Many of the leading English social clubs of the era displayed that contempt; one of the most prestigious and infamous was that of the famous “monks” of Medmenham. This group was at its height from 1753 to 1762; its membership during that period included a secretary of state, a first lord of the admiralty, a chancellor of the exchequer, and other cabinet ministers, as well as the leader of the radical opposition and other leading politicians and writers. A host of other influential leaders, including a prime minister, apparently were visitors at one time or another.
It is sometimes hard to separate fact from fiction in both the contemporary accounts of the club’s activities and those of more recent historians, but the history of its founder and leader is clear. Sir Francis Dashwood, a well-connected rake who became chancellor of the exchequer in 1762 and 1763, was an admirer of Voltaire and a student of his works.
[…]
Dashwood in 1752 or 1753 purchased (or perhaps took out a long-term lease on) Medmenham, a semiruined Cistercian abbey in Buckinhamshire, set back from the Thames amid hanging woods, meadows, and a grove of elms. He rehabbed the abbey and landscaped the grounds to make them, in Dashwood’s words, a “garden of lust” with statues in poses to appeal to the prurient and shrubbery pruned to resemble a woman’s private parts. Inside, Dashwood put in stained glass windows that contained indecent pictures of the twelve apostles, a chapel ceiling with a huge pornographic fresco, a library that was said to contain the country’s largest collection of pornographic books, and small rooms with couches placed beneath portraits of past kings and famous prostitutes. Over the eastern porch of the building, Dashwood had workmen paint a motto borrowed from Rabelais: “fay ce que voudras (Do as you please).”
[…]
An account by Charles Johnstone, in his thinly-veiled novel Chrysal, described what Dashwood had to offer in his “monastery”: “The cellars were stored with the choicest wines, the larders with the delicacies of every climate, and the cells were fitted up for all the purposes of lasciviousness, for which proper objects were also provided.” Dashwood then “selected from among his intimates a number equal to that of those who had been at the first chosen to inculcate the religion which he designed to ridicule, whose names they assumed, as he, with equal modesty and piety, did that of the Divine Author of it.” The new apostles and their lord then met in a chapel that featured “walls painted with the portraits of those whose names and characters they assumed, represented in attitudes and actions horrible to imagine.”
But Johnstone was not always accurate; for example, he had one prominent member initiated six or seven years later than he actually was. There were rumors but no proof that Medmenham members practiced Satanism. What is unmistakable is that at least twice a year for a decade, political dignitaries reveled for a fortnight at what was at least the eighteenth-century equivalent for parties at Hugh Hefner’s mansion: Medmenham members dressed as monks were “drinking wine poured by naked girls.” The appeal was that offered in a note from one member, Thomas Potter, to John Wilkes, who like most of the other members was married but unwilling to give up promiscuity: “If you prefer young Women and Whores to old Women and Wives… if Life and Spirit and Wit and Humour and Gaity but above all if the heavenly inspir’d Passion called LUST have not deserted you and left you a Prey to Dullness and Imbecility, hasten to Town…”
Source:
Olasky, Marvin. “Theological Battles.” Fighting for Liberty and Virtue: Political and Cultural Wars in Eighteenth-Century America. Crossway Books, 1995. 87-9. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Donald McCormick, The Hell-Fire Club (London: Jarrolds, 1958), 33, 74, 90, 132.
Fuller, Hell-Fire Francis; Louis C. Jones, The Clubs of the Georgian Rakes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942).
Cecil B. Currey, Road to Revolution: Benjamin Franklin in England, 1765-1775 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968).
David Mannix The Hell-Fire Club (New York: Ballantine, 1959).
Barbara Jones, Follies and Grottoes.
Charles Johnstone, Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea (London, 1760), 384, 387.
Potter quotes in Fuller, Hell-Fire Francis, 137.
Further Reading:
Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron le Despencer PC FRS
François-Marie Arouet / Voltaire
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