Lord Frederick Beauclerk — MCC President as the Old Order Ends, 1826-27

Beauclerk had been the leading amateur batsman of the 1790s and 1800s, with a top first-class score of 170 for Homerton against Montpelier in 1806. His authority at MCC was as much social as cricketing — as a peer's son, a clergyman and a fellow of an Oxford college, he carried weight that no professional could match.

By the mid-1820s the roundarm question was no longer theoretical. Beauclerk's election as president in 1826 was understood as a signal that the conservative element wanted control of the law-making process during the looming confrontation.

Lord Frederick Beauclerk — great-great-grandson of Charles II, vicar of St Albans, and the most prominent amateur cricketer of the Regency — had played first-class cricket from 1791 to 1825 and bowled slow underarm donkey-drops with deceptive flight. He was famous for his temper, his greed (he bet heavily on every match he played), and his absolute conviction that cricket should remain underarm. He had personally lobbied the MCC to ban roundarm in 1822, the year of John Willes's walkout. By 1826 his playing career was effectively over; that May the MCC elected him president for 1826-27, the only two-year presidency in the club's nineteenth-century history. The presidency was largely ceremonial, but it placed Beauclerk at the symbolic head of cricket during the very months when the roundarm trial matches were being arranged. He continued to play in minor matches into his sixties and was a fixture in the Lord's pavilion until his death in 1850. His later career as vicar of St Albans (from 1828) and his patronage of cricket combined the contradictions of the era: a clergyman who bet, a sportsman who held the law in contempt of practice, and the man who, more than anyone else, embodied the old gentleman-amateur cricket that the 1820s were sweeping away.

Beauclerk's presidency could not stop the trial matches and the law change of 1828 followed almost immediately. He remained a figure of authority at Lord's but his cause was lost. The compromise of 1828 was as much as he could secure; the full legalisation of roundarm in 1835 came over his enduring objections.