If William Bankes MP had been a little more discreet, perhaps he would not have been forced to flee abroad and leave his beloved stately home, Kingston Lacey in Dorset, and his considerable collection of Egyptian antiquities.Ī nineteenth-century male brothel, from a French study of prostitution, where boys from the street are made available to clients. Just as the top-drawer whores went unacknowledged and unmolested by the police, so a blind eye was often turned to homosexuality in high places if the protagonists were sufficiently well connected, and cover-ups to protect the reputation of the culprits were not unknown. In some respects, the homosexual underworld operated like a parallel universe. 4 Of course the expression covers an entire range of sexual behaviour, but, for the duration of this chapter, ‘homosexual’ best serves to describe the personalities and activities depicted. There have been many words for homosexuality and gay sex, but the actual term ‘homosexual’ originates with a Hungarian physician named Benkert in 1869. Like many homosexuals of this era, he was condemned to end his days in exile. 3 Leaving scandal in his wake, Bankes died abroad in 1855. Under the Buggery Statute of 1533, initiated by Henry VIII, homosexual activity was technically punishable with death, although conviction was difficult, as the witness had to have seen penetration.
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Unfortunately for him, however, in 1841 he was caught in a compromising position with a guardsman in Green Park, and fled the country before he could go on trial for a second time. 2 This appears to be a clear example of how far the establishment would go to protect an open secret, and Bankes’s reputation seemed safe. Aristocrats, professors and clergymen testified to the effect that ‘he was never yet known to be guilty of any expression bordering on licentiousness or profaneness and the jury acquitted him despite incriminating evidence on the grounds that his character was not that associated with sodomites’. 1 Bankes was lucky to escape a jail sentence. In 1833, William Bankes, MP for Dorset, was discovered ‘standing behind the screen of a place for making water against Westminster Abbey walls, in company with a soldier named Flower, and of having been surprised with his breeches and braces unbuttoned at ten at night, his companion’s dress being in similar disorder’. ‘Does it really matter what these affectionate people do – so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses?’
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