Not only did the devil, as Blake observed, grab for himself the best lines of Paradise Lost, but by the 18th century he seems to have got into the top secret societies as well. No hell-raising libertine could join one of the thrillingly named Hell-Fire clubs unless Satan would have him as a member. The clubs, which appeared across the country like the mark of the beast, were rumoured to toast their diabolical leader and so confident were the Irish Hell-Fire members of the devil’s approval that they saved him a seat at their meetings. One night he did indeed join them, bursting forth from the body of a black cat and shooting up through the roof of the building. The Satan-shaped hole he left could be seen by all, but “this story”, Evelyn Lord tells us in her sober and sobering book, “is obviously apocryphal”.

The Hell-Fire clubs were, like the sphinx in Oscar Wilde’s story, societies without a secret. Were it not for the dubious stories that stuck to them as feathers will to tar — members, it was variously rumoured, indulged in blasphemy, rape, devil-worship, the occult, pornography, orgies and murder — there would be very little to say about them other than that they were flamboyant drinking societies whose purpose was to shock. They consisted of well-born rakes or “Rake Hells” with time to kill and money to lose, and they did nothing more scandalous to public morals, so Lord concludes, than question the established church. More interesting than what the Hell-Fire clubs got up to is what the public believed they got up to, and Lord is in the curious position of having to sex her subject down.

The Hell-Fire clubs that emerged at the start of the 18th century had disappeared by its close. Being clubbable was one of the tenets of an age that claimed sociability as a virtue. The Enlightenment saw the flowering of literary and scientific clubs, philosophical clubs, political clubs; there were decadent clubs such as the Society of Dilettanti and the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks, and serious clubs such as the Kit-Kat Club and the Lunar Society, which set out to change the world. The Hell-Fire clubs were a parody of the more earnest and improving societies: rather than discuss theology, their members would curse and blaspheme; instead of reading learned tomes they wrote lewd verses, and as Lord neatly puts it, “when scientific societies experimented with laboratory apparatus, the Hell-Fire clubs experimented with their own bodies”. So elite were some that a certain Cambridge club, like the exclusive Junta dining club in Zuleika Dobson, had only one member.

Lord divides the “Hell-Fire genre” into three groups. First there were the gangs such as the Mohocks, a well-organised group that consisted of a few rich young men — one member was the son of the Earl of Sandwich — who rampaged through London in 1712, apparently attacking people at random and smashing the windows of houses. The hysteria surrounding the Mohocks’ activities makes it difficult to get a real sense of the damage they caused, or even, according to some historians, whether they existed at all. The Spectator described them as “a Noctornal fraternity” ruled by a president with a “Turkish crescent engraven upon his forehead”, whose object was to wage war against mankind.

The qualification for membership was to be able to drink beyond “reason or humanity”, and one means of attack was “tipping the lion” — squeezing the nose flat to the face and boring out the eyes with a finger. Jonathan Swift wrote that the Mohocks “play the Devil about town every night, slit people's throats and beat them”. Lady Strafford reported that they “put an old woman into a hogshead and rooled her down a hill, they cut off soms nosis, others hands and several barbarous tricks without any provocation”. Lord wonders whether they were “asserting their masculinity through violence” or “exerting gentlemanly freedom in a society that was putting pressure on them to conform to a moral code?” I wonder what Ross Kemp, “TV hard man” and gang specialist, would have to say.

The Mohocks evolved into organised clubs whose purpose was not to “tip the lion” but “deny the Trinity”. The first HellFire club to carry the name was founded in 1721 by Philip, Lord Wharton, a restless Jacobite who didn’t much like his family. Secrecy was the key, and the identities of the well-born members were concealed. “There is a great deal of speculation about this club and not too many facts,” Lord says in what is by now becoming a familiar refrain.

The speculation includes suggestions that they met in rooms of sulphur and brandy, ate Holy Ghost Pie and the Breast of Venus, and admitted a woman with a pillow up her dress to act the part of the pregnant Virgin. The mysterious purpose of their meetings ignited the public imagination: one journal wrote that of the 40 supposed members, 15 were women of high birth and when a member died, they became the club’s ambassador to hell.

The sexual rituals that have been associated with the Hell-Fire clubs belong to the third group, which consisted of societies such as the Schemers — in which masked men would take masked women to a private room for a night of frolics — and the Knights of St Francis. This latter club, founded in 1751 by Sir Francis Dashwood, met at Medmenham Abbey in Buckinghamshire. Here it is said that an inner sanctum of 12 “Friars”, each in a white habit and with a bed in his own specially made cell, would enjoy “any woman they wanted”.

Many of the exaggerated tales about the Medmenham Friars can be traced to the radical MP John Wilkes, a disgruntled former member whose revelations found their way into an avidly consumed novel called Chrysal by Charles Johnstone (1760). Johnstone imagined that satanic rituals took place at Medmenham in which “every sacred rite of religion was profaned” and “hymns and prayers were dedicated to the devil”. All we know, concludes Lord, is that the society “would appear to have been a private club for gentlemen, where they could indulge in alcohol and sex. It also allowed them to pursue that peculiar 18th-century fascination with fancy dress”.

While her separation of fact from fiction is diligent, if disappointing to the reader in search of more florid revelations, Lord’s conclusion is so sweeping as to nearly brush away her entire argument. The book closes by saying that one reason for the disappearance of the Hell-Fire clubs is “Romanticism”, which replaced “planned classical landscapes” with “rugged mountains” — a supposition more dizzying than any of those she has dismissed in the previous pages.

It is a mark of the author’s achievement as a dowser of flames that the Hell-Fire clubs seem less interesting by the end of her scrupulously researched and clearly written book than they did at the start. To deter the wrong kind of reader, however, her subtitle should be changed to “The Absence of Sex and Satanism in Societies Whose Secrets Are Not Worth Knowing”.

Bottoms up

Bragging and sexual bravado were an inescapable part of Hell-Fire tradition, but few took this sort of schoolboy badinage to quite the same lengths as the Wig Club. Founded in 1775, and boasting everyone from the Earl of Fife to the Marquess of Queensberry on its roster, the club got its name from a wig, allegedly made from the pubic hair of royal mistresses, that members had to kiss or put on during toasts. Another source of ribald amusement was the club’s phallic drinking glass, left, that members had to empty in one go.

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