The Rakes and Gamesters of Regency London

A Society That Rewarded Audacity

Regency London — roughly 1811 to 1820 — was a small, gilded world. Perhaps three thousand families truly mattered, and they all knew one another's business. Parliament sat for part of the year, the Season ran from spring into summer, and the rest of the time the ton, the fashionable elite, drifted between country houses, Brighton and the clubs of St James's. In such a hothouse, notoriety was a kind of currency. A man could ruin himself twice over and still be invited to dinner, provided he did it with style.

That tolerance is the thing modern readers find hardest to credit. Debts were shrugged off, mistresses were discussed openly over tea, and a duel fought over a careless word was treated as a matter of honour rather than a criminal offence. The rake was not an outsider. He was frequently the guest of honour.

The Dandies Who Gambled Through Fortunes

George Bryan Brummell — Beau Brummell to history — perfected the pose of the man who cared for nothing but his own appearance. He was not rich. He lived on credit, on wit and on the friendship of the Prince Regent, until he referred to his patron as "my fat friend" once too often. He fled to Calais in 1816 to escape his debts and died in an asylum at Caen in 1840, penniless and deranged. His fall was unusually complete, but his manner was widely imitated.

Others simply outspent him. The clubs of St James's — White's, Brooks's, Watier's — kept betting books in which members could record wagers on absolutely anything. Lord Alvanley, one of the great wits of the age, is said to have bet on which of two raindrops would reach the bottom of a windowpane first. Thousands changed hands at faro and hazard, played through the night in rooms where the candles were never allowed to go out.

• Watier's, founded in 1807 and nicknamed the Dandy Club, was the most glamorous and the most dangerous. It never recovered from an accusation of cheating at cards and closed its doors in 1819.
• White's and Brooks's doubled as political headquarters, which gave their members a respectable cover for ruinous habits.
• Debts of honour were payable before all others. A man might let his tailor wait years while settling a card loss the following morning.
• Annual incomes of £10,000 were not unusual among the peerage; a single bad night could consume several years of it.

Pistols at Dawn: The Duel as Social Ritual

Duelling was illegal and almost never prosecuted. The ritual was carefully stage-managed so that both parties could emerge with reputations intact: seconds negotiated, shots were often deliberately missed, and apologies could be extracted without blood. When it went wrong, it went very wrong indeed.

In September 1809, Lord Castlereagh and George Canning met on Putney Heath after a quarrel over the disastrous Walcheren expedition. Castlereagh wounded Canning in the thigh, and the two men later served in the same Cabinet without apparent difficulty. Twenty years later, in March 1829, the Duke of Wellington met Lord Winchilsea at Battersea Fields over the Catholic Relief Bill. Wellington fired wide, Winchilsea fired into the air, and both walked away satisfied. The point was never accuracy. It was the willingness to stand there.

Seduction, Divorce, and Criminal Conversation

For married women, the stakes were far higher than for men. A husband could bring an action for criminal conversation against his wife's lover, suing for damages as though his property had been injured. Trial reports were printed and devoured by the public. A wife's adultery meant almost certain social ruin; a husband's was a matter of course.

The most spectacular case came in 1820, when George IV attempted to divorce Queen Caroline by Act of Parliament. Witnesses were called, servants cross-examined, and the whole squalid business dragged through the House of Lords. The Bill of Pains and Penalties was eventually abandoned, but the King's private life had been laid bare before the nation. Byron, meanwhile, left England in 1816 under a cloud of rumour following the collapse of his marriage, and never returned.

How the Rakes Got Away With It

Reputations survived because the machinery of scandal sat entirely in the hands of the class it threatened. There was no mass press to keep a story alive, no professional police force, and no effective bankruptcy law for the very rich. A rake's debts could be settled by a compliant father, a wealthy marriage or a seat in Parliament — and his sins were, in any case, sins against his own kind.

When the reckoning came, it came quietly. Brummell died abroad, forgotten. The Prince Regent, who had set the tone for the whole era, grew fat, isolated and increasingly mocked. The tolerance of the ton was generous, but it was never unlimited — and fashion, in the end, has a very short memory.