The molly houses of London, taverns, raids and the gallows

In eighteenth-century London men who loved men met in molly houses, where they danced, took women's names and held mock weddings in a room called the Chapel. Paid informers and reforming constables raided them, and in 1726 three customers of Mother Clap's house in Field Lane were hanged at Tyburn.

London, Sunday 14 November 1725. Samuel Stevens, a constable working for the Society for the Reformation of Manners, climbs the stairs of a house in Field Lane, Holborn, passing himself off as the "husband" of one of the regulars. Inside, he later tells the court at the Old Bailey, he finds between forty and fifty men "making Love to one another, as they call'd it": sitting on each other's laps, kissing, dancing, curtseying and calling each other "Sir" in falsetto voices, and slipping off in couples into a room next door¹.

The house belonged to Margaret Clap, known as Mother Clap, and it was the most popular of the London molly houses: taverns, alehouses and private rooms where men who loved men met to drink, dance, flirt and have sex in the early eighteenth century. Within three months the police would raid it. Within six, three of its customers would hang at Tyburn. What follows is the story of those houses, told largely through the trials that destroyed them.

Beds in every room

Mother Clap's house stood in Field Lane, a crowded street just north of Holborn, between an archway and the Bunch of Grapes tavern. It was not an inn with a sign but a private house and coffee house, owned by her husband John Clap, who seldom appeared. She ran it, fetched the drink from next door, and, according to witnesses, had provided beds in every room².

On ordinary nights thirty or forty men came, more on Sundays. The main room was big enough for fiddling and country dances. Off it was a smaller room with a bed that the regulars called the Marrying Room or the Chapel. A man named Eccleston stood at its door. Couples went in "to be marry'd", and when they came back they would tell the others what they had been doing³.

Several men lived in the house. William Griffin, an upholsterer, had lodged there for almost two years. Mother Clap herself, according to a later witness, stayed in the room all evening and seemed to enjoy the company's jokes.

Madam, Miss Betty and Orange Deb

Field Lane was not unique. The historian Rictor Norton, who has spent decades reconstructing this world from trial records and newspapers, counts molly houses in London from about 1700. In 1709 the satirist Ned Ward described a "Mollies Club" whose members talked and behaved like women².

Others turn up in the 1726 trials. Thomas Wright, a wool-comber, ran one in Beech Lane, near Moorfields. George Whittle was accused of keeping another at the Royal Oak, at the corner of St James's Square in Pall Mall, with its own "Chapel". A candle-maker named Jones kept a third at the Three Tobacco Rolls in Drury Lane.

The men had a language of their own. They called each other "Madam" and "Miss Betty", took female "maiden names", and spoke of a sexual encounter as a wedding. A young orange-seller, Martin Mackintosh, was known in the houses as Orange Deb; Samuel Roper, accused of keeping a house in Giltspur Street, was Plump Nelly³.

They also had their cruising grounds, which a horrified editorial in the London Journal of 7 May 1726 listed for its readers: the Royal Exchange, Moorfields, the privies of Lincoln's Inn, the south side of St James's Park and the arcades of Covent Garden³.

The historian Alan Bray argued that the molly houses were something genuinely new: not just men who sometimes had sex with men, as in earlier centuries, but a subculture with its own meeting places, manners and identity⁴. Randolph Trumbach went further, and saw in the effeminate molly a new social type, a "third gender" that took shape in London around 1700⁵.

Informers in disguise

The Societies for the Reformation of Manners had been founded in the 1690s to fight swearing, drunkenness, prostitution and Sabbath-breaking by bringing offenders before the magistrates. They paid informers and worked with constables who shared their zeal. Sodomy was one of their targets.

Their way into the molly houses was a man named Mark Partridge. After a quarrel with his lover in 1724 he became, under pressure, an informer, and in late 1725 he took constables to house after house, introducing each as his "husband". On 17 November he brought Joseph Sellers and William Davison to Wright's house in Beech Lane, where the regulars had heard that someone was informing on them. They called Partridge a treacherous bitch, then forgave him and kissed him, and kissed the constables too³.

Two young men did even more damage. Thomas Newton, about thirty, had been fetched to molly houses for years to "oblige Company". Edward Courtney, eighteen, had worked in several of them. Both turned informer, and both testified against men they had slept with. Newton also acted as bait.

One night he leaned against a wall in Moorfields, on a path known as the Sodomites' Walk, while two constables watched from a distance. When a man came up and took his hand, Newton held on and shouted for the constables. The man, William Brown, was asked why he had done it. He answered, according to the trial report, that he thought there was no crime "in making what use I please of my own Body"⁶. He was sentenced to the pillory, a fine and two months in prison.

The Sunday night raid

On a Sunday night in February 1726, constables surrounded the house in Field Lane, blocked the ways out and emptied it. By the early hours about forty men had been taken to Newgate prison. Other molly houses were raided in the following weeks³.

Nobody had been caught in the act, and most of those arrested were eventually released for lack of evidence. To convict, the prosecution needed a witness who had taken part, and that is where Newton and Courtney came in.

Three carts to Tyburn

The trials began at the Old Bailey in April 1726. Gabriel Lawrence, a forty-three-year-old milkman and a widower, was accused of sodomy with Newton. Constables Stevens and Sellers swore he was a regular at Mother Clap's. Lawrence said he had drunk ale there without knowing what sort of house it was, and a string of neighbours, cow-keepers and in-laws spoke for his good character. The jury found him guilty¹.

William Griffin, the upholsterer who lodged at Clap's, was convicted on Newton's evidence too. So was Thomas Wright, thirty-two, the wool-comber of Beech Lane. George Kedger was convicted on Courtney's word but later reprieved. George Whittle of the Royal Oak, who mounted a lively defence and called a crowd of witnesses, was acquitted.

On Monday 9 May 1726 Lawrence, Griffin and Wright were taken in a cart to Tyburn and hanged together. Lawrence and Griffin went on denying the charges to the prison chaplain. Wright admitted to him that he had kept a molly house, but insisted Newton had lied about him³. As was usual for hanged felons, Lawrence's body was handed over to the surgeons for dissection.

"I am a Woman"

Margaret Clap came to trial in July 1726, charged with keeping a disorderly house where she encouraged men to commit sodomy. Stevens told again what he had seen in November. Her defence was a single sentence, recorded in the trial report: she hoped it would be considered that she was a woman, and therefore could not be thought to be concerned in such practices¹.

The jury convicted her. She was sentenced to stand in the pillory at Smithfield, to pay a fine of twenty marks and to spend two years in prison. The crowd at the pillory treated her so roughly that she fainted and fell several times, and newspapers doubted she would survive³. After that, she disappears from the records.

By the end of the summer, three men had been hanged, others pilloried, fined and jailed, one had died in prison awaiting trial, and many had gone into hiding. Norton notes that almost every accusation had come from two men who were themselves accomplices, and that after 1726 the wave of prosecutions stopped².

Vere Street, 1810

The molly houses did not end with Mother Clap. The Societies for the Reformation of Manners faded and were wound up by 1738, but prosecutions went on, and so did the houses.

The most notorious later case was the White Swan in Vere Street, off Oxford Street, raided by the Bow Street Runners on 8 July 1810. Twenty-seven men were arrested. On 27 September six of them, convicted of attempted sodomy, were driven to the pillory in the Haymarket and pelted by a huge crowd with mud, rotten fish, dead cats and vegetables.

In March 1811 two men linked to the house by later charges, John Hepburn and Thomas White, were hanged at Newgate for sodomy. White, a drummer, was only sixteen. In 1813 the lawyer Robert Holloway published a pamphlet about the case, The Phoenix of Sodom, or the Vere Street Coterie, which described a chapel and mock weddings very like those of Field Lane eighty years earlier⁷.

Sodomy remained a capital crime in England until 1861. The last executions, as the chapter tells, took place in 1835.

Rediscovering the mollies

For two centuries the molly houses survived only in the trial reports and a few satires. Then, from the 1980s, gay historians went back to the documents. Bray's Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982) put the molly houses at the centre of the story of how a gay subculture began. Norton's Mother Clap's Molly House (1992) told it in detail, and his online sourcebook has transcribed hundreds of trials, newspaper reports and satires².

In 2001 the playwright Mark Ravenhill brought the house back to life on stage in Mother Clap's Molly House, at the National Theatre in London, setting Field Lane alongside a modern sex party.

The trial reports were written by the enemies of the men they describe, and they have to be read with care. But they keep the voices of men like William Brown and Gabriel Lawrence, and of a woman who told a jury she could not be blamed because she was a woman. The wider story of the age that put the naked male body on a pedestal while it hanged men who loved men is told in the chapter on neoclassicism and the camera.