The Molly House Raids of 1726

300 years ago this month, a series of raids on molly houses in London culminated with a raid on Margaret Clap’s coffee house. Prosecutions for sodomy had remained at around 5 every decade in London, but in the 1720s there were 15 a year.

It’s LGBTQ History Month in the UK, so let’s dig into what happened, why it mattered, and how this moment still resonates today.

What was a molly house?

I briefly mentioned molly houses in my post, Gay Life in Georgian Britain, but here’s a quick recap.

Think of a molly house as a cross between an 18th‑century gay bar, community centre and sometimes a brothel. They were social spaces where gay men could meet, drink, dance and hook up if they wished.

On 14^th November 1725, Samuel Stevens, a member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners, became a member of a molly house by pretending to be the ‘husband’ of a patron-turned-informant, and described:

“between 40 and 50 Men making Love to one another, as they call’d it. Sometimes they would sit on one another’s Laps, kissing in a lewd Manner, and using their Hands indecently.”

These places weren’t rare, either. Legal records suggest there were around 30 molly houses in London, which was a large number for a city with a population of around 600,000. That’s the equivalent of having hundreds of gay venues in modern London.

A Morning of Frolic, an 18th century engraving by John Collet . Public Domain

The term “molly” itself was slang, meaning something like effeminate man. While the word wasn’t flattering, gay men claimed it as a kind of identity.

Mother Clap’s establishment in Field Lane, Holborn, was one of the most popular. She reportedly kept “beds in every room of the house”, hosted mock weddings, and even let one man lodge with her for two years. Was she just running a business, or did she care for a community that had nowhere else to go?

Why did the raids happen?

In the 1720s, London was in the grip of a moral panic. The Society for the Reformation of Manners, the self-appointed morality police of the day, was determined to stamp out vice and shameful behaviour, especially sodomy, which was still a capital crime under the Buggery Act of 1533.

Writers of the time were obsessed with the idea that wickedness was becoming “more open and bare‑fac’d,” and molly houses became symbols of this supposed moral decline. They were private spaces where shame didn’t operate the way society expected, and that terrified the moral reformers.

Surveillance of Mother Clap’s house began when a few gay men and former patrons turned informants following disagreements with their lovers (no, that’s gross, no one is to use that word again – if you know, you know 😉). Thomas Newton and Edward Courtney acted as paid agents provocateurs, luring men into compromising situations so constables could arrest them. One example is William Brown, who is mentioned in my post about Sodomite’s Walk.

A wave of fear and public backlash

Over the months of the raids, men were rounded up, interrogated and publicly shamed. Some were released for lack of evidence, but others weren’t so lucky. One Sunday night in February 1726, constables stormed Mother Clap’s molly house. Around forty men were arrested and dragged off to Newgate Prison.

Gabriel Lawrence, William Griffin and Thomas Wright were found guilty of sodomy and hanged at Tyburn on 9th May 1726. Others were pilloried, fined, imprisoned or forced into hiding. One man died in prison awaiting trial.

Mother Clap was charged with “keeping a disorderly house” and accused of encouraging sodomy. Witnesses testified that she “appear’d to be wonderfully pleas’d” by what went on in her house. She was sentenced to stand in the pillory, pay a heavy fine and serve 2 years in prison. During her pillorying, the mob attacked her so violently that she fainted repeatedly. Newspapers doubted she would survive, and even though there are no records, it is believed that she died in prison.

While the Society for the Reformation of Manners congratulated itself on “purging the Streets” of “the wretched Tribe of… most detestable”, public opinion turned against them.

The courts eventually backed off following public disapproval. The principal witnesses were clearly unreliable rogues acting out of scorn. People grew tired of the society’s intrusive methods and accusations of corruption surfaced. By 1738, the society had collapsed, the LGBTQ community went deeper underground and molly houses, while still active, were harder to find.

William Hogarth – Industry and Idleness, Plate 11; The Idle ‘Prentice Executed at Tyburn.’

But the morality police, as always, resurge every now and again. Less than a century later, the Society for the Suppression of Vice took a stand against, what it called, society’s evils.

The Lord Bishop of Clogher, Percy Jocelyn, was a leading member of the society, despite being accused of buggery in 1811 – don’t we love hypocrites in positions of power? The charges were dropped, but when he was caught in the act again in 1822, the Lord Bishop escaped to France. 🙄

Why this matters in LGBTQ history

The molly house raids are one of the earliest documented examples of queer community life in Britain, and one of the earliest examples of sanctioned persecution.

They show:

queer people have always existed, even in eras where the law tried to erase them
chosen families and safe spaces have always been essential, just as they are today
criminalisation didn’t stop queer life; it just made it dangerous
allies mattered, and Mother Clap stands out as one of the earliest known straight allies in British queer history.

Most importantly, these events remind us that LGBTQ history isn’t just about oppression; it’s about resilience.