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destroy himself. Almost inevitably, he was a slave to, and perhaps even a victim of …
The Club Life
    There was no shortage of taverns and drinking dens in the city where, after work, the social classes mixed a bit more freely than at work. Only fallen women allowed, of course. But for those gentlemen who could afford it there were the tucked-away clubs – with all kinds of unusual names and themes which were mostly, to put it politely, rather naughty. Bawdy songs – some even penned by Robert Burns – were a specialty of the Crochallan. The Dirty Club was not entirely subtle about its interests, and there were others with strange names and rituals: the Poker, the black Wigs, the Spendthrift, the Odd Fellows – where members wrote their names upside-down. Many businessmen were also members of Freemasonry lodges whose rituals were even more esoteric.
    But it was the Cape Club to which the thrill-hungry William Brodie was most attracted. This most famous of the city’s social clubs held its meetings in James Mann’s tavern, also known as The Isle of Man Arms, in Craig’s Close. He liked this club not just because he needed to eat of an evening but also because he was disinclined to break off his convivialities to go home and do so – wherever home might be that night: his own house or either one of his mistresses’. And he liked it not just because of its culinary offerings but because of its central theme of (often sexual) fantasy. Ostensibly a supper club serving meals – such as Welsh rarebit and Loch Fyne herring and London porter – the Cape had many depths and dimensions that clearly intrigued Brodie. There were good (or bad) reasons why it magnetised him: the genuinely artistic and merchants and manufacturers who claimed appreciation of the Arts. Apart from the glovers, bakers, fish-hook makers, lawyers, tanners, surgeons and insurance brokers, it drew touring thespians from the Theatre Royal and some of Scotland’s most celebrated artistic names. Notably on the roll of the Knights Companions of the Cape were the painters John Bonnar, Alexander Runciman and Henry Raeburn, the writer David Herd and Robert Fergusson – who met his premature and untimely death four months before William Brodie was elected to the club in February 1775.
    So what was so exotic about it? Each new member was required, while suggestively holding a poker with his left hand that might then fall to rest on his crotch, to solemnly speak the oath before the president in a red velvet cap:

    I swear devoutly by this light
    To be a true and faithful Knight
    With all my might, both day and night
    So help me Poker!

    The new member then had to assume some fanciful personal title carrying rude innuendo with allusions to his character or misadventures. There was a Sir Stark Naked and a Sir Roger; Mr Raeburn was Sir Discovery long before he was actually knighted by the king, while Mr Fergusson was Sir Precentor, who caught the spirit of the club in his verse and self-sung song. Brodie took the title of Sir Lluyd, and tales were by all, amid loud hilarity, of sexual adventures and conquests.
    But his fellow members did not remain faithful to him to the end. After his last public appearance on the scaffold thirteen years later, the grim scene was recorded by the sketch of a mischievous colleague on the margin of the roll prefixed to the club’s minute-book.
    As William Roughead wrote in his book Trial of Deacon Brodie of 1906, ‘Had the young Brodie been satisfied with the legitimate and very ample convivialities afforded by the Cape Club it would have been better for himself. But …’
The Cards
    ‘Brodie became a frequenter of a rough tavern kept by the vintner James Clark, at the head of the Fleshmarket Close, where gambling by dice was practised nightly among a band of disreputable twitchers and crook-fingered Jacks.’
    He had doubtless cheated here before, but one night’s work came back to haunt him after a worse-for-wear James