More Than A Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years. John Major

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 Duchess of Cleveland, and as son-in-law to the King was further ennobled as Earl of Sussex. His wife, only twelve years old at the time of her marriage, had such a wild temperament that by the age of fifteen her husband had removed her from Court to Hurstmonceaux Castle in Sussex. In June 1677, no doubt seeking a few quiet hours, the Earl drew £3 from his accounts to attend ‘the crekitt match at Ye Dicker’, a stretch of common land near to the castle.

      It seems the young Countess was not seduced by cricket, because later that same year she deserted her husband to join her mother in Paris. Here life looked up for her when she was seduced by the British ambassador, the future Duke of Montagu. In the early 1680s she returned to her husband, with whom she had little in common. A few years later Sussex supported William of Orange in the 1688 Revolution, while she sided with her uncle, the deposed King, James II, then in exile at St-Germain. It must have been a real Jack Spratt marriage, for their views differed on every matter. Nor would she have been pleased when the Earl’s extravagance and gaming losses compelled him to sell his estates.

      But, so far as we know, their relationship never led to ‘riot and battery’. This was the conviction obtained against Thomas Reynolds, Henry Gunter and a widow, Eleanor Lansford, for battering Ralph Thurston while ‘being only spectators at a game of cricket’. The cause of the assault is not known, but it is most likely to have been a dispute over a bet: if so, they would have been wiser to have paid up, as did Sir John Pelham, Bart, who lost 2s.6d. in ‘a wagger about a cricket match at Lewis’ in 1694.

      Five years later, philosophers were muscling in on the game. The text in 1699 of The World Bewitched, by Edward Ward, contains a dialogue between two Astrologers and the Author, in which it is asserted that: ‘Quoits, cricket, nine-pins, and trap-ball will be very much in fashion, and more tradesmen may be seen playing in the fields, than working in their shops.’

      As the seventeenth century came to a close, the British navy was carrying traders, missionaries and the game of cricket to many parts of the world – a naval chaplain on HMS Assistance, Henry Teonge, recorded a game of ‘crickett’ near Aleppo as early as 6 May 1676. In England, the game was widening its appeal. Cricket was moving beyond its base camp around the Weald. London, then the greatest city in Europe, was beginning to appreciate it. Noble families were beginning to patronise the game. Spectators, gamblers and publicans welcomed it as a vehicle for their interests. The press – then, as now, with a London bias – newly freed from censorship, was on hand to publicise it, or more typically the antics of prominent supporters and the size of their bets on matches.

      For cricket, money was to be the root of all progress. As the eighteenth century dawned, most of the wealth of England was in the hands of a small number of families, who by and large had few time-consuming responsibilities and ample leisure in which to enjoy their good fortune. The age of the patron was not far away.

* In this he echoes the eighteenth-century historian Joseph Strutt, who suggested that ‘the manly exercise of cricket’ originated from club-ball.

* He later produced an epic on the Crusade entitled Antiocheis.

** Macaulay was never short of opinions. When he was a precocious toddler, his aunt enquired after a minor ailment and drew the reported response: ‘I thank you, Madam, for your solicitous inquiry. The agony has somewhat abated.’

* The relevant extract from the deposition is shown in full, as the works of some early historians, notably H. S. Altham’s classic A History of Cricket (1926), contain errors of transcription. Altham also refers to Derrick as ‘Denwick’.

* But see Coriolanus, Act I, Scene I: ‘What’s work, my Countrymen in hand?, Where go you, with bats and clubs?’ The game is unlikely to be cricket.

СКАЧАТЬ