The Evening Telegraph

Another Fast British Peer Financially Dead.

His Disgraceful Career.

Another British peer has come to grief, forming, with those exemplary young noblemen, the Duke of Hamilton, the Marquis of Hastings, and the Earl of Jersey, a quartette of hereditary legislators of whom even the House of Lords might be ashamed. The individual in question is the most Noble Henry Pelham Alexander Pelham-Clinton, sixth Duke of Newcastle, and son of that Duke of Newcastle who was known as a liberal statesman, and as one of the companions of the Prince of Wales on his visit to this country nine years ago.

He is thirty-five years of age, and inherited ample estates from his father, to which he added largely by his marriage with a lady of the wealthy family of Hope. The turf has been his ruling passion and his ruin. He owned a large and costly stud, always backed his own horses, and almost always lost. To pay his turf debts he had recourse to the money-lenders, and notably to one Padwick, called the "spider" from his success in luring unwary young spendthrifts into his clutches. The manipulations of this man, and those of the pimps, parasites, and jockeys who were the Duke's chosen companions, together with his own lack of judgment as a sporting man, combined to clean him out; and now, having spent his patrimony and made away with all the family estates he could lay hold of, he stands before the world a beggared and disgraced man. He is perhaps worse than beggared, for he owes Padwick upwards of £95,000, with no visible means of paying him. The latter is endeavoring to indemnify himself by levying upon the Newcastle estates, and Mr. Gladstone, a personal friend of the late Duke, and one of the trustees named in his will, is now striving to save something from the wreck of the family property for the present Duke's successor. The spectacle is a sad and humiliating one, but is simply a repetition of what has happened over and over again within the last two or three years, and will doubtless prove ineffectual to warn the gilded youth of England from ruin.

Two brothers of the Duke of Newcastle, Lords Albert and Arthur Pelham-Clinton, are companions with him in disgrace. Both inherited the slender portions of younger brothers, and both have contracted debts, which they can never pay, equal to three or four times their fortunes. In most societies this would be called swindling, but in the aristocratic circles in which these young gentlemen move, a different view seems to be taken of their conduct, for we read that they are received with no diminution of the affectionate regard bestowed in England upon the possessor of a title.