Reclaiming the Queer history of Chiswick House

Queer Georgians, by Dr Anthony Delaney

Part of the Queer Minds Festival, Saturday 6 September

A new book by Dr Anthony Delaney uncovers a side to Georgian England which has been forgotten. ‘Recovers’ is probably a better word to use than ‘uncovers’, as this is described by Penguin books as a ‘restorative’ history, restoring the Queer past deliberately erased by the moralistic Victorians.

In Queer Georgians, Dr Delaney traces the stories of people who dared to challenge society’s expectations regarding gender: people like two women, exiled from their families, who set up a utopian homestead in a remote Welsh cottage, inspiring a generation of Romantic poets, and the celebrated Chevalier d’Eon, soldier, diplomat and spy, who challenged a rival to a fencing match. Onlookers held a sweepstake, not on who would win, but on whether the Chevalier was a man or a woman.

Dr Delaney spoke to The Chiswick Calendar about the references to Chiswick in his book and in the PhD which inspired it.

Taste in the High Life, 1746 etching by William Hogarth – V&A

Hogarth’s pictorial references

The satirist William Hogarth, who lived in Chiswick, provides a lot of information about the attitudes of Georgian society in his pictures. He took aim at “Frenchified effeminacy”, says Anthony, “the very rich, the elite”.

READ ALSO: Hogarth’s house

In Taste in the High Life Hogarth satirises the clothes and behaviour of fashionable society – the woman on the left with her black servant, a child who she has dressed up in a feathered turban; another woman with a ludicrously full skirt and a man with a huge fur muff sharing their delight in a tiny porcelain teacup.

Anthony interprets the portrayal of the man as one of “inadequate manliness”.

Considered the most important English artist of his generation, Hogarth’s satirical caricatures, distributed as mass produced prints, were hugely popular, but Hogarth was also a portrait painter in the more conventional sense.

Anthony devotes a chapter to two of Hogarth’s portrait subjects: Stephen Fox and John Lord Hervey, who lived together at 31 Great Burlington Street. It is clear from their correspondence that they had set up home together, rather than just sharing the same house.

While people tend to have heard of Mollies – working class men who offered men sex in the street or other public places such as Margaret Clap’s molly house, a coffee house in Holborn popular in the 1720s – they do not know so much about men who set up home together – ‘cotqueans’, Anthony tells me.

It might be difficult for them to have a home like they did on the continent, Fox wrote. Sodomy was punishable by death in England at that time; (the word ‘homosexuality’ was not used until later).

Describing the completion of the decoration and furnishings, Hervey says: ‘It’s quite finished. And looks the smuggest, sprucest, cheerfullest thing I ever saw. Nothing can improve it but a piece of moveable goods of my acquaintance [ie. Fox], which I expect home with more impatience than I can tell you …’

“Men didn’t talk about ‘making a home'”, Anthony tells me. Their correspondence makes the intimacy of their relationship quite clear.

The Hervey Conversation Piece by William Hogarth – National Trust; Hervey stands at the centre, wearing the gold key, the badge of his office as Vice-Chamberlain to the Royal Household. Stephen Fox is seated at the table 

“There are men, there are women, and then there are Herveys”

Hogarth leaves clues to their sexuality in the painting, the symbolism of which Fox and Hervey may not have been aware.

“Fruit baskets were a well-known symbol of fertility, and Hogarth’s artful placement of a fruit basket on the dry and dusty floor was an indication that this was a sexual relationship doomed to be barren”.

I asked Anthony how he could be certain that was Hogarth’s intention. How does he know Hogarth did not just have a bare space on the canvas that he needed to fill with something, and randomly chose a fruit basket instead of flowers or a piece of furniture?

“You’d have to take that up with some very accomplished art historians who have spent years studying the hints and clues Hogarth put in his pictures”.

The tipping chair on which the clergyman is standing on the left of the picture is also a clue, as it is a sign of disorder, of society being overturned.

Hervey was also married to Mary Lepell, with whom he had eight children, and had other affairs with women, including Anne Vane, over whom he quarrelled with the Prince of Wales, and possibly also Princess Caroline and his great friend, the socialite Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

Referring to him as a third sex, Mary is reported to have said: “There are men, there are women, and then there are Herveys”.

(L) William Kent; government art collection; (R) Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, by Jonathan Richardson, c 1717-1719, portraits courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Queer relationship between Lord Burlington and William Kent, the creators of Chiswick House

Hogarth also portrayed Richard Boyle, the Lord Burlington who created Chiswick House, and William Kent, its architect, known also as the father of English landscape gardening, in a satirical pamphlet.

They are not featured in the book, because Anthony decided the evidence for their relationship was not “bullet-proof” in the same way as Fox and Hervey’s, but he believes they were “Queer”, suggesting in his PhD they were also cotqueans.

“People forget that Burlington and Kent lived together. I think their relationship was more than that of master and architect”.

Like Fox and Hervey, they had also gone on a Grand Tour of the continent together. Anthony chooses the word “Queer” deliberately, as he does not suggest they were a gay couple. Both had relationships with women, in Lord Burlington’s case a long and by all accounts happy marriage to Dorothy, with whom he had several children.

READ ALSO: 300 years of Chiswick House Gardens 

There were contemporary clues to the intimacy of their relationship, he says. In Hogarth’s Bad Taste of the Town print, published in 1723 (around the time they started work together on Chiswick House), the artist mocks the contemporary fashion for foreign culture.

The Bad Taste of the Town by William Hogarth – © British Museum

The Bad Taste of the Town

The picture satirises Italian opera, masquerades and pantomimes, and Palladian architecture. In the background is Burlington House.

“Kent is standing over the doorway. On either side of him are Raphael and Michaelangelo, notorious sodomites. Everyone would have got that reference, it would have been impossible to depict those two artists without an undercurrent that something was amiss. Same sex desire is writ large.

“Kent’s name is abbreviated to KNT, clearly alluding to female genitalia, and Burlington is on the ground pointing up at KNT with his stick, a very obvious reference to an erect penis.

“It was drawn after Kent had moved into Burlington House and Kent is depicted as the gatekeeper”.

While no historian can ever know absolutely who was having sex with whom, they can pick up on clues, Anthony tells me.

Data from paternity tests in the US in 2004 found around 28 percent of fathers were biologically unrelated to their children. By definition these were men who were questioning the paternity of their children, but it proves the point that historians cannot really tell the truth of sexual relationships.

Another clue to the intimacy of the relationship of Lord Burlington and William Kent, says Anthony, is that once he moved into Burlington House, Kent switched to calling it “our house”, and when Chiswick House had been built, 16 November 1732, Kent wrote to Burlington describing how he was ‘melancholy’, lying by the obelisk  (what more phallic symbol could you have?) and thinking about him.

Anthony is not the first to have read their relationship as intimate. Art historian Gary Thomas wrote of Chiswick House as a ‘homoerotic milieu’ and thought there could be no doubt of Kent’s same sex attraction.

Architectural historian John Summerson, writing in the 1950s, ventured that Burlington and Kent had become “extremely fond” of each other:

“One imagines Kent’s vitality went straight to the heart of the young patrician, nor did anything disturb the happy friendship of nearly a lifetime”.

Chiswick House is listed already by English Heritage as one of seven sites linked to England’s LGBTQ+ history not because of Burlington and Kent’s relationship but because of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire’s romantic entanglements with Mary Graham and Lady Elizabeth Foster, known as Bess.

‘Bess, estranged from her husband and in financial distress, forged an intense bond with Georgiana, leading to a profound and enduring relationship. Their connection evolved into, what could be described in modern terms, as a polyamorous arrangement spanning 25 years with Georgiana’s husband, William Cavendish’.

Miniature portrait of Georgiana (right) and Lady Elizabeth Foster (left) by Jean-Urbain Guérin, 1791 © The Wallace Collection

A concerted effort to erase queer people from the archive

Why is it important to know these things?

“There has been a deliberate effort to erase Queer people from the archive”, said Anthony. “The other reason is that it informs who we are and where we are going.

“When you have people like Elon Musk saying queerness is just part of a woke 21st century mindset, this history shows that we stand on the shoulders of these people,  and they are fundamental to understanding where we stand now. Queer lust did not begin with Oscar Wilde”.

Dr Anthony Delaney will be talking about his book Queer Georgians at the Queer Minds Festival at 21 Soho on Saturday 6 September

Book tickets: Queer Minds Festival