The Hellfire Club was the popular name for what is supposed to have been an exclusive English club established by Sir Francis Dashwood which met irregularly from 1746[citation needed] to around 1760 as an extension to his Society of Dilettanti.
At the time, the Club was know under numerous other names such as the Brotherhood of St. Francis of Wycombe, Order of Knights of West Wycombe and later, the Monks of Medmenham. Other clubs using the name "Hellfire Club" were set up throughout the 18th century, most notably the "Hell-Fire Club" founded around 1719 in London by Philip, Duke of Wharton.
The members addressed each other as "Brothers" and Dashwood as "Abbot".
Female "guests" (a euphemism for prostitutes) were referred to as "Nuns". Unlike the more determined Satanists of the 1720s, the club motto was Fait ce que vouldras (Do what thou wilt) from François Rabelais, later used by Aleister Crowley. According to Horace Walpole, the members' "practice was rigorously pagan: Bacchus and Venus were the deities to whom they almost publicly sacrificed; and the nymphs and the hogsheads that were laid in against the festivals of this new church, sufficiently informed the neighbourhood of the complexion of those hermits."
Founders and Members
The two most infamous Hellfire Clubs were founded by Sir Francis Dashwood and the Duke of Wharton. The membership was initially limited to twelve but soon increased. Of the original twelve, some are regularly identified: Dashwood, Robert Vansittart, Thomas Potter the son of John Potter the Archbishop of Canterbury, Francis Duffield, Edward Thompson and Paul Whitehead. Benjamin Franklin is said to have occasionally attended the club's meetings[citation needed] as a non-member during his time in England. The name George Bubb Dodington, a fabulously corpulent man in his 60s, is often cited. Though hardly a gentleman, William Hogarth[citation needed] has been associated with the club. Many Hellfire Club members have been linked to Freemasonry. We see this with the Duke of Wharton, who after disbanding his Club became the Grandmaster of England.
Meetings and Club Activies
According to tradition, the first gathering of this "unholy sodality" was in May of 1746 at the George and Vulture public house in Castle Court, near Lombard Street, City of London. This meeting-place, however, has been ascribed to several other of the Hellfire Clubs, so it must be treated as anecdotal. Later it met on Dashwood's properties at West Wycombe Caves and at Medmenham Abbey, beside the Thames. Rumours of Black Masses, orgies and Satan Worship were well circulated during the time the Clubs were around.
Fire and rebuilding
The George and Vulture Pub, a notorious meeting place, burned down in 1749, possibly as a direct result of a club meeting. It was rebuilt shortly thereafter and survives as a city chop house off Cornhill. Dickens lived and wrote here for a period of time. The Pickwick Club still meets there to this day. After a hiatus, meetings were resumed at members' homes. Dashwood built a temple in the grounds of his West Wycombe home and nearby "catacombs" were excavated. The first meeting at Wycombe was held on Walpurgis Night, 1752; a much larger meeting, it was something of a failure and no large-scale meetings were held there again. Despite this and the factionalising of the club Dashwood acquired the ruins of Medmenham Abbey in 1755[1], which was rebuilt by the architect Nicholas Revett in the style of the 18th century Gothic revival. It is thought that William Hogarth may have executed murals for this building; none, however, survive.
Later years
The list of supposed members is immense; among the more probable candidates are John Wilkes and John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich. Whatever the nature (the existence, even) of such club, there is no question that several events in the early 1760s prevented further activities on the part of Dashwood.
The first was the rise of the Earl of Bute and the Tory party to power following the accession of George III in 1760. In 1762 Bute appointed Dashwood his Chancellor of the Exchequer, despite Dashwood's being widely held to be incapable of understanding "a bar bill of five figures". (Dashwood resigned the post the next year, having raised a tax on cider which caused near-riots.) The second was the publication (1762–5) of Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea by Charles Johnstone, in which Lord Sandwich was ridiculed as having mistaken a monkey for the Devil, supposedly during a rite of the club. The third was the attempted arrest and prosecution of John Wilkes for seditious libel against the King in the notorious issue 45 of his The North Briton in early 1763. During a search authorised by a General warrant a version of The Essay on Woman was discovered set up on the press of a printer whom Wilkes had almost certainly used. This scurrilous, blasphemous, libellous pornographic skit, principally written by Thomas Potter which can from internal evidence be dated to around 1755, was subsequently to be used by the Government as the means by which to destroy Wilkes as a public figure.
Hellfire Clubs Today
Today, the name Hellfire Club is given to a number of fetish clubs in Australia. The name also refers to a group of supervillans in the Marvel Universe who are constantly in battle with he X-Men
References
- ^ The Hell Fire Club, by Daniel P. Mannix, Four Square Books, 1961.
- Sex, Rakes and Libertines. The Hell-Fire Clubs, by Geoffrey Ashe, Sutton Publishing, 2005, ISBN 0-7509-3835-8.
- The Hell Fire Club, by Daniel P. Mannix, Four Square Books, 1961 (previously published in the USA by Ballantine Books, Inc.).
- The Hellfire Consipracy, by Will Thomas, Touchstone, 2007, ISBN 0-7432-9640-0.