]]>Support our sponsors High stakes, really high stakes gambling had its own culture. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, got caught in a gambling scandal that is known as The Tranby Croft Affair. Even the Royal family were no strangers to gambling. Beau Brummel had to flee to France when his gambling debts got too high. That is not artistic license, it really did happen. Sir Rodney Hampton in Carla Kelly’s The Lady’s Companion gambles until he finally loses his home. Readers of Regency novels sometimes come across plots where a man loses his entire estate while gambling. One writer I came across said that just as gin was the ruination of the lower classes, gambling was the ruination of the upper classes. In England during the Georgian, Regency and early Victorian periods, gambling was endemic among the upper classes.
