Charlotte Hayes and Dennis O’Kelly took their reverses well, refusing to allow their circumstances to cramp their styles. While in the Fleet, Charlotte, in the words of The Genuine Memoirs of Dennis O’Kelly, ‘did not forget to perform her midnight orgies, or sacrifice to the powers of love and wine’. Dennis was reduced to impoverishment, alleviated only slightly by a job in the tap room (bar), but he never lost his jovial manner. The Fleet was a place where, albeit in depressing and limited surroundings, you could try to lead some semblance of a normal life.
The prison had been built in 1197, near the Fleet river. It adjoined what is now Farringdon Street (to the north-east of Fleet Street). By the mid-eighteenth century it housed mostly debtors – about 110 of them in Charlotte’s and Dennis’s time, although sometimes there were up to three hundred, along with their families.
Again, Hogarth – whose father had a spell in the Fleet – gives us a flavour of the scene. Tom Rakewell, hero of The Rake’s Progress, sits gloomily beneath a meagre grilled window, in a small room shared with two other debtors but containing, in the picture, ten people. One of them is Tom’s wife, who is berating him; on his other side, a boy runner and a gaoler are demanding money. A note on the table is from the manager of Covent Garden Theatre, and says: ‘Sir, I have read your play and find it will not do.’ (For some writers, this print has particular power to chill.)
Tom is not a prisoner in the sense of one enduring punishment for crimes. Rather, he is in confinement until he settles his debts or reaches agreement with his creditors, and, in common with his fellow inmates, he has a key to his room. Some debtors went to the Fleet voluntarily: it offered a way of avoiding payment. Taking to the life there, they would remain inside to spite the people demanding money from them. A Mr Yardley, who had an income of £700 a year, spent ten years in the Fleet owing £100; on his death in 1735 he left in his room items valued at £5, 000.
The Fleet boasted a number of distinguished inmates. John Donne, the poet, did time there, at the instigation of his father-inlaw. William Wycherley, author of Restoration comedies, was in the Fleet for seven years. William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, got into financial trouble and lived for a while in the Rules of the Fleet – an area outside the walls. In fiction, the inmates included Tobias Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle (1751), who was waited on by a former Guards officer, and, alliteratively, Charles Dickens’s Mr Pickwick (1836–7).
One of the sadder declines of Dennis’s and Charlotte’s era was that of Mrs Cornelys, impresario of theatrically staged promenades at Carlisle House in Soho. They were, in the words ofdiarist and rake William Hickey, 8 ‘quite the rage’. Each Sunday evening, an immense crowd, ‘from the Duchess of Devonshire down to the little milliner’s apprentice from Cranbourn Alley’, would saunter through the Carlisle House rooms, meeting, greeting and ogling. The decorations might be in Indian, Persian and Chinese styles, with illumination from ‘9, 000 candles’, according to one account; the next week, there would be a different theme. ‘The magnificence of the rooms, splendour of the illumination and embellishments, and the brilliant appearance of the company exceeded anything I ever saw, ’ the eighteen-year-old Fanny Burney wrote. But Mrs Cornelys faced competition from attractions such as Almack’s Assembly Rooms in St James’s and the Pantheon on Oxford Street. When these venues became quite the rage instead, she responded by increasing her expenditure. It did not work. She sank into obscurity, and died in the Fleet in 1797, dreaming of a comeback. Her ‘melancholy end holds forth a warning to the imprudent’, the Gentleman’s Magazine observed.
The prison building had four storeys. In the cellar were a kitchen and a dining room, which was known as Bartholomew’s Fair. (The original Bartholomew Fair was a summer jamboree at Smithfield.) On the ground floor were a hall and the tap room. The upper floors contained 110 rooms off central corridors. Most of the rooms were 141â„2 by 121â„2 feet, and 91â„2 feet high – the largest in any prison in Britain. A coffee room provided newspapers and journals; in the grounds, you could play games including skittles and tennis. There was a wine club on Mondays, and a beer club on Thursdays, often lasting into the early hours and prompting complaints from those trying to sleep.
On arrival, you paid a commitment fee of £1 6s. The Fleet staff commanded various other sums, and there was rent of 2s 6d (121â„2p) a week for the share of a furnished room. Hogarth’s Tom Rakewell shares with two others; some rooms housed six, and dependants too. More prosperous inmates were able to live alone, and to decorate rooms according to their own tastes. One Elizabeth Berkley furnished her chamber with two cane and two stuffed leather chairs, an easy chair, a looking glass, elegant curtains, a chocolate mill and various items of silverware. This was the ‘master’s side’. The ‘common side’ was the southern wing, where prisoners slept in dormitories. No stuffed leather chairs and elegant curtains here, in what was probably Dennis’s home. He did not earn enough in the tap room to afford better accommodation, but nevertheless became known for his ‘jolly song’. And, as when he was a sedan chairman, he managed to insinuate himself into the company of his social superiors.
Delivering drinks for Charlotte’s entertainments, he caught her eye; and so began a lifelong relationship, both affectionate and mutually profitable, and never compromised by Charlotte’s way of life. ‘Charlotte had many friends, it is true, but policy induced her to see them with complacency, ’ the Genuine Memoirs insisted. ‘Her affections were still [always] centred in our Hero.’ Dennis was both Charlotte’s lover and the promoter of her professional affairs. In return, she paid him, financing a resumption of his former ostentation and swagger. He also earned a kind of honour in the jail. A man known as the Sovereign of the Fleet – the informal title belonged to a senior resident, and carried about as much authority as that of Father of the Marshalsea in Dickens’s Little Dorrit – dubbed him ‘Count’ O’Kelly. Dennis flaunted the title, unwisely. It was to stick, as the symbol of his upstart status.
Charlotte also subsidized Dennis’s transfer to the Rules of the Fleet, where debtors could lodge provided they compensated the prison staff for loss of earnings. During the day they could roam wherever they liked – a leniency that allowed Dennis to be ‘as constantly seen in all public places, as if he had not owed a shilling’, Town & Country magazine reported, with a hint of disapproval. He immediately returned to his old haunts – a potentiallydisastrous move. But, having endured a painful initiation as a gambler, Dennis was a master practitioner now.
Despite her lucrative enterprises during this period, Charlotte continued to get into trouble, as she would at various times during her long life. In January 1759, John Grinfield took her to court. On 13 April 1761, her accuser was Samuel Wilkinson; and four days later, Joseph Lessly claimed from her £15 10s in damages for her failure to fulfil ‘certain promises and undertakings’. Charlotte may have enjoyed episodes of freedom, but in execution of the last debt the court sent her to the Fleet again.
This sentence did not last long. To advertise the generosity of George III, who had come to the throne the previous year, Parliament passed an act ‘For the Relief of Insolvent Debtors’. In September 1761, Charlotte and Dennis each filled in and signed the appropriate form, headed ‘A true schedule and account of all the real estate, either in possession, reversion, remainder, or expectancy’.9
They were free.
4 I am sorry to say that Charlotte Hayes, some years later, would not be above such stratagems.
5 Charlotte did not sign her name with the éclat of Dennis O’Kelly, but she was more literate than he.
6 Two examples:‘A smart little black gypsy [Miss Cross], with a very endearing symmetry of parts; has an odd way o
f wriggling herself about, and can communicate the most exquisite sensations when she is well paid’;‘She [Pol Forrester] has an entrance to the palace of pleasure as wide as a church door.’
7 As we have seen, that was £10 more than Dennis O’Kelly’s annual salary as Lady —’s chairman.
8 From the 1930s to the 1980s, the pseudonym ‘William Hickey’ appeared under a diary column in the Daily Express.
9 Dennis’s form claimed that several people owed him money.
3
The Gambler
ENGLAND IN THE mid-eighteenth century was mad about gambling, and had been for years. Charles II, brought back from exile to assume the throne on the collapse of the Commonwealth in 1660, set a very different tone from the Puritan one that had prevailed in the country under Oliver Cromwell. At Newmarket, where Charles established a court devoted to pleasure and high jinks, the fast set spent fortunes on horses, cock fights, dice and cards. In her history of Newmarket, Laura Thompson reported a story that Nell Gwynn, the King’s mistress, once lost 1, 400 guineas in an evening, and quoted Samuel Pepys’s observation that Lady Castlemaine was ‘so great a gamester as to have won £15, 000 in one night, and lost £25, 000 in another night, at play’.
The Merrie Monarch was succeeded by less breezy characters. But the kingdom of the Hanoverian Georges was no less playful than his. George II was himself the subject of wagering, when he led his troops at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743: you could get 4-1 against his being killed. A similarly ghoulish opportunity for the sporting arose when a man collapsed outside Brooks’s club in London. The members staked money on whether he was dead. Perhaps, someone said, they should see if the man could be revived; that suggestion was bad form, the outragedmembers cried, because it might affect the bet. At another club, White’s, the twenty-year-old Lord Stavordale lost £11, 000 in an evening, then won it back in a single hand at hazard, exclaiming, ‘Now, if I had been playing deep, I might have won millions!’
Stavordale’s adventure was recorded by Horace Walpole, who was too fastidious to take part in such activities. Walpole’s letters also featured another great gambler, the statesman Charles James Fox, characterized as ‘dissipated, idle beyond measure’. Fox – at one time effectively the joint leader of the country – lost £140, 000 at cards by the age of twenty-five. His escapades were careless and brilliant. Having entered into a wager about a waistcoat that was available only in Paris, he set off in the middle of the night to get hold of one. Mission accomplished, he returned to Calais, where he suddenly recalled that Pyrrhus and Trentham, horses owned by Lord Foley and himself, were carrying wagers to beat another horse at Newmarket; he commandeered a fishing smack, steered for East Anglia, and arrived at the races just in time. A witness reported: ‘[Fox] eyed the horses advancing with the most immovable look; he breathed quicker as they accelerated their pace, and when they came opposite to him he rode in at full speed, whipping, spurring, and blowing, as if he would have infused his whole soul into his favourite racer.’ The instant the horses were past the post, Fox turned his attention elsewhere – a gentleman may sport full-bloodedly, but he is above showing exultancy in victory or dismay in defeat.10
Later, he set off with some companions for London, but on a whim stopped off at another friend’s house. Dinner was served, the cards and the dice came out, and there was about £5, 000 on the table by dawn, when there was a rapping on the door: it was a messenger, chasing Fox to remind him that he was due to speak in the House of Commons that afternoon. Fox swept away the empty bottles, threw the dice one last time, and rushed to the stables for his horse. Lacking sleep, underprepared, and with a good deal of alcohol still coursing through his system, he nevertheless ‘answered both Lord North and Burke, ridiculed the arguments of the former, and confuted those of the latter’, as Walpole reported.
Charles James Fox, the brilliant Whig politician, whose girth and features at the age of thirty-three were evidence of his self-indulgence. A reckless gambler and womanizer, he ended up happily married to Elizabeth Armistead, a former ‘nun’ at the establishment of Charlotte Hayes’s forerunner, Mrs Goadby.
This anecdote comes from Theodore Cook’s Eclipse and O’Kelly, published in 1907, and the standard work on the great horse and his owner. Cook observed, ‘Philosophic foreigners might well have imagined that England was little better than a vast casino from one end of the country to the other.’ The Duke of Queensberry (‘Old Q’), a notorious rake, once bet someone that he could convey a letter fifty miles in an hour. He won by inserting the letter into a cricket ball and hiring twenty-four men to throw it to one another around a measured circle.
Horsemen not only raced, they also contrived more exotic equestrian activities on which they and their circle could bet. On 29 April 1745, Mr Cooper Thornhill rode from Stilton in Cambridgeshire to London, from London back to Stilton, and from Stilton back to London again, covering the two hundred-plus miles in eleven hours, thirty-three minutes and fifty-two seconds. ‘This match was made for a considerable sum of money, ’ reported William Pick in his Authentic Historical Racing Calendar (1785), ‘and many hundred pounds, if not thousands, were depending on it.’ More fancifully, Sir Charles Turner made a ‘leaping match’ with the Earl of March for 1, 000 guineas: Sir Charles staked that he would ride ten miles within an hour, and that during the ride he would take forty leaps, each of more than a yard in height. He accomplished the feat ‘with great ease’. At Newmarket in June 1759, Mr Jenison Shafto backed himself to ride fifty miles in under two hours, and came home in one hour, forty-nine minutes and seventeen seconds. ‘To the great admiration of the Nobility and Gentry assembled, he went through the whole without the least fatigue, ’ Pick noted. For an even more gruelling challenge, Shafto commissioned a Mr Woodcock to do the riding on hisbehalf. He made a match with Mr Meynell for 2, 000 guineas that Woodcock would ride a hundred miles a day for twenty-nine consecutive days, using no more than one horse a day. Woodcock started early each morning, his route illuminated by lamps fixed on posts. His only crisis came on the day when his horse, Quidnunc, broke down after sixty miles; he had to requisition a replacement and start again, and he did not cover the 160-mile total until eleven o’clock that night. But he went on to complete his schedule.
Gambling was not only a sport for grandees. The middle classes and the lower orders loved it too. Horse race meetings, cricket matches, boxing matches and cock fights all offered wagering opportunities, both at the main events and at various side shows – stalls and tables with dice, cards and roulette wheels. There was a national lottery, raising money for such causes as building bridges across the Thames, with a draw staged as a dramatic spectacle at Guildhall. You could – as you cannot today – place side bets on what numbers would appear, paying touts who were called ‘Morocco Men’ after the leather wallets they carried.
There were many gaming houses in London. Like brothels, they operated openly, but suffered occasional crackdowns. The Gentleman’s Magazine reported one such incident: ‘Justice Fielding [London magistrate, and half brother of novelist Henry], having received information of a rendezvous of gamesters in the Strand, procured a strong party of guards who seized forty five at the tables, which they broke to pieces, and carried the gamesters before the justice, who committed thirty nine of them to the gatehouse [overnight prison] and admitted the other three to bail. There were three tables broken to pieces … under each of them were observed two iron rollers and two private springs which those who were in the secret could touch and stop the turning whenever they had any youngsters to deal with and so cheated them of their money.’
These venues were both dodgy and the haunts of people ofall classes. They were therefore ideal settings for Dennis O’Kelly, who was by now a master
‘blackleg’. The origin of this term is obscure, although it may have come from the black boots that were the standard footwear of professional gamblers; or possibly the derivation was the black legs of the rook, a word that also meant sharpster. Another term was ‘Greek’, first used to indicate a wily character by Shakespeare. Whatever the derivation, Dennis personified the meaning: a person practised in the art of cheating others out of their money. His assiduous apprenticeship ‘had reduced to a system of certainty with him, what was neither more or less than a matter of chance with his competitors’.11
Sir John Fielding, the ‘Blind Beak of Bow Street’, presiding at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court. Dennis O’Kelly came before Sir John following a fight at the Bedford Arms; and escaped with a fine, thanks only to the intercession of a friend.
Opportunities for making a profit were everywhere – even on his feet. Dennis, on achieving a level of affluence, wore gold buckles on his shoes, while also owning a pair of buckles made of pinchbeck, an alloy that resembles gold. If he wore the gold ones, he kept the pinchbeck buckles in his pocket, and vice versa. In company, one of his companions would strike up a discussion about whether the Count’s buckles were gold, and encourage the pigeon (dupe) to bet on the question. Dennis would simply perform a bit of sleight of hand, no doubt during some distracting activity initiated by the companion, to produce the buckle that would take the bettor’s money.
He continued to get into trouble. At the Bedford Arms, he won money from an American officer who, probably with good reason, suspected that chicanery had taken place, and refused to pay. There were scuffles, and eventually Dennis came before Sir John Fielding.12 Sir John was inclined to be harsh, but Dennis was rescued by the actor, playwright and fellow Fleet graduate Sam Foote, who persuaded the magistrate to accept a fine. Dennis’s relief, according to Nocturnal Revels, was overwhelmed by his sense of ill treatment.
Eclipse Page 3
