the members. In the first of these two
rooms, or ante-chamber, were half-length portraits of James I. and
Charles I.; whole lengths of Charles II. and James II., and of William
and Mary, and Anne; a head of the facetious Dr. Savage, of Clothall,
"the Aristippus of the age," who was one of its most famous members,
and its first Chaplain. In the larger room were portraits of many
notable men in full wigs, and yellow, blue and pink coats of the period.

One of the rules of the Club was that the steward for the day had to
furnish the wine, or five guineas in lieu of it; and as politics went
up the wine went down, and vice versa, for, in 1760, after a
Hertfordshire election had gone wrong, and damped the ardour of the
Club, now in its old age, the attendance of members appears to have
fallen off, and the wine in the cellar had accumulated so much that no
steward was chosen for three months. By September, 1783, there
remained of claret, Madeira, port, and Lisbon, about three pipes.
There is also a reference to "venison fees," from which it appears that
the gatherings were as hospitable as the list of membership was notable
for distinguished names--Sir Edward Turner, Knight, and Speaker of the
House of Commons; Sir John Hynde Cotton, Sir Thomas Middleton, Sir
Peter Soame, Sir Charles Barrington, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Thomas
Salisbury, of Offley, and many other men of title, besides local and
county family names not a few. Such an institution must have given to
the old town a prestige out of all proportion to what it has ever known
since. A fuller account of the Royston Club belongs, however, to a
history of Royston, rather than to these sketches.

{21}

It is more to the purpose here to note that the head-quarters of the
Old Club remained for many years after the Club itself had disappeared,
a rallying point for social and festive gatherings of a brilliant kind,
in which political distinctions were less prominent. For anything I
know, this over-ripe institution, with its old age and cellar full of
wine, may have been responsible for the following dainty _morceau_; at
any-rate it is in perfect harmony with the Club's traditions:--

"April, 1764. On Monday last at the Red Lion, at Royston, there was a
very brilliant and polite Assembly of Ladies and Gentlemen, which was
elegantly conducted. The company did not break up till six the next
morning, and would have continued longer had not a Northern Star
suddenly disa