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—

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,

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:—

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:—

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.