The Sexual History of London (8 page)

To achieve some insight into Henry's motivation, let us look at ‘buggery' in its historical context. From the time of Henry I, ‘buggery' had been downgraded from a criminal offence to a moral one, which required to be dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts rather than the judiciary. And to all accounts the offence was treated leniently, no doubt because buggery was so common amongst the priesthood, and was also prevalent at court. The Italian author and diplomat Castiglione, who had visited the court of Henry's father, Henry VII, noted the ‘womanish' men who, ‘seeing nature hath not made them women ought to be banished not only out of princes courtes but also out of the company of gentlemen', while another commentator argued that sodomy was associated with following French fashion trends, and that courtiers in French dress were transvestites, proud and drunken ‘progeny of Lucifer' who flew in the face of nature by committing lechery, abuse and other abominable acts.
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This condemnation derived from the biblical edict on same-sex activities: ‘If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death' (Leviticus 20:13). Castiglione doubtless was aware that the vice was associated, as were other sexual peccadilloes, with his fellow countrymen; the Italians were regarded as being particularly given to buggery, hence the common insult of ‘back door Italian', meaning one who enjoys anal sex (‘buggery' derives from the Italian ‘
buggerare
'). Anal sex was also routinely practised by heterosexual couples as a form of contraception, as in the poet Guilpin's observation that ‘Since marriage, Faber's prouder than before, Yfaith his wife must take him a hole lower.'
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While Castiglione and his associates may have had certain reservations about homosexual practices, a reasonable degree of tolerance prevailed while England was still controlled by the Church of Rome. This tolerance was analogous to the acceptance of prostitution, a manifestation of the Roman Catholic belief that man was essentially impure and susceptible to the temptations of the flesh. However, after the Reformation, the climate of tolerance changed. To gain some idea as to the implications of this, let us analyse the meaning of the term ‘buggery' in Reformation England.

For the modern reader, buggery means anal sex, but the Tudors interpreted buggery as any form of sexual deviation, including incest, bestiality and even witchcraft. This product of the peculiar Tudor mentality consisted of lingering medieval superstitions and ill-informed beliefs, including the idea that stillborn or deformed children were evidence of copulation with the devil. Bestiality was included because it was believed that buggery was not merely a sexual preference but associated with witchcraft and devil worship, the buggers in question copulating with the Prince of Darkness himself in animal form.

So, for the Tudors, buggery became a blanket term for sex crimes. The Buggery Act even contains one fascinating and bizarre reference to a noblewoman who, it was claimed, committed bestiality with a ‘Barbary ape' and gave birth to a mutant offspring. Her crime was, it appears, too early for her to be prosecuted under the statute. Buggery was held to be such a vile crime that it actually constituted a form of treason. Committing buggery was a
crimen laesae Majestatis
, or a crime against the king, for which the only fitting punishment would be death followed by burial without religious rites. The Buggery Act was not a means of persecuting homosexual men. Instead, it represented a convenient method for disposing of anyone who represented a threat to the king, and its most famous victim died at the Tower of London on 19 May 1536. Executed as a heretic and a witch, she was Anne Boleyn, one of London's greatest
grandes horizontales
and the most tragic.

Anne had been the star of the court during her affair with Henry. The original ‘It girl', right down to the initial necklace (a golden ‘B' for Boleyn surrounded by pearls), Anne was celebrated for her vivacity, intelligence, political acumen and dark good looks. Anne had married Henry VIII secretly in January 1533, following his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, but the marriage was not officially announced until June. The populace took against Anne, and soon allegations circulated that she was a witch with six fingers. Anne gave birth to one healthy child, the future Queen Elizabeth I, but then came two miscarriages; rumours flew around that the second foetus was hideously deformed.

By this time Henry was suffering bouts of impotence, which he blamed on Anne, since witches were believed to cause impotence by ‘overlooking' unfortunate men. Meanwhile, Henry and his adviser, Thomas Cromwell, who had fallen out with Anne over policy issues, conducted a character assassination on a grand scale, discrediting Anne with allegations of ‘buggery'.

Towards the end of April, Anne's musician, a young Flemish boy named Mark Smeaton, was arrested and tortured until he ‘confessed' to having had sex with her, as were three other men, Henry Norris, Sir Francis Weston and William Brereton, despite the fact that the latter two were exclusively homosexual in their orientation. Finally, Anne's own brother, George, was charged with incest, the stillborn baby being considered evidence of an unnatural union. The ‘evidence' for these allegations would not withstand the scrutiny of a modern legal team, but the trumped-up charges were sufficient to see Anne's four alleged ‘lovers' executed on 17 May, while Anne herself went bravely to the scaffold two days later, and submitted to her fate with considerable dignity.
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Anne's real crime was not ‘buggery' in any of its manifestations. She did not commit adultery, or incest, or dabble in witchcraft. The mundane facts are that she fell out of favour with her husband, and alienated the powerful political operator Thomas Cromwell by opposing his proposals for the funds confiscated during the dissolution of the monasteries. In short, Anne was executed for being an infertile woman whose husband had tired of her, and who meddled in affairs of state.

The Buggery Act received royal assent in 1533 and became enshrined in English law as the Buggery Statute, with buggery remaining a capital offence until 1861. Four days later, ‘Walter', Lord Hungerford (1503–40) was executed for infringing it. By all accounts Hungerford had been a violent and despicable man. He tried to starve his wife, Elizabeth, to death by locking her up in a castle for four years, and then tried to poison her.

Elizabeth wrote to their mutual friend Thomas Cromwell, concerning Hungerford's physical and mental cruelty, saying she was willing to testify against him in court. Cromwell had previously ignored her pleas, finding it expedient to take Hungerford's side. Subsequently, however, Hungerford found himself charged with exercising the ‘abominable and detestable vice and synne' of buggery with his servants; William Maister and Thomas Smyth (his sons-in-law); and others at his house in Heytesbury, Wiltshire, and at ‘divers other places within the same county'. Hungerford also stood accused of having sexual relations with his own daughter, and practising witchcraft, ‘being seduced and led by the Devil, willing and desiring by all his wicked wit and power the mortal death and utter destruction of Your most royal person'. This consisted of attempting to predict how long the king had to live, with the help of Mother Roche, a notorious witch.

Another charge of treason stated that Hungerford had taken in a young priest and employed him as his chaplain. As the priest, William Byrde (a relative of the composer of the same name), was an out-spoken critic of King Henry, Hungerford was also guilty of treason. So, although the church registers kept by the Grey Friars record that Hungerford was beheaded for ‘bockery', the real cause was treason.

Hungerford was executed on Tower Hill, and he did not die with dignity. According to Holinshed, at the time of his death, ‘he seemed so unquiet, that many judged him rather in a frenzy than otherwise'. As for Elizabeth, once her husband had been executed, she married Sir Robert Throckmorton, ‘with whom she spent many years of presumably happy life, and by whom she became the mother of several children'.
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Executed alongside Hungerford was the original instigator of the Buggery Statute, the very man who had led the plot against Anne Boleyn. Thomas Cromwell himself had fallen out of favour with the king, following the latter's disastrous marriage to Anne of Cleves, and he now fell victim to the volatile monarch's terrifying destructive rage.

Not every charge of buggery resulted in execution. Nicholas Udall (1504–56), a cleric and poet who had written celebratory verse on Anne Boleyn's entry into London as a newly crowned queen, was also a Latin teacher at Eton College. By 1534, Udall had risen to the position of headmaster. But in March 1541, less than a year after Hungerford's execution, Udall was accused of physical and sexual abuse and admitted buggery with two of his pupils. Udall was lucky to escape execution – thanks to the intervention of the Earl of Southampton. Because he had not committed treason, Udall's sentence was commuted to imprisonment, and he was free within a year, but with his career in ruins. Who would employ a master who had sexually abused his pupils? However, after a period of rehabilitation which saw Udall as vicar of Braintree and vicar of Calborne, Isle of Wight, he returned to teaching, and ended his career as headmaster of Westminster School in 1555.
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The Buggery Statute was repealed by Queen Mary during her brief reign of 1553–8. As a Roman Catholic, Mary demonstrated tolerance towards sexual peccadilloes such as homosexuality and prostitution, but more than made up for this apparent leniency with her fanatical religious persecution.

When Elizabeth I took the throne, she renewed the law against buggery on the grounds that ‘divers ill-disposed Persone have been the more bold to commit this most horrible detestable vice to the High Displeasure of Almightie God'. One suspects, however, that Elizabeth, like her father, was using the Buggery Statute as a political measure, rather than a method of persecuting homosexual men. After all, the atmosphere at court was one of high camp, as the bewigged, bejewelled, enamelled Elizabeth peacocked about like a drag queen, surrounded by her coterie of mincing ministers. These included such notable homosexuals as Sir Francis Bacon and Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. The latter was Shakespeare's most famous patron, dedicatee of ‘Venus and Adonis' and ‘The Rape of Lucretia' and possibly the mysterious male lover referred to in the
Sonnets.

Elizabeth presided over one of the most magnificent outpourings of poetry and drama ever witnessed, in England or elsewhere, a considerable amount of which was composed by homosexual men. Much of Elizabethan literature is blatantly homoerotic, whether it be the passionate sonnets addressed by Shakespeare to the enigmatic Mr W H or the sex comedies with their innuendo-laden titles such as
As You Like It
,
All's Well That Ends Well
and even
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. Add to this titillating mix the fact that boys performed the role of girls dressed as boys and you have a plethora of transsexual teasing. No wonder the Puritans closed the theatres down.

Poets such as Richard Barnfield and William Drummond published manifestly erotic odes to Arcadian shepherd boys in the classical tradition, while Christopher Marlowe's famous invitation to ‘come live with me and be my love' was addressed to one of London's ‘golden lads', Lord Hunsdon, a favourite cousin of the queen, who was notorious for keeping a male brothel, described as a ‘bawdy house of beasts', in Hoxton.
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This climate of happy tolerance existed in an era when there was no formal definition of male homosexuality, or a gay scene as it is understood today. Instead, behaviour which we would now categorize as homosexual was accepted as part of the spectrum of male sexuality, if it fell within certain socially acceptable boundaries. No shame attached to the young man about town who stepped out with his plump mistress on one arm and his ‘Ganymed', or boyfriend, on the other.

Derived from the classical Greek tradition, it was permitted for a young man to have a pederastic relationship with an older mentor, which would then be discarded on marriage. George Villiers, for instance, was referred to by James I as ‘my sweetheart' and shared James's bed, although he was twenty-five years younger than the king. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was a good example of an establishment homosexual, celebrated for his intellectual and artistic achievements and tolerated because of his privileged status. Even when his political career ended in disgrace, he spent only a few days in the Tower of London before re-inventing himself as a popular scientist and writer.

A fascinating and witty man, Bacon had ‘a delicate, lively, hazel eye, like the eye of a viper'
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and was excellent company. Despite being engaged to a young widow, Elizabeth Hatton, who called off the marriage, and later marrying Alice Barnham, a girl of fourteen, Bacon was ‘a Pederast'. According to John Aubrey, he was surrounded by his ‘Ganymeds', who took bribes.

Bacon escaped censure in England, unlike his older brother, Anthony, who faced prison in France for buggery, after it emerged that he kept a houseful of young boys, one of whom penetrated another so forcefully that the victim screamed in pain. Anthony Bacon was lucky to escape with his life, as execution for sodomy was common across the Channel. An engraving by the Flemish artist Franz Hogenberg (1540–90) shows the execution of a group of Franciscan monks for ‘sodomitical godlessness' in the town square at Bruges in 1578, and the same engraving comes with the inscription that three other friars had been burned for the same crime.

Prosecution for male rape in England was rare; the most notable instance was that of Humphrey Stafford, executed for this offence in 1608. Stafford's trial and subsequent execution were sensational, attracting ‘a great throng and mass of people'. It will never be known whether Stafford was the unfortunate victim of a blackmailing scheme gone wrong, or a rapist, but his case caused a stir largely because it was so unusual. There are just two sources for this case; it was cited by Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), the noted jurist, and became the subject of an anonymous pamphlet which circulated soon after Stafford's execution.
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