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Queer Heritage · London, Greater London

Mother Clap's Molly House

London's most famous molly house, a coffee-house refuge for gay men run by Margaret Clap. Constable Samuel Stevens' report of his 14 Nov 1725 visit records 'between 40 and 50 Men making Love to one another, as they call'd it'; the raid of 17 Feb 1726 saw ~40 arrested and three men — Gabriel Lawrence, Thomas Wright and William Griffin — hanged at Tyburn on 9 May 1726.

StatusDocumented + folklore

Date1724–1726 (raided Feb 1726)

The peopleMargaret 'Mother' Clap, Gabriel Lawrence, Thomas Wright, William Griffin

The siteFormer site, Field Lane, Holborn (near modern Farringdon)

Coordinates51.51900, -0.10700 (confidence 2/5)

The story

Mother Clap's was the most famous of London's early-eighteenth-century "molly houses" — places where men who desired men could meet, drink, dance, take female names and have sex. Margaret Clap ran it in Field Lane, Holborn, around 1724–1726. We know the inside of it only because a constable, Samuel Stevens, infiltrated it in 1725 for the Societies for the Reformation of Manners and testified at the Old Bailey; his deposition describes "between 40 and 50 Men making Love to one another", sitting in laps, dancing, mimicking women's voices, and going off "by Couples into another Room... to be marry'd, as they call'd it" — the marrying room, guarded by a doorkeeper. In February 1726 the club was raided and about forty men taken to Newgate. Three — Gabriel Lawrence, William Griffin and Thomas Wright — were hanged at Tyburn on 9 May 1726 on the word of an informer. Margaret Clap was pilloried, fined and jailed, and then vanishes from the record. Field Lane was obliterated by the building of Holborn Viaduct in the 1860s: there is nothing to see. The record survives only because the state gathered it in order to kill these men — the running paradox of queer history.

More stories at this spot

Princess Seraphina

The best-documented individual molly is John Cooper, known to everyone as Princess Seraphina — a servant and "messenger" for the mollies who wore, one witness said, "a white Gown, and a scarlet Cloak". In 1732 she did something astonishing: she went to the Old Bailey not as defendant but as prosecutor, charging a man with robbing her of her clothes at knifepoint. Witnesses cheerfully called her "the Princess" and used "she". He was acquitted; she was never charged with anything.

The wooden baby

The mock "lying-in" — a man miming childbirth and being "delivered" of a jointed wooden doll, then mock-christened — is the most theatrical molly ritual. But its fullest description is Ned Ward's satire of 1709, written to mock, not to witness, and set in an unnamed tavern years before Clap's. Handle with care: it is real folklore, recorded by a hostile hand.

Not caught in the act

For all the hangings, almost none of the men raided at Clap's had been caught having sex. A few had unbuttoned breeches; the rest were convicted, when convicted at all, on the paid testimony of informers like Thomas Newton and Mark Partridge, mollies who turned on their friends to save themselves. The evidence that survives is the evidence that was manufactured to kill.

Sources

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