More Than A Game: The Story of Cricket's Early Years. John Major

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 of the Prince of Wales, which suggests either that the Prince loved fine 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