In this chapter are a selection of legal cases from 1822 to 1895, incorporated with specific legal clauses and commentaries on the meaning and execution of justice in relation to unnatural offences, gross indecency, attempted sodomy, sodomy and episodes which may be seen to emanate from the socalled ‘blackmailer’s charter’ that the law on sodomy was seen to be. Two of these narratives can be seen as consequences of the opprobrium in which samesex relationships between men were held. In the case of R v.Attrell, and the suicide of the Marquess of Londonderry (better known by his courtesy title of Lord Castlereagh), threats of exposure and extortion are derived from the fears of any man of being accused of an unnatural offence, since he could not hope to escape such an accusation without some of the mud sticking. The self-destruction of the Marquess of Londonderry clearly depicts the power of such a taint, whether or not it has any substance. The somewhat comic episode of Mr Baring Wall, MP’s nocturnal encounter with a policeman reveals the extent to which an ostensibly respectable member of society must prove his respectability, rather than the offence he may have committed being proved. Whatever the legal technicalities, in practice these men are guilty until proven innocent, and while Wall may have walked from the court a free and stainless man, the case of a fellow MP, William John Bankes, shows another side to the response to public scandal. Bankes was arrested and charged in 1833 for an act of indecency performed with a soldier in a public lavatory outside Westminster Abbey. At Bankes’s trial he had, amongst others, the Duke of Wellington as a character witness, and was acquitted. However, in 1841 he was arrested for indecent exposure, bailed to appear in court and fled abroad, to die in Venice in 1856. Perhaps one arrest might be perceived as bad luck, but a second would smack of guilt, whatever the truth.