Once Patrick was downstairs, his first inclination was to tell his elder son to “turn [Webber] out of doors instantly.” James, however, resisted his father’s request, telling him, “No; he shan’t go till I have got a policeman.” The two argued for some time, with Webber’s offers first of ten pounds and then of any amount to let him go not seeming to affect the argument one way or the other.39 Other fathers, such as one Matthias Cundal, were willing to go directly to the police when a son came seeking advice regarding an incident of sex between men.40 It may have been Patrick’s complicity in the event that motivated his reluctance to call the police, or it may have been that he was more aware than his son of the dangers inherent in prosecuting men of higher social status, even in instances when guilt seemed clear. James eventually prevailed, and a policeman was called.
When the case came before the first magistrate, most of the details were published, and the sympathies of the court reporter seemed clearly on the side of the Dawleys. This report included a mention of the crowds that gathered to hear the case, as well as a reference to the two medical examinations that the thirteen-year-old Thomas underwent to confirm the crime.41 The criminal-trial coverage, by contrast, did not recount how Webber came into contact with the Dawleys or even mention that the assault occurred in the Dawleys’ home. This short second report instead devoted most of its space to the defense’s claim that there were “great discrepancies which appeared in [the Dawleys’] evidence, not only on the present occasion, but also before the magistrate.” This claim was made in spite of the fact that the police court coverage stated that James Dawley “was cross-examined by Mr. Wontner at great length, but without at all shaking his testimony.”42 Webber’s defense was that the three men’s stories were contradictory and that the whole incident was simply a conspiracy to extort money. He was found not guilty, after which Patrick Dawley and his sons became liable on charges of threatening to accuse of an infamous crime.43
Undoubtedly many men in London did use the accusation of unnatural assault to extort money from other men, and it is problematic to second-guess a particular court decision based on the limited information that remains, but this case represents an improbable scenario for unnatural-assault extortion. The Dawleys had been in their own home and extended a courtesy to a stranger at the request of that stranger. That this was the preliminary step to extortion seems highly unlikely. This case does, however, reflect the tendency evident in multiple examples, and discussed in detail in the final two chapters, for middle- and upper-class men to be believed, and for courtroom and other officials to assume that sexual desire for other men, or the willingness to invoke it for mercenary reasons, resided almost exclusively in those of lower character, from the lower classes, who were less in control of their base desires.44
The Dawleys would have been better off had Patrick prevailed in the argument and simply turned Webber out of the house. Other examples suggest that fathers and sons usually were not so divided in their response to such threats. A working-class father who believed his son to have been sexually assaulted by another man often accompanied his son to confront the attacker, usually seeking restitution for the injury done to the family. Middle-class fathers and sons sometimes recruited one another as witnesses at such meetings. Middle-class men in these situations also presented themselves to their family members as victims of extortion attempts by lower-class men. Both middle- and working-class men who could plausibly present themselves as victims rather than instigators of such incidents often seemed willing to seek the help of a father or a son.
For an upper-class man facing a public accusation, the reputation and character of his father were powerful defenses. In two high-profile cases involving upper-class men from the period, it was the father who marshaled the friends of the family to speak in defense of the accused son’s character, and the good character of the family was also invoked to refute the accusations against the son. In one case it seemed that the father truly believed in the son’s innocence, whereas in the other the strain between the father and son was evident to court reporters. Presenting a united front against working-class accusers generally enabled upper-class fathers and sons to weather the crisis with their reputations intact, provided that the sons were never involved in another such incident.
This pattern can be illustrated through a comparison of the obituaries of the two members of Parliament arrested on indecent-assault charges in 1833. Both William John Bankes and Charles Baring Wall, through the help of their fathers, were able to employ the best barristers of the day for their defense. They also drew on their family networks to obtain impeccable character references, and their trials found them innocent of the charges.
Wall, who was never involved in another such public incident, went on to have an impressive career in Parliament. Although he had served as a member of Parliament only sporadically from 1819, 1832 marked the beginning of a string of election victories. In 1835, 1837, and 1841 he was returned as a member for Guildford, and in 1847 and 1852 he was elected to represent Salisbury. He was the director of the British Institution for a number of years, “and his aid was usually sought in Committees of the House of Commons on matters relative to art. . . . Among his immediate friends and dependents he was much esteemed for his kindness of disposition and unaffected simplicity of manners.”45
Examples like Wall’s counter the many courtroom speeches suggesting that a man could be ruined for life by even being associated with a case involving sex between men. His election to Parliament after 1832 can be understood, at least in part, as a ratification of his character by voters of the middle and upper classes. Wall asserted that he was innocent of the charges: he was the victim of a lower-class policeman who had accosted him at night in an attempt to obtain money. Wall’s defense asked “what were likely to be the habits of a man capable of committing the act imputed” and then called attention to Wall’s past character to indicate that such behavior was unthinkable for him.46 The jury did not even allow the presiding judge to sum up the evidence before declaring Wall innocent, and it was said by a juryman that Wall left the courtroom with his character “entirely spotless.” His later success seems to have borne out that assessment, and Wall was never again publicly associated with sex between men.47
William Bankes, however, was less careful, and ended his days in disgrace and exile. Bankes had also been found innocent in 1833, but the newspaper coverage of his unseemly statements at the time of his arrest and of the cold distance at which his father held him throughout the proceedings meant that he was considerably more compromised by the process than Wall had been. The obituary for Bankes in the Annual Register of 1855 is unusually short: for the years after 1833, the only fact mentioned is his failure to retain his parliamentary seat for Dorset.48 Although his parliamentary career ended after his trial, he did not leave London. It was when he was again brought before a London magistrate in September 1841 for “indecently exposing himself with a soldier of the Foot Guards in the Green Park” that he “forfeited his recognizance, disappeared from society, and has not been heard of since.”49 His father, William Bankes Sr., had been able to muster many of the most prominent men of the day to speak for his son’s character at the first trial, but the son must have felt no such effort would be made for him a second time.
Another upper-class man who lost the protections of his class only after multiple public associations with sex between men was George Dawson Lowndes. Both his parents had died when he was a young boy, but they had left him a personal fortune of between fifteen and twenty thousand pounds, and “a small patrimonial estate amply sufficient for his station as a gentleman.”50 Whether because of his lack of parental supervision or some other combination of factors, he had been in the police courts numerous times on unnatural-assault charges in the space of a few years.51 It was his repeated assaults on a sixteen-year-old bookseller’s assistant that led to his criminal trial in February 1841.
Lowndes had significant advantages going into his 1841 trial, but he squandered them with reckless behavior. His wealth allowed him to retain two highly