We get a good account of the Gaming-house of this period in “The Nicker Nicked; or, the Cheats of Gaming Discovered” (1669), but as it closely resembles Cotton’s account of an Ordinary, I only give a portion of it.
“If what has been said, will not make you detest this abominable kind of life; will the almost certain loss of your money do it? I will undertake to demonstrate that it is ten to one you shall be a loser at the year’s end, with constant play upon the square. If, then, twenty persons bring two hundred pounds a piece, which makes four thousand pounds, and resolve to play, for example, three or four hours a day for a year; I will wager the box shall have fifteen hundred pounds of the money, and that eighteen out of the twenty persons shall be losers.
“I have seen (in a lower instance) three persons sit down at Twelvepenny In and In, and each draw forty shillings a piece; and, in little more than two hours, the box has had three pounds of the money; and all the three gamesters have been losers, and laughed at for their indiscretion.
“At an Ordinary, you shall scarce have a night pass without a quarrel, and you must either tamely put up with an affront, or else be engaged in a duel next morning, upon some trifling insignificant occasion, pretended to be a point of honour.
“Most gamesters begin at small game; and, by degrees, if their money, or estates, hold out, they rise to great sums; some have played, first of all, their money, then their rings, coach and horses, even their wearing clothes and perukes; and then, such a farm; and, at last, perhaps, a lordship. You may read, in our histories,[20] how Sir Miles Partridge played at Dice with King Henry the Eighth for Jesus Bells, so called, which were the greatest in England, and hung in a tower of St Paul’s Church; and won them; whereby he brought them to ring in his pocket; but the ropes, afterwards, catched about his neck, for, in Edward the Sixth’s days, he was hanged for some criminal offences.[21]
“Consider how many people have been ruined by play. Sir Arthur Smithouse is yet fresh in memory: he had a fair estate, which in a few years he so lost at play that he died in great want and penury. Since that Mr Ba——, who was a Clerk in the Six Clerks Office, and well cliented, fell to play, and won, by extraordinary fortune, two thousand pieces in ready gold: was not content with that; played on; lost all he had won, and almost all his own estate; sold his place in the office; and, at last marched off to a foreign plantation to begin a new world with the sweat of his brow. For that is commonly the destiny of a decayed gamester, either to go to some foreign plantation, or to be preferred to the dignity of a box-keeper.