Whereby His Excellency profit makes.
He also on another element
Does give his choused customers content
With net or angling rod, to catch a dish
Of trouts or carp or other sorts of fish.
The Welsh Ambassador was the nickname of the proprietor, James Howell, an enterprising though not very reputable person, who had once been imprisoned for some offence in Newgate.
Races[203] and similar amusements continued for several years to be provided, and music was performed every day during the season. In the spring of 1733 (31 May) a race was advertised for ponies twelve hands six inches high. The length of the race was six times round the course; “Mr. Treacle’s black pony,” which distinguished itself by winning the plate at Hampstead Heath in the previous year, being excluded.
In 1736 a fat doe was advertised to be hunted to death by small beagles, beginning at nine in the morning, and sportsmen were invited to bring their own dogs, if “not too large.” In the same year (16 September) a boys’ race was run, beginning at three o’clock, six times round the course: a prize of one guinea was given to the winner, and half a guinea to the second runner. “Each person to pay sixpence coming in, and all persons sitting on the wall or getting over will be prosecuted.”
For an afternoon in August 1737, there was announced a running match six times round the park, between “the Cobler’s Boy and John Wise the Mile-End Drover,” for twenty guineas. In 1745 there were foot-races in the park, and this is the last notice we have of Belsize as a place of amusement.
The mansion falling into a ruinous state[204] was pulled down at the close of the eighteenth century (before 1798), and a large, plainly-built house was erected in its stead. From 1798–1807 this new Belsize House was tenanted by the Right Hon. Spencer Perceval and others. In the autumn of 1853 the house was pulled down (cp. The Illustrated London News for 9th September, 1854, p. 239), and the buildings of the Belsize Estate were subsequently erected on the site of the Park.