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civility of their friend Mr England, who had honoured a bet that would otherwise have been forgotten.
    â€˜As you mention this bet, sir, ’ one of the companions said, ‘and very properly observe that it is gentlemanly to honour debts incurred when intoxicated, I hope we may be forgiven for reminding you of your debts to us’; and the fictitious notes were flourished.
    â€˜This cannot be so, ’ Dawson protested. ‘I have no recollection of these transactions.’
    â€˜Sir, ’ came the reply, ‘you question our honour; and did not Mr England lately pay you for bets made at the same table?’
    Defeated, Dawson promised to pay up the next day.
    His own friends came to the rescue. With the help of a fiveguinea gift, they encouraged the waiter at the inn to recall that Dawson had been paralysed by drink, and had not played cards. Dawson, with some contempt, returned England the thirty guineas, adding five guineas as his portion of the supper bill. England and his cronies left Scarborough the next day.
    Dennis O’Kelly may have spent some time in Scarborough, 15 but there is no suggestion that he was involved in this attempted theft. He was, though, implicated with England – and fellow blacklegs Jack Tetherington, Bob Walker and Tom Hall – in the ruination of one Clutterbuck, a clerk at the Bank of England. Clutterbuck, as a result of playing with this crowd, fell heavily into debt, attempted to defraud the bank of the sum he needed, was caught, and hanged.
    Although the divisions between the classes in the Georgian era were as wide as they always have been, gambling threw together lords and commoners, politicians and tradesmen, the respectable and the disreputable. Some years later, eminent witnesses would testify on Dick England’s behalf at his trial for murder. At the rackets courts, England’s companion Mr Damer ‘would not have walked round Ranelagh [the pleasure gardens in Chelsea] with him, or had him at his table, for a thousand pounds’. 16 One writer referred to ‘Turf acquaintanceship’, and offered the anecdote of the distinguished gentleman who failed to recognize someone greeting him in the street.
    â€˜Sir, you have the advantage of me, ’ the gentleman said. The other man asked, ‘Don’t you remember we used to meet at certain parties at Bath many years ago?’
    â€˜Well, sir, ’ the gentleman told him, ‘you may speak to me should you ever again meet me at certain parties at Bath, but nowhere else.’ 17
    The fortunes of Charlotte Hayes, too, began to look up on her departure from the Fleet. Her newly won freedom from debtors’ prison received ironic celebration in Edward Thompson’s 1761 edition of The Meretriciad , as she took advantage of the new King’s clemency to begin her ascent to the pinnacle of her profession:
    See Charlotte Hayes, as modest as a saint,
    And fair as 10 years past, with little paint;
    Blest in a taste which few below enjoy,
    Preferr’d a prison to a world of joy:
    With borrow’d charms, she culls th’unwary spark,
    And by th’Insolvent Act parades the Park.
    Her opportunities in courtesanship may have closed – as Samuel Derrick gently put it in Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies , ‘Time was when this lady was a reigning toast … She has been, however, a good while in eclipse’ – but other opportunities were opening. The brothel-keeping business, she saw, was going upmarket, and was ready to boom.
    Jane Goadby was showing the way. Back in the 1750s, Mrs Goadby had been on a fact-finding mission to Paris, touring the stylish brothels of the city. They were not known as brothels: they were ‘nunneries’, populated by ‘nuns’ under the charge of the ‘Lady Abbess’, or, in pagan terminology, the ‘High Priestess of the Cyprian Deity’ (a reference to Aphrodite, goddess of love). The abbess selected