Sex In History. Part 3: Sense and Sensuality

We need not doubt that the processes father and mother identification still occurred, but when fathers and mothers permitted themselves every licence, children in copying them, would learn to do the same. This sense of licence naturally extended itself to sexual matters and the Age of Reason is an age of astonishing sensuality. The arts and trades of an increasingly complex civilization were invoked to create new triumphs of creative endeavour, but they were also exploited to satisfy the wildest vagaries of sexuality.

Such movements seem to start among the leaders of the community and then to filter slowly downwards: it was certainly so in this case. The Court of Charles II displays in microcosm all the major trends which were to appear more widely in the following century. Quite incorrectly, the Restoration has gained the reputation of being a period of general licence. The plays of the Restoration dramatists, written principally by courtiers or noblemen, set a new standard of frankness and have given the age a name for debauchery, but they were seen by only a minute fraction of the population. The plays themselves constituted only two per cent of the sales of booksellers, most of whose trade consisted of scientific and religious works. And while Charles licensed two theatres - as compared with a maximum of six or seven in Elizabeth`s time - they received so little support that the two companies were obliged to merge. A few court rakes, like Rochester or Medley, wenched and cheated themselves into premature graves, but the mass of the population remained unaffected.

However, it is certainly true that the overthrowing of Puritan rule and the restoration of the king caused a great outburst of popular rejoicing, in which the erection of maypoles of unprecedented height played a significant part. It is true that a king is a father figure and normally is seen as authoritarian. But Charles was indulgent. Cromwell had embodied all the everest features of a father figure; Charles profited by receiving he affection due to a loving and permissive parent. It was recalled that the Puritans had been regicides, and it became a mark of loyalty to pull down all they had set up. "To be debauched", says Krutch, with pardonable exaggeration, was the easiest way of clearing oneself of the suspicion of disloyalty." Sons, too, are frequently in reaction from their fathers, and now the times favoured such a reaction. Thus, Philip, Lord Wharton, whose father had been so strict a Calvinist that he forbade not only poems, dancing and playgoing, but even hunting, acquired the reputation of being the greatest rake in England, while still maintaining an influential political position.

Charles himself was no authoritarian, but a cynic who

"had a very ill opinion of both men and women; and did not think there was either sincerity or chastity in the world out of Principle".

Bored by long sermons while in the hands of the Puritans, he now demanded church music he could beat time to, entertained himself with both the Catholic and Protestant whores, and, as Dryden said "scattered his maker`s image through the land".
Charles was, one imagines, a matrist: though loving pleasure, he betrayed no signs of the vindictive and destructive aggressiveness which was to mark the eighteenth century, and his political acts were both far-seeing and restrained. His reign saw the Act of Indulgence to religious dissenters, the Habeus Corpus Act, and the foundation of the Royal Society- . three landmarks in history. Under his permissive rule, learning received a great stimulus: Boyle, Hooke, Harvey and Newton produced their greatest discoveries, while in art was inaugurated a period which reached its peak in the reign of Anne, when the accession of another Queen gave a more stimulus to the matrists, and the age blossomed with playwrights, poets, musicians and architects.

It is to the court rakes that one has to turn for the first warnings of eighteenth century vindictiveness, sensuality an exhibitionism. Whether we think of Rochester tempting Charles to a brothel and then arranging for all his money be stolen, or of Sedley, naked at a window in Covent Garden profanely haranguing the crowd (Pepys said there were a thousand people): whether we think of the Countess of Pembroke arranging for the stallions to leap the mares in front of the house ("and then", says Aubrey, "she would act the like sport herself with her stallions") or whether we think of Dr. Triplet, Protected by armed men, singing a scabrous ballad beneath the windows of the flagellomaniac Dr. Gill, head master of St. Paul`s, and "so frighted that he beshitt himself most fearfully", the picture is not an attractive one.

But in reading the memoirs of the time, it is not so much the licence as the unscrupulousness and brutality that impress one .The Earl of Oxford did not hesitate to achieve seduction by entering into a spurious marriage; Farquhar was deceived by fake heiress. Hired bravi were employed, as in the Italian Renaissance, to execute revenges: Rochester had Dryden beaten up for a supposed slight in one of his plays; Kynaston and Coventry were among others similarly treated. Brawls in theatres were commonplace, and a man might be run through for jostling another in the press. But this violence was not a peculiarity of the Court, it was part of the tenor of the times: even Oxford dons would black one another`s eyes. In the Moorfields, the weavers would fight a pitched battle with the butchers until the butchers, fleeing, were driven to remove and conceal their aprons, while the weavers strode victoriously about crying "A hundred pounds for a butcher". Even the Inns of Court were the scene of riots, and the Lord Mayor, invited there for dinner, found himself besieged in a room.

Our bowdlerized history books give but a poor impression of the cruelty which was still natural to an age which had tortured so many witches. The taste is best conveyed by quoting not impulsive and individual acts of violence, but a deliberate court decision, the sentence pronounced on the five judges who condemned Charles I to death:

"You shall go from hence to the place from whence you came, and from that place shall be drawn upon a hurdle to the place of execution, and there shall hang by the neck till you are half dead, and shall be cut down alive, and your privy members cut off before your face and thrown into the fire, your belly ripped up and your bowels burnt, your head to be severed from your body, your body shall be divided into four quarters, and disposed as His Majesty shall think fit."
By the eighteenth century, this violence had become so widespread that men scarcely dared venture on the streets at night: in Kensington and Hampstead bells were rung when parties were about to set out for the city under armed guard, so that all who wished to make the hazardous journey might join them. "The impunity with which outrages were committed in the ill-lit and ill-guarded streets of London during the first half of the eighteenth century can now hardly be realized", says Lecky "In 1712 a club of young men of the higher classes, who assumed the name of Mohocks, were accustomed nightly to sally out drunk into the streets to hunt the passers-by and to subject them in mere wantonness to the most atrocious outrages. One of their favourite amusements, called `tipping the lion`, was to squeeze the nose of their victim flat upon his face and to bore out his eyes with their fingers. Among them were the `sweaters` who formed a circle round their prisoner and pricked him with their swords till he sank exhausted to the ground, the `dancing masters` so-called from their skill in making men caper by thrusting swords into their legs, the tumblers, whose favourite amusement was to set women on their heads and commit various indecencies and barbarities of the limbs that were exposed. Maid servants, as they opened their masters` doors, were waylaid, beaten and their faces cut. Matrons enclosed in barrels were rolled down the steep and stony incline of Snow Hill. Watchmen were beaten unmercifully and their noses slit. Country gentlemen went to the theatre as if in time of war, accompanied by their armed retainers. A Bishop`s son was said to be one of the gang and a baronet was among those who were arrested."

Just as in Italy, the ever present possibility of insult an injury made it essential to resent the smallest slight for fear that it might be followed by some worse imposition, and, also as in Italy, this produced an institutionalised pattern in the form of duel. Once created, the duel could itself be used as a means expressing aggression. It would be interesting, for instance, to know more of the private resentments of John Reresby, who, while dining at a neighbour`s house, quarrelled with the fiance of his host`s daughter, and threw his wine in his face. Besought by his fiancee not to throw away his life in a duel, the young man swallowed the insult; and Reresby records the incident with satisfaction, evidently feeling that he emerges well from it.

The second, and perhaps the most significant, strain in the sexuality of the period seems to have-been a fear of impotence We might suspect this from the emergence of Don Juanism for the obsessive repetition of seduction generally derives from need to prove one`s potency. Not infrequently, it became quite explicit: for instance, in 1732, the Hon. Mrs. Weld sought dissolution of her marriage (marriages could be dissolved by Act of Parliament) on the grounds of her husband`s impotence which he admitted. He said, "as often as he attempted to have Carnal Knowledge of his wife, a Pain struck him across the Belly which so contracted his Privy Parts, as to put him in much Torment, and obliged him to desist from further Caresses". Thus it was clearly impotence of psychological origin. Moreover, when one reads the closing chapters of "Clarissa Harlowe" it is difficult to escape the impression that the duel was a symbolic method of proving potency. The hair-trigger sensitivity of the gallant, and his especial concern with his sister`s honour, point to fears of impotence and incest such as we should expect to find where mother fixations were heavily repressed.

One of the most extraordinary literary judgments ever made is that Richardson was a moralist. Both "Clarissa Harlowe", and the "Letters from Pamela", are endlessly prolonged accounts, characteristically obsessive, of the seduction and degradation of girls, which could only have been written by a man for whom such events had a dreadful fascination. Not only is Clarissa, rejected by her family, placed in a brothel (the obvious fantasy for anyone who feels that women are whores - and we have seen the Oedipal origins of such a feeling) and eventually driven to her death, but, for good measure, we are shown Lovelace`s friend, Belmont, seducing a girl with the aid of drugs and abandoning her. The story almost exactly parallels that of a recent highly successful novel, except that in this case the seducer is not presented as being a gentleman, and the psychic impotence which motivates him is frankly stated.

The themes of violence and impotence run through the sexual life of the period in a horrid counterpoint, and ever more repellent steps are necessary to evoke some shadow of the vanished potency. Where the Restoration poet had hoped that Phyllis would be kind, the Georgian gallant ruthlessly seduced girls, if necessary using narcotics for the purpose, and left them to their fate. It was considered especially important that the girl should be a virgin. This is a demand which differs in an important respect from the demand of a man that his intended wife should be a virgin, and it occurred with such frequency that Bloch has spoken of the period as one of "defloration mania". To deflower a woman is a method of expressing one`s resentment of her sex: and how important the sadistic element was is shown by a work like "The Battle of Venus" which dwells on the charm of the victims struggles and cries of pain.

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