Clement Knox - Strange Antics: A History of Seduction

CONTENTS

When we behold two males fighting for the possession of the female, or several male birds displaying their gorgeous plumage, and performing strange antics before an assembled body of females, we cannot doubt that, though led by instinct, they know what they are about, and consciously exert their mental and bodily powers.

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, Chapter VIII

Clement Knox was born in Hong Kong in 1989. He has a BA in Modern History from the University of Oxford and an MA in International Relations from John Hopkins University. He currently lives in London, where he works for Waterstones. Strange Antics is his first book.

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright Clement Knox 2020

Cover image Sandro Botticelli (1444-1510) Florentine School. The Birth of Venus, 1482. Oil on canvas, 1.72 x 2.78 m. Florence, The Uffizi Gallery. (Photo by Christophel Fine Art/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Clement Knox asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008285678

Ebook Edition February 2020 ISBN: 9780008285692

Version: 2019-12-13

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He could not fidget as a man well might, standing in the dock of the Old Bailey charged with a capital offence because his thumbs were bound together with twine. This seemed to be the end of the road for Colonel Francis Charteris. After a long and infamous career as Britains most notorious rake, Charteris, now in his late sixties, stood accused of the rape of his former maidservant Anne Bond. Standing before a judge and jury in February 1730 he had little hope of obtaining an acquittal. He was one of Londons most renowned sexual predators, so detested for his lechery and his abusive methods that his house in Hanover Square had been attacked on more than one occasion by angry mobs. He had only managed to have annulled a previous conviction for rape through generous bribery (what was then known as a Golden Nol. Pros.). His trial took place amid a blizzard of Grub Street pamphlets that chronicled his misdeeds, real and fictional, and denounced him as the Rape-Master-General of Great Britain. In taverns, coffee-houses and salons throughout the capital the most scandalous rumours were spread about him, including allegations that he had raped his own grandmother.

When Charteris was duly found guilty the courtroom erupted in cheers. A few days later he was summoned to the same place for sentencing. Dressed in a cavalry officers uniform, attended to by a brace of footmen, he was sentenced to hang at Tyburn along with nine other common criminals brought before the magistrate in the same session. His carriage back to Newgate Prison was followed by a large crowd of happy Londoners, eager to advertise and celebrate the imminent demise of the nations most prolific and unprincipled sexual adventurer. The most popular Whore-master in the three Kingdoms, as one contemporary account had it, said to have lured as many Women into his toils as would set up a Sultan.

***

Charteris had been born in Edinburgh at some point in the 1660s. His father was a wealthy landowner in Dumfriesshire and the Charterises were a family with ancient ties to the Scottish aristocratic elite. His youth was almost exactly coterminous with the reign of the restored Charles II, the Merry Monarch, whose priapic rule signalled a dramatic end to Cromwells Puritan Protectorate. The libidinism of Charless court was without parallel in English history. The king very much led by example. His scepter and his prick are of a length, the Earl of Rochester reported, And she may sway the one who plays with th other. St Jamess was a long way from the Charteris family seat in Amisfield. Nevertheless, the cyprian spirit of the age made itself felt on the young man and would find morbid expression in him in his later years.

Charteriss devilish ways first became a matter of public record in the 1690s, when he joined the army of the Duke of Marlborough in Flanders. It is unclear how much, if any, combat Charteris saw. What is known is that he soon became a figure of general loathing for his ill-treatment of his brother officers. Charteris had become an inveterate card cheat as well as a ruthless loan shark. It seems as though he used his skills in one arena to create customers for the other. These demoralising activities, combined with various unspecified abuses of the local population, secured his expulsion from the army twice, the second occasion shortly before the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. Thereupon Charteris returned to Scotland where he paid his way back into the army, came into his inheritance following his fathers death, and, to general amazement, managed to marry. The details of this union, like so much about his earlier life, are unknown, but it yielded a daughter, Janet Charteris, who would later do no service to the cause of British women through her loyalty to her villainous father.

Rich and married, Charteris now embarked on a phenomenal spree. He invested his income at the card table, where he systematically bilked the Scottish elite of their wealth. The master of the marked card and the loaded die, he had soon multiplied his net worth. On one particularly scandalous occasion he managed to inveigle his way into the Edinburgh salon of the Duchess of Queensberry and, with the aid of a strategically situated mirror, rob his hostess blind during a card game in her own drawing room. (This enraged her husband the Duke so much that he lobbied Parliament to change the law concerning the amount of money one could wager while gaming.)