Lucrative
Gambling

To the gambling games of Faro, Hazard, Macao, Doodle-do, and Rouge et Noir, more even than to horse-racing, many tradesmen, once possessing good fortunes and great business, owed their destruction. Thousands upon thousands have been ruined in the vicinity of St James's. It was not confined to youths of fortune only, but the decent and respectable tradesman, as well as the dashing clerk of the merchant and banker, was ingulfed in its vortes.

The proprietors of gaming houses were also concerned in fraudulent insurances, and employed a number of clerks while the lotteries were drawing, who conducted the business without risk, in counting-houses, where no insurances were taken, but to which books were carried, as well as from the different offices in every part of the town, as from the Morocco-men, who went from door to door taking insurances and enticing the poor and middling ranks to adventure.

It was gambling, and not the burdens of the long war, nor the revulsion from war to peace, that made so many bankruptcies in the few years succeeding the Battle of Waterloo. It was the plunderers at gaming tables that filled the gazettes and made the gaols overflow with so many victims.

A foreigner has advanced an opinion as to the source of the gambling propensity of Englishmen. `The English,' says M. Dunne,[68] `the most speculative nation on earth, calculate even upon future contingences. Nowhere else is the adventurous rage for stock-jobbing carried on to so great an extent. The fury of gambling, so common in England, is undoubtedly a daughter of this speculative genius. The _Greeks_ of Great Britain are, however, much inferior to those of France in cunning and industry. A certain Frenchman who assumed in London the title and manners 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, or rather _chevalier d'industrie_, a person who had acted the double character of a French spy and an English officer at the same time. Their tactics being at length discovered, the baron was obliged to quit the country; and he is said to have afterwards entered the monastery of La Trappe,' where doubtless, in the severe and gloomy religious practices of that terrible penitentiary, he atoned for his past enormities.

[68] `Refexions sur l'Homme.'

`Till near the commencement of the present century the favourite game was Faro, and as it was a decided advantage to hold the Bank, masters and mistresses, less scrupulous than Wilberforce, frequently volunteered to fleece and amuse the company. But scandal having made busy with the names of some of them, it became usual to hire a professed gamester at five or ten guineas a night, to set up a table for the evening, just as any operatic professional might now-a-days be hired for a concert, or a band- master for a ball.

`Faro gradually dropped out of fashion; Macao took its place; Hazard was never wanting; and Whist began to be played for stakes which would have satisfied Fox himself, who, though it was calculated that he might have netted four or five thousand a year by games of skill, complained that they afforded no excitement.

`Wattier's Club, in Piccadilly, was the resort of the Macao players. It was kept by an old _maitre d'hotel_ of George IV., a character in his way, who took a just pride in the cookery and wines of his establishment.

`All the brilliant stars of fashion (and fashion was power then) frequented Wattier's, with Beau Brummell for their sun. `Poor Brummell, dead, in misery and idiotcy, at Caen! and I remember him in all his glory, cutting his jokes after the opera, at White's, in a black velvet great-coat, and a cocked hat on his well-powdered head.

`Nearly the same turn of reflection is suggested as we run over the names of his associates. Almost all of them were ruined-- three out of four irretrievably. Indeed, it was the forced expatriation of its supporters that caused the club to be broken up.

`During the same period (from 1810 to 1815 or thereabouts) there was a great deal of high play at White's and Brookes', particularly at Whist. At Brookes' figured some remarkable characters--as Tippoo Smith, by common consent the best Whist- player of his day; and an old gentleman nicknamed Neptune, from his having once flung himself into the sea in a fit of despair at being, as he thought, ruined. He was fished out in time, found he was not ruined, and played on during the remainder of his life.

`The most distinguished player at White's was the nobleman who was presented at the Salons in Paris as Le Wellington des Joueurs (Lord Rivers); and he richly merited the name, if skill, temper, and the most daring courage are titles to it. The greatest genius, however, is not infallible. He once lost three thousand four hundred pounds at Whist by not remembering that the seven of hearts was in! He played at Hazard for the highest stakes that any one could be got to play for with him, and at one time was supposed to have won nearly a hundred thousand pounds; but _IT ALL WENT_, along with a great deal more, at Crockford's.

`There was also a great deal of play at Graham's, the Union, the Cocoa Tree, and other clubs of the second order in point of fashion. Here large sums were hazarded with equal rashness, and remarkable characters started up. Among the most conspicuous was the late Colonel Aubrey, who literally passed his life at play. He did nothing else, morning, noon, and night; and it was computed that he had paid more than sixty thousand pounds for card-money. He was a very fine player at all games, and a shrewd, clever man. He had been twice to India and made two fortunes. It was said that he lost the first on his way home, transferred himself from one ship to another without landing, went back, and made the second. His life was a continual alternation between poverty and wealth; and he used to say, the greatest pleasure in life is winning at cards--the next greatest, losing!

`For several years deep play went on at all these clubs, fluctuating both as to amount and locality, till by degrees it began to flag. It had got to a low ebb when Mr Crockford came to London and established the celebrated club which bore his name.

`Some good was certainly produced by the system. In the first place, private gambling (between gentleman and gentleman), with its degrading incidents, is at an end. In the second place, this very circumstance brings the worst part of the practice within the reach of the law. Public gambling, which only existed by and through what were popularly termed hells, might be easily suppressed. There were, in 1844, more than twenty of these establishments in Pall Mall, Piccadilly, and St James's, called into existence by Crockford's success.'[69]

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