‘Innocence is as Innocence Does’: Anglo‐Irish Politics, Masculinity and the De Cobain Gross Indecency Scandal of 1891–3

He brought me round to the back of the house and into the conservatory. He loosed the buttons of my gallows [on the] behind. I did not pull my trousers down he pulled them down. He pulled my shirt up. It was in the dark and I felt something between my legs. At that time I saw him with his person in his hand. When I pulled up my trousers I told him I was not a boy of that sort . . . I wanted away. I then came round to the front of the house to leave. He told me not to mention it for the peril of my life, and that he would nominate me there and then. These were the words of Benjamin Rosemond, a Queen’s Island labourer in his early twenties at the Antrim Assizes in Belfast on 23 February 1893, as he described a sexual encounter with a former Member of Parliament. Seven other young men, ranging in age from 18 to 26, provided comparably vivid recollections of sexual contact with the same ‘public man’, Edward Samuel Wesley De Cobain. These testimonies, rich with detail – apparently so garish that the press could not reprint them – branded the former MP a sexual deviant. In all, De Cobain was charged on ten counts of gross indecency with eight young men in Belfast over a period of three years (1887–90).In court De Cobain struggled to parry the buggery charge. He answered the accusation with a ‘not guilty’ plea, as he had done time and time again during the prolonged period of scandal that preceded his trial. His attorney presented a remarkable,if somewhat outlandish, defence. According to the defence attorney, the ‘abominable charge’ made against the defendant was the outcome of ‘a conspiracy initiated by a man named Heggie’, who had previously failed to blackmail De Cobain. He continued to explain that De Cobain had made himself objectionable to the Ulster Tory caucus when he defeated the Conservative nominee for the parliamentary elections of 1885 and 1886, and that he ‘incurred the enmity’ of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC)during the Belfast riots of 1886. The argument was simple: the ‘high Tory clique’ and the largely Catholic RIC trumped up charges and paid poor young men for their testimonies to debase De Cobain for his political transgressions.