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Mollies Arrested in
London
England, 1726. Guided by the Societies for the
Reformation of Manners, police raided houses in London known as gathering places for
sodomites. In the slang of the day, these sodomites were called mollies, a word that
had earlier referred to female prostitutes. Their gathering places, the molly houses,
catered to a working class clientele, people like butchers, upholsterers and clerks. The
1726 raids were the most thorough in the 1700s, and about 20 of the houses were shut
down.
The Molly Houses
One agent who had infiltrated the molly houses found men who "sat
in one another's lap, talked bawdy, and practiced a great many indecencies". The men
he observed there were feminine and called each other "madam" or "your
ladyship". They took on feminine names like "Princess Seraphina",
"Plump Nelly", and "Mary Magdalen". Some of the men dressed in drag,
and at least one, the Princess Seraphina, dressed in drag most of the time, but cross
dressers usually wore women's clothes only within the relative safety of the molly houses.
Ned Ward, one of the forefathers of tabloid journalism, wrote an account of scenes he had
probably heard rumors about in his book The History of the London Clubs (1709).
The mollies, he wrote, "fancy themselves women, imitating all the little vanities
that custom has reconciled to the female sex, affecting to speak, walk, tattle, curtsy,
cry, scold, and to mimic all manner of effeminacy...". Broadsheets published about
them referred to them as both "mollies" and "woman-haters".
Some of the houses that were raided were taverns, others were private
homes. Most accounts from the time describe a large room for drinking, dancing, and
socializing with an adjoining room called the chapel, where men retired to have sex,
or as they said, to "get married". The first molly houses that historians have
discovered appeared in London in the 1690s. A series of prosecutions in 1699 and
again in 1707, along with well-known suicides of mollies who feared court trials, led to
public knowledge of this new species of sodomite.
The 1726 raids that closed down 20 molly houses were much broader than
those in 1707, but like the earlier raids, they were the work of the same group of
reformers who had organized to suppress what they saw as urban depravity in London,
especially public cursing, Sabbath breaking, prostitution, and of course, sodomy. These
Societies for the Reformation of Manners boasted that they had done much to suppress
cursing and prostitution, but sodomy remained, in the words of Rev. Thomas Bray, a Society
leader, "an evil force invading our land". London's constables were few in
number, corrupt, and ineffectual in suppressing the mollies, so the Societies hired agents
to spy on, and even entrap the sodomites.
The raids netted several sodomy convictions with executions by hanging
carried out in May, 1726, but the usual sentence for those caught in the molly-house raids
was time in the pillory and jail. Although time in the pillory was an easier
sentence than death, the suffering of convicts went well beyond public pain and
embarrassment. One newspaper report describes the procession of mollies who were
hauled from the pillory back to jail in an open cart:
it is impossible for language to convey an adequate idea of the
universal expressions of execration, which accompanied these monsters on their journey ...
the wretches were so thickly covered with mud [probably dung] that a vestige of the human
figure was barely discernible.... Some of them were cut in the head with brickbats
and bled profusely.
In at least one of the raids, the mollies resisted and fought with their
arresters, but the constables eventually prevailed.
Mollies' Public Image
The 1707 raids inspired a spate of popular publications. The Woman
Hater's Lamentation was a whimsical ditty of 14 verses celebrating the 1707
executions and sung to the tune Ye pretty Sailors all. In verse IV, the point is
sharply made that mollies have turned away from the natural love for women.
IV. Nature they lay aside,
To gratifie their
lust;
Women they hate
beside,
Therefore their
Fate was just.
Verses X and XI describe the success of the raids, and who these mollies were:
X. A Hundred more we hear,
Did to this Club
belong,
But now they scatter'd
are,
For this has broke the
gang.
XI. Shop-keepers some there were,
And Men of good
repute,
Each vow'd a
Bachelor,
Unnatural Lust
pursued.
The public image of the molly as a bachelor exclusively interested
in sex with other men became well entrenched even though material presented in court shows
that many were married and had children.
Sodomy before the Mollies
The arrival of the molly subculture in London
radically changed the English public's perception of sodomy. Before the mollies,
people believed that sodomy was a serious sin against God and nature that sprang from
lust, a universal desire to sin sexually. Sodomy was the most serious sexual sin -
it was, after all, punishable by death - but 17th Century Englishmen thought that any man
could fall into it if he yielded to sexual lust. The theology of the time taught
that the best antidote for lust is hard work, so aristocrats who led lives of idleness and
luxury were believed especially vulnerable to sexual and sodomitical temptations.
Literary representations of sodomy also
influenced people's perception of sodomy just before the first reports of molly arrests
appear. In the late 1600s, literary depictions of sexuality and sodomy were
increasing, especially on the stage. A new kind of character called the rake emerged
who was a libertine devoted to a life of unrestrained sexual pleasure. Rakes were
depicted as aristocratic men who relentlessly pursued women, but in their single-minded
hunger for pleasure, some even pursued boys. When playwrights set the scene for
rakish sodomy, the rake appeared as a masculine ravisher of youths. His taste for
sodomy was not a sign of effeminacy, but instead expressed unrestrained masculine desire. As knowledge of the effeminacy of
mollies grew in the early 1700s, the character of the rake disappeared from literature
because any sodomitical behavior came to be associated with the despised effeminacy of the
mollies.
The Molly as a Homosexual
Since so much was published about the mollies by the end of the 18th
Century, any adult engaging in sodomy, whether active or passive, came to be seen as a
"he-whore" who, though a man, had the sexual appetites of the lowest form of
woman. Sodomy had been transformed from a sinful but masculine act into a new
stigmatized sexual identity.
The mollies and their contemporaries in Paris and
Dutch cities were the first modern
homosexuals. Even though the word "homosexual" wouldn't be coined for more
than a hundred years, the people that 18th Century Londoners called effeminate
woman-haters were exactly those that 19th Century doctors would diagnose as sexual
degenerates, inverts and homosexuals.
References and Further Reading
Eyewitness accounts of the mollies are from Bray, 1982.
Ned Ward's 1709 article on the mollies is reprinted in McCormick, 1997. The
quotation from Reverend Bray and the Woman Hater's Lamentation are from Rubini,
1988. The newspaper description of the mollies procession from pillory to jail is
from Hyde, 1970.
Bray, Alan, 1982. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. London: Gay Men's Press.
Hyde, H. Montgomery, 1970. The Other Love: An Historical and Contemporary
Survery of Homsexuality in Britain. London: Heinemann.
McCormick, Ian, ed., 1997. Secret Sexualities: A
Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writing. New York: Routledge.
Norton, Rictor, 1992. Mother Clap's Molly House. London: GMP
Publishers Ltd.
Rubini, Dennis, 1988. "Sexuality and Augustan England: Sodomy, Politics, Elite
Circles, and Society." Journal of Homosexuality Vol. 16 Nos. 1 & 2.
Troyer, Howard William, 1946. Ned Ward of Grub Street: A Study of
Sub-Literary London in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.
Trumbach, Randolph, 1988. "Sodomitical Assaults, Gender Role, and
Sexual Development in Eighteenth-Century London." Journal of Homosexuality
Vol. 16 Nos. 1 & 2.
Trumbach, Randolph, 1991. "Sex, Gender, and Sexual
Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment
London." Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, No. 2. reprinted in
John C. Fout, ed., 1992, Forbidden History: The State, Society and the Regulation of
Sexuality in Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Weber, Harold M., 1986. The Restoration Rake
Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.
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© 1998
Andrew Wikholm
All Rights Reserved |
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