At the coronation of George IV. he was employed with eighteen other prize-fighters, dressed as pages, to guard the entrance to Westminster Abbey and Hall. But it is in Continental courts that boxing has been most favoured. The elder brother of the late Czar of Russia died on the eve of the day appointed for his marriage from the effects of a blow received in a boxing encounter with Alexander; and on one occasion, when a bout took place between the Prince Waldemar and the late Czar, between the acts in the private tea-room at the Court Theatre at Copenhagen, Alexander was thoroughly knocked out. Archery appears to have been a fashionable sport during the reign of Henry VIII., who, according to Holinshed, shot as well as any of his guard. Edward VI. and Charles I. are known to have been fond of this exercise, which retained its attractions during the succeeding reigns, and was occasionally sustained by the presence and practice of the sovereign. Mary Queen of Scots was as fond of archery as was her cousin, Elizabeth of England. One story of Queen Mary’s shooting has often been cited against her, since the time Sir William Drury wrote to Mr. Secretary Cecil from Berwick, telling how Mary, a fortnight after Darnley’s murder, had been shooting with Bothwell at the butts of Tranent against Huntley and Seton for a dinner, which the latter pair had to pay--a story proved to be untrue.[108] In a letter from the Queen of Bohemia, sister of Charles I., written from Rhenen, her Majesty’s summer residence on the Rhine, in 1649 to Montrose--who had long been reputed to be a good archer--she says: “We have nothing to do but to walk and shoot. I am grown a good archer to shoot with my Lord Kinnoul. If your office will help it, I hope you will come and help us to shoot.” In 1703 Queen Anne granted a Charter to the Royal Company of Archers, prohibiting any one “to cause any obstacle or impediment to the said Royal Company in the lawful exercise of the Ancient Arms of Bows and Arrows”--a privilege for which they were to pay to the Sovereign “one pair of barbed arrows, if asked only.” These, it seems, have twice been delivered to the Sovereign, first to George IV., during his visit to Edinburgh in 1822, and when Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort went to Scotland in 1842. And it was in the reign of the first James of Scotland that Charles VII. formed from the survivors of Lord Buchan’s Scots the famous Archer-guard of France, familiar to every reader of “Quentin Durward,” who, “foreigners though they were, ever proved themselves the most faithful troops in the service of the French Crown.”