(iv) Gambling—A National Obsession
EXPIRING HOPES
parlours" or yards, for the sole amusement or edification of those who then happened to be present.
They were part and parcel of everyday brawls and rarely found their way into the press.
Newspaper notices however, of formal challenges and fights between women were almost as common as those between men.
In June, 1722, the London Journal printed this challenge :
T Elizabeth Wilkinson, of Clerkenwell, having had some words with Hannah Highfield and requiring satisfaction, do invite her to meet me on the stage and box with me for three guineas, each woman holding half-a-crown in each hand, and the first woman that drops her money to lose the battle."1
The said Hannah, the Journal continued, " hearing of the resolution of Elizabeth, will not fail to give her more blows than words, desiring home blows and from her no favour."
Even as late as 1768 a London paper (June 22nd) reported that:
"On Wednesday last two women fought for a new shift (shirt) valued at half-a-guinea, in the Spa Fields near Islington.
The battle was won by a woman called ' Bruising Peg,' who beat her antagonist in a terrible manner."'?
For prize fights between famous male bruisers, who battled bare-fisted, with little science and few restraining rules, the Age of Reason could muster mobs of 12,000 spectators, to whom "' downright slaughtering '"' was capital sport.
(iv) Gambling—a National Obsession The gambling mania of this era—a subject much discussed both by political and general historians—is a matter of universal admission, though often the tyranny of its grip is but little understood.
The Government regularly raised vast sums by popular lotteries: even the building of Westminster Bridge (1736) and the founding of the British Museum (1753) were financed chiefly by this means.* Parliament was full of gamblers, and the smart Clubs of West London were nearly all gaming dens.
White's was the favourite centre of aristocratic Tories, and Almack's (later Brooks's) of aristocratic Whigs, while at more Bohemian centres, like the '' Cocoa Tree," both met for equally high stakes.
Horace Walpole, writing to Sir' Horace Mann (February 2nd, 1770), says:
'"' The young 1 The idea of holding a half-crown in each hand was that the women would thus be kept from scratching each other's eyes and tearing each other's hair.
| 2 Sydney, Vol. I, p. 177.
3 See Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, Vol. III, p. 300.
156 ENGLAND:
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men of the age lose ten, fifteen, twenty thousand pounds in an evening there (Almack's).
Lord Stavordale, not one-andtwenty, lost £11,000 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'."?
Lord Ilchester "lost £13,000 at a single sitting'; the Duke of Devonshire '' lost his estate, ' Leicester Abbey,' at a game of basset? ; Lord Mountford who committed suicide on New
Year's Day, 1755, had spent the preceding night gambling 'deep "' and losing heavily at White's ; the Hon. John Damer, who also made his quietus with a pistol, was involved in gambling debts to the tune of £70,000.
Miss Pelham, daughter of the Prime Minister, was but a notorious representative of the gambling intoxication among high-born women ; Lady Cowper, in her Diary, speaks of sittings at Court at which " the lowest stake was 200 guineas"? ; even Addison relates that he won
in a lottery: and Swift says that Lord Oxford never passed White's without bestowing upon it a curse as " the bane of the English nobility.''?
Sir John Bland, M.P., who "died suddenly abroad" in 1755, had '' squandered his entire fortune" at hazard*: at one point in a night's play, reports Horace Walpole, Bland had
lost two and thirty thousand pounds "'* ; while at an earlier date the Duke of Bedford forfeited almost an equal sum in a single night's fling.
That gay wag George Selwyn who entered Parliament in 1747, two years after his expulsion from Oxford
for a blasphemous travesty on the Eucharist," seems to have spent most of his time around " gaming hells'? and was the means of leading many a young patrician into the trap.
He it was who, in 1756, on seeing Ponsonby, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, airily toss a fat roll of notes over a gaming table at Newmarket, exclaimed : "' Look how easily the Speaker passes the money bills!'
George Harley Drummond, of the famous banking house of Charing Cross, dropped £20,000 at whist, and was " forced to resign his partnership in the firm " ; while, at the '' Cocoa Tree," one cast at hazard awarded the 1 Horace Walpole's Letters (Cunningham Ed.), Vol. V, p. 226.
* Lecky, I., p. 522f.; Sydney, I, p. 23off.
For a vivid, though perhaps overdrawn, picture of the gambling mania on the Continent, see Thackeray's George the First (Works, Vol. X, pp.
285-307).
European Princes, in " play," sometimes gambled the lives of whole regiments of their army as mercenaries for foreign service.
4H. Walpole, Letters, Vol. II, p. 425.
5 Chambers's Biog. Dict., p. 841; Jesse's George Selwyn and His Contemporaries, Vol. III, p. 137£; Life of Wilberforce, by his sons, Vol. I, p. 117.
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victor no less than £140,000.1 "Gay ladies, too, it was openly whispered, sometimes gambled themselves into immorality :
" And when the Fair One can't the Debt defray In Sterling Coin—does Sterling Beauty pay ? '"?
The classic gambling victim however was the brilliant Charles James Fox who, before reaching his twenty-fourth year, was committed at high interest to the Jews for gaming debts of some £100,000.- Sportively Fox dubbed the retiring room where Hebrew creditors waited after his play to adjust accounts, his "' Jerusalem Chamber."
Gibbon drolly recalls a certain twenty-two hour spell of Fox's "' recreation' at the " trifling cost of £500 per hour,"? and Horace Walpole wonders what the said gentleman will do when he has " succeeded in selling the estates of all his friends."
Fox's passion for gambling had been implanted by his notorious father, Lord Holland.
When the future statesman was but fifteen, sojourning at Spa, his father gave him a rouleau of guineas to stake on the gaming tables there ; at sixteen he was a member of Brooks's ; at twentyfour he was a dupe of " the Honourable '' Mrs. Grieve, who *' gave advice on all emergencies for half-a-guinea," and who persuaded Fox that she could manage a marriage for him with a certain Miss Phipps, then '' on her way from the West Indies to England with a fortune of £80,000."
It was only when Mrs. Grieve was arrested by another of her dupes, that Fox's dealings with her were revealed.* Sir G. O. Trevelyan's Early Life of C. 7. Fox delineates the society of the day as ''one vast casino."
Horace Walpole, writing to Mann in August, 1776, asks:
"' Can you believe that Lord Foley's two sons have borrowed money so extravagantly, that the interest they have contracted to pay amounts to £18,000 a year?'
Smaller fry often found themselves fleeced of their "little all.'
Oliver Goldsmith, at twenty-one, was "equipped with £50 to study law in London"; but before ever he saw London, it all '' disappeared at a Dublin gamingtable."
Some four years later, '' at play " in Leyden, he again lost every penny he possessed.
Little wonder therefore that he "died £2,000 in debt.'"4
Nor could a twentieth century gangsters' den, have taught much to the infamous "' gambling hells" of the Age of Reason, concerning the use of cunning, camouflage and guile.
In 1731, the Editor of the St. James's 1 See Botsford's English Society in the Eighteenth Century, p. 245f.
2 Mrs. Centilevre, The Gamester (1705), Epilogue.
8 Correspondence of C. $. Fox (Edited by Lord J. Russell), Vol. I, p. 94.
4 See "' Goldsmith " (Chambers's Biog. Dict.).