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.