THE MYSTERIES OF MEDMENHAM THE Hell-Fire Club is one of
the vaguest of historical legends. It has been given two local habitations, at Medmenham Abbey and in the caverns of West Wycombe ; and nobody has a very clear idea of what went on in either of them, or who took part, except that John Wilkes released a baboon disguised as a devil in the midst of some nefarious rite. The exasperating uncertainty of tittle-tattle clouds the whole episode.
Mr. Fuller has probed into the story of the club and its membership, concentrating upon the life of Sir Francis Dashwood, who was undoubtedly its founder, financier, and leading spirit. Mr. Fuller is a scholar well versed in the arts of research. He is also the master of an easy and graceful prose, and of a most original vocabulary. Both the form and content of his work deserve the highest praise.
The ancestry of the Hell-Fire Club is traced back by Mr. Fuller along two lines. On the male side, so to speak, it was the late offspring of the innumerable rowdy clubs of the Restoration and after. Some of these, like the Mohocks of whom we read in the Journal to Stella, were merely hooligan gangs ; others cultivated their special branches of profanity and excess : but it was a common characteristic of the age that vice was always most energetically pursued beneath the forms of a club, a set of rules, and if possible a distinctive fancy dress. This tradition, tiresome at all times and after a century trite, derived fresh impulse about the 1750's from the growth of the new taste for Gothick melancholy and decay. Country gentlemen and their gardeners went mad upon urns and owls and ivy ; they planted dead trees and hired hermits to adorn their grottoes. Nothing could have been more in keeping with this mania than a dining-club in the guise of a monastic order ; Horace Walpole or William Beckford might have had the notion at either end of the romantic period ; but it needed the talents of Sir Francis Dashwood to give to its execution his own peculiar twist.
Sir Francis had distinguished himself as a young man by appearing as the Devil in the Sistine Chapel itself. A crowd of penitents had gathered on Good Friday to kneel in the darkness and mortify their bare backs with little scourges ; and when a tall cloaked Englishman rose in their midst and began to lay furiously about him with a horsewhip, they were readily persuaded of his supernatural origin. Dashwood preserved through life the macabre tastes which this exploit indicates. He was a whole-hearted debauchee, with a fondness for dressing-up and a passion for making mock of sacred matters. When at last the Gothick taste got hold of him, he discovered his vocation in the foundation of a mock monastery.
There was a touch of brilliance, and more than a touch of fetishism, in Dashwood's execution of his scheme. The derelict Abbey of Medmenham, in its dank Thames-side meadows, was a setting as perfect as Newstead itself. The monastic appurtenances—habits, inscriptions, and skulls—were a fine foil to the hardboiled personalities of Sandwich, Bubb Dodington, Thomas Potter and John Wilkes. The harlots ere attired as nuns, and the friars disported in little cells. The same determined profanity was manifested in an abund- ance of statuary and painting. With regard to the actual rites performed, even Mr. Fuller is more censorious than precise. Poets, statesmen, clerics, and Fellows of All Souls appear to have joined in practising some form of puerile diabolism : but it was undoubtedly subordinate to the main purpose of the fraternity.
Medmenham itself flourished but a short while. Political complications disbanded the brethren, who blackmailed each other with tha memory of their common exploits. Wilkes went into exile ; Sandwich returned yet again to the Admiralty ; Churchill died, and Lloyd decayed in prison. But Sir Francis Dashwood, sated of public life by his brief experience as Chancellor of the Exchequer, sold up his abbey and retired to West Wycombe. He did not, like most of his cronies, grow bitter and savage in a premature old age. He was always well liked and agreeably occupied. His attention to a given purpose was always in inverse proportion to its importance. His feebly pornographic wit found costly ex- pression in the symbolical disposition of plantations and waterfalls about his grounds. To commemorate Bubb Dodington, quite the most ineffectual of his friends, he built the huge mausoleum on the hill at West Wycombe. Why he should have built the church beside it, Mr. Fuller cannot explain ; his atheism was unabated, but it seems he fancied the view from the golden ball. A last gesture was the funeral that he gave to his hanger-on, Paul Whitehead. This degraded and repellent individual was buried like a hero, with a strange and elaborate pageant of musical and military honours. An incantation, specially composed for the event, pronounced that-
" From Earth to Heaven, Whitehead's soul is fled! Immortal glories beam around his head! "
About such a man as Dashwood there is the perpetual charm of the unexpected. He could not have found a more adept
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