Mr. George Payne, although at this period close upon sixty, was the centre of every fashionable gathering that met for racing or card playing; a favourite of the highest in the land, he had come direct from Norfolk to Nice in company with the chief actor in a notorious drama enacted many years later, and no man had raised his voice with greater indignation when, nolens volens, he found himself in the very centre of the unsavoury vortex, “By —, sir! By —, sir!”—an invariable adjunct—“D— scoundrel!” dominating considerably amid the numerous pourparlers that ensued.
As a card player his stakes were simply appalling, and it is a well-known fact that on one occasion he won £30,000 from the late Lord Londesborough, who immediately afterwards hurried off to be married. £100 a game was to him a normal stake, and any aspirant attempting to “cut in” at the table who was not prepared to have an extra hundred on the game was “By —, sir’d!” ad infinitum for depriving a better man of the seat.
Opinions on that remarkable meteor—Henry Plantagenet Hastings—who first came into public notice at the Newmarket Spring Meeting of ’62, will always differ. By those who knew him intimately he will be remembered as a weak, amiable, and generous youngster, terribly handicapped by a colossal rent roll, a splendid pedigree, a generous, impulsive disposition, and an entire ignorance of the value of money. To the present generation, who have only heard of his escapades, he will appear as a reckless, unprincipled reprobate, preferring low company to that of his equals, incapable of restraining his passions in pursuit of the object of the moment, and sacrificing anything and anybody for their attainment. Barely had he left Oxford than he became the target of that sporting world that pursued him to his grave, and was swindled out of £13,500 for a “screw” that ended his days in a cab; after which he settled down to racing as a serious occupation, and had fifty horses in training; thence (1862) to 1867 he won the Cambridgeshire, the Grand Prix, the Goodwood Cup, and a host of minor races, besides such a colossal sum as close upon £80,000 on Lecturer in the Cesarewitch of ’66.
But although the fates had apparently condoned his infringement of the Tenth Commandment in ’64, Nemesis was even then on his track, and it would seem that the colt foaled about the very time he was exploiting the structural merits of Vere Street was to be the humble instrument in the hands of Providence for the ruin of the wicked Marquis.
It is needless here to repeat the threadbare story that once interested people of how the most beautiful woman of her day stepped out of a brougham one fine morning at the Oxford Street entrance to a linen-draper’s, and emerged from another door in the vicinity of Vere Street with the Marquis’s boon companion, Fred Granville. Suffice for our reminiscences, that if all this had not occurred in ’64, there would probably have been no “Hermit’s year” in ’67; that Captain Machell would not have commenced his career by netting £80,000 over the event, and that poor Hastings would never have lost and paid the 103,000 sovereigns he did. One cannot follow the ups and downs of this unhappy sport of Fortune without comparing the cheers that everywhere greeted him up to ’67 with the execrations with which he was assailed by the same rabble at Epsom the following year, and all because one of the most generous of golden calves had been tricked and swindled out of a colossal fortune in less than six years, and had met every obligation till plucked of his last feather.
Nor can one forget that the yelpings of his indignant judges (!) were mingled with the hacking cough that carried him to his grave five months later; yet nobody who saw him drive off the course would have imagined that the incident had affected him in the least. “I did not show it, did I?” he remarked to an intimate friend almost from his death-bed; “but it fairly broke my heart,” and so Henry Plantagenet Hastings was gathered to his fathers at the early age of twenty-six, and almost before the howls of the mob had ceased to ring in one’s ears.
Whilst on the fascinating but occult science of racing, the licence invariably accorded by an indulgent public will not it is hoped be here withheld if one jumps for a moment into the early seventies, an era, alas! as far removed from the present generation as the long-ago sixties. With railway facilities very different from those of to-day, it was the custom of “bloods” to make a week of it at Newmarket during the great meetings, and so it came to pass that a distinctly representative party took up their quarters at the residence of Mr. Postans, the courteous postmaster at Mill Hill, for the Two Thousand festival of ’72.
In those long-ago days class distinctions were religiously observed even in such trifles, and whilst the “second chop” resorted to the “White Hart” and other comfortable hostelries, the upper crust engaged houses at fabulous prices, to the advantage of owner and tenant.
The existence was as regular as it was exciting, the racing being followed by an excellent dinner and a stroll about nine to “The Rooms.” It was on the night before the big race that Forbes-Bentley—a lucky dog who owned a number of horses, and who had recently been left a fortune of £140,000 conditional on his adding a second barrel to his name—suggested to a sportsman at dinner that to avoid notice he should put some money on for him on Prince Charlie for the Two Thousand.
Beginning his racing career in a pure love of the sport, he eventually developed into a colossal punter, and discovered—it is feared too late—that the game is not a paying one. “Tommy,” he whispered to his next-door neighbour over their cigars, “I want a monkey on Prince Charlie; will you, like a good fellow, put it on for me with as little publicity as possible?”