George Selwyn And Thomas Potter were monks at Medmenham Abbey, brethren at the infamous Hell-Fire Club of Sir Francis Dashwood. Both were society wits, both respected MPs, both had decidedly necrophile tendencies.

Thomas Potter – The younger son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, he was rich and handsome, madly profligate and with an insatiable priapic drive. Disdainful of the church, he once seduced the wife of a bishop out of mere contempt. Afflicted by the diseases of excess: scurvy, gout and palsy; his pastimes included watching executions and copulating in graveyards. A talented poet, he naturally squandered these skills, preferring to pen obscene distortions of the others' material – smutty versions of Psalms, a pornographic parody of Alexander Pope's Essay On Man.

At Medmenham Abbey, he put his religious background to good use, concocting mock Christian services, spattering the litanies with puerile innuendo.

Potter's diseases caught up with him. By November 1758 he was on a milk diet, by June 1759 he was dead.

His legacy was the aforementioned "Essay on Woman". Addressed to the delectable Fanny Murray, she was one of the legendary nuns of Medmenham. Hired prostitutes and deflowered maidens, these sisters arrived at the Abbey in masks. They pleasured with the abbots in gondolas on secluded Thames' Islands and rode a dildonic hobbyhorse, the Idolum Tentiginis.

"Essay on Woman" was posthumously published by fellow Medmenhamite John Wilkes; printed in an exquisitely limited edition of twelve, illustrated by phallic statue on frontispiece, and meant only for the superior friars… when Wilkes was arrested for daring to allege regal corruption, the essay was discovered along with his papers.

The fabulous rarity of the publication didn't stop it being run to earth by a most well qualified censor, Rev. John Kidgell. This hypocritical clergyman, as if conceived from the sperm drenched pages of De Sade, wrote ingratiating sermons and interfered with choirboys, struck a priggish pose but peddled pornography.

He bribed proof sheets from Wilkes' printer and profiteered from the scandal. He wrote a pamphlet vicariously sketching the content yet denouncing the essay. His defamation must be the perfect epitaph both himself and the monks of Medmenham, describing the work as "a volatile, saline effluvia of the unchaste imagination of a prurient debauchee".

George Selwyn - society wit, gambler and pseudo-Satanist, this sinister politician's nature was more chiaroscuro than a Caravaggio painting. Known to friends for his kindness, generous benefactor of an adopted daughter, Selwyn used his wealth and power to languish in the dark baths of sadism.

To begin an appraisal of Selwyn, let us turn his portrait - painted by that confidant of the exotic, Sir Joshua Reynolds. We see George resplendent in a claret dressing gown trimmed with sable fur. It is the costume of a cruel sportsman; an imbiber of moreish ports. Upon his lap, sits a beady eyed Pug – a pampered yet petulant familiar. Selwyn slouches, one elbow resting on a plinth decorated with some bacchanalian motif. His hand touches the side of his face, soft pale fingers arranged in a feigned mudra; the quasi-mystical gesture of a louche Mason. In contrast to the dog, Selwyn's eyes are hollow and sated; there is a Crowleyean nadir and tiredness about them. But what is most striking about his face is the mouth – the Mona Lisa-like micro-smile, in fact more a smirk. The question is… can we break the code behind his demeanour, decipher the gnosis in that deadpan countenance?

As to the academic pedigree of his perversions, he graduated with distinction, expelled from Oxford for profaning a communion chalice at some college soiree. In a mock and gothic imitation of Catholic Mass, he cut his arm and let blood drip into the goblet. Then he encouraged fellow partygoers to drink from the cup in his memory. This was a velvet exeunt from the dreaming spires as would befit the most florid and Wildean of aesthetes.

A rabid anti-Papist, he was a lover of capital punishment and corpses. Like Thomas Potter, his favourite pastime was attending executions, though, as a respected politician, he felt compelled to disguise himself in women's attire when attending such events. A connoisseur of cruelty, he once traveled as far as Paris to witness the quartering of Robert Damiens, an ex-soldier who had attempted to murder King Louis XV. Driven by his mordant lust, Selwyn clambered for a ringside seat, causing a French nobleman to mistake him for the executioner - to wit our renaissance sadist retorted:

"No monsieur, I have not that honour: I am but an amateur".

Thus Selwyn's reputation as a polymath of vice became codified and encrusted like a rare cancer. Though he bemoaned his reputation as 'an habitual jester with an unnatural taste for horror', the legacy was cast. Together with Swinburne, his personality formed an archetype for French literature's image of the vice Anglais. Author and critic Edmund De Congout melded their decadent ores to create the "English Gentleman sadist" in his novel Le Faustin. Maturin appraised him in Melmoth the Wanderer asserting that "it is possible to become amateurs in suffering. I have heard of men who have traveled into countries where horrible executions were to be witnessed, for the sake of that excitement which the sight of suffering never fails to give, from the spectacle of a tragedy, or an auto de fe, down to the writhings of the meanest reptile on whom you can inflict torture, and feel that torture is the result of your own power"

But Selwyn achieved his inverted apotheosis through a poem, The Diaboliad, in which he was nominated as no less than the devil's successor:

The murmurs hush'd - the Herald straight proclaimed
S-l-n the witty next in order name'd
But he was gone to hear the dismal yells
Of tortur'd ghost and suffering criminals.
Tho' summoned thrice, he chose not to return,
Charmed to behold the crackling culprits burn
With George all know ambition must give place
When there's an execution in place

However, to unlock the enigma of that Gioconda-like smile, so captured by Reynolds, perhaps we should turn to a quote from "George Selwyn: His Letters and Life". It concedes that 'Selwyn was ever trying to get as much amusement out of life as possible, and he would have been acting contrary to all the ideas of the fashionable society of his age if he had sat at home when a criminal was to die'.

Perhaps the empty eyes and practiced smirk were merely brought on by aristocratic duty; the ennui of too many executive orgies, the tiresome round of corporate hospitality - ringside at Tyburn, for the dismemberment of some failed traitor. We realise the smile is but an exercise in public relations. This is the gloat he perfects for a visit to the gibbet – though we must concede that it is not the weak twitch of a modern politician. For that is the grimace of an imbecile emperor hiding behind the crumbling walls of corrupt dynasty. No, Selwyn's smile is a Gnostic gesture; the gesture of one who knows that the earth is ruled by Rex Mundi.

Proposal: A lost Vaudeville recording of bawdy song and psychogeographic sketch. A stand-up routine by this comic duo - lascivious warps of Flanagan and Allen in a diabolic fairground mirror. A blood sperm and brandy soaked art install - curated by the cthonic shades of Gilbert and George. Our aim is to inhale the perfume and cruel pastimes of these aristocratic poseurs. We will visit the ruins of Medhemham and the gibbets of London. We will imbibe their reek and glamour in the dying splendor of a baroque necropolis. We will issue puerile smut over charnel winds at Tyburn. We will descend the caves of West Wycombe to recite dilettante verse, to channel their maniacal cackle, to conduct rakish seances with these forever-wenching ghosts. And donning concubine clothes, in Hells stygian heart, shall we finally solicit their spectres. Before the wax effigy of Sir Francis Dashwood, we will break a Black Plaque, in decadent communion with these monks of Medmenham.