Aristocrats (25 page)

London at night offered little to the exhausted labourers who turned their backs on the darkening city and made for home. As they walked, some dreamed of their children
heaped up on truckle beds fast asleep; some conjured up steaming cauldrons of soup with bread and ale; others hoped for better times. In Spitalfields the weavers straightened their backs, sat up stiffly and then went downstairs. Fluffing up their feathers the birds on the ground floor settled down for the night. Doors closed; link boys stretched up to light flaring street lamps; children mumbled, cried and fell asleep.

A little while later other doors began to open. From the basements of houses in the City, Whitehall and St James’s, apprentices and servants emerged, running eagerly up the steps to the lighted streets and an evening out. With their gowns and coats trimmed to the latest fashion, servants could pass for their social betters, which astonished foreign visitors and made employers regret the custom of paying part of their wages in cast-off clothing.

Other servants stayed indoors. They arranged chairs and card tables, straightened carpets, lit fragrant bees-wax candles in sconces and chandeliers. Ladies’ maids tucked imitation flowers into their mistresses curled hair and discreetly dabbed rouge on to cheeks made sallow and hollow by years of sedentary gourmandising. Far below the liveried butler announced the assembly’s first arrivals.

The streets filled and revellers made choices. Some headed for taverns to drink the hours away; some walked the length of Oxford Street watching the urban parade. Others milled outside the theatres in Covent Garden and Drury Lane or strolled to the river where, at Westminster and Whitehall Stairs, barges and rowing boats waited on summer evenings to take customers across to Vauxhall Gardens. On a warm night as many as fifteen thousand people paid their shilling entrance fee to the pleasure gardens on the south bank of the river opposite Westminster. Peers rubbed shoulders with stable hands, well dressed courtesans might be mistaken in the gloom for women of fashion. Ladies’ maids met their lovers in the lamp-lit walks and leaving the gardens’ crowded centre drifted amorously to the periphery where mock rockeries and
clumps of shrubs covered their flirtations. Music from the orchestra floated over them as they kissed and loosened fastenings.

The middle of Vauxhall was an elongated quadrangle formed by four covered colonnades. It was sprinkled with trees pollarded in the French manner to make them elegantly tall and thin, and optimistically called the grove. Festoons of lamps undulating along the colonnades lit up the grove and its jostling crowd. At nine o’clock visitors hurried to the north side of the garden to see the cascade, where a curtain was drawn aside to show a sculptured rustic landscape illuminated with concealed lights. In the foreground were a miller’s house and waterfall. As the crowds clustered round, the ‘exact appearance’ of water seemed to flow down the slope, turn the mill wheel, rise up in foaming billows at the bottom of the race and glide away.

For the next couple of hours visitors strolled about and stared at one another. In the boxes along the colonnades friends met up and chatted, keeping one eye on the crowd, hoping to spot a famous beauty, a minor political figure or a fashionable courtesan. Soon afterwards tables were set in the alcoves of the colonnades and diners sat down to supper. It was part of the evening’s entertainment to complain about the food: the old joke went round that you could read the newspaper through a slice of Vauxhall beef or ham. Poorer visitors bunched round the booths of wealthy diners, commenting on their manners and dress. In the early hours of the morning, boatmen ferried the weary back to the northern side of the river. In the gardens servants extinguished the lights and the illusion they created. Soon only the marble statues of Milton and Handel were left to survey the scene.

In 1742 a more respectable pleasure garden opened on the north side of the Thames at Ranelagh, by the Chelsea Hospital. The high entry price to Ranelagh of 2s. 6d. allowed its proprietors to claim that the garden was genteel and socially exclusive. In the summer there were regular concerts, fireworks and promenades; but it was the constant display of
London’s social élite that really drew the crowds. At the centre of Ranelagh an enormous rotunda was built, a round Romanesque structure ringed inside with two tiers of forty-eight wood-panelled boxes. At one side of this huge space stood a canopied orchestra box from which players serenaded the couples and groups who walked solemnly round the floor. Brass chandeliers with candles enclosed in glass spheres hung from the distant ceiling; sound disappeared into the dome and the building was sometimes eerily quiet. Walkers’ conversation sounded like the murmuring of lost spirits and women’s dresses swished along the marble floor. To diners in the upper boxes it seemed as if the promenaders were purgatorial wanderers, condemned to walk for ever round in circles.

Dawn broke over the city. Ladies and gentlemen back from balls and masquerades flopped into bed. But in some houses the candles still burned, fading to blue flames as the white morning light filled the rooms. The clubs of St James’s were still crowded. Young men sat at baize-topped tables, piles of guineas to one side of them, glasses of wine and brandy to the other. In front of them and in their hands were cards. By the morning hours only these inveterate gamblers were left at the tables, men who lost (and occasionally won) hundreds or thousands of pounds a night. Stories circulated of their depravity; to a nation which became ever more addicted to risk as it became more commercialised, they epitomised both the lure and the shame of playing life itself for high stakes. These pallid young men, emotionally exhausted and financially ruined by night-long bouts of gaming, were only the visible representatives of a country in the grip of gambling fever.

Almost everybody who had any spare cash, and many who did not, gambled. Servants and labourers put away part of their meagre wages to buy shares in lottery tickets, hoping against hope that chance would free them from a life of unremitting servitude. Farmers gambled at rural race meetings.
Apprentices, merchants and their clerks held bets on political events, on which merchantman would arrive first at the Port of London, even on which woman would first turn the corner at the end of the street. Dowagers and gentlemen sat over games of faro or whist through long winter evenings, regularly losing twenty pounds a night to their hosts who took the bank. Virginal, unmarried women were not supposed to play – one loss, it was thought, might lead to another – but they did, out of the public gaze. ‘Sarah is fond of loo,’ Caroline wrote before Sarah’s marriage, ‘but I have desired her, except in private parties with the Duchess of R[ichmond] not to play.’ After her marriage Sarah came of age as a gambler. Caroline noticed with alarm that when Bunbury was not in London she played with the Duke and Duchess of Richmond and other young men at Richmond House. Emily regularly lost moderate amounts without a qualm. Caroline, drawn towards something she thought of as dangerous and wrong, was both attracted and worried by the idea of playing for considerable sums. In 1760 she wrote, ‘I can’t help when I play deep having an unpleasant feel about it, as if I did something wrong; perhaps a little vanity at not acting consistent with the rest of one’s character. In short, I don’t quite know, but ’tho I love it I don’t feel pleasant at it, and fear encouraging myself in it.’

But it was those who played for very high stakes who held the nation transfixed. Everyone agreed that in moderation gambling was an innocuous pastime but that too much gaming was a vice. Parents and commentators alike puzzled over the cause of this excess, the more so because the line between enjoyment and ruin seemed so permeable. At the beginning of the century, writers regarded games of chance as a kind of pleasure. They trusted to reason and conscience to exercise moderation, and they saw excess as a failure of will, especially since in games like faro the players took turns at being the banker and thus at recouping their losses. Later on, the focus shifted from individuals to the larger world. The habits of
gilded youth seemed to offer up a mirror to society; gambling became a symbol of national corruption and imperial decline. As troubles with the American colonists brewed, Horace Walpole wrote, ‘the gaming is worthy the decline of our Empire. The young men lose five, ten, fifteen thousand pounds in an evening. Lord Stavordale, not one-and-twenty, lost eleven thousand last Tuesday, but recovered it by one great hand. He swore a great oath – “Now if I had been playing deep, I might have won millions.”’

Gambling on this scale was confined to a few dozen young men,
habitués
of Newmarket, denizens of Almack’s and White’s. They gambled to display their wealth, to identify themselves as part of a group and, increasingly, to indicate a way of life that had political as well as social parameters. Caroline’s sons were at the heart of this cadre. To her horror, Ste and Charles Fox, trading on the expectation of very large fortunes, were ostentatious in their huge gambling losses and others in their circle followed their lead. Lord Stavordale was their cousin. Lord Carlisle and Richard Fitzpatrick, Lord March and George Selwyn were the Fox brothers’ companions at the gaming table. These men, with their associates of club and turf, developed a culture of gambling. Winning was exhilarating but losing, and losing well, was equally important; a member of Brooks’s who left the club with winnings of £12,000 (probably gained as the banker) was vilified by those who remained. By his name in the club books they wrote, ‘that he may never return is the ardent wish of the members’.

As Charles Fox made his way in Parliament in the 1770s, gambling became part of his political personality. Fox’s admirers lovingly repeated what Horace Walpole wrote about a great extempore performance in the House after a gaming bout. ‘Fox was dissipated, dissolute, idle beyond measure. He was that very morning returned from Newmarket, where he had lost some thousand pounds the preceding day, … had sat up drinking all night … had been running about the House
talking to different persons,’ and yet spoke with ‘amazing spirit and memory.’ Where his rival Pitt was cautious and costive, Fox and his supporters were excessive and carelessly brilliant. By the time Fox took on the mantle of ‘Champion of the People’ in the 1780s, his gambling had been transformed by legend into an aspect of his populism, a form of generosity and symptom of political openness, English liberties and, eventually, for his supporters, of Liberty itself.

Caroline, who was to see nothing of Charles’s deification, continued to think of her sons’ gambling as a corruption of reason. While Charles and Ste made huge inroads into their father’s fortune, and broke every resolution of better conduct, and while onlookers blamed their vice on a lack of childhood discipline, Caroline still trusted to reason and ‘confidence’ to get the better of their unbridled passion for cards. ‘Oh Ste,’ she burst out in 1773, ‘you have neither of you the excuse of having harsh or hard parents. Too indulgent ones is no excuse for bad conduct, as our indulgence never tended to, nor our example to encourage, sin; but we hoped to reclaim folly by gaining confidence.’

When fortunes were lost and credit ran short, other amusements had to be found. A shilling a night took anyone to the theatre. There audiences asked over and over again the same questions that dominated the gambling dens: ‘What will happen next?’ and ‘how will it all end?’ Suspense and resolution were the stuff of the playhouse; in a melodrama everything might depend if not on the fall of the dice, then on an act of the gods or the flick of a tyrant’s wrist. Emily had a box in the Dublin theatre, Caroline one at both Drury Lane and Covent Garden. When she came to London in 1760, Sarah went to the play several times a week, often in the company of Charles and Ste Fox, who had been regular visitors since they were five or six years old. At home plays were read silently in the morning, out loud in the evenings and acted by the younger members of both the Fox and Fitzgerald families. Everybody joined in the cult of Garrick. Caroline invited him to assemblies, Louisa had him to dinner when she came to London
and Sarah and Susan followed his career with minute attention until the day he died in 1779.

Time spent at the playhouse and reading plays testified to the allure of the theatre not only as an oratorical training ground for budding politicians but also as a metaphor for life itself. It was, of course, an old metaphor, stretching back through Shakespeare to classical writers. But in the eighteenth century it was given new impetus. Actors and theatres were growing in popularity and commentators began to hint at the double role that everyone played in the world, at once actor and audience, all watching the unfolding drama. As early as 1719, Addison’s
Spectator
, weighing up the merits of the metaphors of life as a journey and life as a stage, plumped for the latter on the grounds that it was more suited to the bustling and crowded condition of modern life. For the younger generation of Foxes and Fitzgeralds, though, the theatre was more than metaphoric. They worshipped actors and actresses as minor deities, confused actors with their roles and cast themselves as heroes and heroines. In the spring of 1764 the social and metaphorical distance between the aristocratic and the theatrical house broke down altogether. Susan Fox-Strangways eloped with William O’Brien who compounded the error of being an actor by his Irish, Catholic descent.

From the time she appeared in London society Susan had been regarded by her family as unpredictable, headstrong and ‘cunning’. ‘I fear Lady Suke,’ Caroline had written during the negotiations with the Bunburys over Sarah’s marriage settlement, afraid that Susan might induce Sarah to call off the wedding and damage her reputation. ‘She has too much of the reverse of humility in her composition,’ Louisa added. Susan said, ‘I thought myself fitter to advise and govern than to soothe and cultivate’, and when George III fell in love with Sarah, Susan had hopes of unprecedented influence in national affairs. ‘I almost thought
myself Prime Minister
.’ She was baulked in this ambition and unable as she said later ‘to talk, to confide’ in her family. She summed up her childhood
thus: ‘my father in one room reading – my mother in another playing cards – the ennui I felt – then very little communicating of sentiments or opinions’. Susan turned her attentions to the theatre. There communication between actors and audience created a magic web of confidence and there, too, powerful women like Kitty Fisher stalked the aisles. Home was all reserve, the theatre all engagement.