The Lives of the English Rakes Fergus Linnane Portrait, 342pp, £18.99 ISBN 074995096X

How lovely to be reading about English rakes as John Prescott goes prancing through the tabloids with a lady in red leather trousers. Fergus Linnane is a former Mail and Mirror journalist and author of numerous books on London vice. So you can expect the "I don't believe it!" prurience of tabloid headlines as he recounts tales of wickedness long ago. A pity he didn't bring his narrative bang up to date.

The blurb says that rakes are "impossibly handsome, cynical and dangerous", which hardly applies to Prescott. Their heyday was the 18th century - in Dr Johnson's dictionary of 1755, a rake is defined as "a man addicted to pleasure". The reality, says Linnane, was more complex. The hedonists who rampage through his book are psychopaths and poets, kill-ers and wits, often ending as forlorn and booze-sodden wrecks.

The monarch often played a leading role: George IV, the Prince Regent and Bertie, Prince of Wales, all kiss their mistresses in these pages. Rakes first appeared after Charles II's restoration in 1660, when theatres reopened and young blades swaggered through town. Charles gathered a "Merry Gang" of courtiers to keep him amused and to provide a debauched environment in which to enjoy his women, a pattern copied by many of his successors.

The style was set by the dazzling Earl of Rochester, who wrote an obscene playlet called Sodom in which the King's French mistress was portrayed as Clithoris. Challenged by the King to write his epitaph, Rochester came up with: "We have a pretty witty King/Whose word no man relies on/Who never said a foolish thing/ Nor ever did a wise one" - a judgement that has survived the centuries. His friend the Duke of Buckingham was in end- less scrapes, including killing the Earl of Shrewsbury in a duel over the earl's wife. Yet Louis XIV called him "the only true gentleman I have ever met". Questioned in parliament about the incompetence of his administration, Buckingham dangerously blamed the King and Duke of York: "I can hunt the hare with a pack of hounds, but not with a brace of lobsters."

The rakes also hunted in packs, and the streets of London became unsafe. In March 1712, five peers were involved in a scuffle in a tavern on the Strand. When the landlady was killed, "the gentlemen laughed and ordered that it be added to their bill". Such cases might end up in court, where miscreants would be acquitted or fined derisory sums. Any woman they came across was fair game; outraged husbands were an occupational hazard to be bought off or ignored. Only if the monarch was offended might anyone be forced to flee.

The "Rape-Master General", Colonel Francis Charteris, was a truly evil man, a professional gambler who made a fortune out of the South Sea Bubble. An object of hatred for the London mob, he was cashiered by Queen Anne, tried twice for rape and sentenced to death, but pardoned by King George I. He and his prostitutes spawned Hogarth's Rake's Progress and Harlot's Progress (Charteris is the fat lecher in plate one), as well as John Cleland's Fanny Hill.

A contemporary of Charteris, the Marquis of Queensbury - "Old Q" - lived to the grand age of 84 and is rather a favourite of mine; his womanising was legendary. Queensbury once made a celebrated wager that a four-wheeled carriage could travel at 19 miles an hour, and for this he designed a special light racing frame with a jockey as driver. Numerous horses died in the trials, but he won the bet.

However, these men appear here not because of their quarrels, duelling and scheming, but because of their insatiable sex drives and the bawdy women they fornicated with. Familiar figures live and love again: the Hellfire Club and Sir Francis Dashwood, the Earl of Harrington, George Selwyn, MP and necrophile, assorted bawds, whores and sadists, along with the renowned Monks of Medmenham. Here I felt the author, who calls the chapter "The Mystery of Medmenham", should have unbuttoned a bit. We have all seen Eyes Wide Shut. Whatever went on in that film can't be far off the mark: men and women, usually aristocratic, naked except for masks, having it away like satyrs in mock-satanic rituals.

Linnane has left out the politics, which is a pity, as this means we fail to understand why anyone was fascinated by these syphilitic yobs; and most of the stories are lifted from other books. Never mind, it's entertaining reading. And how different from the sex life of our own dear Queen.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website