Height: 10.5cm (4in)
Engraved with the regimental badge of the Royal Horse Guards and of barrel form with the bands inscribed ‘From Captain Williams Bulkeley on his leaving the Regt May 1865’ / ‘To the thirsty souls he leaves behind’, the glass base etched with the words ‘The Last Drop’ and a depiction of man hanging from a gallows following, one presumes, the suspended man’s ‘last drop’. Made by William Leuchars of 38 Piccadilly, London.
Sir Richard Lewis Mostyn Williams-Bulkeley, 11th Baronet (1833-1884) was the eldest son of the 10th Baronet, an officer in the Royal Horse Guards, and later High Sheriff of Anglesey, 1876-77. In 1857 he married Mary Bingham-Baring at the British Embassy in Paris and took up residence in Mayfair, but divorced her amidst a fashionable scandal in 1863-64, citing his erstwhile friend Colonel Armytage, Coldstream Guards, as the corespondent. During a visit to the Bulkeley family seat, Baron’s Hill in North Wales, Armytage appeared off the coast in his yacht and taking advantage of Captain Bulkeley’s absence at the Duke of Beaufort’s shoot, slipped ashore with adulterous intent. Williams-Bulkeley was divorced from his wife on his own petition the in November 1864, a certain Captain Bastard giving the concluding evidence. He left The Blues the following year as the tankard testifies, and succeeded to the baronetcy in 1875. He married secondly Margaret Elizabeth, daughter of Colonel Thomas Peers Williams of Craig y Don.