But these are not normal times, so we needed to keep the little urchins away from our biosecure gates and door.
But we did put out an illuminated pumpkin for them to spot and one bowl of sweets atop the hedge for those bold enough to take anything at all from such an uninviting place.
I hope the “joke” involved in getting a “Keep Out – foot and mouth disease” sign for a podiatrist’s door isn’t wasted on you readers…it probably is wasted on many of the passers by, not least the local kids.
We’ve done our best this year. Hoping we can go back to the normal levels of pseudo-horror next year. The real horrors of 2020 are not fun.
Perhaps only subscribers can see the above piece but here, on fair use principles, is the sentence that made me gulp my coffee:
In that role of peacemaker, he also trekked in 2011 into the forests of Chhattisgarh to oversee the handover by Maoist rebels of five abducted policemen.
Janie and I were in Chhattisgarh in February that year. Intrigued, I Googled the incident to see if, as I suspected, it occurred when we were there and near where we were.
So, the hostages were taken on 25 January 2011 and a hostage crisis started to unfold in Narayanpur on 3 February when demands were made by the Maoists and interventions planned by Agnivesh and others.
Janie and I were due to visit Narayanpur for market day on 6 February, but our host, Jolly, assured us that it would not be a good idea to go there and said he had revised our itinerary to see equally or even more interesting tribal people and markets nearer to Bastar.
Of course, we had been warned before we travelled to Chhattisgarh that it was a politically volatile place and that our itinerary might be subject to last minute change.
But what a wonderful day we had on the back of that change.
And how extraordinary to learn, after nearly 10 years, that the reason for that change was a hostage crisis that was being resolved by one of our human rights heros in the place we were supposed to visit.
We can’t (in practical terms) travel at the moment, during the pandemic, but Janie and I were all-but transported, through time and space, back to that 2011 adventure of ours in the central plains of India. Invigorating, it was.
Bernard Rothbart (left) – with thanks to Mike Jones (right) for the image
I don’t believe in ghosts. No ifs. No buts. I don’t believe in ghosts.
By which I mean, actually, that I don’t believe in revenants; the animated corpses and undead beings that haunt the living throughout folklore.
Possibly because I don’t believe, I don’t particularly care for ghost stories.
I do, however, especially care for Ghosts, a play by Henrik Ibsen, written in 1881. I first encountered this play when studying drama at school. I thought it was a cracking read.
I subsequently had the honour and privilege to see the 1986 Young Vic production with Vanessa in the lead…
…Vanessa Redgrave, dears. In theatre circles, you merely say “Vanessa”.
More recently, in 2003, Janie and I saw the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden’s production of Ghosts directed by Ingmar Bergman, with Pernilla August in the Vanessa role; Mrs Alving.
Intriguingly, the title of the play in the original Norwegian and Danish, is Gengangere and Ibsen disliked the translation of the title as “Ghosts”. The word gengangere has the double-meaning of revenants and events that repeat themselves. Ibsen felt that the word ghosts fails to express that second meaning.
For sure the play Ghosts is about being haunted by events and the past repeating itself.
As is my story, about an event more than 40 years ago.
Many of my former schoolmates, like me, are haunted by the sudden, untimely death of Bernard Rothbart, one of our biology and chemistry teachers. He died by his own hand, at the school, in December 1979. Mr Rothbart sat in his car in the teachers’ car park and ingested potassium cyanide. He was 29 years old.
I was reminded of the event about six years ago when a fellow alum mentioned on our alumni Facebook group how much he’d been affected by the incident. It kicked off a several-hundred comment thread.
…helping me to recover the memory of my Uncle Manny’s funeral, 18 months later, at Bushey Jewish Cemetery, the same location as Mr Rothbart’s.
I had been asked…almost begged…to attend Bernard Rothbart’s funeral, as the teachers felt nervous about attending a Jewish funeral and wanted my help to explain the relevant laws and mores. I think they also felt that a Jewish pupil might help put the grieving Rothbart family a little more at ease with the Alleyn’s School contingent.
In truth I felt a bit of a fraud. I had never attended any funeral before, so it was a case of the partially blind leading the totally blind. I had to pump my parents for information ahead of the day and brief the other Alleyn’s attendees based on my folks’s briefing, rather than the direct experience I think they were hoping for.
I had also been one of Mr Rothbart’s less attentive chemistry students. I recall thinking self-centredly at the time that the sight of my utterly hopeless mock A-level exam paper might have driven poor Mr Rothbart to cyanide.
I had meant to write up that strange experience; Bernard Rothbart’s funeral, when I mentioned it in my recovered memory piece about Uncle Manny & The Hoover Factory…
…in 2017, but didn’t get around to it at that time.
A few months ago, I received a message, out of the blue, enquiring whether I had ever got around to writing up my Bernard Rothbart piece. The message came from one of the fellows who had been larking around out of bounds that day in 1979 and found Mr Rothbart in his car.
I promised that I would write up the piece soon, but just didn’t have the spirit to delve into that particular memory during this strange summer.
Then, a few weeks ago, Janie & I learnt that a close friend’s former partner, Mitchell, had hanged himself on his sixtieth birthday. We can only try to imagine Mitchell’s mental state. Mitchell’s story felt like a haunting echo of the Bernard Rothbart story.
Now I am preparing to go to my first socially distanced funeral, a few days before I read this piece at ThreadZoomMash.
More than forty years since my first funeral; I have now been to many. This one will be a humanist cremation at Hoop Lane. I have even been to plenty of those.
But, like 1979, I don’t really know how to behave at this funeral.
I’m part of a different tribe now. Everyone must follow novel, social-distancing mores… now.
Yet still, I sense the gengangere, the ghostly echo of repeating events.
Postscript: Reflections On The Evening
Reflecting a few days after the event, my thoughts have been very much provoked by the readings that evening.
Adrian Rebello’s choice of Ghosts as the theme bothered me a little at first, as I thought that theme might yield a more homogeneous collection of pieces than usual. In fact the selection was very diverse and I thought the quality extremely high. As a group, I think we are getting better and better at writing short pieces for recital.
I didn’t take notes as I wanted to reflect on these pieces impressionistically and also imagined (correctly) that some of them could not really be described without spoilers. So I will say little about some pieces, which does not cast judgment on their quality.
Rohan Candappa went first and talked about several Ghost-themed songs from our youth; There’s A Ghost In My House by R Dean Taylor, Ghosts by Japan, Ghost Town by The Specials, Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Junior and finally (obvs?) Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush. Rohan prefaced the piece by asking us all to think about 16 February 1978 (the day Wuthering Heights first appeared on Top Of The Pops). As it happens I have already Ogblogged my experience at that time; I would have been in rehearsal for Andorra that evening so (unusually for that era) would have missed TOTP that night:
Kay Scorah went next with a very creepy story about a lost twin…or two. It’s creepiness was enhanced by the sense that she was telling a true story. It transpired from the discussion afterwards that the story was largely based on truth.
Ian Theodoreson’s story was very much a true story about strange ghostly happenings (and unhappenings) at the former Mary Datchelor School Building, when Ian was working there as Finance Director of Save The Children. I first met Ian in that setting, as it happens, some time before the haunting events that Ian described. I have my own mixture of haunting memories of that time, despite the happy ending to my Save The Children story:
Terry’s story, about the loss of a child, was very moving as well as spooky. Terry has a direct, sparse style of writing and delivery that works well generally and worked especially well for this piece.
Then my piece (above).
Then David Wellbrook’s story, which fitted well with his new-found ability to write suspenseful horror/thriller stories, such as his Dahlesque piece, “The Gift”, which I read out at the fourth ThreadMash. The Ghosts one this evening had lots of twists and turns…
…but not as many twists and turns as Julie Adams’s piece. Her piece had more twists and turns than the ghost train ride that was central to her story. How she managed to pack such a rich, complex, diverse, funny and horrifying story into 800 or so words I have no idea. Julie is one of the less confident writers in our group, because that’s how she is, not because she has grounds for lack of confidence in writing. But if ever I have sensed that her lack of confidence in writing is misplaced it is with this piece, which was a tour de force and genuinely shocking. Unfortunately Julie wasn’t able to join us that evening, but Adrian was able to read her piece out brilliantly well.
Geraldine Sharpe-Newton wondered about extreme of old age in her piece, exploring the idea that the very old, tucked away neatly in care homes, might be a form of living ghosts prior to their clinical demise. As always with Geraldine, it was beautifully structured, steeped in clarity and wisdom; I found myself, as usual, wanting to hang on to every word.
Fiona Rawes (Flo’s) piece was a haunting piece about a pet. Writing about ghosts of species other than humans is quite rare and/but Flo’s style, which tends to focus in delicious detail on miniature domestic stories, worked beautifully for this piece.
John Eltham’s piece was a very well crafted ghost story about a hill-runner rescued from a near-death experience. John is another of our less confident writers but he is proving each time he writes that he has a gift for writing and that his stories deserve to be heard. John is also extremely good at delivering his stories as the spoken word.
Jan Goodman’s piece was an hilarious, post-modern ending to the evening. Upon learning the theme, she had immediately worked out in her mind the sketch of a great story. Unfortunately, she hadn’t quite worked out how to fit such a complex story into 800 words and had left the writing task until a little too close to the deadline. So instead of dropping that idea and writing something else, she wrote the story of that sketchy idea and her subsequent struggles…let’s face it, failure…with that story idea. It was a very amusing piece and it must have spoken to many if not all of us who have had that type of struggle in our time.
Adrian hosted the evening extremely well. I thought he had ordered the pieces very cleverly, as his joins were very confident, but he admitted at the end of the evening that he had decided to sequence the pieces using the simple method of listing the recitals in the order that the pieces came in…and then “winging it” for the joins.
Well winged, Adrian. Indeed, well done everyone. It was a great evening.
Since then, friends of Gerry, not least NewsRevue alums John Random & Caroline Am Bergris, put in an enormous effort to ensure that we found out as much as possible about Gerry, who had no next of kin and had always been near-silent about his earlier life. John & Caroline also went through the arduous process of arranging a funeral when there is no next of kin nor a will.
Hence, some 10 weeks after Gerry died, we gathered. Ironically, we gathered at Hoop Lane crematorium, the same place we NewsRevue alums gathered 20 years ago along with Ivan Shakespeare’s nearest and dearest to say goodbye to Ivan:
As I reported in the above piece, we comedy writers were not sure how to behave at a comedy writer’s funeral. Could we make jokes? We got by. And sadly, we have had some more experience since, saying goodbye to several of our fellow funny people in the past 20 years.
But on this bright but slightly chilly autumn day in 2020, we gathered again not quite knowing how to behave. A socially-distanced funeral. No closeness. No touching. Gatherings of clans aren’t normally like this.
The celebrant handled the ceremony with great dignity and grace. He admitted that it was an unusual situation while putting us at our ease to find ways to pay respects and grieve as we saw fit, within the rules of course.
Caroline read one of Gerry’s favourite poems, Ring Out, Wild Bells, very beautifully.
Then John Random gave a very thoughtful and charming eulogy. John reminded us that Gerry was a “quickie specialist”, a commissioned writer for The News Huddlines. John also hinted at one of Gerry’s more edgy and long-running NewsRevue sketches. Gerry imagined an advert for Vidal Sassoon’s Wash & Go shampoo. There had been a tradition of Vidal himself advertising his own products, as the following real advert attests…
…although I don’t think any of the real ones were quite like the following joke advert. Gerry imagined Vidal appearing jointly with the foul-mouthed comedian Bernard Manning, with Vidal saying, “it’s called Wash…” before Manning chimes in, “and f*** off!”.
I parodied Gerry’s parody advert around that time, “Nosh & Throw” as an intro to my Princess Diana song, She Ain’t Heavy, She’s Bulimic:
I recall offering to credit Gerry for a share of the intro quickie, but he adamantly refused, claiming that the new joke was all mine and that my joke had given his joke an extended lease of life, as the show for many years ran the two as a mini-runner ahead of my song…
…until Diana died. Now they’ve all gone: Diana, Vidal, Manning & Gerry. But my point is that John reminding us all of that joke, brought to my mind the fact that Gerry had, in terms of sharing comedic ideas, a generous, collaborative spirit.
John closed his enigmatic eulogy with another Gerry joke:
APPLICANT: Hello, is this the school of hard knocks?
ENROLMENT REGISTRAR: Yes it is.
APPLICANT: I’d like to enrol please
ENROLMENT REGISTRAR: (snarling) Well you can’t.
Gerry might well have enrolled in the school of hard knocks early in his life. We suspect so but don’t know for sure. Between his short youthful RAF stint in the 1960s and the late 1980s when he turned up as a writer – some quarter of a century later – there seems to be no record at all of what he did.
There was a lovely video to go with that song back in 2016, which John, Caroline, Helen and others managed to track down and show at the funeral, which was a very moving moment for me and I’m sure for others too. Here is the video with Donna Macfadyen singing beautifully and Gerry himself accompanying on guitar:
Then of course the inevitable committal and finally Helen bravely played Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life on the organ as we left the chapel.
Several of the NewsRevue “Class of ’92” gang were there in addition to organisers John and Caroline; Mark Keegan (& Victoria), Barry Grossman, Graham Robertson (& Sue), Colin Stutt, plus at least 10-12 people from other walks of Gerry’s later life.
Many went on to the Spaniards Inn to continue grieving in a socially distanced yet traditional aftermath manner. Someone else will need to write that one up if indeed it should be writ.
Well done John, Caroline & Helen; you gave Gerry a wonderful goodbye.
That was Simon’s, Janie’s and my conclusion a few days before this gathering, when we realised that Janie & I had been meaning to go and have a nosy at Simon’s house extension and makeover for ages.
Then, a few months later, Simon chose to show the world the wreckage that used to be his lovely house (and was soon to be his even lovelier house) in the video for his song, Make It Happen.
Anyway, it’s just as well we made the “let’s just do this” decision and hastily arranged to meet up that very Saturday…
…because if we had left it even one more week we’d have been unable to visit Simon’s household under the childishly simple rules of the Tier 2 partial lockdown.
Simon shows off the dressing room/walk-in wardrobe adjacent to the master bedroom – Simon looks blasé about it all while Janie gesticulates
We had the guided tour between the starter (pea and mint soup) and the main (roast lamb).
Simon looks a bit more animated when showing off his sound studio room, which is about the size of my “man cave” and/but has padding on the walls and the ceilingSimon: “It’s compulsory to have a chair that swivels around in one’s sound lab”
The house makeover looks terrific. In particular the loft extension that is Timothy’s studio, which I neglected to photograph…in part because I couldn’t work out how to do justice to that space with my phone camera.
After the lamb, we all enjoyed Janie’s apple strudel. Janie and I had felt badly about inviting ourselves around for a nosy and finding ourselves invited around for a meal. We felt as though we’d invited ourselves around for a meal, which is not the done thing. Simon’s wise suggested compromise was for us to provide a desert. Simon really likes deserts but doesn’t much DO deserts.
The left-overs of the large strudel can just about be made out at the far end of the table.
We talked about all manner of things. Old times, current affairs, putting the world to rights. We were on the verge of putting the world completely to rights when we realised that it was already far too late and way past all of our bedtimes, so unfortunately the world will now have to wait until after the tier-two-lockdown-that-isn’t-a-lockdown, when the solving of all problems can be resumed at our place.
The video clips shown at the end of the webinar are embedded after the transcript below
Introduction
In 1561, Thomas Gresham, while residing in Antwerp, provided “bridging finance” to a young travelling spendthrift, Thomas Cecil; William Cecil’s son, who had been living beyond his means in Paris. A few months later, Thomas Cecil and his travelling tutor, Thomas Windebank, took sanctuary under Thomas Gresham’s roof in Antwerp. It seems likely that one of young Cecil’s dalliances in Paris had required the dynamic duo to move on from Paris in a hurry.
Th0mas Cecil, once he was a few years older and wiser
“I see, in the end,”said the disapproving father in a letter to Windebank on 4 November 1561,“my sone shall come home lyke a spendyng sott, mete to kepe a tenniss court.”
This reference, to be found in J.W. Burgon’s monumental 1839 two-volume Life & Times Of Sir Thomas Gresham, seems to be the only mention of tennis to be found in any biography of Thomas Gresham to date.
Facsimile of J.W. Burgon p427 of Volume 1
Tennis does not seem to have been a big thing to Thomas Gresham. But it was a very big thing to the Cecil family and it was a big thing in Tudor times.
So why did William Cecil, who was such a massive tennis fan he even built a tennis court at his house on the Strand, write in such disparaging tones about tennis in this context?
William Cecil with disapproving look
And how on earth did this minor Cecil family intergenerational gripe find its way, some 40 years later, into a subplot of Hamlet?
It is my intention to use this tiny fragment from Thomas Gresham’s life as a MacGuffin, or plot device, to describe tennis and the colourful characters that populated the game around the time of Thomas Gresham.
Medieval & Renaissance Tennis
Humans have played ball games with implements since the very dawn of civilisation. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which was written some 4000 years ago, uses stick and ball games as a plot device more than once.
But the game we call tennis emerged in medieval times, around the 12th century, probably initially in French monastery courtyards and subsequently in noble courts. Known as Jeu De Paume in France, this walled, galleried courtyard game played with hard balls became known as tennis in England.
Today we call the game “real tennis” to distinguish it from the modern, 19th century game played with vulcanised rubber balls on open courts of grass, clay, etc.
Real tennis is often referred to as a sport of kings. There is documentary evidence of tennis as a royal pursuit from the early 14th century. Tennis’s first “star”, for all the wrong reasons, was Louis X of France, known as Louis The Quarrelsome.
Philip IV, Louis’s dad, bought the Tour de Nesle in 1308 and had a covered tennis court built within. While Philip was clearly keen on the game, there is no evidence that he played. It is said that the fashion for covered courts emanated from young Louis’s love of the game. That love also, perhaps, proved to be Louis’s undoing. Just a couple of years after succeeding to the French throne, Louis X died, age 26, apparently after playing an especially rigorous game of tennis at Vincennes, in 1316. Louis X thus became the earliest named tennis player in history.
Quarrelsome? Moi?
There are three characteristics about Renaissance tennis that might seem alien to lovers of the modern variety of this sport which are vital to understanding what it was about in the time of Thomas Gresham:
it was originally played with the hand (hence the name “Jeu De Paume”) but by around 1500 the use of the racket was emerging, the racket becoming ubiquitous within 100 to 150 years;
the game was a wagering game. If the players were of uneven quality, “odds” or “handicapping” would be deployed, such that the stakes would be an even bet. Odds might be deployed through scoring (the lesser player being given points), through the cramping of the better player through restricting their use of the court (e.g. banning certain galleries or walls) or a mixture of those handicaps. We still use handicapping today in real tennis for all but the top level competitions;;
noble folk and monarchs tended to become very fond of the game for themselves and their own sort…while taking great pains to prohibit lesser folk from playing of tennis or such sports.
During the reign of Charles V . palm play , which may properly enough be denominated hand – tennis , was exceedingly fashionable in France, being played by the nobility for large sums of money ; and when they had lost all that they had about them , they would sometimes pledge a part of their wearing apparel rather than give up the pursuit of the game . The duke of Burgundy , according to an old historian , having lost sixty franks at palm play with the duke of Bourbon , Messire William de Lyon , and Messire Guy de la Trimouille , and not having money enough to pay them , gave his girdle as a pledge for the remainder ; and shortly afterwards he left the same girdle with the comte D ‘ Eu for eighty franks , which he also lost at tennis .
Philip The Bold, Duke of Burgundy – 14th Century loser?
As an aside, Philip the Bold was not only well-known to be an enthusiast of tennis, he was also a great enthusiast for the Pinot Noir grape; prohibiting the cultivation of the Gamay grape in Burgundy (1395), thus perpetuating that region’s fine wine tradition. Philip the Bold also initiated a musical chapel which founded the great Burgundian school of music. Tennis, wine & music – Philip was my kinda guy.
Tennis-loving royals and nobles married for strategic, territorial alliance in those days. I don’t suppose that “spreading tennis across parts of Europe that other games couldn’t reach” was central to that strategy, but such marriages seem to have contributed to the spread of the game…or in some cases possibly the tennis history of the place might have attracted the marriage.
Longue paume, or field tennis, is an outdoor variety of the game, versions of which were played across all tiers of society, which probably adopted the use of implements before jeu de paume. Elements of modern tennis and cricket derive from it. It is still played today, mostly in Picardy. It is probably the variety of the game that Edward III was banning with his infamous 1349 prohibition of sports.
Jeu de paume, the court version, almost certainly became established in Spain and the Low Countries before it became established in England. So long before Thomas Gresham popped up in Antwerp, a famous court had been established there, in Borgerhout.
The Early Tudor Period
Prior to the Tudor period, the limited popularity of tennis in England was restricted to the clergy and guilds of craftsmen in larger towns and cities in the south. The clergy tended to play the game themselves while prohibiting others from doing so; hence we have some written evidence of the game.
Henry VII, tennis enthusiast, painted 29 October 1505, by order of Herman Rinck
But the Tudor monarchs were very keen on the game, so it became a more widespread, noble sport in England from the late 15th century. It is well documented that Henry VII was a player and a fan. He liked to wager on his games and his substantial losses are well documented in royal accounting documents, as are those of his more-famously tennis-keen son, Henry VIII. Naturally those monarchs were also keen on banning the game for all but the right sort.In 1493 Henry VII decreed that, “…no sheriff or mayor or any other officer…suffer any man’s servant to play at the dice or at tennis.”
Henry VIII, who neither said “anyone for tennis?” nor did he write Greensleeves
During Henry VIII’s time, several noble courts were built and several others were planned. At Austin Friars, following the dissolution of the monasteries, Thomas Cromwell planned to build a tennis court in his garden but did not see through his plans. Drapers Hall now stands on that site.
Austin Friars Copperplate c1550
But Thomas Wolsey’s court at Hampton Court Palace did get built. There is still a court on the original site (albeit a Stuart period replacement) to this day. I have had the honour and pleasure to play there.
Dedanists Norman Hyde (left) & Christie Marrian (right) defending Henry VIII (grille)Me, marking a rubber from the Hampton Court dedans, having just (successfully) fought my own
The only other court in Great Britain that remains from that period is the Falkland Palace Court, built between 1539 & 1541 by James VI of Scotland. It is the only jeu quarré court – i.e. an older design of outdoor court, without an interior (dedans) still in use in the world. Janie and I had a delightful game there in 2018.
Believe it or not, I succeeded in hitting the ball through one of those small portholes, known as lunes, more by luck than judgement I assure you, in the course of our match. Some say that such a shot merits just one point, others say that it completes a game and yet others say that it determines the entire match. Needless to say the four of us debated that matter at length in a neighbouring hostelry after the match.
Talking of eye-witness accounts of tennis matches, there is a fascinating report by one of Henry VII of England’s attendants, of a “visit” to Windsor Castle by Philip The Handsome (another Duke of Burgundy, plus also King of Castille) and his Queen: Joanna The Mad of Castille, in early 1506:
Philip The Handsome, Duke of Burgundy, King of Castille
The Sattordaye the 7 of ffebruary…
Bothe Kyngs wente to the Tennys plays and in the upper gallery theare was Layd ij Cushenes of Clothe of gold for the ij Kyngs…
…wheare played my Lord marques [of Dorset] the Lord Howard and two other knights togethers, and after the Kyngs of Casteele had scene them play a whylle , he made partys wth the Lord marques and then played the Kyngs of Casteele with the Lord Marques of Dorset the Kyngs Lookynge one them, but the Kyngs of Castelle played wth the Rackets and gave the Lord Marques xv. and after that he had pled his pleasure and arrayed himself agene it was almost nights, and so bothe Kyngs Retorned agayne to their Lodgingss.”
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in that eye-witness account. That early 16th century period was a period of transition between hand-play and racket-play at tennis. Most scholars agree that the racket came into use around 1500. So the handicap described in the account has the King of Castille playing with a racket and the Marquess of Dorset playing with his hand, while receiving fifteen (i.e. starting each game 15-0 up). Personally, I’d prefer the racket, but perhaps the Marquess was a very handy player.
Sadly, the account doesn’t tell us who won the tennis match, but the story doesn’t end brilliantly well for the visiting monarch; who in reality was more a hostage than a guest of Henry VII. Philip signed some helpful treaties and trade deals to help bring his “visit” to an amicable conclusion. Still, within a few months, Philip The Handsome died in Spain; probably poisoned/assassinated there. This made Joanna The Mad even more distraught than usual, apparently.
Joanna The Mad, but possibly Joanna The Gaslit or Joanna The Misconstrued
Thomas Grey, the Marquess of Dorset, who as a youngster had been a ward of Henry VII, was, by 1508, sent to the tower as a suspected conspirator against Henry VII. Only the accession of Henry VIII the following year saved Grey, who had a decent run as a high-ranking courtier after that narrow escape. His grand-daughter, Lady Jane Grey, was not so lucky; famously the “nine day queen”. Coincidentally , one of his other grand-daughters, Mary Grey, pops up as a house guest for Thomas Gresham in 1569, thanks to William Cecil again, perennial supplier of house guests to Thomas Gresham. A politically sensitive and expensive guest, Mary Grey stayed with the Greshams, much to their chagrin, until 1573, by which time Sir William Cecil had become Lord Burghley.
The Late Tudor Period, Cecil & Gresham
William Cecil was a contemporary of Thomas Gresham; the two worked well together on matters of state and commerce from the early 1550s onwards. Cecil became Elizabeth’s Secretary of State in 1558. By 1560 he was ensconced in Cecil House on the Strand on the site that is now the Strand Palace Hotel and The Lyceum Theatre. Cecil House had a tennis court designed by Henry Hawthorne, the Royal Architect. It was by all accounts quite a small court with unequal lengths of penthouse along both side walls; it might have been used for hand tennis rather than racket tennis.
By that time, the prohibition of sports such as tennis had been clarified through several of Henry VIII’s statutes. Noblemen and those with an annual income of £100 or more were permitted to possess a tennis court on their own property.
Henry VIII’s 1541 statute included a system of licencing for public tennis courts and bowling alleys. Mary I abolished such licences in 1555. Elizabeth reintroduced a system of licencing for tennis courts circa 1567.
So when William Cecil vented in 1561 that his son Thomas was “mete to kepe a tenniss court”, he was not talking about the dignified tennis court that graced Cecil House. He was referring to barely reputable or even disreputable places, more or less gambling dens, frequented by “idle and misruled persons”, as the Mary prohibition statute described them.
William Cecil was an intriguing and important character during the second half of the Tudor period. Fortunately for us, he had a tendency to keep everything and to insist on his correspondence being kept, which is why we have such a rich treasure trove of material on his life and those around him, such as Thomas Gresham.
Another fascinating character who entered and stayed in William Cecil’s orbit for many decades was Michelangelo Florio, an Italian pastor who converted to Lutherism and escaped execution in Rome by the skin of his teeth around 1550. William Cecil helped establish Michelangelo Florio in London, where he became pastor to the Italian Reform Church in the City of London and chaplain to Lady Jane Grey. On this occasion, William Cecil himself gave his guest house room which led, rumour has it, to a scandalous affair with one of Cecil’s servants which resulted in Florio’s marriage to the servant and the birth of the more famous Renaissance humanist John Florio.
Soon after John’s birth, Lady Jane Grey became the nine day queen, succeeded by the Catholic Queen Mary, at which point London was not really the place for a firebrand Italian Lutheran pastor and his family.
John Florio
In the early 1570s, John Florio, steeped in a humanist education, returned to England. Around 1578, William Cecil (by then Lord Burleigh), sponsored John to study at Oxford where he excelled and the rest is history. Florio wrote several wonderful works and translated many others, not least Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Florio’s own works include First Frutes & Second Frutes, which are basically primers in the English and Italian languages. Chapter 2 of the Second Frutes book (pp15-29) is a dramatised story of a day going to play tennis with the intention to go on to the theatre afterwards.
There’s a good deal of insight into Tudor tennis in that little drama, which is a fascinating and amusing read. But Shakespeare it isn’t…
…however there are those who believe that John Florio was Shakespeare. I think those people are mistaken, but I do believe that Shakespeare probably met John Florio (through their mutual patron, the Earl of Southampton). Or at the very least Shakespeare will have read several of Florio’s works, not least the Frutes books and the Montaigne translations.
Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford
Of course there are a great many “alternative Shakespeare authorship” theories, the most popular of which, Edward de Vere, Earl Of Oxford, was yet another of William Cecil’s long-term house guests; his ward for about 10 years from 1562 and subsequently Cecil’s son-in-law. In the early 1590s Oxford unsuccessfully attempted to marry off his daughter Elisabeth to the Earl of Southampton.
These geezers were all moving in similar circles, but that, to my mind, does not provide credibility to such “alternative authorship” theories about Shakespeare. But what do I know?
What is widely believed and is almost certainly true is that the character of Polonius in Hamlet was based on William Cecil and the character of Laertes, Polonius’s ne’er-do-well son abroad, based on the young Thomas Cecil. Scholars have suggested the Cecil connection for a great many reasons. For our purposes, Act Two Scene One of Hamlet has the sole mention of tennis in Hamlet, in a context that is reminiscent of the sole mention of tennis in Thomas Gresham’s biographies.
A stained glass representation of Polonius
So was Thomas Cecil “mete to kepe a tenniss court” in the end? He was less adept at stately matters than his dad and less adept than his younger brother, Robert, who became the first Earl of Salisbury and built Hatfield House. Robert Cecil didn’t build a tennis court there, but his Victorian descendants built a fine one, a refurbished version of which is still in use there today.
Hatfield House Tennis Court
But still Thomas Cecil had a pretty successful career. He inherited Cecil House, changing its name to Exeter House when he became the first Earl of Exeter, so to that extent he did keep a tennis court.
The Old Rectory, Wimbledon
He also bought, in 1576, The Old Rectory and most of the land that is now Wimbledon Park, where he developed Wimbledon Palace.
Thomas Cecil didn’t develop tennis courts in Wimbledon. But 300 years later, some other fellows did develop tennis courts, of sorts, around there, which was the start of a sustained, global, commercial sporting success. Thomas Gresham would no doubt have approved.
Wimbledon Championship, 1877
Further Reading & References
Ian Harris’s Ogblog Tetralogy On The Origins Of Tennis:
Tennis: A Cultural History, Heiner Gillmeister, A&C Black, 1998 or Tennis A Cultural History (Second edition), Heiner Gillmeister, Equinox Publishing Ltd, 2017
Real Tennis Today and Yesterday, John Shneerson, Ronaldson Publications, 2015
Willis Faber Book Of Tennis & Rackets, Lord Aberdare, Hutchinson, 1980
