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Bohemian & Libertine · West Wycombe, Buckinghamshire

The Hellfire Caves, West Wycombe

Chalk caverns dug a quarter-mile into the hill for Sir Francis Dashwood's infamous brotherhood, whose motto — 'Fais ce que tu voudras', do what thou wilt — presided over banquets, blasphemy and 'nuns' hired from London. The deepest chamber, the Inner Temple, sits below the parish church: sinners underground, saints above.

StatusDocumented history

Dateexcavated 1748–52; club active 1749–c.1766

The peopleSir Francis Dashwood, the Knights of St Francis ('Hellfire Club'), John Wilkes, Benjamin Franklin (visitor)

The siteWest Wycombe Caves, West Wycombe Hill

Coordinates51.64740, -0.80533 (confidence 4/5)

The story

Almost everything lurid you have heard about the Hellfire Club comes from a satirical novel and a political vendetta, not from the club itself. Sir Francis Dashwood (1708–1781) founded his Order of the Friars of St Francis of Wycombe — the "Monks of Medmenham" — around 1750, meeting from 1751 at Medmenham Abbey on the Thames, rebuilt in Gothic with the motto Fais ce que tu voudras, "Do what thou wilt", over the door. Members included John Wilkes, the Earl of Sandwich and Thomas Potter; Benjamin Franklin was a visiting friend.

The documented reality: monks' habits, "brothers", enormous quantities of claret, mock-monastic toasts to Bacchus and Venus, and the company of women some styled "nuns" — clever, powerful men satirising the Church over long boozy weekends. The Satanism, orgies and black masses come from Charles Johnstone's novel Chrysal (1760–65), which set embroidered scenes at Medmenham, and from John Wilkes, who leaked and inflated stories after falling out with the club. The famous prank — Sandwich mistaking a dressed-up baboon for the Devil — is Wilkes's, if it happened at all.

The Hellfire Caves under West Wycombe were dug between 1748 and 1752, not as a temple but as famine relief: after harvest failures, Dashwood paid the poor a shilling a day to excavate chalk for a new road. Later cave-guides invented much of the sinister lore for tourists. And Dashwood himself ended up co-producing, with Franklin, an abridged Book of Common Prayer. Today the caves, the church with its golden ball, and the Dashwood mausoleum at West Wycombe are open; Medmenham Abbey is private.

More stories at this spot

The novel narrated by a coin

The engine of the whole legend is Charles Johnstone's Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea (1760–65), in which a magic gold coin passes between owners recounting their vices, several unmistakably set at Medmenham. Georgian readers took the satire literally, and fiction hardened into "fact". A later 1766 edition piled on more, elaborating on Wilkes's leaks. The Hellfire Club's infamy is, quite precisely, a publishing phenomenon.

The best globe tavern

Dashwood rebuilt St Lawrence's Church atop West Wycombe Hill with a great hollow golden ball on the steeple, large enough to seat about six inside. John Wilkes, no admirer by then, conceded it was "the best globe tavern I was ever in". Members are said to have climbed up to drink and talk within the golden sphere — a detail more genuinely eccentric than any invented orgy.

The Chancellor who couldn't add up

Dashwood's spell as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1762–63 was a disaster. His tax on cider was so unpopular it helped bring down the government and got him removed within months. It also handed his enemies their motive: the smearing of the Hellfire Club was, in large part, revenge politics aimed at a man who had briefly and calamitously held the nation's purse.

Sources

Nearby on the map

Bohemian & LibertineMedmenham Abbey (the Monks of Medmenham)Medmenham, Buckinghamshire · England

The riverside sham-gothic abbey where Dashwood's order first met, its door inscribed with Rabelais's 'Fais ce que tu voudras'. Contemporaries whispered of mock rites and masked ladies arriving by barge; the truth was scandalous enough that every account since has struggled to separate orgy from embellishment — this entry says so plainly.

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At Cliveden's walled-garden pool on the weekend of 8–9 July 1961, War Secretary John Profumo, 46, encountered nineteen-year-old Christine Keeler. Her exact state of undress is disputed; their subsequent affair and Profumo's lie to Parliament helped bring down a government.

Documented historyHot spot Royal LiaisonFort Belvedere (Edward VIII & Wallis Simpson)Sunningdale, Surrey · England

The country retreat where the King's affair with the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson deepened, and where he signed the Instrument of Abdication in December 1936 — love versus the crown.

Documented history

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