Love Is a Gamble

Author’s NoteAt the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, especially the Regency, gaming reached an all time extravagance. Watier’s Gaming Club that Beau Brummell was President of for some years, was notorious throughout this period for its nightlong gaming when many young bucks staked their entire fortunes and their ancestral homes. This passion for gambling and betting was not only on horses, there were even Regency characters who bet on anything from the progression of two flies up a wall. It was, of course, in most cases the result of too little to do and they suffering from boredom. One of the most notorious of the Regency bucks, the second Lord Alvanley, inherited an income worth between sixty and seventy thousand pounds and began squandering it in all directions and was soon in debt. He was one of the Regency characters who not only kept losing his money at the gaming tables, but would bet on anything anywhere. Charles James Fox, a brilliant witty Whig politician, was the son of an enormously rich father, but having been sent to Eton, Oxford University and on the ‘Grand Tour’ Charles early developed an insatiable passion for gambling. This was to leave him constantly in debt throughout the whole of his life. In his mid-twenties he arrived to speak in the House of Commons after playing hazard at Almack’s for twenty-four hours at a stretch. After one all-night sitting, by five o’clock the next afternoon he had lost eleven thousand pounds, in those days an immense amount of money. This, however, was small compared to the high gambling of General Blucher who, when he visited London after Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, lost five thousand pounds gambling at Carlton House and when finally he left England he was almost destitute.