The Everlasting Club

There is a chamber in Jesus College the existence of which is
probably known to few who are now resident, and fewer still have
penetrated into it or even seen its interior. It is on the right hand
of the landing on the top floor of the precipitous staircase which for
some forgotten story connected with it is traditionally called "Cow
Lane." The padlock which secures its massive oaken door is very rarely
unfastened, for the room is bare and unfurnished. Once it served as a
place of deposit for superfluous kitchen ware, but even that
ignominious use has passed from it, and it is now left to undisturbed
solitude and darkness. For I should say that it is entirely cut off
from the light of the outer day by the walling up, some time in the
eighteenth century, of its single window, and such light as ever
reaches it comes from the door, when rare occasion causes it to be
opened.

Yet at no extraordinarily remote day this chamber has evidently ben
tenanted, and, before it was given up to the darkness, was comfortably
fitted, according to the standard of comfort which was known in
college in the days of George II. There is still a roomy fireplace
before which legs have been stretched and wine and gossip have
circulated in the days of wigs and brocade. For the room is spacious
and, when it was lighted by the window looking eastward over the
fields and common, it must have been a cheerful place for the sociable
don.

Let me state in brief, prosaic outline the circumstances which
account for the gloom and solitude in which this room has remained now
for nearly a century and a half.

In the second quarter of the eighteenth century the University
possessed a great variety of clubs of a social kind. There were clubs
in college parlours and clubs in private rooms, or in inns and coffee-
houses: clubs flavoured with politics, clubs clerical, clubs
purporting to be learned and literary. Whatever their professed
particularity, the aim of each was convivial. Some of them, which
included undergraduates as well as seniors, were dissipated enough,
and in their limited provincial way aped the profligacy of such clubs
as the Hell Fire Club of London notoriety.

Among these last was one which was at once more select and of more
evil fame than any of its fellows. By a singular accident, presently
to be explained, the Minute Book of this Club, including the years
from 1738 to 1766, came into the hands of the Master of Jesus College,
and though, so far as I am aware, it is no longer extant, I have
before me a transcript of it which, though it is in a recent
handwriting, presents in a bald shape such a singular array of facts
that I must ask you to accept them as veracious. The original book is
described as a stout duodecimo volume bound in red leather and
fastened with red silken strings. The writing in it occupied some 40
pages, and ended with the date November 2, 1766.

The Club in question was called the Everlasting Club--a name
sufficiently explained by its rules, set forth in the pocket--book.
Its number was limited to seven, and it would seem that its members
were all young men, between 22 and 30. One of them was a Fellow-
Commoner of Trinity: three of them were Fellows of Colleges, among
whom I should especially mention a Fellow of Jesus, named Charles
Bellasis: another was a landed proprietor in the county, and the sixth
was a young Cambridge physician. The Founder and President of the Club
was the Honorable Alan Dermot, who, as the son of an Irish peer, had
obtained a nobleman's degree in the University, and lived in idleness
in the town. Very little is known of his life and character, but that
little is highly in his disfavor. He was killed in a duel in Paris in
the year 1743, under circumstances which I need not particularise, but
which point to an exceptional degree of cruelty and wickedness in the
slain man.