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 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 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 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 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.”