ROYAL SPORTS AND PASTIMES
In this country sports and pastimes of most kinds have generally had the
patronage of royalty, many of our sovereigns having excelled in such
modes of recreation. According to a story told by the old annalists, one
of the most interesting events in connection with this game happened
when Henry V. was meditating war against England. “The Dauphin,” says
Hall, “thinking King Henry to be given still to such play and light
follies as he exercised and used before the time that he was exalted to
the Crown, sent him a ton of tennis-balls to play with, as he had better
skill of tennis than of war.” On this incident, Shakespeare has
constructed his fine scene of the French Ambassador’s audience in “King
Henry V.,” wherein the English King speaks--
“When we have matched our rackets to these balls,
We will, in France, by God’s grace, play a set
Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.”
Like his father, Henry VIII. was much attached to tennis, and it is
recorded that his “propensity being perceived by certayne craftie
persons about him, they brought in Frenchmen and Lombards to make
wagers with him, and so he lost much money; but when he perceived their
craft, he eschewed the company and let them go.” But Henry did not give
up the game, for from the same source we learn that twelve years
afterwards he played at tennis with the Emperor Maximilian for his
partner against the Prince of Orange and the Marquis of Brandenborow;
and among the additions that he made to Whitehall were “divers fair
tennis-courts, bowling-allies, and a cockpit.”
When Philip, Archduke of Austria, became King of Castile, he set out
from the Netherlands in 1506 to take possession of his new kingdom.
Stress of weather compelled him to seek shelter in Falmouth, on hearing
of which Henry sent the Earl of Arundel to bring him to Windsor, where
for many days he was entertained. During the festivities the two kings
looked on, while the Marquis of Dorset, Lord Howard, and two other
gentlemen played tennis. Then the King of Castile played with Dorset,
“but,” says the chronicler, “the Kyng of Castille played with the
rackett, and gave the Lord Marques xv.”
And when Queen Elizabeth was entertained in 1591 at Elvetham in
Hampshire by the Earl of Hertford, after dinner ten of his lordship’s
servants “did haul up lines, squaring out the form of a tennis court.”
James I., if not himself a tennis-player, often speaks of the pastime
with commendation, and recommends it to his son Prince Henry as an
exercise becoming a prince, who seems to have been very fond of the
game. But on more than one occasion he appears to have lost his temper,
and to have struck his father’s infamous favourite, Carr, Earl of
Somerset, with his racket.
At another time, when he and the young Earl of Essex were playing, a
dispute arose, whereupon Prince Henry in his anger called Essex the “son
of a traitor,” alluding to the execution of his father, Elizabeth’s
favourite. The young Earl in retaliation struck the Prince so hard a
blow as to draw blood, but the King, on hearing all the circumstances of
the case, refused to punish the high-spirited lad. Prince Henry’s
illness is supposed to have been caused by a chill caught one evening
when playing tennis without his coat.
The Scottish King James I., too, is said to have forfeited his life
through his love for tennis. At Yuletide 1436-37 the Court kept the
festival at Perth, in the Blackfriars Monastery; and here one night,
after the royal party had broken up, and, as James stood before the fire
of the reception-room, chatting with the Queen and her ladies, ominous
sounds were heard without. The great bolt of the door was discovered to
be wanting, but a lady, a Douglas, thrust her arm through the staples,
and held the door till the conspirators snapped this frail defence. By
her brave and noble devotion she gave James time to tear up a plank of
the flooring and to drop into a small vault beneath. “As fate would have
it,” writes Dr. Hill Burton, “there had been an opening to it by which
he might have escaped, but this had a few days earlier been closed by
his own order, because the balls by which he played at tennis were apt
to fall into it.” Then the conspirators jumped into the vault, and, as
Adamson the seventeenth century historian of Perth tells us,
“King James the First, of everlasting name,
Killed by that mischant traitor, Robert Grahame,
Intending of his crown for to have rob’d him,
With twenty-eight wounds in the breast he stob’d him.”
Both James IV. and V. of Scotland were tennis-players, and it seems that
they lost considerable sums at it with their courtiers. Thus, in the
accounts of the Lord High Treasurer, we find these items under June 7th,
1496: “To Wat of Lesly that he wan at the cach frae the King, £23, 8s.”;
and on 23rd September 1497 the king again loses at tennis in Stirling,
this time “with Peter Crechtoune and Patrick Hammiltoune, three
unicorns”--that is, £2, 13s.
With the Restoration, tennis became fashionable at Court again, and
Pepys, under December 1603, makes this entry:--“Walking along Whitehall,
I heard the King was gone to play at tennis. So I drove down to the new
tennis court, and saw him and Sir Arthur Slingsby play against my Lord
of Suffolk and my Lord Chesterfield. The King beat three, and lost two
sets.”
When Frederick, Prince of Wales, died suddenly in 1751 many causes of
death were assigned, one being that it was the result of a blow of a
tennis ball three years before. But Nathaniel Wraxall makes it an
accident at cricket, and says: “Frederick, Prince of Wales, son of
George II., expired suddenly in 1751 at Leicester House, in the arms of
Desnoyers, the celebrated dancing-master. His end was caused by an
internal abscess, in consequence of a blow which he received in the side
from a cricket ball while he was engaged in playing at that game on the
lawn at Cliefden House, Buckinghamshire, where he then principally
resided. It was of this prince that it was written, by way of epitaph:--
“‘He was alive and is dead,
And, as it is only Fred,
Why, there’s no more to be said.’”
Tennis was also played at foreign courts. Thus during the reign of
Charles V. of France hand-tennis was very fashionable,[104] being played
by the nobility for large sums of money, and, when they had lost all
that they had about them, they would sometimes pledge part of their
wearing apparel rather than give up the pursuit of the game. The Duke of
Burgundy is said to have lost sixty francs in this manner “with the Duke
of Bourbon, Messire William de Lyon, and Messire Guy de la Trimouille;
and not having money enough to pay them he gave his girdle as a pledge
for the remainder, and shortly afterwards he left the same girdle with
the Comte d’Eu for eighty francs, which he also lost at tennis.”
It would seem that golf was a fashionable game among the nobility at
the commencement of the seventeenth century, and, from an anecdote
recorded in one of the Harleian manuscripts, it was one of the exercises
with which Prince Henry, eldest son of James I., occasionally amused
himself: “At another time playing at golf, a play not unlike to _pale
maille_, whilst his schoolmaster stood talking with another, and marked
not his Highness warning him to stand further off, the Prince, thinking
he had gone aside, lifted up his golf club to strike the ball, meantyme
one standing by said to him, ‘Beware that you hit not Master Newton,’
wherewith he, drawing back his hand, said, ‘Had I done so, I had but
paid my debts.’”
Tradition, for whatever it may be worth, says that Charles I. was
playing on Leith Links when a courier arrived with tidings of Sir Phelim
O’Neal’s rising in Ireland in 1641; and when the Duke of York resided at
Holyrood in 1679 he was frequently to be seen at a golf party on the
Leith Links. “I remember in my youth,” writes Mr. William Tytler, “to
have conversed with an old man named Andrew Dickson, a golf club-maker,
who said that when a boy he used to carry the Duke’s golf clubs, and to
run before him and announce where the balls fell.”
According to a Scottish story, during the Duke’s visit, he had on one
occasion a discussion with two English noblemen as to the native country
of golf, his Royal Highness asserting that it was peculiar to Scotland,
while “they insisted that it was an English game as well.” The two
English nobles good-humouredly proposed to prove its English character
by taking up the Duke to a match, to be played on Leith Links. James
accepted the challenge, and sought for the best partner he could find.
It so happened the heir-presumptive of the British throne played with a
poor shoemaker named John Patersone, the worthy descendant of a long
line of illustrious golfers. If the “two Southerners were, as might be
expected, inexperienced in the game, they had no chance against a pair,
one member of which was a good player. So the Duke got the best of the
practical argument, and Patersone’s merits were rewarded by a gift of
the sum played for,” with which he was enabled to build a somewhat
stylish house for himself in the Canongate.
But with the Stuarts went out for a time royal countenance of the game,
till William IV. became patron of the Royal and Ancient Club of St.
Andrews, and presented to it for annual competition that coveted golfing
trophy--the gold medal, the blue ribbon of golf.
A game which has of late years been revived is bowls, a pastime which
was once the favourite amusement of all classes, most pleasure gardens
having in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had their
bowling-greens. Of all the English kings, Charles I. was the greatest
enthusiast in this game. Many anecdotes are told “of his great love for
it, a love that survived through all his troubles, for we find him alike
devoting himself to it while in power, and solacing himself with it
while a captive.”[105] According to a correspondent of _Notes and
Queries_, in a secluded part of the Oxfordshire hills, at a place called
Collins’ End, situated between Hardwicke House and Goring Heath, is a
neat little rustic inn, having for its sign a portrait of Charles I.
There is a tradition that this unfortunate monarch, whilst residing as a
prisoner at Caversham, hearing that there was a bowling-green at this
inn, rode down to it, and endeavoured to forget his sorrows in a game of
bowls; an incident which is written beneath the sign-board:--
“Stop, traveller, stop! in yonder peaceful glade,
His favourite game the royal martyr played;
Here, stripped of honours, children, freedom, rank,
Drank from the bowl, and bowl’d for what he drank;
Sought in a cheerful glass his cares to drown,
And changed his guinea ere he lost a crown.”
In Herbert’s “Memoirs of the Last Two Years of Charles I.” there are
several allusions to his Majesty’s love of bowls. As there was no
bowling green at Holmby, he constantly rode over either to Althorpe or
Harrowden--the latter a house of Lord Vaux--where he might divert
himself with his favourite amusement. Charles was at the Althorpe
bowling-green when Cornet Joyce arrived at Holmby to take him away.
With the Restoration bowls became a fashionable Court recreation, and in
the Grammont “Memoirs” we are told that when the Court was at Tonbridge
Wells “the company are accommodated with lodgings in little clean and
convenient habitations that lie straggling and separated from each other
a mile and a half all round the Wells, where the company meet in the
morning.... As soon as the evening comes every one quits his little
palace to assemble on the bowling-green.”
Another game once countenanced by royalty was skittles or nine-pins, a
pastime, it is said, in which Elizabeth, Queen Consort of Edward IV.,
and her ladies indulged in 1472. And later on we find it among the
amusements of the exiled courtiers, for in the “Grammont Memoirs” the
Earl of Arran writes of his sister-in-law, the Countess of Ossory, Miss
Hyde, and Jermyn playing at nine-pins to pass the time. At this period,
too, a popular game was pall-mall, being one of the “fair and pleasant
games” that James I. recommended to Prince Henry, and which seem to have
been much played at Court in the early part of the seventeenth century.
On April 2, 1661, Pepys walks to “St. James’s Park, where he witnessed
the Duke of York playing at pall-mall, the first time he ever saw the
sport;” and Evelyn speaks of King Charles’s fondness for this game.
Then there was the running at the quintain, a pastime practised at most
rural festive gatherings, and one of which Laneham, in his “Progresses
of Queen Elizabeth,” gives an amusing account in his description of “a
country bridal,” at which Queen Elizabeth was present at Kenilworth in
1575; and two years previously, in 1573, on her visit to Sandwich, it is
recorded that “certain wallounds that could well swim,” entertained her
with a water tilting, in which one of the combatants “did overthrow
another, at which the Queen had good sport.” Randolph, in a letter to
Sir William Cecil, December 7, 1561, describes this pastime as
celebrated at the Scottish Court of Queen Mary, and narrating part of a
conversation he had with De Foix, the French Ambassador, he writes:
“From this purpose we fell in talk of the pastimes that were the Sunday
before, when the Lord Robert, the Lord John, and others ran at the
ring--six against six--disguised and apparelled, the one half like
women, the other half like strangers, in strange masking garments....
The Queen herself beheld it, and as many others as listed.” When King
James’s brother-in-law, Christian of Denmark, visited England in 1606,
we read how he excelled before all others in running at the ring in the
tilt-yard at Greenwich.
Charles I. is said to have been “perfect in vaulting, riding the great
horse, running at the ring, shooting in cross-bows, muskets, and
sometimes great pieces of ordnance.” And Howell, writing from Madrid,
says that the Prince was fortunate enough to be successful at the ring
before the eyes of his mistress the Infanta.
Charles II. was an indefatigable walker, and nothing pleased him more
than to divest himself of the trappings of state and indulge in this
pastime. Burnet mentions his walking powers, and says that his Majesty
walked so fast that it was a trouble to keep up with him. One day, when
Prince George of Denmark, who had married his niece--afterwards Queen
Anne--complained that he was growing fat, “walk with me,” said Charles,
“hunt with my brother, and do justice to my niece, and you will not long
be distressed by growing fat.”[106] And during his walks his Majesty
would converse freely with those who attended him, oftentimes arresting
“some familiar countenance that encountered him in his walk.”
Among the additions made by Henry VIII. to Whitehall was a cock-pit, the
first of which, according to a correspondent of _Notes and Queries_,
there is any record. And so partial was James I. to this diversion of
cock-fighting that he amused himself by seeing it twice a week. It
appears, too, that on his progress in 1617, James I. being at Lincoln,
“did come in his carriage to the Sign of the George to see a cocking
there, where he appointed four cocks to be put in the pit together,
which made his Majestie very merrie.” Exclusive of the royal cock-pit
there were others in St. James’s Park, Drury Lane, Shoe Lane, and Jermyn
Street. By an Act of Cromwell, in 1654, cock-fighting was prohibited,
but with the Restoration it again flourished. And from this time until
the close of the last century the diversion was practised more or less
throughout the country. William III. patronised this sport, and Count
Tallard, the French Ambassador, writes: “On leaving the palace King
William went to the cock-fight, whither I accompanied him.”
The site of the cock-pit at Whitehall is now occupied by the Privy
Council Office, and a notable occupant of the cock-pit apartments in the
time of Charles II. was the Princess Anne--afterwards Queen Anne--who
was living there at the period of the Revolution. It was from here that,
on the approach of the Prince of Orange, November 26, 1688, “she flew
down the back-stairs at midnight, in nightgown and slippers, with Sarah,
Duchess of Marlborough, as her companion, and drove away in a coach, on
either side of which Lord Dorset and Bishop Compton rode as
escort.”[107]
George IV. in his early life was a great patron of the ring, as his
grand-uncle, Culloden Cumberland, had been before him; but being present
at a fight at Brighton, where one of the combatants was killed, the
Prince pensioned the boxer’s widow, and declared he never would attend
another battle. But, nevertheless, it is said, “he thought it a manly
and decided English feature, which ought not to be destroyed.” His
Majesty had a drawing of the sporting characters in the Fives’ Court
placed in his boudoir, to remind him of his former attachment and
support of true courage; and, when any fight of note occurred after he
was King, accounts of it were read to him by his desire.
At this period there was a famous boxer, John Jackson, known as
gentleman Jackson, the son of a London builder. He appeared only three
times in the prize-ring. His first public fight took place June 9,
1788, near Croydon, when he defeated a noted Birmingham boxer, in a
contest lasting one hour seven minutes, in the presence of the Prince of
Wales.
At the coronation of George IV. he was employed with eighteen other
prize-fighters, dressed as pages, to guard the entrance to Westminster
Abbey and Hall. But it is in Continental courts that boxing has been
most favoured. The elder brother of the late Czar of Russia died on the
eve of the day appointed for his marriage from the effects of a blow
received in a boxing encounter with Alexander; and on one occasion, when
a bout took place between the Prince Waldemar and the late Czar, between
the acts in the private tea-room at the Court Theatre at Copenhagen,
Alexander was thoroughly knocked out.
Archery appears to have been a fashionable sport during the reign of
Henry VIII., who, according to Holinshed, shot as well as any of his
guard. Edward VI. and Charles I. are known to have been fond of this
exercise, which retained its attractions during the succeeding reigns,
and was occasionally sustained by the presence and practice of the
sovereign. Mary Queen of Scots was as fond of archery as was her cousin,
Elizabeth of England. One story of Queen Mary’s shooting has often been
cited against her, since the time Sir William Drury wrote to Mr.
Secretary Cecil from Berwick, telling how Mary, a fortnight after
Darnley’s murder, had been shooting with Bothwell at the butts of
Tranent against Huntley and Seton for a dinner, which the latter pair
had to pay--a story proved to be untrue.[108]
In a letter from the Queen of Bohemia, sister of Charles I., written
from Rhenen, her Majesty’s summer residence on the Rhine, in 1649 to
Montrose--who had long been reputed to be a good archer--she says: “We
have nothing to do but to walk and shoot. I am grown a good archer to
shoot with my Lord Kinnoul. If your office will help it, I hope you will
come and help us to shoot.” In 1703 Queen Anne granted a Charter to the
Royal Company of Archers, prohibiting any one “to cause any obstacle or
impediment to the said Royal Company in the lawful exercise of the
Ancient Arms of Bows and Arrows”--a privilege for which they were to pay
to the Sovereign “one pair of barbed arrows, if asked only.” These, it
seems, have twice been delivered to the Sovereign, first to George IV.,
during his visit to Edinburgh in 1822, and when Queen Victoria and the
Prince Consort went to Scotland in 1842. And it was in the reign of the
first James of Scotland that Charles VII. formed from the survivors of
Lord Buchan’s Scots the famous Archer-guard of France, familiar to every
reader of “Quentin Durward,” who, “foreigners though they were, ever
proved themselves the most faithful troops in the service of the French
Crown.”
Hawking, again, was practised with much vigour by many of our
sovereigns, and Alfred the Great, who is commended for his proficiency
in this, as in all other fashionable amusements, is said to have
written a treatise on the subject, which has not come down to us. In the
fields and open country, hawking was followed on horseback; and on foot,
when in the woods and coverts. In the latter case, it was usual for the
sportsman to have a stout pole to assist him in leaping over rivulets
and ditches. It was, according to Hall, when pursuing his hawk on foot,
at Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, that Henry VIII. was plunged into a deep
slough by the breaking of his pole, and would have been stifled but for
the prompt assistance of one of his attendants. But when the
fowling-piece presented a more ready and certain method of procuring
game, while it afforded an equal degree of air and exercise, it is not
surprising that the fall of falconry should have been sudden and
complete.
A favourite game of James I. was quoits, and one day when he was so
engaged with the young Earl of Mar, he cried out, “Jonnie Mar has
slaited me!”--the word “slaiting” in the north meaning to take an undue
advantage in a game of this kind. From this incident the young King
always nicknamed Mar “Jonnie Slaites.” It may be compared with a story
told of Louis XVII. when Dauphin, who being beaten in a game of quoits
by an officer of the National Guard, the latter exultingly exclaimed,
“Ah, I have conquered the Dauphin!” Piqued at the expression, the
Dauphin used some uncomplimentary remark, which was reported to the
Queen, who reprimanded him for having so far forgotten himself.
“I feel,” replied the Dauphin, “that I have done wrong. But why did he
not satisfy himself with saying that he had won the match? It was the
word ‘conquered’ which put me beyond myself.”
And, when the exiled Court of England returned at the Restoration,
Charles II. is commonly said to have brought back that popular pastime
skating. For Evelyn, under December 1, 1662, speaks of divers gentlemen
skating in the canal in St. James’s Park “after the manner of the
Hollanders,” and Pepys tells us that he went to see the Duke of York
“slide upon his skates,” which he did very well.