Strange Antics

When Charteris was duly found guilty the courtroom erupted in cheers. A few days later he was summoned to the same place for sentencing. Dressed in a cavalry officer’s uniform, attended to by a brace of footmen, he was sentenced to hang at Tyburn along with nine other common criminals brought before the magistrate in the same session. His carriage back to Newgate Prison was followed by a large crowd of happy Londoners, eager to advertise and celebrate the imminent demise of the nation’s most prolific and unprincipled sexual adventurer. ‘The most popular Whore-master in the three Kingdoms’, as one contemporary account had it, ‘said to have lured as many Women into his toils as would set up a Sultan’.[2]

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Charteris had been born in Edinburgh at some point in the 1660s. His father was a wealthy landowner in Dumfriesshire and the Charterises were a family with ancient ties to the Scottish aristocratic elite. His youth was almost exactly coterminous with the reign of the restored Charles II, the Merry Monarch, whose priapic rule signalled a dramatic end to Cromwell’s Puritan Protectorate. The libidinism of Charles’s court was without parallel in English history. The king very much led by example. ‘His scepter and his prick are of a length,’ the Earl of Rochester reported, ‘And she may sway the one who plays with th’ other.’ St James’s was a long way from the Charteris family seat in Amisfield. Nevertheless, the cyprian spirit of the age made itself felt on the young man and would find morbid expression in him in his later years.

Charteris’s devilish ways first became a matter of public record in the 1690s, when he joined the army of the Duke of Marlborough in Flanders. It is unclear how much, if any, combat Charteris saw. What is known is that he soon became a figure of general loathing for his ill-treatment of his brother officers. Charteris had become an inveterate card cheat as well as a ruthless loan shark. It seems as though he used his skills in one arena to create customers for the other. These demoralising activities, combined with various unspecified abuses of the local population, secured his expulsion from the army twice, the second occasion shortly before the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. Thereupon Charteris returned to Scotland where he paid his way back into the army, came into his inheritance following his father’s death, and, to general amazement, managed to marry. The details of this union, like so much about his earlier life, are unknown, but it yielded a daughter, Janet Charteris, who would later do no service to the cause of British women through her loyalty to her villainous father.

Rich and married, Charteris now embarked on a phenomenal spree. He invested his income at the card table, where he systematically bilked the Scottish elite of their wealth. The master of the marked card and the loaded die, he had soon multiplied his net worth. On one particularly scandalous occasion he managed to inveigle his way into the Edinburgh salon of the Duchess of Queensberry and, with the aid of a strategically situated mirror, rob his hostess blind during a card game in her own drawing room. (This enraged her husband the Duke so much that he lobbied Parliament to change the law concerning the amount of money one could wager while gaming.)

This incident and many others like it served to make Charteris persona non grata in Scottish society. But ostracism could little restrain a man with Charteris’s capacity for roguery, nor did it hinder the indulgence of his other appetites: women and property. Acquiring the latter was fairly straightforward. As for the former, Charteris used money, force and fraud to obtain sex, travelling far and wide to do so. His preference was for working-class women, ‘strong, lusty, fresh Country Wenches’, one account records, ‘of the first Size, their B–tt–cks as hard as Cheshire Cheeses, that should make a Dint in a Wooden Chair and work like a Parish Engine at a Conflagration’. The accumulation of a substantial property portfolio created the need for large permanent staffs upon whom Charteris could prey. In 1713 he purchased Hornby Lodge in Lancashire, a place which became host to any number of proto-Sadean scenes as Charteris remodelled the house for his own debauched purposes – including the installation of secret passages that led to trapdoors in the servants’ bedrooms – and then sent his agents out into the neighbouring countryside to find victims for his orgies. Soon the residents of the surrounding villages knew better than to send their wives and daughters to work for Charteris, and his panders had to search further afield for suitable targets.

On one famous occasion, Charteris’s valet John Gourley found a girl looking for work as a maidservant, but willing only to enter the service of either an unmarried woman or a widow. Gourley lured her to Hornby Hall on the promise of work with his benign and virtuous mistress. Upon arrival she was told her potential new employer would interview her from her bed. Halfway through the conversation, her would-be mistress sprang from beneath the covers and disrobed to reveal the degenerate form of Francis Charteris, struggling to free himself from his disguise. He presently tried to seduce the shocked girl and, when that failed, drew a pistol and demanded sex. She pretended to comply, but when Charteris laid down the gun in readiness for his ministrations, she seized it, turned it upon her attacker and ‘swore by all that was sacred, she would discharge it into his Body, if he did not return instantly to his Bed’. Charteris obliged and the girl was able to make her way safely out of the building, gun in hand.[3]

The great number of properties Charteris owned necessitated a considerable amount of travel between them, and it was during these sojourns that much of his most despicable business was carried on. On one such occasion Charteris was travelling between Musselburgh and Edinburgh when he came across a solitary woman carrying a sack of corn. Charteris solicited her, and when she refused both his advances and his money, he raped her at pistol point. Afterwards, having escaped, she told her husband, who sought personal revenge, and when that was not forthcoming, legal redress. Charteris’s customary attempts to bribe his way out of trouble failed, and an Edinburgh court summoned him to appear before it charged with rape. Fearing that justice would be done, Charteris fled south to England and made his way to London.

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London in the early eighteenth century, according to one jaundiced contemporary, was

like the Ocean, that receives the muddy and dirty Brooks, as well as the clear and rapid Rivers, swallows up all the Scum and Filth, not only of our own, but of other Countries: Wagons, Coaches, and Carrivans; Pack-Horses, Ships, and Wooden-Shoes; French, Dutch, German, and Italian tattered Garments, being constantly emptying and discharging themselves into this Reservoir, or Common-Sewer of the World.[4]

With a population of over half a million it was the largest city in Europe and the largest conurbation by far in the United Kingdom, accounting for a tenth of the total population and dwarfing the next largest city, Bristol, which was home to a mere 30,000 people.

London was dirty, crowded and dangerous. There were innumerable ways to die. Highwaymen worked the roads between the built-up centre and the nearby villages and market towns of Kensington, Camberwell, Hampstead and Islington. Swords were worn in public and used in street fights, tavern brawls, and confrontations in the theatre. Smallpox was the terror of every citizen; the sexually indulgent, or even just the unlucky, faced an agonising death from the venereal diseases that claimed several thousand lives each year. The poor died of gin-drinking and starvation and upon the ravenous scaffolds at Tyburn. The old wooden houses in Covent Garden and Drury Lane came cheap – as little as twopence a night – but collapsed with regularity and were at perpetual risk of fire. ‘Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire,’ Samuel Johnson wrote in London, a poem:

And now a rabble rages, now a fire;

Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay,

And here the fell attorney prowls for prey;

Here falling houses thunder on your head,

And here a female atheist talks you dead.

The city’s capacity to kill was offset by the enormous quantity of sexual activity going on among its populace. To read the London press of the day is to enter a world that seems exclusively populated by coquettes, coxcombs, cuckolds and prudes engaged in a permanent carnival of amorous intrigue. ‘I confess,’ wrote one despairing Londoner to a country friend, ‘if you have a Design to make your self a good Proficient in the Arts of Whoring, and Drunkenness, or to understand exactly the Methods of Debauchery and Profaneness, this is indeed the Place of the World.’[5] Sexual profligacy was then the fashion and the men of London competed with one another to prove their seductive powers. The mania for sexual adventure and amorous expertise found innumerable means of expression. A whole new vocabulary sprang to life to describe the mores of the day. Seemingly every man aspired ‘to keep cully’, the more prodigious being known as ‘Whore-mongers’; for those with limited resources a couple of shillings could afford a visit to a ‘Vaulting School’ kept by an ‘Abbess’ or ‘Mother’, though doing so brought with it the risk of contracting the ‘Drury-Lane Ague’ or the ‘Covent Garden Gout’. Among the Quality, ‘Whoring, Drinking and Gaming, are reckon’d among the Qualifications of a fine Gentleman’. These well-born, moneyed sybarites were the rakes who, either as individuals or gathered together in clubs – the Mohocks, the Hell-Fire Club, and many more – roved the city searching for trouble and pleasure. One ballad recorded in print in 1719 records the sexual escapades of these leisured men:

But the Town’s his Seraglio, and still he lives free;

Sometimes she’s a Lady, but as he must range,

Black Betty, or Oyster Moll serve for a Change:

As he varies his Sports his whole Life is a Feast,

He thinks him that is soberest is most like a Beast:

All Houses of Pleasure, breaks Windows and Doors,

Kicks Bullies and Cullies, then lies with their Whores:

Rare work for the Surgeon and Midwife he makes,

What Life can Compare with the jolly Town-Rakes.

Such behaviour was by no means limited to the wealthy elite. Scandalised observers recorded the democratic nature of the phenomenon. One complained of the ‘Suburbs gallant Fop that takes delight in Roaring, / He spends his time in Huffing, Swearing, Drinking, and in Whoring’. A Portuguese visitor singled out for criticism the legal clerks who ‘are under no manner of government; before their times are half out, they set up for gentlemen; they dress, they drink, they game, frequent the playhouses, and intrigue with the women’. In London, even the humblest apprentice could don his finest clothes and go to the theatre or to the Vauxhall Leisure Gardens for a shilling and mingle, unobserved, with other young men and women looking for adventure. For this was not a man’s world. Women were active and perceptive participants in the London frolics. There were, in the first instance, the thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of active sex workers: ‘The Sisterhood of Nightingale-lane, Ratcliff-high-way, Tower-Ditch, Rose-mary-lane, Hatton-Wall, Saffron-hill, Wetstone’s-Park, Lutener’s-lane’, the women of Bankside, known as the Stewes Bank for its great quantities of prostitution, and, of course, the wealth of formal, informal and opportunistic sex work going on in amid the storied ‘Hundreds of Drury Lane’ – the vast and murky warren of back alleys, dim courtyards and precarious tenements that ran between Drury Lane and the Piazza of Covent Garden. These women were understood to be tempters as much as temptations, and it became almost a matter of form to warn young men to steer well clear of their siren call:

Of Drury’s mazy courts, and dark abodes,

The harlot’s guileful paths, who nightly stand,

Where Katherine-street descends into the Strand .

Say, vagrant Muse, their wiles and subtil arts,

To lure the strangers unsuspecting hearts;

So shall our youth on healthful sinews tread,

And city cheeks grow warm with rural red.

Prostitution was not then understood in the same clear terms as it is now. Language was used loosely, and who or what was a ‘whore’ and what their motives were at any one moment was always in flux. James Boswell recorded that he picked up two girls in Covent Garden with nothing more than the promise of ‘a glass of wine and my company’. Even the hardened regulars of the trade understood their position as being essentially a gamble on social mobility, preferable to a lifetime as a domestic servant. Jacob Ilive, confined in Clerkenwell Prison, vividly recalled the imprisoned prostitutes trading stories of jaunts down to Bath, nights out at the theatre, and days out at the races with their ‘Gallants’, as they beat hemp together.

To be sure, the opportunities for social mobility on offer for those who chose a life as a courtesan operated at the vertiginous extremes – but there were those who made it. Lavinia Fenton, the first woman to play the female lead in The Beggar’s Opera, wound up as the Duchess of Bolton. Fanny Murray came to London after being seduced by the Duke of Marlborough’s grandson and worked her way up from Covent Garden to be the mistress of the Earl of Sandwich before ending up happily married to the actor David Ross. In the next generation, Soho native Kitty Fisher became one of the most famous women in the country, charming her way to the top through a deft manipulation of men, the media, and her own potent sexual allure. These are just some of the most famous examples. That the average female Londoner could be just as sexually adventurous as any man was attested to by the immense literature in which worries were expressed about the morality of modern women. One pamphleteer complained in the 1730s that women were running riot ‘on account of the promiscuous liberty allowed both Sexes’ and that consequently even ‘the best Husbands are often hornified, as well as bad ones’. The spectre of the seductress loomed large in the consciences of god-fearing Englishmen:

’tis a deplorable Truth, that our young ladies … are wise, and more, knowing in the Arts of Coquetry, Galantry [sic], and others Matters relating to the Differences of Sexes, &c. before they come to be Twenty, than our Great-Grandmothers were all their lives.[6]

More equanimous observers of the London scene agreed with the famous and oft-repeated lines from Alexander Pope’s Moral Essays: ‘Men, some to Bus’ness, some to Pleasure take; / But ev’ry Woman is at heart a Rake.’

It was into this world that Francis Charteris entered at some time around 1720, living at first in Poland Street, Soho, before moving to Great George Street, near Hanover Square, by 1729. He was soon immersed in the sexual demi-monde of Georgian London. With the help of his faithful deputy, John Gourley, and the assistance of the West End’s many bawds and procuresses – Mother Needham of Park Place, St James’s, emerged as his preferred intermediary – Charteris was soon well supplied with women. His methods remained much the same as they had in the provinces. In 1724 Isabella Cranston applied for poor relief in St Margaret’s Parish, Westminster, following her seduction by Charteris. She reported that she had been ruined by him after she was lured to the house of one Mrs Jolly in Suffolk Street under the promise of domestic service. Many more girls would share Cranston’s fate.

One victim who departed from the typical profile was a young widow in Marylebone whom Charteris wooed while in disguise as a foreign nobleman. Thus compromised, she found herself extorted out of her jewels, causing her such torment in the process that she went mad and had to be committed to an asylum. On another occasion Charteris was drawn to an actress at Lincoln’s Inn Theatre. After the performance ended he found her backstage and, when his advances failed, raped her at pistol point in the green room, while four of his lackeys guarded the door with their swords drawn. Some of his more egregious transgressions – such as this assault at the theatre – did not go unanswered and Charteris was regularly obliged to bribe victims, judges and husbands to forget about his crimes. But for the most part justice was not forthcoming.[7]

Then came Anne Bond. Tricked into working for ‘Colonel Harvey’ of Hanover Square, Bond was raped by Charteris, then beaten by his servants and thrown out onto the street. She found a friend, one Mrs Parsons, and together they went to court to file a suit against Charteris. A Middlesex jury agreed to indict the Colonel – a fact made retrospectively inevitable when it emerged that Charteris had once attempted to seduce the sister of one of the jurors – and in a matter of months he had been sentenced to hang.

Charteris’s life was saved through the intervention of his daughter Janet. In 1720 she had married the eldest son of the Earl of Wemyss, a prominent Scottish peer. George II relied upon such men to keep the peace in Scotland, where the prospect of Jacobite rebellion still lurked just beneath the surface of daily life. When Janet, operating through influential Scottish intermediaries in London, sought her scoundrel father’s pardon, the king had little choice but to comply. In April 1730, a pardon was issued through the Privy Council and Charteris was released from Newgate. He was obliged to pay damages to Anne Bond and, all told, the price of his freedom was £15,000 – an immense amount for the time. But freedom did not buy security. London was no longer safe for him. In a reversal of his previous fortunes, he now fled up north – doubtless encouraged in his decision when he was pulled from his carriage and beaten by an angry mob as he swept through Chelsea.[8] He was now an old and ravaged man, and he died two years later in Edinburgh. His estate was valued at a plum[9] (or two, depending on whether one believed his lawyers or his Grub Street obituarists), the awesome gains of a lifetime of fraud, larceny and extortion. He left the bulk of his estate to his grandson, the future 7th Earl of Wemyss, whose grateful descendants have borne the name of Charteris ever since.[10]

His burial in Edinburgh was as turbulent as his life. Enraged crowds repeatedly attacked the constables present to keep the peace in an attempt to seize and destroy the body. They failed to do so, but succeeded in pelting the service from afar, and so Colonel Francis Charteris’s coffin was lowered into the ground accompanied by a hail of dead dogs, dead cats, living cats and offal.

Charteris’s was a uniquely eighteenth-century life. His was the era of the rake, and he was the rake nonpareil. His ignominious achievements in the field secured him lasting recognition as the great sexual villain of his time. He passed directly from life into art. Alexander Pope paired him with the Devil in the third of his Moral Essays (1733); Jonathan Swift did likewise on more than one occasion. Charteris, his henchman Gourley, and his bawd of choice, Mother Needham, all appear together in the first plate of William Hogarth’s The Harlot’s Progress, the phenomenally popular 1732 series of etchings that made the young artist’s name. Most significantly, Charteris, the class of rakes he exemplified, and the problem he posed to women, morals and society found their clearest and most enduring expression in a trilogy of books by a man who, more than any other individual, codified and popularised the modern concern with seduction: Samuel Richardson.

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William Hogarth’s The Harlot’s Progress (1732). Colonel Francis Charteris and his henchman, John Gourley, lurk in the background on the right.

Samuel Richardson was born in 1689, on the marches of two worlds. The year before his birth the Dutch king, William of Orange and his English wife, Mary Stuart, had been invited to take the throne from Mary’s father, James II, in the so-called Glorious Revolution. This bloodless handover of power was accompanied by a new constitutional settlement embodied by two Acts of Parliament instituted in the year of Richardson’s birth. The Bill of Rights codified the rights and liberties of English subjects and confirmed Parliament’s sovereignty; the Act of Toleration granted religious freedom to dissenting Protestants (though to no Catholics), so ending the attempt to impose religious uniformity on the nation from above. In the spirit of the new, liberty-infused age, the Printing Act was allowed to lapse in 1695, bringing an end to pre-publication censorship; marking England’s arrival as a pragmatic, mercantile power, the Bank of England was established in 1694. These bureaucratic landmarks were not intended to transform the moral worlds of regular English men and women, but the second-order effect of the upheavals of the late seventeenth century was to inaugurate a revolution in social conduct and sexual attitudes. The celebration of individual political liberty opened the door to libertinism. The toleration of religious minorities implied a willingness to turn a blind eye to private peccadilloes. A Swiss visitor in the early eighteenth century was in awe, like so many continental visitors, of English freedoms, but appalled at the permissiveness unleashed thereby in society at large. ‘They cherish their liberty to such an extent,’ he wrote, ‘that they often let both their religious opinions and their morals degenerate into licentiousness … Debauch runs riot with an unblushing countenance.’[11]

In one of the few extant autobiographical accounts of his early life, Richardson made a conscious effort to link his own family to the events of 1688. His father was a humble London joiner who, he claimed, enjoyed the patronage of the Duke of Monmouth. In 1685 Monmouth staged an ill-fated uprising against the rule of James II. When it failed, Richardson’s father, in his son’s telling, ‘thought proper, on the Decollation of the first-named unhappy Nobleman, to quit his London Business & to retire to Derbyshire; tho’ to his great Detriment; & there I, & three other Children out of Nine, were born’. Richardson Sr, however, was on the right side of history. After the Glorious Revolution he and his family returned to London and had his remaining sons baptised in his native parish of St Botolph’s, Aldgate. At first the family lived in Tower Hill, a poor neighbourhood just outside the eastern limit of the City of London, on a street called Mouse Alley that sat in the shadow of the Tower of London, connecting the city’s commercial centre to the docks. Later the family would move a short distance north, to Rosemary Lane just inside the City. In neither location were the family considered rich, or even prosperous, but in both the young Richardson would have been exposed to the hectic realities of daily life in the capital.

Given his silence about his youth it is hard to accurately reconstruct what Richardson absorbed from the city in these years. One likes to think that as a child he would have been privileged to live so close to the Tower of London, known then not just for its prison but for the menagerie of exotic animals – including a famous pride of lions – that were kept on public display in its precincts. More prosaically, it seems likely that Richardson’s lifelong fascination with clothing and the details of fashionable dress must have begun in the thronged streets of the City where the parvenu ‘Cits’ (the merchants and tradesmen made good) mixed with apprentices, journeymen, foreign businessmen, off-duty servants, clerks, molls, vendors and pedlars eager to display themselves and their finery. The City was still a distinct entity from Westminster and had its own fashions, typically more democratic (some would say garish) than those prevailing in the haughtier neighbourhoods that surrounded St James’s. The ‘mix’d Crouds of saucy Fops and City Gentry’ that thrived in the streets of Richardson’s childhood were ripe targets for social satire.