“Stop, traveller, stop! in yonder peaceful glade, His favourite game the royal martyr played; Here, stripped of honours, children, freedom, rank, Drank from the bowl, and bowl’d for what he drank; Sought in a cheerful glass his cares to drown, And changed his guinea ere he lost a crown.”
In Herbert’s “Memoirs of the Last Two Years of Charles I.” there are several allusions to his Majesty’s love of bowls. As there was no bowling green at Holmby, he constantly rode over either to Althorpe or Harrowden--the latter a house of Lord Vaux--where he might divert himself with his favourite amusement. Charles was at the Althorpe bowling-green when Cornet Joyce arrived at Holmby to take him away.
With the Restoration bowls became a fashionable Court recreation, and in the Grammont “Memoirs” we are told that when the Court was at Tonbridge Wells “the company are accommodated with lodgings in little clean and convenient habitations that lie straggling and separated from each other a mile and a half all round the Wells, where the company meet in the morning.... As soon as the evening comes every one quits his little palace to assemble on the bowling-green.”
Another game once countenanced by royalty was skittles or nine-pins, a pastime, it is said, in which Elizabeth, Queen Consort of Edward IV., and her ladies indulged in 1472. And later on we find it among the amusements of the exiled courtiers, for in the “Grammont Memoirs” the Earl of Arran writes of his sister-in-law, the Countess of Ossory, Miss Hyde, and Jermyn playing at nine-pins to pass the time. At this period, too, a popular game was pall-mall, being one of the “fair and pleasant games” that James I. recommended to Prince Henry, and which seem to have been much played at Court in the early part of the seventeenth century. On April 2, 1661, Pepys walks to “St. James’s Park, where he witnessed the Duke of York playing at pall-mall, the first time he ever saw the sport;” and Evelyn speaks of King Charles’s fondness for this game.
Then there was the running at the quintain, a pastime practised at most rural festive gatherings, and one of which Laneham, in his “Progresses of Queen Elizabeth,” gives an amusing account in his description of “a country bridal,” at which Queen Elizabeth was present at Kenilworth in 1575; and two years previously, in 1573, on her visit to Sandwich, it is recorded that “certain wallounds that could well swim,” entertained her with a water tilting, in which one of the combatants “did overthrow another, at which the Queen had good sport.” Randolph, in a letter to Sir William Cecil, December 7, 1561, describes this pastime as celebrated at the Scottish Court of Queen Mary, and narrating part of a conversation he had with De Foix, the French Ambassador, he writes: “From this purpose we fell in talk of the pastimes that were the Sunday before, when the Lord Robert, the Lord John, and others ran at the ring--six against six--disguised and apparelled, the one half like women, the other half like strangers, in strange masking garments.... The Queen herself beheld it, and as many others as listed.” When King James’s brother-in-law, Christian of Denmark, visited England in 1606, we read how he excelled before all others in running at the ring in the tilt-yard at Greenwich.