Locating the Macaroni: Luxury, Sexuality and Vision in Vauxhall Gardens *

In the summer of 1773, Henry Bate—an Essex parson, editor of The Morning Post, and a man with a love of boxing and self-publicity—visited Vauxhall Gardens with the actress Elizabeth Hartley and her husband. During the evening Mrs Hartley was somewhat distressed by being stared at by a group of fashionable young men, later identified as Captain Croftes, Thomas Lyttelton and George Robert Fitzgerald. Lyttelton was the son of a well-respected politician who had been a staunch opponent of Robert Walpole. He was a product of Eton, Oxford and the Grand Tour and, unlike his father, was known for his loose and prodigal lifestyle. Fitzgerald had been born into a well-connected Irish Protestant family and educated at Eton. He was a soldier, gambler and duellist who had fought for his honour twenty-five times by the mid-1770s. ‘Fighting Fitzgerald’ carried a limp from a duel in Paris and a cracked skull from being shot in the head in Galway. He was a quarrelsome and dangerous man whose final act was to be hanged for arranging the coldblooded murder of an Irish neighbour. ¹ Collectively, these men were known as ‘the Macaronis’ in the newspaper debate and gossip that the incident provoked. ²