Some rich people just have so much time and money on their hands they don't know what
to do with it all.
The Hellfire Club was made up of those sorts of people.
In the 18th century some of the richest men in Britain and Ireland decided to fill their
nights with activities organized under the guise of a club whose name says it all: the
Hellfire Club.
There were a number of "chapters" of the club that sprang up throughout the 1700s, and there
are a few crucial points that need to be made.
They were definitely not part of an official sort of organization, they were incredibly
secretive, and they were born from an upper class that had been enraptured by the Enlightenment
Philosophy.
What does that mean?
It means they were testing the boundaries of society and good taste, turning their back
on what they had been taught about morals, and essentially seeing what they could get
away with.
Over the centuries, the legend of the Hellfire Club has become a pop culture staple, and
their legacy has informed the ways cults and secret societies have been depicted in literature
and on screen.
But what's the truth?
Here's what really went on behind the closed doors of the Hellfire Club.
The members of the Hellfire Clubs had a few things in common: They were rich, they had
no regard for the morals of society, they could keep secrets, and they could get out
of pretty much any trouble they happened to get into.
That means the common folk were left to tell stories about what they thought went on behind
those closed doors.
Hellfire Clubs were commonly linked with tales of Satanic rituals and demonic dealings.
Simon Luttrell was the sheriff of Dublin City when he was in the Hellfire Club, and there
were whispered rumors that he'd sold his soul to the Devil.
There's also a story that involves a card game with an unfortunate player who dropped
a card.
As he bent down to pick it up, he noticed that one of his fellow players had a cow's
foot.
He regained his composure, but after a few hands he revealed what he'd seen.
The hoofed player disappeared, and the man who'd seen his true foot promptly died.
According to popular legend, Dublin's Hellfire Club always left one seat empty in case the
Devil decided to join them.
Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction.
That was the case with Irish Hellfire Club member Henry Barry, Lord Santry.
According to legend, Barry employed a sedan chairman to carry him around, and when the
servant was ill and bedridden one day, Barry forced him to drink a quart of brandy, then
set the entire bed on fire.
Another story says that Barry was attending a Hellfire Club meeting when he forced a man
to drink so much brandy it filled his stomach and throat, then lit him on fire.
He was never prosecuted for that, but he was arrested for events that happened during a
gathering of the Hellfire Club in Palmerstown, Dublin.
When someone laughed at Barry, legend says he drew his sword and stabbed a tavern employee.
Barry's bribery worked for a while, but he was eventually found guilty for the murder.
Barry only dodged execution because his wealthy, land-owning uncle threatened to cut off Dublin's
drinking water, and Barry scored a royal pardon.
Mixing fire and booze was also a particular pastime of Hellfire Club member Richard Chappell
Whaley.
He had an unhealthy obsession with fire, and according to rumor, he eventually burned Hellfire
Club's Montpelier Hill headquarters to the ground after dousing a servant in brandy and
setting him on fire.
Sounds like there was a lot of that going on!
It's difficult to separate legend from truth because the Hellfire Club most commonly met
at the Eagle Tavern, not Montpelier Hill.
But historians do seem to agree that club meetings were kicked off with a drink called
scaltheen, which was essentially whiskey, butter, pepper, and sugar.
The Herald says one of the more popular drinking games they played was drinking, quote "while
standing close enough to a roasting fire to melt the marrow in their bones."
The last man standing was the winner.
Couldn't they have just played Clue instead?
"Flames.
Flames.
Flames on the side of my face."
Regardless of whether they were drinking to the devil, the Hellfire Club was definitely
drinking to something.
Chapter members in England recorded some of the names of their cocktails, like "Gin and
Sin" and "Strip Me Naked."
They also referred to members as three- or four-bottle men based on how many bottles
of port they could drink at a time.
Simon Luttrell was one of the more notorious members of Ireland's Hellfire Club.
Supposedly, Darkey Kelly, the madam of a Dublin brothel, became pregnant with Luttrell's child
and tried to blackmail him.
He accused her of being a witch, and she was tried and executed.
Straightforward enough, but there may have been a little more to it.
Newspaper reports from the time suggest Luttrell, who was a member of the House of Commons and
the Sheriff of Dublin at the time, may have had a different role.
Kelly's execution came in 1760, not 1746, as it was claimed, after she was put on trial
for the murder of a local shoemaker named John Dowling.
Authorities searched her property, found the bodies of five men, and she was found guilty.
After unsuccessfully trying to get a stay of execution for a pregnancy she didn't have,
she was strangled until she was nearly dead then burned to death.
According to researchers, Kelly's story was probably confused with another scandal involving
Luttrell: one where his son was accused of assaulting a teenage girl.
During the Enlightenment, people started to question what they had been taking on faith
for a long time.
The wealthy rakes of the Hellfire Club were highly skeptical of Christianity in particular,
and according to one letter written by a member under the pseudonym "Morlock," a lot of what
they were doing was essentially thumbing their noses at organized religion.
Morlock wrote of a club practice called "the sacrifice of the maidens," but historians
think it's not entirely what it seems.
It was likely taking a woman's virginity, and they were doing it while pledging allegiance
to old pagan gods.
When Philip Wharton first started the Hellfire Club, it was officially dedicated to "drinking,
lewdness, and puerile acts of blasphemy."
Members would dress as monks and characters from the Bible, and it seems as though the
anti-religious stuff was what authorities really took an issue with, Wharton's club
was closed in 1721 due to "blasphemy and profaneness."
When Sir Francis Dashwood founded his drinking-and-debauchery club in the 1750s, he called it the Knights
of Sir Francis of Wycombe.
Kerry Ann Williams, who works on the West Wycombe Estate, says the "Hellfire Club" label
came later, but it stuck.
She told the BBC that beneath Dashwood's estate is a series of tunnels, the purpose of which
are entirely unknown.
Inside those tunnels is the Inner Temple, an extra-secret room at the bottom of a series
of secret rooms, that was so off-limits that the highest-ranking members could only access
it by boat.
There are some clues as to what went on there.
Silverware and drinking vessels have survived, and Williams says wine and women were undoubtedly
the most popular things in the caverns.
She also says historians were close to having complete documentation of all Hellfire Club
activities.
Paul Whitehead acted as the club's steward and recorded everything that went on.
Unfortunately for history, he spent the three days prior to his death burning all club records.
There is a strangely happy footnote to this all, though: Dashwood ordered the caves excavated
as a way to provide jobs for locals who were suffering through a series of crop failures.
Dashwood was in Italy when he developed his seething hatred of the Roman Catholic Church,
and even before his "knights'' assembled first in London's George & Vulture pub, he had a
certain fondness for commissioning some of the era's finest artists to do insanely blasphemous
portraits of him, including one where he ogles a statue of Venus.
For his club, he "acquired" Medmenham Abbey and inscribed the motto "Fay ce que vouldras,"
or "Do what thou wilt" over the door.
"What is the password?"
"Orgy."
Supposedly, Dashwood built a temple dedicated to Bacchus on his estate and became obsessed
with the idea his estate encompassed an old pagan site.
When he had his labyrinth of caves excavated, he made sure the ancient deities were included.
According to the era's coffee-house gossips, part of the rituals that went on there were
so-called "sacrifices" to both Bacchus and Venus.
The members of the Hellfire Club were all among the upper crust: lords and earls, military
officers, members of Parliament.
As you might expect, politics and debauchery weren't always separate, and on at least one
occasion, a prank gone wrong may have had drastic repercussions.
John Wilkes was a poet and controversial politician who was ousted from Parliament because of
charges of libel brought by John Montagu, Lord Sandwich.
Wilkes and Thomas Potter, the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, had taken Alexander Pope's
Essay on Man and written a parody called Essay on Woman.
Wilkes had been in the process of printing 12 copies, likely for his fellow Hellfire
Club members, when Sandwich brought charges against him.
Apparently, Sandwich had hated Wilkes for a while, ever since Wilkes had decided it
would be funny to dress a baboon as the Devil and let it loose during one of the club's
"services" in Dashwood's Medmenham Abbey.
Sandwich, believing it was the Devil coming to get his soul, fled as fast as he could,
and never forgave Wilkes for the humiliation.
After the libel trial, Wilkes was found guilty, fled to France, and was declared an outlaw.
Of all the Hellfire Club's misdeeds, the authorities really had the biggest problem with the blasphemy.
"You know, 300 years ago you'd have been burned at the stake for saying something like that."
"300 years ago, I wouldn't have said it."
In 1738, a painter named Peter Lens found himself under investigation by the Committee
for Religion.
He was a self-confessed member of the "Blasters," which was likely just another name of Dublin's
Hellfire Club.
The Blasters had become well-known for publicly praying to the Devil and disrupting church
services.
In reality, they no more believed in the Devil than they believed in God, and they just used
blasphemy as a way to offend the establishment.
Even though there have been artifacts that seem to show diabolical imagery, that doesn't
mean they actually worshiped the devil.
Historians think any rites and rituals were done in part to heighten the club's mysterious
image, and in part because they thought it was just pretty hilarious.
No one else did, and Lens was ultimately arrested for his blasphemous and disruptive actions.
While there were definitely some Hellfire Club members who were more into murder than
mayhem, there's one anecdote that speaks volumes to the mentality of the men in the club.
High above Francis Dashwood's estate is a gold sphere perched on the top of the Church
of St. Lawrence.
There's just enough room inside for a few people to look out not only over the countryside,
but over Dashwood's gardens which have been planted in the shape of a curvaceous woman.
Not only did the gardening feature some carefully placed pink rose bushes and triangles of forest,
but there were also strategically placed fountains that could be turned on with a signal from
Dashwood.
Dashwood was reportedly a fan of taking members of the clergy up into the sphere to see his
massive lady-garden, and according to Sir Edward, the modern Dashwood descendant in
charge of the estate a lot of what actually went on at the Hellfire Club was all in good
fun.
He says:
"Sir Francis wasn't crazy.
He was just a tremendous character.
And he had bloody good fun...They all dressed up and drank a hell of a lot."
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