Wagers and Betting—Samson—Greek and Roman betting—In the 17th Century—“Lusty Packington”—The rise of betting in the 18th Century—Walpole’s story of White’s—Betting in the House of Commons—Story by Voltaire—Anecdotes of betting—Law suit concerning the Chevalier d’Eon.

Betting, or rather, that peculiar form of wager which consists in a material pledge in corroboration of controverted assertions, is of very ancient date, and we meet with it in one of the early books of the Bible, see Judges xiv. where in vv. 12, 13, Samson makes a distinct bet—owns he has lost in v. 18, and pays his bet, v. 19.

“12. And Samson said unto them, I will now put a riddle unto you: if ye can certainly declare it me within the seven days of the feast, and find it out, then I will give you thirty sheets and thirty changes of garments.

“13. But, if ye cannot declare it me, then shall you give me thirty sheets and thirty changes of garments. And they said unto him, put forth thy riddle that we may hear it.

“14. And he said unto them, out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness. And they could not, in three days, expound the riddle.

“15. And it came to pass, on the seventh day, that they said unto Samson’s wife, Entice thy husband, that he may declare unto us the riddle, lest we burn thee and thy father’s house with fire: have ye called us to take that we have? is it not so?

“16. And Samson’s wife wept before him, and said, Thou dost but hate me, and lovest me not: thou hast put forth a riddle unto the children of my people, and hast not told it me. And he said unto her, I have not told it my father, nor my mother, and shall I tell it thee?

“17. And she wept before him the seven days, while the feast lasted; and it came to pass, on the seventh day, that he told her, because she lay sore upon him: and she told the riddle to the children of her people.

“18. And the men of the city said unto him, on the seventh day, before the sun went down, what is sweeter than honey? and what is stronger than a lion? And he said unto them, if ye had not plowed with my heifer, ye had not found out my riddle.

“19. And the Spirit of the Lord came upon him, and he went down to Ashkelon, and slew thirty men of them, and took their spoil, and gave changes of raiment unto them which expounded the riddle. And his anger was kindled, and he went up to his father’s house.

“20. But Samson’s wife was given to his companion, whom he had used as his friend.”

Now, in this very ancient story, we find embodied as much roguery and crime as in any modern turf episode. Samson bet without any means of paying, if he lost: he lost, and was a defaulter. But, to pay this “debt of honour,” he had recourse to wholesale murder and robbery—to satisfy men, who to his own knowledge, had (to use a modern expression) “tampered with the stable.”

The early Greeks betted, as we find in Homer’s Iliad, b. xxiii. 485-7 where Idomeneus offers a bet to the lesser Ajax to back his own opinion:

?e??? ??? ? t??p?d?? pe??d?e???, ?? ??et???
?st??a d? ?t?e?d?? ??a????a ?e??e? ?f?.
?pp?te?a? p???? ?pp?? ??a ?????? ?p?t????.

“Now, come on!

A wager stake we, of tripod, or of caldron;
And make we both AtreidÈs Agamemnon
Judge, whether foremost are those mares: and so
Learn shalt thou, to thy cost!”

In Homer’s Odyssey, xxiii. 78, Eurycleia wagers her life to Penelope that Ulysses has returned: Aristophanes in his Equites, 791; Acharnes, 772, 1115; and NebulÆ, 644, gives examples of wagers; and, in the eighth idyll of Theocritus, Daphins proposes a bet to Menalcas about a singing match.

Among the Romans, Virgil tells us of a wager in his third Eclogue of the Bucolics, 28-50, between Menalcas and Damoetas, which is virtually the same as that of Theocritus, and Valerius Maximus tells us how a triumph was awarded by the senate to Lutatius, the Consul, who had defeated the Carthaginian fleet. The prÆtor Valerius, having also been present in the action, asserted that the victory was his, and that a triumph was due to him also. The question came before the judge; but not until Valerius had first, in support of his assertion, deposited a stake, against which Lutatius deposited another. But in classical time they seem to have known little about odds.

The word wager is an English word—and was spelt in Middle English, Wageoure, or Wajour, as in The Babee’s Book.

“No waiour non with hym thou lay,
Ne at the dyce with hym to play.”

It was in early use, for we have the Wager of Battel, which was a practical bet between two men as to the justice of their cause. This ordeal was in force until 1819, when it was done away with by 59 Geo. III., c. 46.

In Shakespeare’s time betting was common, and the practice of giving and taking odds was well known, as we may see in Hamlet, Act v. s. 2, where Osrick, speaking to Hamlet, says, “The King, sir, hath wagered with him six Barbary horses; against which he hath imponed, as I take it, six French Rapiers and poniards, with their assigns, as girdles, hangers and so.” In Cymbeline, Act i. s. 5, we have a bet, which is so serious that it has to be recorded. Iachimo says, “I dare thereupon pawn the moiety of my estate to your ring, which, in my opinion, o’ervalues it something,” and, ultimately, ten thousand crowns are laid against the ring, and Iachimo says, “I will fetch my gold, and have our two wagers recorded.”

By the way, there was an epitaph on Combe, the usurer, which has been attributed to Shakespeare, which intimates the laying of odds.

“Ten in the hundred lies here ingraved;
‘Tis a hundred to ten, his soul is not sav’d.”

It is recorded of Sir John Packington, called “Lusty Packington” (Queen Elizabeth called him “her Temperance”), that he entered into articles to swim against three noblemen for £3000 from Westminster Bridge to Greenwich; but the queen, by her special command, prevented the bet being carried out.

Howell in his EpistolÆ Ho-ElianÆ says: “If one would try a petty conclusion how much smoke there is in a pound of Tobacco, the ashes will tell him: for, let a pound be exactly weighed, and the ashes kept charily and weighed afterwards, what wants of a pound weight in the ashes, cannot be denied to have been smoke which evaporated into air. I have been told that Sir Walter Rawleigh won a wager of Queen Elizabeth upon this nicety.”

Men betted, but their wagers are not recorded until the eighteenth century, and one of the earliest of these is told in Malcolm’s Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London during the eighteenth century. “Mrs Crackenthorpe, the Female Tatler of 1709, tells us ‘that four worthy Senators lately threw their hats into a river, laid a crown each whose hat should first swim to the mill, and ran hallooing after them; and he that won the prize, was in a greater rapture than if he had carried the most dangerous point in Parliament.’”

“There was an established Cock pit in Prescot Street, Goodman’s Fields, 1712: there the Gentlemen of the East entertained themselves, while the Nobles and others of the West were entertained by the edifying exhibition of the agility of their running footmen. His Grace of Grafton declared his man was unrivalled in speed; and the Lord Cholmondeley betted him that his excelled even the unrivalled; accordingly, the ground was prepared for a two mile heat, in Hyde Park; the race was run, and one of the parties was victor, but which, my informant does not say.”

“I have frequently observed, in the course of my researches, the strange methods and customs peculiar to gaming, horse racing, dice and wagers; the latter are generally governed by whim and extreme folly. We have already noticed Noblemen running their Coaches and Footmen. In 1729, a Poulterer of Leadenhall Market betted £50, he would walk 202 times round the area of Upper Moorfields in 27 hours, and, accordingly, proceeded at the rate of five miles an hour on the amusing pursuit, to the infinite improvement of his business, and great edification of hundreds of spectators. Wagers are now a favourite custom with too many of the Londoners; they very frequently, however, originate over the bottle, or the porter pot.”

“To characterise the follies of the day, it will be necessary to add to the account of the walking man, another, of a hopping man, who engaged to hop 500 yards, in 50 hops, in St James’s Park, which he performed in 46. This important event occurred in December 1731.”

In No. 145 of the Spectator (16th Aug. 1711) is a letter about the prevalence of laying wagers. “Among other things which your own experience must suggest to you, it will be very obliging if you please to take notice of wagerers.

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“Not long ago, I was relating that I had read such a passage in Tacitus; up starts my young gentleman, in a full company, and, pulling out his purse, offered to lay me ten guineas, to be staked, immediately, in that gentleman’s hands, pointing to one smoking at another table, that I was utterly mistaken. I was dumb for want of ten guineas; he went on unmercifully to triumph over my ignorance how to take him up, and told the whole room he had read Tacitus twenty times over, and such a remarkable incident as that, could not escape him. He has, at this time, three considerable wagers depending between him and some of his companions, who are rich enough to hold an argument with him. He has five guineas upon questions in geography, two that the Isle of Wight is a peninsula, and three guineas to one, that the world is round. We have a gentleman comes to our coffee house, who deals mightily in antique scandal; my disputant has laid him twenty pieces upon a point of history.”

It was in the early part of the eighteenth century that betting was made a part of professional gambling, as we read in Smollett’s Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom. On his return to England “he perceived that gaming was now managed in such a manner, as rendered skill and dexterity of no advantage; for the spirit of play having overspread the land, like a pestilence, raged to such a degree of madness and desperation, that the unhappy people who were infected, laid aside all thoughts of amusement, economy, or caution, and risqued their fortunes upon issues equally extravagant, childish and absurd.

“The whole mystery of the art was reduced to the simple exercise of tossing up a guinea, and the lust of laying wagers, which they indulged to a surprising pitch of ridiculous intemperance. In one corner of the room might be heard a pair of lordlings running their grandmothers against each other, that is, betting sums on the longest liver; in another, the success of the wager depended upon the sex of the landlady’s next child: one of the waiters happening to drop down in an apoplectic fit, a certain noble peer exclaimed, ‘Dead, for a thousand pounds.’ The challenge was immediately accepted; and when the master of the house sent for a surgeon to attempt the cure, the nobleman, who set the price upon the patient’s head, insisted upon his being left to the efforts of nature alone, otherwise the wager should be void: nay, when the landlord harped upon the loss he should sustain by the death of a trusty servant, his lordship obviated the objection, by desiring that the fellow might be charged in the bill.”

Horace Walpole in a letter to Sir H. Mann (1 Sep. 1750) tells a similar tale. “They have put in the papers a good story made on White’s; a man dropped down dead at the door, was carried in; the club immediately made bets whether he was dead or not, and when they were going to bleed him, the wagerers for his death interposed, and said it would affect the fairness of the bet.” But there is no such bet mentioned in White’s betting book.

They even betted in the House of Commons. In the course of a debate Mr Pulteney charged Sir Robert Walpole with misquoting Horace; the prime minister replied by offering to bet that he had not done so, and the wager was accepted. The clerk of the House was called upon to decide the question, and declared Pulteney right; upon which Sir Robert threw a guinea across the House, to be picked up by his opponent, with the remark that it was the first public money he had touched for a long time.

Brookes’ betting book has C. J. Fox’s name frequently. In 1744 he bet Lord Northington that he would be called to the Bar within four years time. In 1755, he received one guinea from Lord Bolingbroke, upon condition of paying him a thousand pounds when the debts of the country amounted to a hundred and seventy-one millions; an event Fox lived to see come to pass.

In the Connoisseur of 9th May 1754 is an article on the prevalence of wagers. It says: “Tho’ most of our follies are imported from France, this had its rise and progress entirely in England. In the last illness of Louis XIV. Lord Stair laid a wager on his death; and we may guess what the French thought of it, from the manner in which Voltaire mentions it, in his SiÈcle de Louis XIV. ‘Le roi fut attaquÉ vers le milieu du mois d’AoÛt. Le Comte de Stair, ambassadeur d’Angleterre paria, selon le gÉnie de sa nation, que le roi ne passeroit pas le mois de Septembre.’ ‘The King,’ says he, ‘was taken ill about the middle of August; when Lord Stair, the Ambassador from England, betted according to the custom of his nation, that the king would not live beyond September.’

I am in some pain lest this custom should get among the ladies. They are, at present, very deep in cards and dice; and while my lord is gaining abroad, her ladyship has her rout at home. I am inclined to suspect that our women of fashion will, also, learn to divert themselves with this polite practice of laying wagers. A birthday suit, the age of a beauty, who invented a particular fashion, or who were supposed to be together at the last masquerade, would, frequently give occasion for bets. This would, also, afford them a new method for the ready propagation of scandal, as the truth of several stories which are continually flitting about the town, would, naturally, be brought to the same test. Should they proceed further, to stake the lives of their acquaintances against each other, they would, doubtless, bet with the same fearless spirit, as they are known to do at brag; one husband would, perhaps, be pitted against another, or a woman of the town against a maid of honour. In a word, if this once becomes fashionable among the ladies, we shall soon see the time, when an allowance for bet money will be stipulated in the marriage articles.

As the vices and follies of persons of distinction are very apt to spread, I am much afraid lest this branch of gaming should descend to the common people. Indeed, it seems already to have got among them. We have frequent accounts of tradesmen riding, walking, eating and drinking for a wager. The contested election in the City has occasioned several extraordinary bets. I know a butcher in Leadenhall Market, who laid an ox to a shin of beef on the success of Sir John Barnard against the field; and have been told of a publican in Thames Street, who ventured a hogshead of entire beer on the candidate who serves him with beer.”

Walpole tells one or two stories about betting in the course of his chatty letters. “Dec. 19, 1750. There has been a droll cause in Westminster Hall: a man laid another a wager that he produced a person who should weigh as much again as the Duke.[46] When they had betted, they recollected not knowing how to desire the Duke to step into a scale. They agreed to establish his weight at twenty stone, which, however, is supposed to be two more than he weighs. One Bright,[47] was then produced, who is since dead, and who, actually, weighed forty-two stone and a half. As soon as he was dead, the person who had lost, objected that he had been weighed in his clothes, and though it was impossible that his clothes could weigh above two stone, they went to law. There were the Duke’s twenty stone bawled over a thousand times; but the righteous law decided against the man who had won!”

“10th July 1774. One of them has committed a murder, and intends to repeat it. He betted £1500 that a man could live twelve hours under water; hired a desperate fellow, sunk him in a ship, by way of experiment, and both ship and man have not appeared since. Another man and ship are to be tried for their lives, instead of Mr Blake, the assassin.”

On 30 June 1765 a wager of 1000 guineas was decided between two noblemen, one of whom had constructed a machine which was to work a boat at the rate of 25 miles an hour: a canal was prepared near the banks of the Thames, on which to try it, but the tackle breaking, the bet was lost.

28 Feb. 1770. A bet was laid by a noble earl that he would procure a man to ride to Edinburgh from London, and back, in less time than another noble earl could make a million of scores, or distinct dots, in the most expeditious manner that he could contrive.

On 12th June 1771 was tried before Lord Mansfield and a special jury, in the Court of King’s Bench, a cause wherein Lord March was plaintiff, and Mr Pigot, defendant. The action was brought to recover the sum of 500 guineas for a wager which Lord March had laid with Mr Pigot, whether Sir William Codrington or old Mr Pigot would die first. Mr Pigot happened to die suddenly from gout in his head on the morning previous to the laying of the wager, and the younger Mr Pigot thought, from this circumstance, that it was no bet. The defendant’s counsel said, that if you make a bet for two horses to run, and one of them should die before the race came off, there could be no bet; and he hoped that the jury would find for his client. After a short charge from the judge, the jury brought in a verdict for the plaintiff of 500 guineas, and full costs of suit.

On 1st July 1777 a case came before the Lord Chief-Justice Mansfield, which is one of the most extraordinary that ever was tried in a Court of Justice, respecting the sex of the Chevalier d’Eon, formerly ambassador to England from the Court of France.

The action was brought by Mr Hayes, surgeon, against one Jacques, a broker and underwriter, for the recovery of £700, the said Jacques having, about six years previously, received premiums of fifteen guineas per cent., for every one of which he stood engaged to return one hundred guineas, whenever it should be proved that the Chevalier d’Eon was, actually, a woman.

Mr Buller opened the case as counsel for Mr Hayes. He stated the fairness of the transaction, and the justifiable nature of the demand, as Mr Hayes, the plaintiff, thought himself now to be in possession of that proof which would determine the sex of the Chevalier d’Eon, and, for ever, render the case indisputable.

In proof of the fact, M. de Goux, a surgeon, was the first witness called, and gave his testimony to the following effect: That he had been acquainted with the Chevalier d’Eon from the time when the Duc de Nivernois resided in England in quality of ambassador from the Court of France. That to his certain knowledge, the person called the Chevalier d’Eon was a woman.

Being closely interrogated by the counsel for the defendant, as to the mode of his acquiring such a degree of certainty relative to the sex of the party, M. de Goux gave this account of the matter: That, about five years ago, he was called in by the Chevalier d’Eon, to lend his professional aid, as she, at that time, laboured under a disorder which rendered an examination of the afflicted part absolutely necessary. That this examination led, of course, to that discovery of the sex of which M. de Goux was now enabled to give such testimony.

The second witness called on the part of the plaintiff was M. de Morande. He swore that, so long ago as the 3rd of July 1774, the Chevalier d’Eon made a free disclosure of her sex to the witness. That she had even proceeded so far as to display her bosom on the occasion. That, in consequence of this disclosure of sex, she, the Chevalier d’Eon, had exhibited the contents of her female wardrobe, which consisted of sacques, petticoats, and other habiliments calculated for feminine use. That, on the said 3rd day of July 1774, the witness paid a morning visit to the Chevalier d’Eon, and, finding her in bed, accosted her in a style of gallantry respecting her sex. That, so far from being offended with this freedom, the said Chevalier desired the witness to approach nearer to her bed, and then permitted him to have manual proof of her being, in very truth, a woman.

Mr Mansfield, on the part of the defendant, pleaded that this was one of those gambling, indecent and unnecessary cases, that ought never to be permitted to come into a Court of Justice; that, besides the inutility and indecency of the case, the plaintiff had taken advantage of his client, being in possession of intelligence that enabled him to lay with greater certainty, although with such great odds on his side; that the plaintiff, at the time of laying the wager, knew that the Court of France treated with the Chevalier, as a woman, to grant her a pension; and that the French Court must have had some strong circumstances to imbibe that idea; therefore, he hoped the jury would reprobate such wagers. The defendant’s counsel did not attempt to contradict the plaintiff’s’ evidence, by proving the masculine gender.

Lord Mansfield expressed his abhorrence of the whole transaction, and the more so, for their bringing it into a Court of Justice, when it might have been settled elsewhere; wishing it had been in his power, in concurrence with the jury, to have made both parties lose; but, as the law had not expressly prohibited it, and the wager was laid, the question before them was, who had won? His Lordship remarked that the indecency of the proceeding arose more from the unnecessary questions asked, than from the case itself; that the witnesses had declared they perfectly knew the Chevalier d’Eon to be a woman; if she is not a woman, they are certainly perjured: there was, therefore, no need of inquiring how, or by what methods they knew it, which was all the indecency.

As to the fraud suggested, of the plaintiff’s knowing more than the defendant, he seemed to think there was no foundation for it. His Lordship then recited a wager entered into by two gentlemen, in his own presence, about the dimensions of the Venus de Medicis, for £100. One of the gentlemen said, “I will not deceive you; I tell you fairly, I have been there, and measured it myself.” “Well,” says the other, “and do you think I should be such a fool, as to lay if I had not measured it?... I will lay for all that.”

His Lordship then went on to state to the jury, that this Chevalier had publicly appeared as a man, had been employed by the Court of France, as a man, as a military man, in a civil office, and as a Minister of State here, and in Russia; there was all the presumption against the plaintiff, and the onus probandi lay upon him, which might never been come at; for it appeared, the only proposition of a discovery of sex that had been made to the Chevalier, by some gentlemen on an excursion, had been resented by d’Eon, who had instantly quitted their company on that account: it might, therefore, never have been in his power to have proved his wager, but for some accidental quarrels between d’Eon and some of her countrymen. His Lordship was, therefore, of opinion that the jury should find a verdict for the plaintiff.

The jury, without hesitation, gave a verdict for the plaintiff, £700, and 40s. Yet, when d’Eon died, in London, in 1810, it was proved, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was a man.