The Pursuit of Glory, page 12
According to the London newspaper The Flying Post, Captain Rigby ‘appeared very gay’ when he stood in the pillory in Pall on 20 December 1698. If so, he must have been a very tough nut, for it was a truly terrible ordeal. On 27 September 1810 six men were pilloried in the Haymarket after being convicted for sodomy following a raid on a male brothel at the White Swan public house in Vere Street. The route from the Old Bailey to the Haymarket was lined by an enormous crowd many thousands strong, all determined to express their indignation with word and missile: ‘it is impossible for language to convey an adequate idea of the universal expressions of execration, which accompanied these monsters on their journey’, as one newspaper account put it. So the occupants of the open-topped cart were encrusted with filth by the time they reached the actual pillory, where ‘upwards of fifty women were permitted to stand in the ring [in front of the pillory], who assailed them incessantly with mud, dead cats, rotten eggs, potatoes, and buckets filled with blood, offal, and dung, which were brought by a number of butchers’ men from St James’s Market’. At least they survived. Two other members of the White Swan group were hanged in public the following year, watched by a large crowd including the Duke of Cumberland (son of George III and later King of Hanover), and the earls of Sefton and Yarmouth, all of whom were rumoured to have been clients of the men executed.
Given the numbers involved, executions were very rare and prosecutions of any kind relatively rare. A homosexual seeking public gratification in London could probably escape detection, especially if he were careful, lucky and upper class. A German visitor, Johannes Wilhelm von Archenholz, wrote in 1789: ‘it is very uncommon to see a person convicted, and punished for this crime; not on account of the paucity of the numbers charged with perpetrating it, but because they never yield to such a brutal appetite but with the utmost precaution’. Between 1730 and 1830 only seventy cases of sodomy were tried at the Old Bailey. A more common hazard was the male prostitute seeking to improve his earnings by blackmail–Charles Vaughan, also known as ‘Fat Phyllis’, for example, who went to masquerades and the theatre dressed as a woman. In 1790 he made the mistake of trying to extort money from the Reverend Mr Cuff, who promptly took him to the magistrates.
Perhaps not surprisingly, whenever there was a panic over the alleged prevalence of homosexuality, the blame was assigned to foreigners. This was a national prejudice of long standing: when Parliament petitioned Edward III in the mid-fourteenth century to banish foreign artisans and merchants, one of the accusations levelled at their target was their introduction of ‘the too horrible vice that is not to be named’. Attached to Captain Edward Rigby’s pillory in 1698 was a ballad entitled ‘The Women’s Complaint to Venus’:
How happy were good English Faces
Till Mounsieur [sic] from France
Taught Pego a Dance
To the tune of old Sodom’s Embraces
But now we are quite out of Fashion:
Poor Whores may be Nuns
Since Men turn their Guns
And vent on each other their passion.
In the Dutch Republic it was asserted that sodomy had been completely unknown until introduced by the Spanish and French envoys attending the negotiations that led to the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. Henceforth it was known as the ‘Catholic vice’, part of the great conspiracy by the Antichrist whose headquarters at Rome was also ‘catamitorum mater’.
The knowledge that has survived of homosexuality has come down to us mainly through trial records, police reports and satirical pamphlets, so it necessarily appears much more unusual and aberrant than it really was. That was particularly the case of same-sex relations between women, of which only the tiniest tip of the iceberg protrudes above the documentary surface. As we have noted already, the pornography written by men for men liked to pretend that lesbianism was rife in convents and perhaps it was. Only the occasional flash of evidence from the non-fictional world can be found, in the correspondence of the duchess of Orléans, for example, who in 1685 reported that at the convent school founded by Louis XIV’s morganatic wife Madame de Maintenon at Saint Cyr,
some of the young ladies there had fallen in love with one another; they were caught committing all sorts of indecencies. Mme de Maintenon is supposed to have cried her eyes out. She had all the relics put on display to drive out the devils of lechery. Also, she sent for a priest to preach against lewdness, but he talked about such hideous things that none of the modest ladies could bear to listen; they all left the church, but the culprits were overcome by uncontrollable fits of the giggles.
As punishments go, having to listen to a sermon seems to err on the side of severity. More fortunate was Henriette de Castelnau, comtesse de Murat, a notoriously flagrant lesbian, who at about the same time was banished to a remote château under official surveillance. Elsewhere, it was very much a submerged vice, unmentioned and unmentionable, appearing only when the ladies in question decided to flaunt their relationship, as did the wonderfully flamboyant Eleanor Butler (‘tall and masculine’) and Sarah Ponsonby (‘effeminate, fair and beautiful’) in England in the 1780s. When an opinion was expressed, the language used was as extreme as that employed to denounce male homosexuality. In a treatise of 1700 Father Ludovicus (Luigi) Maria Sinistrari de Ameno argued that in cases of same-sex relations between women, an enlarged clitoris should be taken as presumption of guilt, and justify both torture and burning at the stake. That ultimate penalty appears to have been rare almost to the point of absence, although a German woman who had lived as a man was executed in Bavaria in 1721 for sodomy with her female lover, with whom she had celebrated a form of marriage.
MIGRATION
As we saw in Chapter 1, physical mobility in early modern Europe was not easy. It was some indication of the intensity of demographic pressure, therefore, that there was so much migration during the course of the period 1648–1815. Most of this was from west to east, from regions which were densely populated and increasingly experiencing problems of over-population, to the thinly populated expanses of Prussia, Russia and what William McNeill called ‘Europe’s steppe frontier’ of Danubian and Pontic (i.e. to the north and north-west of the Black Sea Europe. Reviewing a range of statistical information, Denis Silagi concluded that the population of the Kingdom of Hungary, including Transylvania and Croatia-Slavonia, more than doubled between the late seventeenth and the late eighteenth centuries. That total conceals some more dramatic regional changes: for example, in the course of the eighteenth century, the county of Bács-Bodrog went from 31,000 to 227,000 and the Bánát from 45,000 to 774,000. Most of those increases were due to immigration, made possible by the epochal defeat of the Turks at Vienna in 1683 and their subsequent retreat into the Balkans. In 1690–91 perhaps as many as 100,000 Serbs moved north to what is today the Vojvodina in northern Serbia, the biggest single migration in Balkan history. More still came from the west, albeit more gradually. From Lorraine, the Palatinate, Hessen and Swabia came peasants seeking land and artisans seeking employment. They were both pushed and pulled. They were pushed by population pressure at home, especially in regions of nonpartible inheritance. They were pulled by offers of free or cheap land from landlords eager to populate their vacant estates.
The Habsburg authorities also played an important part in this great resettlement project. To protect their newly won territory, they established a paramilitary zone running right along the frontier of southern Hungary. There they established Croatian, Serbian and Romanian soldier-settlers, organized them into regiments and granted them personal freedom and free land in return for service against the Turks. In the eighteenth century, both Maria Theresa and Joseph II organized recruiting campaigns in the western regions of the Holy Roman Empire. An eye-witness in the Palatinate in 1782 recorded:
There was no town, village or hamlet where printed manifestos were not circulating from hand to hand. The Emperor Joseph’s bounty was so highly esteemed that it seemed that the whole region wanted to emigrate. So many family-groups, including those that were well-off, set out on the emigration trail that the roads were crowded and gave the impression that everyone wanted to leave.
From agencies established at Kaiserslautern, Zweibrücken and Worms, Austrian recruiters toured the region advertising the patents of 1781 which promised new settlers in Galicia, recently added to the Monarchy by the partition of Poland, exemption from forced labour dues, forty free yokes of land, freedom of worship for Protestants, exemption from military service for ten years and ample subsidy to cover the costs of the journey. Dangerous and difficult was the journey across Europe and many were those who returned poorer and wiser, but enough stayed to alter permanently the population and ethnic composition of many parts of central-eastern Europe. More intrepid still were the 27,000-odd Germans who responded to similar inducements offered by Catherine the Great of Russia to settle around the Volga river. By 1914, they had multiplied to number around 600,000.
Anything the Austrians could do, the Prussians could do better. On 18 October 1685 Louis XIV signed the Edict of Fontainebleau, revoking the Edict of Nantes of 1598 and with it the limited degree of toleration accorded to French Protestants in certain places. This act of Catholic triumphalism led to the emigration of about 250,000 Huguenots. Most went to the two great ‘arks of the refugees’–the Dutch Republic and England–but a significant number went east. Just eleven days after Louis XIV’s revocation, the Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg issued the Edict of Potsdam inviting the Huguenots to settle in his territories and offering all sorts of material rewards if they did. Around 14,000 responded, a figure which should be multiplied many times if the quality of the contribution to their backward and depopulated new home is to be assessed correctly. There was a further surge of Huguenot immigration in 1689 when Louis XIV’s armies devastated the Palatinate and sent the refugees who had taken shelter there fleeing further eastwards. As a disproportionate number of those who took the decision to flee France were young, they enjoyed a correspondingly high birth rate when they reached their destinations. By 1720 every fifth inhabitant of Berlin was a Huguenot or of Huguenot origin.
So common did policies to promote immigration become that a new word was coined to describe the phenomenon: Peuplierungspolitik. It became a permanent feature of Brandenburg-Prussia. In 1732 King Frederick William I self-consciously imitated the example of his grandfather when he welcomed to his territories the 20,000-odd Protestants expelled from Salzburg by the Archbishop. He was particularly anxious to repopulate East Prussia, where plague had killed around a third of the population between 1709 and 1710. Frederick William may have been one of the more brutal sovereigns of his–or any–age, but he knew instinctively how to make a gesture. As the first contingent of Salzburgers neared Berlin, he led his court out to meet them, singing hymns and kneeling with them to give thanks to the Almighty for this latest act of Divine Mercy. This proved to be a great public relations coup, advertised to the rest of Europe in word and image and establishing Prussia as the third great ‘ark of the refugees’. It was now said that while France was the refuge of kings (James II of England, Stanislas Leszczyski of Poland), Prussia was the refuge of oppressed peoples.
As in so many other respects, there was a strong line of continuity with the reign of his son. In the course of Frederick the Great’s long reign from 1740 to 1786, around 280,000–300,000 immigrants entered Prussia, attracted by free land, livestock, equipment and seed, personal freedom, religious toleration and initial exemption from conscription, taxation and labour dues. According to Günther Franz’s suspiciously precise figures, they brought with them 6,392 horses, 7,875 cattle, 20,548 sheep and 3,227 pigs and 2,000,000 talers in cash. Most were settled on land reclaimed by drainage projects around the Oder, Netze and Warthe rivers, but about a quarter were craftsmen of various kinds and settled in the towns. Well might Frederick claim that he had ‘won a province in peacetime’. It was an achievement with important implications. As Christof Dipper has pointed out, as demographic regeneration from a country’s own resources was such a long and uncertain process, the states which did best were those able to attract immigrants.
Causes célèbres such as the expulsion of the Huguenots or the Salzburgers were few. Most migrants were pulled by the prospect of material gain rather than pushed by persecution. And most of them moved inside the territorial boundaries of a state. Harold Temperley observed that the Habsburg Monarchy was not so much a single country as a whole continent, a description which could be applied with even greater validity to the Russian Empire. Not surprisingly, it was in these great multinational conglomerates of the east that the highest figures were recorded. Between the first Russian census of 1719 and the third of 1762–3, the population of European Russia increased by 33.8 per cent, but the population of the Siberian provinces by almost exactly twice that rate. The highest figure of all, of course, was scored by the brand-new capital St Petersburg, which went from swamp to metropolis in just two generations. By 1750 its population had reached 75,000 and was still growing fast. There was also a good deal of seasonal migration in Russia. One traveller estimated that in spring the population of Moscow fell by 50,000 as the nobles and their households returned to their estates. Later in the century, especially following the victories of the war of 1768–74, there was a demographic surge southwards to the rich and empty lands secured by the Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardja. They were particularly attractive to runaway serfs.
Further west, the distances traversed were less impressive but the total numbers were far greater. In northern, western and most of central Europe, there was no serfdom to keep the rural population tied to the lord’s estate. In the British Isles, the great magnet was London, the great demographic success story of the western world in the eighteenth century, increasing from c. 200,000 in 1600 to c. 400,000 in 1700 to 600,000 in 1720 to almost a million by the end of the century. This rate of growth could only be attained by massive migration of around 7,500 per annum in the early eighteenth century, for the imbalance between births and death made the capital a ‘demographic black hole’ (Julian Hoppit). London was a special city for many reasons: unfortified, never captured by a foreign enemy, built by private not public wealth, unplanned, little influenced by court or Church, largely self-governing and, in the words of Sir John Summerson, ‘the least authoritarian city in Europe’. Its importance in British life–political, social, economic and cultural–was unmatched by any other country’s capital city. The proportion of the population of France living in Paris remained steady at around 2.5 per cent, but London’s share of England’s inhabitants was already 5 per cent in 1600, 7 per cent in 1650 and had grown to 11 per cent a century later. Moreover, ease of communication and a plethora of employment opportunities meant that an even greater proportion spent long or short sojourns there. Tony Wrigley has estimated that one in six of the adult population of England had some experience of London at some stage during their lives. Londoners were well aware of their special status. Typical was Edward Chamberlayne’s boast in 1687 that London was ‘the largest and the most populous, the fairest and most opulent city at this day in all Europe, perhaps in the whole world, surpassing even Paris and Rome put together’.
In France, as befitted its greater size and more complex geography, there was a wider variation of migration patterns. Broadly speaking, they divided into three kinds: seasonal, involving an absence of several months each year; temporary, involving an absence of some years but ending with a return to the home-base; and permanent. Regionally, there was a marked difference between the relative stability of the north-west and the greater mobility of the centre and south. It was the poorly resourced mountainous regions such as the Massif Central, Alps and Pyrenees that were obliged to send their surplus population down into the cities and plains in search of supplementary income. The seasonal migrant was usually male, young, a family-man, a country-dweller, the owner or tenant of a small plot, unskilled or at best semi-skilled, and poor. The work he sought was most often in agriculture, especially bringing in the harvest, fruit-picking or wood-cutting, although he was often to be found in the building trades. He was both common and ubiquitous. In 1810 it was estimated that there were around 200,000 seasonal migrants moving around France, with another 800,000 people dependent on them for their livelihood.
What this makeshift economy could mean for the wretched inhabitants of villages with insufficient resources was explained by Olwen Hufton in her study of the poor of eighteenth-century France. She reconstructed the annual struggle for survival undertaken by the villagers of Saint-Jean-d’Ollères in the Py-de-Dôme. Every October, 200 adult males left the village to cut wood. After returning the following summer to work briefly on their own land, they left again to work on the olive harvest in Provence. Meanwhile, another group of the same size, but accompanied by 100 children, had left in November to seek work in Berry, combing hemp. If they failed, they travelled on to Paris to find work where they could or to beg. In any event, shortage of food at home meant that they could not return until the following Easter. After work in the fields, they then set off for Provence to gather mulberry leaves for silkworms, a task which kept them busy until the autumn, when the cycle began again. Three hundred children from the village were also on the road for much of the year, working as chimney sweeps, as were an unspecified number of adults, eking out a living as pedlars and/or beggars. Even the aged were expected to do their bit, sowing the seeds in the field before tottering off to the towns to beg. The only members of the community to spend prolonged periods at home were small children and their mothers.
