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originally posted by: DJW001
a reply to: LABTECH767
The Hellfire Club were not Satanists, they were Jacobites.
originally posted by: solve
a reply to: beyondtheskys
Sweet mother, sweet mother, send your child unto me, for the sins of the unworthy must be baptized in blood and fear.
The most certainly were not Jacobites, Jacobites were Catholic and the Hellfire club whom supposedly once summoned the devil in the form of a goat legged entity were technically neo pagan's.
Although the Medmenham Monks are the most famous band to be dignified with the appellation, they were certainly not the original Hell-Fire Club. The first half of the century saw the establishment of many circles of rakehells throughout the British Isles, and tales of their activities have often been transferred to Dashwood's group.
For our purposes the Monks' most important precursor is the Hell-Fire Club founded around 1719 in London by Philip, Duke of Wharton (1698-1731). Wharton was a prominent Whig politician, Freemason, and atheist who sought to ridicule religion by publicly presiding over festive gatherings with "Satanic" trappings.
[Edit for brevity--DJW001]
The Hell-Fire Club was disbanded, and Wharton went on to become Grand Master Mason of the London Grand Lodge in 1722. During the instalment ceremony, the orchestra played "Let the King Enjoy His Own Again," a Jacobite anthem. This amounted to a dangerous declaration of political allegiance.
The Jacobites favoured the Catholic House of Stuart's claim to the British throne over that of the Protestant, but very German, House of Hanover's. There were many reasons why one might support the Jacobite cause, from Catholic sympathies and a mystical sense of sovereignty to xenophobia and a dislike for the character of the Hanoverian King George I (who reigned from 1714 to 1727), an arrogant "foreigner" who never bothered to learn English. Consequently, the moment attracted a wide variety of adherents with differing political philosophies, and the term soon came to be applied to anyone who held subversive ideas, much like the word "commie" in our own time. Whatever Wharton's motivations, he threw himself into the Jacobite cause, was awarded the Star and Garter by the Old Pretender, James Stuart, and died destitute at the age of thirty-two.