Is it true that King Henry VIII played tennis?
According to Alison Weir in her “Henry VIII: King and Court”, he was a world-class player. The tennis that was played was “not the sedate lawn tennis of today, but the earlier, more aggressive version known as royal, or real, tennis, or ‘palme’, which derived from the medieval French game of jeu de paume and had become a popular aristocratic sport in France and Italy. Henry was ‘extremely fond of tennis’ and may have been taught the game by the professional players employed by his father; he himself certainly retained a coach. According to the Venetian ambassador Giustinian, ‘it was the prettiest thing in the world to see him play, his fair skin glowing through a shirt of the finest texture’; for playing, he stripped to his ‘slops’ (drawers) and wore soft shoes, and after the game he would don a ‘tennis coat’ of black or blue velvet to stop him catching a chill.
