by a Steward, the only other permanent officer, who performed such duties as collecting dues and ordering supplies. Duly organized, the great experiment began.

After the Black Mass, it was customary for the Hell-Fires to murmur the equivalent of "Shall we join the ladies?" and retire to an adjoining room where a number of masked (continued on page 121)Hell Fire Club(continued from page 59) women – one for each monk – awaited them, ranked like Rockettes. They were dressed as nuns, in robes as loose as their morals. As one of the Hell-Fires wrote:

Womanhood in habit of a Nun At Medmenham lies, by backward Monks undone.

"Although most of the girls were professional prostitutes," explains Daniel P. Mannix in The Hell-Fire Club, "many were the wives and daughters of local merchants and tradesmen who were thrilled at the idea of having a fling with members of the nobility.... There were even some noted ladies of fashion, but, most surprising of all, a few of the 'nuns' were the wives, sisters, or even the mothers of the 'monks.'" And so, whatever items of apparel the women may have shed of an evening, the masks are supposed to have stayed on.

The monks passed up and down before the row of women like officers reviewing their troops. First choice was the perquisite of the Abbot, a rotating post whose duties included selecting the menu, wines and nocturnal diversions. When the Abbot had picked his wench out of the lineup, the other Hell-Fires paired off with the remaining girls. Festivities began in the Roman Room, an earthy paradise for voyeurs and exhibitionists alike. Each couple made for one of a series of comfortable couches covered with green silk damask on which they could recline in the traditional Roman fashion. The couches, all in full view, lined the room. The walls were whimsically hung with paintings of the Kings of England interspersed with those of well-known prostitutes; there were pornographic murals copied from those in Pompeian villas; and a statue of Harpocrates, the Egyptian god of silence, finger to lips, stared across the room at a statue of the Volupian Angerona, goddess of covert passion, in the same pose.

After a while, the company gathered around a heavily laden banquet table where they drank brandy laced with sulphur out of human skulls, or homebrewed cocktails picturesquely named "Lay Me Down Softly," whose chief ingredient was gin. For victuals there were items like "Breasts of Venus," a pair of squabs each topped with a cherry. Then all joined in the communal singing of bawdy ballads led by Lord Sandwich, who knew more of them than anyone else. Between musical selections, the more literary Hell-Fires would read passages of salacious verse and prose that they had penned. As a contemporary account put it, "Disquisitions of an amorous and Platonic kind sometimes are introduced, in which full liberty of speech is allowed.... In case the topics should unexpectedly become too warm and passionate... some females seize this opportunity for a temporary retreat with their paramours."

Couples could slip out of the Roman Room to the library to sample England's leading collection of pornography. Others, feeling the need for a modicum of privacy, might withdraw to the Withdrawing Room, a series of individual cells furnished with one green silk couch apiece. The hardier types could always go outdoors where the grounds had been laid out in a series of groves, alleys and serpentine walks punctuated by erotic statuary in acrobatic poses and conveniently placed benches with suggestive inscriptions. A wandering couple might, for example, come upon a statue of Mercury, holding a phallic staff with a red tip. On his pedestal was the inscription "Peni Tento non Penitento" – "A penis tense rather than penitent." In the words of a member, "The garden, the grove, the orchard, the neighboring woods, all spoke the loves and frailties of the younger monks, who seemed at least to have sinned natural'y."

Of course, not even the Hell-Fires found it possible to sport with their female guests for a week or longer without a break. There were quiet intervals when the ladies read or amused themselves by playing musical instruments, and the men gathered round the table to drink and display their wit in sexual boasting. Clocks and sundials were prohibited: it was a place to while away the hours, not count them. As Thomas Potter wrote John Wilkes just after Mrs. Potter had given birth to a daughter, "I'm escaping from the solemn lullabies of my mother-in-law and the yells of a young female Yahoo that has just thrust herself into the world yesterday. If you prefer young women and whores to old women and wives, come and indulge the heavenly inspired passion of lust."

About fifty years ago, some British scholars found The Hell-Fire Club's Minute Book which was kept by the Steward and contained a painstaking record of all Abbey activities. They burned it as being too obscene for publication. Fortunately for posterity, however, the pen of Charles Churchill set down at least one participant's tribute to his sojourns with the nuns, or "the sweet little satin-bottoms," as they were sometimes called. Churchill wrote:

The grasp divine, the emphatic, thrilling squeeze!

The throbbing, panting breasts, the trembling knees!

The tickling motion, the enlivening flow!

The rapturous shiver and dissolving... oh!

With propaganda of this sort circulating, it is no wonder that The Hell-Fire Club was soon besieged with applications from aspiring rakes. To keep up the standards of their monastery, the Hell-Fires created two degrees of membership. The twelve original members were known as the Superior Order and they remained the inner circle, the most active members of a very active brotherhood. The Inferior Order was also kept to a dozen and, according to one source, "was composed chiefly of illustrious visitors or amusing neighbors."

When a member of the Superior Order died or left the country, an Inferior monk was elected to fill the vacancy. The initiation ceremony was one of the mock-serious highlights of Abbey rigmarole. It took place at midnight. First, the candidate approached the chapel door through which he could hear "solemn plaintive music." After knocking three times, he entered and knelt before the altar and, of course, the naked woman. Behind the carved altar-rails stood the Superior monks, St. Francis at their head. Then the candidate, according to a writer of the time, made "a profession of his principles, nearly in the words but with the most gross perversion of the sense of the Articles of Faith... [and] demanded admission within the rails. The Brotherhood... retired to the table, and kneeling around it, [the Prior] repeated a prayer in the same strain and manner... to the Being whom they served." After a vote, the elected friar was allowed to pass behind the altar rails. There, after renouncing the Christian faith and swearing allegiance to the Devil, he underwent the Black Baptism: he was sprinkled with salt and sulphur from an ebony font and given his monastic nickname by the Prior.

By a quirk of Georgian morality, sexual looseness was winked at, but the Black Mass was frowned upon by most people. So perhaps there is a touch of poetic justice in the fact that one such memorable conjuring session contributed to the eventual dissolution of The Hell-Fire Club. On the evening in question, it was Lord Sandwich's turn to conduct the chapel services. As he knelt before the altar (and that monumentally patient naked woman) invoking the name of the Emperor Lucifer, a strange black figure suddenly appeared in the members' midst, chattering wildly and unintelligibly. A little tipsy to begin with, the monks bolted for the door shouting "The Devil!" – an ironic echo of Dashwood's exploit in the Sistine Chapel. "Grinning horribly," according to one report, the weird stranger leaped high into the air and came down squarely on Sandwich's shoulders. The distraught Lord fell to the floor, swore repentance, and shrieked for mercy. But when he opened his eyes at last, he found himself staring into the face of a baboon.

It turned out that it was all a practical joke conceived by John Wilkes, who was bored to tears by all this Satanism. Wilkes wanted to have that part of the evening eliminated, so they could get to the women lined up and waiting in the Roman Room. What he had done was put clothes on the Abbey's mascot (sent from Bengal by Governor Vansittart as a gift to his former cronies) and hide him in a chest in the chapel. A string running from the chest to Wilkes' seat controlled the lid so the ape could be released at the most opportune moment. Since the joke was largely at the expense of Sandwich, it sowed the seeds of bitter enmity between Wilkes and the influential Lord.

Although The Hell-Fire Club had been founded as a means of escaping politics and other mundane cares, the members found that even at the Abbey the world was still too much with them. The friction between Sandwich and Wilkes had political ramifications. Sandwich, like most of the Hell-Fires, was a Tory. Wilkes and his friend Churchill were liberal Whigs who criticized the government sharply in their newspaper. The Tories huddled and decided to discredit their opponents. Sandwich, anxious to avenge himself for the baboon episode, rose in the House of Lords and read a long pornographic poem, An Essay on Woman, written by Wilkes. Several peers called for Sandwich to stop, but others shouted "Go on!" and the Upper Chamber heard every disgraceful word by majority vote. As a result, a bill was passed outlawing Wilkes for libel, blasphemy and obscenity. Fleeing to Paris, Wilkes retaliated by planting items in London newspapers alluding to the doings at Medmenham Abbey. A satirical novel was published which did likewise, its author reportedly having received inside information from Churchill. Although the insiders of London society had long known about The Hell-Fire Club, now the gossip spread to the point where the Abbey became a magnet for the curious. Many members dropped out because of the publicity – but not Hell-Fire Francis.

Dashwood had not yet given up his lifelong dream of a Coney Island of Vice. He dismantled the Abbey's furnishings and had them carted to his house in West Wycombe Park. As far as he was concerned, the orgy must go on. He laid out his garden so that its shrubbery formed the curves of a woman's body, and he commissioned pornographic paintings throughout his sixty-eight-room house. But his masterstrokes were the furnishing of a series of caves deep within West Wycombe Hill and the reconstruction of the Church of St. Lawrence on top of the hill. As might be expected, neither was the work of a conventional designer.

Atop the church spire, instead of a cross, Dashwood put a great golden dome, twenty feet in diameter. The dome was hollow and Sir Francis enjoyed sitting inside it with his friends, drinking his "divine milk punch" whose recipe has not come down to us. One of his visitors called it "the best Globe tavern I was ever in." At the mouth of the cave system Dashwood had local laborers build a large Gothic façade with pointed towers and pillared arches. The tunnels, mined out of chalk, ran into the hill to a depth of 280 yards. It was here, far from prying eyes, that the indomitable Sir Francis would lead the few remaining Hell-Fires and some Wycombe lasses for an evening's diversion. Passing carved demon heads set into niches in the walls of a catacomb-like section of cave, crossing an underground stream which Dashwood dubbed the River Styx, the robed figures entered a great vaulted banquet room forty feet high. Around the circular walls, hacked into the rock at regular intervals, were six recesses just large enough to hold a couch – a subterranean version of the Roman Room. The old Abbey traditions were carried on faithfully, though on a smaller scale. Wrote one participant in these submerged revels, "A village maiden said goodbye to her innocence when she visited the Inner Temple."

Whether high above the hill or deep within its bowels, Hell-Fire Francis had created the facilities in which the Hell-Fires could assemble once more and pick up where they had left off. But his last grand effort to recapture the spirit of what had been was futile. Most of the other monks had either died or – perhaps worse, in Hell-Fire Francis' view – defected to respectability. His era of gieatness was at an end.

In The Profane Virtues, Peter Quennell sums up the meaning of The Hell-Fire Club, as well as the other rakes' groups, from a historical perspective:

"A recrudescence of paganism, not unconnected with the fertility rites of the European Middle Ages, these clubs provided an outlet for some of the violent and revolutionary impulses that had begun to ferment beneath the smooth surface of a so-called 'age of reason.' They represented a revolt against Christian ethics, the desire of the individual to explore dark labyrinths in his own nature from which conventional morality and the dictates of common sense alike debarred him. Debauchery is a key that has often been employed, though very seldom with success, in an attempt to make new discoveries on the mental and spiritual planes; mysteries and orgies are frequently hard to distinguish; and whereas it would be unwise to attribute too solemn a significance to the extravagant mummeries enacted by the monks and nuns of Medmenham, we should yet regard them as the frivolous inheritors of an ancient and serious cult."

Latest addition to the burgeoning list of bosom-baring films is "The Hell-Fire Club," a much-romanticized fable built around some very high Eighteenth Century jinkery. Made at Britain's Pinewood Studios, the movie is resplendent with unfettered ladies (including titian-tressed Adrienne Corri and Kai Fischer) and uninhibited gentlemen in uncompromising dalliance—pictorial examples of which adorn the ensuing factual report of what the roaring Hell-Fires were all about.