At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (34 page)

Most important of all was the freedom conferred by a masque’s anonymity. Candor and spontaneity replaced artifice and inhibition, exposing the inner self while concealing one’s public identity. To “masque the face” was to “unmasque the mind,” Henry Fielding wrote in “The Masquerade” (1728). Conversations were bolder and more impulsive. “Absolute freedom of speech” was the protocol, according to
Mist’s Weekly Journal
. Flirtations became more daring and jests less subtle. Polite manners, stiffened by courtly etiquette, yielded to gestures of physical intimacy. Rued a writer in the
Gentleman’s Magazine
, “Whatever lewdness may be concerted; whatever luxury, immodesty, or extravagance may be committed in word or deed, no one’s reputation is at stake.” Critics of masquerades complained loudly of the liberties taken by men and women, though the latter received the greatest blame for their defiance of traditional stereotypes—shedding, as a person put it, one’s “daily mask of innocence and modesty.” More than that, alcoves and gardens permitted sexual liaisons, often, one presumes, with vizards still intact. “Immodesty and leudness propagate, and with promiscuous congress in disguise, practise obscene and flagrant villanies,” condemned a poet.
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And then there were the costumes. These, often worn in place of a black silk gown, or “domino,” added to one’s sense of liberation. No doubt some disguises were donned in a spirit of derision, yet a further annoyance to critics, particularly when government and religious authorities were targets. But often, guests chose instead to indulge personal fantasies, and to some degree wearers were transformed by the experience of such close identification. For a single night, one could become a pauper or a prince, or, for that matter, a demon or a god. For Joseph Addison, commenting in the
Spectator
, masquerades permitted persons to dress as they “had a mind to be.” In addition to impersonating such historical figures as
Henry V
III or Mary Queen of Scots, guests appeared in abstract guises, attired, for instance, as Day or Night. Common were costumes modeled after proletarian clothing. Dairymaids, shepherds, prostitutes, and soldiers were all popular characters. Cross-dressing was prevalent. Henry III of France (1551–1589) usually appeared in a low-cut gown that “showed his throat hung with pearls.” Horace Walpole arrived one evening dressed as an elderly woman. A writer railed in 1722, “Women, lewd women, dress in mens habits, that they may vent their obscenity more freely, and that to their own sex; and where men dress in the female habit, to give and receive a flood of unclean, and, to them, luscious conversation.”
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Masquerades
, then, occasioned evenings of striking license. Still, genteel entertainments represented, at most, momentary reprieves from reality—passing fancies staged sporadically over the course of a year. Nor in their lavish displays of pomp and privilege, their sumptuous buffets and beeswax candles, did masquerades embody a genuine spirit of egalitarianism. Despite critics’ fears, any commitment to social leveling was at best ephemeral. Lords and ladies invariably departed from masquerades as they arrived, in coaches squired by squads of footmen. A Danish writer remarked, “A servant is as good as his master,” but only, he noted, “for as long as the masquerade lasts.”
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III

O thou the silent darkenesse of the night,

Arme me with desperate courage and contempt,

Of gods—lou’d men, now I applaud the guile,

Of our brave roarers which select this time

To drink and swagger, and spurne at all the powers

Of either world.

THOMAS GOFFE,
1631
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What did directly affect the tenor of upper-class society, if not masquerades, was the opportunity evening granted for rowdier escapades. Bloods, bucks, and blades, roarers and gallants—upper-class libertines went by a variety of titles. For them, the natural mask of darkness, not vizards of brocade, afforded a refuge from the regimen of courtly life. They embraced night as a time of boundless freedom. In train were assorted youths of gentle breeding, equally disdainful of polite society. No one city claimed a monopoly, for nearly every European capital, and many a large town, had its share of delinquent aristocrats. By the mid-eighteenth century, early American cities even spawned small bands of “bucks.” In New York, Dr. Alexander Hamilton, during a visit in 1744, encountered “three young rakes” bent on “whoreing”; in Philadelphia, six youths “in the dress of gentlemen” brutalized a woman, first throwing her to the ground. And though certain eras, such as the Restoration in late seventeenth-century England, saw their numbers grow, few periods were free of gallants.
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Their behavior bespoke a fierce individualism, contemptuous of hypocrisy and social conformity in the pursuit of wealth and riches. Guilty on both scores were courtiers, clerics, and men of trade, all wedded to lives of artifice and false propriety. To gallants, the chivalric ideal of personal honor had long given way to servility, good manners, and fealty to king and country. In
Night
, his ode to libertinism published in 1761, the dissolute poet Charles Churchill affirmed,

Let slaves to business, bodies without soul,

Important blanks in nature’s mighty roll,

Solemnize nonsense in the day’s broad glare,

We NIGHT prefer, which heals or hides our care.

Such men, “unpractis’d in deceit,” were “too resolute” to “brook affronts,” “too proud to flatter, too sincere to lie, too plain to please”—at least, that is, during the hours of darkness, when repressive forces were weakest. More important, instead, was the unbridled pursuit of pleasure that nighttime encouraged. Gratification, free of social obligations and constraints. Stated the author of
The Libertine
(1683), “Long tales of heav’n to fools are given, / But we put in pleasure to make the scale even.” Appalled by such libertinism, Henry Peacham warned in
The Compleat Gentleman
(1622) that “to be drunke, sweare, wench, follow the fashion and to do just nothing are the attributes and markes nowadayes of a great part of our gentry.”
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In cities and towns, blades typically slept much of the day, drinking and roaring after sunset. Some cavorted openly at aristocratic gatherings, to the shock of less debauched company. At a concert in 1706, the Duke of Richmond proposed extinguishing all the candles so that guests “might do as they list [choose],” prompting more sober heads to object “while so many of their wives and relations were present.” More often, young males shunned polite entertainments in favor of coarser fare, relishing the low life of brothels and alehouses. “To drink away their brains, and piss away their estates,” according to a critic. “Lords of the street,” they were christened by Samuel Johnson, “flushed as they are with folly, youth and wine.” Emphasized a London newspaper in 1730, “There is a certain pleasure in sometimes descending.”
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In fact, one suspects that social elites in general, notwithstanding their professed distaste for the poor, often envied their “vulgar pleasures.” This was a theme of Richard Steele’s comedy The Gentleman (17??), to judge from a surviving portion. “I think you are happier than we masters,” Sir Harry Severn tells his servant Tom Dimple, before joining him and the “lower world” for a night’s merriment. In 1718, the Duchess of Orleans confided to a friend, “The peasant-folk of Schwetzingen and Oftersheim used to gather around and talk to me, and they were more entertaining than the duchesses in the cercle.” No less a figure than the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V (1500–1558), tradition has it, delighted in the vulgar manners of a peasant with whom, one night, he was forced to shelter outside Brussels. Reportedly, Charles laughed heartily at the peasant’s coarse speech as he urinated, unaware of his sovereign’s identity. “You are farting,” reprimanded Charles, upon which the peasant retorted, “There is no good horse that does not fart while pissing!”
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William Hogarth,
A Rake’s Progress
(pl. 3), 1735. Note in this riotous scene of a tavern chamber the broken lantern and staff at the young gallant’s feet, spoils from scouring the nightwatch. Meanwhile, his own watch is lost to a pair of prostitutes.

James Boswell, the future Laird of Auchinleck, derived periodic pleasure from consorting at night with streetwalkers. On a visit to Germany, he recorded in his journal, “In the evening I must needs go and look at the Dresden streetwalkers, and amuse myself as I used to do in London. Low. Low.” Besides supplying carnal gratification, “low debauchery” held great interest for Boswell, who donned a disguise for some outings. In June 1763, to celebrate “the King’s birthnight” in London, he wore a ragged dark suit along with “dirty buckskin breeches and black stockings.” Determined “to be a blackguard and to see all that was to be seen,” he wenched his way across the city, alternately calling himself a barber, a soldier, and finally, to a young prostitute in Whitehall, a highwayman! “I came home about two o’clock, much fatigued,” he wrote. Even ecclesiastics forsook their vows by cavorting in drinking houses and brothels. In seventeenth-century Flanders, two officials, Dean Henri Wiggers and Canon Arnold Cryters, during their “night games” not only drank and gambled in taverns but also danced and brawled. “Run him through,” shouted the canon to his embattled friend one tumultuous evening at the Corona tavern. Travelers in Italian cities attributed their want of street lamps to prelates anxious to conduct sexual affairs in the dark. Volunteered a visitor to Rome, “The darkness of the streets has been in itself alledged, as having an object not strictly spiritual.”
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Genteel women were not immune to night’s appeal. Besides the burdens of courtly civility, they faced domestic constraints. Even more than other women, their lives revolved around the home, with fewer opportunities for personal fulfillment or independence. Of forced marriages suffered by young maidens, the heroine of the ballad “Loves Downfall” bemoans, “Would I had been a scullian-maid / Or a servant of low degree, / Then need not I have been afraid, / To ha’ loved him that would love me.” Once married, complained Margaret Cavendish, women had “to live in constant masquerade,” hiding their true selves. Remarked a woman in Cavendish’s
Orations
(1662), men “would fain bury us in their houses or beds, as in a grave.” As a result, she remonstrated, “We are as ignorant of our selves, as men are of us.”
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Consigned by day to the domestic sphere, upper-class wives and daughters occasionally took flight at night, notwithstanding traditional injunctions against unescorted travel. As one woman advised another in a seventeenth-century tale, “Since he barreth you of your libertie in the day, take it your selfe in the night.” A character in
The Corbaccio
(ca. 1365), by Boccaccio, marvels at the ability of women to cross great distances at night for illicit meetings, despite their normal fears of “ghosts, spirits, and phantoms.” Some wives reportedly assumed dual identities. The London playwright George Chapman wrote in 1599 of a “hundred ladies in this towne that wil dance, revill all night amongst gallants, and in the morning goe to bed to her husband as cleere a woman as if she were new christned.” Besides frequenting genteel diversions like masquerades, aristocratic wives were said to game, riot, and whore. Hence, for example, the promiscuous likes of Barbara Palmer, Countess of Castlemaine in the Restoration court, after whom Samuel Pepys lusted. Such was her love of gaming that she allegedly “won £15,000 in one night and lost £25,000 in another night at play.” An April evening in 1683 found three “gentelwomen of Cambridge,” attired in male gowns, breaking windows and assaulting female pedestrians. Madame de Murant, the estranged wife of the Count de Rousillon, was reported to sing “lewd songs during the night, and at all hours” with her lesbian lover, even “pissing out the window” of her Paris home after “prolonged debauchery.” Plainly, while literary depictions reflected misogynist fears of infidelity, night afforded scattered numbers of women a measure of personal autonomy, not just at home but also, in some cases, abroad. Of mornings, Montesquieu claimed, “Often the husband’s day began where his wife’s ended.”
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