Part 14

So great was the mania for wagers at this epoch, that even the clergy were affected by the prevailing craze. A young divine, in the vicinity of Edinburgh, declared himself ready to undertake for a wager of a hundred guineas to read six chapters from the Bible every hour for six weeks. The betting was ten to one against him.

In France matters were much the same as in England.

The Duc de Chartres, the Duc de Lauzun, and the Marquis de FitzJames once competed in a foot-race from Paris to Versailles for two hundred livres; this was won by the Marquis de FitzJames.

The Duc de Chartres bet a considerable sum with the Comte de Genlis that the latter would not go from Paris to Fontainebleau and back before he (the Duc de Chartres) had pricked 500,000 pinholes in a piece of paper. The Comte de Genlis was the winner by several hours.

The wager of the Comte d'Artois as to the building of Bagatelle is historical. He bet Marie Antoinette 100,000 livres that he would erect a palace on a certain site in the Bois de Boulogne in six weeks.

Nine hundred workmen were employed night and day, whilst patrols of the Swiss Guard seized any building materials which might be of use on the roads in the vicinity--these, it must, however, be added, were paid for. At the end of the six weeks the Comte d'Artois entertained Marie Antoinette at a splendid fête in the completed house.

Matches against time were common. In 1745 Mr. Cooper Thornhill rode three times between Stilton and Shoreditch--two hundred and thirteen miles--in eleven hours and thirty-four minutes on fourteen different horses. Six years later, Captain Shafto won £16,000 by winning a wager that he would cover fifty miles in two hours. He was allowed as many horses as he pleased.

Not a few of these matches against time were carried out under most whimsical conditions.

On 22nd August 1774, for instance, Anthony Thorpe, a journeyman baker, at the Artillery Ground, ran a mile tied up in a sack, in eleven minutes and a half.

In 1773 a London to York match was run, the winner, a mare, taking forty hours and thirty-five minutes to complete the journey.

A sensational match of a more sporting description was the ride of George IV., when Prince of Wales, to Brighton and back, a journey of one hundred and twelve miles, which the Royal sportsman is said to have performed on one horse in ten hours.

A wonderful ride was that performed in 1786 by a featherweight jockey at Newmarket, who rode one horse twenty-three miles in two or three minutes under the hour.

The Duke of Queensberry ("Old Q.") was at one time fond of sporting matches, in which he generally came off victorious, for he was a shrewd man. In 1789, during the Newmarket October Meeting, he and Sir John Lade, mounted on a brace of mules, rode from the Ditch in for £1000. This ludicrous race, which was very anxiously and obstinately contested, terminated in favour of the Duke.

Mr. Thomas Dale was also the hero of a donkey match at Newmarket, where he rode one hundred miles in twenty-two hours and a half on an ass; £100 to £10 was laid against this being done within twenty-four hours.

Old Q., when Earl of March, for a wager, sent a letter fifty miles within an hour by hand, which was cleverly effected by the missive in question being enclosed in a cricket ball and thrown from one to the other by twenty-four expert cricketers.

On another occasion Old Q. made a bet of a thousand guineas that he would produce a man who would eat more at a meal than any one Sir John Lade could find. The bet being accepted, the time was appointed, but his Grace, not being able to attend the exhibition, wrote to his agent to know what success, and accordingly received the following note:--

MY LORD,--I have not time to state particulars, but merely to acquaint your Grace that your man beat his antagonist by a _pig and apple-pye_.

(Signed) J.P.

A curious wager which led to litigation was one between Old Q., when Lord March, and Mr. William Pigot. The latter and Mr. Codrington being together at Newmarket, it was proposed to run their fathers against each other. Mr. Pigot's father was upwards of seventy, and Mr. Codrington's father little more than fifty. The chances were calculated, and Mr. Codrington, thinking them disadvantageous to him, declined the bet, whereupon Lord March agreed to stand in his place, and mutual notes were interchanged. Mr. Pigot's note was:--

I promise to pay to the Earl of March 500 guineas if my father dies before Sir William Codrington.

WILLIAM PIGOT.

The Earl's was:--

I promise to pay to Mr. Pigot 1600 guineas in case Sir William Codrington does not survive Mr. Pigot's father.

MARCH.

The fact was that Mr. Pigot's father was then actually dead, but that was wholly unknown to the parties.

It was contended on the part of Mr. Pigot, that, as he could not possibly win, he ought not to lose, and it was compared to a ship insurance. If the policy upon a ship had not the words "lost or not lost" inserted, and the ship should be actually lost at the time of making that policy, it would be void.

For the plaintiff it was argued that the contract was good, because the fact being wholly unknown to the parties, it could not influence either.

The wager was held to be good, and the plaintiff obtained a verdict of £500, the amount of his wager.

The most important match made by the "evergreen votary of Venus," as Old Q. was called, was in 1750, when, as Lord March, he bet Count O'Taafe, an Irish gentleman notorious for eccentricity, one thousand guineas that a carriage with four wheels could be devised capable of being drawn at not less than nineteen miles within an hour.

Wright of Long Acre exhausted all the resources of his craft to diminish weight and friction; the harness was made of silk combined with leather. Four thoroughbreds, with two clever light-weight grooms, were selected, and several trials, causing the death of some horses, were run. On August 29, 1750, the match came off over a course of a mile at Newcastle, many thousands of pounds being wagered on the result, which was favourable to Lord March, the carriage being drawn over the appointed distance well within the hour. Three of the four horses which drew the machine had won plates. The leaders carried about eight stone each, the wheelers about seven, and the chaise, with a boy in it, about twenty-four. The time was 53 minutes 27 seconds.

The print (here reproduced) was published in 1788 by J. Rodger, after the original painting by Seymour, which is now, I believe, in the possession of Lord Rosebery.

Large sums were laid upon very trivial and useless performances, and a certain number of individuals, well-known for their physical strength, used to undertake to carry out all sorts of queer tasks.

In 1789 a man called Shadbolt, a respectable innkeeper at Ware, called Goliath on account of his great muscular powers, undertook, for a considerable wager, to run and push his cart from Ware to Shoreditch Church (a distance of twenty-one miles) in ten hours, which he easily performed within the space of six hours and a few seconds, without the least appearance of fatigue. Great sums were won and lost on the occasion.

All sorts of curious wagers were laid in Ireland. The celebrated Buck Whalley, for instance, once jumped over a carrier's cart on horse-back for a bet. This he did from an upper story of a house, quantities of straw being laid on the other side of the cart.

Thomas Whalley, known as Jerusalem Whalley, owing to the journey which he made for a wager to Jerusalem, was the son of a gentleman of very considerable property in the north of Ireland. His father, when advanced in years, married a lady much younger than himself, and left her a widow with seven children.

Thomas Whalley was the eldest son of this family, and had a property of £10,000 per annum left him by his father. At the age of sixteen he was sent to Paris to learn the French language and perfect himself in dancing, fencing, and other elegant accomplishments. The tutor selected to accompany him was not able or desirous of checking young Whalley's extravagance. The latter purchased horses and hounds, took a house in Paris, and another in the country, each of which was open for the reception of his friends. His finances, ample as they were, were found inadequate to the support of his extraordinary expenses, and, with the hope of supplying his deficiencies, he had recourse to the gaming-tables, which only increased his embarrassments. In one night he lost upwards of £14,000. The bill which he drew upon his banker, La Touche, in Dublin, for this sum was sent back protested, and it became necessary for him to quit Paris. On his return to England, however, his creditors (or rather the people who had swindled him out of this money) were glad to compound for half the sum.

Whalley then went back to Ireland and took a house in Dublin, where he lived in the most expensive manner, but quickly tiring of rural life decided to return to the Continent. While he was still hesitating as to his exact place of destination, some friends, with whom he was dining, and who had heard that he was intending to go abroad, made inquiry of him whither he was going. He hastily answered: "To Jerusalem." Upon this, certain that he had no such intention, they offered to wager him any sum he did not reach that city. As a result of this, in spite of the fact that he originally had not the faintest idea of such an expedition, he was so much stimulated by the offers made him that he accepted bets to the amount of £15,000, and at once made preparations for his journey. A few days later he set out, and having accomplished what was then an adventurous journey, eventually returned to Dublin within the appointed time, and in due course claimed and received from his astonished antagonists the reward of his most unexpected performance.

After staying some time in Dublin, Whalley again went to Paris, and was witness to the very interesting scenes which occurred in the early part of the Revolution in France. He remained in Paris till after the return of the King from Varennes; and, when it became no longer safe for a subject of the King of Great Britain to remain in France, he returned to Ireland.

Being of a very active disposition, Whalley made constant trips to England, where he frequented the gaming-houses in London, Newmarket, and Brighton, and soon dissipated a large part of his remaining fortune. He then retired to the Isle of Man, where he employed himself in cultivating and improving an estate he possessed there, and in educating his children. He at the same time drew up memoirs of his own life, which were discovered a few years ago and published under the title of _Memoirs of Buck Whalley_.

Another sporting character well known in Ireland was the celebrated Buck English, who spent the latter part of his life in litigious turmoil, and was a man who experienced infinite vicissitudes of fortune. Born to a large estate, the earlier part of his life was spent in scenes of the most unbounded dissipation; but these were curtailed when he got into the hands of a litigious attorney, who, for years, kept him out of his property. Mr. English was tried for his life, for the murder of Mr. Powell, and was with difficulty acquitted, and escaped narrowly from being torn to pieces by the mob in Cork. Previous to this, he threw a waiter out of a window, and desired him to be "charged in the bill!" In his career, he fought two duels with swords, in the streets of Dublin; was a Member of Parliament, and an excellent speaker; was thrown into a loathsome prison for debt, where his constitution was totally destroyed. He died almost immediately after his liberation, just as he recovered his fortune.

In October 1791, at the Curragh Meeting in Ireland, Mr. Wilde, a sporting gentleman, made bets to the amount of two thousand guineas, to ride against time, viz., one hundred and twenty-seven English miles in nine hours. On the 6th of October he started in a valley, near the Curragh course, where two miles were measured in a circular direction; each time he encompassed the course it was regularly marked. During the interval of changing horses, he refreshed himself with a mouthful of brandy and water, and was no more than six hours and twenty-one minutes in completing the one hundred and twenty-seven miles; of course he had two hours and thirty-nine minutes to spare.

Mr. Wilde had no more than ten horses, but they were all thoroughbreds from the stud of Mr. Daly.

Whilst on horse-back, without allowing anything for changing of horses, he rode at the rate of twenty miles an hour for six hours. He was so little fatigued with this extraordinary performance, that he was at the Turf Club-house in Kildare the same evening.

The Right Honourable Thomas Conolly also rode for a wager of five hundred guineas on the Curragh. He was allowed two hours to ride forty miles with any ten hunters of his own. He with ease rode forty-two miles in an hour and forty-four minutes on eight hunters.

At this time much money was wagered both in Ireland and England upon the leaping powers of the horse, and occasionally the methods employed were none too honourable.

A young sportsman, for instance, having boasted of the powers of a recently purchased hunter which he offered to back at jumping against any horse in the world, a friend ridiculed the idea, and said he had a blind hunter that should leap over what the other would not. A wager to no inconsiderable amount was the consequence, and day and place appointed. The time having arrived, both parties appeared on the ground with their nags; when laying down a straw at some distance, the friend put his horse forward, and at the word "over" the blind hunter made a famous leap; while neither whip nor spur could induce the other to rise at all.

A very sporting bet was decided in the most fashionable part of London in 1792. On the 24th of February in that year was accomplished the feat of leaping over the high wall of Hyde Park from Park Lane. A bet of five hundred guineas was reported to have been laid between a Royal personage and Mr. Bingham, that the latter's Irish-bred brown mare should leap over the wall of Hyde Park, opposite Grosvenor Place, which wall was six feet and a half high on the inside, and eight on the out. Mr. Bingham having sold his mare to Mr. Jones, the bet, of course, became void. Mr. Jones offered bets to any amount that the mare should do it, but his offers were not accepted. Mr. Bingham, to show the possibility of its being done, led his beautiful bay horse, Deserter, to the same place, who performed this standing leap twice without any difficulty, except that, in returning, his hind feet brushed the bricks off the top of the wall. As the height from which he was to descend into the road was so considerable, he was received on a bed of long dung. The Duke of York, Prince William of Gloucester, the Earl of Derby, and a number of the nobility joined the vast concourse of impatient spectators, who were pretty well tired out before the jumping began.

Another remarkable feat was the leap over a dinner-table with dishes, decanters, and lighted candelabra, performed by Mr. Manning, a sporting farmer, on a barebacked steed in the Rochester Room at the White Hart Inn, at Aylesbury, during the steeplechases in 1851.

Wagers entailing considerable risk and endurance were popular in the past. Two gentlemen at a coffee-house near Temple Bar once made an extraordinary bet of this nature. One of them was to jump into seven feet of water, with his clothes on, and to entirely undress himself in the water, which he did within the appointed time.

The present writer, when an undergraduate at Cambridge, witnessed a somewhat similar exploit performed in the Cam on a particularly cold winter's day.

On this occasion, however, the undergraduate, a man of herculean frame, who had wagered that he would undress in the water, was allowed to cancel his bet after he had discarded everything but one sock. As he appeared to be much exhausted, all bets were declared off by mutual consent. The layer of the wager was in a terrible state on leaving the water, but entirely recovered the next day.

Those fond of shooting frequently wagered on their powers as shots.

In 1800 the celebrated Colonel Thornton made a bet that he killed 400 head of game at 400 shots. The result was, he bagged 417 head of game (consisting of partridges, pheasants, hares, snipes, and woodcocks) at 411 shots. Amongst these were a black wild duck and a white pheasant cock; and at the last point he killed a brace of cock pheasants, one with each barrel. On the leg of the last killed (an amazing fine bird) was found a ring, proving that he had been taken by Colonel Thornton when hawking, and turned loose again in 1792.

Colonel Thornton could not bear to hear that any one had outdone him at anything. On one occasion a foreigner was boasting of the sporting powers of the Comte d'Artois, afterwards Charles X., and asserted that the Prince in question was, without doubt, considered the greatest shot in Europe. On hearing this the Colonel looked highly offended, when the foreign sportsman added, "except Colonel _Tornton_" (thus pronounced), "who is acknowledged to be the longest shot in the world." There was a great deal of bitter-sweet in this, but the Colonel wisely interpreted the phrase in a sense complimentary to himself.

Colonel Thornton, though his name has come down to us as a great sporting character, was not by any means universally popular in his own day. Notwithstanding that he was of quite respectable descent, and had inherited a comfortable fortune, he was never on familiar terms with the aristocratic sportsmen of his age, with whom it was his darling passion to be able to associate. A well-known member of the Jockey Club, when the Colonel's name was mentioned, once said: "Oh! Thornton, never let us hear that fellow named; we don't know him."

The Colonel provoked much ridicule by his overwhelming ambition to excel everybody in everything--a notable instance of which was his taking Thornville Royal, a palatial house of which his family and suite could only occupy one corner, his means being inadequate to keep up the house and domain in proper style. Incapable of restraining an innate tendency to exaggeration, Colonel Thornton was known to many as "Lying Thornton," a nickname which was in some degree justified by the palpably mendacious accounts of his exploits, which his craving for notoriety prompted him to disseminate. His conceit was gigantic. He once actually sent an apology for not being present at a Royal Levee, which absurd conduct caused a great personage many a hearty laugh.

The Colonel's extravagance, and the lawsuits in which he indulged, often reduced him to great straits for ready money. Nevertheless, he was always possessed of considerable property. Colonel Thornton undoubtedly deserves to be remembered as a sportsman, though his reputation as such would have been greater had he not sought to excel all men in bodily activity and physical exertion, as well as eclipse them in the extent and variety of land and water sports, which was naturally an impossible feat.

Much given to litigation in life. Colonel Thornton gave the lawyers employment even after his death. By his will he bequeathed all his remaining property to an illegitimate daughter by Priscilla Druins, leaving his wife, Mrs. Thornton, nothing, and his son by her only £100. The will was disputed by the lawyers both in France and England. In the English Courts it was decided that the Colonel had never ceased to be a British subject, and that, therefore, the will must be valid. The French Court, passing a contrary judgment, decreed that the Colonel had petitioned in 1817, and obtained a complete naturalisation; that his real domicile being therefore in France, the will must be decided by its laws; and that the property having been willed to a child born in adultery, and otherwise contrary to the laws of France, the will was null and void; and they adjudged accordingly, with costs in favour of Mrs. Thornton, the lawful wife. The Colonel's real property appeared to be very little. He inhabited the Château de Chambord only as a tenant, but he had purchased the domain of Pont le Roi, and the vendors sued the Colonel's legatees for the purchase money.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century long-distance matches continued to be in vogue. The distance between Burton, on the Humber, and Bishopsgate, in the City of London, one hundred and seventy-two miles, was covered in something like eight hours and a half by a sportsman in 1802, who had bet that, with the fourteen horses allowed him, he would accomplish the journey in ten hours.

In April 1806 a very singular bet, or agreement, was made at Brighton between Lieutenant-General Lennox and Henry Hunter, Esq. The former, after some remarks on the prevalent winds at Brighton, proposed to give to the latter, during the space of twenty-eight days, whenever the wind blew from the south-west, one guinea per diem, provided the other would forfeit to him the same sum, during the same period, every day that the wind should blow from the north-east, which proposal was instantly accepted. For the ensuing thirteen days the wind lay mostly in the south-west quarter, upon which Mr. Hunter remarked that, in spite of south-west gales not being to every one's taste, this was merely another proof of the old adage that "It is an ill wind that blows nobody good."

In 1807, Captain Bennet, of the Loyal Ongar Hundred Volunteers, engaged to trundle a hoop from Whitechapel Church to Ongar, in Essex, in three hours and a half, a distance of twenty-two miles, for the wager of one hundred guineas.

He started on Saturday morning, November 21, precisely at six o'clock, with the wind very much in his favour, and the odds about two to one against him. Notwithstanding the early hour, the singularity of the match brought together a numerous assemblage. The hoop used by Captain Bennet on the occasion was heavier than those trundled by boys in general, and was selected by him conformably to the terms of the wager. The first ten miles Captain Bennet performed in one hour and twenty minutes, which changed the odds considerably in his favour.

He accomplished the whole distance considerably within the given time, as the Ongar coachman met him only five miles and a half from Ongar, when he had a full hour in hand.

A cruel wager was the following, made in December of the same year, when a Mr. Arnold, a sporting man who resided at Pentonville, bet Mr. Mawbey, a factor of the Fulham Road, twenty guineas that the former did not produce a dog, which should be thrown over Westminster Bridge at dark, and find its way home again in six hours, as proposed by Arnold. The inhuman experiment was tried in the evening, when a spaniel bitch, the property of a groom in Tottenham Court Road, was produced and thrown over from the centre of the bridge. The dog arrived at the house of her master in two hours after the experiment had been made.

Little consideration was shown for animals in those days.

On a Saturday evening in August 1808, a crowd of people assembled at Hyde Park Corner to watch the start of a pony which was, for a stake of five hundred guineas, matched to start with the Exeter Mail and be in Exeter first, with or without a rider. A man leading the pony was at liberty to take a fresh post-horse whenever he liked. The backer of the pony won the match, for though the odds were against it, the game little animal arrived at Exeter in very good condition, forty-five minutes before the Mail reached that city. Several thousands of pounds were wagered on the result.

It should be added that the pony drank ale during the journey, and several pints of port in addition.