Support For Old English Sports
Windham was opposed to the evangelical movement and their attempt to outlaw traditional English sports: "Few subjects agitated...Windham...more than the puritanical and Wilberforcian assault on the traditional sports of Englishmen such as boxing and bull-baiting. Windham's speeches in parliament in defense of such practices seem among his most heart-felt". William Wilberforce wrote to Hannah More on 15 November 1804: "I really think there scarcely ever were, or can be, two men more different from each other in all their ideas than Windham and myself". Windham said that Wilberforce would delight in sending aristocrats to the guillotine.
Windham wrote to a friend on 17 August 1809 on the subject of boxing, in the aftermath of the British victory over the French at the Battle of Talavera:
Why are we to boast so much of the native valour of our troops, as shewn at Talavera, at Vimeira, and at Maida, yet to discourage all the practices and habits which tend to keep alive the same sentiments and feelings? The sentiments that filled the minds of the three thousand spectators who attended the two pugilists, were just the same in kind as those which inspired the higher combatants on the occasions before enumerated. It is the circumstance only in which they are displayed, that makes the difference. ... Bravery is found in all habits, classes, circumstances, and conditions. But have habits and institutions of one sort no tendency to form it, more than of another? Longevity is found in persons of habits the most opposite: but are not certain habits more favourable to it than others? The courage does not arise from mere boxing, from the mere beating or being beat:—but from the sentiments excited by the contemplation and cultivation of such practices. Will it make no difference in the mass of a people, whether their amusements are all of a pacific, pleasurable, and effeminate nature, or whether they are of a sort that calls forth a continued admiration of prowess and hardihood? But when I get on these topicks, I never know how to stop...
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