of Wales. A letter to Richmond written by Gage on 16 July 1725 catches the flavour of the times:
My Lord Duke,
I have received this moment Your Grace’s letter and am extremely happy Your Grace intends as the honour of making one [presumably a game, but possibly also a wager] on Tuesday, and will without fail bring a gentleman with me to play against you, one that has played very seldom for these several years. I am in great affliction from being shamefully beaten yesterday, the first match I played this year. However, I will muster up all my courage against Tuesday’s engagement. I will trouble Your Grace with nothing more than I wish you success in everything but ye cricket match.
The wording of the letter suggests that the approach for either a game or a wager came from Richmond, and may have been for a single-wicket contest. Gage is keen to assure the Duke that he and his partner are in neither good form nor practice, although whether this was really the case or was intended to entice a larger wager is unclear. The fact that Gage tells Richmond he has only just played his first game of the year, with the season so well advanced, suggests, if true, that he may have been engaged on parliamentary duties.
Other games against Richmond were certainly between teams of eleven a side, for one, at Lewes in August 1730, was postponed because the Duke’s most accomplished player, his groom Thomas Waymark, fell ill. It is likely that Richmond was being cautious as the wager was high. In any event, the match was off.
Gage’s enthusiasm for cricket is summed up in a letter from John Whaley to Horace Walpole in August 1735, after he had seen Gage’s Sussex team beat the Gentlemen of Kent: ‘They seem as much pleased as if they had got an Election. We have been at Supper with them all and have left them at one o’clock in the morning laying betts about the next match.’ Where bets were concerned, return matches were common courtesy, and later in the month the Earl of Middlesex, supported by his brother Lord John Sackville and nine other gentlemen, defeated Gage and his Sussex colleagues to secure their revenge and – perhaps – recover their money.
The combination of cricketing rivalry and betting could be combustible. In July 1741 Slindon beat Portslade in a game attended by Gage and the Duke of Newcastle. On 5 August, Gage wrote to Newcastle to report the aftermath:
… the night of the cricket match after Your Grace left the field there was a bustle occasioned by the cry of ‘Calves head’ being resented by some of Your Grace’s friends and some hearty blows were given … the Western cricketers that had left the hearing of it returned with their cricket batts and dealt some heavy blows which carried the victory … I am glad the cricket match was over before this happened.
Sometimes the blood flowed during a match. The Old Whig reported on 1 July 1736 that ‘two famous Richmond men’ were playing two London men, Mr Wakeland (a distiller) and Mr Oldner, when one of the Richmond men (who were not named) was badly injured. The ball ‘hit up against the side of his nose, broke his nose, hurt his eye, and bruised his face … he lost a great quantity of blood’. ‘Notwithstanding this accident some Human Brutes who laid [bets] against the Richmond men, insisted he should play … after his nose was set, and his face dressed, and one side tied up, [he] attempted to play again.’ It was gallant but unavailing. The blood flowed again, and the match had to be rescheduled.
In its long history, cricket talent has often passed from father to son – for example, in recent years the Pollocks, Cowdreys and Stewarts, among others– and this phenomenon was evident with the greatest of the early patrons, the Sackville family. Three Sackvilles were prominent supporters of cricket, and a second wave was to follow. Lionel Sackville was created first Duke of Dorset in 1720, and in his pomp maintained his own ‘cricketing place’ at Knole near Sevenoaks: it was the first ground to be regularly mown, rolled and cosseted in preparation for cricket. There is no record of how often games were played at Knole, but Dorset employed as a gardener Valentine Romney, who according to the Kentish Gazette ‘was held to be the best cricket player in the world’. It was, of course, a ‘world’ still confined to the Home Counties of England, but the Duke’s employment of Romney bore testimony to his enthusiasm, which was inherited by his sons Charles and John.
In 1734, at the age of twenty-three, Charles Sackville, bearing the courtesy title of Earl of Middlesex, was elected Member of Parliament for East Grinstead, the family borough, but the embryonic politician had a far greater enthusiasm for cricket than for government. One year after his election he was seen at cricket matches, in the company of the Prince of Wales, more often than in the Commons. The two men raised teams to play one another, and in one encounter Sackville’s team won by four wickets for a prize of £1,000,* even though the Prince had employed Cook of Brentford, reckoned to be one of the best bowlers of the day. A return match at Bromley Common saw Sackville win by ten wickets. The Prince’s team batted first and scored 73, a reasonable score on the bumpy wickets of the day, but it was easily topped by Sackville’s Kent, who amassed 97. When London collapsed in the second innings for 32, Kent needed only a mere 9 runs for a comfortable win. A contemporary report gives a flavour of the social niceties when a Prince of the realm was involved. The Earl and his team were in place by 11 a.m., together with a multitude of spectators, but the stumps were not pitched until the Prince arrived two hours later, having driven leisurely to the ground in a one-horse chair. At the end of the game, pandemonium ensued as the Prince departed. The large crowd, boisterous and refreshed with strong ale, mingled together and ‘a great deal of mischief was done, by some falling from their horses, or others being rode over … and one man was carried off for dead as HRH passed by’. It must have been mayhem.
Middlesex was an easy-natured character, who loved fun, was open-handed and lavished substantial sums of money on opera as well as cricket. Not everyone approved. In 1743 the acidic Horace Walpole wrote to his friend Horace Mann:
There is a new subscription formed for an Opera next year to be carried on by The Dilettanti, a club, for which the nominal qualification is having been in Italy and the real one being drunk: the two chiefs are Lord Middlesex and Sir Francis Dashwood who were seldom sober the whole time they were in Italy.
This was a harsh judgement, but standard fare for Walpole, who did not always escape unscathed himself. One victim jeered that ‘he used to enter a room as if he were stepping on a wet floor with his hat crushed between his knees’. In short, he minced. Perhaps Walpole’s sharp tongue was a weapon of self-defence. If so, he was exercising it again on 4 May 1743:
Lord Middlesex is the impresario and must ruin the House of Sackville by a course of these follies. Beside what he will losethis year, he has not paid his share of the losses of the last, yet he is singly undertaking another for next season, with the utmost certainty of losing between £4000 and £5000.
Not everyone was so censorious – or ungrateful. Years later, an obituarist praised Middlesex as ‘a leading Patron of Opera’. Walpole would have scoffed, and it beggars the imagination what he might have written of the scale of present-day opera subsidies. The Duke of Dorset shared Walpole’s analysis of his son’s opera ventures, for he advised the King not to subscribe: if the son fell out of favour with the monarch, the father had no intention of doing so. Walpole dripped contempt: ‘Lord Middlesex is so obstinate that this will probably only make him lose £1000 more.’
Such episodes infuriated Dorset, who sought a steadying influence for his wayward heir. He found one in Grace Boyle, the daughter of Viscount Shannon, whom Middlesex married, no doubt under duress, in 1744. Grace was no beauty – she was unkindly described as ‘low and ugly but a vast scholar’, and ‘very short, very plain, very yellow, and a vain girl, full of Greek and Latin’. She seems an unlikely bride for the pleasure-loving Middlesex, but Dorset was pleased to have tied his son down: in relief, he settled £2,000 a year on him. Unfortunately, Middlesex didn’t tie Grace down, and she became the mistress
