Both at hasard and mom-chaunce."
In the privy purse expenses, from 1536 to 1544, of the Princess Mary, daughter of Henry VIII, afterwards Queen Mary, there are numerous entries of money delivered to the princess to play at cards. In a prefatory memoir, Sir Frederick Madden remarks: "Cards she seems to have indulged in freely; and there is a sum generally allotted as pocket-money for the recreation every month." [129] As Mary is said to have been extremely devout, we may presume that, adopting the decisions of the more indulgent casuists, she availed herself of their permission to play at cards as a recreation when her mind was fatigued with the exercise of her strenuous piety. The records of the burning of men and women in her reign for the sake of religion, form a singular contrast with the entries in her privy purse expenses of money delivered to her to play at cards.
From the preceding incidental notices of cards in poems and plays, as well as from the direct evidence of the statute book and the privy purse expenses of the Princess Mary, it would appear that card-playing was common in England during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, both in the cottage and the palace; and there is reason to believe that about the same period the game was equally common in Scotland. William Dunbar, who wrote in the reigns of James IV and James V, in his 'General Satire,' exposing the depravity of all classes of people in the kingdom, thus alludes to the prevalence of dicing and card-playing:
"Sic knavis and crakkaris, to play at carts and dyce,
Sic halland-scheckaris, qwhilk at Cowkilbyis gryce
Are haldin of pryce, when lymaris do convene;
Sic store of vyce, sae mony wittis unwyse,
Within this land was nevir hard nor sene."
In the poems of Sir David Lyndsay, there are several allusions to card-playing; and in his 'Satire of the Three Estaites,' which Chalmers says was first acted at Cupar, Fifeshire, in 1535, the Parson declares himself to be an adept at the game:
"Thoch I preich nocht, I can play at the caiche: