Born into ‘the inner circle of English aristocratic life’, Lord Ronald Gower (1845-1916) is best known as the likely inspiration for the hedonistic aristocrat, Lord Henry Wotton, in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and as the sculptor of the Shakespeare Memorial in Stratford-upon-Avon. He is a prominent figure in Britain’s nineteenth-century LGBTQ+ history on account of his connection with Wilde (who spoke at the unveiling of the Shakespeare Memorial), his own output as an artist and author, and his centrality to queer metropolitan society from the 1870s.*

As Joseph Bristow has suggested, despite Gower’s ‘sexual interest in other men’ becoming an increasingly open secret in high society by the end of the nineteenth century, his wealth and social status allowed him to avoid the criminal sentencing that destroyed the lives of less connected queer men (both before and after the 1885 Labouchère Amendment).

This relative freedom allowed him to play an influential role in shaping, and to an extent asserting, queer identities during the late nineteenth century. Whitney Davis has astutely observed that in terms of his artistic practice, by the late 1880s Gower ‘had begun self-consciously to enact the possibility – the aesthetic possibility – of an essentially homosexual life-historical identity’. And John Potvin has suggested that Gower’s remarkable bric-a-brac ‘treasure house’ at Windsor Lodge, which became a meeting point for a generation of young aesthetes from the 1870s, reflected Gower’s ‘unique sense of queer time and place’.

In 1867, at the age of just 21, Gower was returned for the Scottish county of Sutherland. He represented the constituency until 1874. For most of those years he kept a detailed diary, parts of which found their way into his popular two volume autobiographical memoirs, My Reminiscences, published in 1883. After working on the manuscript of Gower’s diary for the History of Parliament’s forthcoming Commons 1832-1868 volumes it has become clear to me that Gower undertook a considerable amount of self-censorship in his memoirs. More importantly it is evident that the document warrants specific attention beyond the scope of the traditional History of Parliament biography format.

As well as being a significant source for understanding the machinations of parliamentary politics at the time of the second Reform Act, Gower’s unpublished diary offers an amazing opportunity to understand the life of a young, aristocratic queer man as he navigated his way through the homosocial world of Westminster politics, and established himself in London society. It also offers an opportunity to examine Gower’s connection to London’s queer culture during the 1860s, discussed in Charles Upchurch’s excellent Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform (2009).

In this series of articles I’ll use Gower’s diary to consider various aspects of his life in London as an MP during 1867 and 1868, from his reputed nickname as ‘the beautiful boy’ of the House of Commons, to his election at the 1867 by-election, and his experiences as an MP at Westminster. Moving outside Parliament, I’ll consider his busy social life (featuring aristocratic balls, West End nightlife and an intriguing predilection for spectating at major London fires), an apparent summer romance with the son of the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, his close friendship with his cousin and MP for Argyllshire, the Marquess of Lorne, and his developing connections with London’s art world.

MS

* Following the theories pioneered by leading queer theorists since the 1980s (including Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner) I use the term ‘queer’ because, to borrow from Warner, it ‘defin[es] itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual’. Queer allows for a much wider definition of sexuality because it avoids the binary of homosexuality vs heterosexuality.

Read the rest of the series on Gower via these links:

Part two: ‘Lord Ronald Gower (1845-1916): the social life of a queer MP at the time of the Second Reform Act’

Part three: ‘The ‘beautiful boy’ of the Commons: Lord Ronald Gower (1845-1916) and sexual identity in Parliament at the time of the Second Reform Act’

Part four: ‘A Highland canvass in a ‘pocket county’: Ronald Gower (1845-1916) and the 1867 Sutherland by-election‘

Part five: ‘‘Covent Garden was lit up by a lucid light’: an MP’s account of the fire at Her Majesty’s Theatre, 6 December 1867‘

Further Reading

S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientation, Objects, Others (2006)

S. Avery, K. M. Graham, Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London, c.1850 to the Present (2018)

J. Bristow, ‘Oscar Wilde, Ronald Gower, and the Shakespeare Monument’, Études anglaises (2016)

M. Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality 1885-1914 (2003)

H. G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (2003)

W. Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (2010)

W. Davis, ‘Lord Ronald Gower and ‘the offending Adam’, in D. Getsy (ed.), Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain (2004)

E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (1990)

J. Potvin, Bachelors of a Different Sort (2014)

C. Upchurch, Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform (2009)

C. Upchurch, “Beyond the Law”: The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain (2021)

P. Ward-Jackson, ‘Lord Ronald Gower, Gustave Doré and the Genesis of the Shakespeare Memorial at Stratford-on-Avon’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1987)

P. Ward-Jackson, ‘Gower, Lord Ronald Charles Sutherland-Leveson- (1845-1916)’, Oxf. DNB

M. Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (1993)

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 19 February 2020, written by Dr Martin Spychal.

One of the most privileged men in nineteenth-century Britain, Lord Ronald Gower (1845-1916), was returned to Parliament in May 1867, aged 21, for his family’s pocket county of Sutherland. As discussed in my first article of this series, historians and literary critics have shown how Gower played an influential role in shaping British queer identities, utilising his position of privilege to navigate life as a queer man in late nineteenth-century Britain.

My research into the first two years of his parliamentary career for the History of Parliament’s Commons 1832-1868 project has revealed new insights into Gower’s life as a young queer MP. This blog focuses on Gower’s social life during his first year in Parliament, which mixed London’s more conventional aristocratic social calendar with London’s queer nightlife.

Gower’s detailed private diary reveals that he maintained a very busy social life after taking his seat in Parliament in May 1867. As well as attending aristocratic dinners and balls and the major cultural events of that year’s London Season, he was a devoted attendee of London’s art galleries, West End theatres and Covent Garden nightspots. He was usually accompanied on these frequent, and elongated, nights out by one or more of his close school or university friends: Robert ‘Jorcy’ Jocelyn (1846-1880), John ‘Ian’ Campbell, the Marquis of Lorne (1845-1914), Lord Archibald Campbell (1846-1913), or his brother Albert Sutherland-Leveson-Gower (1843-1874).

During 1867 Gower was a regular presence in London’s West End theatres: the Strand, the Adelphi, Drury Lane Theatre, Haymarket, St James’s, the Royal Italian Opera House and the Royal Alhambra Palace. The acerbic witticisms that litter his diary suggest that he fancied himself as something of a theatrical critic, and he was more than happy to prioritise attending a new play over important debates in the Commons.

On 28 June 1867, for instance, he missed a close vote over the Conservative ministry’s reform bill to attend the St James’s Theatre to watch his favourite play of the season for the second time, Les Idées De Madame Aubray by Alexandre Dumas fils. The crowd, he reported, were ‘cheering [Monsieur] Ravel and [Mademoiselle] Deschamps being the principal performers but the whole company is excellent’.

After attending the theatre (or escaping from what he invariably found to be ‘very slow’ aristocratic dinners or balls) Gower would usually move on to his favourite late-night Covent Garden drinking haunt, the notorious Evans’s Supper-room, 43 King Street.

Evans’s was a male-only late night dining room and music hall (with women only admitted to view proceedings from behind a screen and on presentation of their address). Known for its heavy drinking culture and ‘madrigal glees’ sung by ‘well known boys’, it was derided by temperance reformers during the 1860s for ‘vice and profligacy’ and for attracting disreputable gentlemen ‘who had not paid a tailor’s bill for the last seven years’.

As a number of historians have shown, the theatres, pubs and clubs of London’s West End were some of the most significant queer spaces in nineteenth-century London.

One contemporary recalled how from the 1850s ‘the Adelphi Theatre, the Italian Opera, and the open parks at night became his fields of adventure’. That Evans’s Supper-room may also have been regarded by contemporaries as one of London’s queer spaces is suggested by its mention in Thomas Boulton and Frederick Park’s sodomy trial of 1870. During their trial a witness reported that waiting staff at Evans’s refused to remove the cross-dressed Park and Boulton from the establishment, as well as the latter’s partner, the former MP for Newark, Lord Arthur Clinton (1840-1870).

Several remarkably open entries in his diary suggest that these queer spaces allowed Gower to pursue a brief relationship during July and August 1867 with the ‘quite beautiful’ and ‘Spanishy’ William John Mayne (1846-1902), the son of the first commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Richard Mayne (1796-1868). The relationship embraced the complete array of Gower’s social haunts, evolving from a meeting at a conventional aristocratic ball, to a series of nights out in Gower’s favourite Covent Garden nightspots.

It appears that Gower and Mayne either met at a ball at Stafford House on 15 July 1867, or at the India Office Ball held later that week to celebrate the London visit of Ottoman Sultan Abdulaziz, which Gower described as ‘probably the finest ball ever given in London’. A week later Gower took Mayne for lunch and then to the Royal Academy of Arts:

27 July 1867

On Saturday 27^th [July] to town after lunch (a new friend) W. Mayne (Sir Richard’s last son and youngest) came with me to the [Royal] Academy; he is 22 and quite beautiful; Spanishy; lived a good deal in Paris and has the most charming manners.

Gower’s diary suggests he met with Mayne on four further occasions over the following few weeks. In addition to the places already discussed above, Gower’s diary entries listed below mention Chiswick House, where Gower lived during 1867 with his mother the 2^nd duchess of Sutherland; St. James’s Club, Gower’s gentleman’s club then situated at Grafton Street; and 80 Chester Square, Mayne’s home address:

28 July 1867

Mayne came [to Chiswick House] in the afternoon and was (in Archie’s [word illegible]) booted … I drove Mayne back to [80] Chester Square at 7.

3 Aug. 1867

Later out with Will. Mayne (who I am exceptionally fond of).

5 Aug. 1867

Dined with W. Mayne at my Club (St. James’s), and we went to the Adelphi to see Kate Terry in ‘The Lady of Lyon’, much disappointed; also to Evans’s.

15 Aug. 1867

I went to town on the 15^th and stopped the night, dining with W. Mayne and going with him to a concert at Covent Garden and also to Evans’s.

Gower’s diary contains no further mentions of Mayne, suggesting that the relationship ended abruptly. It may have been that Mayne spurned Gower’s advances, that either one grew tired of each other, or that they were spotted. Both were high profile figures – the son of the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and a member of Parliament – and if the affair had become public knowledge it would have been a society scandal.  Little is known about Mayne following this, aside from that he died, aged 56, unmarried and ‘without profession’ in Ostend, in August 1902.

Either way, for Gower the moment appears to have been a watershed. As my next blog will discuss, it was not long before rumours surrounding Gower’s sexuality surfaced in Parliament, leading him to change his social habits and to long for an alternative mode of life.

MS

This post is part two of a five article series. Follow the links to read more:

Part one: ‘Lord Ronald Gower (1845-1916): the life of a queer MP at the time of the Second Reform Act’

Part three: ‘The ‘beautiful boy’ of the Commons: Lord Ronald Gower (1845-1916) and sexual identity in Parliament at the time of the Second Reform Act’

Part four: ‘A Highland canvass in a ‘pocket county’: Ronald Gower (1845-1916) and the 1867 Sutherland by-election‘

Part five: ‘‘Covent Garden was lit up by a lucid light’: an MP’s account of the fire at Her Majesty’s Theatre, 6 December 1867‘

Further Reading

S. Avery, K. M. Graham, Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London, c.1850 to the Present (2018)

M. Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality 1885-1914 (2003)

H. G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (2003)

S. Joyce, ‘Two Women Walk into a Theatre Bathroom: The Fanny and Stella Trials as Trans Narrative’, Victorian Review (2018), 83-98

C. Upchurch, Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform (2009)

C. Upchurch, ‘Forgetting the Unthinkable: Cross-Dressers and British Society in the Case of the Queen vs. Boulton and Others’, Gender and History (2000), 127-57

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 21 October 2020, written by Dr Martin Spychal.

In May 1868 the twenty-two-year-old MP for Sutherlandshire, Ronald Gower (1845-1916), made his maiden parliamentary speech. When reporting on the speech the Leeds Mercury shared some unexpected Westminster gossip. The paper informed its readers that Gower had

the reputation of being the handsomest man in the House of Commons, and when he first entered it a year ago he obtained the name of ‘the beautiful boy’, which has clung to him ever since.

Leeds Mercury, 30 May 1868.

MPs were regularly given nicknames by their colleagues, but in our research for the History of Parliament’s forthcoming Commons 1832-1868 volumes, Gower’s designation as ‘the beautiful boy’ stands alone as an example of the objectification and sexualisation of a young MP by his older colleagues.

Gower was not the only MP to be labelled as ‘the handsomest man in the House of Commons’. Seeking re-election for Hull in 1868, Charles Norwood was commended to the electors with the observation that ‘the ladies, so many of whom now grace us with their presence, say that he is the handsomest man in the House of Commons’. However, the use of the nickname the ‘beautiful boy’ for Gower carried rather different connotations. A Commons full of classically trained MPs could surely not have failed to note the association of such a moniker with notions of the ‘beautiful boy’ (or erômenos) of ancient Greek culture, a figure synonymous with sexual desire between an older man and a younger male.

At first glance, then, the existence of such a nickname suggests a level of openness in attitudes towards same-sex desire in the homosocial private club culture of the nineteenth-century Commons. This would be surprising, however, given Ben Griffin’s insightful research into masculine identity at Westminster during the period. As Griffin astutely notes, mid-Victorian MPs ‘could not abandon heterosexuality, domestic responsibilities, domestic authority, independence or self control without abandoning one’s claim to be a “real” man’.

What seems more likely is that in calling Gower ‘the beautiful boy’ MPs were referencing, and adding to, Westminster gossip and innuendo surrounding his sexuality. Following his arrival in the Commons in May 1867 it is conceivable that MPs came up with the nickname to marginalise a colleague who they perceived as unmanly or effete. Certainly, reports in the Elgin Courant suggest some perception of what would now be termed Gower’s camp aesthetic. In reporting on his parliamentary nickname, the paper couldn’t resist the play on words of calling Gower ‘his Grace’s graceful brother’, ‘his grace’ being Gower’s brother and fellow parliamentarian, the 3^rd duke of Sutherland (1828-1892).

As his first year in Parliament wore on, though, it is highly plausible that MPs started to link Gower’s nickname to rumours about his sexuality. As discussed in my previous blog, Gower’s private diaries indicate that he spent most of the 1867 parliamentary session mixing London’s conventional aristocratic social calendar with London’s queer West End nightlife. Covent Garden’s theatres and drinking establishments were a stone’s throw from Parliament and were very public spaces. It is not hard to conceive that reports of Gower’s regular attendance in the area, and apparent relationships with other men, got back to his colleagues.

By calling Gower ‘the beautiful boy’, then, MPs may at best have been offering a coded warning to Gower to ensure that his extra-parliamentary activities were in keeping with the expected norms for a figure in public life. Alternatively the nickname was simply deployed as a form of bullying.

A distinct change in Gower’s social habits during the 1868 parliamentary session suggests that he was more than aware that questions were being raised about his extra-parliamentary nightlife. His diary for 1868 indicates that he stopped his regular trips to Covent Garden’s theatres and Evans’s Supper Rooms of the previous year. In their place were visits to the more respectable, and private, Mayfair gentleman’s ‘night clubs’ (as Gower called them) of Pratt’s Club House, 14 Park Place, and Egerton’s, 87 St James’s St.

As 1868 progressed, Gower’s diary also suggests his increasing disaffection with parliamentary life and the social expectations of conventional aristocratic society. In March 1868, Gower’s nephew and close friend, John ‘Ian’ Campbell, the Marquis of Lorne (1845-1914), was returned to Parliament. Lorne’s constant presence in London over the following months came as a great relief to Gower:

What a difference his being in the House [of Commons] makes to me I cannot say, it only wanted such a company to take away the feeling of loneliness that I formerly felt among so many older people than myself; and our walks or drives to and from the House are charming.

SRO, D6578/15/22, 5 Mar. 1868

Although his friendship with Lorne provided some respite from the ‘loneliness’ of the Commons, by the summer of 1868 Gower complained increasingly in his diary of the ‘pain and boresomeness’ of much of London society. In doing so he began pining for a more selective social set that shared his love of art and literature.

In July 1868 he was inspired by a visit to the Holland Park residence of the artist, Frederic Leighton (1830-1896):

If only I could see more and live more with the people (and society in general of those) with whom Ian and I breakfasted this morning (Thursday 2^nd) life would be intensely more enjoyable and interesting. We broke fast nearly at 12 with F. Leighton and a far greater brother artist [George] Watts; with these was also young [Valentine] Prinsep, a rising artist and I do not think I have ever spent two pleasanter hours.

SRO, D6578/15/22, 2 July 1868

His disdain for conventional aristocratic society was compounded that autumn after enduring a fortnight at his family’s estate in Dunrobin in the company of the future Edward VII, the Prince of Wales. He complained that ‘I do not enjoy the society (if it can be called such) which the Wales’s bring’. Regretting that ‘the more I am here [Dunrobin] the greater I feel the change from old times’, he went on to imagine an alternative future life in an idealised ‘Spanish Castle’ in Kilmarnock:

My “Spanish Castle” is a wee house at Kilmarnock. It’s large enough for me or two friends where I can feel and be perfectly free; with my books and myself. All this may sound and perhaps is selfish. If so I cannot help it; surely, we all may follow unnatural tendencies (if right and honourable) and mine is to be utterly independent and not obliged to live at all with a set of people utterly and wholly uncongenial and unsympathetic to myself.

SRO, D6578/15/22, 4 Oct. 1868

As well as foreseeing his future bric-a-brac ‘treasure house’ at Windsor Lodge (which as John Potvin has demonstrated became a meeting point for a generation of young aesthetes from the 1870s), Gower’s statement presents as a remarkably frank admission of his sexuality and disillusionment with the conventions of aristocratic society.

As with the multiple meanings inherent in his parliamentary nickname of the ‘beautiful boy’, it is hard to escape the notion that in privately admitting his ‘unnatural tendencies’ Gower was coming to terms with his sexuality. ‘Unnatural’ was nineteenth-century shorthand for same-sex desire and ‘unnatural offences’ was the principal legal term used to categorise an array of criminal sexual offences enacted by men such as ‘sodomy’, ‘indecent assault’ or ‘carnal knowledge’.  

Within eighteen months of entering public life as a member of Parliament, Gower had clearly come to realise that a career at Westminster was not for him. While he would be returned again to Parliament at the November 1868 general election, his position of immense privilege as a member of one of Britain’s leading aristocratic families allowed him to devote the next few years of his life to forging an alternative career as a sculptor and writer…

MS

This is the third part of the five article series. Read the other posts via the links below:

Part one: ‘Lord Ronald Gower (1845-1916): the life of a queer MP at the time of the Second Reform Act’

Part two: ‘Lord Ronald Gower (1845-1916): the social life of a queer MP at the time of the Second Reform Act‘

Part four: ‘A Highland canvass in a ‘pocket county’: Ronald Gower (1845-1916) and the 1867 Sutherland by-election‘

Part five: ‘‘Covent Garden was lit up by a lucid light’: an MP’s account of the fire at Her Majesty’s Theatre, 6 December 1867‘

Further Reading

H. G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (2003)

K. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (first published 1978, most recent edition 2016)

B. Griffin, The politics of gender in Victorian Britain: masculinity, political culture and the struggle for women’s rights (2012)

J. Potvin, Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain (2014)

R. Scruton, Beauty (2009)

S. Sontag, Notes on “Camp” (first published 1964, most recent edition 2018)

C. Upchurch, Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform (2009)

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 12 November 2020, written by Dr Martin Spychal.

When the HIV/AIDs epidemic arrived in the UK in the early 1980s it was a frightening, confusing time. Little was known about this new disease, other than it appeared to be deadly to all who caught it. As in other countries it spread quickly in certain communities in the UK: haemophiliacs, who relied on blood products, drug users and gay men. The last two groups were already marginalised. As recounted heartbreakingly in the BBC/British Library documentary series based on oral history testimony, Aids: The Unheard Tapes, those living with the disease, and those who loved them, faced discrimination and fear from wider society.

The lack of knowledge about how AIDs spread and how to treat the disease, alongside this marginalisation, made tackling the subject politically a difficult issue. Although homosexuality had been decriminalised in the UK in the 1960s, discrimination against the gay community was widespread and, at times, political debate was homophobic. The MPs we have spoken to as part of our Oral History Project who spoke out about AIDs in Parliament believed other MPs would stay quiet because they could find the whole debate ‘distasteful’, in the words of Labour’s Gavin Strang. This of course made introducing legislation to record and prevent the spread of HIV, as well as support those living with the disease, all the harder.

Some MPs though were determined to address this crucial public health issue. Chris Butler, for example, remembers speaking about HIV in Parliament at a time when its spread felt ‘unstoppable’. Edwina Currie became junior health minister in 1986, partly, in her words, to help front then Health Secretary Norman Fowler’s public campaign on HIV.

The ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ government campaign, and Currie’s inappropriate public comments about AIDS, have been criticised then and after as only encouraging the stigma of those suffering with the disease. The image of a tombstone and the apocalyptic tone of the TV advert in particular were seen by many as ‘demonising’ them as the victims of the disease. However, the campaign has also been lauded for sharing better information, its frank language, and in particular for the attempt to reach the entire country. Fowler remembered in a Guardian interview that Margaret Thatcher had wanted a campaign more targeted to specific communities, and with less direct language. This battle, as shown from the archives, was won by Fowler and the Health Department. The advert and information leaflet reached most of the country, made it clear that anyone could catch HIV, and promoted safe sex. Fowler later remembered that one of his main motivations was to prevent attacks on the gay community, arguing that better information about HIV would help undermine discrimination. He has since continued to be involved in campaigning for both the LGBTQ+ community and for those suffering with HIV.

Others out of government also worked hard within parliament to do what they could to stem the epidemic. For example, Gavin Strang introduced a Private Members’ Bill in 1987, the AIDS (Control) Act, which required reporting on numbers of cases across the country. Neil Gerrard joined, and later chaired, the All Party Parliamentary Group on HIV/AIDs because he had friends diagnosed with the disease and others who worked with AIDs patients. He later sat on an Inter-Parliamentary Union working group advising parliaments across the world on HIV policy.

Of course there were others in Parliament deeply affected by the illness. Robert, now Lord, Hayward, was not publicly out at the time but remembered how ‘frightening’ it felt on the gay scene, how ‘awful’ it was to lose good friends to this disease. Chris, now Lord, Smith – the first MP to choose to come out – was diagnosed with HIV in 1988. He chose to keep this information secret at the time. Smith was at first treated with the more experimental AZT, which he believes may have given him enough ‘breathing space’ to be able to receive better therapy later on.

Here he describes how he reacted to his diagnosis:

Lord Smith describes his ‘determination to fit everything in come what may’ kept up his motivation to continue sitting on Labour’s front bench: ‘If I’m not here in 5 years’ time I want to make the most of what I’ve got.’ Even for a MP though, the discrimination around HIV remained. Lord Smith decided much later to make his diagnosis public and to talk about his experiences. He has since featured in campaigns demonstrating that a HIV diagnosis no longer means a death sentence.

EP

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Find more blogs from our oral history project here.

The rediscovery and analysis of long forgotten evidence can change our understanding of the period from which it came, especially in relation to sensitive topics, such as gender and sexuality. The sexually explicit material culture of everyday life revealed with the rediscovery of Pompeii, for example, showed how our understanding of the ancient world had been filtered through the aesthetic values of later, Christian morality. Political debates, especially over failed and forgotten initiatives, can also reveal long buried and forgotten opinions, practices, and attitudes, and the History of Parliament project is a uniquely useful tool for recovering them.

This was borne out during my work investigating how and why the death penalty for sodomy was ended in the nineteenth century. It is a story that up until recently had received very little investigation, in part because it was felt that the sequence of events was already known as well as it could—or indeed needed—to be.

Jeffrey Weeks, the first academic to write nineteenth-century British queer history, established the narrative that historians subsequently followed: the law ending the death penalty for sodomy was changed in 1861, replacing capital punishment with a sentence of ten years of imprisonment. At the same time the sentences for attempted sodomy and indecent assault were raised from two to up to ten years of imprisonment. Since the last executions for sodomy occurred in 1835, as subsequent death sentences were commuted to sentences of imprisonment or transportation, the change in the law hardly seemed worth celebrating. It was done within a broader criminal code bill, and there was almost no recorded discussion about the change made to the sodomy law specifically. Given that this occurred decades before the origins of modern homosexual identity in the late nineteenth century, there seemed little reason to assume that what had occurred was anything more than a rationalization of the legal code, and it has been treated as such in much of the historiography ever since.

But the real struggle had happened decades earlier, and I was able to reconstruct that previously forgotten sequence of events using the History of Parliament database. My approach was similar to what I had done in my first book, where I had demonstrated that there was far more reporting of court cases involving sex between men in London newspapers in the early nineteenth century than previously suspected. The ability to electronically search newspapers was an aid in this work, but only after figuring out the ways that Georgians and Victorians referred to sex between men without using obvious terms like “sodomy.” Similar techniques are needed when working with the History of Parliament articles. Men in parliament worked to avoid being publicly associated with the discussion of sodomy, and certainly with seeming to condone lesser penalties for it, even as many privately questioned the morality of continuing to have the death penalty for engaging in what was often a private consensual act.

The unravelling of the previous account began by investigating the footnotes of Jeffrey Weeks. Weeks drew on legal historian Leon Radzinowicz’s magisterial multivolume A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750  for his discussion of the sodomy law, and Radzinowicz briefly mentioned an 1841 attempt by Lord John Russell to end the death penalty for sodomy that was abandoned as it faced resistance in the House of Lords. But the bill that Radzinowicz attributed to Russell, I discovered by tracking the references in the History of Parliament volumes, was actually proposed by two backbench MPs, one Whig and one Tory, one at the start of his career in parliament, and the other already committed not to run again. Following these individuals, Fitzroy Kelly and Stephen Lushington, brought into focus debates that lasted nearly a year, back to 1840, and involved three separate bills, with references to an earlier bill by a different sponsor, in 1835. The History of Parliament database allowed me to amass the material to challenge the findings of Radzinowicz, something I would never have been able to do otherwise. The excellent biographies of all the members of parliament up to 1832 that are a part of the History of Parliament project, both detailed and frank on matters of sexuality as well as politics, allowed me to use division lists and other sources to reconstruct the networks of supporters for the bills of Kelly and Lushington.

The speed with which I could investigate individuals and their political and familial networks allowed for the completion of a number and range of investigations that would have been otherwise impossible, demonstrating, among other things, that Jeremy Bentham’s arguments against the sodomy law were not kept secret by him, as previously thought, but played a part in these debates. It also helped to establish a family connection, of a sort, between the two cosponsors of the 1840 and 1841 bills, as Fitzroy Kelly’s brother, William Kelly, an unsuccessful actor, was involved in a ten-year relationship with the novelist and playwright Matthew Gregory Lewis. William Kelly has been described as “the absorbing passion of [Lewis’s] life,” and Lewis’s attractions to men, documented and commented on in his lifetime, have been analyzed by scholars throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Stephen Lushington’s brother was married to Matthew Lewis’s sister, and a web of family, kinship, and connection linked the individuals most involved in fighting for the 1840 and 1841 bills.

Lord John Russell’s argument for ending the death penalty for sodomy, in support of Kelly’s and Lushington’s final bill, is also a part of the parliamentary record in 1841, but it takes some detective work to discern this, even with electronic resources like the History of Parliament online. Russell never says the word “sodomy,” but in his key speech in the 1841 debate, he offers his opinions on the clauses of Kelly’s and Lushington’s bill in the order that they appear in the proposed legislation. In this and many other ways, the highly structured nature of the information in the parliamentary record makes it possible to follow arguments of men who were consciously trying to obscure the nature of the subject at hand, even as events compelled them to speak publicly about sodomy.  

Demonstrating that there was a well-developed liberal critique of the sodomy law in the early nineteenth century is not meant to argue that there was a modern homosexual identity in the period, but rather to suggest that such an identity was not needed to have an ethical objection to executing men for a private consensual act. This liberal stance has been forgotten and drowned out by the more vocal individuals who argued that sodomy was “the worst of crimes,” but tools like the History of Parliament allow for the recovery of these minority and controversial but still widespread beliefs.

Up until the 1970s, scholars often ignored or omitted evidence related to same-sex desire that they encountered in the historical record, so the lack of discussion of events such as the one analyzed above should not be taken to indicate that they are absent from the parliamentary records of the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. Many other events likely remain to be rediscovered, excavated, and used to enhance our understanding of topics that might otherwise be difficult to investigate. The History of Parliament project provides a powerful new tool to do a new kind of work on gender and sexuality in Britain.

Charles Upchurch is a Professor of British history at Florida State University. His newest book, “Beyond the Law”: The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain (Temple University Press, 2021) is the first account of the men who worked through the British parliament to reduce the penalties for sex between men in the early nineteenth century. An illustrated 35-minute talk summarizing this research, given as a part of the 2022 iMagine Belfast Festival, can be found here. A 55-minute talk discussing this research in relation to broader debates within British history and the history of sexuality can be found here. Prof. Upchurch’s first book, Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform, calls attention to the widespread reporting of court cases related to sex between men in London newspapers between 1820 and 1870, and places family reactions at the center of the narrative. He has served as a Distinguished Academic Patron of LGBT History Month in the United Kingdom, a Scholar in Residence at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and as the President of the Southern Conference on British Studies.

Further Reading

Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964)

Louis F. Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961)

George Haggerty, “Literature and Homosexuality in the Late Eighteenth Century: Walpole, Beckford, and Lewis,” Studies in the Novel 18, no. 4 (Winter 1986)

Find more History of Parliament LGBTQ+ blogs, here.

Read Dr Martin Spychal’s blog series on the queer MP Lord Ronald Gower, here.

Biographies on Fitzroy Kelly, Stephen Lushington, and Lord John Russell are currently being researched for The History of Parliament, House of Commons 1832-1868. Keep up-to-date with this project by following @TheVictCommons on Twitter and read some of their work, here.

Very few declarations of same-sex love survive from early-17th-century England, and generally they occur only in private correspondence, such as that of James I and his favourite George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham. However, tucked away in central Cambridge is just one such testimony, literally set in stone, and intended for a public audience. At first sight, the funeral monument to Thomas Legge in the chapel of Gonville and Caius College is an elaborate but conventional piece of sculpture. Mounted high on the wall in the middle of the building, it shows Legge kneeling in prayer, in a fairly typical architectural surround, with several Latin inscriptions below the effigy where they can be more easily read. It’s this lower section which makes the monument remarkable. Immediately below the effigy is a plaque within which two disembodied hands are lifting a flaming heart up towards Legge. This symbol of ardent love is not a standard Jacobean funeral motif. And underneath the plaque is the following text: ‘Iunxit amor vivos sic iungat terra sepultos. Gostlini reliquum. Cor tibi Leggus habes.’ Roughly translated, this means: ‘As love joined them in life, so may the earth unite them in the grave.  [Here lie] the remains of Gostlin; his heart, O Legge, is yours.’

This unexpected statement requires some explanation. Legge was a former master of Caius, who died in 1607. John Gostlin had been one of the college fellows during Legge’s time, working closely with him as dean and bursar, and eventually became master himself in 1619. It was Gostlin who commissioned what was in effect a joint monument, and when he died in 1626 he left instructions that he should be  buried in the chapel close to Legge, as suggested by that inscription. Neither man had married, and while that was quite normal for Cambridge fellows at the time, the monument makes it clear that their relationship went some way beyond routine friendship.

Two points should be emphasised at this juncture. First, while group monuments were quite common in this period, they almost invariably represented members of the same family, generally husbands and wives, perhaps accompanied by some of their children. Where two or more adult men were commemorated, they were normally brothers, as in the memorial at Braughing, Hertfordshire to John and Charles Brograve. On that basis, an epitaph to two men who were not closely related would have struck contemporaries as unusual.

Second, the construction of funeral monuments was not a complete free-for-all. Permission had to be obtained from the relevant authorities, even if the precise details of a design were not subject to scrutiny. In the case of the Legge-Gostlin memorial, at the very least the fellows of Caius must have been consulted. Gostlin, reputedly a popular master, was certainly in a strong position to get his own way, but his proposals were out of the ordinary. That the scheme went ahead implies that the fellows understood his relationship with Legge, and didn’t have a problem with it.

This might seem counter-intuitive. We are conditioned to viewing same-sex relationships of that era through the lens of the 1533 Act of Parliament which made sodomy a capital offence. However, it’s important to recognise that this legislation was a by-product of the Reformation, a minor element of the crown’s general power-grab from the Church, which had previously policed this notorious ‘sin’ rather more leniently. Repealed during the Marian reaction, then revived under the protestant Elizabeth I, there is very little evidence that the Sodomy Act was actually enforced prior to the more puritanical years of the mid-17th century. Moreover, the law targeted very specific physical behaviour already proscribed by the Bible as an abomination. It had nothing to say about same-sex emotional attachments. And indeed, the Bible contains some very positive images of platonic love between men, notably the intense relationship of David and Jonathan in the Old Testament, and more ambiguous New Testament references to Jesus and the ‘beloved disciple’, generally taken to be the Apostle John. It was the latter scenario that James I famously referenced in his own defence, informing his startled courtiers that Jesus had his John, and he, James, had his George (meaning Buckingham).

In a culture which still derived its moral values primarily from Scripture, such distinctions mattered. Precisely how they played out in Tudor or Jacobean society is of course much harder to determine, due to the paucity of evidence. It seems clear that, in line with biblical teaching on the respective roles of men and women, effeminacy was frowned upon, as was any hint of ‘unnatural’ sex. However, it’s much less certain that such behaviour was seen as determining a man’s sexual identity, in the way that it might today. This was a time when embraces and even kisses between men were still a relatively common feature of standard social intercourse, and no stigma attached to bed-sharing. It’s not hard to imagine how borders might become blurred, and how same-sex relationships might have been conducted discreetly without attracting undue attention. In the case of Gostlin and Legge, it appears that a balance was achieved which allowed them to display their feelings quite openly, at least within the confines of Gonville and Caius.

It must be stressed that the Legge-Gostlin monument has no known direct parallels in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, and its allusions to love are comparatively subtle. We might understand more about contemporary public opinion if another project had been carried through. In 1615 the recently-appointed chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Fulke Greville, drew up plans for a much more conspicuous memorial in St Paul’s cathedral to himself and the all-round Elizabethan hero, Sir Philip Sidney. The two men had been very close friends prior to Sidney’s tragic early death in 1586, and Greville subsequently became his biographer and editor of the famous ‘Arcadia’. Sidney was buried in St Paul’s, but his family couldn’t afford an expensive monument, and the wealthy Greville took it upon himself to resolve this shortcoming. The surviving details of his proposal are incomplete, but he probably envisaged effigies of himself and Sidney, each on a polished stone slab, Sir Philip’s raised on columns several feet above his own. Given that the cathedral was one of the most-visited locations in London, this would have been truly attention-grabbing, and most likely controversial, since Greville and Sidney were only very distantly related. In the event, the project was abandoned, for reasons which remain unclear. Greville’s relationship with Sidney was complex, probably closer to obsessive hero-worship than the kind of love shared by Legge and Gostlin, and it’s difficult to know how far his feelings were reciprocated by the object of his affections. Nevertheless, it was a bond that Greville treasured until the end. The monument that he eventually constructed for himself alone at Warwick recorded for posterity the three roles of which he was most proud: ‘servant to Queen Elizabeth, councillor to King James, and friend to Sir Philip Sidney’.

PMH

Further reading:

Alan Bray, The Friend (2003)

R.A. Rebholz, The Life of Fulke Greville (1971)

Eric Berkowitz, Sex and Punishment: 4000 Years of Judging Desire (2013)

Biographies of George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham and Fulke Greville, 1st Lord Brooke, feature in our recent volumes, The House of Lords 1604-29 ed. Andrew Thrush (2021)

Martin has been researching Lord Ronald Gower as part of the History of Parliament’s Commons 1832-68 project and been working with Gower’s extensive personal diary, which is an important source for British parliamentary, social and queer history.

Lord Ronald Charles Sutherland-Leveson Gower (1845-1916) was elected for his family’s pocket county of Sutherland in 1867. He represented the constituency as a Whig until 1874. A member of ‘the inner circle of English aristocratic life’ and close friend of the royal family since childhood, Gower is best known for his post-parliamentary career. He was the sculptor of the Shakespeare Memorial in Stratford-upon-Avon, which was unveiled in 1890, and he wrote several popular biographies and memoirs. He is also thought to be the likely inspiration behind the hedonistic aristocrat, Lord Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890). By the end of his life, Gower’s sexual relationships with men had become an increasingly open secret in high society.

*We would like to acknowledge the pronunciation error made throughout the podcast when pronouncing Leveson Gower’s surname. Thank you to those who informed us of this.

Listen to the podcast here

You can read Martin’s series of blogs here.

Further Reading (download in PDF format):

British LGBT+ and Queer Histories:

‘LGBT+ And Queer Histories – Getting Started’, Royal Historical Society Blog, https://blog.royalhistsoc.org/2020/09/28/what-is-queer-history-getting-started/

P. Ackroyd, Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day (2018)

S. Avery, K. M. Graham, Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London, c.1850 to the Present (2018)

H. G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (2003) 

M. Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality 1885-1914 (2003)

D. Friedman, Before Queer Theory Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (2019)

B. Griffin, The politics of gender in Victorian Britain: masculinity, political culture and the struggle for women’s rights (2012)

M. Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (2006)

S. Joyce, ‘Two Women Walk into a Theatre Bathroom: The Fanny and Stella Trials as Trans Narrative’, Victorian Review (2018), 83-98

B. Lewis, British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives (2013)

C. Upchurch, Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform (2009) 

J. Weeks, ‘Queer(y)ing the “Modern Homosexual”’, Journal of British Studies (2012), 523-539.

Ronald Gower:

J. Bristow, ‘Oscar Wilde, Ronald Gower, and the Shakespeare Monument’, Études anglaises (2016) M. Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality 1885-1914 (2003) 

W. Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (2010) 

W. Davis, ‘Lord Ronald Gower and ‘the offending Adam’, in D. Getsy (ed.), Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain (2004) 

J. Potvin, Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain(2014)

P. Ward-Jackson, ‘Lord Ronald Gower, Gustave Doré and the Genesis of the Shakespeare Memorial at Stratford-on-Avon’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1987) 

P. Ward-Jackson, ‘Gower, Lord Ronald Charles Sutherland-Leveson- (1845-1916)’, Oxf. DNB 

You can view Philip Ward Jackson’s selected transcripts of Gower’s diary here: https://tinyurl.com/39mz5cnr

If there was a History of Parliament award for ‘constituency most under the thumb of an aristocratic patron’, the Highland county of Sutherland would be a top contender. Following the Act of Union in 1707 a succession of earls, ladies, dukes and duchesses of Sutherland effectively controlled who would represent the county at Westminster.

The 1832 Reform Act, which extended Sutherland’s electorate from 20 life-rent tenants to a mere 104 voters (or around 2% of adult males) did little to challenge this influence. Most of the county’s electorate lived on land owned by the Sutherlands (the family owned 80% of the county), leaving one commentator to dismiss the constituency in 1838 as a ‘pocket county’ containing nothing but ‘serf voters’.

Little had changed by February 1867, when Sutherland’s incumbent MP, David Dundas (1799-1877), advised his patrons, the Duchess of Sutherland (1806-1868), and her son, the 3^rd duke of Sutherland (1828-1892), that he wanted to retire from Parliament. Over family discussions at the dinner tables of two of London’s most exclusive residences, Stafford House (now Lancaster House) and Chiswick House, the family settled on a new nominee – the duchess’s fourth son, Lord Ronald Gower (1845-1916).

While Gower’s return for Sutherland was all but guaranteed, it was still felt necessary that he embark on a full canvass of the county. Gower’s diary, which I’ve discussed elsewhere, offers a rare glimpse into electioneering in a constituency usually dismissed for its political inactivity. His account offers intriguing insights into how the Sutherland family maintained a network of relationships with the county’s voters and non-voters, the transformative role that the railways had on increasing connectivity between Westminster and the furthest reaches of the United Kingdom, and Sutherland’s breathtaking landscape.

After being informed by his brother on 13 May 1867 that he was to stand as the family’s nominee for Sutherland, Gower had to make hasty plans to complete the 600-mile trip to his family’s estate in Dunrobin.

I shall start for Dunrobin [from London] by Limited Mail tomorrow. I have written to all of the principal tenants to let them know what has and what will take place; and an address (by Sir D[avid Dundas]) will probably be published in some of the northern papers in a few hours.

Gower left London Euston by train at 8.40 p.m. on Tuesday 14 May and arrived at Bonar Bridge at 6 p.m. the following evening, taking an ‘intensely cold’ ride on the top of a coach for the final leg of the trip to Dunrobin Castle. Over dinner Gower ‘had a chat about plans for the canvassing’ with his election agents, Joseph Peacock, the factor of the Dunrobin estate, and Donald Gray, a banker in nearby Golspie.

Over the following ten days Gower met Sutherland’s electors and non-electors in towns and villages across the south-east of the county before travelling north to meet electors around Tongue.

The first visit of his canvass on Thursday 16 May was to ‘old Mrs Houston’ of Kintradwell, likely the mother of William Houston of Kintradwell (1819-1898), who had started a preliminary canvass of the county when a vacancy appeared in 1861. Gower recorded that Mrs Houston ‘was highly delighted at seeing me and was a very amiable poor old lady. She is 88 and has still a marvellous memory’. Later in the day he visited Crakaig, before meeting ‘about 20’ voters at Helmsdale where ‘old Dr [Thomas] Rutherford was of great use’ as ‘he knew where all the electors lived and all about them’.

On Friday 17 May he canvassed in Dornoch and Little Ferry, and on Saturday endured ‘one very long day’s work from 10 a.m. till near 10 p.m’, visiting Lairg, Skibo, Achany and Bonar, when ‘it poured all the afternoon, and the east wind was bad’. Gower noted in his diary that it was ‘quite a relief waking on Sunday to remember that it was a no canvassing day’.

Resuming his canvass on Monday 20 May, Gower visited the Reid family at their Gordonbush estate, where he ‘fished at the top of the Brora and Blackwater but it was too cold for any sport’, and on the following day he returned to Little Ferry, before calling ‘on the electors at Golspie’. With a trip to the north of the county beckoning later in the week, he spent Wednesday 22 May meeting ‘about half a dozen electors’ at Brora, before ‘fishing again but not with the same success’. As he was leaving Brora he finally met William Houston, who Gower was disgruntled to find had caught ‘2 fine trout, rather aggravating’.

Gower spent most of Thursday 23 May travelling the 40-mile journey via horse-drawn carriage from Dunrobin to Altnaharra, stopping on the way to meet voters at Lairg and Pittentrail. He arrived at Altnaharra Inn at 7 p.m. where he enjoyed ‘a very pleasant evening tete a tete … full of anecdotes and talk’ with Sutherland’s sheriff and returning officer, George Dingwall Fordyce (1809-1875). During dinner Gower was able to revel in:

the view of Clebrig [Ben Klibreck] from our sitting room window [which was] very fine and during sunset became of a deep purple; a cuckoo close to the house made it sound very spring like.

On the following morning [Friday 24 May] Gower travelled to Tongue, recording that the first leg of the journey ‘along Loch Loyal’ took in the ‘splendid view of Ben Loyal’ which ‘was almost covered with snow’. His guide at Tongue was John Crawford, of Tongue House, a long-serving factor for the Sutherland family estates. Gower travelled with Crawford to an auction at a farm in Borgie where he was ‘able to see many of the voters belonging to this Western part of the county, without having the time lost by going from one to the other’. He returned to the Altnaharra Inn that night.

Gower departed for Dunrobin the following morning [Saturday 25 May] at 9:30 a.m. stopping on the way at Lairg for a ‘lunch (of whisky)’ with the former MP for Ashburton, Thomas Matheson (1798-1873), of Achany House, before arriving home at Dunrobin Castle at 7 p.m. He enjoyed a leisurely Sunday – ‘there was no Kirk till 5’ – before preparing his election speech for the nomination, which had been arranged for the next day.  

As had always been expected, on Monday 27 May Gower was returned unopposed as MP for Sutherlandshire. He was elected at a brief, rain-soaked nomination outside Dornoch County Buildings, walking through the crowd to the hustings at 12:15 p.m., counting ‘fifty people or so formed [in] a semi-circle below’ who ‘looked imposing owing to the number of umbrellas’.

The nomination had concluded by 12:25 p.m., before the returning officer completed the legal formalities at Dornoch Court House. Gower then enjoyed a ‘large luncheon’ at Dornoch Inn with many of the electors he had met over the past ten days, before departing at 2 p.m. for Bonar Bridge to catch the 4 p.m. train to Inverness. Gower left Inverness at 10.18 a.m. the following morning, reaching London at 4.27 a.m. on Wednesday 29 May. He took his seat in the Commons the following day.

MS

This post is part four of a five article series. Follow the links to read more:

Further Reading

Part one: ‘Lord Ronald Gower (1845-1916): the life of a queer MP at the time of the Second Reform Act’

Part two: ‘Lord Ronald Gower (1845-1916): the social life of a queer MP at the time of the Second Reform Act‘

Part three: ‘The ‘beautiful boy’ of the Commons: Lord Ronald Gower (1845-1916) and sexual identity in Parliament at the time of the Second Reform Act’

Part five: ‘‘Covent Garden was lit up by a lucid light’: an MP’s account of the fire at Her Majesty’s Theatre, 6 December 1867‘

For details on how to access Sutherland’s draft constituency article for the History of Parliament’s Commons 1832-1868 see here.

For a history of the constituency of Sutherland between 1707 and 1832 see:

D. Hayton, ‘Sutherland’ HP Commons 1690-1715

E. Cruikshanks, ‘Sutherland’, HP Commons 1715-1754

J. Cannon, ‘Sutherland’, HP Commons 1754-1790

D. Fisher, ‘Sutherland’, HP Commons 1790-1820

T. Jenkins, ‘Sutherland’, HP Commons 1820-1832

The History of Parliament’s researchers have been trying out the Curations tool recently launched by Art UK, which enables anyone to create a digital exhibition from the artworks on its site. With art galleries and museums currently closed, it is an excellent way to visit their collections online. It also has the advantage of being able to see works from geographically dispersed collections side by side. The Art UK website hosts almost 250,000 artworks from over 3,250 locations. This gave us plenty to choose from in putting together a variety of exhibitions to share different aspects of our research, which can be accessed through the links below.

Dr. Andrew Thrush, editor of the House of Lords, 1558-1603 section, used Art UK’s excellent range of portraits to focus on a key figure in the early modern Lords: George Villiers (1592-1628), 1st Duke of Buckingham. A favourite of James I, he was showered with lands, offices and titles by the king, but also acquired many parliamentary enemies, before dying at the hands of an assassin in 1628. Find out more about him in the exhibition here.

The exhibition put together by Dr. Robin Eagles, editor of the House of Lords, 1715-1790 section, accompanied his blog on the eighteenth-century garden, taking us on a virtual tour of the key features of the gardens created for Viscount Cobham at Stowe in Buckinghamshire. This landscape was not just a place for recreation; its design also reflected Cobham’s political stance as a ‘patriot’, as the exhibition explains.

Although he suggests that ‘Parliaments can make bad paintings’, Dr. Paul Seaward, our British Academy/Wolfson Research Professor, has chosen some of the ‘hits’ in paintings of the House of Commons from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. An important theme in his exhibition is key moments of parliamentary change, from the first Parliament to assemble after the 1832 Reform Act, as painted by Sir George Hayter, to the first Labour prime minister addressing the Commons in John Lavery’s 1923 work (seen below). Discover what other paintings he chose here. Complementing this selection of images of the Commons, his second curation looks at depictions of the Lords.

Hayter’s depiction of the reformed Commons is the starting point for an exhibition from Dr. Kathryn Rix, assistant editor of the House of Commons, 1832-1868 section. This selection looks at the major changes to Parliament’s buildings during this period, as the old Palace of Westminster captured on canvass by Hayter was destroyed by fire in 1834. This forced MPs into temporary accommodation while the new Houses of Parliament designed by Charles Barry were being constructed. For more on these buildings and the people who made and used them, see her exhibition.

With so many paintings to choose from, our 1832-1868 project also moved beyond Westminster to the constituencies, looking at depictions of elections and electioneering. Some of these artworks show imagined election scenes; others portray actual events in constituencies ranging from Bedford to Blackburn. All of them give a good flavour of the vibrancy and colour of elections in this period, with widespread popular involvement in proceedings, despite the limited franchise, as seen here.

Finally, Dr. Emma Peplow showcases the work of our Oral History project, which has interviewed over 170 former MPs since it began in 2011. Her curation includes depictions of some of the MPs who have been interviewed, among them Denis Healey, Michael Heseltine, Tam Dalyell and Helene Hayman, as well as large-scale works such as June Mendoza’s 1986 painting of the House of Commons. From the chamber to the tea-room, our archive, which has been deposited at the British Library, provides illuminating insights into parliamentary life, as the exhibition explains.

K. R.

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In 1958, Harford Montgomery Hyde MP asked the House of Commons, ‘If homosexual conduct between consenting adults in private is to continue to be an offence, is homosexual conduct between consenting female adults in private also to continue not to be an offence?’ [emphasis added]. His question marked an important shift in Parliament’s understanding of lesbianism.

The previous year, the Wolfenden Report had recommended partial decriminalisation of sexual activity between men. It would take a decade of parliamentary discussion for that recommendation to become law thanks to the Sexual Offences Act 1967. This process transformed Parliament’s approach to sexual activity between men – and also between women. For men, acts now legally labelled ‘homosexual’ were, in very limited circumstances, no longer a crime. For sex between women, now named as ‘female homosexuality’ or ‘lesbianism’, the changes were significant but subtle. While the law was unchanged, the terms in which lesbianism was understood and debated were transformed.

The Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution had been appointed in 1954 and chaired by John Wolfenden. The Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe included homosexuality in its remit because of a recent growth in both convictions and press coverage. While Sir David was concerned only with male homosexuality, the Committee’s terms of reference referred to ‘persons’ convicted of ’homosexual offences’. Among the offences considered was indecent assault of a female (contrary to section 14, Sexual Offences Act 1956) which could be committed by women.

There was no female equivalent to the offence of gross indecency between males (section 11, Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885) which had notoriously led to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in 1895. Most Victorian parliamentarians had assumed that women’s sexuality (passive, if it existed at all) was very different from men’s (actively desiring). Male homosexuality was considered a deviant form of the natural masculine sexual impulse. Female homosexuality made little cultural sense – how could two undesiring creatures instigate sexual activity between themselves? Parliamentarians preferred to act as if it were not found among respectable women and discreetly ignore it. While an offence of gross indecency between females had been proposed in 1921, it was a spoiling amendment designed to stop a bill passing rather than a serious proposal. Both that amendment and the parent bill failed, and the issue was not debated in Parliament again.

The silence on this issue in the Houses of Parliament did not mean that lesbianism was unknown to lawmakers. The Wolfenden Committee read and heard extensive witness evidence during its three-year inquiry. This evidence included frequent mentions of lesbianism. However, the Committee was aware that legislators were not ready for the full equality that comparison of men’s and women’s legal positions could suggest. When witnesses criticised legal inequality, committee members pointed out that the alternative could be criminalisation for women rather than decriminalisation for men.

The final Report made recommendations intended to keep homosexuality out of public view. It dealt with sex between women very briefly; convictions for indecent assault by women, it asserted, lacked ‘the libidinous features that characterise sexual acts between males.’ The Report did go on to explain that this was because most women had been convicted of aiding and abetting, rather than committing, assaults. However, it reinforced the impression of lesbianism as essentially sexless.

The Wolfenden Report was introduced to the House of Commons in 1958 under a different Home Secretary, Rab Butler. In the subsequent debates, lesbianism was sometimes used as a comparison. Reformers such as Montgomery Hyde advocated extending the toleration of lesbianism ‘between consenting adults in private’ to gay men. In other words, women behaved themselves in public without explicit criminalisation so men should be trusted to do the same. Unprosecuted, their behaviour would not be publicised in the press. Male homosexuality, the Earl of Arran suggested, could then take ‘its dreary place side by side with lesbianism’. Opponents of law reform argued that male and female homosexuality were different, and required distinct treatment, although some struggled to explain why. Frederick Bellenger MP, for example, took refuge in ignorance of lesbianism; he felt he knew something of gay male sexuality from his wartime military service.

Despite the novel comparison of lesbians to gay men, Parliament did not accord them equal status. Women were considered relevant to the debates only as a counterpoint to men, not in their own right. Once the debates turned to whether the age of consent should be higher for male homosexual acts, it would not have been politically expedient to remind those who favoured cautious and limited reform that there was an equal age of consent for sex between women. With the comparison no longer useful, lesbians disappeared from the discussion. The result was that the Sexual Offences Act 1967 introduced the ‘homosexual’ into law as male: the lesbian was obscured, if not quite invisible. She had become a recognised point of comparison for her male counterpart, but she was not an equal.

The treatment of male and female same-sex activity as parallel to each other is a feature of more recent legislation. In statutes such as the Equality Act 2010 and the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act 2013, it is taken for granted that they should be treated in the same way. However, the events of 1957 to 1967 are a reminder that the comparison was not always obvious and was never gender-neutral: the homosexual of statute law came into being as male. The supposedly less troublesome, less libidinous lesbian remained firmly in his shadow.

Further reading:

• Caroline Derry, Lesbianism and the Criminal Law: Three centuries of regulation in England and Wales (2020, Palgrave Macmillan), chapter 6
• Rebecca Jennings, A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Women since 1500 (Greenwood World Publishing, 2007), chapter 9
• Brian Lewis, Wolfenden’s Witnesses: Homosexuality in Postwar Britain (2016, Palgrave Macmillan)

For more blogs about Parliament and LGBTQ+ History click here.