Sir Francis Dashwood and the Hellfire Club

West Wycombe Park, Buckinghamshire

If you find yourself in Buckinghamshire, you might enjoy stopping in the little village of West Wycombe.

It is very nearly as pretty as dear old Lacock, although the road to Oxford goes right through it and the odd oversized lorry rather spoils the effect of the several Tudor cottages and coaching inns.

West Wycombe Park is open in the summer months and you can admire this gorgeous residence, exquisite inside and out, set to advantage by the side of the lake.

Dashwood Mausoleum and St Lawrence Church

You will not fail to notice that, high up on the opposite hill, there is a rather grandiose structure that dominates the landscape.

It is the Dashwood Mausoleum, crowned by the tower of St Lawrence’s Church.

They were both commissioned in the late 1740s by the then owner of West Wycombe Park, Sir Francis Dashwood.

Sir Francis Dashwood

By everybody’s standards, Sir Francis was not a religious man and even the building of this church was dismissed by his contemporaries as for show rather than prayer. Indeed, why else build a church at the top of a hill, when the entire congregation lives at the bottom?

As the story goes, during his visits to Italy on his Grand Tours, Sir Francis had developed a profound antipathy for the Roman Catholic Church. This was later shown in a variety of ways, not least in having himself painted as a Franciscan monk in irreverent parodies of Renaissance art. 

In one of those paintings, the deity ‘San Francisco di Wycombo’ worships is Venus, and the book he reverently peruses is not the Bible, but a copy of an erotic novel, while the profile of Dashwood’s friend and partner in mischief, Lord Sandwich, peers from the halo.

Sir Francis Dashwood and the Earl of Sandwich were members of the notorious club that began by meeting at the George and Dragon inn as the Order of the Knights of St Francis, then at Medmenham Abbey where they became the Friars of Medmenham, and lastly in the caves dug under the hill crowned by the Dashwood Mausoleum, known to this day as the Hellfire Caves.

The Hellfire Caves are a network of man-made caverns excavated by the local villagers who were employed to mine chalk and flint. The chalk was used to build the road between West Wycombe and High Wycombe, and also the church, the Mausoleum and some of the houses in the village.

Hellfire Caves Entrance

The caves were used as a meeting place for Sir Francis Dashwood’s gathering of ‘friars’, by then renamed the Hellfire Club. Its members included various important XVIII century figures such as William Hogarth, John Wilkes, Thomas Potter and John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich. Though not believed to have been a member, Benjamin Franklin was a close friend of Dashwood’s who visited the caves on more than one occasion.

Two of those notable personages are immortalised in the names chosen for some of the chambers. The route through the caves progresses from the Entrance Hall to the Steward’s Chamber and Whitehead’s Cave, then passes through Lord Sandwich’s Circle, Franklin’s Cave , the Banqueting Hall, the Triangle, the Miner’s Cave and finally, across a subterranean river named the Styx, into the Inner Temple, where the meetings of the Hellfire Club were held.

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.”

Meetings occurred twice a month, with a gathering of all members for a fortnight or so in June or September, and rumours of black magic, satanic rituals and orgies circulated in the area and beyond. Nevertheless, it would appear that the majority of the participants were merely interested in drinking, singing bawdy songs and meeting in privacy with their mistresses, while a handful of others, which included Sir Francis himself, were genuinely interested in the revival of some ancient ‘pagan’ cults.

A satirical engraving of John Wilkes

There is a very entertaining story about a practical joke played on Lord Sandwich at one of the meetings of the club. John Wilkes, the notorious radical, contrived to bring a baboon to the proceedings, dressed the animal in ‘phantastic garb’, kept him secreted away, and eventually released him at a chosen moment without being noticed, by means of an elaborate contraption. Finally freed from his place of confinement, the baboon leapt on Lord Sandwich’s shoulders. Shocked by the sudden appearance of the shrieking creature, his lordship was gripped by the fear that it was the very Devil whom they had been invoking, come to carry him away. The harder he tried to shake the baboon off, the tighter it clung, while Sandwich cried: “Spare me gracious Devil! Spare a wretch who never was sincerely your servant. I sinned only from vanity of being in the fashion. Thou knowest I never have been half so wicked as I pretended, never have been able to commit the thousandth part of the vices which I have boasted of. Leave me therefore and go to those who are more truly devoted to your service. I am but half a sinner!”

Whether half- or full-measure sinners, and whatever the Hellfire Club had been up to in the bowels of the earth, by the late 1760s the party was over. The club was disbanded in 1766 and the caves, disused after Sir Francis Dashwood’s death in 1781, fell into disrepair. However, after the Second World War, they were renovated and turned into a visitors’ attraction by another Sir Francis Dashwood, a descendant of the notorious sybarite, and the profits used to refurbish the dilapidated family home.

If you find yourself in the area, do visit the caves for a remarkable experience.

So far I have heard no tales of naughty spectres haunting the caverns, but maybe this is just a story waiting to be written. So here’s to the Ghost of the Banqueting Hall :)

(Art and history sources: www.hellfirecaves.co.uk;  www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk and Wikipedia. Contemporary photos J. Starnes).