‘Stavordale is returning to Redlinch; I believe that he sets out to-morrow. He is also deeply engaged in this Sedgmoor Bill, and it is supposed that he or Lord Ilchester, which you please, will get 2000l. a year by it. He will get more, or save more at least, by going away and leaving the Moor in my hands, for he told me himself the other night that this last trip to town had cost him 4000l.’
Another letter warns Lord Carlisle that the only way to get his creditors to pay their debts to him, when they come into their money through the enclosure, is to press for payment, and goes on to describe the unexpected opposition the Bill had encountered. Selwyn had been made chairman of the Committee.
‘... My dear Lord, if your delicacy is such that you will not be pressing with him about it, you may be assured that you will never receive a farthing. I have spoke to Hare about it, who [was] kept in it till half an hour after 4; as I was also to-day, and shall be to-morrow. I thought that it was a matter of form only, but had no sooner begun to read the preamble to the Bill, but I found myself in a nest of hornets. The room was full, and an opposition made to it, and disputes upon every word, which kept me in the Chair, as I have told you. I have gained it seems great reputation, and am at this minute reputed one of the best Chairmen upon this stand. Bully and Harry came home and dined with me....’
The next letter, written on 9th December, shows that Selwyn is afraid that Stavordale may not get his money out of his father, and also that he is becoming still more anxious about the fate of the Enclosure Bill, on which of course the whole pack of cards depends:
‘... I have taken the liberty to talk a good deal to Lord Stavordale, partly for his own sake and partly for yours, and pressed him much to get out of town as soon as possible, and not quit Lord I. [Ilchester] any more. His attention there cannot be of long duration, and his absence may be fatal to us all. I painted it in very strong colours, and he has promised me to go, as soon as this Sedgmoor Bill is reported. I moved to have Tuesday fixed for it. We had a debate and division upon my motion, and this Bill will at last not go down so glibly as Bully hoped that it would. It will meet with more opposition in the H. of Lords, and Lord North being adverse to it, does us no good. Lord Ilchester gets, it is said, £5000 a year by it, and amongst others Sir C. Tynte something, who, for what reason I cannot yet comprehend, opposes it....’
The next letter describes the final catastrophe:
‘December 12. Tuesday night.... Bully has lost his Bill. I reported it to-day, and the Question was to withdraw it. There were 59 against us, and we were 35. It was worse managed by the agents, supposing no treachery, than ever business was. Lord North, Robinson, and Keene divided against. Charles[84] said all that could be said on our side. But as the business was managed, it was the worst Question that I ever voted for. We were a Committee absolutely of Almack’s,[85] so if the Bill is not resumed, and better conducted and supported, this phantom of 30,000l. clear in Bully’s pocket to pay off his annuities vanishes.
‘It is surprising what a fatality attends some people’s proceedings. I begged last night as for alms, that they would meet me to settle the Votes. I have, since I have been in Parliament, been of twenty at least of these meetings, and always brought numbers down by those means. But my advice was slighted, and twenty people were walking about the streets who could have carried this point.
‘The cause was not bad, but the Question was totally indigestible. The most conscientious man in the House in Questions of this nature, Sir F. Drake, a very old acquaintance of mine, told me that nothing could be so right as the enclosure. But they sent one Bill into the country for the assent of the people interested, and brought me another, differing in twenty particulars, to carry through the Committee, without once mentioning to me that the two Bills differed. This they thought was cunning, and I believe a happy composition of Bully’s cunning and John’s idea of his own parts. I had no idea, or could have, of this difference. The adverse party said nothing of it, comme de raison, reserving the objection till the Report, and it was insurmountable. If one of the Clerks only had hinted it to me, inexperienced as I am in these sort of Bills, I would have stopped it, and by that means have given them a better chance by a new Bill than they can have now, that people will have a pretence for not altering their opinion....’
These letters compensate for the silence of Hansard, so real and instructive a picture do they present of the methods and motives of enclosure. ‘Bully has a scheme of enclosure which, if it succeeds, I am told will free him from all his difficulties.’ The journals may talk of the undrained fertility of Sedgmoor, but we have in this sentence the aspect of the enclosure that interests Selwyn, the Chairman of the Committee, and from beginning to end of the proceedings no other aspect ever enters his head. And it interests a great many other people besides Selwyn, for Bully owes money; so too does Stavordale, another prospective beneficiary: he owes money to Fox, and Fox owes money to Carlisle. Now Bully and Stavordale are not the only eighteenth-century aristocrats who are in difficulties; the waiters at Brooks’s and at White’s know that well enough, as Selwyn felt when, on hearing that one of them had been arrested for felony, he exclaimed, ‘What an idea of us he will give in Newgate.’ Nor is Bully the only aristocrat in difficulties whose thoughts turn to enclosure; Selwyn’s letters alone, with their reference to previous successes, would make that clear. It is here that we begin to appreciate the effect of our system of family settlements in keeping the aristocracy together. These young men, whose fortunes come and go in the hurricanes of the faro table, would soon have dissipated their estates if they had been free to do it; as they were restrained by settlements, they could only mortgage them. But there is a limit to this process, and after a time their debts begin to overwhelm them; perhaps also too many of their fellow gamblers are their creditors to make Brooks’s or White’s quite as comfortable a place as it used to be, for we may doubt whether all of these creditors were troubled with Lord Carlisle’s morbid delicacy of feeling. Happily there is an escape from this painful situation: a scheme of enclosure which will put him ‘once more on his legs.’ The other parties concerned are generally poor men, and there is not much danger of failure. Thus if we trace the adventures of the gaming table to their bitter end, we begin to understand that these wild revellers are gambling not with their own estates but with the estates of their neighbours. This is the only property they can realise. Quidquid delirant reges plectuntur Achivi.