The Scottish King James I., too, is said to have forfeited his life through his love for tennis. At Yuletide 1436-37 the Court kept the festival at Perth, in the Blackfriars Monastery; and here one night, after the royal party had broken up, and, as James stood before the fire of the reception-room, chatting with the Queen and her ladies, ominous sounds were heard without. The great bolt of the door was discovered to be wanting, but a lady, a Douglas, thrust her arm through the staples, and held the door till the conspirators snapped this frail defence. By her brave and noble devotion she gave James time to tear up a plank of the flooring and to drop into a small vault beneath. “As fate would have it,” writes Dr. Hill Burton, “there had been an opening to it by which he might have escaped, but this had a few days earlier been closed by his own order, because the balls by which he played at tennis were apt to fall into it.” Then the conspirators jumped into the vault, and, as Adamson the seventeenth century historian of Perth tells us, “King James the First, of everlasting name, Killed by that mischant traitor, Robert Grahame, Intending of his crown for to have rob’d him, With twenty-eight wounds in the breast he stob’d him.” Both James IV. and V. of Scotland were tennis-players, and it seems that they lost considerable sums at it with their courtiers. Thus, in the accounts of the Lord High Treasurer, we find these items under June 7th, 1496: “To Wat of Lesly that he wan at the cach frae the King, £23, 8s.”; and on 23rd September 1497 the king again loses at tennis in Stirling, this time “with Peter Crechtoune and Patrick Hammiltoune, three unicorns”--that is, £2, 13s. With the Restoration, tennis became fashionable at Court again, and Pepys, under December 1603, makes this entry:--“Walking along Whitehall, I heard the King was gone to play at tennis. So I drove down to the new tennis court, and saw him and Sir Arthur Slingsby play against my Lord of Suffolk and my Lord Chesterfield. The King beat three, and lost two sets.” When Frederick, Prince of Wales, died suddenly in 1751 many causes of death were assigned, one being that it was the result of a blow of a tennis ball three years before. But Nathaniel Wraxall makes it an accident at cricket, and says: “Frederick, Prince of Wales, son of George II., expired suddenly in 1751 at Leicester House, in the arms of Desnoyers, the celebrated dancing-master. His end was caused by an internal abscess, in consequence of a blow which he received in the side from a cricket ball while he was engaged in playing at that game on the lawn at Cliefden House, Buckinghamshire, where he then principally resided. It was of this prince that it was written, by way of epitaph:-- “‘He was alive and is dead, And, as it is only Fred, Why, there’s no more to be said.’”