clubmen, keeping things remarkably snug, and delighting much in
house-dinners at the sign of the Misletoe, where a roasted Ancient Briton
was no rare dish. It might aid, too, to clear up the puzzling enigma
of Stonehenge—who built it, and how, and why?—if we were to look upon
Druidism in a purely club-light. I should like to know whence the money
came which the Megatherium or the Mastodon Clubs in Pall Mall cost to
build. We know that Captain Threadbare, late of the Rifles, that the
Hon. Jemmy O’Nuffin, respectively members of those grand _cénacles_,
didn’t find the money; that they never paid anything towards their clubs,
save the entrance fee and the subscription; and that they dine there,
nine months out of the year, for eighteen-pence. Other members did,
do, will do the same; yet there the club stands, stately and superb,
with its columns of multi-coloured marbles, its stately halls, its
sumptuous furniture, its army of liveried lacqueys. A belted earl might
ruin himself in building such a mansion; yet Captain Threadbare and
Jemmy O’Nuffin call it their club, and it is theirs to all intents and
purposes. Cunning men, when you express excusable wonder at the thing,
whisper, “Debentures!” and debentures seem in truth to have been the
seven hundred times seven gifted servants, who have hoisted this Fortunio
of a place to its proud position. Why should not Stonehenge have been
built by debentures?
The old Saxon Wittenagemotte must have been strongly impregnated with
the club element; and the resemblance of clubs to parliaments has come
down to this day. What, after all, is our much-vaunted British House
of Commons but a club of the first water, somewhat more exclusive than
its brethren of St. James’s, and black-balling its scores of candidates
every general election? It has its reading-rooms, coffee-rooms, and
smoking-rooms; the members lounge in and out, and loll on forms and
benches, just as they would do in Pall Mall; and while some five hundred
members indulge in the real _dolce far niente_ of club life, smoking, and
reading, and dawdling, and dozing, and refreshing themselves, and never
troubling themselves about club matters, save when they are called upon
to vote, the affairs of the club (and of the nation too, by the way)
are managed by a snug little committee, who do all the work and all the
talking, and are continually popping themselves into snug little berths
connected with the management of that other great club which lies beyond
the walls of St. Stephen’s, and is called the Country.
And the middle ages, sunk as the unthinking believe them to have been in
barbarism, had their clubs, and brave ones too. Thorough clubmen were the
old Freemasons; secret and sturdy, and swift in action; and it’s O! to
see the club-houses they erected in the fanes that are yet the pride and
glory of our cathedral towns. When you look at their crenelated towers,
and at the strange sculptures in the rich spandrils of their arches, in
their groins and corbels, in their buttresses and great rose windows,
and cunningly-traced roodscreens and carved bench-ends, you shall find
copious store of club-marks, and secret signs, and passes only known to
themselves, and, grotesque and frivolous as to the uninitiated they seem,
truly drawn from the innermost arcana of the great mystery of masonry.
The old Vehmgericht, too, with its grim symbols, and warnings of the cord
and dagger—may not that be considered as a club? The Flagellants and
the Rosicrucians, were not those queer sects clubs? and what were the
Council of Trent, and the Diet of Worms, but select clubs, frequented by
ecclesiastical and political “swells?”
I am not about to confound the convivial club—with its one room and its
quaint rules, ancient or modern—with its latest perfection, all Portland
stone and plate-glass, gas chandeliers, and luxurious ottomans. Before,
however, I come to the fashionable club of 1859, I may be permitted, I
hope, to discourse for awhile on the jovial clubs, high, low, and middle
class, which have made this metropolis cosy and picturesque for at least
two centuries.
There can be little doubt that the Restoration gave a marvellous
incentive to club-life in London. On the one hand, the sour Puritans
and fierce Independents, driven into holes and corners by the advent of
Charles II., had other places of meeting than the conventicles where
they offered their surreptitious worship; and at these stray places of
re-union, they comforted and refected themselves in their own grim,
uncomfortable fashion. On the other hand, the Cavaliers had their riotous
assemblages, where they met to sing “Down among the dead men,” and
drink their king’s health on their knees; the revival of humorous and
theatrical literature filled the taverns and coffee-houses with wits and
dramatists, instead of pedants and theologians; table companions formed
into knots, and knots into throngs, and these at length formed themselves
into clubs, where they could jest and criticise, argue and carouse, at
their ease, without the fear of interlopers; and though, so late as the
days of Foote and Chatterton, a stranger of good address and brilliant
conversation could form a rallying coffee-house acquaintance with the
most famous wits of the town, it was difficult for him to be admitted
into their inner circle; even as, in our own time, a man may find
plenty of conversation in a railway carriage or an hotel coffee-room,
at a German Spa or a charity dinner, but must not feel surprised if
his voluble acquaintance of the previous evening cut him dead the next
time he meets him. The change of succession at the Revolution gave an
impetus both to the establishment and to the exclusiveness of the clubs.
While William, the Dutchman, held his uneasy, hooked-nose pre-eminence
in this country, innumerable were the dim taverns in whose securest
rooms stealthy clubs, with cabalistic names, were held; where, when
the club-room doors were tightly closed, Captain Henchman, late of
Roper’s horse, turned out to be Father Slyboots, high up in the order
of Jesus, where sympathy was openly avowed for Sir John Fenwick, and
the exiles of St. Germains were yet spoken of as the possessors of the
Crown; and where, after William’s death, the health of “the little
gentleman in black velvet,” meaning the molehill over which, according
to the Jacobites, the king’s horse had stumbled, when William fell and
dislocated his collar-bone, was enthusiastically drunk. It would have
been hard, too, if the days of Queen Anne—the Augustan era in which
Swift, Gay, Pope, Addison, Prior, Bolingbroke, Somers, and Dorset, held
their glorious sway of intellect—had not been fruitful in the production
of clubs; and it is to the first quarter of the eighteenth century that
we may trace the birth of our most famous clubs. The accession of George
the First, embittering as it did a new question of the succession to
the throne, gave a fresh lease of popularity to the Jacobite clubs,
which had languished somewhat during the reign of Anne, for sheer want
of something to conspire about. They were held all over London: in
taverns and mug-houses, in the purlieus of Westminster and the Mint in
Southwark, and in the multitudinous courts and alleys about Cornhill and
the Exchange. How I should like to have seen one of these old honest,
wrong-headed Jacobite club meetings! There was our old friend Captain
Henchman, _alias_ Father Slyboots, grown gray in conspiring; always in
active correspondence with Rome and St. Germains, Douai and St. Omer,
and, as of yore, fiercely hunted by Mr. Secretary’s messengers, from his
Majesty’s Cockpit, at Whitehall. There were old Roman Catholic baronets
and squires, from Lancashire and Cheshire, who would as soon have thought
of surrendering their ancestral faith in the false and fickle Stuarts, as
of abandoning their old shields of arms and trees of descent; there were
hot-headed young counsellers from the Temple; and otherwise steady-going
Jacobite mercers, and goldsmiths, and vintners, whose loyalty to the
dethroned house had somewhat of a commercial tinge in it, as you see
now radical hatters and grocers proud to blazon the Royal arms above
their doors, and the Lord Chamberlain’s warrant in their windows, as
“purveyors, by appointment, to her most Gracious Majesty.” The landlord
was a staunch Jacobite, of course; how, indeed, should he be otherwise?
His grandfather had fought at Naseby field; and his father had furnished
one of King Charles the Second’s madams with clove-gillyflower water, and
had never been paid for it. The drawer was Jacobite to the backbone (he
turned traitor afterwards, it is true; was the means of hanging half the
club, and retired with a handsome competence to the plantations, where
he was exceedingly prosperous in the export of tobacco and the import of
kidnapped children, and died elder and deacon)—but who but he brought in
the great China bowl filled with a clear fluid, across which the company
drank, with clasped hands, the toast of “The king over the water.” Ah,
days of furious party and faction differences, but of self-sacrificing
honour and loyalty, ye shall return no more! It was lucky for the
Jacobite club-men when their convivialities were not interrupted by the
irruption through the window of a party of the Foot Guards, who had
climbed over the adjoining tiles. Traitors were always in their camp:
spies always watching them. The English ambassador in Paris knew of their
goings on, and revealed their bacchanalian machinations to wary Mr.
Secretary at the Cockpit; and every now and then would come a tide of
evil days, and the venue of the club would be changed; Father Slyboots
would go into closer hiding, baffling pursuit as a verger of Westminster
Abbey, compounding with skippers of smuggling luggers for conveyance to
Dunkirk or Fecamp, crouching in the “priest’s hole” of some old Roman
Catholic mansion of the North country, or indeed, good man, as the times
were very bad, purchasing a stout horse and betaking himself to the road
with Captain Macheath and Cornet O’Gibbet, and Duvalising travellers,—of
course confining himself to those who were of the Hanoverian way of
thinking. Not the first honest man who has turned highwayman: besides,
was it not for the greater glory of Church and King? When the club had
its next meeting, it might be in ’16 or in ’46 (for the century was quite
gray-headed before the Jacobite clubs quite died out), there would be a
lamentable hiatus here and there in the list of members. Where was Sir
William Flowerdeluce?—Shot at Sheriffmuir. Where Colonel Belmain?—Hanged
at Carlisle. Where young Christopher Layer, the barrister, gallant,
devoted, enthusiastic?—His head was rotting on a spike, over Temple Bar,
within sight of his old chambers. Where Jemmy Dawson, the pride, the pet,
the pearl of the Jacobites, the dashing swordsman of Townley’s ill-fated
Manchester Regiment?—Go ask the judge and jury, go ask the hangman, go
ask the veiled lady in the black coach, who follows the fatal hurdle to
Kennington Common, and sits out the hideous drama, and when she sees
the heart of him she loves cast into the flames, and his fair limbs
dismembered by the executioner, swoons and dies.
I have been reading a little old book, bearing the date of 1725, which
professes to give a “Complete Account” of the principal clubs of
London and Westminster. Its authorship is anonymous; yet I think I can
discern traces of a certain fine Roman hand, well-known to me, in its
composition, and I don’t think I am in error in ascribing it to Mr. Ned
Ward, the scurrilous though amusing author of the “London Spy.” Its
contents must be taken, of course, _cum grano salis_, with the other
lucubrations of that diverting vagabond; yet I am ready to believe
that many of his clubs were then existent. Some of them, indeed, have
come down to our own times. According to the writer of the “Complete
Account,” there was the “Virtuous Club,” established as a succursal to
the Royal Society (which, indeed, was little more than a club at its
commencement), at the Golden Fleece, a tavern in Cornhill, whence they
moved to the Three Tuns, in Southwark: a queer locality, indeed, for
the white-neckclothed savants, who now have their habitat in Burlington
House. The chronicler treats them somewhat contemptuously, as collectors
of “pickled maggots and mummies’ toenails,” and seems considerably
to prefer the “Surly Club,” held at some out-of-the-way place near
Billingsgate Dock, whose members had “a stoker to attend their fire”—I
did not know the appellation “stoker” was so old—a skinker to ignify
their pipes, and a chalk accountant to keep a trencher register of the
club reckoning, lest the landlord below should be tempted to augment
the scot by means of a double-notched chalk. The principal feature
of the “Surly Club” appeared to lie in the members being all surly,
ill-tempered, wrangling chuffs, who were bound to abuse each other and
the world generally, at their every time of meeting. I believe that
there are London clubs, not yet extinct, which carry out the principles
of the “Surly Club” in a remarkably undeviating manner. Then there
was the “Split-Farthing Club,” instituted by a society of usurers and
money-spinners, who met together in the dark, in order to avoid the
expense of candle or lamp-light, and of which the Hopkins immortalised by
Pope was a distinguished member. The “Ugly Club” (which yet flourishes,
I believe,) owed its foundation to a superlatively ugly fellow by the
name of Hatchet (whence the term “hatchet-faced”), who had a nose of
such immense size, that he was one day in the street charged by a
butcher-boy with overturning a tray full of meat, when his head was at
least a foot distant therefrom. A violent attempt was made to break up
the “Ugly Club” by a committee of spinsters, who made unheard-of attempts
to marry the members _en masse_, but in vain. Jack Wilkes was elected
perpetual president of the “Ugly Club,” early in the reign of George
III., and Honorè Gabriel Riquetti, Count de Mirabeau, who had some slight
connection with the first French Revolution, was unanimously chosen an
honorary member on his visit to England. I must not forget to mention
the “Unfortunate Club,” held at the sign of the “Tumbledown Dick,” in
the Mint. To have been at least once bankrupt (a fraudulent failure was
preferred), or to have come in some way in collision with the laws of
the country, was a _sine quâ non_ in the qualification for a member of
the “Unfortunates.” The Market Women’s, or “Flat-cap Club,” was at one
time quite a fashionable place of meeting, being frequented by many of
the wild gallants from the Rose, and Tom King’s coffee-house, who treated
the lady company to burnt brandy and flowing “Winchesters” (_i. e._,
Winchester measures) of “powerful three thread”—our modern porter. Then
there was the “Lying Club,” among whose voluminous rules were these,
that the chairman was to wear a blue cap and a red feather, and that if
any member, in the course of an evening, told a lie more impudent and
egregious than he, the chairman, could manage to cap, he was at once
to vacate the chair in favour of the superior Mendax. There was a very
stringent rule, inflicting a severe fine upon any member who should
presume, between the hours of nine and eleven of the clock, to tell one
word of truth, unless, indeed, he prefaced it with the rider of “By your
leave, Sir Harry”—Sir Harry Gulliver being the name of the original
chairman of the club. There was the “No-Nose Club,” the “Beggars’ Club,”
the “Thieves’ Club,” and the “Northern or Yorkshire Tyke’s Club;” and, to
sum up, there was a horrific assembly, founded in the reign of Charles
II., and called the “Man-killing Club.” The members of this savage
corporation were debased Life-guardsmen, broken-down bullies, and old
scarified prize-fighters. The prime qualification for membership was the
commission of homicide. The “Mohocks,” “Scourers,” and “Sweaters” of
Queen Anne’s time, were, as may readily be imagined, highly prominent
members of this murderous fraternity, which might have flourished much
longer but for the interference of the Sheriff’s hangman in ordinary, who
disposed of the members with such amazing despatch and persistence, that
the club could not at last form a quorum, and was so dissolved.
The “Irish Fortune-hunters’ Club” I am somewhat chary of recognising, for
I am afraid that it existed only in the lively fancy of Mr. Ned Ward or
his imitator. There is, indeed, a copy of some resolutions of the club
appended to the “Complete Account,” but I am inclined to consider them
apocryphal. Leave, by these resolutions, is given to Captain Donahoo to
change his name to Talbot Howard Somerset; Captain Macgarret is empowered
to change the place of his nativity from Connemara to Cornwall; and
Lieutenant Dunshunner is presented with a suit of laced camlet at the
club expense, in order to his successfully prosecuting his suit with
Miss Bridget Tallboys, “with ten thousand pounds fortune; in the event
of which happy consummation, he is to repay the price of the suit with
interest, and moreover to release from his captivity at the Gate-house
the club secretary, therein confined on suspicion of debt.”
Very different is the bran-new modern club whose interior my faithful
artist has depicted, and whose appearance at five o’clock in the
afternoon I am now called upon to describe. Gentlemen members of clubs,
these gorgeous palaces are but the growth of one generation. Your
fathers had, it is true, their Wattier’s, the Cocoa-Tree, White’s, and
Boodle’s, but those were considerably more like gambling-houses than
clubs. To obtain admission was exceedingly difficult, and to remain a
member was, save to men of immense fortune, absolutely ruinous. Hundreds
of the superior middle-classes, nay, even of the aristocracy, who would
consider themselves social Pariahs now-a-days, if they did not belong to
one or more clubs, were perfectly content, a score of years since, to
frequent the coffee-rooms of hotels and taverns. A modern London club
is the very looking-glass of the time; of the gay, glittering, polished,
improved utilitarian, material age. Nothing more can be done for a
palace than the fitters-up of a modern club have done for it. The march
of upholstering intellect is there in its entirety. It must be almost
bewildering to the modest half-pay captain or the raw young ensign, to
the country gentleman, the book-worm fellow of his college, or the son of
the country squire, fresh from dog-breaking and superintending the drains
on his father’s estate, to find themselves suddenly transferred from
the quiet lodgings in St. Alban’s Place, the whitewashed barrack-room,
the ivy-grown parsonage, the tranquil oak-sporting rooms of “Keys” or
“Maudlin,” the dull comfort of the country mansion-house, to this great
hectoring palace, of which he is the twelve-hundreth part proprietor,
and where he may live on the fatness of the land, and like a lord of
the creation, for twenty guineas entrance fee, and a subscription
of ten guineas a year. He has a joint-stock proprietorship in all
this splendour; in the lofty halls and vestibules; in the library,
coffee-rooms, newspaper and card-rooms; in the secretary’s office in
the basement, and in the urbane secretary himself; in the kitchen,
fitted with every means and appliance, every refinement of culinary
splendour, and from whence are supplied to him at cost prices dishes
that would make Lucullus wild with envy, and that are cooked for him,
besides, by the great _chef_ from Paris, Monsieur Nini Casserole, who
has a piano and a picture-gallery in the kitchen—belongs, himself, to a
club, little less aristocratic than his masters’, and writes his bills
of fare upon laced-edged note-paper. From the gorgeous footmen in plush
and silk-covered calves, which the flunkeys of duchesses could scarcely
rival, to the little foot-page in buttons; from the letter-racks to the
French-polished peg on which he hangs his hat in the hall; from the
books in the library to the silver spoons in the plate-basket; from the
encaustic mosaic on the pavement of the hall to the topmost turreted
chimney-pot—he has a vested interest in all. He cannot waste, he cannot
alienate, it is true; he can but enjoy. Debentures have taken care of
that; yet the fee-simple is in part his; he is the possessor of an
entailed estate; yet, for all purposes of present enjoyment, he sits
under his own roof on his own ground, and eats his own mutton off his
own plate, with his own knife and fork. Oh! the wonderful workings of
debentures, and the inestimable benefits they confer on genteel persons
with expensive tastes and small incomes! Do you know that a man may drink
wines at his club, such as, were he to order them at an hotel, the head
waiter would hold up his hands at the extravagance of the order, or else
imagine that he had Rothschild or Mr. Roupell dining in No. 4 box; nay,
might perchance run round to the chambermaid to ask how much luggage
the gentleman had. Rare ports, “worn-out ports,” grown colourless from
age and strength, that cannot be looked at without winking—wondrous
bitter Sherries—strange yellow Rhine wines, that gurgle in the glass
when poured out—Claret that has made bankrupt the proprietors of the
_vignobles_ who grew them, or else sent them mad to think their stock was
out—indescribable Cognacs—Maraschinos and Curaçoas that filtrate like
rich oil: all these are stored by special wine-merchants in the cellars
of the club. The chief butler himself, a prince among the winepots, goes
forth jauntily to crack sales, and purchases, standing, the collections
of cunning amateurs in wines. You shall smoke such cigars at a club
as would make Senor Cabana himself wonder where they were purchased.
Everything is of the best, and everything is cheap; only the terms are,
as the cheap tailors say, “for ready money.” Tick is the exception, not
the rule, at a club; though there have been Irish members who have run
goodly scores in their time with the cook and the waiter.
A man may, if he be so minded, make his club his home; living and
lounging luxuriously, and grazing to his heart’s content on the abundant
club-house literature, and enjoying the conversation of club friends.
Soap and towels, combs and hair-brushes, are provided in the lavatories;
and there are even some clubs that have bed-rooms in their upper storeys,
for the use of members. In those that are deficient in such sleeping
accommodation, it is only necessary to have a tooth-brush and an attic in
an adjacent bye-street; all the rest can be provided at the club. Thus
it is that, in the present generation, has been created a type peculiar
thereunto—the club-man. He is all of the club, and clubby. He is full
of club matters, club gossip. He dabbles in club intrigues, belongs to
certain club cliques, and takes part in club quarrels. No dinners are
so good to him as the club dinners; he can read no journals but those
he finds in the club news-paper-room; he writes his letters on the club
paper, pops them into club envelopes, seals them with the club seal,
and despatches them, if they are not intended for postage, by the club
messengers. He is rather sorry that there is no club uniform. He would
like, when he dies, to be buried in a club coffin, in the club cemetery,
and to be followed to the grave by the club, with members of the
committee as pall-bearers. As it is, when he has shuffled off this mortal
coil, his name appears on a board among the list of “members deceased.”
That is his epitaph, his hatchment, his _oraison funêbre_.
[Illustration: FIVE O’CLOCK P.M.: THE FASHIONABLE CLUB.]