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St
Lawrence Church
and The Dashwood Mausoleum.
West Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.
The Nefarious Goings On Of The Hell Fire Club.
West
Wycombe is a delightful, though tiny, village, comprised of a
single high street of timber and flint buildings, on the outskirts
of which sits the magnificent seat of the Dashwood family, the
beautifully Palladian West Wycombe Park. On the summit of the
steep conical hill across the road from the house, is the immense
Dashwood Mausoleum, behind which towers the strange golden ball
that sits uneasily atop the church of St Lawrence. Meanwhile, hewn
out of the hillside beneath are a series of caves, reached via an
entrance that has been fashioned to resemble a gothic church and
which adds to the overall ambience of eccentricity with which the
overall estate seems imbued.
The
person responsible for all this was Sir Francis Dashwood
(1708-1781), a man whose name has become a byword for hedonistic
debauchery, and who is today best remembered as a leading light in
the most infamous of all the so-called “Hell Fire” clubs.
These secret societies had become popular with wealthy young
aristocrats in the first half of the 18th
century and in 1721 it was considered necessary to pass a Royal
edict condemning “Young People who meet together in the most
impious and blasphemous manner.. and corrupt the minds and morals
of one another”.
Ironically,
Dashwood’s organisation, which is now perhaps the only one to be
universally remembered, and which operated between the 1740’s
and 1760’s, never actually called itself the
‘Hell-Fire-Club’, preferring instead to be known as the
“Knights of St Francis”. John Wilkes (1725 – 1797), the
radical politician, and an enthusiastic member, described their
gatherings as “A set of worthy, jolly fellows, happy disciples
of Venus and Bacchus, got together to celebrate women in wine”.
The select central core of just thirteen “apostles”, led by
Sir Francis Dashwood, included Lord Sandwich, John Wilkes, the
painter William Hogarth, poets Charles Churchill, Robert Lloyd and
Paul Whitehead, whilst American, Benjamin Franklin, was reputed to
have been an occasional visitor.
Although
their early meetings probably took place at the homes of various
members, including West Wycombe Park, Sir Francis began casting
around for a base that would provide the necessary seclusion for
the club's activities. He settled on the ruins of the old
Cistercian abbey at Medmenham, six miles from West Wycombe, which
he restored to opulent splendour and inscribed above archway over
the entrance the club's motto Fay ce que voudras (Do as you
wish). Thereafter the society would also be known as “The Monks
of Medmenham”.
Despite
the fact that these self -styled monks certainly indulged in a
goodly amount of sexual frolicking, and did include mock religious
services in their rituals, there is no evidence to suggest that,
as has been frequently claimed, they ever practiced Satanism. The
rumour that they did, was probably begun by their enemies in the
late 18th Century, and gathered momentum throughout the 19th and
20th Centuries. There is, however, a delightful, though spurious,
tale that at one of the meetings, John Wilkes concealed a baboon,
which he had dressed as the Devil, in a chest beneath his seat. At
an appropriate moment, he jerked a cord which opened the chest and
the creature jumped onto Lord Sandwiches shoulders who, believing
that he had conjured up the Devil, cried out “Spare me gracious
Devil: spare a wretch who never was sincerely your servant. I
sinned only from vanity of being in the fashion; thou knowest I
never have been half so wicked as I pretended: never have been
able to commit the thousandth part of the vices which I boasted
of…”.
The
animosity felt by Lord Sandwich for John Wilkes would lead him to
pursue a vendetta against him that would see Wilkes expelled from
the House of Commons and ultimately, lead to his being jailed for
three years. At the height of the Wilkes scandal, Sandwich is
supposed to have exclaimed at him, “Upon my soul Wilkes, I
don’t know whether you’ll die upon the gallows or of the
pox” “That depends, my lord,” replied Wilkes “on whether I
first embrace your lordships principles or your lordships
mistresses”. But their feud also dragged in other members,
including Sir Francis himself and, by 1766, he had effectively
disbanded the Knights of St Francis and thereafter they would
be nothing more than a vague, albeit infamous memory, around whom
all manner of salacious gossip would gather.
Borrowed
from Haunted
Britain and Ireland |
