The Heir Who Was Not Killed by a Cricket Ball

On the evening of Wednesday, 20 March 1751, at his residence at Leicester House on what is now Leicester Square in central London, Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales — eldest son of King George II of Great Britain, father of the future George III, heir to the British throne and the German Electorate of Hanover — collapsed in pain while standing by an open window in his bedchamber. He had been complaining for a week of a recurring chest pain and a persistent cough. He recovered enough during the night to be put back into bed by his attendants. He died eleven days later, on the evening of Saturday, 31 March 1751, aged forty-four, after an extended period of fever and breathing difficulties.

The cause of death was, in the standard story repeated for two centuries afterward, a cricket ball. The Prince had been struck on the chest by a cricket ball — or, in some versions, a real-tennis ball — during a game some weeks before. The blow had developed into an internal abscess. The abscess had burst, fatally, on the evening of his collapse. The story appears in the memoirs of Lord Hervey, the Prince’s longstanding political enemy, written during the 1730s and 1740s and published posthumously in 1848. It was repeated by every subsequent eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historian and is still occasionally cited in popular history.

The story is not quite right. There was no cricket ball. There was a chronic respiratory condition — almost certainly a pleural empyema, possibly arising from tuberculosis — that had been developing for over a year, and that had been visibly affecting the Prince’s breathing for several months before his death. The autopsy, performed on the morning of 1 April 1751 by the royal physician Frank Nicholls (the same Frank Nicholls who would, nine years later, perform the autopsy on the Prince’s father George II and identify the first medically-documented case of aortic dissection in English clinical literature), described a substantial collection of pus in the right pleural cavity, a partially collapsed right lung, and a chronic inflammation of the lung tissue extending back probably several years. There was no evidence of a discrete external blow injury.

The cricket-ball story, in the careful judgment of modern medical historians, was almost certainly an elaboration after the fact by Lord Hervey, designed to make a politically convenient death look more accidental than chronic.

What Hervey wrote

John, Lord Hervey, second Baron Hervey of Ickworth, was one of the most acidly funny political memoirists of the early Hanoverian period. He had been a courtier in George II’s household through the 1720s and 1730s, had been the lover of the Queen Caroline of Ansbach (his memoirs make this nearly explicit), and had detested Prince Frederick — with whom he had a long-running personal feud over court appointments — with an intensity that lasts in his prose three centuries after his death. The Hervey memoirs cover the period 1727 to 1737. They were written by Hervey in the late 1740s, just before his own death in 1743, and were preserved by his family for over a century before being published in 1848.

The cricket-ball detail appears in Hervey’s account of the early 1730s, in a passage describing the Prince’s various physical infirmities. Hervey writes that the Prince had been struck on the chest “by a cricket-ball” sometime in 1731 or 1732, and that the blow had “left an internal injury which His Royal Highness chose not to attend to.” Hervey clearly intends the detail as a small additional indictment of the Prince’s character — a careless young man who had injured himself through inattention to his own health.

The detail does not appear in any contemporary source from 1731 or 1732. There are extensive court records, multiple physician’s notes, and substantial Prince’s household correspondence from the period. No mention of any cricket injury appears anywhere. Frederick was indeed a substantial cricket enthusiast — he was one of the most prominent aristocratic patrons of the sport in its early-Georgian formative period, organized matches at his country estate Cliveden, and was the financial backer of several of the first published cricket rules in the 1740s — but there is no record of any specific match in which he was injured.

The Hervey detail was published in 1848 and was immediately picked up by Victorian historians of the Hanoverian period. By the 1880s it was in the standard schoolbook narratives of British royal history. By 1920 it was in the introductions to most published cricket histories. By 1960 it had escaped scholarly hands entirely and was part of the popular culture’s general knowledge of “weird royal deaths.”

It remained the standard version of Frederick’s death until the late twentieth century. John Walters’s 1972 biography of Frederick — the first full modern biography — examined the autopsy report and the surviving physician’s notes in detail and concluded that the cricket ball was Hervey’s invention. Subsequent historians (Stephen Taylor, Andrew C. Thompson) have agreed.

What the autopsy actually found

Frank Nicholls’s autopsy report, performed at Leicester House on the morning of 1 April 1751, was given to the Royal College of Physicians and published in summary in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society later that year. The full text, preserved in the Royal College’s archive, gives the following findings:

• A substantial collection of purulent matter in the right pleural cavity — what modern medicine calls a pleural empyema, an abscessed collection of pus between the lung and the chest wall. The volume was estimated at “above one quart” (approximately a liter).
• Partial collapse of the right lung, with substantial thickening and inflammation of the lung tissue extending across multiple regions.
• A small fistula — a passage — between the abscess cavity and one of the larger right bronchi, which Nicholls correctly identified as the immediate cause of the fatal respiratory failure on the night of 31 March. The abscess had burst into the airway, flooding the remaining lung with pus.
• No external thoracic injury or rib fracture of any kind.

The findings are entirely consistent with a chronic empyema arising from a primary infection of the lung — almost certainly pulmonary tuberculosis, which was endemic in Georgian Britain and which would have been the leading cause of death of men in Frederick’s age range. The Prince had been observed by multiple physicians to have a persistent cough and shortness of breath for at least eighteen months. The collapse on 20 March 1751 was, in modern terms, an acute exacerbation of the chronic infection — possibly the moment the fistula first formed — and the death eleven days later was the fully septic terminal phase.

There is no medical role for a cricket ball or any other external blow in this clinical picture. A traumatic chest injury can occasionally produce a pleural collection (a hemothorax), but the autopsy specifically records purulent matter — pus, indicative of infection — rather than blood, and the inflammation pattern is that of a chronic disease, not an acute injury.

What the death changed

The political consequences of Frederick’s death were substantial. He had been the leader of an opposition political faction — the Leicester House Set — that had positioned itself against his father George II’s ministry. The death dissolved the faction. Frederick’s eldest son, the future George III, was twelve years old. The succession passed, eventually, to the grandson rather than to the son, with the immediate effect that George III’s character — formed in the next ten years under his mother’s guidance rather than his father’s — was substantially more pious, more domestic, and considerably less politically combative than Frederick had been.

Frederick was buried in Westminster Abbey under a small memorial stone — without an effigy, because he had specifically requested in his will that the family money be saved for his children’s education rather than spent on his tomb. The stone is on the floor of the nave, near the tomb of his grandfather George I. The inscription gives his dates and titles. It does not mention either his cricket patronage or any cause of death.

The 1751 cricket season, which had been scheduled to include several matches at Cliveden under his patronage, was cancelled.

A small marble bust of Frederick was commissioned by his widow Augusta in the late 1750s and installed in the Royal Collection. The bust shows him in his late thirties, in armor, holding a baton. The bust is currently on display at Kew Palace — the residence Frederick had bought for his family — in the small room where Augusta lived as a widow for the following twenty years. There is no plaque mentioning how he died.

The Marylebone Cricket Club, founded in 1787, played its first match in Frederick’s memory. The MCC has been the governing body of cricket worldwide since 1814. The annual MCC vs. Rest of the World match, played at Lord’s Cricket Ground, is by tradition opened with a minute of silence “for the patron.” The patron is Frederick. Nobody at the match is told he did not, in fact, die from being hit by a cricket ball.