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 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,
“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.