The company he wanted was on the street: William Gladstone was the first to leave dinner at the Clarendon Hotel, turning his back on Foreign Secretary Henry Temple, Third Viscount of Palmerston, and the US ambassador in London, Abbott Lawrence. Turning down New Bond Street in London, Gladstone began looking for the sex-worker Elizabeth Collins—“a most lovely statue,” he had written in his private diaries in Italian. “Two more hours, strange, questionable,” his entry for that summer night in 1851 reads.
Following the words, the to-be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Gladstone drew a small picture of a whip. Torn by guilt over his sexual desires, biographer Roy Jenkins has recorded, the deeply religious Gladstone would flagellate himself.
As former US president Donald Trump confronts the prospect of years in prison, the story of the great 19th century Liberal leader reminds us that, barring its public performance, there is little unusual about his conduct. Trump’s misogyny and his execrable sexual politics are part of the warp and weft of America’s deeply Christian ideological character, woven from guilt, shame and redemption.
There can be more than one opinion, Eric Levitz notes, on whether Trump’s payoffs to former porn star Stephanie Clifford, a.k.a. Stormy Daniels, should have ended up in a criminal court. However, there can be only one opinion about the educational merits of sexual scandals.
Great men, these scandals teach us, are driven by unexamined neurosis, sexual anxieties, and self-delusions just as surely as all other men. All leaders, and their ethical claims, need to be subjected to constant, sceptical scrutiny.
Sex and the Republic
Three women had accused John Cotton Junior, a popular, newly-married cleric, and son of a great pillar of New England’s Puritan theocratic establishment, of sexual misconduct in the 1600s. One had alleged that Cotton talked his way into her bedroom by feigning an interest in her furniture, and another of “sinful striving”. Two judges and two clerics had been summoned to investigate the charges. In response, Cotton compared himself to the Biblical Joseph, and his accuser to Potiphar’s ( the captain of the Egyptian king’s guard who is said to have bought Joseph as a slave) wife: She had relentlessly pursued him.
Even though the trial could arrive at no conclusion, the young cleric was expelled from his congregation, the First Church of Boston, in 1664, “for lascivious unclean practices with three women and his horrid lying to hide his sin.” He then confessed his guilt in public, was forgiven, and began a long, stellar career.
From its founding moments, the Republic of God set up by the Protestant fundamentalists who emigrated from Europe confronted tensions between its moral principles and human nature. The Lord might have had no patience with sodomy and bestiality, but the young male population of the colonies was not always mindful of his commands.
Late in 1789 in colonial America, historian John Murrin has recorded that a soldier, unironically named Sparrow—“the tallest, straightest & cleanest Grenadier in the whole Regt.,” according to one contemporary account—was tried for having sex with a turkey, while in full dress uniform.
The 13-year-old girl who saw this unusual spectacle was too young to be called as a witness, but the bloodied turkey served as evidence. The turkey was plucked, and its feathers were pasted to the soldier’s body as he was marched through the town.
Even the most pious citizens of the colonies, historians Susan Juster and Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor have written, struggled with their forbidden desires. The diaries of the 19th century Baptist preacher William Babcock show he was tormented by “hateful obscene ideas,” and “vexed with the flesh.”
There was one occasion when he, while preaching, “stopped and walked to the opposite side of the room & kissed a woman.” To the irate congregation, he explained that “the woman desired it, and I felt it my duty to gratify her.”
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Anglo-Saxon vices
French brothels in the 19th century, literature scholar Colleen Lamos reminds us, were familiar with men like Prime Minister Gladstone: The English predilection for whipping led it to be labelled Le Vice Anglais. Victorian England, Gladstone’s cultural milieu, was awash in flagellant pornography, and contemporary journalists sometimes lamented the prevalence of the practice among élites. Likely, the practice had something to do with the trauma unleashed by the public-school use of the whip as a pedagogical tool.
To his friends and confidantes—and to his own diary—Gladstone confided that he met sex workers to proselytise them. The project, by his own account, had no success but he kept at it earnestly, provoking sniggers among his contemporaries. The diaries leave little doubt that his missionary project was suffused with unacknowledged erotic longing.
British statesman Edmund Burke’s attack on the East India Company, historian Durba Ghosh records, was enabled by fears that the Victorian order was threatened by miscegenation and the adoption of non-English cultural mores in colonial India. The maintenance of the Victorian order demanded the crushing of such transgressions.
American political history was suffused with similar figures. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, arguably the most brilliant of America’s founding fathers, had an affair with his secretary Maria Reynolds in 1791-1792. Like Trump, Hamilton made several payoffs to Reynolds, who his biographer Richard Brookhiser describes as a “blackmailer” and other derogatory names. The exposure of the affair played a role in ensuring Hamilton never became President, despite his manifest competence.
Two strategies emerged for dealing with sex scandals. Thomas Jefferson, who became US President in 1801, rose to the top by stoically ignoring claims that he had a relationship and children with a teenage slave, Sally Hemings. For a century and a half, historians dismissed the allegations as scurrilous—until DNA evidence proved otherwise.
Grover Cleveland, the two-time US President who confessed to fathering an illegitimate child in 1884, was quickly forgiven by the public. As the historian Howard Wayne Morgan has noted, many had assumed the President’s political career would not withstand the crisis. The decision to tell the truth, though, redeemed him.
President Warren G. Harding was rumoured to have had several mistresses, including one who took $20,000 in hush money and another who bore his child. The news of his affairs, though, only emerged after his death, together with evidence of large-scale corruption. “It’s a good thing I’m not a woman,” he once told the press. “I would always be pregnant. I can’t say no.”
The 32nd US President Franklin D Roosevelt’s affair with Lucy Mercer never became public. President John F. Kennedy’s legendary sexual appetite was kept quiet by a largely plaint press. And, just like Cleveland and the preacher Cotton, Bill Clinton was pardoned by the public after humiliating, public self-flagellation.
Power, sex and punishment
Washington, as the political scientist Alison Dagnes has noted in a brilliant book Sex Scandals in American Politics, has long been a kind of “Hollywood for ugly people”: Predation, exploitation and sleaze are enmeshed with success and power. Eliot Spitzer, the square-jawed Governor of New York who had promised to bring morals back to Albany, was implicated in a prostitution ring in 2008. Larry Craig, a prominent Right-wing senator, was caught attempting to solicit a male sex worker in an airport toilet in 2007. There are dozens of similar cases.
This should not surprise us: The scandals of the film star or the sports icon are not greatly different.
Elsewhere in the world, religion and sex had arrived at a more accommodating relationship. In 11th century Rome, physician William Sanger noted, a brothel stood next to a cathedral, while Pope Clement sought to earn taxes from prostitution. In Islamic Turkey, homosexuality was legally proscribed, but enforcement was lenient-to-nonexistent.
The philosopher AC Grayling in Life, Sex and Ideas has argued that Anglo-Saxon culture, by contrast, moved sex from its place as a natural part of human behaviour to the domain of vice. Environments in which religion and morals play a major role—key among them politics—became a site of this neurosis.
Few cultures, outside the US and the UK, expect their leaders to uphold moral values that society itself has proved unwilling to practice. The personal lives of Presidents of France or Prime Ministers of India are largely ignored in public discourse. Though concerns about sex, fidelity, and family run deep in all cultures, political leaders are not expected to be moral exemplars. That job is left to saints.
Trump’s dogged denial of wrong-doing, or a future Clinton-like confession, might yet retrieve his standing among his congregation. The lesson the world ought to be learning, though, is that the crimes he is being punished for are also the failings of his people, and their culture.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami.