Facts and Speculations on the Origin and History of Playing Cards

by William Andrew Chatto

From the frequent mention of cards by writers of the time of James I, it would appear that the game was as common a diversion with his Majesty's peaceable subjects, as it was with the fighting men who followed the banner of Wallenstein or Tilly in the Thirty-Years' War. Inordinate gaming in one country, according to certain authorities, was the result of long-continued peace and too much ease; according to others, it was the natural consequence of war; in England, the devil, finding men idle, gave them employment at cards and dice; and in Germany, where they were busy in the work of destruction, he encouraged them to play as a relaxation from their regular labours. Prodigals, in each country, lighted their candle at both ends: English gallants used to divert themselves with cards at the playhouse before the performance began; [156] and desperate hazarders in the imperial camp staked, on a cast at dice, their plunder, ere it had well come into their possession.

In the reign of James I, a controversy arose respecting the nature of lots, in which the lawfulness—"in foro theologorum"—of deciding matters by lot, and of playing at games of chance, such as cards and dice, was amply discussed. It was maintained by one party, that as lots were of divine ordinance, for the purpose of determining important matters, [157] and of so ascertaining, as it were, the divine will, their employment for the purpose of amusement, was a sinful perversion of their institution, and a disparaging of Divine Providence, which was thus made the arbiter of idle and immoral games. [158] In opposition to this opinion, the learned Thomas Gataker published his treatise, historical and theological, 'Of the Nature and Use of Lots,' in 1619. In this work he treats of casual events in general, and of the different kinds of lots, which he thus classes under three heads: 1, Lots which are commonly employed in serious affairs; 2, Lots which enter into games of chance; 3, Lots extraordinary or divinatory. The first are generally admitted to be innocent; but the third are absolutely condemned by Gataker, except when they are expressly required to be used by a revelation or a divine command. [159] With regard to lots of the second kind, he contends that they are neither prohibited in the Scriptures nor evil of themselves; though, like those of the first, they are liable to great abuse. The abuse he earnestly condemns; but at the same time shows that it is not a necessary consequence of the employment of lots in games of amusement. He also refutes the arguments of James Balmford, who, in a small tract which appears to have been first published about 1593, had maintained that all games of chance were absolutely unlawful. An account of the controversy on this subject, between Gataker on one side, and William Ames and Gisbert Voet on the other, will be found in the preface to the second edition of Barbeyrac's 'Traité du Jeu.' [160]

In the reign of James I, and in the early part of that of his successor, ere the discussion of political grievances had produced a decided effect on the public mind, the fashionable vices of excess in apparel, gaming, drinking, and smoking tobacco, were fertile themes of declamation with a certain class of reformers, both lay and clerical. Their denunciations of the vanity and wickedness of wearing fine clothes are merely variations to Stubbes's 'Anatomy of Abuses;' while their fulminations against tobacco are generally pitched in the somewhat loud key of King James's Counterblast. Their common-places against drunkenness and gaming, are, in general, "very common indeed,"—as Sir Francis Burdett said of a certain common lawyer, who, since his elevation to the peerage, has been convicted of a petty larceny on the literary property of Miss Agnes Strickland, and who seems to be an adept at Cribbage, though no card-player.

In a woodcut on the title-page of 'Woe to Drunkards,' a sermon preached by Samuel Ward, of Ipswich, 1627, the vices of that age are typically contrasted with the virtues of a former one. In the upper compartment we are shown what men were of old by the open Bible, the foot in the stirrup, and the hand grasping the lance; while in the lower, the degeneracy of their descendants is typified by the leg and foot, decorated with a broad silk garter and a large rosette; by cards and dice, and a hand holding at the same time a lighted pipe and a drinking cup with a cockatrice in it. Twenty years afterwards, these types would have been more strictly applicable, with the inscriptions merely transposed.

At what time the manufacture of cards was established in this country, has not been ascertained; though from their being included in an Act of Parliament of 1463, prohibiting the importation of sundry articles, as being injurious to native manufacturers and tradesmen, it would seem that there were card-makers in England even at that early period. [161] Barrington, referring to a proclamation of Elizabeth, and another of James I, says, "It appears that we did not then make many cards in England." In his paper in the 'Archæologia,' he gives a fac-simile of the cover of an old pack of cards, as a decisive proof that cards were originally made in Spain. On this cover was printed a wood engraving of the arms of Castile and Leon, together with a Club, a Sword, a Cup, and a piece of Money, the marks of the four suits of Spanish cards. To an inscription purporting that they were fine cards, made by Jehan Volay—"Cartas finnas faictes par Jehan Volay"—there was also added, in letters of a different character, either by a stencil, or by means of inserting a new piece of wood in the original block, the name "Edward Warman," probably that of the English vendor of the cards. The maker's name, Barrington reads, "Je (for Jean or John) Hauvola," and the final Y he mistakes for the Spanish conjunction "and." The whole of the inscription, he says, being rendered into English, runs thus: "Superfine cards made by John Hauvola, and (Edward Warman)," the last name being substituted for that of a former partner of John Hauvola. [162] Mr. Barrington's reading of the maker's name, Je. Hauvola, instead of Jehan Volay, and his then introducing Edward Warman into the firm, by means of the final Y, construed as a copulative conjunction, are fair specimens of the proofs and illustrations which he adduces in favour of his theory about Spanish cards.

Jean Volay, as I learn from Leber, [163] was one of the most celebrated French card-makers of the sixteenth century; at what time "Edward Warman" lived, whose name also appears on the cover, is not known; but Mr. Barrington says that a person of that name kept a stationer's shop somewhere about Norton Folgate, about fifty years before the date of his paper, that is about 1737. Any vogue that Spanish cards might have had in the more northerly countries of Europe, during the times of Elizabeth and James I, was probably owing rather to the circumstance of so many Spaniards being then resident in the Low Countries than to any superiority of the cards manufactured in Spain. Until a comparatively recent period, large quantities of cards used to be sent from Antwerp to Spain. [164]