and, moreover, a trained lawyer, who had many opportunities of obtaining first-hand information, for he had lived in the Chancery office from childhood.  He is very precise as to Bacon’s homosexual practices with his own servants, both before and after his fall, and even gives the name of a “very effeminate-faced youth” who was his “catamite and bedfellow”; he states, further, that there had been some question of bringing Bacon to trial for sodomy.  These allegations may be supported by a letter of Bacon’s own mother (printed in Spedding’s Life of Bacon), reproving him on account of what she had heard concerning his behavior with the young Welshmen in his service whom he made his bedfellows.  It is notable that Bacon seems to have been specially attracted to Welshmen (one might even find evidence of this in the life of the Welshman, Henry VII), a people of vivacious temperament unlike his own; this is illustrated by his long and intimate friendship with the mercurial Sir Toby Mathew, his “alter ego,” a man of dissipated habits in early life, though we are not told that he was homosexual.  Bacon had many friendships with men, but there is no evidence that he was ever in love or cherished any affectionate intimacy with a woman.  Women play no part at all in his life.  His marriage, which was childless, took place at the mature age of 46; it was effected in a business-like manner, and though he always treated his wife with formal consideration it is probable that he neglected her, and certain that he failed to secure her devotion; it is clear that toward the end of Bacon’s life she formed a relationship with her gentleman usher, whom subsequently she married.  Bacon’s writings, it may be added, equally with his letters, show no evidence of love or attraction to women; in his Essays he is brief and judicial on the subject of Marriage, copious and eloquent on the subject of Friendship, while the essay on Beauty deals exclusively with masculine beauty.

During the first half of the eighteenth century we have clear evidence that homosexuality flourished in London with the features which it presents today in all large cities everywhere.  There was a generally known name, “Mollies,” applied to homosexual persons, evidently having reference to their frequently feminine characteristics; there were houses of private resort for them ("Molly houses"), there were special public places of rendezvous whither they went in search of adventure, exactly as there are today.  A walk in Upper Moorfields was especially frequented by the homosexual about 1725.  A detective employed by the police about that date gave evidence as follows at the Old Bailey; “I takes a turn that way and leans over the wall.  In a little time the prisoner passes by, and looks hard at me, and at a small distance from me stands up against the wall as if he was going to make water.  Then by degrees he siddles nearer and nearer to where I stood, till at last he was close to me.  ’Tis a very fine night,’ says he.  ‘Aye,’ say I, ‘and so it is.’  Then he takes me by the hand, and after squeezing and playing with it a little, he conveys it to his breeches,” whereupon the detective seizes the man by his sexual organs and holds him until the constable comes up and effects an arrest.