The most famous story about the Hellfire Club goes like this. The brotherhood is gathered in a chapel for a ceremony to summon the Devil. Their prankster, John Wilkes, has hidden a baboon in a chest and tied a cord to the lock. At the moment of the ritual he pulls the cord.
According to the version quoted on the website of the Hellfire Caves, the animal leaps onto the shoulders of the Earl of Sandwich, who believes the Devil has come to carry him off. The more he struggles, the tighter it clings, and he cries out:
“Spare me gracious Devil: spare a wretch who never was sincerely your servant. I sinned only from the vanity of being in the fashion...”
It is a perfect scene. It is also a legend. The sources we read do not say where it first appeared, and we found no record of it made at the time. The details change between tellings: Wikipedia’s account of Wilkes has a mandrill in a cape and horns, not a baboon.
What can we trace? A real man, a real abbey on the Thames, real letters, and a real scandal that ended in the House of Lords.
Sir Francis Dashwood was born in December 1708 and died on 11 December 1781. He sat in Parliament, became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1762 and later sat in the Lords as Baron le Despencer. From 1765 he was Postmaster General. A man named Wraxall, quoted by Wikipedia, said he “far exceeded” any model since Charles II in licentiousness. That is one opinion, not a record.
The engraving at the top of this post is a taste of his sense of humor. It shows Dashwood in a monk’s habit, kneeling in a rocky setting, with a halo over his head. Wikipedia says William Hogarth drew Dashwood at his devotions for a fellow Dilettante, and describes a Hogarth portrait in this pose as a parody of Renaissance images of Saint Francis of Assisi, with the Bible swapped for an erotic novel and the profile of his friend Lord Sandwich in the halo.
That is part of the key. The joke was the point. Rich men turned a monastery into a theater, with Rabelais’s motto “Fay ce que voudras” (”Do what you will”) placed over the entrance.
First, the name. The History of Parliament calls Dashwood’s group the “Order of St Francis of Medmenham,” “also known (erroneously) as the Hellfire Club.” The Victoria County History of Buckinghamshire says Dashwood’s society “has been confused with the famous Hell Fire Club founded by Philip Duke of Wharton early in the reign of George I.”
That earlier club did have the name. Wikipedia says Wharton founded the first official Hellfire Club in London in 1718 and that it ended in 1721, when George I’s government moved against “horrid impieties.” Dashwood, born in 1708, was a boy at the time.
Dashwood’s own groups were different, and their names were jokes. In 1732, says Wikipedia, he formed the Society of Dilettanti, a dining club for men who had traveled in Italy. Walpole sneered in 1743 that its “nominal qualification is having been to Italy, and the real one, being drunk.”
The Knights of St Francis came next. Wikipedia dates the precursor to 1746, at the George and Vulture, and says the group moved to West Wycombe in 1752 as the “Order of the Friars of St Francis of Wycombe,” later calling themselves the “Monks of Medmenham.” The Victoria County History says “about 1745.” The History of Parliament says Dashwood leased Medmenham Abbey in 1751. The sources disagree on the dates, and Wikipedia’s Hellfire Club page says the group met irregularly from about 1749 to about 1760, possibly until 1766.
So was it a Satanic cult? The History of Parliament, in a blog post by its historian Dr Robin Eagles, says that the suggestion that devil worship took place at Medmenham is “almost certainly without foundation.” Then what was going on behind that door?
The answer sits in two letters, a cellar inventory, and the strangest of all the clues: a room that was emptied out. In 1766 a member named John Tucker arrived at Medmenham and found that something had been done to the chapter room. He was amazed, and he wrote it down.
This is a paid post. The rest of the story, including what Tucker found, the man who broke the club, the caves, and the Irish Hellfire Club, continues below for paid subscribers. Subscribe to Historic Mysteries to read it and the full archive.
