"The Closet Shall Not Be Their Sanctuary": Sodomites, Macaronis, Nabobs and The Politics of Masculinity In The Trial Of Captain Jones

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2014
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Thesis
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eng
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Haverford users only
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In the summer of 1772 a scandal broke out that captivated London. Captain Robert Jones was tried and convicted for sodomy in July 1772. Jones and his friends asked the King to grant Jones a pardon, which he did. The public was outraged at the King's decision. The radical Whig politician John Wilkes and his followers turned the outrage into scandal when he claimed secret sodomites had infiltrated the court and influenced the King. In this thesis I examine how the debate caused by the scandal fused categories of effeminate male behavior, which allowed a new normative masculinity to emerge in contrast. The thesis is divided into four sections. The first three sections will follow reconstruct the chronology and examine how the debate created a figure of non-normative masculinity. Each section looks at a single figure and how it mapped onto the figure from the previous section. The first section will look at how critics opposed to calls for Jones's pardon and situated the debate within a class framework that broadened debated about the Bloody Code. According to Jones's Wilkite critics, sodomy and sexual crimes more broadly were aristocratic crimes much more dangerous to society then the small property crimes committed by the poor. The debate linked sodomites to the aristocracy, foreignness, and luxury. The next section examines how these associations around the sodomite allowed the other effeminate figure of the macaronis to merge though the course of the debate. I will argue the merger accrued, because of Wilkes accusation that there were secret sodomites at court. This required the ability to prove or at least point to who those sodomites were. The outward signifiers of the macaroni provided the necessary language Wilkes required to point to the existence of sodomites at court. The third section looks at the waning days of the debates when commentators suspect the King will pardon Jones on condition of banishment. The two most popular rumors that circulate of where he would end up were Italy or in the service of the East India Company. Looking though the lens of the nabob panic sparked by the EIC's debt crises, I argue that the Italy and India were linked by the anxieties over luxury and commerce elicited by the macaroni. The nabob and the macaroni merged in the metaphor of England as an oriental country. Section four takes a different approach to the previous three. This section looks at how a normative masculine identity dependent upon classical republicanism and defined by participation in the political public sphere cut across the two sides of the debate and took focus in contrast to sodomites, macaronis, and nabobs. I argue that the appeal of classical republicanism at this moment arose as a potential answer to politeness embodied by the effeminate figures under attack. The commentators shared a nostalgia for an English past uncorrupted by foreign manners. Their golden age thinking was an episode in the attacks against politeness that began in the late 1760s and continued into the 1770s. In Robert Jones's trial these attacks set off a wave of anti-sodomitical rhetoric that caused the emergence of a normative masculinity and spurred the collapse of politeness in 1774 and macaronis along with it a few years later.
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