On 9th May 1726, three men—William Griffin, Thomas Wright, and Gabriel Lawrence—were hanged at Tyburn in London for (as the courts and newspapers invariably put it) the abominable crime of sodomy.
They had been arrested, along with forty or fifty other men, in a raid on a queer space—a ‘molly house’ run by Margaret Clap. Mrs Clap had—according to reports at the trial—filled her premises in Holborn with beds for the convenience of her customers. One newspaper reports:
There were 8 or 9 of them in a large Room, one was playing upon a Fiddle, and others were one while dancing in obscene Postures, and other while Singing baudy Songs, and talking leudly, and Acting a great many Indecencies.
There were many such ‘molly houses’ across the city. One writer estimates that there were more queer venues in London in the Eighteenth Century than there were in the 1950s. But there were plenty of trials, too. The Buggery Act of 1533 (created in a sort of post-Brexit legislative shake-up after Henry VIII's break with the Catholic Church) made sodomy a crime punishable by death. This was the act under which gay men in the Eighteenth Century were prosecuted.
I stumbled on this subject a few years ago, while researching my family tree. I was looking for any references in old newspapers to a man I thought I might be distantly related to. He lived in London, which none of my other ancestors did; and I wanted to find any evidence of him moving down from the north of England. No joy. But what I did find was an account of him being arrested on suspicion of committing ‘the abominable crime of sodomy’ in a ‘necessary house’ in the capital. As it turned out, I'm not related to him, but I wanted to see if there were any other such trials from around the same time.
There were plenty. Cottaging has a long history, and so do homophobic laws. A typical report, from the same year as the raid on Mrs Clap’s, reads:
Yesterday at Guildhall two Men were convicted of attempting to commit the detestable Sin of Sodomy; and were sentenced to stand in the Pillory; the one in the Minories near Aldgate, and the other in Smithfield.
Some of the accused were acquitted. Some where fined and imprisoned. Many were made to ‘stand in the pillory’—a hideous punishment in itself, which killed at least one man convicted of sodomy.
These reports stayed in the back of my mind. I wanted to use the material in a poem. Working at the Leeds Library (surrounded by historical material, including Georgian newspapers) renewed my interest, and in September 2023 I started looking again for reports relating to trials of gay men in Eighteenth Century London.
I went back to the newspaper reports. They range from reports of arrests and trials to bile-filled letters to the editor and gossip.
Then I found the Proceedings of the Old Bailey. All surviving records from trials at the Old Bailey from 1674 to 1913 have been made available online, not just digitised, but transcribed and searchable. You can search by offence, including ‘sodomy’. How trials were recorded varies; but for the period I was interested in, a lot of detail is included—witness statements, sometimes full verbatim minutes. These records contain the most detail, and sometimes we hear the voices of the men themselves—the ‘accused’.
These men come alive on the page. We can hear their voices—hear them singing at Mother Clap’s, hear them in the dock defending themselves, hear what they said as they were apprehended. One man, standing with his lover before a judge, says: “This Imprisonment has almost cost me my Life; I have almost lost my Limbs, my Legs are swelled, and my Feet almost numbed and dead; so that if I was to lie as much longer I should be dead; as to being disguised, I have lost my Clothes and Linnen, or I would not have presumed to have waited on your Lordshipin this Pickle.” They were found guilty and imprisoned and made to stand in the pillory.
But most of the voices are those of the persecutors, not the men themselves; and I knew that any poem I wrote would have to develop a voice or voices that spoke against the voices in the archive—contradicting them, developing what’s largely absent and inferred: a lively and joyful queer community having fun and having sex—lots and lots of sex.
The poem is called ‘A Cloud of Witnesses’. It contains material from the newspapers and the courts—the title is a phrase used to describe the number of people who gave evidence against one accused man. But woven between and against and around the cloud of witnesses is another voice, made of an amalgamation of voices, speaking for itself, speaking against the salacious, shrieking bigotry of murderous officialdom. As one man said as he was apprehended with his breeches down with another man against—as it goes—some church railings, “Can't I use my own body?”
I read excerpts from the poem at Rhubarb at Triangle in Shipley earlier this year; and at Word Space in Horsforth. But the poem continues to develop, and the material keeps coming. The picture of queer London gets richer and richer.