At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (35 page)

William Hogarth,
The Bagnio
(pl. 5 of Marriage à la Mode), 1745. Following a masquerade, the lawyer Silvertongue and the Countess have repaired to a bathhouse of ill repute, only to be pursued by her husband, the Earl, who is mortally wounded in the ensuing confrontation.

Descending the social ladder for persons of property was not always easy. Nocturnal frolics, especially in unfamiliar neighborhoods, posed myriad risks, not least negotiating one’s way through the muck of ill-lit streets. In the play
Squire Oldsapp: or, the Night Adventures
(1679), the character Henry laments, “Ah, plague’o these night-rambles; the trouble a man gets in finding his way home after ’em, is more by half than the pleasure he gets by ’em.” Boswell, after one of his drunken expeditions, returned home “all dirty and bruised.” Unescorted women ran the risks of taunts and jeers, or worse, even at polite entertainments. In 1748, Lady Charlotte Johnston and two friends ventured into the “dark walks” of London’s Vauxhall Gardens, a notorious spot for midnight assignations. Whatever their reasons (prurient curiosity perhaps), they were mistaken for prostitutes, chased by a half-dozen drunken apprentices, and assaulted. Moreover, it was one thing to dress as a ruffian, and quite another to behave as one. The London law student Dudley Ryder became tongue-tied whenever approaching a prostitute. “I am under a strange confusion and hurry when I attack a whore and cannot tell how to talk to them freely,” he confessed in his diary. Boswell, despite his shabby costume, found it difficult to hide his true identity when consorting with prostitutes. “Notwithstanding of my dress,” he later noted with thinly veiled pride, “I was always taken for a gentleman in disguise.”
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Some social friction was unavoidable. An Irishman wrote of the mannered gentleman who, having spent the “whole day in company he hates,” turns at night to vice “among company that as heartily hate him.” Claiming to be a “gentleman and a scholar,” Francis Woodmash, while drunk, antagonized a table of tradesmen at a London alehouse by speaking Latin. A flurry of heated insults followed—“Blockhead,” “Brandy-Face,” “
Irish
Rogue”—before Woodmash killed one of them with his sword. Other gallants, however, appear to have frolicked freely with the lower orders, at least until tempers warmed. Of an evening in a Covent Garden alehouse, a “watchman” reported in a newspaper:

Bullies, whores, bawds, pimps, lords, rakes, beaux, fops, players, fiddlers, singers, dancers, &c. who are strangely mixed together. You will sometimes find a Lord in deep conversation with a pimp, a Member of P—— explaining his privilege to a whore; a bawd, with a great deal of prudency, exclaiming to a rake against riots, a whore with a fribble, a beau with a butcher, and yet all hail fellow well met, as the saying is; till the gentleman get quite drunk, and then the bullies, sharpers, whores, bawds, pimps, &c. get to their trade of kicking up a dust, as they call it, and begin to fleece those who have any money. Now begins the high scene; swords, sticks, hats, wiggs, any thing, away they go; bloody noses, black eyes, broken heads, broken glasses, bottles, &c.
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For drunken gallants, no jest at the expense of polite behavior or human decency seemed too outrageous. In Leeds, “young gentlemen,” for their late-night amusement, summoned persons from bed, falsely notifying them of some dying friend or relation. In June 1676, John Wilmont, the rakish second Earl of Rochester, together with three comrades, severely beat a constable in Epson after vainly searching for “a whore.” At a nearby tavern, they had already terrorized several fiddlers by “tossing” them “in a blanket for refusing to play.” Before the night ended, Rochester drew his sword, prompting one of his party to be slain by the nightwatch. Even Pepys, no prude, occasionally found his middle-class sensibilities shocked, such as when two blades, Sir Charles Sedley and Lord Buckhurst, reportedly ran “all the night with their arses bare through” London streets, “at last fighting and being beat by the watch.” On another evening, Pepys spied “two gallants and their footmen” drag off “a pretty wench” by “some force.” (“God forgive me,” he confessed, “what thought and wishes I had of being in their place.”) More unfortunate still was the fate of a provincial innkeeper who objected to noise made by “a party of Bucks.” Taking the path of her furniture, she was tossed out an upstairs window to her death.
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Violent confrontations were inevitable among gallants who eschewed both the protections and the constraints of civil society. Swordplay and drunken brawls fueled youthful exuberance, making nocturnal escapades seem more heroic. Wrote the Earl of Rochester, “I’ll tell of whores attack’d, their Lords at home, / Bawds quarters beaten up, and fortress won: / Windows demolish’d, watches overcome.” A visitor to Lisbon complained of the late-night “squabbles of bullying rake-hells, who scour the streets in search of adventures.” Most violence was gratuitous and unprovoked. On a December night in 1693, three swordsmen paraded through London’s Salisbury Court, declaring “damn them they would kill the next man they met, making responses I will, I will, I will.” Vandalism was customary, with windows, doors, and street lamps broken and smashed. Young women, beaten and kicked, bore the brunt of their aggression. Some were pulled into dark streets from their beds. Targets included members of the nightwatch, lone symbols of royal authority whose advanced years made them objects of greater contempt. James Shirley’s play
The Gamester
(1633) spoke of “blades, that roar, / In brothels, and break windows, fright the streets, / At midnight worse that constables, and sometimes, / Set upon innocent bell-men.” Following a masquerade, a band of gallants that included the dukes of Monmouth and Richmond mortally wounded a watchman, a crime also imputed to the Duke of York before ascending the throne as James II (1633–1701). In turn, a small crowd led by two French noblemen, on an April night in 1741, attacked the front door of the mayor of Libourne, first with an axe, then with a battering ram.
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Some cities saw the rise of nocturnal gangs composed of blades with servants and retainers in tow. Loosely organized at best, they acquired notorious reputations for violence. In Amsterdam, members of the Damned Crue routinely assailed innocent pedestrians at night, as did Chalkers in Dublin. Italian cities were beset by bands of young nobles and gentlemen. In Florence toward the late sixteenth century, a traveler discovered:

The gentlemen in companies walked by nights in the streets, with rapyers, and close lanthornes, I meane halfe light, halfe darke, carrying the light syde towardes them, to see the way, and the darke syde from them, to be unseene of others, and if one company happened to meete with another, they turned their light syde of their lanthorns towardes the faces of those they mett, to knowe them, . . . and except they were acquainted frendes they seldome mett without some braule, or tumult at the least.

Anon.,
Drunken Rakes and Watchmen in Covent Garden
, 1735.

In Rome, the painter Caravaggio belonged to a group of gallants that preyed on prostitutes and rival swordsmen. “
Nec spe, nec metu
” (“without hope or fear”) was their credo. In 1606, after killing a member of another gang in a brawl, Caravaggio was forced to flee to Naples.
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In London, members of the Bugles, formed in 1623, allegedly contained the scourings of “taverns and other debauched places,” led by “diverse knights, some young noblemen, and gentlemen.” In later years, London suffered such bands as the Scowrers and the Hectors, who cut their veins in order to “quaff their own blood.” Of Rochester’s Ballers, Pepys described an evening in which “young blades” danced naked with prostitutes. Most feared were the Mohocks, who acquired their name shortly after the well-publicized visit to London of four Iroquois chiefs from America. For several months in 1712, the city was terrorized by the gang’s brutality. Besides knifing pedestrians in the face, they stood women on their heads, “misusing them in barbarous manner.” Mohock numbers were such, taunted a handbill, that watchmen feared to make arrests. Jonathan Swift, concerned for his safety, resorted to riding in coaches at night and coming home early. “They shan’t cut mine [face],” he wrote, “I like it better as it is, the dogs will cost me at least a crown a week in chairs.” Lamented Sarah Cowper, “The manners of Indian savages are no[w] becoming accomplishments to English Earls, Lords, and gentlemen.”
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In English literature, no pair of peers cavorted more famously than Prince Hal and his stout companion, Falstaff. In Part 1 of
Henry IV
(1598), we discover them conspiring with other rowdies, for the sake of a “jest,” to waylay wealthy travelers in the dark. Declares Falstaff to the prince, “There’s neither honesty, manhood, nor good fellowship in thee, nor thou camest not of the blood royal, if thou darest not stand for ten shillings.” Real-life sovereigns of this sort reportedly included the peasant king Matthias of Hungary (1440–1490), France’s Francis I (1494–1547), and Francis Duke of Milan, who disguised himself at night as a peddler. Equally, it was said that though the Duke of Orleans, brother to Charles VI, “showed himself to be so pious during the day,” he “secretly” led “a very dissolute life at night,” which included heavy drinking and frolics with prostitutes. The Scandinavian monarch Christian II (1481–1559), as prince, quitted his hall to drink wine in Copenhagen taverns, having first bribed the nightwatch to open the castle gate. Another Danish king, Christian IV (1577–1648), was known to rampage through streets, breaking windows like other young aristocrats. Such, too, was said of England’s
Henry V
III, whose “rambles” as a youth inspired the well-known tale of
The King and the Cobbler
, published in the seventeenth century. Charles II (1630–1685), during one of his “nocturnal rambles” with Rochester, reputedly visited a Newmarket brothel in “his usual disguise,” only to have his pocket picked by a prostitute. Perhaps most notorious were the escapades of Henry III of France, a devout Catholic by day who caroused on Paris streets at night, usually with faithful courtiers called
mignons
. Of these, a contemporary complained, “Their occupations are gambling, blaspheming, jumping, dancing, quarreling, fornicating, and following the King around.”
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CHAPTER NINE

MASTERS BY NIGHT:
PLEBEIANS

I

Who dares not stir by day must walk by night.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
1596
1

N
IGHT REVOLUTIONIZED
the social landcape. If darkness rendered members of the mighty more plebeian, it made legions of the weak more powerful—walking “the streetes,” moaned a writer, “as uprightly, & with as proud a gate as if they meant to knock against the starres with the crownes of their heads.” Freed from hours of toil and degradation, multitudes in Europe and America drew renewed purpose from the setting sun. Night’s widespread appeal—freedom from both labor and social scrutiny—resounded among the lower orders. Personal associations were by choice, confined to family and friends, social peers rather than superiors. “No eyes break undistinguish night / To watch us or reprove,” wrote John Clare, the former Northamptonshire hedge-setter. The attraction of darkness takes on richer significance if we consider night’s ability to obscure vestiges of the visible world. Veiled on black evenings were common reminders of institutional power and privilege, designed to instill fear along with veneration and respect. Crests and crucifixes receded from sight; guildhalls and gaols loomed less large; and church steeples no longer dominated the terrain. “All real ills in dark oblivion lye,” wrote Charles Churchill, “and joys, by fancy form’d, their place supply.”
2

Night, to be sure, afforded asylum to diverse sorts. Forced to conceal their identities by day, dissident minorities found fresh resolve after dark, successfully eluding the constraints of church, state, and popular prejudice. In England not only did political outsiders like the Jacobites cabal at night, but rival factions during times of heightened unrest used the cover of darkness to circulate incendiary broadsheets. In the tense period surrounding the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, mornings brought the discovery of handbills strewn about the streets of London. Years later, during the Hanover Succession Crisis, Mary, Countess Cowper remarked, “Not a night passing but some scandalous pamphlet or other was cried about.”
3

Religious dissenters congregated at night much in the tradition of early Christians during the Roman persecution. In the Middle Ages, Cathars, Waldensians, and other heretical sects assembled secretly. Their enemies circulated rumors of midnight orgies. Of a sect in 1427, the Sienese friar Bernadino wrote, “Deep in the night they all get together, men and women in the same room, and they stir up quite a broth among themselves.” Crypto-Jews, like the
marranos
in Spain, worshipped in private and committed isolated acts of defiance. So in early seventeenth-century Seville, for two nights in a row, signs appeared on the door of the Church of San Isidro proclaiming, “Long live the laws of Moses. They are the best.” Late one evening in 1551, a small band of Italian Jews, during the Jewish festival week of Purim, roamed freely through the empty streets of Rome, even at one point masquerading as the nightwatch.
4

On the heels of the Reformation, Protestant minorities, fearing arrest, held nocturnal services, including weddings and burials. Reportedly, French Protestants (
Huguenots
) acquired their name from meetings at night in the city of Tours, where once the spirit of a medieval monarch, King Hugo, was said to haunt the streets. Whether true or not, secret assemblies for reading and discussion were customary in French cities. Persecuted Anabaptists in Strasbourg congregated in nearby forests. According to an eyewitness in 1576, two hundred men and women prayed and listened to sermons, having first taken secret “paths and by-ways” protected by guards. “The many lighted candles looked like wolves’ eyes shining among the trees and bushes on a dark night.” Some may have been.
5

François Morellon la Cave,
Night Meeting of the Adamites,
eighteenth century. An antiauthoritarian religious sect active at different times in England and other parts of Europe. Seeking to regain the innocence of the Garden of Eden, they worshipped in the nude.

In Britain, Catholic recusants occasionally met at night for services and sacraments. Of a widow in 1640, a Monmouth gentleman noted, “She was unlawfully buried by night in the church, she being a papist.” In the wake of the Clarendon Code re-establishing the primacy of the Church of England after the Civil War, numerous nonconformists met covertly. The diary of Oliver Heywood in Yorkshire is filled with evening excursions to preach in private homes, some nearly too crowded with followers to enter. Years later, during another spasm of Anglican persecution, the Manchester dissenter Thomas Jolly wrote, “Our danger of being deprived of our priviledges wholly made us meet in the evening and the night-time mostly according to the example of the primitive christians.”
6

Refugees from daylight also included victims of disease, lepers and other sufferers whose physical disfigurements exposed them to daily scorn. During outbreaks of plague, urban officials frequently restricted victims and their families to home, with doors barred from the outside, and, in London beginning in 1519, marked with a red cross and the plaintive inscription “Lord Have Mercy Upon Us.” Often, inmates were unable to acquire fresh water and food, much less receive the help of friends. Still, at night, persons managed to escape, either fleeing to the countryside or returning home before daybreak with provisions. During an outbreak in Florence, the gold beater Alessandro Conti, in a frenzied effort to safeguard his son, lowered him one night from a household window. Of London’s Great Plague, Daniel Defoe recounted the “running of distempered people about in the streets” at night, who were nearly impossible for officials to curb.
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No less common were homosexuals. By the sixteenth century or earlier, European cities including Florence, Venice, and Geneva contained homosexual networks, with London, Paris, and Amsterdam all following suit by the 1700s. In many localities, sodomy was a capital offense, which it became in England at the urging of
Henry V
III. In London, more than twenty homosexual brothels, known as “molly-houses,” were raided in 1726. At Margaret Clap’s house, with “beds in every room,” thirty or forty men were said to assemble each evening. Wherever the location, night was widely favored as the safest time for sexual encounters. In Tuscany, la
notte
was a popular metaphor for sodomy. The Florentine court chiefly responsible for the prosecution of homosexuals in the late Middle Ages was titled the Officials of the Night. In Paris, public gardens were favorite sites, where clumps of shrubs and trees provided shelter on moonlit evenings. On a summer night in 1723, the abbé de la Vieuxville informed a fellow stroller in the Tuileries, “I see you here every evening. If you want to, come with me under the yew trees, for there’s no staying here because the moonlight is too bright and there are too many people around.” Less often, nighttime for homosexuals posed risks of its own. In Florence, Jacopo di Niccolò Panuzzi, amid the gathering darkness of evening, offered money to a young male for the commission of “shameful gestures,” only to discover that the “youth” was a constable.
8

II

Their shortliv’d jubilee the creatures keep,

Which but endures, whilst tyrant-man does sleep.

ANNE FINCH, 1713
9

Religious and political minorities, the diseased and disabled, and homosexuals—all were wayfarers instead of permanent denizens of the nocturnal world. Rather than laying claim to darkness, each sought, as the French saying went, to make “a hole in the night”—or, as a Spanish rabbi remarked, “to hide from the world.” Their scattered numbers only enhanced their anonymity. Quite different was the larger body of people for whom nighttime spawned an alternate existence, a separate realm rather than just a passing refuge.
10

Many evenings, few looked forward to sunset more eagerly than did the indigent and dispossessed. Along with unskilled laborers and struggling peasants, the preindustrial countryside teemed with vagrants and beggars, many of them refugees from regional wars and economic dislocation. Predominantly male and single, they streamed to cities, where poverty, according to conservative estimates, swelled during years of economic crisis to between 20 and 30 percent of municipal populations. Having scant opportunities for employment, these unfortunates, in Daniel Defoe’s words, comprised “the miserable, that really pinch and suffer want.”
11

At night, indigent men and women grew bold. Darkness freed untold numbers from the control of their betters, including, for some, the oversight of masters. “They lie close in their dens and holes all the day, and at night range the country for their prey,” fumed a contemporary. Anxious superiors likened the movements of the lower classes to those of owls, wolves, and other nocturnal creatures—“wicked night birds,” groused a commentator. “They are like the beasts that creep forth in the night,” declared Solomon Stoddard of Massachusetts. Such comparisons attested to both their prowess and their prevalence at night. Paintings by artists as disparate as Leonaert Bramer, David Teniers the Younger, and Johann Konrad Seekatz reveal not only the nighttime camps of the poor but also their favored haunts for camaraderie and drink. “Those who appear,” observed Oliver Goldsmith in 1759, “no longer now wear their daily mask, nor attempt to hide their lewdness or their misery.”
12

Johann Konrad Seekatz,
Gypsies Before a Campfire
, eighteenth century.

Impatient of patriarchal authority, the young were also drawn to evening hours—apprentices, students, and other adolescents whose subordination was more often the consequence of age than class. For adults, the young were a persistent concern. The years between seventeen and twenty-seven, declared the sixteenth-century scholar Roger Ascham, were “the most dangerous of all in a man’s life.” Moralists warned of their restless temperaments and the need for close control. Apprenticeship, undertaken by young males of modest origins, offered training over a period of years in a craft or trade while supplying moral supervision both on the job and off. Across Europe, the institution was a popular means of socializing adolescents, as well as a cheap source of labor. Although large numbers failed to complete their training, London alone by the early seventeenth century contained upwards of twenty-five thousand apprentices, roughly 12 percent of its population. Not only were they supposed to reside in their masters’ households, but there was little free time except for meals and, at most, a midday rest.
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