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when eight players were fined and ordered to make public penance. It is a tribute to cricket that it survived such disapproval.

      If the misbehaviour of parishioners shocked the Church elders, they were dumbfounded when one of their own, the Reverend Henry Cuffin, was charged in 1629. Cuffin, a young curate of Ruckinge, Kent, and presumably as godly as his cloth, was censured for playing cricket ‘in very unseemely manner with boyes and other very meane and base persons of our parrishe to the great scandal of his Ministerie and offence of such as sawe him play at the said game’. His defence was a stiletto in the ribs of those who peppered the charge with the unsuitability of the curate consorting with ‘very meane and base persons’. Not so, said Cuffin, he had been playing with ‘persons … of repute and fashion’. And moreover, he added that he ‘doth diligentlie serve the Cure of Ruckinge’. It is not clear whether Reverend Cuffin would have accepted the charge meekly if he had been playing with the peasantry, but the presence among his fellow cricketers of ‘persons of repute’ made him belligerent in his defence. There is no record that he was censured, fined or ordered to make public penance, but the whole episode, apart from casting a light on the class-consciousness of the time, tells us that the peasants’ game was moving upmarket.

      Oliver Cromwell is one of the great figures of English history, and he held a special fascination for me as by far the most illustrious Member of Parliament for my own constituency of Huntingdon. He and I are the only Members from that seat – thus far – to head a government. Cromwell became leader after a civil war in the country; I became leader as a civil war erupted within the Conservative Party. In each case, our enemies were implacable. Cromwell, General of the New Model Army and Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, was said by his foes to have enjoyed a boisterous youth. Whether this is true or not, his adult life was uneventful until, in his forties, he was propelled to the forefront of English life. As a private man he was commonplace. As a General, he was superb. As Lord Protector, his virtues and failings were on a grand scale; he can be mentioned with justice alongside Caesar and Napoleon.

      The downside of Puritanism was that it robbed the Church of charity and put a premium on cant and piety. The prigs were in control. Lives were disrupted. Theatres were closed. Drama was stigmatised. The arts were restrained, and an anti-clerical feeling took root that would one day welcome the restoration of the monarchy. During the years of the Commonwealth poetry was the only art that prospered, thanks to the mighty imagination of Milton. It is an anomaly that Milton was a supporter of Puritanism: he was so by default, in his opposition to the excesses of an autocratic King. But neither his blindness, nor his gout, nor his many disappointments and hardships, could dim his advocacy of the liberty of the press and the elimination of prejudice, or his belief in taxation by the people, not the crown. He did not advocate the freedom to play cricket, or even deign to notice the game. Milton’s nephew Edward Phillipps was, however, familiar with cricket. In a poem written in 1658, entitled ‘Treatment of Ladies as Balls and Sports’, he wrote: ‘would that my eyes had been beaten out of my head with a cricket ball the day before I saw thee’. He was not always so averse to women, his preferred recreation being more basic: ‘Ellen, all men command thy eyes/ Only I command thy thighs,’ he wrote in ‘The Art of Wooing and Complementing’ (1655).

      But the courts did not always convict. At the Kent assizes held at Maidstone on 27 July 1652, six men of Cranbrook were accused of playing ‘a certain unlawful game called cricket’, but were acquitted as, to the horror of the Church, the justices ruled that the game was not unlawful. It was a rare blemish for the killjoys that was soon to be corrected at Eltham, Kent, in 1654, when seven players were fined two shillings each by the churchwardens for playing on the Sabbath. Four parishioners of Hunton, Kent, were similarly charged in 1668. Even after the restoration of Charles II and the end of Puritan government in 1660, some of the old attitudes still prevailed. In May 1671 Edward Bound was held to be ‘in contempt of the law of England’ and ‘a bad example to others’ for playing cricket on a Sunday. However, he was luckier than earlier miscreants, and was exonerated under the General Pardon Act.

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