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shilling a ticket, people gathered to walk, eat, listen to music, and stare at one another. He spent many hours in coffee houses, at tennis courts, and at billiard tables, where he picked up some money as both marker (keeper of the score) and player. He made notablefriends, among them the Duke of Richmond and Sir William Draper, the soldier. Everyone was clubbable – while he had money.
    As the money ran out, Dennis continued to spend. He had discovered an addiction to extravagance, and he thought he could charm, or dupe, his creditors. But there was a way of taking revenge on people who did not honour the money they owed: you could get them jailed. Dennis’s creditors sued, and saw him confined to the Fleet, the debtors’ prison.
    The year was 1756. Five years would pass before Dennis regained his freedom. It was the disaster of his life. But it led him to the woman who would be both his lifelong companion and his partner in making his fortune.

    The Whore’s Last Shift . A once-fashionable ‘Cyprian lass’ (one of the arch phrases by which Charlotte Hayes and her contemporaries were known) is down on her luck. On the table is Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies , first compiled by Charlotte’s sometime lover, Samuel Derrick.
    1 Canaletto’s version may be underpopulated, however, as a result of his use of a camera obscura, which failed to capture many moving objects.
    2 From the Genuine Memoirs . I have amplified some of the details of the story of Dennis and Lady —.
    3 Dennis styled himself ‘Kelly’ – the anglicized version of his name – during his early years in London.

3

The Gambler
    E NGLAND 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