‘How the men of business and the great orators of the House of Commons contrive to reconcile it with their exertions I cannot conceive,’ writes that most charming of public men, Sir Gilbert Elliot, to his wife. ‘Men of all ages drink abominably. Fox (a Prime Minister) drinks what I should call a great deal, though he is not reckoned to do so by his companions; Sheridan (M.P. and dramatist, and withal the bosom friend of the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV.) excessively; and Grey (Viscount Howick) more than any of them. But it is in a much more gentlemanly way than our Scotch drunkards, and is always accompanied with lively clever conversation on subjects of importance. Pitt (a Prime Minister), I am told, drinks as much as anybody.’
The same observer, Sir Gilbert Elliot (1787), describes a scene at W. Crewe’s, where three young men of fashion, Mr. Orlando Bridgman, Mr. Charles Greville, of the Picnic Club, and Mr. Gifford were so drunk, ‘as to puzzle the whole assembly.’ The last was a young gentleman lately come out, of a good estate of about five thousand pounds a year, the whole of which he is in the act of spending in one or two years at least (125,000l.), and this without a grain of sense, without any fun to himself or entertainment to others. He never uttered a word, though as drunk as the other two, who were both riotous, and began at last to talk so plain, that Lady Francis and Lady Valentine fled from the side table to ours, and Mrs. Sheridan would have followed them, but did not escape till her arms were black and blue, and her apron torn off.
Pitt, the model young minister, broke down in the house in the following year, owing to a debauch the night before at Lord Buckingham’s, when, in company with Dundas and the Duke of Gordon, he took too much wine.
Indeed, the manners and customs of the times (1780-1830) might be called a ‘precious school’ for the young princes (Prince of Wales, Dukes of York, Cumberland, and Kent), and there was no public opinion to check these vices.
The lawlessness that was abroad reached even to the young, who disdained the control of their parents.
To the same effect writes Dr. Doran:—
Any one who will take the trouble to go carefully through the columns of the ill-printed newspapers of the last century, will find that drunkenness, dissoluteness, and the sword hanging on every fool’s thigh ready to do his bidding, were the characteristics of the period. People got drunk at dinners, and then slew one another, or in some other way broke the law.
The taverns were crowded with morning drinkers. On the site occupied by the Bank of England, four inns used to stand; one of them was called The Crown. Sir John Hawkins, in his History of Musick, mentions that it was not unusual to draw a butt (120 gallons) in half-pints in the course of a single morning.
The drinking at the Universities was terrible.
Henry Gunning, M.A., Christ’s College, Cambridge (a descendant of the Bishop of Ely, who wrote the prayer for the Church Militant), had great opportunities of judging of the Cambridge of his day, for he was born 1768 in a Cambridgeshire vicarage, went up to Cambridge at an early age, was made Esquire Bedell 1789, and continued in that capacity till his death early in 1854. In his charming Reminiscences of the University, Town, and County of Cambridge, from the year 1780, he observes:—