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  ‘By Jasus, ’ he exclaimed, licking his wounds at Tom’s CoffeeHouse, ‘he [the American officer] has ruined my character, and I will commence an action against him.’

  ‘Poh, poh, ’ said Foote, ‘be quiet. If he has ruined your character, so much the better; for it was a damn’d bad one, and the sooner it was destroyed, the more to your advantage.’

  Mortifyingly, this riposte earned hearty laughter from Tom’s clientele. Dennis had to prove that he was a sport by laughing too, especially as he was in Foote’s debt.

  At least he had the good spirits to rise to this challenge. His cohorts at the gambling centres of London included Dick England, in whom good spirits were entirely absent. England was a version of Dennis with the charm removed, and brutality added. Like Dennis, he was an Irish expatriate. Emerging from an ‘obscure, vulgar and riotous’ quarter of Dublin, he took an apprenticeship to a carpenter; but the only manual activity for which he showed an aptitude was fighting. Like Dennis, he became the protégé of a businesswoman – his was a bawd. England was rumoured to be involved in highway robbery, and when one of his companions was found shot at the scene of a crime he decided that it was time to decamp to London, setting himself up at a house of ill repute called the Golden Cross. He soon rose in the world, to an address in Piccadilly, where he acquired a manservant, a pair of horses and a smattering of French. There was an awkward moment when his former mistress, who ‘could not boast of a single attribute of body or mind to attract any man who had the use of his eyes and ears’, 13 turned up on his doorstep, but he got rid of her with a hefty pay-off. Back in Dublin, she used the money to drink herself to death.

  Contemporary magazines offer various dismal accounts of the outcomes of England’s tricks. At the rackets courts, he cultivated the Hon. Mr Damer, a decent player, before going off to Paris in search of a better one, hiring him to play regularly against Damer, and instructing him to start off by losing. He pretended to back Damer; and Damer, encouraged by the support and by belief in his superiority, backed himself as well – thereby losing up to 500 guineas at a time. With debts of (according to The Sporting Magazine) 40, 000 guineas, Damer threw himself upon the mercy of his father, but despaired of getting help. Even while his father’s steward was on the way to town with the money, Damer was in Stacie’s hotel, sending out for five prostitutes and a fiddler called Blind Burnett. He watched them cavort for a while, put a gun to his temple, and fired.

  England’s most notorious swindle, recounted in Seymour Harcourt’s The Gaming Calendar (1820), was one of his rare failures. While passing some time in Scarborough, he got into company with Mr Da—n (hereafter called Dawson), 14 a man of property. At dinner, England refilled Dawson’s glass assiduously, softening him up for the card game to follow, but he overdid it, causing Dawson to complain that he was too drunk to play. Sure enough, once the cards came out, he descended into a stupor. The conspirators, though, soon devised a fall-back plan to part him from his money. Two of them wrote notes, one recording ‘Dawson owes me 80 guineas’, the other ‘Dawson owes me 100 guineas’; England wrote a note saying, ‘I owe Dawson 30 guineas’. The next day, he met Dawson, apologized for his drunkenness and rough behaviour of the previous evening, said he hoped he had given no offence, and handed over thirty guineas.

  ‘But we didn’t play, ’ Dawson pointed out.

  ‘Get away wit’ ye, ’ England assured him. ‘An’ these be your fair winnings an’ all.’

  What an honest gentleman, Dawson reflected as the pair parted ‘with gushing civilities’. Soon after, he bumped into England’s companions. Further comparisons of sore heads ensued, and Dawson commented on the civility of their friend Mr England, who had honoured a bet that would otherwise have been forgotten.

  ‘As you mention this bet, sir, ’ one of the companions said, ‘and very properly observe that it is gentlemanly to honour debts incurred when intoxicated, I hope we may be forgiven for reminding you of your debts to us’; and the fictitious notes were flourished.

  ‘This cannot be so, ’ Dawson protested. ‘I have no recollection of these transactions.’

  ‘Sir, ’ came the reply, ‘you question our honour; and did not Mr England lately pay you for bets made at the same table?’

  Defeated, Dawson promised to pay up the next day.

  His own friends came to the rescue. With the help of a fiveguinea gift, they encouraged the waiter at the inn to recall that Dawson had been paralysed by drink, and had not played cards. Dawson, with some contempt, returned England the thirty guineas, adding five guineas as his portion of the supper bill. England and his cronies left Scarborough the next day.

  Dennis O’Kelly may have spent some time in Scarborough, 15 but there is no suggestion that he was involved in this attempted theft. He was, though, implicated with England – and fellow blacklegs Jack Tetherington, Bob Walker and Tom Hall – in the ruination of one Clutterbuck, a clerk at the Bank of England. Clutterbuck, as a result of playing with this crowd, fell heavily into debt, attempted to defraud the bank of the sum he needed, was caught, and hanged.

  Although the divisions between the classes in the Georgian era were as wide as they always have been, gambling threw together lords and commoners, politicians and tradesmen, the respectable and the disreputable. Some years later, eminent witnesses would testify on Dick England’s behalf at his trial for murder. At the rackets courts, England’s companion Mr Damer ‘would not have walked round Ranelagh [the pleasure gardens in Chelsea] with him, or had him at his table, for a thousand pounds’.16 One writer referred to ‘Turf acquaintanceship’, and offered the anecdote of the distinguished gentleman who failed to recognize someone greeting him in the street.

  ‘Sir, you have the advantage of me, ’ the gentleman said. The other man asked, ‘Don’t you remember we used to meet at certain parties at Bath many years ago?’

  ‘Well, sir, ’ the gentleman told him, ‘you may speak to me should you ever again meet me at certain parties at Bath, but nowhere else.’17

  The fortunes of Charlotte Hayes, too, began to look up on her departure from the Fleet. Her newly won freedom from debtors’ prison received ironic celebration in Edward Thompson’s 1761 edition of The Meretriciad, as she took advantage of the new King’s clemency to begin her ascent to the pinnacle of her profession:

  See Charlotte Hayes, as modest as a saint,

  And fair as 10 years past, with little paint;

  Blest in a taste which few below enjoy,

  Preferr’d a prison to a world of joy:

  With borrow’d charms, she culls th’unwary spark,

  And by th’Insolvent Act parades the Park.

  Her opportunities in courtesanship may have closed – as Samuel Derrick gently put it in Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, ‘Time was when this lady was a reigning toast … She has been, however, a good while in eclipse’ – but other opportunities were opening. The brothel-keeping business, she saw, was going upmarket, and was ready to boom.

  Jane Goadby was showing the way. Back in the 1750s, Mrs Goadby had been on a fact-finding mission to Paris, touring the stylish brothels of the city. They were not known as brothels: they were ‘nunneries’, populated by ‘nuns’ under the charge of the ‘Lady Abbess’, or, in pagan terminology, the ‘High Priestess of the Cyprian Deity’ (a reference to Aphrodite, goddess of love). The abbess selected beautiful nuns from diverse backgrounds and faiths. They were required to submit entirely to her authority, and to behave in a demure manner, avoiding excesses of eating and drinking. But they were to show no such restraint in the bedroom, where their brief was to demo
nstrate ‘le zèle le plus sincère pour les rites et les cérémonies de la déesse de Cypros’ (the most devoted zeal in the rites and ceremonies of the Cyprian goddess). At a time when venereal diseases were widespread, the nunneries offered some degree of security to their patrons by ensuring that the nuns received weekly medicals. A gentleman, who was also expected to behave with decorum, could pass entire evenings there, eating a fine meal, enjoying musical performances, and at the end retiring with his chosen nun. As a bonus, it was all very reasonably priced.

  On her return to London, Mrs Goadby set about reproducing these attractions, except the pricing. At her establishment in Great Marlborough Street, Soho, you could spend up to £50 – £20 more than Dennis’s annual salary as Lady —’s chairman – for just the sex. But gentlemen who had been on the Grand Tour, and who had experienced the splendours of continental brothels, were delighted to find such services on their doorsteps. The Covent Garden Magazine announced excitedly: ‘Mrs Goadby, thatcelebrated Lady Abbess, having fitted up an elegant nunnery in Marlborough Street, is now laying in a choice stock of virgins for the ensuing season. She has disposed her nunnery in such an uncommon taste, and prepared such an extraordinary accommodation for gentlemen of all ages, tastes and caprices, as it is judged will far surpass every seminary of the kind yet known in Europe.’ Elizabeth Armistead (Charles James Fox’s future wife) started her career as one of Mrs Goadby’s nuns.

  Charlotte Hayes saw this market as her opportunity too, and Dennis was able to help. Their relationship was one of true partners, sharing the rewards of their labours. In the Fleet, she had provided the funds to get him back into circulation; now he was in a position to reciprocate, and, through his sporting connections, to bring her a classy clientele. She opened a serail near Mrs Goadby’s in Great Marlborough Street, and attracted regulars including the Duke of Richmond, the Earls of Egremont and Grosvenor, Lord Foley and Sir William Draper. Not only did these men bring prestige to Charlotte’s establishment, they also – being gamblers as well as philanderers – offered synergy, as we say nowadays, with Dennis’s business interests.

  10 He won the bet. Trentham was first, Pyrrhus second, and their rival, Pincher, third.

  11 From Pierce Egan’s Sporting Anecdotes (1804).

  12 Knighted in 1761, Sir John was known as the Blind Beak of Bow Street. He had lost his sight in a naval accident, and was reputed to have been able to recognize three thousand criminals from the sounds of their voices. He had taken over as chief magistrate of London on the death in 1754 of his half brother Henry.

  13 The Sporting Magazine (December 1795).

  14 Eighteenth-century reports often gave only initials, or initials with a few other letters. In formulas such as En—l—d, the attempt at concealment was feeble.

  15 See chapter 1.

  16 The Sporting Magazine (January 1796).

  17 From Seymour Harcourt’s The Gaming Calendar and Annals of Gaming (1820).

  4

  The Duke

  POSTERITY HAS DECIDED that William Augustus, third son of George II, was on the whole a bad man. BBC History Magazine named him the Worst Briton of the 18th Century. He was cruel in battle, earning the nickname ‘Butcher’ for his conduct at the Battle of Culloden; he was physically unattractive; and he was selfindulgent. Nevertheless, the racing world, taking what may be a blinkered view, is inclined to view him generously. ‘No man can fairly be said to have done more for English racing’ is a typical verdict.18This was the man who created the finest stud farm of the eighteenth century. He bred Herod, one of the most influential of all Thoroughbred stallions. And he bred Eclipse.

  He was born in 1721. His eldest brother, Frederick, Prince of Wales, was fourteen; another brother, George, had died three years earlier, aged only three months. It was William Augustus who became his parents’ favourite, while George II and Queen Caroline grew actively to dislike Frederick, who was arty.19 At four, William was made a Companion Knight of the Bath. That was a mere taster for what was to come a year later: the five-year-old prince became Duke of Cumberland, a title that took in Marquess of Berkhamstead, Earl of Kennington, Viscount Trematon, and Baron of Alderney. Marked out for a career in the forces, he joined the navy, did not take to it, but showed precocious enthusiasm and aptitude in the army. By twenty-one, he was a major-general.

  The War of the Austrian Succession, one of the immensely complex conflicts in which this period of history specialized, was in progress, and in 1743 Cumberland fought against the French at Dettingen, serving under his father. It was the last occasion on which a British monarch led his troops into battle. As noted in the previous chapter, there was betting that George II would not survive. He did; but Cumberland got a grapeshot wound below his knee, and would be plagued by the injury for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, the battle was a personal as well as a national triumph. Cumberland had given his orders ‘with a great deal of calmness and seemed quite unwearied’, 20 and was hailed as a hero.

  His standing did not diminish two years later when, as captain-general and leader of the allied forces at Fontenoy in Flanders, he suffered defeat. It was a noble defeat, everyone thought, and the King was inclined to share Cumberland’s view that the blame lay with the ‘inexpressible cowardice’ of their Dutch allies. ‘Now he will be as popular with the lower class of men as he has been with the low women for the past three or four years, ’ Horace Walpole wrote. So, when danger arose at home, Cumberland was the obvious man to deal with it.

  Ever since the Catholic James II had been ousted from the throne in 1688, he and his descendants had been trying to regain it. In 1689, James landed in Ireland, but was eventually defeated by the forces of William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne (July 1690).21James’s son, James Francis Edward, led a second rebellious invasion in 1715, and was also defeated. Thirty years later, the Jacobite cause was in the hands of James’s grandson, Charles Edward Stuart – Bonnie Prince Charlie. He landed in Scotland in July 1745, raised an army of supporters, but failed to increase his following when he marched south, and retreated north of the border.

  Cumberland caught up with him on 16 April 1746 at Culloden Moor. The battle lasted only about an hour. When the outnumbered Jacobites retreated, they left behind more than a thousand dead, as many wounded, and some six hundred prisoners. This was when Cumberland earned his Worst Briton tag. Ordering the wounded and the prisoners to be executed, he followed up the battle by hunting down the rest of the defeated army and their sympathizers, jailing and deporting thousands of them, and bayoneting and hanging more than a hundred. The policy was ‘to pursue and hunt out these vermin from their lurking holes’22 – language that encouraged the English troops to go on a spree of raping and pillaging. Bonnie Prince Charlie escaped, over the sea to Skye (‘Speed bonnie boat …’, as the song has it) and then back to France. He died, unfulfilled, in 1788.

  Cumberland’s destruction of the Jacobites got a mixed press. For many, the bloody suppression of a threatened Catholic coup was a glorious act. Parliament voted him an additional income of £25, 000 a year; Handel wrote the oratorio Judas Maccabaeus, which included the march ‘See, the Conquering Hero Comes’, in his honour; many English inns changed their names to the Duke’s Head; Tyburn Gate, in the area of London – now Marble Arch – where executions took place, became Cumberland Gate (the area now houses the Cumberland Hotel, on Great Cumberland Place). For others, he was ‘Butcher’ Cumberland. The nickname gained currency, with the encouragement, some suspected, of the Prince of Wales, who had always been jealous of his brother’s superior place in his parents’ affections. In Scotland, the Duke is the Butcher irrevocably. The flower that the English call the Sweet William is, north of the border, the Stinking Billy.

  Within a few years, the bad odour ha
d spread. Cumberland did not confine inflexible brutality to his enemies: he also showed it, when they betrayed any hint of poor discipline, to his own troops. When, in 1751, Frederick, Prince of Wales died, leaving behind a son who was heir to the throne but only twelve years old, Cumberland wanted to be named Regent, 23 but Parliament refused. Then Cumberland’s military fortunes reached their nadir in another highly complicated conflict, the Seven Years’War, which broke out in 1757. Leading a Hanoverian force, he was defeated at the Battle of Hastenback, and in September 1757 he signed the Convention of Klosterzeven, releasing Hanover to the French. He agreed to this settlement with the sanction, he believed, of George II; but he returned home to be informed by his father that ‘he had ruined his country and his army, had spoilt everything and hurt or lost his own reputation’.24

  Cumberland took the rebuke with dignity. He resigned his military posts, and retired to concentrate on the one pursuit in which he left an indisputably beneficial legacy: horseracing.

  Cumberland may have been the first Hanoverian to take an interest in the Turf, but the status of racing as the Sport of Kings – a sport defined by royal patronage – had been embedded in British society since the Middle Ages. King John (reigned 1199 to 1216), who was ‘not a good man’ as A. A. Milne put it, was another controversial figure to benefit the sport, importing Eastern horses and setting up a royal stud at Eltham. Richard II (1377 to 1400) raced in a match against the Earl of Arundel; the outcome is not known, but some years later Arundel was beheaded. During the reign of Henry VIII (1509 to 1547), horses came to England from Spain, Morocco and Mantua, two of them as valuable gifts from Ferdinand of Aragon, whose generosity was ascribed to madness resulting from an aphrodisiac dinner fed him by his wife. Henry founded another royal stud, at Hampton Court, and kept an establishment exclusively for what were then known as ‘running horses’ at Greenwich, where there were a stable jockey and a trainer. He introduced a law designed to improve England’s warhorses, also improving the racing stock: he outlawed the grazing of small horses, and he empowered rangers each Michaelmas to make a cull, including among their targets fillies and mares that ‘shall not be thought able, nor likely to grow to be able, to bear foals of reasonable stature, or to do profitable labours’. It was the kind of ruthlessness he also applied to his marital affairs.