Donald McCormick - The Hellfire Club

[dem bones]

Donald McCormick - The Hellfire Club (Pedigree, nd: originally Jarrold, 1958)

Blurb
When John Wilkes was prosecuted for the obscene libel of his Essay on Women in 1763, the repercussions of this case produced one of the biggest political scandals of all time.
A shocked public learned that its Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer and other Cabinet Ministers had for years been masquerading in the semi-ruined Abbey of Medmenham on the banks of the Thames. Not only had they dressed up as "monks" and indulged in mysterious rites, but they had admitted to their strange society masked and hooded women, whom they were pleased to call "nuns".
When the secret of Medmenham became known, this rakes' club transferred its headquarters to caves cut deep into the heart of West Wycombe Hill. Thus posterity has come to know the originally styled "Knights of Saint Francis of Wycombe" as the "Hell-Fire Club".
This book makes a fascinating study of an age when rakemanship was a fine art. By judicious selection of much original material, including extracts from the club's wine books, from faded letters and diaries of con­temporary figures, the author has succeeded in building up a factual, well-documented picture of these scandalous "monks" and their lively "nuns".
"Read this fascinating book for a close-up of the rakes who once ruled Britain."— Daily Mirror.
This is an original PEDIGREE BOOKS reprint, complete and unabridged, of a book hitherto available only in full cloth-bound form and priced at 18s. net.
For the BEST in modern reading choose — PEDIGREE BOOKS

Should be interesting comparing this one with the Daniel P. Mannix minor masterpiece, specially as McCormick was, at the time, a serious researcher with decidedly pulp inclinations. Or, to put it another way; in The Jack The Ripper A-Z ((Headline, 1991-6), Messers Begg, Fido and Skinner advise that McCormick's The Identity of Jack The Ripper (Jarrolds 1959; Arrow & John Long, 1970) is a book "to be used with extreme caution .... The conventions of his generation led McCormick to invent dialogue and eschew sources for many of his interesting revelations, which means that some data traced back to him ... rest on his unverifiable assertions." Well, much as i appreciate a well-researched book, i'm hoping The Hellfire Club is more of the same, as this almost invariably makes for an interesting read (think Stephen Knight's Jack The Ripper: The Final Solution, Elliott O'Donnell's Confessions Of A Ghost Hunter or Peter Haining's forays into "non- fiction" with Spring-Heeled Jack, Sweeney Todd, etc). The Hellfire Club was later included in the Dennis Wheatley Library Of The Occult (Vol.26, Sphere, 1975). Wheatley himself has certain reservations: "it must be stated here that in my view the author has done his utmost to whitewash the Order, as he asserts that there is no foundation for the general belief during the past that the rites performed were worship of the Devil. So, if the reader wants descriptions of Black Masses, he must turn to Huysmans’ Down There, Francis Mossiker’s The Affair of the Poisons, volumes 23 and 28 in this library, or to some of my own books."

But of course, Dennis, of course.

[dem bones]

Donald McCormick - The Hellfire Club (Sphere, 1976)

Blurb
Many myths have grown up around the activities of the Hell-Fire Club, deep in the caves at the heart of West Wycombe Hill. The mysterious rites, Satanic practices and masked orgies of some of the most elevated figures in the land – including the Prime Minister – captured the public imagination.
This book reveals the fascinating truth behind the legends of the infamous club.

The Hell-Fire Club is Volume 26 in the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult

"They realised that while life could be lived joyously and rumbustiously, it contained an element of melancholy and mystery that was worth nurturing. So they sought to have the best of both worlds - the word of carnal carnival and Bacchanalian revelry against a background wild grandeur and Poesque grotesquerie. It was romance as it might be practiced by Jean-Paul Sartre ...." - Donald MCCormick on 18th Century Clubbers.

made a false start on this some months back as it was too soon after finishing Daniel P. Mannix's The Hell Fire Club, Richard Harrington's Hellfire Today and, of course, granting serious viewing time to The Avengers: A Touch Of Brimstone, Emma Peel donning spiked collar and fetish swimsuit to become 'The Queen of Sin' for Peter Wyngarde's version of the Brimstone Mob. Thanks to the kindness of friend nosferatu, i'm now up to p. 163 (of 210) of the DWLOTO edition and it's all rather restrained in relation to what i recall of Manniix's version.

You can see why Wheatley got so grumpy about McCormick's book. Not yet out of the brief introduction and already Donald raises doubts that there was anything particularly Satanic about Sir Francis Dashwood and his cronies. According to him, the 'Hellfire' aspect was a bit of a laugh and gave a sense of theatre to the proceedings: what the monks and their nuns were really about was lechery, mockery of superstition, parody of Religious ritual (they had a particular down on all things Papist) and drinking phenomenal amounts of alcohol. The majority of the known participants weren't even particularly blasphemous. Wheatley counters that this is an infamous whitewash, it's perfectly obvious that these fellows were involved in Black Sorcery, though he later concedes that, other than the treacherous Earl Of Sandwich, they were quite nice about it. Sir Francis, as inspired a Postmaster General as he was inept a Chancellor of the Exchequer, emerges from the book as thoroughly likable, philanthropic, fiercely loyal and slightly eccentric, even his political enemies had only good to say of him. At least the same can't be said of the Earl Of Sandwich - a spectacular ugly looking rake: "the most vicious of the monks - as lecherous as a goat." Tory M.P. George Selwyn, a big fan of public executions, had a worrying fondness for studying fresh corpses. Another monk of morbid inclination was Thomas Potter, son of the Archbishop of Canterbury and a man whose sexual leanings were said to border on necrophilia. And among the masked nuns, Betty Weyms, forever mislaying her glass eye once she'd had a few in the Rose Tavern.

likely some more to follow ....