Masked parties were only occasionally broken up by civil authorities

. The Weekly Journal

as a gathering of "Chamber-Maids, Cook-Maids, Foot-Men, and Apprentices" [5]

it was more likely that the event had been hosted by those of the working class rather than by the more prominent people in England's "fashionable society."

. Many opponents of the masquerade looked to the foreign influence of other European nations such as Italy and France and the Orient as the diabolical source of the "cultural epidemic" which they believed was invading both the morality and the national pride of England [7].

"foreign Diversion" was a conspiracy on the part of foreign nations to neutralize the beauty of English women by forcing them to "hide their charms with a mask" [10].

Weekly Journal another writer

"conspiracy theories"

equated attending the masquerade with the sexual act itself,

female attendance at the masquerade was viewed as a heinous, criminal offence, though not condoned, male attendance was more or less tolerated by the critics of the masked balls.

claimed that the tragedy of the Lisbon earthquake occurred as a result of the sin and corruption that had been infecting not only English culture but also the culture of the world for many years.

As a result of these public outcries, the masquerades were forbidden to take place throughout the following year [15].

In her comprehensive study on the eighteenth-century English masquerade, Masquerade and Civilization, Terry Castle explains that the discourse of the anti-masquerade movement which exposed the masquerade as "a threat to bourgeois decorum and national taxonomies" could actually help explain the cultural implications of the decline of the masquerade.