Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

21 Pre-Victorian Society And Sport Thus the genuine historical question is not where did cricket start but when and how did cricket emerge from the morass of ‘gameness’ as a discrete sport, nationally recognised and nationally regulated. It is at this point that the ‘simple’ and ‘gentle’ equation also manifests itself. It is only when the latter take up the cricketing cudgels with some degree of sharing with the former that a prescriptive typology of cricket appears. It is generally agreed that the principal if not the exclusive factor in this development was gambling. The canvas to this was the gradual shift of mercantile life from a more straightforward matter of trading with a relatively uncluttered handling, buying and selling of goods to a new dimension of large scale investment and complex fiscal instruments – the Bank of England, for example, was established in 1694 and gradually became the key agency – involving both government and private operators. Since the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89 and the consolidation of parliamentary sovereignty, finance had become more standardised. Monarchs for years had had to take out commercial loans and levy taxes to meet their bills with subsequent pressure to ‘redress grievances’ as part of the bargain. Now this was government business. For example, the crippling cost of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) was £150m against a normal peacetime government expenditure of only £2m annually. Parliament had to assume responsibility for loans, with its credit-worthiness reliant on the understanding that the propertied and moneyed classes would ensure that debts were paid. It meant that much rested on the collaboration of the governing regime and the rich. It was an oligarchy. It was a plutocracy. Hereby was constructed a financial apparatus that was somehow detached from the trading arm of the economy. It signalled the rise of the financial sector. Much of previous commerce had engaged merchants in direct business transactions, including loans, in goods and products with which they were familiar. Now through the medium of stocks and shares a financial market developed alongside the actual workaday economy. The imperial element supported this, with both the Indian sub-continent and the West Indies at the forefront. The South Sea Bubble which burst in 1720 was the classic and foremost illustration of the frenzy of fiscal speculation that was in evidence at this time. It was, in a word, gambling. Gambling was the major Georgian vice. The success especially of overseas trade in the second half of the 17 th century had filled the coffers of the upper classes. Apart from mercantile speculation, huge amounts were laid on wagers on all kinds of hazards. Had some of the Puritan grandees who had striven to enrich their families by arduous graft been able to witness how their descendants wasted their hard-won assets, they would have been shocked. An oversimplification of the line-up for the English Civil War tends to place the nobility wholly on the royalist side but the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Warwick were but the leading two peers central to the Parliamentary cause. With their fortunes based on overseas trade, they were mightily suspicious of the caprice of monarchical government. 9