discourage cricket, as did their allies the Church, who were only too happy to promote propaganda against it. A contemporary pamphlet recounted the tale of four young men unwise enough to play cricket on a Sunday. As they did so, a ‘Man in Black with a Cloven-foot’ rose out of the ground. The Devil, for it was said to be he, flew up into the air ‘in a dark cloud with flashes of fire’, but left behind him a very beautiful woman. Two of the players lost interest in the game and stepped up to kiss her. This was a bad move. The young men fell down dead: it was, after all, the Sabbath. Their companions, shocked at the result of such sin, ran home, appropriately to Maidenhead, where they lay in a ‘distracted condition’. The local minister prayed with them, and in church preached a sermon on the theme ‘Remember the Sabbath Day to Keep it Holy’ (Exodus 20, Verse 8). For good measure, he denounced cricket as a ‘hellish pastime’ – thus explaining to the congregation why the Devil was so attracted to it. At the inquest into the deaths of the two unfortunate youths, the coroner and the jury attributed their fate to ‘the last judgement of God, for prophaining his Holy Sabbath’. In cricket’s infancy, such poppycock resonated among the ill-educated peasantry. No one even considered a more likely cause of death: the players were struck by lightning, and the beautiful woman was a figment of the fevered imagination of a sunny day.
More eminent men than these rustic boys found themselves the victims of pamphlet propaganda. In May 1712 a broadsheet, The Devil and the Peers, attacked the Duke of Marlborough and an unidentified peer for playing a single-wicket match in Berkshire. This was real villainy, for the match was on a Sunday – and for a wager of twenty guineas. The unidentified peer, ‘who went to Eaton School’, was most likely Marlborough’s son-in-law Francis Godolphin, known by his courtesy title Lord Railton. Godolphin won, but – for even hostile pamphleteers must fawn over a Duke – not before His Grace had ‘gave ’em several Master strokes’. Marlborough was, after all, a national hero, and Sunday or not, master strokes were master strokes. Despite his sycophancy to Marlborough, the sour old pamphleteer predicted that the ‘Sabbath-Breakers will not escape the Hands of Justice’. He was wrong: not even the Church dared to move against the Duke, who heavily outgunned minor officials, as well as the pamphleteer.
So, of course, did the early patrons, all of whom had wealth or title, or both, to bolster their immunity from potential attackers. This is fortunate for cricket, since otherwise the spoilsports might have won the day. Aristocratic patronage began to lend a social respectability to cricket that it badly needed. Stow’s Survey of London (1720) mentions cricket as no better than football, wrestling, bell-ringing, shovelboard and drinking in alehouses as an amusement of ‘the more common sort’, but this slur would soon become redundant. Samuel Johnson played cricket at Oxford University in 1729, and Horace Walpole refers to cricket at Eton between 1727 and 1734.* Eton cricket also features in a poem entitled ‘The Priestcraft or the Way to Promotion’ printed in 1734 ‘behind the Chapter House in St Paul’s churchyard’ and written by an eighteenth-century angry young man, J. Wilford, who offers tongue-in-cheek advice to ‘the inferior clergy of England’ about how to behave at the forthcoming election. In the midst of his rant he unwittingly confirms that cricket was of rising interest:
No more with Birch, let Eton’s pupils bleed;
No more with learned lumber stuff their head,
Her rival fee! Like Nursery of Fools,
Who practice Cricket, more than Busby’s Rules.
Clearly, the aristocracy’s fascination for cricket was being reflected in the schools and universities to which they sent their children.
Three early patrons stand above the rest: Edward Stead, a sponsor of Kentish cricket, and two sponsors of Sussex, the Duke of Richmond and Sir William Gage. Stead (1701–35) lived the proverbial ‘short life but a merry one’. In his teens he inherited large estates in Kent, but he soon set about losing his fortune at cards and dice, to which, along with cricket, he was addicted. ‘The devil invented dice,’ said St Augustine, but Stead was not listening. He was so reckless that at the age of twenty-two he was forced to mortgage some of his lands to repay his gambling debts and raise capital.
By night Stead played the tables. By day he abandoned them for cricket, and formed his own team, ‘Stead’s Men’, or sometimes ‘Men of Kent’. Throughout the 1720s he arranged and played in many games – with mixed fortunes. On one occasion, Stead’s men were in a winning position when their Chingford opponents refused to finish the game. The cause of their refusal is unknown, but as a large wager depended on the result, Stead went to court to get his money. His plea was heard by the aptly-named Lord Chief Justice Pratt, who, it was reported, ‘not understanding the [rules of the] game, or having forgot’, simply ordered the match to be finished from where it left off, and made no order that Stead should be paid the sum due on the wager. There is no record of whether the game was ever completed or the wager settled. Nor do we know if the insolent journalist who doubted the Lord Chief Justice’s competence was fined for contempt.
But the ruling that the game should be finished had a favourable repercussion for cricket, if not for Stead. When, a week later, in Writtle, Essex, a zealous justice of the peace summoned a constable to disperse a few innocent locals playing the game, a cricket-lover wrote indignantly to the press with the unanswerable question: was it legal to play cricket in Kent at the order of the Lord Chief Justice – but not legal to play in Essex?
With or without his guineas, Stead played on. In August 1726 the ‘Men of London and Surrey’ faced him for twenty-five guineas at Kennington Common. Two years later his team was matched against the Duke of Richmond for ‘a large sum of money’ at Cox Heath. In the same year Stead and another of cricket’s early patrons, Sir William Gage, played an eleven-aside game for fifty guineas at the Earl of Leicester’s park at Penshurst. Stead’s men won after leading by 52 to 45 on the first innings. The final margin of victory is not recorded. It was the third occasion that summer that the ‘Men of Kent’ had defeated the Sussex team.
This fixture seems to have been a popular event, for the teams were rivals again the following year at Penshurst, when Gage obtained his revenge and won back double his money. The star of the game was a groom of the Duke of Richmond, Thomas Waymark, who ‘turned the scale of victory by his agility and dexterity’. Undeterred by this defeat, Stead, whose enthusiasm was greater than his success, played on – the gambler’s ‘win some, lose some’ mentality being his natural instinct. In August 1730 he and three other gentlemen played, and lost, against four men of Brentford for a ‘considerable wager’ in the deciding match in a series of three.* In June 1731 his ‘11 Gentlemen of Kent’ lost to ‘11 of Sunbury’, and thirty guineas changed hands. On 4 September a further (unknown) sum was wagered on a Surrey and Kent game, but a severe rainstorm washed out the fixture when Surrey, with three men to bat, needed twelve runs to win. The drenched cricketers agreed to a rematch, and Stead’s guineas were temporarily saved.
Stead was a graceful loser, and his nonchalance won him powerful friends. In August 1733 his team was matched against one raised by Frederick Louis, the Prince of Wales, the eldest son of George II, for a plate valued at £30. The game was played at Moulsey Hurst, Surrey, and the Prince’s men won. The contest was repeated in 1735, when Stead backed a London club against the Prince’s ‘Surrey’ team, and gained a narrow win by one wicket. It was to be the gambler’s last throw: Stead died a month later near Charing Cross, having done much to popularise early cricket.
One of Stead’s familiar opponents, Sir William Gage, succeeded to a baronetcy in 1713, at the age of eighteen. Nine years later he was elected to the Commons as MP for Seaford, which he retained until his death twenty-two years later. His estate, Firle in East Sussex, was one of the cradles of cricket, and it is likely that he learned to love the game as a boy. Apart from contests against Stead, Gage’s ‘Sussex
