beau–brummell:

On this day in 1726, three men were hanged by the neck until they were dead on the infamous gallows of Tyburn.

Their names were Thomas Wright, Gabriel Lawrence & William Griffin. They have been lost to history, joining the ranks of thousands upon thousands of men, women and children who were sentenced to death in the long 18th century. No portraits of these men survive, only recorded court testimonies and savage witness condemnation. But Wright, Lawrence and Griffin represent more than simply the fall out of a harsh criminal justice system. They had been caught up in the famous Sodomy Trials of the 1720s, specifically an investigation into the mollyhouse (gay brothel) of Mother Margaret Clap, on Field Lane, Holborn, London. This area of London was famous for its gay community, often dubbed Sodomite’s Walk. When the Reformation societies, deeply, deeply Protestant in creed, decided to take on the perceived vice of London (not just gay communities, but poor prostitutes too), it was here that they aimed their bow. They used spies, men who entered suspected gay men’s confidence and followed them to their favoured haunts and snap them up in the act. It was a vicious, dishonest trap but it managed to catch Mother Clap, the male sex workers she presided over, and the customers she served, in its claws.

Wright, Lawrence and Griffin were unfortunately sold out by hidden informants, spies, their bribed and manipulated lovers (often promised to be saved from death themselves if they spoke out against their male lovers and dubbed them as rapists) or a combination of all three. Not even the three men’s character witnesses, who all stated that the men were honest, kind and upstanding could save them. Wright, Lawrence and Griffin were the only men who ended up being executed, the rest who were found guilty, either of sodomy or some other sexual misdemeanour, were sentenced to time in the pillories where the public were given the freedom to pelt them with rotten fruit, animal corpses etc. (bearable but disgusting), though these three men were certainly not the first or last men to be executed simply for their lifestyle. Unlike other public hangings which were often treated as forms of entertainment and days out in these days, the mood was sombre. People were not keen to celebrate.

Their hanging marked a change in the opinions of the general public. Whilst it didn’t totally change their views on homosexuality to those of tolerance, the general public felt particularly attacked by Reformation societies, their nosey and interfering practices, and the utter insanity of execution as a punishment for one’s private lifestyle. Whilst sodomy was nowhere near being decriminalised, independently minded Londoners, who in the 18th century were marked out by their strong sense of British liberty, began to believe wholeheartedly in bodily autonomy. Put plainly: people should be allowed to do what they wanted with their bodies. This was no longer the age of religious superstition and fear, it was an age of science and progress, no matter what the Reformation societies did or said. Moreover, the hypocrisy of heterosexual sodomy not ever being punished was indisputable.

This revelation was too late for Wright, Lawrence and Griffin, but their deaths were not in vain. The brutality they endured posed a new, lasting idea to the British public. In fact, another man caught up in the Mother Clap Sodomy trials (he escaped execution for a spell in the pillories) would state at his own trial, when asked to defend his actions, that he was and would continue to do what he wanted with his own body and life and for that, there could and should be no punishment.

Sources:

• The Secret History of Georgian London // Dan Cruickshank

• Georgian London: Into the Streets // Lucy Inglis