No, Emma, your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English. He may be very “aimable,” have very good manners, and be very agreeable; but he can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people: nothing really amiable about him. (Austen 114)
1This is the verdict Mr Knightley delivers on Frank Churchill, a younger and livelier man viewed by Knightley–more or less avowedly–as a rival for the affections of the titular heroine. The last of her novels to be published during Austen’s lifetime, Emma revolves in part around the construction of a benevolent and unreservedly English moral authority, discussed more particularly in the excerpt in relation to male politeness. Knightley upbraids the absent Churchill for failing to visit his new stepmother, Mrs Weston, following her marriage to his father. In doing so, Knightley argues that the young man forces her into the uncomfortable position of defending this unknown stepson to her friends and neighbours, against accusations of a slight of which she is in fact the primary victim.
2Through the character of Knightley, Austen establishes a distinction between French “amabilité” and English “amiability,” understood not as equivalent translations for a similar concept, but rather as two distinct and competing systems of politeness, affect, and social obligations. Emotions and affective ties become nationalised, and it is rather obvious which system Knightley values the most. In the context of the 1815 publication of the novel, coming at the close of the Napoleonic Wars, this flash of nationalist pride against Frenchness can perhaps be envisioned as a much softened callback to social, ideological and geo-political tensions that had characterised Franco-English relations for most of the previous century.
3The temporal focus of the present essay turns back to that period of heightened tension, through the investigation of two real-life events from the mid-eighteenth century. They too concern masculine attitudes falling short in their behaviours towards women, in much more brutal contexts than the social faux pas depicted by Austen. Specifically, this essay seeks to explore the national and, perhaps surprisingly, the international implications attributed to instances of sexual violence by Englishmen against Englishwomen on English soil.
4The facts are the following: in the 1750s and 1760s, two English gentlemen were judged in two separate trials for the rapes of socially inferior women. Daniel Lackey, Esquire, was tried at the Old Bailey in April 1757 for the rape of Christian Streeter, a young provincial woman staying in the capital for the first time. In March of 1768, Frederick Calvert, 6th Baron of Baltimore was tried at the Surrey Assize for the abduction and rape of Sarah Woodcock, a London milliner. The courts proceedings, transcribing the testimonies and questions of the various legal and civil participants in the two trials, have survived for both. Each time the spectre of France looms over the events, raised in large part by the social standing of the accused, yet subsequently used as a rhetorical device by both legal teams across the proceedings.
5In the hands of the prosecution, the perceived Francophilia of the accused was portrayed as the root of all aristocratic ills: deceitfulness, indolence and, more critically in the context of a rape trial, sexual perversion. The defendants’ affinity for French culture was presented as inherently suspicious and largely to blame for their alleged predatory behaviour against chaste English maids. Whereas for the defence, the taint of Gallic infection lay squarely on the prosecutrix, depicted as vain and spiteful, their supposed attraction to French fashion marking them as sexually available but also sexually manipulative, seducing affluent men only to perjury themselves later in hopes of even greater gains.
6In both the Lackey and Baltimore trials, the central issue of whether a sexual assault has occurred is investigated in part by asserting who of the defendant or the prosecutrix is the most Francophile, to be understood as the most morally compromised. These diverging but complementary approaches by the legal teams played to the assumed Francophobia of the court, supposedly representative of the nation at large. These judicial and rhetorical strategies must be replaced in a wider context of simultaneous kinship and hostility between eighteenth-century France and England. These case studies stand as two specific examples within significant eighteenth-century source material testifying to both the enduring attraction of French culture on parts of English society, and the state of anxiety and nationalist exasperation such attraction appeared to have triggered in others. In a legal setting, the exploration of French influence on social, gendered, sexual behaviours and identities is utilised to negotiate literal life-or-death situations.
7Before discussing the two specific legal case studies in further details, they must be contextualised within the wider backdrop of Franco-English relations in the eighteenth century, and more specifically in the latter half of the century. This will enable a brief complementary overview of the judicial landscape within that same time frame, the better to grasp the legal understanding and response to sexual violence under which the Lackey and Baltimore trials were operating.
8Finally, the specifics of the two proceedings will be laid out, highlighting the presence in both of a joint rhetoric of Francophilia and Francophobia that played upon and echoed established stereotypes constructed along social and gendered lines.
9In Britons: Forging the Nation, Linda Colley stresses that Britain and France were in a state of “on and off” warfare from 1689 to 1815. Most of the conflicts up until the mid-eighteenth century were directly linked to France’s championing of Jacobite and Stuart claims to the British throne. By the mid-century, Jacobitism had become significantly less of a political threat, but this fraught state of affairs was prolonged through the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), the American War of Independence (1775-83, France joining in 78) and later by the French Revolution and the subsequent Revolutionary (1793-1802) and Napoleonic (1803-15) Wars. It must be noted that those successive conflicts can be characterised as assaults on Britain’s authority as a colonial and monarchical power, each time enacted at least partially through French offensives.
- 1 Emma’s praise of the “English verdure, English culture, English comfort […] sweet to the eye and sw (...)
10Eighteenth-century France was therefore identified as the “hostile Other” (Colley 5), but one against whom the project of a unified British identity could gradually take shape, in an attempt to construct a viable and cohesive sense of national awareness. By establishing their Gallic neighbour as a common enemy, cultural, historical and religious differences between England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland could be subdued, at least partially. This did not create a meaningful sense of blended identities, but rather “superimposed” Britishness over pre-existing and enduring loyalties and identities. Therefore, even though born out of hostile defiance, France has to be paradoxically credited for the “invention of Britishness” (Colley 1) as it manifested itself throughout the eighteenth century. In her contribution to the collective work English Masculinities 1600-1800 entitled “Manliness, Effeminacy and the French,” Michèle Cohen identifies a shift in the representations and comparisons of English and French masculinities, occurring across the eighteenth century specifically. Cohen thus argues that English taciturnity, touted as a national trait inherent in the male population, went from being lamented and mocked to being depicted by the end of the century as a marker of wholesomeness and trustworthiness. French male sociability meanwhile, characterised as civilising but somewhat effeminate, suffered the reversed trajectory, being increasingly depicted as affected and corrupting. What Cohen stresses particularly is that sincerity and roughness were presented as inherently English traits, establishing a dichotomy between false (French) and true (English) politeness, which the excerpt from Emma illustrates, proving the endurance of such a conception in the English cultural consciousness.1
- 2 “At his Return, he found a Nation lost as much in Barbarism as in Rebellion. And as the excellency (...)
- 3 “Criminal conversation” trials were legal actions established in the 17th century but becoming part (...)
11An example of the initial favouring of French manners is similarly discussed by Maximilian Novak in his now seminal essay on the “Libertine Offensive of the 1670s,” Novak cites in particular John Dryden’s 1672 “Defence of the Epilogue” in which the author presents the criticism levelled at the bawdy Restoration comedies as a metaphor for the animosity against the hedonistic court of Charles II. Dryden thus attributes the Merry King’s taste and relaxed manners to his stay in France, where he became “gallant and generous” (cited in Novak 5). “Defence of the Epilogue” presents the English people as naturally talented and sturdy, but rendered stiff and uneasy by their “breeding,” clinging to Elizabethan drama and unable to appreciate the new comic wit of the Restoration playwrights.2 Charles II, as an English king endowed with a French education, is presented as the cure to such social and aesthetic ills. For the opposite discourse and the mounting anxiety over French cultural invasion, Cohen locates it as emerging in the second half of the eighteenth century, having become something a common-place by its close. A similar argument appears in Donna T. Andrew’s Aristocratic Vice: The Attack on Duelling, Suicide, Adultery, and Gambling in Eighteenth-Century England. As its title suggests, Andrew retraces a history of eighteenth-century criticism against the aristocracy through the study of four specific vices identified as inherent in the English upper orders. She notes that gambling in particular was portrayed and decried by contemporaries as the result of French corruption, in part because numerous gaming houses hosting Faro tables, particularly popular among the aristocracy, were owned by Frenchmen. However, it appears that of the four vices investigated, only suicide was not directly blamed on the French. Indeed, Andrew remarks that several eighteenth-century commentators identified a French influence for the prevalence of trials for adultery, colloquially referred to as “crim con” trials (163-164).3 Similarly, in writings lamenting the enduring prevalence of duelling among the upper social echelons, the practice is being depicted as socially transgressive, alienating and dangerously un-English. Already in 1687, the churchman Thomas Comber writes in his Discourse upon Duels that duellists are unfit to live among proper English society, and should be relegated to “Conversation of barbarous Indians, or the Company of Out-laws and Banditti” (cited in Andrew 22). Mounting exasperation is palpable in Thomas McDonnell’s 1760 sermon The Eighth Commandment considered in its full extent, and particularly as applicable to the present reigning spirit of gameing: a sermon, published in the midst of the Seven Years’ War. The speaker worries that French soft power will succeed where open armed conflict had so far been less triumphant: “Shall then French Fashions and French Modes bring about, what French Arms, and even French Politicks have so long in vain attempted?” (cited in Andrew 189).
- 4 Colley explores how, in response to the lasting wound inflicted by Thomas Paine’s depiction of the (...)
12It seems necessary to note that the first legal case under study, the Lackey trial, took place during a period of open conflict against France and the second, Baltimore’s, was tried during peacetime. Nonetheless, as will be demonstrated, both displayed a similar recourse to Francophilia as an aggravating factor, used alternatively against the male upper-class defendants and the female claimants of middling origins. In 1757, as in 1768, criticism of the Francophile upper-class was prevalent, at the same time as the spread of Francophilia throughout the lower social echelons was met with increasing hostility and anxiety. On the one hand, the ruling elite was more and more perceived as inefficient and potentially two-faced in its links with the Gallic nation, a discontent that would be exacerbated later in the century. Both Colley and Andrew discuss in particular the deleterious effect of the Revolutionary Wars–engineering an alliance between the American colonies and the French crown–and the subsequent British loss as a tipping-point in the plebeian defiance against the ruling class.4 On the other hand, Robin Eagles chronicles a parallel, growing affinity among the middle orders for all things French in Francophilia in English Society, 1748-1815. Studying the complex equilibrium between Francophilia and Francophobia in that period, he posits that despite earlier attacks against the rampant Gallicism of the English aristocracy, the Francophile craze reached its paroxysm only in the second half of the century. Eagles identifies the year 1763–the end of Seven Years’ War resulting in an Anglo-Prussian victory–as marking the enthusiastic return of Anglo-French tourism and cultural exchanges. According to him, this in turn led to the spread of such leisure practices from the upper to the middling orders. He cites in particular “the regularity of the packets to and from the continent, and the establishment of tried-and-tested routes from the Channel ports to Paris and beyond” as offering a less daunting and less costly travelling experience, that would have gradually become available to “all but the completely destitute” (Eagles 121). Although most of the criticism against aristocratic values (or lack thereof) and habits seemingly originated from middling circles, not all individuals rejected the lure of French influence. This is particularly relevant to the Lackey and Baltimore trials, where the prosecutrixes are depicted as hypocritical and venial, pretending to condemn upper-class licentiousness and the violence it triggered against them, when in fact they themselves are presented as secretly guilty of unbecoming refined taste and French affiliation that betrayed their own social backgrounds. The criticism and subsequent parodies of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela in the early 1740s had already testified to the latent anxiety that accusations of sexual violence by middling and labouring women were motivated by predatory desires for enrichment and social mobility. The real-life cases under study added to this the troubling possibility of the disruption of national identity. Lackey’s 1757 trial took place early on during the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), in which England and France found themselves on opposite sides. Baltimore’s 1768 trial on the other hand happened during one of the brief peacetimes between the two nations. The final section aims to show how that distinction played out in court during the respective proceedings. As such, to better grasp how such rhetoric might have come to find its place in courts of law judging sexual offences, it is necessary to turn now to a brief overview of the uneasy inscription of sexual violence in English legal history.
13The spectrum of sexual violence as a whole, and rape in particular, were vexing issues on many different levels in early modern England. Legal scholars identify a steadfast institutional difficulty, perhaps even a reluctance, to define sexual crimes and to establish the means to prove and punish them.
- 5 The 1753 Clandestine Marriages Act was subjected to much controversy as it drastically restricted t (...)
14Since the thirteenth century, legal texts had conflated “rape,” a sexual act committed against the will of an individual always understood to be female, with “ravishment,” the abduction of an unmarried person of wealth. Ravishment did not necessarily include a sexual component, nor was it concerned with the consent of the alleged abductee, but rather with that of their guardians. In her essay “Clarissa and the Marriage Act” exploring the impact of the 1753 Clandestine Marriages Act on literary productions, Mary Vermillion notes that eighteenth-century English law defining proper and improper sexual entanglements was first and foremost concerned with the “dynastic interests” of guardians and authority figures, rather than with the “freedom of disposal” (5-6) of the individuals whose actual mental and physical well-being was at stake.5 Although in indictments for rape, generally involving women and girls from the lower echelons, “dynastic interests” are largely non-existent, the significance granted to the claimant’s bodily integrity remains similarly absent. Thus in theory, both ravishment and rape were punishable by death, though the application of the capital punishment in practice proved a highly complex issue to settle. As Mary R. Block remarks in the collective work Interpreting Sexual Violence 1660-1800, “[f]or the early modern period most English rape ‘law’ was articulated […] in legal treatises. Treatises are not laws but explanations of them. [...] In a very real sense, treatises are both the law on the books and the law in action” (24). The leading treatise on rape in the eighteenth century was Sir Matthew Hale’s History of the Pleas of the Crown, written in the late seventeenth century but only published posthumously in the early eighteenth. Hale exposes his jurisprudence on rape in the following terms:
It is true rape is a most detestable crime, and therefore ought severely and impartially to be punished with death; but it must be remembered, that it is an accusation easy to be made, hard to be proved, but harder to be defended by the party accused, though never so innocent. (I, 635)
15Hale’s views on rape accusations became so influential as to be quoted in nearly all proceedings for rape, as is the case in the Baltimore trial, where the defendant himself stated that “The charge against me [...] is in its nature very easy to be made, and hard to be disproved” (Trial of Frederick Calvert 93). The same statement would be repeated by the presiding judge during his closing remarks, tellingly just before the jury was to deliberate:
In point of law, the fact is fully proved on my Lord and the other two prisoners, if you believe the evidence of Sarah Woodcock. It is a crime which in its nature can only be proved by the woman on whom it is committed; for she only can tell whether she consented or no; it is, as my Lord observes, very easy to be made, and hard to be disproved. (141)
16Hale’s writing therefore stressed the atrocity of rape and the need to punish it by death, while asserting that the act itself was virtually unprovable and that in practice the capital punishment should be avoided at all cost. Thus, Gregory Durston chronicles in “Rape in the eighteenth-century metropolis: part 1” how, between the years 1700 and 1799, 281 indictments for rape were tried at the Old Bailey, “the metropolitan equivalent of the Assizes” for the City of London, Westminster and Middlesex (170). Daniel Lackey’s in 1757 is one of those 281 trials, of which only 45 resulted in guilty verdicts, leading to a conviction rate of roughly 16% percent. Even then, capital punishment would regularly be commuted into imprisonment or transportation.
17Furthermore, Hale established what can be cynically viewed as a rape etiquette, the proper behaviour expected of a credible victim. This included a sterling reputation prior to the assault and a strict set of requirements during it: the victim was expected to cry out to alert passers-by, to bear substantive physical signs of violence, and to report the attack immediately afterwards. Failure to fulfil even one of those criteria was perceived as highly suspicious. In his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769), William Blackstone, paraphrasing Hale, thus writes that:
[I]f she be of evil fame, and stands unsupported by others; if she concealed the injury for any considerable time after she had opportunity to complain; if the place, where the fact was alleged to be committed, was where it was possible she might have been heard, and she made no outcry; these and the like circumstances carry a strong, but not conclusive, presumption that her testimony is false or feigned. (IV, 213-214)
- 6 Several commentators point to this being an enduring pattern throughout the century. See among othe (...)
18In the 1987 Women's silence, men's violence: sexual assault in England, 1770-1845, Anna Clark’s pioneering study of sexual violence in late eighteenth-century London, identifies a pattern in rape cases, with most victims and assailants belonging to the lower orders, though the aggressor is usually observed to be in a position of social or professional authority over their victim. The trials transcripts available on the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, spanning the period 1674 to 1913, confirm this distribution.6 XIt could be argued that, besides the obvious inscription within narrow ideals of feminine virtue, the behaviour expected of the victim during the assault was shaped by assumptions on their social standing. If both the aggressor and the victim are assumed to belong to the lower echelons, the assault is more likely to take place outdoors, or at least in populous and busy areas that could provide quick access to potential witnesses and officers of the law.
19What transpires in the Lackey and Baltimore cases is that the social status of the defendants not only turned the trials into media sensation, it also greatly impeded the prosecutrixes’ ability to follow that rape etiquette. Both assaults took place in the private lodgings of the aggressors, with the only other people present being individuals in their employ. Furthermore, the attacks both occurred over the course of a period of sequestration, reducing the likelihood for the victims of presenting physical marks and being able to immediately raise the alarm. It is the steep social discrepancy between the accused and the accuser that turned the two trials into out-of-the-norm legal events, and it is also that very discrepancy that made appeals to Francophilia and Francophobia pertinent rhetorical devices in court. It thus appears that for many in eighteenth-century England a taste for anything French was a marker of status and wealth, or worse, of an aspiration to status and wealth. Erin Mackie, in her analysis of Frances Burney’s 1778 novel Evelina, pays specific attention to the national hybridity of Madame Duval, the heroine’s English-born but Paris-based maternal grandmother. Duval is characterised as a vulgar upstart, originally a tavern maid who after twice marrying above her station naturally settled in France. Mackie discusses the animosity between her and the character of Captain Mirvan, the latter keen to “assert his brusquely English and bluntly masculine domination over the Frenchified and corrosively feminine Madame Duval” (Mackie 158). While Mirvan is depicted as equally blameworthy, his behaviour a betrayal of the English character, when his aggressivity escalates to physical violence (carrying the latent threat of sexual abuse) against Duval, the narrative intimates that the proper thing to do is to keep quiet. Although Evelina expresses some guilt over her collusion with the Mirvan family in keeping the identity of the masked assailant concealed from her grandmother, she is later vindicated. It must be noted that, in conjunction with her Gallicism, the narrative confirms Madame Duval’s vulgarity through her repeated threats of legal redress. These schemes involve no only herself but also her granddaughter, as she intends to resort to the courts to force Evelina’s estranged aristocratic father to legitimise her birth. Writing to her guardian Reverend Villars, the heroine reports that “[i]t would be impossible for me to express my extreme consternation when she thus unfolded her scheme. My surprise and terror were equally great” (Burney 102). She begs for Villars’ guidance, the latter expressing his disgust at “a plan so violent, so public, so totally repugnant to all female delicacy” (107). Proper English moral authority is eventually restored through the heroine’s private reunion with her father and her marriage to Lord Orville, both events effectively removing her grandmother’s Frenchified influence and the attending danger of becoming a legal agent.
20Thus, within the broad national understanding of attitudes and practices associated with France, specific incarnations are to be found, shaped by gendered identities and social status. As such, although equally reprehensible for a significant part of the British public, expressions of Francophilia and reactions to them varied depending on the profile of the suspected Francophile. This brings the present reflection to the necessary unravelling of the minutiae of the two legal cases under study.
- 7 “He only told me what danger there was in walking alone, and what a very wicked place London was, a (...)
21Daniel Lackey was tried on April 20th 1757 at the Old Bailey for events alleged to have taken place in October of the previous year. The prosecutrix, Christian Streeter, a young woman visiting the capital for the first time and being hosted by family’s friends, accused Lackey of accosting her during a stroll in St James Park. In her court testimony, she states that Lackey gently chided her for walking alone and gloveless in a public place, and after buying her gloves invited her to accompany him to supper.7 He then offered to bring her back to his lodgings, where they would wait for Lackey’s manservant to return from his errands and accompany Streeter home. Streeter describes how, upon arriving, Lackey promptly assaulted her and kept her prisoner for the night. In the morning, he had a hairdresser brought in, who proceeded to cut and style her hair. Lackey then attempted to convince Streeter to stay, offering her material and monetary presents to that effect:
Q. What discourse had you with him in the morning?
Streeter: He told me he would send for a milliner and dress me up, and I should have a coach to ride in; also the buttons on his waistcoat, which he said cost twenty guineas a piece, to button my gown, if I would stay. I told him I had rather go. (“Trial of Daniel Lackey” 162)
22Streeter subsequently explains that she refused the gifts but was allowed to go home only after accepting a guinea, which she alleged to have taken for that reason only, while Lackey promised–threatened–to visit her at her host’s lodgings and see whether she wished to return to him.
- 8 “Lackey: at that time of the day (it is known very well) people walk there with an intent to be pic (...)
- 9 “Streeter: After I had all my cloaths on he ordered his man to cut my hair. / Q. And did he? / Stre (...)
23Within the transcript available on the Old Bailey Proceedings, I have chosen to focus specifically on the elements in Streeter’s testimony that would be used against her both during her cross examination by the defence and during Lackey’s own testimony. The most salient points are the fact that she visited a public place unattended and gloveless, supposedly signs of sex work, and more particularly her behaviour while Lackey had her groomed the following morning.8 Counsel for the prosecution questions Streeter only briefly about the hairdressing episode, to ascertain when it happened and how she reacted to it.9 Tellingly, it is the defence who pursues it further, in a somewhat lengthy exchange that it nonetheless seems pertinent to quote in full:
Q. Was not the cutting off your hair, in order to dress it in the French way?
Streeter: I don’t know. It was cut all off to about two inches long or thereabouts; his servant turn’d it up with an iron.
Q. Did he powder it?
Streeter: No, he did not.
Q. Did not you look in the glass, when the servant was dressing your hair?
Streeter: No, I never did.
Q. Do you remember Mr. Lackey’s coming to you and kissing you, and saying it was very pretty?
Streeter: No, he did not do any such thing.
Q. How came you to have your hair cut?
Streeter: The reason was, I was afraid of being murder’d. (“Trial of Daniel Lackey” 161-2)
24It appears that the defence is attempting to have Streeter betray both knowledge and enjoyment of French fashion, which would render her character even more dubious when coupled with the circumstances in which she met Lackey. The various testimonies never clarify whether a specific hairstyle categorically proving the influence of French fashion was intended. Raising the possibility that the coiffure worn by the prosecutrix in the aftermath of a sexual encounter with the defendant was French in inspiration seems to have been sufficient in the defence’s strategy. Returning to the trial’s inscription within the context of the Seven Years’ War allows to better understand the significance of mentioning French taste during a trial for rape. As discussed previously, patriots decrying aristocratic Francophile taste and its diffusion into the professional and middle orders did not wait for open conflict to do so. But anxieties surrounding this sentiment of Gallic infection can only have been heightened during wartime, when issues of cultural emulation and national individuality now carried implications for the military and political health of the nation.
25As such, the Laudable Association of Anti-Gallicans, founded in 1745 with the view of curbing commercial import from France, was extremely active during the conflict. In its 1758 annual sermon, the abandonment of French culture was presented as part of the British civilian war effort: “We therefore most humbly pray, that French words, as well as French dress and French manners, may be laid aside, at least during the continuance of the present war” (Annual Register cited in Beale 149).
26It is noteworthy that during Lackey’s trial, the defence successfully implies that the culpability of French taste was Streeter’s, despite her being the recipient of the grooming session orchestrated by the defendant. Subsequent mentions of the episode all originate from Lackey himself or witnesses for his defence, and are clearly envisioned as being in his favour:
Lackey: She had her hair cut by my servant; I asked her which way she would have it cut, or in what fashion: she said, Sir, you are the best judge, cut it as you please. [...] I could not get her to stand away, from the glass. [...]
Q. Did the lady submit to have her hair cut?
Ellis [the hairdresser]: She came out of the bed-chamber, sat down, and I cut it: I asked her how she would have it cut, she said just as I pleased: she took off her cap, which was loosely upon her head, and sat facing the glass: it took up half an hour to cut it I did it according to the best of my skill, in the fashion: she seemed very well pleased. (“Trial of Daniel Lackey” 171)
- 10 My contention is that regardless of Streeter’s behaviour towards her host, it was in the latter’s b (...)
- 11 “For James Burgh, the danger represented by the French for all ranks was ‘bewitching Pleasure,’ not (...)
- 12 “The reason I suspect that Charteris was allowed defense counsel at the trial is that the cross-exa (...)
27Consequently, it can be argued that Streeter’s behaviour, as well as the manner in which Lackey came upon her and the frankly hostile testimonies of her own character witnesses–the woman hosting her and her maid depicting her as vain and capricious–all doomed her suit from the start.10 Michèle Cohen argues that by the second half of the eighteenth century, the artificial divide between private and public spheres was engineered not just along gendered but also national lines: “This ‘domestic’ sphere was not just the moral, but [...] the national antithesis of what the social and its practices had come to represent–dissipation, effeminacy, and the corrupting influence of the French” (Cohen 67). Streeter’s conduct could be painted as not just unchaste, but also as un-English and unpatriotic in a time of war. By being out and about alone in public, Streeter is already inherently “Frenchified” and therefore guilty.11 In The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, John H. Langbein regards the 1730s as the decade during which defence counsels became allowed in the courtroom. Prior to that estimated date, Langbein describes a system known as the “accused speaks,” part of the larger model of the “altercation trial” (48), meaning the confrontation of the claimant’s and defendant’s claims, with minimal intervention by the prosecution. The accused was thus expected to speak their defence without any intermediary, which was felt to produce the most truthful testimony. In contrast, the introduction of defence counsels led to the systematic cross-examination of prosecution witnesses and prosecutors themselves, what Langbein refers to as the “adversary trial.” It is easy to see how, with the emergence of professional teams, defence rhetoric shifted from proving the defendant’s innocence to arguably more achievable goal of undermining the prosecutor’s credibility and morality. None of this is more obvious than in proceedings dealing with sexual assault. In a case of dubious serendipity, Langbein’s identification of 1730 as the potential date for the appearance of defence counsels in criminal courts is linked to another infamous rape trial, that of Colonel Francis Charteris, the “Rape-Master General” depicted in Plate 1 of William Hogarth’s 1732 series A Harlot’s Progress. Charteris, accused of having assaulted his servant Anne Bond, was initially judged guilty and sentenced to death, before receiving a royal pardon a few weeks later.12
28Ultimately, and perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, Daniel Lackey was acquitted for the rape of Christian Streeter. In this trial, it was the prosecutrix that had to defend herself from accusations of Francophilia and malicious venality. At best, Streeter appeared as a flighty and slovenly provincial all too willing to be made up in the French way by a genteel London seducer. At worst, she was portrayed as a cunning loose woman aiming to bleed a former client dry, using both intimate and legal channels to prey upon his purse. For legal minds, and seemingly for some civilian contemporaries as well, here critically those that made up Lackey’s jury, the issue of whether she was raped as a result of either practices became a moot point.
29This final sub-section will endeavour to show how the opposite approach was employed in the Baltimore trial, in which it is the defendant who is depicted as suspiciously Gallic by the prosecution team, and even directly by his alleged victim.
30The trial of Frederick Calvert, 6th Baron Baltimore, for the abduction and rape of Sarah Woodcock, a London milliner, took place on March 26th 1768 at the Surrey Assizes. The events themselves occurred throughout December 1767. Baltimore, having previously patronised Woodcock’s shop and attempted to have her step out with him, was accused of conspiring with female accomplices to lure Woodcock into private lodgings, under the false pretence of a professional opportunity.
31Woodcock alleged to have been imprisoned first in London, before being brought to Baltimore’s country estate in Epsom where she was raped, leading to the indictment in Surrey. She is presented as a reputed beauty in her neighbourhood, but from a strict Dissenter middling background, refusing and condemning Baltimore’s advances.
32Woodcock’s religiosity appears to have played a large part in her identification of her captor as a Francophile lecher, and even initially an actual Frenchman, fuelling her distaste perhaps as much as the sequestration, at least during the first days. Early into her captivity, Woodcock indeed assumed Baltimore to be French because of his employment of a man with whom he converses in a foreign language. She appears either unsure or unwilling to formally identify the language as French, but still deduces from it that Baltimore and his accomplice are French. The employee indeed turns out to be a French national, presented to the court as Richard-Francis Smith, who acted as a middleman between Baltimore and Woodcock’s father, the prisoner having been ordered to establish a correspondence dictated by Baltimore with her father. When Smith eventually comes back with a response supposedly from Mr Woodcock, his daughter Sarah refuses to believe that the message is genuine. Her distrust seems to reside in large part in the alien quality she detects in both her jailer and his lackey:
He pretended to read it to me, but I told him it was nothing at all, for he could read it as he lik’d. With that he said he would send for the man, and make me a liar. [...] The man came in and sat down, and he spoke to him something first in another language; it was not English I know; and then said, did not you bring this letter? he answered, Yes. I told him I did not believe he did; the more, because he had been talking to him in another language. [...] I then said to Lord Baltimore, who is a liar now, you or me? I said they were a parcel of popish, rubbishing people, and I would not believe any thing they said to me, (for I thought Lord Baltimore had been a French man and a Papist.)
Mr. Cox [Woodcock’s counsel]. Can you give any reason?
S Woodcock. I thought him a Frenchman, and therefore supposed him to be a Papist.
Court. Did he speak broken English?
S. Woodcock. I thought so; but that might be my ignorance. (Trial of Frederick Calvert 19)
33Aside from Woodcock’s clear conflation between Frenchness and Catholicism and from there between Catholicism and moral decay, her last statement references wider social practices of the Francophile aristocracy. Baltimore is said to speak in accented English, enough so to be mistaken for a native French speaker. In her study of “Linguistic Patriotism and Francophobia in 18th-century Britain” Joan Beal notes that mastery of the French language was a mark of aristocratic refinement, but that the borrowing of French words or affectation of French accent were viewed with hostility and suspicion, especially in an increasingly troubled geopolitical context.
- 13 The entry for “Gallant” in the Oxford English Dictionary online read as follows: “mid-15c., ‘man of (...)
34Beal mentions such instances as Members of Parliament in the House of Lords being called to order for using “Bastille” as a metonym for “prison” during 1793 Parliamentary sessions, in the midst of the French Terror. However, already between 1757 and 1759, an informal group calling themselves the “Mob of Great Britain” wrote a series of letters to the London Chronicle “against the importation of French Words” (cited in Beal 142, 149). They denounced in particular the euphemistic use of French terms, citing the example of “rencontre” being used in press reports to speak of duels or even physical brawls. To those examples can be added similarly euphemistic uses such as carte blanche or rendez-vous.13 Janine Barchas retraces in “Hell-Fire Jane” potential references found throughout Austen’s novels to rakish MP and member of several secret societies Sir Francis Dashwood. Remarking that Austen was not the first writer to be inspired by Dashwood and other members of his equally scandalous family, Barchas cites The Fashionable Cypriad, whose subtitle gives all the information needed regarding its titillating content: In a Series of Elegant and Interesting Letters, with Correlative Anecdotes of the Most Distinguished Characters in Great Britain and Ireland. Here it is not the relation to the Dashwood name that is of specific interest, but rather the coy use of French loan words to refer as genteelly as possible to rather mundane sexual and financial arrangements: “Upon Mr. D______’s marriage with Miss B__dh__d, he settled £100. a year upon his faithful and forsaken chere amie” (cited in Barchas 22).
35A pattern certainly emerges in the eighteenth century regarding the lexical fields and the imagery evoked by the specific French terms borrowed into English. Most if not all of them dealt with illicit behaviours, and particularly sexual transgression, in varying degrees of intensity. As Peter Wagner notes in Eros Revived:
The new usage of words of love was partly influenced by French romances of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century origin: formerly negative words were upgraded. Thus adultery became gallantry; a love affair was an amour; and an attempt at seducing someone was labelled intrigue. (131)
36The understanding of Francophilia as a form of perversion that could lead to sexual violence was prevalent and harmful enough that Baltimore felt the need to defend himself from such an accusation in the same way he refuted the charge of rape: by sowing doubt regarding the claimant’s moral standing. Although the accusation of French pollution is not included here, as it was in the character assassination of Streeter, Baltimore and his defence certainly make the most of Woodcock’s professional identity being linked to the clothing industry. He thus depicted Woodcock as a former–willing–mistress, a fashion-crazy upstart seeking alternative means of enriching herself following the breakdown of their affair. Mrs Griffinburg, Baltimore’s housekeeper and co-defendant due to her involvement in Woodcock’s sequestration, depicts the claimant as demanding and obsessed with her appearance:
she did go into my room and chuse these cloaths, caps, handkerchiefs, and any thing she desired. [...] she asked me if I had a ribbon for her cap? I said no, I have no ribbon, I have a red garter, if you will have that: she said that will not do, it mu[st] be some[thing] white; she took a white tucker out of her black gown, and that she tied to her head. (Trial of Frederick Calvert 94)
37Throughout the proceedings, much attention is given by the defense to the fact that Woodcock lacked change of clothes when she came to stay with Baltimore. Although one might argue that this would indicate the precipitated and non-consensual nature of her stay, the defense rhetoric instead focuses on the garments that were ordered for her as a result. On various occasions, both Baltimore himself and his counsel attempted to have Woodcock admit to some impatience and enjoyment as she was measured and made to wait for the new designs. In Dress, Distress and Desire, Jennie Batchelor remarks upon the dual conception of women milliner as “active agents in the burgeoning consumer economy, rather than its mere beneficiaries” (52). She notes further than the professional and moral respectability of women involved in trade–and particularly the highly Francophile fashion trade–was often stained by “persistent conflation of [their] bodies with the goods they produced” (331). Whether or not Baltimore and his legal team could prove that Woodcock had sought and longed for the clothing he had made for her, her involvement with a trade structured around dubious foreign allegiances might have already marked the prosecutrix as too suspicious.
- 14 “Mr. Cox. Did my Lord say any thing to you in French? / Smith. Yes he did speak some words in Frenc (...)
38Later on in the proceedings, responding to Woodcock’s accusations of sinister collusion with a foreign agent, Baltimore presented his conversation in French with his employee as a pragmatic necessity, entirely innocuous in tone, rather than the proof of any sadistic plot.14
39Perhaps most importantly–and kept at the very close of his defendant’s plea–he offered an alternative narrative to the libertine predator script, transforming his cosmopolitanism into a moral virtue.
I could have kept myself and my fortune out of the reach of the laws of this country. I am a citizen of the world; I could have lived any where: but I love my country, and submit to its laws; resolving, that my innocence should be justified by the laws.” (Trial of Frederick Calvert 93-94)
40By reminding the court of his social status and financial means, enabling him to travel at will and establish himself abroad for any length of time, Baltimore reaffirmed his moral superiority through his supposedly conscious and patriotic decision to submit himself to English justice. As defendant, he adopted a rhetoric that turned his cosmopolitanism into a mark of both aristocratic refinement and Christian abnegation, strengthening his love for his native country rather than distancing him from it. This final tactic, coupled with the undermining of Woodcock’s character, appears to have rescued Baltimore from the accusations of Frenchification and sexual assault levelled at him, as he was acquitted after “about an hour and twenty minutes” of deliberation (Trial of Frederick Calvert 142), a relatively lengthy duration for the time.
*
41Rapports between France and England throughout the eighteenth century thus appear to have been characterised by a fear of invasion, mostly one-sided on England’s part. This invasion felt by parts of the English public spread to cultural practices but also ideological beliefs, ranging from fashion and linguistic habits to the nationalising of specific sociable and sexual practices.
42A primary concern of this essay has been the concrete embodiment of this invasion anxiety, with Francophilia perceived as a corruption of both the mind and the body. French infection was routinely portrayed across the period as an aristocratic disease rendering the male social elite either indolent and disloyal or morally and sexually perverse. When diagnosed in female, and more particularly lower-class female bodies, Francophilia becomes the symptom, or potentially even the root, of venality and deceit. In the Lackey and Baltimore trials, accusations of French invasion on the mind and manners of both the defendant and the prosecutrix act as diversions to the much more concrete invasion of the bodies of Englishwomen by their male compatriots.