Fanny and Stella (33 page)

Whatever the shortcomings of the Metropolitan Police Detective Force – and they were legion – it excelled at the administrative apparatus of criminality, at keeping lists, records, photographs of suspected and convicted criminals alike. These records revealed that Park had an older brother, Edward Henry Park, also known as Charles Ferguson, who had been charged with attempted indecency upon a police officer eight years ago.

Henry or Harry? Was it possible? No address. No date. No surname. But adrift in the tumultuous sea of paper in Lord Arthur’s trunk there was an envelope and upon that envelope there was a postmark. He had never heard of Abbey Green but he understood it to be somewhere in Lanarkshire. A telegram to Glasgow. Discreet enquiries undertaken. They were looking for a Mr Park or a Mr Ferguson (or any other young Englishman of effeminate appearance aged around twenty-six) living in or around Abbey Green. It was a long shot, but it had proved to be a lucky shot, a very lucky shot.

M 
r Charles Ferguson of Abbey Green was not entirely sober. Truth be told, he was some considerable distance from sobriety, but he carried his drink very well and could muster enough gentlemanly self-possession to instruct the girl to show his visitors in. He felt a familiar churning in the pit of his stomach as he recognised the unmistakable presence, the unmistakable smell of a policeman, though neither of his two visitors were dressed as such.

George White spoke first.

‘Mr Edward Henry Park?’ It was as a much a statement of fact as it was a question.

‘Will you have something to drink?’ Charles Ferguson countered, fumbling with the decanter.

George White nodded to Inspector Thompson. Yes, they had the right man.

‘You are wanted for absconding from bail,’ Inspector Thompson said calmly, ‘while awaiting trial for serious offences.’

Harry Park turned to face his visitors.

‘Not likely,’ he replied. ‘It’s so long ago. They had the “tin”, had they not?’

Inspector Thompson turned and looked at George White disdainfully. He knew full well what Harry Park meant by the ‘tin’. It meant money paid for sex, money extorted after sex. So that was it. George White and Edwin Dibdin. They were in it together. A racket. White would entice the sodomites. Something disgusting would take place. Money demanded with menaces. Money handed over. And then the poor sod would still be arrested. He almost felt sorry for Harry Park and for the others – for there would have been others, you could be sure of that.

Three days later, on the day Fanny and Stella were released on bail, Harry Park, ‘a tall, stylishly-dressed young man, who had an effeminate aspect, no beard or whiskers, slight moustache, and hair carefully parted in the centre’, was back in Marylebone Police Court. ‘The bench and court were densely crowded with persons anxious to hear the trial,’ the
Illustrated Police News
reported. Harry Park had nothing to say for himself, except his name and his address and that he left the case entirely in the hands of his solicitor.

In court, Mr Sergeant Parry was eloquent in his plea of mitigation.

‘I am here at the earnest request of a broken-hearted father. Where Park has learnt such degrading practices it is utterly impossible to surmise or guess, and the father’s anguish must be the greater in thinking that all his care and anxiety should meet with this sad result.

‘Many persons are of the opinion that the perpetration of such offences in itself shows something wanting in mind and feeling which indicates that the offender is not in full possession of his faculties, and that such cases would be far better treated in a lunatic asylum than in a court of Justice.’

But Mr Sergeant Parry’s oratory fell on deaf ears. The magistrate, Mr D’Eyncourt, was not to be swayed by pleas for mercy or intimations of insanity. He sentenced Harry Park to twelve months’ imprisonment with hard labour, the heaviest sentence he was able to impose under the law, he said. Harry Park remained impassive as the sentence was handed down, but his frail-looking father, Judge Alexander Park, was seen to stagger under the weight of the blow.

25

‘Pestiferous and Pestilential’

What words can paint the infamy of such Hellish proceedings on the part of men towards those of their own sex?

Extraordinary Revelations
, 1870

A 
t the time of Fanny and Stella’s arrest in April 1870, the subjects of Queen Victoria could be forgiven for thinking that their world was under siege from an army of threats: internal and external, visible and invisible, actual and imagined. Things seemed to be getting worse rather than better, and many thought that they could hear the not-so-distant thunder of the hooves of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse: pestilence, war, famine and death.

The nation was in a state of flux, of transformation. The world seemed to be changing almost daily. New ideas, new inventions and new ideologies were everywhere. There were threats of war, revolts and revolutions at home and abroad. The Fenians were bringing terror to the streets of London, Liverpool and Manchester, and nobody knew where they might strike next. And there were no less important revolutions of the mind, revolutions which seemed to shake and shatter the old certainties. Mr Charles Darwin seemed to be suggesting that Man was not created by God in His own image, but was actually descended from the bestial ape, and might very well revert to that bestial state.

Contagious diseases had become virtually endemic, and frequently erupted into epidemics: smallpox, consumption, cholera, typhus, typhoid, scarletina, diphtheria, influenza, measles and the whooping cough killed off large swathes of the population, especially infants and children, and debilitated those who survived.

And there were other contagions, no less dangerous, no less threatening to the nation’s health. There were the multiple and interlinked contagions of poverty, crime, disorder, immorality and vice. Especially vice. Prostitution was everywhere, with some experts positing that there were no fewer than a hundred thousand prostitutes working in London, or one prostitute to every ten men. Marriage was on the wane, and yet the numbers of children born – especially to the very poor – just grew and grew. As the poor became more numerous, the slums of the cities expanded, becoming the breeding grounds for all the spoken and unspoken ills of society.

The certainties and clarities of a divinely ordered hierarchical society where all men – and women – knew their station had been replaced by an anarchic world driven by instinct and appetite, by lust and by greed; a random, rudderless and unfixed world where the old bastions of religion, law, custom and morality were buffeted and besieged by forces so dark and so primal they could barely be apprehended, let alone understood.

Doubt – a corrosive, contagious and cancerous doubt – had entered into the heart and soul of the nation. Fears, anxieties and uncertainties seemed to swirl about the landscape of the national psyche like a London pea-souper, casting strange new shapes and shadows upon a once familiar landscape. Much of this doubt seemed to coalesce and dwell upon the human body, upon its sexual frailties and deviations, and upon the concomitant afflictions which – many thought – were visited upon the land as divine retribution for sins of the flesh.

Of all these sexual contagions, syphilis – silent, creeping, invisible and ultimately deadly – was the most feared. Many believed that syphilis was causing degeneration in the wider population. If syphilis continued to spread unchecked, then future generations would be enfeebled and made even more prone to disease and early death. Mr William Henry Sloggett, a noted surgeon, was in deadly earnest when he told a Royal Commission that he was convinced that ‘the effect of venereal disease is to deteriorate and sometimes to produce the gradual
extinction
of a race, as is the case of the South Sea Islanders’.

Everyone was agreed that something had to be done to stem the rising tide of filth, immorality and disease that threatened to inundate and destroy Britannia and all that she stood for. What was needed was ‘a grand movement . . . to improve the social and moral condition of the inhabitants of this country’, a newspaper editorial rousingly declared. It was to be a vast sanitary and social engineering endeavour, a modern crusade, designed not merely to reclaim Jerusalem from the infidel, but to remake it, to build a new Jerusalem for the modern world.

Innumerable commissions of the great and the good were established to enquire minutely into every aspect of life, most especially into the lives of the poor: into their housing, their sanitation, their children, their diet, their health, their leisure, their habits and their work. There were grand plans afoot to clear slums and eradicate overcrowding; to provide sewers and clean drinking water; to set standards of hygiene in common lodging houses; to have compulsory education and compulsory vaccination for children; to regulate working conditions in factories; reform the legal system; and stop the adulteration of food. Innumerable charities were established with the stated aim of reclaiming prostitutes, encouraging temperance and promoting sexual continence.

If the lives and habits of the poor could be regulated and controlled, if they could be sanitised, the entire nation would benefit. Just as the children of the poor would be vaccinated against disease, society would be inoculated against the evils of crime and disorder, plague and pestilence, revolt, revolution and degeneration.

Sex between men had long been a target for those who wanted to cleanse society of its vices. And sodomy with its clear associations with excrement lay at the very confluence of potent fears, both old and new, about sex, dirt, disease and death which haunted the national psyche.

Sodomy was both an old and a new vice. It was as old as sin, as old as the Old Testament itself, as old as the horrible fate of the Cities of the Plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, destroyed by fire and brimstone.

From the Middle Ages onwards, there was a widely held belief that sodomy, even the least toleration of sodomy, would bring down divine retribution upon an entire nation. Sodomy was, as the illustrious jurist Edward Coke wrote, ‘
contra ordinationem Creatoris et naturae ordinem
’, contrary to the commandments of God and the order of Nature.

Even to speak the very word was dangerous. Sodomy was the ‘
crimen inter Christianos non nominandum
’,
the crime not to be named among Christians. To say the word was to invoke the diabolical deed and bring calamity in its wake. In 1642 Governor Bradford of New England spoke of sodomy and buggery as ‘things fearful to name’.

Sir Robert Heath, the Attorney-General who, in 1631, prosecuted the Earl of Castlehaven in a state trial in Westminster Hall for committing sodomy with his servants, warned that the Earl’s crimes were ‘of that pestiferous and pestilential nature that if they be not punished they will draw from Heaven heavy judgements upon this Kingdom’.

‘Pestiferous and pestilential’ was more than mere rhetoric on the part of Sir Robert Heath. He meant exactly what he said: sodomy was literally plague-bringing. If even a single case of sodomy went unpunished, the Kingdom would be collectively and divinely punished by plagues, contagions and pestilences. ‘By these abominations the land is defiled,’ he declared, ‘therefore the Lord does visit this Land for the iniquity thereof.’

In his masque
Sodom
, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester and celebrated Restoration rake, wrote of the imaginary Kingdom of Sodom ruled by King Bolloxinion and Queen Cunitigratia. Advised by Borastus, his ‘Buggermaster-General’, and encouraged by Buggeranthos, General of the Army, Bolloxinion decrees, in a fit of pique, that sodomy is to be the new order of the day: 

Henceforth, Borastus, set the Nation free,

Let conscience have its force of Liberty,

I do proclaim, that Buggery may be us’d

Through all the Land, so Cunt be not abus’d.

The Kingdom of Sodom is turned upon its head. All is in ‘hugger-mugger’: topsy-turvy, upside-down and inside-out. Death and disease stalk the land; children are stillborn; crops fail; and the people are ‘raving and mad’. Sodom totters on the edge of a dark abyss. A despairing Flux, the King’s Physician and ‘Man of Philosophy’, beseeches Bolloxinion to reverse his decree in an effort to cure the ‘epidemical’ and ‘tortur’d pains your Nation doth endure’. But Flux’s pleas falls on deaf ears. ‘I’ll reign and bugger still,’ a defiant Bolloxinion proclaims, provoking a horrible chorus of ‘firy demons’ to rise up in a cloud of ‘fire, brimstone and smoke’. It is Hell upon earth.

When, in February and March 1750, two earthquakes shook London, Thomas Sherlock, the Bishop of London, declared them divine retribution for the rise of sodomy in the city:

The unnatural Lewdness, of which we have heard so much of late, is something more than Brutish and can hardly be mentioned without offending chaste Ears, and yet cannot be passed over entirely in Silence, because of the particular Mark of Divine Vengeance set upon it in the Destruction of
Sodom
by Fire from Heaven. Dreadful Example!