Meet the Faro Ladies: The Regency Women Who Gambled at Home

ajordanfreelance

Sep 10

7 min read

How easy was it for a woman to sit down at a gambling table in Georgian and Regency England? As it turns out, the answer is complicated — and rather fascinating.

I was recently researching a cosy mystery set in the Regency period when I found myself faced with a very simple question.

Could my female character really sit down at a gambling table?

The scene involved a gambling hall, cards, money changing hands and all the delicious possibilities that come with putting a fictional character somewhere she probably shouldn't be.

So, naturally, I went looking. That is how I found the Faro Ladies.

I should probably warn you now: once you start researching eighteenth-century aristocratic women who ran high-stakes gambling tables from their own homes, it is remarkably difficult to stop. Then I found the cartoons.

Oh, the cartoons.

So, could a woman gamble?

Yes, yet — as ever with women's history — there is a rather large yes, but... attached.

Gambling was enormously popular in Georgian Britain, among both men and women. High-stakes play was a particular obsession of fashionable society. Men had their clubs and established gaming societies, including famous establishments such as White's and Brooks's. Women did not have quite the same socially accepted institutional spaces.

Instead, some aristocratic women brought the gambling table into their own homes. This was not exactly a gentle game of whist over a cup of tea.

These women hosted faro banks — high-stakes gambling operations centred on the hugely fashionable card game faro. Elite households could become gaming venues, with the women who hosted them becoming known in the press as the Faro Ladies. Recent scholarship has emphasised that these were not merely innocent domestic card parties: some of these at-homes were organised and profitable gaming enterprises, with commercial interests and male financial backing behind them.

I think this distinction is important.

These women weren't sneaking into some shadowy gaming den because they couldn't possibly be allowed near a pack of cards. They were using the social and domestic world that was already available to them — their own houses, their connections, their reputations — to create spaces where gambling could flourish. These actions made them extraordinarily visible.

Enter Albinia Hobart, the Countess of Buckinghamshire

If there is a poster girl for the Faro Ladies, it has to be Albinia Hobart.

Born Albinia Bertie, she was a co-heiress and married George Hobart in 1757. When her husband inherited the earldom in 1793, she became the Countess of Buckinghamshire.

Albinia did not retreat quietly into the background of aristocratic domesticity as she bore her husband eight children.

She was a celebrated hostess, performer and society figure, and her home became associated with lavish entertainments and high-stakes gambling. She and other women hosted faro tables in their houses, sometimes several times a week. In 1797, Albinia and other women were fined for illicit gambling.

One account of the time even records the extraordinary claim that Albinia slept with a blunderbuss and pistols beside her bed to protect her Faro bank. Although I should add a heavy caveat here, as I've only found this referred to in secondary sources. Sound fishy? What's the reckoning that this was a claim made to make Albinia sound more masculine and less like other women?

Whether every colourful story about these women should be believed is, of course, another question. Eighteenth-century gossip was not exactly known for its commitment to fact-checking.

Yet the fact remains that Albinia was a formidable presence for such stories to be invented about her, and likewise, the cartoonists absolutely loved her. Or rather, they loved to hate her.

The woman behind the caricature

This is where my feminist hackles began to rise.

Because once I started looking through the satirical prints featuring Albinia, I realised that I was seeing a woman being judged not simply for gambling, but for taking up space.

James Gillray (a lauded regency cartoonist) repeatedly caricatured Albinia, and her body became one of his favourite targets. She appears in more than fifty satirical prints, with her weight, clothing, age, gambling and social life repeatedly turned into jokes.

One of Gillray's most memorable images, A Sphere, Projecting Against a Plane (1792), turns Albinia into a literal sphere opposite the famously thin William Pitt. Gillray exaggerates her body to absurd proportions, reducing her to a visual punchline.

And this is something I kept coming back to while looking at the images.

The woman is gambling, but the joke is her body. She is powerful enough to attract attention, but the joke is still about her body. She has money, influence, a household, a social network and a gambling enterprise, and yet, you guessed it, the joke is always her body.

She had eight children. Apparently eighteenth-century society had not yet developed the revolutionary concept that a woman might get older, have children, gain weight and still be a fascinating human being.

Imagine!

The Faro Ladies were not alone

Albinia wasn't operating in isolation.

There was Lady Sarah Archer, Mrs Sturt, Mrs Concannon and Lady Elizabeth Luttrell, among others. They became recurring figures in the popular press and satirical prints of the 1790s. The more I looked, the more interesting the story became.

Because these women were not simply playing cards. Their homes were places where money, politics, society and influence could mingle. The private gaming parties created spaces where women could participate in political and social discussion in ways that were not necessarily available to them through formal political institutions.

Historian Gillian Russell has argued that the domestic world of the Faro Ladies was an important social forum through which elite women entered political life.

Which brings me to another woman I found while researching my Regency mystery: Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire.

Georgiana: gambler, political campaigner, writer, intellectual — and cartoonist's nightmare

Georgiana is one of those historical women where you begin with one question and, several hours later, realise you have fallen into an enormous rabbit hole.

She was a famous gambler and hosted gaming at Devonshire House. Thomas Rowlandson depicted her presiding over gambling there, and another of his images shows Georgiana and her sister Henrietta, Lady Duncannon, at a gaming table alongside the Prince of Wales and other players.

Yet gambling was only one part of Georgiana's extraordinary life. She was a writer. She published The Sylph anonymously and wrote poetry. She was deeply involved in Whig politics and famously campaigned for Charles James Fox during the 1784 Westminster election.

Naturally, the cartoonists had a field day. Because heaven forbid an aristocratic woman should have opinions.

When a woman behaves “like a man”

Georgiana's political activity attracted enormous attention.

She was not content to sit decoratively in the background while the men did the important things. We know that she canvassed voters, she talked politics, she campaigned, and she used her celebrity and personal connections to advance her politics. The satirists responded by portraying her as something distinctly unnatural: too political, too powerful, too masculine.

One cartoon literally depicted her as a man, striding along and carrying men towards the polls in support of the Whigs. Another, The Devonshire, or Most Approved Method of Securing Votes, famously portrayed her kissing a butcher while canvassing for Fox — turning her political activity into a sexual joke.

There were other caricatures that played on the same idea. In A Political Shaver, Georgiana is depicted being shaved, quite literally giving her a masculine appearance.

The message seems fairly clear:

'A woman who behaves like a powerful political actor is behaving like a man.'

Therefore she can be mocked as one.

It is a fascinating reminder that caricature wasn't simply making fun of Georgiana's clothes or appearance. It was policing the boundaries of what a woman was supposed to be.

Beautiful? Fine.

Fashionable? Wonderful.

Entertaining? Excellent.

Influential? Apparently, now you've gone too far.

And then there's the portrait I keep coming back to

Here's where the story gets particularly interesting to me.

Because we don't have to look only at the caricatures. There are other ways women saw women.

In 1782, artist Maria Cosway painted Georgiana as Cynthia, the moon goddess from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy and received considerable attention. It is now at Chatsworth.

Look at the difference.

The caricaturists give us the gambling, the politics, the scandal, the supposedly masculine behaviour.

Cosway gives us something entirely different. Georgiana appears elevated, radiant and powerful — a woman transformed into a mythological figure.

There's something rather wonderful about remembering that Maria Cosway was also woman in a man's profession.

She was an accomplished artist who exhibited extensively at the Royal Academy. Her Duchess of Devonshire as Cynthia was among the works she exhibited there in 1782, at a time when female artists faced their own considerable barriers. So, when I look at Cosway's painting after spending time looking at Gillray and Rowlandson, I find myself wondering:

What changes when women get to tell the story of other women?

It's not that Cosway's portrait is necessarily the "true" Georgiana and the caricatures are all false.

It's that Georgiana contained multitudes: gambler, mother, wife, political campaigner, writer, poet, hostess, intellectual and famous.

Perhaps the problem with the caricatures is that they were determined to make her into only one thing - a woman who didn't play by the rules.

And what about my gambling hall?

So, where does that leave the scene in my cosy mystery?

Well, it has certainly made me look at my fictional gambling table differently. A woman sitting down at a gambling table in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century wasn't necessarily impossible.

But who she was, where she was, whose house she was in, who else was present and what sort of establishment it was all mattered.

For an aristocratic woman, a private house could provide possibilities that the more formal male gaming world did not.

And the Faro Ladies show us that women didn't simply accept the limitations placed around them. Inevitably, they became targets.

The women history turned into punchlines

This is what I love about falling down these historical rabbit holes.

You begin looking for an answer to a very practical question: Could my character enter a gambling hall?

You end up meeting Albinia Hobart. You meet Georgiana Cavendish. You meet women who hosted gambling tables in their own homes and navigated a society that simultaneously gave them enormous privilege and very tightly prescribed ideas about how they should behave.

You start looking at the cartoons differently. Because those prints are fascinating historical sources. They tell us what contemporary society found shocking, funny or threatening.

Perhaps that's why I find the Faro Ladies so fascinating. They were not necessarily rebels in the modern sense. They were privileged aristocratic women operating within a very particular world.

Yet they nevertheless found ways to exercise influence within it.

And I am delighted that they did.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a Regency murder mystery to finish, and my character has just walked into a gambling hall.

I have some more exciting research to do.

Again!

Portraits and caricatures:

Adele Jordan