'45, and here again the cold facts of history are too much for us, for after the catastrophe of the Act of Attainder he settled in France, and not in Hampshire; and at that date Richard Nyren was already twelve years old. Richard Nyren may have been a Nairne, but, if so, it was through another branch of the family. The third Lord Nairne (a lord only among Jacobites) died in France in 1770: it was his grandson William (to whom the title was restored, mainly through the efforts of Sir Walter Scott, in 1824) that exchanged rings with our John Nyren.
I now return to Miss Nyren's narrative:—'Richard Nyren married, at Slindon, in Sussex, Frances Pennicud, a young lady of Quaker origin, a friend of the Countess of Newburgh, who gave her a large prayer-book, in which the names of her children were afterwards inscribed. When she was an old lady, still living at Hambledon, she dressed in a soft, black silk dress, with a large Leghorn hat tied on with a black lace scarf, and used a gold-headed cane when out walking. She went out only to church and on errands of mercy. . . . Mrs. Nyren, when a widow, found a happy home in her son John Nyren's house till her death at over ninety years of age. It is said she blushed like a young girl up to that time.'
Richard Nyren, as we have seen, learned his cricket from his uncle, Richard Newland, of Slindon, near Arundel, in Sussex. But of his Slindon performances nothing, I think, is known. It was not until he moved to Hambledon, and helped to found, or joined, the Hambledon Club (the parent of first-class cricket), that we begin to follow his movements. I say 'helped to found', but the club probably had an existence before Nyren joined it. In 1764, in the report of a match between Hambledon and Chertsey, the side is referred to as ' Hambledon, in Hants, called Squire Lamb's Club'. We get an approximate date of the Club's inception from the age of John Nyren's hero, John Small, one of its fathers, who was born in 1737. Let
