THE REGENCY LIBRARY  

Beaux of the Regency Chapter 11 Part 2 Pages 230-240

             Next in interest to the bay-window at White’s was the betting book, and members vied with each other in organizing quaint wagers, some of which are amusing:

             Mr. Greville bets Lord Clanwilliam ten guineas, that Lord Stewart will be married to Lady F. Vane in six months.—June 18, 1818 [Clanwilliam paid].

            Sir Georrge Warrender bets Lord Alvanley five pounds that Colonel Stanhope and Mr. Lucy will be found by a committee of the House of Commons not duly elected.-June 28, 1818. [Alvanley paid.]

            Mr. Mills bets Lieutenant General Mackenzie a pony, that Lord Stewart goes to Vienna before he marries Lady Frances Vane. [Mills paid].

            Lientenant-General Mackenzie bets Lord Yarmouth sixty guineas to fifty, that the Duke of Cambridge has a child before the Duke of Clarence.

            Lord Sefton bets Sir Joseph Copley fifty guineas, that Lisbon and Cadiz will be in Buonaparte’s possession on or before the first of April next.—Jan. 17, 1809 [Copley paid.]

            Mr. G. Talbot bets General Bligh two guineas that Sir Arthur Wellesley is gazetted for an English peerage before this day three months.—May 12, 1809. [Talbot paid.]

            Mr. Howard bets Mr. Raikes ten guineas that either Lord T or Lord Pomfret will marry Miss Long.—December 1, 1810. [Howard paid.]

             During the twelve years of its life, from 1807 to 1819, no club was more notorious than Watier’s, the accounts of the origin of which differ materially. Some authorities state that it was founded by John Maddocks (who married Lord Craven’s sister and cut his throat during a fit of madness), Calvert, and Lord Headfort, for harmonic meetings; others declare that it came into being at the suggestion of the Prince of Wales, who, when some members of White’s and Brooks’s were dining with him at Carlton House, asked what sort of dinners were served at these clubs, and, receiving from Sir Thomas Stepney the reply, “The eternal joint and beefsteaks, the boiled fowl with oyster sauce, and an apple tart. This is what we have sir, and very monotonous fare it is,” sent for his chef, Watier, and invited him to take a house and organize a club where special attention should be given to the cuisine. Perhaps these versions may be reconciled by assuming that Watier took over 81, Piccadilly, from the harmonic society; and, indeed, this seems to have been the case to judge from a passage in Raikes’s Journal: “This destination of the club was soon changed. The dinners were so recherches and so much talked of in town, that all the young men of fashion and fortune became members of it. The catches and glees were then superseded by cards and dice; the most luxurious dinners were furnished at any price, as the deep play at night rendered all charges a matter of indifference. Macao was the constant game, and thousands passed from one to another with as much facility as marbles.”

            Brummell was the club’s perpetual president, the Duke of York was a member, and Byron too, who christened it “The Dandy Club.” “I liked the Dandies,” he wrote; “they were always very civil to me, though in general they disliked literary people, and persecuted and mystified Madame de Stael, Lewis, Horace Twiss, and the like damnably. They persuaded Madame de Stael that Alvanley had a hundred thousand a year, etc., etc., till she praised him to his face for his beauty! And made a set at him for Albertine (Libertine, as Brummell baptized her, though the poor girl was and is as correct as maid or wife can be and very amiable withal), and a hundred fooleries besides. The truth is, that though I gave up the business early, I had a tinge of Dandyism in my minority, and probably retained enough of it to conciliate the great ones, at four and twenty. I had gamed, and drank, and taken my degrees in most dissipations; and having no pendantry, and not being overbearing, we ran quietly together. I knew them all more or less, and they made me a member of Watier’s (a superb club at that time), being I take it, the only literary man (except two others, both men of the world, M. and S.) in it.

            “Our Masquerade was a grand one; so was the Dandy Ball, at the Argyle, but that (the latter) was given by the four Chiefs B., M., A., and P., if I err not.”*

             What the great clubs were to the men of the period, Almacks Assembly was to the whole of society, male and female. When William Almack** a Scotchman, came to London as a valet in the suite of the Duke of Hamilton, though there is no doubt he was an ambitious fellow, he can scarcely have hoped that his name would be a household word more than a century and a quarter after his death. Yet to-day, Almack has still a world-wide reputation, though, by the irony of fate, he had been dead for many years before the great fame began to attach itself to him. The valet must have been a clever as well as a provident man, for he found money to run the Thatched House Tavern in St. James’s Street; a venture which in a short time proved so lucrative that he was able to establish Almack’s Club in 1764, and to build with “hot bricks and boiling water” the historic “Almack’s Rooms,” in King Street, St. James’s, which still exist as “Willis’s Rooms,” so called after the husband of Almack’s niece and heiress, who inherited the property in 1781. The Rooms were opened on February 20, 1765, and the venture was from the first successful. “There is now opened here, in three very elegant new-built rooms, a ten guinea subscription, for which you have a ball and supper once a week for twelve weeks. You may imagine by the sum the company is chosen . . . . The men’s tickets are not transferable, so if the ladies do not like us, they have no opportunity of changing us . . . . Our female Almack’s flourish beyond description. Almack’s Scotch face, in a bag-wig, waiting at supper, would divert you, as would his lady in a sack, making tea and curtseying to the duchesses.” So Gilly Williams wrote t his friend Selwyn at the time, and in 1770, Horace Walpole wrote to Edward Montagu; “There is a new institution that begins to make, and, if it proceeds, will make a considerable noise. It is a club of both sexes, to be erected at Almack’s, on the model of that of the men of White’s. Mrs. Fitzroy, Lady Pembroke, Mrs. Meynell, Lady Molyneux, Miss Pelham and Miss Lloyd are the foundresses.”

            All the fashionable world desired entrée but the foundresses at once made it clear that the institution was to be the most exclusive ever known. “The female club I told you of,” wrote Mrs. Boscawen to Mrs. Delany, “is removed from their quarters, Lady Pembroke’s objecting to a tavern; it meets; therefore, for the present at certain rooms of Almack’s, who for another year is to provide a private house. The first fourteen who imagined and planned it settled its rules and constitution; these were framed upon the model of one of the clubs at Almack’s. There are seventy-five chosen (the whole number is to be two hundred). The ladies nominate and choose the gentlemen, and vice versa; so that no lady can exclude a lady, or gentleman a gentleman! The Duchess of Bedford was at first blackballed, but is since admitted . . . . Lady Rochfort and Lady Harrington are blackballed, as are Lord March, Mr. Boothby, and one or two more who think themselves pretty gentlemen du premier ordre, but it is plain the ladies are not of their opinion. When any of the ladies dine with the society, they are to send word before, but supper comes of course, and is to be served always at eleven. Play is to be deep and constant probably.” The principle of exclusiveness was still enforced at the period of which this book treats. “At the present time,” Gronow recorded in 1863 of Almacks half a century earlier, “one can hardly conceive the importance which was attached to getting admittance to Almack’s, the seventh heaven of the fashionable world. Of the three hundred officers of the Foot-Guards, not more than half a dozen were honoured by vouchers of admission to this exclusive temple of the beau monde; the gates of which were guarded by lady patronesses, whose smiles or frowns consigned men and women to happiness or despair. These lady patronesses were the Ladies Castlereagh, Jersey, Cowper and Sefton, Mrs. Drummond Burrell, the Princess Esterhazy and the Countess Lieven. The most popular of these grandes dames was unquestionably Lady Cowper, now Lady Palmerston. Lady Jersey’s bearing, on the contrary, was that of a theatrical tragedy queen, and whilst attempting the sublime, she frequently made herself simply ridiculous, being inconceivably rude, and in her manner often ill-bred. Lady Sefton was kind and amiable, Madame de Lieven haughty and exclusive; Princess Esterhazy was a bon enfant, Lady Castlereagh and Mrs. Burrell de tres grandes dames.”

            “A feminine oligarchy less in number but equal in power to the Venetian Council of Ten”; so Grantley Berkeley*** described the committee of Lady Patronesses, whose arbitrary methods provoked the author of a novel bearing the simple title “Almack’s” to the following satirical dedication:

               “To that most distinguished and despotic CONCLAVE composed of their High Mightinesses The Lady Patronesses of the Balls at Almack’s, The Rulers of Fashion, The Arbiters of Taste, The Leaders of Ton, and the Makers of Manners, Whose sovereign sway over ‘the world’ of London has long been established on the firmest basis, Whose Decrees are Laws, and from whose judgment there is no appeal; To these important personages, all and severally, Who have formed, or who do form, any part of that ADMINISTRATION, usually denominated THE WILLIS COALITION CABAL, Whether members of the Committee of Supply or Cabinet of Counsellors, Holding seats at the Board of Control, the Following Pages, are with all due respect humbly dedicated by

                                    “An Old Subscriber.”******

             Admission to the balls was only to be secured by vouchers issued by the patronesses, who, as is shown by the proportion of the Guards who obtained them, doled out their favours with niggardly hands. There was often as much finesse necessary, and as much diplomacy exercised in this matter, as in negotiating a treaty between two great countries.

            Vouchers were granted only to those personally known to one at least of the patronesses, while Lady Jersey,  the high priestess, would never admit any one unless she had proof that the applicant was a skilful dancer, and under no circumstances would she grant admission to any one connected with commerce—a restriction that was none the less galling because she was the heiress of the banker Robert Child, whose surname was subsequently prefixed to his own by her husband, the fifth Earl.********* Those whose position in society was assured were, all things being equal, allowed without protest to enter the sacred precincts; the tug of war came when those who applied for the coveted privilege were on the fringes of society, and then the decisions of the patronesses were, it must be said, often arbitrary, though on the whole, just—according to their lights.

 *”In my time, Watier’s was the Dandy Club, of which (though no dandy), I was a member; at the time too of its greatest glory, when Brummell and Mildmay, Alvanley and Pierrepoint gave the Dandy Balls; and we (the club that is) got up the famous masquerade at Burlington House and Garden for Wellington.”—Byron to Lady Blessington, April 5, 1823.—Byron appeared in the character of a Caloyer or Eastern monk.

 **It is said that the man’s name was MacCall, and that he transposed it to Almack on coming to London—perhaps because of the unpopularity of the Scotch in the Metropolis.

 ***Life and Recollections.

 ******Almack’s was published anonymously in 1827, and the authorship was long kept secret, because the novel was written against Mrs. Beaumont of Bretton, who is introduced into the story as Lady Birmingham. The Pickering Memoirs state that the author was Mrs. Hudson (nee Marianne Spencer Stanhope).

 Luttrell: Advice to Julia.

 ********”Lord Jersey, when a young man, was desperately in love with my aunt Andover. He was very handsome and very charming. . . . . The want of money proved a serious obstacle, and, while loving her, he married the girl she was chaperoning, the heiress of Child’s Bank. When I was going out in London, Lady Jersey was the undisputed queen and ruler of fashion, before whose worldly sway all things gave way. She was frightfully extravagant; but to the modiste her name was more important than the payment of her bills. She told my mother, when she was staying at Holkham, that life was not worth living after thirty; nevertheless at eighty she found it not to be despised.”—A.M.W. Pickering: Memoirs.