More Than A Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years. John Major
cricket may have begun climbing up the social scale by the 1640s, notwithstanding the distractions of the Civil War. On 29 May 1646 four gentlemen of ‘prophane’ Maidstone – William Cooper, Richard Marsh, Robert Sanders and Walter Francklyn – lost a game of cricket on the open common at Cox Heath, three miles south of the town, to two young Royalists, Thomas Harlackenden and Samuel Filmer. The nature of the game – and the politics of the victors – must have brought the Reverend Thomas Wilson close to apoplexy but it aroused great excitement in Maidstone. A bet on the outcome was laid – cash for candles, and when the loser failed to hand over the candles, court action followed.
Early fiction began to notice cricket, and it is one of ‘the games of Gargantua’ in an English translation of the works of Rabelais. But fiction can mislead as well as inform, and it did so with confident assertions that cricket was played in venerable colleges by the mid- seventeenth century. Although it is possible that it may have been, it is by no means certain. A reference to cricket at Winchester College in 1647 is based on an undated Latin poem, ‘De Collegio Wintoniensi’, by Robert Mathew, a scholar who left the college that year. It relates how boys climbed a hill to play a game involving a ball (‘pila’) and bat (‘bacillo’) which may have been cricket, but he makes no mention of that name. A later reference to cricket at Winchester, circa 1665, is total fiction. It derives from a purely conjectural account of a boy’s schooldays in W.L. Bowles’s The Life of (Bishop) Thomas Ken, published in 1830, which imagines how
our junior, ‘the tear forgot as soon as shed’, if it has ever for a moment been on his youthful cheek, is at ease among his companions of the same age; he is found, for the first time, attempting to wield a cricket bat; and, when his hour of play is over …
This piece of nineteenth-century fiction was seized on as evidence that cricket was played at Winchester and Eton in the mid- seventeenth century. This could be so, but fiction cannot be accepted as bona fide evidence.*
Nor can faulty memory. Writing about the genesis of club cricket, the Cricketer Spring Annual of 1933 records: ‘Fifty years ago, an aged villager, close on 90 years … recollected seeing an old print, then hanging in a wayside cottage, showing “Cricket on ye old Green”, and giving an approximate date of 1685.’ This cannot be correct, since prints of cricket matches became available only in the 1740s, so even if this unlikely tale has a basis in fact, the picture referred to could not date before the middle of the eighteenth century.**
I am puzzled, too, by Altham’s assertion in The History of Cricket that ‘with the restoration [of Charles II in 1660], in a year or two it became the thing in London society to make matches and to form clubs’. If Altham is right I can find no evidence of it. So far as I can determine there is no record of a cricket match being played in London before the 1700s, and no mention of a club until 1722, sixty- two years after the Restoration.
Not that life was dull during the reign of Charles II. Popular history recalls the King as a merry monarch, easy-natured and lascivious, and a welcome antidote to the pious Puritans. Charles would have agreed with the American George Nathan that ‘Women and Englishmen are actors by nature,’ since he lifted an old prohibition and permitted women to act on the stage. Prior to his edict, women’s roles had been played by soft-featured young men, fearful that their voices would break and their careers be over. The way was open for Margaret Hughes, probably the first legitimate professional actress, who became mistress to Charles I’s nephew Prince Rupert, and went on to gamble away a fortune.
More famous names soon followed, including ‘a mighty pretty woman’ (according to Dr Johnson, a keen observer), who had probably had a relationship with the notorious libertine and poet Lord Rochester when very young. ‘Nelly, my life, tho’ now thou’rt full fifteen’, rhymed Rochester, before becoming more explicit. Nell Gwynne made her debut in Dryden’s The Indian Emperor at the King’s Theatre in 1665, and was soon to catch the King’s eye. Cricketers should be grateful she did, for as we shall see, descendants of Charles II and Nell were to play an important part in the history of the game.
By 1660 the Puritans were universally loathed, and the bells rang to welcome home the King. An ultra-Royalist House of Commons, eager to restore power to Charles, invited him home from exile. The loyal populace lined the streets in welcome, and soon cheered and roared as thirteen regicides of Charles I were brutally done to death. To satisfy the mob the half-rotted corpses of Cromwell and Thomas Ireton were dug up to be spat on and hanged. Three of the regicides had been captured in Holland, and handed over to face execution by one of the most unprincipled adventurers in English history. George Downing, an itinerant preacher, became a chaplain in Sir Thomas Fairfax’s Puritan army before worming his way into Cromwell’s favour. As Scoutmaster General– Cromwell’s top spy – in Scotland he was well paid, and he invested his money wisely. He married well, too, into the powerful Howard family, and was appointed British ambassador to The Hague, to which his Letter of Credence was written by Milton: ‘A person of eminent Quality, and after a long trial of his Fidelity, Probity and Diligence, in several and various negotiations, well approved and valued by us.’
In The Hague Downing spied on Royalists, including the future Charles II and his sister, the Princess of Orange. But his loyalties were elastic, and upon Cromwell’s death this Puritan favourite turned coat and became an avid Royalist. The cynical and worldly Charles exploited him as his own spy, and later, for services rendered, appointed him a Baronet. But nothing was ever straightforward with Downing. After a while he fell out of favour, was committed to the Tower of London, released, and then turned to speculative building. One street, on the edge of what was once known as Thorney Island, near Whitehall, still carries his name – Downing Street.
The nation’s fondness for the King did not last once his greed and self-indulgence became common knowledge. Within a few years the great diarist Samuel Pepys was noting of an alliance formed with Holland and Sweden that it was ‘the only good public thing that hath been done since the King came into England’. Nor did anything match it in the years that followed, and it is fortunate that the nation never learned that its dissolute King was willing to take a pension from its arch-enemy, the King of France. Yet even without that knowledge, faithful Royalist support began to crumble. Events did little to help the King. For the average Londoner life was miserable. Grime was everywhere, as every household, shop and factory burned coal. Clothes, rarely changed, went grey, then black. The plague of 1664 – the fifth in under fifty years – and the Great Fire of London two years later devastated the City.
To public dismay, in 1673 the King’s brother James married a Catholic, Mary of Modena. In 1678 Titus Oates developed the fantasy of a Popish plot by Jesuits to murder the King and burn London. The dissolute Parliament, in which Members were bribed and corrupted, was finally dissolved after eighteen years and a new Commons, hostile to the King, elected. Thrice dismissed, it was thrice re-elected. Charles died in 1685, muttering, ‘Let not poor Nelly starve,’ but with no words of comfort for his country, and his brother came to the throne as James II.
In the midst of these dramas there are mentions of cricket, which was now beginning to attract spectators. The quarter sessions in Maidstone on 28 March 1668 were attended by Sir Roger Twysden, who observed in his notebook: ‘there was no great matter of consequence. A question was started whether an excise man could exact money from a poor person [who] at an horse-race or kricketing sold a bushel or two of malt made into drinks.’ The Justice waived the excise duty on ‘kricketing’, which must have brought more agony to the Thomas Wilson school of morality – as must a further decision to allow the sale of ale to spectators. Sport and alcohol were about to begin a long-term relationship. So too were sport and gambling. In July 1697 ‘a great match at cricket was played in Sussex; they were eleven of a side, and they played for fifty guineas apiece’. In the seventeenth century that was a large sum of money – but it would soon be dwarfed.
The game was growing more popular. Thomas Lennard, who became Lord Dacre just before his eighth birthday, was an early spectator. In 1674 he married Anne Palmer, an illegitimate daughter of Charles II and the