LONDON – As the wedding bells echo from Westminster Abbey and millions tune in to watch the royal nuptials, the media will replay over and again the story of how Prince William and Kate Middleton began their fairy-tale romance at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where they met as frisky art-history students in 2001. (William later changed his major to geography.) The 600-year-old college has been elevated in the popular imagination as a magical Old World setting for royal love. It has even received the full-blown Hollywood treatment in a lavish Lifetime movie, which depicts the dewy-eyed undergrads frolicking through its medieval cloisters and leafy, cobbled alleys.
Journalists and tourists who have lately made the pilgrimage to the hallowed campus 55 miles north of Edinburgh, St. Andrews appears stately, dignified, and predictably dull, as manicured as the ancient Scottish golf courses that surround it. But hidden away in one of the more modern university buildings, near the police station, is a cache of erotic relics from Britain’s longest-running and most perverse club, which boasted as a member none other than one of Prince William’s royal ancestors.
Few visitors to the Museum of the University of St. Andrews know to inquire about the BBWCC, the “Beggar’s Benison and Wig Club Collection,” although it is notorious with curators and a small group of scholars. But if you make a formal application (and the serious academic purpose of your research is accepted), staff members will take you to a clinical room, don latex gloves, and slowly unpack several archival boxes of rare historical artifacts.
There are drinking glasses in the shape of giant phalluses. Lewd platters are engraved with surreal pornographic images, including erections shaped as lighthouses and roosters with human penis heads. One prize exhibit is a snuff box filled with female pubic hair that was plucked by one of William’s most debauched and lecherous royal relatives, King George IV, the prince’s fourth great-granduncle, who ruled from 1820 to 1830. And a timeworn case contains a ghoulish wooden mannequin’s head whose peculiar erotic purpose can be traced back to another randy royal forebear, King Charles II. (The bloodline of the Merry Monarch, who ruled from 1660 to 1685,,runs to Prince William through his mother, Lady Diana, via several of Charles II’s illegitimate sons.)
What is intriguing to the modern eye is that these ribald artifacts hail from a period in history that most of us assume to be very conservative, with men in powdered wigs and women in tight corsets politely courting over tea and buttered scones. The bizarre relics belong to a group called the Beggar’s Benison, the longest-lasting of the dozens of “enlightened” sex clubs that emerged across Britain in the Georgian era and are referred to generally as Hellfire Clubs. This gentleman’s society was founded in 1732 in a damp Scottish fishing village called Anstruther, a few miles from St. Andrews on the East Neuk of Fife. Despite the detailed information we have on its lurid club rituals, they have so far never been featured in a British period drama. (Then again, it’s hard to imagine Sir Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson accepting the roles.) According to the surviving club minutes and firsthand accounts, the Benison’s male members-who were drawn from all sections of educated Scottish society-would gather every month in an Anstruther tavern. Early in the evening, naked village girls, known as posture molls, posed on tables in acrobatic positions to reveal “the Secrets of Nature.” Pornographic texts were read. They would then make toasts from the lewd drinking vessels, known as prick glasses.The club president would then open up the wooden box, revealing a motley wig that, according to club tradition, had been woven from the pubic hairs of King Charles II’s many mistresses. Members would take turns wearing it, evidently using the talisman to enhance their sexual potency.
