The Prince detested White’s as the chosen club of Pitt, who had opposed him during the King’s illness, and, as soon as the entertainment was announced, forbade his friends to attend it, and it is said, together with the Duke of York, sent their tickets to be sold at a public library. Three weeks later, on April 21, Brooks’s followed with a grand ball at the Opera House, one of the tickets for which is framed in the “strangers’ room” on the ground-floor of the club. As a matter of fact, the Prince’s conduct towards the ball at White’s gave a party character to that at Brooks’s, with the result that all the ladies of the Court refused to attend. Brooks’s was originally in Pall Mall, on or near the site of the present Marlborough Club, and the precise date of its removal into St. James’s Street cannot be positively fixed; but certain it is that the existing house was built by Brooks, from designs by Holland, the architect, in 1778, and in a letter to G. Selwyn, dated in October of that year, T. Townshend—afterwards first Viscount Sydney—says: “As a proof of our increasing opulence, I need only show the New Opera House, which is now fitting up at a monstrous expense … and Brooks’s new house, fitted up with great magnificence, which is to be opened in a week or ten days.” It was in consequence of these great expenses that the annual subscription was doubled. The originator of Brooks’s seems to have been the Scotsman Almack, whose real name was Macall, and in its early days the club consisted of 150 members at an annual subscription of four guineas, with the proviso that, “in case that proportion falls short of 400 guineas on the whole, such deficiency shall be made good to Mr. Almack.” But this small number of members soon expanded, and by 1776 had been doubled, by successive additions of twenty, thirty, fifty, and fifty. Fifteen years passed, and in 1791 another 150 were added, and 100 more in 1816, bringing the numbers up to 550. Twenty-five more were added in 1823, and a like number in 1857, bringing the total up to 600, at which it remained till 1901, when it was raised to 650, the present number. At the end of 1778 the club moved into its present premises, the new house being owned by Brooks or Brookes, and after that date his name was assumed as a title. [Illustration: PROMISED HORRORS OF THE FRENCH INVASION, BY GILLRAY. Showing both White’s and Brooks’s Clubs. ] The subscription, fixed at four guineas in 1764, was before 1779 raised to eight, and on May 25 in that year the committee, or whatever was the governing body, granted Brooks an extra two guineas for two years only, “in consideration of the great expense he hath been at in erecting and fitting up his house”—viz., the present house. Brooks compounded with those that were willing, for sixteen guineas paid down in advance.