Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (24 page)

Narayaniah’s statement was so vague as to the nature of the “unnatural offence” which he claimed to have witnessed that it led many readers of the newspaper reports of the case into the mistaken belief that Leadbeater was being accused of sodomy; amongst those so deceived was Aleister Crowley who, in a speech delivered at Manchester on June 28th, 1913, took a high moral tone and declared that he deemed “the French slang ‘Petit Jesus’ is being taken too seriously when a senile sex-maniac like Leadbeater proclaims his catamites as Coming Christs”. Such statements showed a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the allegations; as I have previously said, mutual masturbation was the worst of which Leadbeater was ever accused.

The trial, which had been transferred to the High Court in Madras, did not begin until March 20th, 1913 and when judgment was finally given on April 15th it pleased nobody; Annie Besant lost her guardianship, for although the evidence of Narayaniah and Luxman had been thoroughly discredited—both had made a very poor impression under cross-examination—the Judge had denounced Leadbeater as “a man holding immoral ideas” and ruled that as Narayaniah had not been aware that Krishnamurti was to be brought up as “a vehicle of supernatural powers” at the time when he had made Annie Besant the boys’ guardian he was fully entitled to revoke the agreement. On the other hand Narayaniah was, most unreasonably, ordered to pay the full costs of both sides.

As soon as Annie Besant heard the verdict she lodged an appeal against it and obtained a stay of execution of the Judge’s order that the boys should be immediately returned to their father. She fared badly in the Appeal Court, however, for not only was the lower Court’s ruling on the guardianship upheld, but the decision on costs was reversed. A further appeal, to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, was made.

On May 25th, 1914 the Judicial Committee issued its full judgment. This time Annie was completely successful—it was perhaps, significant that Lord Haldane, the Chairman of the Committee, was an old friend of hers—and it was laid down in the judgment that the decision of the Madras High Court was invalid because the Court had failed to consider the wishes and interests of the boys. The Committee pointed out that Narayaniah could start the legal battle all over again, this time in the English High Court; but Narayaniah realised that his sons would have reached the legal age of majority long before the case could be decided, so Annie Besant was left victorious.

Ten weeks after the Privy Council decision the first World War began and public interest in the doings of the Theosophical Society diminished. For the next four years the British people had more important things to think about than the alleged sexual irregularities of C. W. Leadbeater and the coming Christhood of Krishnamurti. It was too good to last! After the war a fresh storm blew up, and this time it was difficult to know whether Leadbeater’s enemies were more annoyed by his sexual behaviour or his episcopal activities in the Liberal Catholic Church. Indeed, in the minds of Leadbeater’s opponents, there seems to have been little distinction made between homosexuality and Liberal Catholicism.

The Liberal Catholic Church had come into existence as a result of the ecclesiastical activities of an eccentric Englishman named A. H. Mathew, an erratic and unstable character, whose lifelong love of animals seems to have been the only constant element in his personality make-up. Born in 1852 of a Roman Catholic father and an Anglican mother Mathew underwent baptism in both Churches. Perhaps this early influence was the cause of the religious indecision that made him first an Anglican theological student, then a Roman Catholic priest— at this period of his life his interest in animals was responsible for him terrorising the faithful of St. Mary’s, Bath, by introducing a live tiger into his pulpit—then a Unitarian, then a curate of the Church of England, then a Catholic layman and, finally an Old Catholic Archbishop. Even this last period was marred by one submission to Rome—recanted, inevitably enough, a few weeks later.

Mathew was consecrated as an Old Catholic Bishop on April 28th, 1908 by Archbishop Gul of Utrecht. On historical grounds the validity of his consecration seems unquestionable, for although the Dutch Old Catholic Church had been in schism from Rome since 1739 its episcopal line of succession could be traced back unbroken to Cardinal Antonion Barberini. Nevertheless, the consecration had clearly been obtained by fraud, for while both the Dutch Old Catholics and Mathew himself were sincerely convinced that the latter represented a large and growing body of English Catholics who desired independence from Rome, the reality was very different. For Mathew was no more than the innocent tool of a tiny body of disgruntled excommunicated, and possibly financially dishonest, Catholic priests. These were led by two Monsignori, Herbert Beale and Arthur Howarth, both of whom had been at one time in charge of parishes in the diocese of Nottingham. They had been on good terms with Bishop Bagshawe, who had been Bishop of Nottingham until his forcible retirement in 1901. Bagshawe has been described as saintly, but senility seems to have been a more noticeable characteristic, and in spite of occasional flashes of bad temper—on one occasion he excommunicated the entire membership of that High Tory and eminently respectable organisation the Primrose League—he was tolerant to the point of lunacy and appointed to responsible positions priests who had been sacked from other dioceses. So great was Bagshawe’s capacity for turning a blind eye to the behaviour of his subordinates, however outrageous, that his diocese became known as
refugium peccatorum
, the refuge of sinners. Bishop Brindle,
Bagshawe’s successor, was a man of quite a different type and he instituted a general clean-up, in the course of which he sacked Beale and Howarth for the alleged misuse of mass-stipends and other financial irregularities. These two managed to convince Mathew and the Old Catholics that they represented seventeen priests and eight large parishes. Both parishes and priests were largely imaginary, and the two Monsignori seem to have had no other motive for getting Mathew consecrated as the head of a non-existent English Old Catholic Church than a desire to annoy their lawful superiors, Bishop Brindle and the Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster.

On his return from his Dutch consecration Mathew soon realised that he had been the victim of fraud. Until his death in 1919 he devoted the remainder of his life to consoling himself for his loneliness by writing lengthy essays designed to prove the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare and dreaming of a National Catholic Church under his own leadership. Unfortunately for his own reputation Mathew attempted to put the latter dream into practice and he ordained priests and consecrated Bishops; he was a remarkably poor judge of character and many of his clergy were clearly quite unsuited to hold any sort of religious office.

In 1914 Mathew consecrated F. S. Willoughby as Titular Bishop of St. Pancras.
¹⁴
The latter had managed to convince Mathew that he had been subjected to religious persecution in the Church of England because of his Anglo-Catholic theological views; in reality he had been forced to resign his living after a particularly revolting series of homosexual offences against choirboys. Willoughby’s motive for becoming a Bishop seems to have been financial, for after his consecration he appears to have been willing to confer the episcopate upon anyone willing to pay a sufficiently large fee.

By this time an actual majority of Mathew’s tiny following were members of the Theosophical Society or one or other of its front organisations; indeed, for a brief period Mathew himself had an intellectual flirtation with the Theosophical Society, which he seems to have hoped, with the optimism that was so typical of him, to incorporate into his own movement. Only two months before his consecration of Willoughby Mathew wrote as follows to Reginald Farrer, one of his priests who was also a Theosophist:

“I have so often seen a sort of mental vision of Mrs. Besant in the garb of an
abbess
! It is very curious, but I think something is working in her mind and that she is seeing more clearly the divinity of the Catholic system and revelation, which is alone able to satisfy the soul’s aspirations and longings. She would be another St. Teresa or Catherine of Siena—and I have for some time—quite a year—felt that that is her destiny. But we shall see.”

Mathew saw indeed! For just a year after the above letter was written Mathew’s hopes of taking over the Theosophical Society were completely destroyed. Instead the Theosophical Society took over his Church, leaving Mathew with a following of exactly three—one priest and two laywomen. The remainder of Mathew’s former followers elected as their chief, James Wedgwood, one of the founders of an occult organisation called the Temple of the Rosy Cross, a holder of the thirty-third degree of co-masonry, and a former General Secretary of the English section of the Theosophical Society. Under his leadership the Theosophists carried on as the Old Roman Catholic Church.

Willoughby, whom Mathew had suspended from the episcopate after a revealing series of articles in the scurrilous magazine
John Bull
, obligingly supplied the (Theosophical) Old Roman Catholics with three Bishops, consecrating Bernard Gauntlett and Robert King
¹⁵
in September 1915 and Wedgwood himself in the following year.

Shortly after his consecration Wedgwood handed over the conduct of ecclesiastical affairs in England to Bishop King and set off for Australia to see Leadbeater, who had been in that country since 1913. Leadbeater himself was quickly made a Bishop, an event that he seems to have regarded as being of great importance; he wrote to Annie Besant:

“Wedgwood has arrived and is in good health. His consecration to the Episcopate has had the unexpected result of putting him practically at the head of the Old Catholic movement so far as the British Empire is concerned… . This being so he desires most earnestly to offer the movement to the World Teacher as one of the vehicles for His force, and a channel for the preparation of His Coming. I took him therefore
to the
LORD MAITREYA
¹⁶
… and He was graciously pleased to accept the offer, and to say that He thought the movement would fill a niche in the scheme, and would be useful to Him … with His permission Wedgwood has consecrated
me
as a Bishop, on the understanding that I am at perfect liberty to wear my ordinary dress, and am in no way bound to perform any ecclesiastical ceremonies or take any outward part in the work unless I see it useful to do so, but to act as an intermediary between the
LORD
and this branch of His Church.”

The Liberal Catholic Church—it had adopted its new name in 1918 —enjoyed a certain modest success and quickly fell completely under the control of Leadbeater who, in 1920, published a lengthy and turgid volume,
The Science of the Sacraments
, devoted to the liturgy of the Church and giving a great deal of amazing information and advice— the use of Gothic Revival vestments, for example, was recommended because “a terrific torrent (of force) pours from the radiating disc on the back”.

Wedgwood seems to have shared Leadbeater’s love of boys but not his hatred of women
¹⁷
and, only a few months after Scotland Yard had begun taking an interest in his friendships with young men, he was making an unsuccessful attempt to seduce the wife of T. H. Martyn, a leading Australian Theosophist. Subsequently Martyn became the leader of the Australian opposition to Leadbeater and his practices, sexual and ecclesiastical.

There is no doubt that Wedgwood was an active homosexual; he seems to have been addicted to what Americans sometimes call “tea room trade”—temporary liaisons made in public urinals. On one occasion a private detective followed Wedgwood for two hours, during which period he visited no less than eighteen “comfort-stations”. When taxed with this Wedgwood produced an interesting and ingenious explanation; it was true, he said, that he had been looking for a young man, but for a particular young man—an individual he had known in a previous incarnation and who had (so he discovered from an astral revelation) gone to the bad and was in need of redemption!

Martyn and his allies soon came to look upon the Liberal Catholic Church as no more than the front for a gang of pederasts; Mrs. Martyn went so far as to claim that she had come upon Leadbeater and one of her sons in a naked embrace. Her suspicions, so she said, had been previously aroused by stains she had found on Leadbeater’s sheets.

By 1922 the whole Australian press was running a virulent campaign, based on information almost certainly supplied by Martyn, against Leadbeater, Wedgwood, the Liberal Catholic Church, and homosexuality. Australia being Australia the vulgarity of the campaign was almost more than Leadbeater could bear—the headline
LEADBEATER A SWISH BISH WITH BOYS
caused him particular offence.

As on previous occasions the fuss died down. Theosophical parents continued to send their sons to Leadbeater for training and the Liberal Catholic Church grew in strength. Leadbeater even built an open air theatre overlooking Sydney harbour in readiness, so it was said, for the day when Krishnamurti would become Christ and appear walking over the sea to visit his old friend and teacher. Alas! It was not to be. For Krishnamurti disappointed his followers by announcing that a mistake had been made and that, in spite of the prophecies made by Annie Besant and Leadbeater, the Christ was not going to incarnate in him after all!

Leadbeater died peacefully in 1934. He was predeceased by his giant cat. She was an animal of a highly evolved spiritual nature and was due to be reincarnated as a human being, a member of the Theosophical Society. Or so, at any rate, said Leadbeater.