*

Steinmetz has collected a number of anecdotes of gamesters of this period: of Sir J. B., who lost 32,000l. one night, and shot himself; of Lord F., who died in 1793, having played away an estate of 18,000l. a year, and 100,000l. in ready money; of Lord D., who succeeded to a large property in Ireland, but encumbered with play-debts amounting to a quarter of a million; of a certain Duchess, wife of a ci-devant Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, who was fleeced of 200,0007.; of Henry Weston, hanged in 1796 for forgery undertaken to defray card-debts; of W. B., a Scotch gentleman of good position, convicted in Edinburgh of violent theft of bank-notes taken for the same purpose. In 1818 nearly every month of the year was distinguished by a duel or duels resulting from gambling quarrels. In a word, the law seemed utterly unable to cope with a habit, which produced disasters of terrible frequency, but of the advantages of which it is impossible to discover a trace.

It was not only at cards that men gambled. Lotteries abounded, though, as we have said, they were to some extent reduced in 1778. The upper classes won or lost money on horse-races; and there was no subject under the sun on which they did not bet. The notorious betting-book at Brooks's is, in Trevelyan's opinion, a curious memorial of the society of the time, possessing an interest of its own which resembles nothing in any library or museum in the country. Fifty guineas that Lord Thurlow gets a tellership of the Exchequer for his son; fifty that Mademoiselle Heinel does not dance at the Opera House next winter; fifty that Lord Ilchester gives his first vote in Opposition and kills his first ten pheasants. A hundred guineas that Consols fall ten per cent. before they rise ten per cent. (made in April 1778). Three guineas to receive five hundred if the Allied Armies are out of Paris at Christmas 1794. One to twenty that martial law is proclaimed before Charles Fox is of the Privy Council. Two to twenty on Lady Weymouth having the Treasury against Lord Weymouth. One to receive a hundred when Lord Derby goes up in a balloon. Ten that Free-trade is abolished before Episcopacy. Five hundred to ten that none of the Cabinet were beheaded within three years. Bets upon the marriages and deaths of unembers. Bets upon an event understood between the bettors.' Bets upon events of little public interest and less delicate nature, some of them erased by the prudery of a later age. Assuredly can the members of Brooks's say

Many of them will be found in a volume called 'The Gaming Calendar,' by Seymour Harcourt, published in 1820.

'Quidquid

'Quidquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas
nostri farrago libelli.'

Brooks's, however, had not the monopoly of club play :

The gaming at Almack's,' writes Walpole to Horace Mann, 'which has taken the pas of White's, is worthy of the decline of the Empire. The young men of the age lose ten, fifteen, twenty thousand pounds in an evening there. Lord Stavordale, not one-andtwenty, lost 11,000l. there last Tuesday, but recovered it by one great hand at hazard. He swore a great oath: "now if I had been playing deep I might have won millions."'

6

At the Cocoa-tree' in 1780 there was a cast at hazard, the difference of which amounted to 180,0001. to 180,000l. At Graham's Club took place the whist which led to the notorious De Ros trial. Lord de Ros being accused of cheating, brought an action for libel against his traducers, but lost a verdict, which he only survived a short time. The Times,' in a leading article, said that the public judgment perfectly coincided with the verdict; and perhaps the least severe criticism on the event was Hook's punning epitaph, Here lies the premier baron of England patiently awaiting the last trump.' In earlier days White's had a well-deserved but not bright reputation:

It is dreadful,' writes a well-known peer in 1750, to see not only there, but almost in every house in the town, what devastations were made by that destructive fury, the spirit of play; I tremble to think that the rattling of a dice-box at White's may one day or other, if my son should be a member of that noble society, strike down all our fine oaks."

Wattier's, where Macao flourished, and where Brummell shone for a dozen years, came to an untimely end in 1819, and was taken by a set of blacklegs. But perhaps the most widely notorious club of all, though a club only in name, was Crockford's, established in 1827. Crockford, who seems to have been a fishmonger, was a man of much energy and no little tact. Having accumulated some capital, he set up the establishment in St. James's Street, which was described at its opening as 'the new Pandemonium, whose walls will tell no tales.' There he kept a hazard bank against all comers. He seems to have played fairly, but fully availed himself of the advantages of being the banker. His courtesy and good manners made 'Crocky's' the rage, and young and old, rich and poor, provided only they had the entrée to good London society, were admitted to his rooms, and thronged to swell his profits. In 1840 he retired, having accumulated a fortune of a least a million sterling.

The

The executive government, lenient to the clubs to which many of their members belonged, seem to have made several spasmodic and not whole-hearted attempts to put down gambling in other classes of society. In 1797 the 'Bedford Arms' was attacked under warrant by the police, who, after a strenuous siege, forced their way in and found fifteen persons at table, but not actually playing, so there could not be a conviction. Two years later the police made several raids; one on a house in Leicester Square, whence one of the gamblers endeavouring to escape fell into the area and was killed; another on two of the notorious places in King's Place. But the law-breakers were stronger than the law-makers, even when the latter were in earnest; the breaking up of one hell' merely led to the establishment of another, and the evidence taken before the Committee of the House of Commons in 1844 clearly showed, that gambling went on in a large number of houses frequented by persons of all positions. There were over twenty such places in Pall Mall, Piccadilly, and St. James's Street alone. Nor were the stakes confined to money; clothes, and jewels, houses and timber, were staked, and alas! sometimes by women that which is more valuable than either. Perhaps, however, the most remarkable wager ever made was brought to light in an investigation which took place at Bow Street in 1812. The police officer reported that he had seen two men on a wall on Hampstead Road, one of them hanging by his neck from a lamp-post, having been just tied up and turned off' by the other. It appears that the men had 'tossed' all day, first for money, then for their clothes, and last which of the two should hang the other. The larger man of the twain lost the toss, and was actually paying the penalty when the police officer intervened to save his life.

Of course there was a good deal of cheating. Of the émigrés driven from France by the French Revolution there were many who lived upon play, and several of these managed to prolong their depredations for some time. A certain Frenchman,' writes Mr. Dunne,'* 'who assumed in London the title and manner of a baron, has been known to surpass all the most dexterous rogues of the three kingdoms in the art of robbing. His aide-de-camp was a kind of German captain who acted the double part of a French spy and an English officer.' In 1820, James Lloyd, who was a Methodist preacher on Saturdays, and the keeper of a Little-go or illegal lottery all the rest of the week, was sentenced to three months' imprisonment with hard labour. And proceedings against one William Wright in Brighton, three

*See Steinmetz, vol. i. p. 129.

years

years earlier, showed a most discreditable state of affairs carried on in the libraries of that ever-popular watering-place.

Among the best known men of their time, who paid heavy penalty for their love of play, were Beau Brummell and Tom Duncombe. For a time very lucky, the former pursued a career of brilliant insolence almost without a rival. Winning largely one day of the Lord Mayor of London, who was a brewer, he pocketed the cash with a low bow and said, 'Thank you, Alderman! for the future I will never drink any porter but yours.' 'I wish, sir,' replied the Mayor, 'that every blackguard in London would say the same.' For many years Brummell held his own, and more than held his own, with men whose purses were far longer. But the turn came-Brummell himself used to say, after the loss of a lucky sixpence with a hole in it— and Brummell went rapidly down hill. He died in abject poverty, in 1840, at the age of sixty-two. Tom Duncombe, heir to a fine fortune, was an habitué of Tattersall's, Almack's, Crockford's, and other temples of play, and being as generous and high-spirited as Fox himself, soon rivalled him in the extent of his losses. At one time his father paid 135,000l. for him, a sum closely approaching that paid by Lord Holland for Fox. Like Fox, he profited nothing by experience, and died poor. There were those who thought that the great Duke of Wellington was among high players. But in 1823 the Duke, who as a rule did not much care what people thought or said of him, took an opportunity of writing to a barrister who had publicly alluded to the rumour, and declaring that in the whole course of his life he had never won or lost 201. at any game, and that he had never played hazard or any game of chance in any public place or club. It is tolerably clear that, unlike Blücher, who repeatedly lost great sums, the Duke was no gambler. The great Captain,' writes Mr. Timbs, 'was never known to play deep at any game, not war or politics.' Neither, however, was he in any sense a gambler at these.

6

Soon after the commencement of the present_reign_there occurred a considerable lull in the fever of high play. Crockford's, as we have seen, was abandoned by its originator in 1840. In 1846 an Act was passed, making all contracts, whether by parol or writing, by way of gaming or wagering, null and void, and no suit maintainable in any court of law or equity to recover any sum of money or valuable thing alleged to have been won upon any wager, or which should have been deposited in the hands of any person to abide the event on which any wager should have been made. But the Act, though it did much by making wagers incapable of legal enforcement, did less to

discourage

discourage gambling than a change in the attitude of those who had influence on the habit of English society. Play grew into disfavour not only absolutely at Court, where the Consort of the Sovereign entirely abhorred it, but among the ranks of statesmen, and men of wealth and culture. The places of Fox and Duncombe, Chesterfield and Queensberry, were not filled up. Hazard and lansquenet fell into disfavour, and where there was play at all, the more moderate attractions of whist and piquet replaced them. The rattle of the bones' was no longer heard at Brooks's, and that club subsided into being one of the most quiet and respectable in any metropolis. Gambling, driven about the same period from France, took refuge in German wateringplaces. There at Baden-Baden, Wiesbaden, Homburg, and elsewhere, roulette and trente et un tables flourished for over a quarter of a century, with the sanction of the governments and to their profit, but to the detriment of many citizens of all the principal European States. The play was strictly fair, but the chances in favour of the keepers of the banks were so great, that all those harpies made enormous fortunes. One of them was called Le Blanc, and the answer he gave to a youthful request for his advice is characteristic for coolness and for truth. 'Dites-moi,' said a beardless tyro to him, 'est-ce que le rouge gagne ou le noir?' 'Monsieur,' was the cynical reply, 'Le Blanc gagne toujours.' The tables of course attracted to them swindlers of all kinds, who found, however, in private play a greater scope for their talents than they could obtain in the public rooms. A good story is told of the unmasking of one of these. A well-known conjuror of honest reputation, whose powers of sleight of hand made it impossible for him to play cards for money, suspected a frequent player of écarté and such games of unfair play; and sitting down with him, with the cognizance of several bystanders, soon found his suspicions confirmed. At one period of the game the players were four all,' and the conjuror's opponent turned up the king. Very remarkable indeed,' said the conjuror, in a tone of emphasis which arrested his opponent's attention.-'Yes, a lucky coup,' was the reply. Very remarkable indeed. I have the four kings of the pack in my lap.'

The play at Homburg and Baden increased, as all continual play is apt to increase, in fury and in amount. During the season men and women of all nations and all classes thronged the well-lit and luxurious salons de jeu. Statesmen and financiers sat side by side with turf men of little reputation and chevaliers d'industrie of none at all. Ambassadresses, wives of ministers, and owners of the proudest names in the aristocracy