THE FIRST OF THE PLUNGERS. 39 



After losing a good many thousand pounds over his hunting 

 establishment, Lord Barrymore concluded that hunting, as 

 Artemus Ward says, ' was not his fort.' 



The commencement of the year 1793 saw our noble plunger 

 sadly crippled in his resources. He had pulled down his splen- 

 did theatre at Wargrave, which cost 60,000/., and had sold the 

 materials by auction for less than a tenth of that sum. He had 

 reduced his racing stud to the modest dimensions of five horses 

 in training. His estate was in the hands of a commissioner, who 

 allowed him 2500/. a year out of the rents, the rest being se- 

 questrated for the benefit of his creditors. By his choice of low 

 companions he had alienated from himself all his aristocratic 

 friends, and his highest enjoyment was boozing in rustic taverns 

 with second-rate bruisers and fifth-rate actors. The Right 

 Honourable Richard Earl of Barrymore, the quondam boon 

 companion of princes, was now content to be chairman of a 

 rustic Bacchanalian club at Wokingham ; the honourable mem- 

 ber of Parliament for Heytesbury had descended to the presi- 

 dentship of a sixpenny debating society at Reading. To what 

 further depths he might have sunk Heaven only knows, had not 

 his career come to an abrupt and tragical conclusion. In the 

 month of March 1793, he was with his regiment (the Berkshire 

 Militia) at Rye. By his own request he was placed in command 

 of the guard appointed to escort a party of French prisoners of 

 war to Deal. His lordship accompanied the escort in his curricle, 

 and amused himself by shooting rabbits and seagulls on the way. 

 At the first inn outside Folkestone the party stopped for refresh- 

 ment. The landlady was a young woman of considerable per- 

 sonal attractions, and Lord Barrymore stayed behind to pay her 

 some gallant attentions. When he mounted his curricle to drive 

 away, he handed his fowling-piece to his servant. The clumsy 

 fellow contrived somehow to fire the gun off, and the contents 

 lodged in Lord Barrymore's brain. His lordship fell from the 

 box, and never spoke again. Such was the end of the first of the 

 plungers. He was only in his tv/enty-fourth year when he met 

 with his sudden death. In less than five years he had squan- 

 dered 300,000/., and left a fine estate mortgaged to the hilt. There 

 have been many like him since ; but of all the race of plungers, 

 of whom he was the first, none has had a career so short or an 

 end so tragical. 



