More Than A Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years. John Major
in prison. He was released after representations by the British Ambassador, but his constituents in Arundel were unimpressed: he came bottom of the poll at the next election in 1754. Thereafter he became notorious as a gambler, libertine and confidence trickster, and was twice more imprisoned in France, including a spell in the Bastille.
As for the Duchess of Richmond, the Goodwood accounts reveal that she bore the costs of staging cricket matches, which suggests that she had absorbed a love of the game from the Duke. In July 1741 she writes him: ‘If there was a leisure day I should be glad to get Slindon and East Dean ready to play at cricket.’ The very next day she writes: ‘Send a servant as soone as you can to lett Robert Dearling at East Dean know he is to get the people att your house on Saturday and the same person must afterwards go to John Newland with the same message.’ Newland was almost certainly John Newland of Slindon, one of three brothers who played for England against Kent in 1744. Nor was the Duchess’s interest short-term. In July 1747 the Whitehall Evening Post was clearly referring to her when it reported of a ladies’ match: ‘They play very well … being encouraged by a lady of high rank in their neighbourhood, who likes the diversion.’
The dukes were not the highest-born enthusiasts for cricket: that accolade belongs to Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales (1707–51), known to history as ‘poor Fred’. The eldest son of George II and Queen Caroline, from his childhood his life was a constant and deadly feud with his parents, with mutual dislike evident on both sides. The underlying cause of the bitterness between them is unknown, but we can conjecture. Certainly the fact that Frederick was educated in Hanover, and barely saw his parents between the ages of seven and twenty-one, cannot have helped. As an adult he lived in an unimpressive house in the unfashionable area of Leicester Fields (now Square). It was a time of Whig domination, in which Tories were regarded as the enemies of the ruling family and excluded from preferment: only Whigs were ennobled or created baronets. Prince Frederick courted the out-of-favour Tories, welcomed them to his home, and opposed Whig policy. All of this must have hugely irritated the King – which was, of course, its purpose.
When the Prince put politics aside he turned to cricket, and matches with such as Stead, Gage and the Sackvilles. He was first seen at a cricket ground at Kennington in 1731, after which his interest blossomed. At the end of a game between Surrey and Middlesex at Moulsey Hurst in July 1733 he paid a guinea to each player for their skills, although that afternoon cricket was only the forerunner of the entertainment. As the Prince prepared to leave a hare sped past him, pursued by soldiers. The terrified animal took to the nearby Thames for sanctuary but, undeterred, the soldiers jumped in and caught her before she had swum to the safety of deep water. A joyous water battle ensued as the soldiers fought over the captured hare, to the vast amusement of the onlookers. The fate of the hare is unknown.
Such diversions whetted the Prince’s appetite for the game. At Moulsey Hurst in June 1735 he backed Surrey and other country men against London in an eventful contest. London’s finest bowler, a Mr Ellis, dislocated his finger and was replaced by the famous Cook of Brentford. It was a bad day for fingers, for one of the Prince’s team also damaged a digit, retired for a while and then returned to the crease, but failed to score many runs.* The London team won, with Mr Wheatley, a distiller, and a Mr Dun leading them to victory.
The Prince played his first match (the Prince and ten noblemen vs London) at Kensington Gardens in 1735, aged twenty-eight, and two years later, in June 1737, was leading a team against the Duke of Marlborough for ‘a considerable sum’. The Prince’s team won, and in July were due to play for £500 against the same opponents, but the game was apparently abandoned following the birth of his eldest son the day before. It was a birth that typified the enmity that now existed between the Prince and his parents: his wife was staying at Hampton Court, but when she was ‘in her birth pains’ he removed her so that his child was not born in a palace in which the King and Queen were resident. He was not alone in his hostility: his parents fully returned it. The King’s view of Frederick was that he was ‘a monster and the greatest villain ever born’, while Queen Caroline confided to the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole, ‘You do not know my filthy beast of a son as well as I do.’ Shortly after her grandchild was born the Queen died, and the royal family’s tangled personal relationships were once more exposed. ‘You must remarry,’ the dying Queen told her husband. ‘Non, j’aurai des maîtresses’ (‘No, I shall have some mistresses’), he replied, in a staggering example of boorishness. ‘Ah, mon Dieu,’ signed the Queen, ‘cela n’empêche pas’ (‘My God, that needn’t stop you’).
Although the Prince was more frequently a spectator than a player, often bringing distinguished guests with him,* in a game at Cliveden, his home in Buckinghamshire, sometime in 1749 he received a heavy blow on his side from a cricket ball. When he died two years later while dancing at Leicester House, that blow was widely thought to be the cause of the abscess that killed him. Following the wretched Jasper Vinall (see page 24), his was another death attributed to cricket. It is probable that his father did not miss ‘poor Fred’, and another of his late mother’s assessments of him echoes through the ages: ‘My dear firstborn is the greatest ass, and the greatest beast in the world, and I heartily wish he was out of it.’
Out of it he now was, but propriety required the King to order full mourning. All public amusements ceased. Ladies dressed in black bombazine and plain muslin, while men wore black cloth (with adornments or decorations), plain muslin cravats and black swords. Both sexes wore muffled chamois leather shoes. This ostentatious display continued for six months. ‘Deep’ mourning lasted a week, ‘full’ mourning for three months, and, farcically, ‘second’ mourning for a similar time, during which grey could replace deepest black. One effect of this charade was to destroy sales of silk, and thus rob fifteen thousand workers in Spitalfields of their jobs. Cricket showed more genuine respect to the Prince, with a game in his memory at Saltford Meadow near Bath in July 1751.
While Frederick had been alive and enjoying his cricket, his younger brother William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1721–65), had been involved in more savage business. Much of Scotland had never been reconciled to the Act of Union with England in 1707, and in 1745 the Jacobite cause raised its standard once more. ‘Bonnie’ Prince Charlie landed in the Western Isles, and within three months was ruler of most of Scotland. His army marched, winning victories as far south as Preston, but gained few adherents either in the lowlands of Scotland or in England. At Derby they halted and turned to march back to Scotland, pursued by the English under Cumberland. In April 1746 Cumberland destroyed the Scots at Culloden, and the Jacobite revival ended. The English pursued the rebels with ferocity, accompanying Cumberland’s victory with merciless slaughter that earned the enduring epithet ‘Butcher’ for their commander. So hated was he that when Dr Johnson visited Bedlam, he found an inmate tearing at his straw in the belief that he was punishing Cumberland for his cruelty to the Scots. If he had visited Jonathan’s Coffee House at Temple Bar he would have seen some more cruelty: it was decorated with the severed heads of Scots rebels. They remained on display for years. None of this seems to have impacted upon the cricket patrons, who rejoiced at the defeat of the Scots and welcomed Cumberland to their number.
There is no doubt that Cumberland was merciless in his pursuit of those who were seeking to turn his father off the throne, and his porcine features and eighteen-stone bulk added to the image of ruthlessness. The reality that he was also a brave and innovative commander, with an eye for merit among his soldiers (he promoted Howe, Coote and Wolfe) and a record of solid if unspectacular reforms of army procedures, is buried in the small print of history.
At leisure, Cumberland loved horse-racing, cards, the fine arts, especially Chelsea china, and when not soldiering he was a frequent spectator at cricket. In one of his early forays, in August 1751, his team was beaten by an innings by a side raised by Sir John Elwell, Bart, an opponent who was better known for his love of fox-hunting. But in the same month Cumberland’s team was victorious against Lord Sandwich in what may have been a return match, for a letter from Robert Ord to the Earl of Carlisle dated 13 August reports the ironic outcome of an earlier encounter:
You