This is a subject I really feel I should have known a great deal more about, but it is almost entirely new to me. The trigger was a chapter from A Short History of the World in 50 Lies by Natasha Tidd, Michel O’Mara Books Limited, 2023, a book I will come back to later. The Buggery Act was passed during the reign of Henry VIII in 1533, “buggery” having a wider meaning than it does now (broadly, any sexual act which was not procreative). Thomas Cromwell was the instigator and it was part of his remit to weaken the power of the Roman Catholic Church by taking the matter into civil rather than ecclesiastical law and was also perhaps intended to be used against its clergy, helping eventually to bring about the Reformation. The intention was that it would then be forgotten about and lapse into disuse. The king, when he turned on Cromwell, fabricated charges of the use of magic and buggery against Walter Hungerford, on top of treason, who was to be executed alongside Cromwell. Hungerford was beheaded in 1540. The Act was tweaked to make it less of a temporary measure, repealed in 1553 but brought back in 1562 and under it thousands of men were charged and hundreds executed. It was only replaced as late as 1828 with the Offences Against the Person Act and buggery remained a capital offence until 1861 when a new version was enacted.
As far as private consensual homosexual acts for those over the age of 21 was concerned, the laws were repealed as recently as 1967. Heterosexual anal sex remained illegal until 1994 and the offence of buggery was only finally and formally removed from legislation in England and Wales in 2003.
I was vaguely aware of most of this although fuzzy about the details, but what has really shocked me are the far-reaching consequences globally as the law was exported through colonialism.
A 2019 Newsweek report stated that there were 71 countries where homosexuality remained illegal. According to the BBC this was down to 63 in 2023, around half of those being in Africa. 29 of those 63 are Commonwealth countries.
Everywhere one looks, it seems, are dreadful legacies of the British Empire.
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