Do What Thou Wilt: The Hellfire Club's Aristocratic Orgies

In 1751, Sir Francis Dashwood leased Medmenham Abbey — a ruined medieval monastery on the Thames — and renovated it as the headquarters of his Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe. The club's motto, etched into a stained glass window above the door, was Rabelais's maxim: "Fais ce que tu voudras" — Do what thou wilt. Dashwood filled the abbey with an altar, pornographic frescoes, and candlesticks, then invited the cream of Georgian England to join what was officially a dining society. Members included a dozen Members of Parliament, the First Lord of the Admiralty, the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Benjamin Franklin, who spent much of the 1750s–1770s in London attending club gatherings. The club met twice a year for multi-day sessions. Members wore monk's robes, brought women described in records as being of a "cheerful, lively disposition," and conducted mock Catholic masses that deliberately inverted the ritual. What actually occurred beyond that is partly lost to history: club steward Paul Whitehead burned most of the records before his death in 1774. What survived paints a picture of theatrical libertinism — aristocrats costumed as clergy performing black-comedy religious rites in a restored Gothic abbey, with all the debauchery that implies. By the 1760s, Dashwood moved the meetings to a network of chalk caves he had excavated beneath West Wycombe Hill, crossing a man-made underground stream he named the River Styx. The caves' inner sanctum — called the Banqueting Hall — was carved at the depth of a church steeple and decorated with phallic carvings and classical mythological scenes. Political backlash arrived when member John Wilkes was expelled from Parliament and turned against his former friends, leaking accounts of the club's activities to the press. The club dissolved in 1766. The Hellfire Caves remain a tourist attraction today.