Hellfire Club

[1] Such clubs, rumour had it, served as the meeting places of "persons of quality"[2] who wished to take part in what were socially perceived as immoral acts, and the members were often involved in politics.

[6] Lord Wharton was made a duke by George I[7] and was a prominent politician with two separate lives: the first as a "man of letters" and the second as "a drunkard, a rioter, an infidel and a rake".

[13][11] According to at least one source, their activities included mock religious ceremonies and partaking of meals featuring such dishes as "Holy Ghost Pie", "Breast of Venus", and "Devil's Loin", while drinking "Hell Fire Punch".

[16] Sir Francis Dashwood and the Earl of Sandwich are alleged to have been members of a Hellfire Club that met at the George and Vulture Inn throughout the 1730s.

[18] The club motto was Fais ce que tu voudras (Do what thou wilt), a philosophy of life associated with François Rabelais's fictional abbey at Thélème[19][20] and later used by Aleister Crowley.

Francis Dashwood was well known for his pranks: for example, while in the Royal Court in St Petersburg, he dressed up as the King of Sweden, a great enemy of Russia.

Of the original twelve, some are regularly identified: Dashwood, Robert Vansittart, Thomas Potter, Francis Duffield, Edward Thompson, Paul Whitehead and John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich.

[32] According to Horace Walpole, the members' "practice was rigorously pagan: Bacchus and Venus were the deities to whom they almost publicly sacrificed; and the nymphs and the hogsheads that were laid in against the festivals of this new church, sufficiently informed the neighbourhood of the complexion of those hermits."

Dashwood's garden at West Wycombe contained numerous statues and shrines to different gods; Daphne and Flora, Priapus and the previously mentioned Venus and Dionysus.

[36] Legends of Black Masses and Satan or demon worship have subsequently become attached to the club, beginning in the late Nineteenth Century.

Dashwood's Club meetings often included mock rituals, items of a pornographic nature, much drinking, wenching and banqueting.

[38] Dashwood now sat in the House of Lords after taking up the title of Baron Le Despencer after the previous holder died.

It was scurrilous, blasphemous, libellous, and bawdy, though not pornographic – still unquestionably illegal under the laws of the time, and the Government subsequently used it to drive Wilkes into exile.

In Anstruther, Scotland, a likeminded sex and drinking club called The Beggar's Benison was formed in the 1730s, which survived for a century and spawned additional branches in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Thirty-nine years later, while the Prince (by now King George IV) was paying a royal visit to Scotland, he bequeathed the club a snuff box filled with his mistresses' pubic hair.

Its motto uno avulso non deficit alter 'when one is torn away another succeeds' is from the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid and refers to the practice of establishing the continuity of the society through a process of constant renewal of its graduate and undergraduate members, but also refers to the alchemical kabbalistic process that a life snatched via sacrifice is a life given back via a spirit at the command of its master.