minds or that Grace was less plain than her detractors claimed. Or perhaps not – the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay claimed, rather spitefully, that the Prince of Wales often quitted ‘the only woman he loved [his wife] for ugly and disagreeable mistresses’. In any event, Middlesex may have had other things on his mind: the first cricket laws were framed that same year.
The old Duke died in 1765, and Middlesex succeeded to the Dorset title. Sackville manuscripts were soon recording bills for cricket bats (at 2s.6d. each) and cricket balls (at 3s.6d. each). But the new Duke’s final years were unhappy; he passed them as a ‘proud, disgusted, melancholy, solitary man’, and his behaviour became irrational and unbalanced. When Grace died in 1763 he lived with a girl he hoped to marry, but was thwarted when his family prevented the match, citing his unstable mental state. The second Duke of Dorset died in 1769, disillusioned, insolvent, mad, and a widower.
His brother John followed an eerily similar path. He entered Parliament even younger than Middlesex, being elected for Tamworth at only twenty-one years of age. He sat in the Commons for thirteen years, but, the family preference being strong, cricket took priority over his parliamentary duties. He played for his brother’s teams, as well as those he arranged himself. As an Equerry to Queen Caroline from 1736 he too came to know the Prince of Wales well, and in 1737 the two of them arranged what the London Evening Post called ‘the greatest match at cricket that has ever been contested’. The game, held on 15 June at Kennington Common, was one of the social events of the year. A pavilion was erected for the Prince, and the press of humanity was so great that one poor woman, caught in the crowd, had her leg broken. Her pain was alleviated with a generous gift of ten guineas from the Prince. Lord John Sackville had assembled a fine team, and Kent won comfortably. A return match was arranged, but Kent won again, by an innings.
In June 1744 Sackville gained a small measure of immortality by taking a crucial catch as Kent beat England by one run at the famous Artillery Ground in London. The poet James Dance, alias James Love (a name he adopted after marrying a Miss Lamour), described it in ‘Cricket: An Heroic Poem’, published on 5 July that year:
Swift as the falcon, darting on its prey,
He springs elastick o’er the verdant way;
Sure of success, flies upwards; with a bound,
Derides the slow approach and spurns the ground.
Prone slips the youth, yet glories in his fall,
With arm extended shows the captive ball.
In other words, Lord John took a running catch and fell over. The description of the event was a bit floral, and the poet confessed in one of his mock-scholarly footnotes that ‘though this description may a little exceed the real fact, it may be excused as there is a great deal of foundation for it’. If so, one wonders why the apologetic footnote was penned.
In that same year there were tricky hurdles for Lord John to face off the field. Two days after his mistress Frances Leveson-Gower gave birth to his child at Woburn Abbey, her irate parents compelled them to marry. Sackville’s cricketing friend the Prince of Wales soothed the ruffled in-laws and offered to make up Lord John’s allowance from his father to £800 a year, which was accomplished by appointing him a Lord of the Bedchamber. It was a much-needed sinecure, for lack of funds was a constant burden for this impecunious second son. He had hoped to inherit the Sussex estates of his elderly great- uncle Spencer Compton,* valued at £3,000–£4,000 per annum, but upon his expected benefactor’s death he received nothing. His great- uncle may have feared the money would be squandered.
A lost inheritance, an unwanted child and a hasty and unwelcome marriage were not the sum total of Lord John’s misfortunes. The taint of mental instability was as strong in the Sackville genes as the love of cricket. In 1746, as a Lieutenant Colonel in the 2nd Foot Guards, he was arrested for desertion as his regiment was about to embark for overseas service. He was released to confinement in a private lunatic asylum, and hustled abroad by his embarrassed family. In 1760 Lord Fitz Maurice reported that Sackville was eking out an existence in Lausanne, ‘living on a poor allowance and but very meanly looked after. He was very fond of coming among the young English at Lausanne, who suffered his company at times from motives of curiosity, and sometimes from humanity. He was always dirtily clad, but it was easy to perceive something gentlemanlike in his manner and a look of birth about him, under all his disadvantages. His conversation was a mixture of weakness and shrewdness, as is common to most madmen.’ When told his brother Lord George had been dismissed from the army in 1759 for failing to obey an order to advance at the Battle of Minden, John immediately responded, ‘I always told you my brother George was no better than myself.’ Unstable or not, he seems to have had an accurate self-image.
John Russell, Duke of Bedford, was related by marriage to Lord John Sackville, and shared his enthusiasm for cricket. In 1741, before six thousand spectators, his team played a match at Wotton, Bucks, against a side raised by Richard Grenville, brother-in-law of Pitt the Elder. Grenville was obviously keen to win, for he paid his players two guineas each, but he lost the game, and no doubt his bets too. Ralph Vernay, a critic of gambling, wrote: ‘These matches will be as pernicious to poor people as horse races for the contagion spreads.’ Bedford also lost two games at Woburn Park to teams raised by the Earls of Sandwich and Halifax, but he was successful a year later in beating a London side at the Artillery Ground. The following year, 1743, London had their revenge, winning two matches, the latter at the Artillery Ground for five hundred guineas. Nothing daunted, the Duke played on and continued to sponsor games at Woburn Park until at least 1756.
The Prince of Wales was not the only cricketing enthusiast with royal blood. Charles Lennox, the second Duke of Richmond (1701– 50), a grandson of Charles II and his French mistress Louise de Kérouaille, later Duchess of Portsmouth, was among the most important of the early patrons. Introduced to cricket at an early age, he became a lover of the game, patron of matches, sponsor of players and father and grandfather of significant figures in cricket history. At the age of eighteen, as Lord March, he was married to a thirteen-year-old girl in settlement of a gambling debt. The cynical ceremony over, the bridegroom toured Europe and the child-bride returned to her education. Five years later, on the eve of a formal reunion, they met by chance and were entranced with one another. They enjoyed a long and idyllic marriage before Richmond died at the age of forty-nine; his Duchess, the once child-bride Sarah, survived him by less than a year. His friend Lord Hervey, often the possessor of a wicked tongue, wrote in his Memoirs:
There never lived a man of more amiable composition; he was kindly, benevolent, generous, honourable and thoroughly noble in his way of acting, talking and thinking; he had constant spirits, was very entertaining and had a great deal of knowledge though, not having had a school education, he was a long while reckoned ignorant by the generality of the world.
It was a kindly and apt epitaph, and surprising too, from a man once described by Alexander Pope as ‘a painted child of dirt that stinks and stings’. The Duke of Richmond would have been flattered by the tribute, but more pleased, perhaps, that both his sons were able cricketers.
In his prime the Duke was fastidious about how his team was turned out. In 1726 he paid for ‘waistcoats, breeches and caps’ for his cricketers, and two years later burdened them with ‘yellow velvet caps with silver tassels’. Apart from these sartorial touches he was also meticulous about the rules under which he played, and two games against a Mr Alan Brodrick – one to be played in July 1727 in Surrey, the second in August in Sussex – saw these spelled out in great detail. The pitches were of twenty-three yards; a player falling sick during the match could be replaced; any player voicing an opinion on any point of the game would be turned out, with, of course, the exceptions of the Duke and Mr Brodrick; each side should provide one umpire; batsmen must
