James and John: A True Story of Prejudice and Murder
By Chris Bryant
Published by Bloomsbury, 2024, £10
Reviewed by Michael Johnson
On the 27 November 1835, the last two men executed for homosexuality in England, James Pratt and John Smith, were hanged. Their crime was described as “against the order of nature… abominable… to the great displeasure of Almighty God, to the great scandal of all human kind”.
The charge, buggery, was indeed felt to be so shocking to the public that it could not even be written down in newspaper, instead styled as “b-gg-ry”. What it actually involved for James and John was meeting privately behind a locked door and being spied on through a window and key hole.
At the time of their conviction and sentencing they were not alone in receiving the death penalty. In 1835, 73 others had been sentenced to death at the Old Bailey. However, James and John were alone in the fact that those 73 were reprieved, the sentence cancelled. A reprieve was at that point such a common occurrence that in recording it clerks would often write ‘ditto’ in their ledgers. The last execution prior to James and John had been more than two years previously and there had not been an execution for sodomy since 1823.
James and John’s execution was fought against, by family and neighbours, with James’ wife getting dozens who knew him to petition for mercy. Even the magistrate, Hensleigh Wedgwood, who brought the men to trial, and John and Jane Berkshire, the spying witnesses to James and John’s crimes, who led the call for prosecution, asked for the sentence to be commuted.
So why were James and John killed? A significant factor was, bluntly, that they were working class. While money did not necessarily serve as complete immunity for accusations of homosexuality it certainly inoculated! MPs faced with rumours about their ‘moral character’ – like Richard Heber – were able to leave the country and find relative seclusion. The home secretary who ignored petitions for mercy for James and John, Lord John Russell, had a cousin living essentially in exile in sunny Lake Como in Italy due to threats of prosecution after propositioning a man while James and John were waiting for their execution.
England had not been alone in the criminalisation of homosexuality, but even by the 19th century it was becoming an outlier. The French penal code of 1791, adopted during the French Revolution by the constituent assembly, did not mention sodomy. Napoleon’s code in 1804 affirmed this while also spreading the code around the world. England would take nearly another two centuries to decriminalise male homosexuality and has still left a legacy to this day: 34 out of 54 countries in the Commonwealth still retaining laws against homosexuality thanks to the British Empire exporting its laws.
Even those few countries that in 1835 still executed men for homosexuality had begun to make changes. In England from the start of the 19th century to James and John’s execution over 400 men were sentenced, and of those 38 were hanged.
To understand why changes were happening around the decriminalisation of homosexuality, why Britain at this time was an outlier resisting these changes, and why decriminalisation eventually happened, it’s necessary to look at why criminalisation happened in the first place. Much is made in the book of the role religion played in the laws and their expression. The judge of John and James’ case was amongst many moralists of the time who spoke against the “sins of Sodom and Gomorrah”. Clergyman’s texts described gay men’s minds as “polluted by the filthiest imaginations”, their bodies “defiled, deformed, destroyed by the most execrable abominations”.
Indeed, the earliest laws against homosexuality were introduced by the churches in Italy, though these were not civil laws, functioning only within the church. However, the spread and expansion of these laws cannot be solely explained by the strength of Christianity, but also by the social conditions at the time. In England, civil laws against homosexuality, allowing the seizure of land, were introduced at a time when Henry VIII was trying to seize land and power from the church, those laws providing another route for this.
At the time of John and James’ execution, major social changes were happening. The growth of cities, led by an influx of working-class people – like John and James – moving there to escape rural poverty, was seen to escalate a more permissive and relaxed morality. For many lesbian and gay people this was true. The size of the cities granted not only an anonymity that was not available in the towns and villages in more rural areas, but also an opportunity to meet other people like you and form relationships, however short.
It was also considered that the growth of the British Empire and arising conflicts played a role in the ‘spread’ of homosexuality. Concerns were raised about British men in the army spending too much time with ‘foreigners’. The necessity of having sailors able to serve the royal navy meant that, despite a position that homosexuality was punishable by death, and religious figures even going as far as to blame ships sinking due to gay men on board, few were ever accused. If they were, they were most frequently court martialled for lesser crimes instead such as ‘uncleanliness’.
In Bryant’s book he acknowledges the massive economic and political changes that were happening at the time – the creation of the steam engine, the spread of tarmac and the abolition of the slave trade, amongst many others. Bryant even correctly points to the impact class had for John and James alongside many other working-class men accused of homosexuality compared to the upper classes. It’s significant that accusing someone of homosexuality for extortion was made a crime of equal statue to homosexuality itself; this was certainly not to protect men like John and James!
However, despite this acknowledgement of the factor of class in the execution, Bryant ignores the role capitalism played in the existence and enforcement of laws regarding homosexuality, and the reason religious fervour around the ‘abomination’ of homosexuality was so high at this time. Capitalism grew across the 19th century, and with this growth required scores of workers to enter degrading and brutal working conditions to create profits for the capitalist class.
As capitalism developed and exerted itself on society, it required rigid family structures and roles to maintain its system, either via the passing on of private property and wealth, or by ensuring the birth and rearing of the next generation of workers. Religion and the brutal punishments under the law were tools for capitalism to ensure structures like the heteronormative family were firmly enshrined in society and gay men, alongside others that would challenge these structures, were repressed.
The law on homosexuality was changed to no longer carry the death penalty in 1861. However, this was due to the abolition of that penalty for all crimes other than murder, and homosexuality remained criminalised until the 1960s in England. While Bryant focuses on the politicians and individuals he credits with reforms and changes in society, not surprisingly as a Blairite Labour MP he largely ignores the role the working class played and will play in the future in challenging the repression and division capitalism encourages.
While England was still imprisoning gay men for homosexuality in the 20th century the Russian revolution in 1917 ushered in not only the removal of the death penalty for homosexuality as part of the Soviet Criminal Code, but alongside advances for women and access to healthcare and gender recognition, unprecedented freedoms for LGBT people.
John and James reflects a dark period of English history and a sad tale of the repression against two men under the oppressive, unequal capitalist system. To fight for an end to that repression we need to go beyond reflecting and remembering these events but learn from them and other struggles of LGBT people and the working class, and fight for a programme of socialist change that breaks with capitalism and wins a truly liberated world.