The Macaroni Club
Strictly speaking, the
Macaroni Club was not a club for dining, gaming and conversation in the manner
of the other gentlemen’s clubs, although they did meet at one of William
Almack’s houses in Pall Mall – very likely Number 49, since there was a
connection with Edward Boodle who managed Boodle’s. Boodle’s founding members
originally met in this house.
The name ‘Macaroni’ comes
from the young gentlemen who returned from the Grand Tour with a fondness for
the Italian pasta, which was little known on these shores at that time. Horace
Walpole, in a letter of 6 February 1764, is deemed to have made the first known
comment about the Macaroni Club, when he wrote, it is ‘composed of all the travelled young men who wear long curls and
spying-glasses.’ A contemporary magazine, according to one source, states
that these travelled and scholarly souls ‘judged
that the title of Macaroni was very applicable to a clever fellow; and
accordingly, to distinguish themselves as such, they instituted a club under
this denomination, the members of which were supposed to be the standards of
taste in polite learning, the fine arts, and the genteel sciences; and fashion,
amongst the other constituent parts of taste, became an object of their
attention.’
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| The Macaroni, Philip Dawe |
From the Oxford Magazine of 1770 comes this satirical description:
‘There is indeed a kind
of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately
started up among us. It is called a macaroni. It talks without meaning, it
smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise,
it wenches without passion.’
Thus the Macaroni, described
rather unkindly in another account ‘as a
person who exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion’ became synonymous with
foppery. This encompassed affectation in manner and speech, in addition to the
employment of the extremes of fashionable life, including fastidiousness in all
matters of dressing, dining and gambling. Cartoonists such as Cruikshank and
Gilray took great pleasure in ridiculing the most famous of them.
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| What Is This My Son Tom, 1774 |
The Dilettanti Society and The Hellfire Club
The Society of Dilettanti
(literally meaning lovers of the Fine Arts) were a group of men who, having
travelled about the Continent and thus discovered an appreciation for the arts,
beauty in all its forms and ‘antiquarian remains’, decided to form a club to
promote these matters. First formed at Parsloe’s in 1734, they removed to the
Thatched House tavern in St. James’s, where, during the London Season, they
held dinners on Sunday evenings. In a letter to Sir H. Mann, in connection with
a subscription for the opera, Horace Walpole had this to say about being a
member:
‘The nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one,
being drunk ; the two chiefs are Lord Middlesex and Sir Francis Dashwood, who
were seldom sober the whole time they were in Italy.’
The public room at the
Thatched House was large and faced St, James’s Street. It was lined with
portraits of the Dilettanti members, and when lit by candlelight the paintings
could be seen from outside. The ceiling was painted to represent the sky, and ‘crossed by gold cords interlacing each
other, and from their knots were hung three large glass chandeliers.’ John
Timbs then describes the frontage: ‘Beneath
the tavern front was a range of low-built shops, including that of Rowland, or
Rouland, the fashionable coiffeur, who charged five shillings for cutting hair,
and made a large fortune by his “incomparable Huile Macassar.”’
He goes on to say there was a
passage through the hostelry to Thatched House Court and the evocatively-named
Catherine-Wheel Alley, where lived ‘the good old widow Delaney’.
The Dilettanti Society were
responsible for sending eminent gentlemen abroad in search of antiquities, both
to collect measurements, drawings and elevations and purchase artefacts.
Various venerable works were produced through the sponsorship of the society.
Possibly the most famous acquisition was by the Earl of Elgin, Ambassador in
Constantinople, who brought the ‘Elgin Marbles’ to Britain.
Other celebrated members,
besides Lord Middlesex and Sir Francis Dashwood (later 11th Baron le
Despencer), included Sir Joshua Reynolds, the Dukes of Norfolk, Bedford and
Dorset, Charles James Fox, Hon. Stephen Fox (later Lord Holland), David
Garrick, George Selwyn, John Towneley, the Marquises of Lansdowne and
Northampton, Earl Fitzwilliam and the Earl of Holderness, Lord Robert Spencer,
George Colman, Richard Payne Knight, Sir William Hamilton and Sir George
Beaumont.
As previously said, their
portraits – many painted by Reynolds – adorned the walls of the Thatched House
meeting room. Three paintings created by the artist and his master Hudson,
after the manner of Paul Veronese states Timbs, portray ‘the Duke of Leeds, Lord Dundas, Constantine Lord Mulgrave, Lord
Seaforth, the Hon. Charles Greville, Charles Crowle, Esq., and Sir Joseph
Banks.’ A similar, second group show ‘Sir
William Hamilton, Sir Watkin W. Wynne, Richard Thomson, Esq., Sir John Taylor,
Payne Galway, Esq., John Smythe, Esq., and Spencer S. Stanhope, Esq.’,
while a third is of Reynolds, garbed ‘in a
loose robe, and in his own hair.’ Some of the members are depicted in
familiar Georgian costume, while others wear dress of a Roman or Turkish
flavour. Lord Sandwich, represented in ‘a
Turkish costume, casts a most unorthodox glance upon a brimming goblet in his
left hand, while his right holds a flask of great capacity.’ A common theme
is one of conviviality, according to John Timbs, with many of the subjects
holding ‘wine-glasses of no small size.’
He goes on:
‘Sir Bouchier Wray is seated in the cabin of a ship, mixing punch, and
eagerly embracing the bowl, of which a lurch of the sea would seem about to
deprive him: the inscription is Dulce est desipere in loco. Here is a curious
old portrait of the Earl of Holdernesse, in a red cap, as a gondolier, with the
Rialto and Venice in the background; there is Charles Sackville, Duke of Dorset,
as a Roman senator, dated 1738; Lord Galloway, in the dress of a cardinal; and
a very singular likeness of one of the earliest of the Dilettanti, Lord Le Despencer,
as a monk at his devotions: his Lordship is clasping a brimming goblet for his
rosary, and his eyes are not very piously fixed on a statue of the Venus de' Medici.’
This leads us nicely into the
Hellfire Club, since some of the pictures, as Timbs points out, ‘remind one of the Medmenham orgies, with
which some of the Dilettanti were not unfamiliar.’
The original Hell-fire Club
was founded by the Duke of Wharton in 1719 – when Sir Francis Dashwood was only
eleven – and lasted only two years.
“Wharton, the scorn and wonder of
our days,
Whose ruling passion was the lust
of praise.
Born with whate'er could win it
from the wise,
Women and fools must like him, or
he dies.
Though wondering senates hung on
all he spoke,
The club must hail him master of
the joke.”
Pope.
Perhaps gossip of the club’s
activities reached the young Francis’ ears, or perhaps he merely had a natural
leaning in that in that direction; we can only speculate. History records that
he inherited his father’s title when still only fifteen, and his fortune with
it. He travelled on the Continent, ‘roaming from court to court’ and whether by
accident or design, achieved notoriety through his escapades and wild exploits.
According to Walpole, the story goes that while in Russia he impersonated
Charles XII and in that guise tried to seduce the Tsarina Anne. His ‘outrages on religion and morality’ in
Italy led to his ‘expulsion
from the dominions of the Church.’ He returned to England and joined the household of Frederick, Prince of
Wales. When the Earl of Westmorland (his uncle) was dismissed as Colonel of the
1st Troop of Horse Guards, these events made Sir Francis ‘a violent
opponent of Walpole's administration’.
He became a prominent member
of the Dilettanti Society, succeeded his friend the Earl of Sandwich as
archmaster when he was removed from office for ‘his misbehaviour to and
contempt of the Society’, and was an active politician, opposing Walpole’s
administration. However, he continued to offend and get into trouble,
possessing as he did the heart of a rake, and fell foul of Horace Walpole again
when having ‘stolen a great fortune, a
Miss Bateman’ while the lover of Lady Carteret. Nevertheless, he was
married in December 1745, at St. George’s, Hanover Square, to Sarah, the
daughter of George Gould from Buckinghamshire. She was already a widow, having
been previously married to Sir Richard Ellis, 3rd Baronet of Wyham
in Lincolnshire. Described by Walpole as ‘a poor forlorn Presbyterian prude’,
Sarah failed to curb Dashwood’s licentiousness.
In 1755 or thereabouts, he founded the Hell-fire
Club, although it was much later when it became known by that name. His home
being in West Wycombe, the club was variously titled the ‘Order of Knights of
West Wycombe’, the ‘Brotherhood of St. Francis of Wycombe’, the ‘Order of the
Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe’ and, most famously, the Monks of Medmenham
Abbey, a property leased by Dashwood in beautiful countryside by the Thames
near Marlow. A former Cistercian monastery, Dashwood rented the property from
his friend Francis Duffield (Geoffrey Ashe, The
Hell Fire Clubs) and some or all of the twelve members, including
Dashwood’s half-brother Sir John Dashwood-King, his cousin Sir Thomas
Stapleton, John Wilkes and Paul Whitehead, spent time there during the summer.
Sir Francis commissioned
various expensive renovations, including rebuilding work in a Gothic revivalist
style by architect Nicholas Revett. An inscription, coined from the Abbey of
Theleme, ‘Fais ce que tu voudras’, was
added over the grand entrance. None survive, but it is believed William Hogarth
may have painted murals for the club. Beneath the abbey, Dashwood discovered an
existing cave. This he had extended into an interconnecting network of such
caverns and tunnels, decorating them with various symbols, items and images of
a phallic, carnal and mythological nature.
Sir Francis himself presided
over club rituals in the manner of a high priest, the so-called ‘Franciscans’
(after their leader) indulging in ‘obscene
parodies of Franciscan rites, and with orgies of drunkenness and debauchery
which even Almon, himself no prude, shrank from describing.’ According to the Dictionary of National Biography entry by Albert Frederick Pollard,
Dashwood ‘used a communion cup to pour
out libations to heathen deities’.
In Horace Walpole’s opinion,
the club’s ‘practice was rigorously
pagan: Bacchus and Venus were the deities to whom they almost publicly
sacrificed; and the nymphs and the hogsheads that were laid in against the
festivals of this new church, sufficiently informed the neighbourhood of the
complexion of those hermits.’
Club meetings took place
twice each month and lasted a week or more during June or September for club
affairs to be discussed. According to Geoffrey Ashe, members are believed to
have worn white ritual clothing of jacket, trousers and cap, while the leader,
who changed on a regular basis and was referred to as ‘Abbot, wore matching
dress in red. Many are the tales ascribed to the Club and their activities,
ranging from devil worship, Satanism and Black Masses to whispers of
scantily-clad female ‘guests’ (i.e. ladies of the night), who were alluded to
as ‘Nuns’. Feasting, drinking and debauchery were the order of the day for
Dashwood’s ‘monks’.
All the years spent
travelling on the Continent had clearly had a lasting effect on Sir Francis,
for at West Wycombe he had installed in the park a number of statues, follies
and temples to various Greek and Italian gods, such as Daphne, Priapus and Flor
a, besides those of love and wine. Inspired by the Temple of Vesta in Rome, the
Temple of Music is situated on an island in the artificially constructed lake.
The Temple of Apollo is now known as the Cockpit Arch because of the cockfights
which took place there. Dashwood’s love of the Gothic was apparent here, too,
in the boathouse beside the lake and a chapel.
Dashwood did finally ‘settle
down’ to a quieter life during his later years. He became the first colonel of
the Buckinghamshire militia during the Seven Years War with John Wilkes his
lieutenant-colonel; he made a good attempt that year of 1757 to rescue Admiral
Byng from ‘political murder’ and later was almost the only peer in the House of
Lords to go to the Earl of Chatham’s assistance when he swooned. Sir Francis
was made Chancellor of the Exchequer by the Earl of Bute, but lasted only a
year after putting excise duty on cider which nearly caused a riot. Having
inherited the title of Baron le Despencer through his mother, he sat in the
House of Lords and was promoted to Lord-lieutenant of Buckinghamshire. He
became comparatively respectable, including being joint Post-master General
during Lord North’s tenure, but apparently this did not prevent him siding with
his old friend the Earl of Sandwich in a libellous attack on John Wilkes over a
bawdy book he had printed. Another publication by Charles Johnstone, states
Ashe, featuring stories easily associated with Medmenham Abbey, the Earl of
Sandwich and the various iniquities practised by the Hell-Fire members, spelled
the Club’s doom. Since many of the ‘monks’ had either already met their own
demise or were beyond travelling distance, the High Priest’s orgies were at an
end.
After a long illness, Sir
Francis Dashwood died at West Wycombe in 1781 and was buried there. His gardens
there and the Hellfire Caves he created above West Wycombe are now tourist
attractions.
The Beefsteak Club and The Sublime Society of Beefsteaks
Various clubs took the name of Beefsteak or Beef-Steak during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the one believed to be the first was founded by actor Richard Estcourt, possibly about 1705. It is conceivable it originated through defectors of the Whig Kit-Kat Club and perhaps because of that merited a mention in The Spectator in Number 9, dated 10 March 1710-11:
‘The Beef-steak and October Clubs are neither of them averse to eating
or drinking, if we may form a judgment of them from their respective titles.’
Popular, merry and witty,
Richard (Dick) Estcourt was made the club’s ‘Providore’ (president) and wore a
small, gold gridiron on a green silk ribbon as his badge of office, the
gridiron being the emblem of the Beef-Steaks. ‘Humbly inscrib’d to the Honourable BEEF STEAK CLUB’ was the poem Art
of Cookery by Dr. William King, who wrote these lines:
‘He that of honour, wit, and mirth
partakes,
May be a fit companion o’er
Beef-steaks:
His name may be to future times
enrolled
In Estcourt's book, whose gridiron’s
framed with gold.’
In the First Edition (1709)
of Secret History of London Clubs,
Ned Ward offers this description of the club.
‘This new Society griliado'd beef eaters first settled their meeting at
the sign of the Imperial Phiz, just opposite to a famous conventicle in the Old
Jury, a publick-house that has been long eminent for the true British
quintessence of malt and hops, and a broiled sliver off the juicy rump of a fat, well-fed bullock… This noted boozing ken, above
all others in the City, was chosen out by the Rump-steak admirers, as the
fittest mansion to entertain the Society, and to gratify their appetites with
that particular dainty they desired to be distinguished by.’
Nevertheless, in spite of a
membership consisting of statesmen and artists, before ten years had passed,
the club was discontinued. It was not until 1735 that actor and theatre manager
John Rich formed the Sublime Society of the Steaks.
The Sublime Society of the Steaks
Following the success of The Beggars’ Opera, John Rich (not Henry as stated by Timbs) left his position as
manager of the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre and joined the Covent Garden
Theatre. A comic actor, he did much to popularize pantomimes and would make
models of his tricks in his room at the theatre. Such was his appeal, ‘men of
rank and wit’ would visit him there, one being the Earl of Peterborough, who
happened one day to be present when Rich cooked a beef-steak on a gridiron over
the fire in his chamber. Invited to join his host, the Earl was so impressed
that after a couple of bottles of wine, he suggested they meet again at the
same time the following week. He brought with him three or four friends,
gentlemen of wit and fashion, and the occasion being particularly successful, a
Saturday club was proposed, to meet during the Season.
However, as John Timbs warns,
there was a club established at Covent Garden named for George Lambert, chief
scene-painter at the theatre, who ‘received,
in his painting room, persons of rank and talent; where, as he could not leave
for dinner, he frequently was content with a steak, which he himself broiled
upon the fire in his room.’ These meetings grew into the Beef-Steak Society
and later were held in a ‘noble room at the top of Covent Garden Theatre’.
During the rebuilding of Covent Garden after the fire of 1808, Timbs suggests
the club moved to the Shakespeare Tavern. However, later he says they were
‘re-established at the Bedford Coffee House’. It is not beyond the bounds of
possibility that one or two meetings were conducted at the former before
removing to the latter around 1809.
Historian of the Society,
Walter Arnold, is in favour of a third account of ‘The Steaks’’ foundation,
which is that Rich and Lambert dined together on steaks cooked by Rich, and
washed them down with a bottle of port ‘from the tavern hard by’. This collaboration
then led to the creation of the Sublime Society.
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| Beefsteak Dining Room, The Lyceum |
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| Beefsteak Badge |
‘When Lun appeared, with matchless
art and whim,
He gave the power of speech to
every limb.
Though masked and mute conveyed his
true intent,
And told in frolic gestures what he
meant;
But now the motley coat and sword
of wood,
Require a tongue to make them
understood.’
This suggests he, too, was a member. John Wilkes was elected in 1754; Samuel Johnson in 1780 and John Philip Kemble in 1805. Royalty, noblemen, celebrated soldiers and politicians soon flocked to join this renowned group of gifted artists. Indeed, the Prince of Wales became a member in 1785 when the membership was increased by one to admit him. This was ‘an event of sufficient moment to find record in the Annual Register of the year.’
“On Saturday, the 14th of May, the Prince of Wales was admitted a
member of the Beaf-steak Club. His Royal Highness having signified his wish of
belonging to that Society, and there not being a vacancy, it was proposed to
make him an honorary member; but that being declined by His Royal Highness, it
was agreed to increase the number from twenty-four to twenty-five, in
consequence of which His Royal Highness was unanimously elected. The Beaf-steak Club has been instituted just fifty years, and consists of
some of the most classical and sprightly wits in the Kingdom.”
It was not long before the
Duke of Clarence and the Duke of Sussex, his royal brothers, were also
accepted, as was the Duke of Norfolk. Members wore a blue coat and, beneath it,
a buff waistcoat with brass buttons embossed with the ubiquitous gridiron, plus
the legend ‘Beef and liberty’. Meetings were held each Saturday between
November and the following June – i.e. the London Season – and continued until
1867, when the Society closed its doors. Club dinners were always beef steaks,
cooked in a variety of ways, and served with onions and baked potatoes, on hot
pewter plates. Toasted or stewed cheese completed the meal, the whole being
accompanied by arrack punch and ‘port-wine’. With the table cloth removed and
the cook paid, the remainder of the evening was passed in merriment and
jollity.
The Society of Eccentrics
There were several clubs
called the Eccentrics, beginning in the 1780s and continuing through to 1986.
The most famous is no doubt the one which closed its doors in the last century,
as it is also the longest-lived, being founded in 1890 and spending most of its
years at 9-11 Ryder Street, St. James’s. However, it is the first club in which
is of interest here.
The Society of Eccentrics was
a branch of The Brilliants and from
1781 met in Chandos Street, Covent Garden, at a tavern belonging to a man
called Fulham. In due course, they moved to St. Martin’s Lane, to Tom Rees’ in
May’s Buildings, and other Covent Garden venues until the club’s demise in
1846. At some stage in the 1820s, the club’s name was changed to The Eccentric Society Club.
It is reported that the
Eccentrics boasted 40,000 members and more from its beginnings, many being from
the upper echelons of Society and including politicians and literary men. Some
of these were Lord Melbourne, Lord Petersham, Lord Brougham, Charles James Fox
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Theodore Hook was accepted on the same night as
Lord Petersham and Sheridan, and it was believed that some of his ‘high
connections’ were achieved through his club membership. Author F. W. N. Bayley,
‘sketched with graphic vigour the
meetings of the Eccentrics at the old tavern in May’s Buildings’ in a novel
‘published in numbers’.
The club, apparently, was
given to night-time revelries, but the authorities indulged the flights of the
celebrity membership. When a new member was inaugurated, a ceremony was carried
out, ending in ‘a jubilation from the
President’.
According to John Timbs, it
seems the early books of The Society of Eccentrics passed into the hands of
Robert Lloyd, hatter to the nobility, of 71, The Strand. Known for being an
eccentric himself, Robert Lloyd was a philosopher, inventor and the author of a
‘small work’ describing fashionable hats of the era, complete with illustrative
engravings.
It is possible that the
succeeding clubs, including the present day Eccentric
Club UK, may have connections with the original Society. A white owl was
the crest of the club in the 1800s and was said to have been adopted by the
1890 version. One source claims Sir Charles Wyndham and other founding members
made references to a revival of the earlier club.
Pictures Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
© Heather King
