Best Historical Novels About Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron le Despencer

Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron le Despencer

1708–1781

Francis Dashwood (1708–1781) was an English politician, landowner and clubman whose public career was much broader than the later legend of the Hellfire Club. He represented New Romney in Parliament from 1741 until 1761 and Weymouth and Melcombe Regis from 1761 to 1763, served briefly as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1762–63, succeeded to the barony of le Despencer in 1763 and was Postmaster General from 1766 until his death. A wealthy traveller and patron, he was also associated with the Society of Dilettanti and extensively remodelled West Wycombe Park and its landscape.

Dashwood’s enduring notoriety comes chiefly from the circle that met at Medmenham Abbey from the 1750s, a private association whose members included aristocrats, politicians and writers and whose mock-monastic style mixed drinking, sexual licence, irreverent ritual and classical parody. Later accounts turned the group into the archetypal “Hellfire Club” and attributed elaborate Satanic practices to it, but the most lurid claims are poorly evidenced and were amplified by scandal, satire and hostile gossip. Dashwood’s reputation therefore requires a distinction between the documented Medmenham circle and the occult mythology that accumulated around it.

Deryn Lake’s Death in Hellfire uses Dashwood, West Wycombe and the Hellfire Club as the historical setting for a John Rawlings murder mystery. Sir John Fielding sends the fictional Rawlings to investigate suspected subversion, and Dashwood’s notorious circle provides the novel with secrecy, political intrigue and danger. The murder plot and its conspiratorial details are fictional, while Dashwood’s association with Medmenham and West Wycombe is historical.

Historical novels and book series featuring Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron le Despencer (1 series)

John Rawlings in Order

by Deryn Lake 17 books 4.2(11,535)

The John Rawlings mysteries follow a young London apothecary whose trained eye for physical detail and talent for deduction repeatedly draw him into murder investigations. Working at first alongside Sir John Fielding, the blind Bow Street magistrate known as the “Blind Beak”, Rawlings moves through pleasure gardens, theatres,…