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{224} 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{225} 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{226} 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{227} 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{228} 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{229} 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{230} 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 ar............