London In The Eighteenth Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing by Jerry White

Author:Jerry White [White, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

‘The Whoring Rage Came Upon Me’: Men and Prostitution

Hawkins has given Me up to ye fucking world again, & my poor miserable Prick is come out of his Hands quite sound with only the loss of a fraenum; I have not yet ventur’d to make use of it …42

Thus Richard Rigby – ‘Bloomsbury Dick’ – writing to his friend Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, some time in the early 1740s. Rigby came of rich London merchant stock and he would go on to become MP for Sudbury and later for Tavistock. He was a government minister from 1755 and paymaster-general of the armed forces from 1765 to 1782, loaning liberally to his friends the money under his command and spending lavishly on his extensive personal needs. When he died in 1788 he still owed the public purse an uncollectable £150,000.

Rigby was one of a select set of politically well-connected and wealthy young men attached to Sir Charles, who was born in London in 1708, with a substantial fortune anchored in the Welsh iron industry. Many years after his death the editor of his witty verse would pay tribute to the ‘lively acuteness’ of Williams’s talents; ‘the elegancy of his manners, and an incessant gaiety of heart’ drew to his side ‘eminent men, who delighted in retreating from political labour and party agitation to a social privacy into which only wit and good-humour were admitted’.43 But not only wit and good humour. Their ‘social privacy’ had one more component in common. The fascinating world of London prostitution was at the very heart of it. Williams’s correspondence in the early 1740s is filled with details of the shifting allegiance of his friends from one woman of the town to another; his memorandum books leave notes for posterity on the Covent Garden characters of the day; his private odes and ballads provide obscene commentary on the sex lives of friends and enemies alike; and letters from his wife reveal all the horror and despair that his own dealings with prostitutes brought disastrously into their marriage.

Prostitution penetrated deeply into the lives of some of the most brilliant and favoured men of the day. It was a part of their lives that had to be kept secret from their wives, if possible, but not from their mistresses, and was a matter of easy social intercourse among friends. Dick (Richard, Second Baron) Edgcumbe ‘did lately call at Olivers but finding no pensionaires he was obliged to bugger an externe & has told all particulars of the action in very publick company’; Charles Wyndham, Second Earl of Egremont, writes from Somerset to say he has ‘been blessed with the conversation of a Sylvan Nymph of the Frome Wood lands, whom her own Mother brought me as a pure Virgin. Pure she might be, but to my great discomfort & disappointment, most capaciously wide’;44 Richard Rigby laments that:

however lucky I was with my numberless Bunters all the Winter, Fortune gets Home upon me now with Cordees & Heat of Urine.

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