¹ The event itself is vividly described in chap. 3 of Norton, Rictor’s excellent Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700–1830 (London, 1992)Google Scholar.

² Mother Clapp’s one was one of at least seventeen houses active at this time. Fifty-six men were charged. See Trumbach, Randolph, “Modern Sodomy: The Origins of Homosexuality, 1700–1800,” A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Men since the Middle Ages, ed. Cook, Matt (Oxford, 2007), 84Google Scholar.

³ Court proceedings from the trial of Gabriel Laurence, April 1726, Old Bailey Proceedings Online (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org), t17260420–64.

⁴ Hitchcock, Tim, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (New York, 1997), 72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Trumbach, Randolph, “London’s Sodomites: Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in the 18th Century,” Journal of Social History 11, no. 1 (Autumn 1977): 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Ibid., 27.

⁷ Trumbach, Randolph, “Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment London,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 2, no. 2 (October 1991): 190Google Scholar.

⁸ The same series of sentences reappears, for instance, in Trumbach, Randolph, Sex and the Gender Revolution, vol. 1, Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago, 1998), 8Google Scholar. There is one key change: “they were hanged” is replaced with “some were hanged.”

⁹ Senelick, Laurence, “Mollies or Men of Mode? Sodomy and the Eighteenth-Century London Stage,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 1 (July 1990): 50Google ScholarPubMed.

¹⁰ Haggerty, George, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1999), 58–59Google Scholar.

¹¹ “The raids and trials of 1726 were not the first time that pogroms of this kind had taken place”; Bray, Alan, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1982), 91Google Scholar.

¹² Goldsmith, Netta, The Worst of Crimes: Homosexuality and the Law in Eighteenth-Century London (Aldershot, 1998), 8Google Scholar.

¹³ Simpson, Anthony E., “Masculinity and Control: The Prosecution of Sex Offences in Eighteenth-Century London” (PhD diss., New York University, 1984), 704Google Scholar.

¹⁴ I am grateful to Robert Beachy for the clarification.

¹⁵ Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 90.

¹⁶ Simpson, “Masculinity and Control,” 707.

¹⁷ Bray’s argument here is also cited by Herrup, Cynthia in A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven (Oxford, 2001), 134CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Kuchta, David, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850 (Berkeley, 2002), 100–101Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ In his discussion of the mollies, Kuchta cites Trumbach, Haggerty, Bray, Senelick, Richard Davenport-Jones, and an unpublished paper by Thomas Alan King. In his footnotes (Three-Piece Suit, nn. 214–15), he challenges aspects of this historiography, arguing that King’s is “the best discussion of the mollies’ relation to political culture” (215) and concluding that “the modern connotations of homosexual practices cannot be understood outside the very process of repression” (215). However, his analytical inhibitions about the argument provided by Trumbach, Bray, and others are mostly removed from the narrative he draws in the main text.

²¹ For challenges to the effeminacy thesis, see Michelle Cohen and Tim Hitchcock, introduction to Hitchcock, English Masculinities, 5; Michele Cohen, review of Sex and the Gender Revolution: Volume One: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London, by Trumbach, Randolph, Social History 26, no. 1 (January 2001): 90Google Scholar; Poole, Steve, “‘Bringing Great Shame Upon the City’: Sodomy, the Courts, and the Civil Idiom in Eighteenth-Century Bristol,” Urban History 34, no. 1 (May 2007): 118CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² Hence Katherine Crawford returns to 1726 in her survey of European sexualities and cites the case of Gabriel Laurence to support the larger point that the visibility of molly houses was enough to inspire persecution; European Sexualities: 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 2007), 204. Peter Hennen, in an examination of the specific effeminacies of the molly house, makes it a point to draw a connection between the “starkly moralistic terms” in which “the general public interpreted the whole affair” and the “swift and terrible” nature of the persecutions; Faeries, Bears, and Leathermen: Men in Community Queering the Masculine (Chicago, 2008), 54.

²³ Ward, Edward, The Secret History of London Clubs: Particularly the Kit Cat, Beef-Stake, Virtuosos, Quacks, Knights of the Golden-Fleece, Florists, Beans, etc. (London, 1709)Google Scholar. For a recent article that relies on Ward and the Old Bailey, see Cassidy, Tanya, “People, Place, and Performance: Theoretically Revisiting Mother Clapp’s Molly House,” in Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality ed. Mounsey, Chris and Gonda, Caroline (Lewisburg, PA, 2007), 99–113Google Scholar. An exception to this rule is Goldsmith, The Worst of Crimes, which uses records from the King’s Bench, from the 1730s onward. It contains a very brief section on 1726 that sums up the historiography and is tellingly entitled “the pogroms.” However, Goldsmith finds some interesting cases of legal intervention in the post-1730 period—cases like that of Laurence that do not set a pattern and deserved detailed inquiry of their own.

²⁴ Cruickshank, Dan, London’s Sinful Secret: The Bawdy History and Very Public Passions of London (London, 2010), 62Google Scholar.

²⁵ Hence Cruickshank writes that “the Old Bailey records suggest that attitudes to homosexuality changed during the first quarter of the eighteenth century,” and, tracing the now-familiar pattern, remarks that “in 1726 there was a dramatic reversal” (London’s Sinful Secret, 62). While he occasionally distinguishes between the culture of the courts and that of the city, he mostly reads one as indication of the other; hence one defendant’s defiant response was “a brave answer with which most sentient people in London during the 1720s must surely have agreed, in private at least” (71); see also 75–76.

²⁶ Ze’evi, Dror, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500–1900 (Berkeley, 2006), 48Google Scholar; Pierce, Leslie, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley, 1993), 102Google Scholar.

²⁷ Simpson, “Masculinity and Control,” 704–5.

²⁸ Goldsmith, The Worst of Crimes, 8.

²⁹ Old Bailey Proceedings Online (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org), July 1726, trial of William Brown (t17260711–77); July 1726, trial of Martin Mackintosh (t17260711–53); July 1726, trial of Margaret Clap (t17260711–54).

³⁰ Between September 1727 and December 1750, thirteen men were tried for sodomy before the Old Bailey, of whom six were found guilty and three were executed. See Old Bailey Proceedings Online (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org), October 1728, trial of John Bleak Cowland (t17281016–16); August 1730, trial of Gilbert Laurence (t17300828–24); February 1738, trial of Samuel Taylor John Berry (t17380222–5).

³¹ Goldsmith, The Worst of Crimes, 58.

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³⁴ Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York, 1990), 93Google Scholar.

³⁵ Ibid.

³⁶ This is too vast a literature to survey here, but the starting point is George, Dorothy, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1966)Google Scholar. Thompson, E. P., Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York, 1975) probably remains the most compelling account of the early 1720sGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ Beattie, John, “London Crime and the Making of the ‘Bloody Code,’ 1689–1718,” in Stilling the Grumbling Hive, ed. Davison, Lee, Hitchcock, T., Keirn, T., and Shoemaker, R. (Stroud, 1992), 70Google Scholar.

³⁸ St. James’s Journal, 22 December 1722.

³⁹ Charles Delafaye to Philip Yorke, 7 February 1725/6, British Library (BL), Add. MSS 36136, fol. 7; see also Richard Jones to Charles Delafaye, 7 February 1725, BL, Add. MSS 36136, fol. 11.

⁴⁰ Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, 244–45.

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴² Beattie, J. M., “Crime and Inequality in Eighteenth-Century London,” in Crime and Inequality, ed. Hagan, John and Peterson, Ruth D. (Stanford, CA, 1995), 116–39Google Scholar.

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⁴⁸ Modest Defense, iii.

⁴⁹ See Dabhoiwala, Faramerz, “Lust and Liberty,” Past and Present 207, no. 1 (2010): 145CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the Modest Defense controversy, see Speck, William, “Bernard Mandeville and the Middlesex Grand Jury,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 11, no. 3 (Spring 1978): 362–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁵¹ List of People Convicted of Sodomy at Colchester Quarter Sessions, 1704–1724, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. C. 3190, fols. 65–66.

⁵² Ibid.

⁵³ Ibid.

⁵⁴ Ibid.

⁵⁵ Mowry, Melissa, “Sex and the Archives: Current Work on Subordinate Identities and Early Modern Cultural Formation,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 1 (January 2005): 179CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁵⁷ The Voluntary Information of Mark Partridge taken before me and his Majesties Justices of the Peace for the said County, 8 April 1726, The National Archives (TNA): SP 35/61, fol. 213.

⁵⁸ The Voluntary Information of Mark Partridge taken upon Oath before US his Majesties Justices of the Peace of the said County whose names are underwritten, 14 April 1726, TNA: SP 35/61, fol. 221.

⁵⁹ “An Account of the Prosecution of the Actors of that Profane Droll called the Prodigal Son which Your Grace recommended to be prosecuted … A Short Account of the Sodomites in London, Westminster, and Southwark,” n.d., Christ Church College Library, Wake MS 231, Wake Letters 27, fol. 185.

⁶⁰ [Anon.] Law Quibbles. Or, a Treatise of the Evasions, Tricks, Turns and Quibbles, Commonly Used in the Profession of the Law, to the Prejudice of Clients, and Others (London, 1724), 13–14Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House, 60.

⁶² Edmund Gibson to William Wake, 8 May 1726, Christ Church College Library, Wake MS 231, Wake Letters 27, fol. 186.

⁶³ Ibid.

⁶⁴ Ibid.

⁶⁵ Ibid.

⁶⁶ Ibid.

⁶⁷ The Information of Joseph Sellers and Samuel Stevens, 8 May 1726, TNA: SP 35/62, fols. 14–15.

⁶⁸ Certificate of the Clerk of the Peace of a Bill being found in Middlesex against Gabriel Lawrence for Sodomy, 7 May 1726, TNA: SP 35/62, fol. 12.

⁶⁹ Foucault, History of Sexuality, 95.

⁷⁰ Rubini, Denis, “Sexuality in Augustan England: Sodomy, Politics, Elite Circles and Society,” in The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, ed. Gerard, Kent and Hekma, Gert (New York, 1998), 358Google Scholar.

⁷¹ Sykes, Norman, Edmund Gibson: Bishop of London, 1669–1748; a Study in Politics & Religion in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1926), 191, 193, 195–97Google Scholar.

⁷² Evening Post, 21–24 May 1726. See also Daily Journal, 9 March 1726; Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer, 28 May 1726; and London Gazette, 24–28 May 1726.

⁷³ Daily Gazetteer 2356 (January 10, 1743).

⁷⁴ Charles Lennox, duke of Richmond to Sarah Churchill, duchess of Marlborough, 9 November 1727, BL, Add. MSS 61476, fol. 207.

⁷⁵ John Manners to Henry Pelham, 21 June 1725, BL, Add. MSS 32687, fol. 89; Sarah Churchill; John Manners to Henry Pelham, 11 August 1725, BL, Add. MSS 32687, fol. 139.

⁷⁶ Lennox is mentioned throughout the historiography of cricket. See Marshall, John, The Duke Who Was Cricket (London, 1961)Google Scholar. See also Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal, 6 September 1729; and London Evening Post, 4 July 1728. On Rutland’s interest in gaming and cockfights, see Mist’s Weekly Journal, 13 August 1726; and Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer 1 April, 1727.

⁷⁷ Simpson, “Masculinity and Control,” 454.

⁷⁸ Dabhoiwala, “Sex and Societies for Moral Reform,” 309.

⁷⁹ Goldsmith, The Worst of Crimes, 8–9.

⁸⁰ William Speck, “Bernard Mandeville,” 373.

⁸¹ Ibid., 374, citing Kramnick, Isaac, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, 1968), 203Google Scholar.

⁸² Charles Townshend to Edmund Gibson, 19 September 1724, University of St. Andrews Library, Gibson MS 5193.

⁸³ Draft letter from Edmund Gibson to Charles Townshend, n.d., University of St. Andrews Library, Gibson MS 5208.

⁸⁴ Castle, Terry, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford, CA, 1986)Google Scholar.

⁸⁵ See Sykes, Edmund Gibson, 187–91, for a full description of his efforts.

⁸⁶ On the control of masquerades, see University of St. Andrews Library, Gibson MS 5213–5218, fol. 37–40. See also Draft Letter from Wake and Other Bishops, n.d. (Control of Masquerades), Christ Church College Library, Wake MS 231, Wake Letters 10, fol. 111.

⁸⁷ Edmund Gibson to Charles Townshend, n.d., University of St. Andrews Library, Gibson MS 5215, vol. 4, fol. 37.

⁸⁸ Ibid.

⁸⁹ Ibid.

⁹⁰ Portland MSS, vii, 420, 260, cited in Norman Sykes, Edmund Gibson.

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⁹² For some of the popular sentiment against the restriction of Bartholomew Fair to three days, see The Pigs’ Petition Against Bartholomew Fair (London, 1708)Google Scholar.

⁹³ For more on this, see May, James E. and Winton, Calhoun, “The ‘Prodigal Son’ at Bartholomew Fair: A New Document,” Theatre Survey 21 (May 1980): 63–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In an engaging and thought-provoking analysis, May and Winton broach the question of why this play was prosecuted in the King’s Bench, and not the Court of Common Council, where a case such as this would ordinarily have been prosecuted. They suggest that this had something to do with a symbolic need to reassert the powers of censorship at a time when these powers had been severely threatened.

⁹⁴ Richard Williams to Edmund Gibson, 16 December 1724, Christ Church College Library, Wake MS 231, Wake Letters 27, fol. 183; see also Wake MS 231, Wake Letters 27, fols. 176–81 and 184.

⁹⁵ Edmund Gibson to Philip York, earl of Hardwicke, 11 February 1725, BL, Add. MSS 35585, fol. 34.

⁹⁶ Gibson’s correspondence with Hardwicke reflects a range of different concerns—college fellowships, ecclesiastical commissions concerning the plantations, royal mandates at academic institutions—that required their combined attention. Edmund Gibson to Philip Yorke, 7 October 1725, BL, Add. MSS 35585, fol. 24; Edmund Gibson to Philip Yorke, 8 November 1725, BL, Add. MSS 35585, fol. 29; Edmund Gibson to Philip Yorke, 11 February 1726, BL, Add. MSS 35585, fol. 34; Edmund Gibson to Philip Yorke, 18 April 1726, BL, Add. MSS 35585, fol. 36; Edmund Gibson to Philip Yorke, 22 September 1726, BL, Add. MSS 36136, fol. 109; Edmund Gibson to Philip Yorke, 22 September 1726, BL, Add. MSS 36136, fol. 111; Edmund Gibson to Philip Yorke, 18 September 1726, BL, Add. MSS 36136, fol. 113.

⁹⁷ York, Philip C., The Life and Correspondence of Philip Yorke Earl of Hardwicke Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain (New York, 1977), 82Google Scholar.

⁹⁸ For more on the details of this, see May and Winton, “The ‘Prodigal Son’ at Bartholomew Fair.”

⁹⁹ “An Account of the Prosecution of the Actors of that Profane Droll called the Prodigal Son which Your Grace recommended to be prosecuted … A Short Account of the Sodomites in London, Westminster, and Southwark,” n.d., Christ Church College Library, Wake MS 231, Wake Letters 27, fol. 185.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid.

¹⁰¹ Ibid.

¹⁰² Edmund Gibson to Charles Townshend, 8 September 1726, BL, Add. MSS 36136, fol. 63.

¹⁰³ Philip Yorke to Charles Townshend, 22 September 1726, BL, Add. MSS 36136, fol. 64.

¹⁰⁴ George R. Bush, “Dr Codex Silenced: Middleton versus Crofts Revised,” Legal History 24, no. 1 (April 2003): 23–58.

¹⁰⁵ Edmund Gibson to Philip Yorke, 2 September 1727, BL, Add. MSS 35585, folio 77.

¹⁰⁶ Edmund Gibson to Charles Townshend, 4 December 1724, University of St. Andrews Library, Gibson MS 5216, vol. 4, fol. 28.

¹⁰⁷ Tindal, Matthew, An Address to the Inhabitants of the Two Great Cities of London and Westminster: In Relation to a Pastoral Letter, Said to be Written by the Bishop of London (London, 1728)Google Scholar, and A Second Address to the Inhabitants of the Two Great Cities of London and Westminster: Occasion’d by A Second Pastoral Letter (London, 1730)Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁸ Fog’s Weekly Journal, 19 July 1729, no. 43.

¹⁰⁹ Gibson, Edmund, The Bishop of London’s Pastoral Letter to the People of his Diocese; Particularly, to Those of The Two Great Cities of London and Westminster. Occasion’d by Some Late Writings in Favour of Infidelity (London, 1728), 2Google Scholar.

¹¹⁰ Senelick, “Mollies or Men of Mode?” 50.

¹¹¹ Edmund Gibson to Charles Delafaye (for the Duke of Newcastle), 24 May 1726, S.P. Dom. Geo. I, B. 62, cited in Sykes, Edmund Gibson, 196.

¹¹² For more on this, see Simpson, “Masculinity and Control,” 431, 491; Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 67, 73; and Goldsmith, The Worst of Crimes.

¹¹³ Sykes, Edmund Gibson, 149.

¹¹⁴ It is interesting to consider a draft of a letter from Gibson to Walpole, undated but from the mid-1730s. The letter itself is seething with rage at the court’s inaction in the face of growing “Antichurch spirits.” It contains a note, in Gibson’s hand, which seems to have been written retrospectively, saying: “It will easily be seen, by the tenor of this Letter, that when I wrote it, I had no thoughts of an Archbishoprick.” See draft letter from Edmund Gibson to Robert Walpole, n.d., University of St. Andrews Library, Gibson MS 5299.

¹¹⁵ Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 104.

¹¹⁶ Ibid.

¹¹⁷ Harvey, Karen, “The Century of Sex? Gender, Bodies, and Sexuality in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Historical Journal 45, no. 4 (2002): 908CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Harvey, Karen, Reading Sex: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge, 2005), 10–11Google Scholar.

¹¹⁸ Harvey, “The Century of Sex,” 916.

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¹²⁰ Cocks, Harry, “Modernity and the Self in the Modern History of Sexuality,” Historical Journal 49, no. 4 (2006): 1226CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹²² Ibid., 92, 96.

¹²³ Ibid., 164.

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¹²⁵ Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 58.

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