A Very Rich Lotterie Generall: The Debacle of Queen Elizabeth I's National Lottery of 1567

  On August 23, 1567 a young Queen Elizabeth I of England issued a Royal Proclamation.  She decreed that there would be held: A VERY RICH LOTTERIE GENERALL WITHOUT ANY BLANKES.

Instantly, on the heels of the Queen’s Proclamation, hundreds of posters five feet high and twenty inches wide advertising both ticket prices and the potential prizes that could be won were plastered on doorways and walls throughout London.  Lottery broadsheets detailing how tickets could be bought were rushed into print and passed from hand to hand among England’s aristocracy.

Queen Elizabeth’s decree established the first national lottery in the history of the western world and it was this “Lotterie Generall” that is the true antecedent to all major lotteries that are held on a weekly basis throughout the world today.

Each ticket for Queen Elizabeth’s lottery cost ten shillings, or about the equivalent of a year’s wages for the average laborer in 1567.  First prize was to be 5000 Pounds (or about $150,000) in today’s money, with other prizes including rich tapestries, gold and silver plates and jewels to be awarded to about 10% of the lottery’s total entrants.

Queen Elizabeth I's Original Proclamation from 1567

Given the high price of a ticket, the Queen’s Lottery General of 1567 was by no means the Tudor equivalent of a modern American Mega-Millions or Powerball drawing where anyone with four quarters and a pipe dream can enter, but it did promise one other very enticing incentive that might have done much to get the  lower elements of 16th century society to stretch their wallets and buy a ticket.

All ticket holders, not winners, merely holders or those who had simply bought a ticket, were promised on Queen’s Orders freedom from arrest for all crimes committed in the months leading up to the lottery except for murder or treason.  In other words, you could buy a ticket for the Queen’s Lottery and pretty much do whatever the Hell you wanted without any fear of going to jail until a winner was declared.

The Lottery General of 1567 was the brainchild of Sir William Cecil 1st Baron Burghley.  At the start of her reign Sir William Cecil was one of Queen Elizabeth’s closest advisors and confidants.  He served, at the time, as both Elizabeth’s Secretary of State and as England’s Lord Treasurer. 

The Encyclopedia Britannica says of William Cecil that, “from 1558 for forty years the biography of Cecil is almost indistinguishable from that of Elizabeth and from the history of England.”

Sir William Cecil always sought to protect the “Virgin” Queen from all enemies and he was ruthless and determined to keep England free from invasion.  It was Cecil who ordered the murder of Mary Queen of Scotts once he deemed that she posed a threat to Elizabeth’s reign.  It was Cecil who launched a campaign of terror and subjugation against the Irish to consolidate English maritime gains and it was Cecil who was obsessed with making the Royal Navy the most powerful military force in the world.

Sir William Cecil

However, in order to make England a mighty seapower, and in order to expand maritime trade, the nation’s ports needed to be updated and improved and a campaign of shipbuilding had to be undertaken.  And to improve its ports and build more ships England needed more money.

In 1567, thanks in large part to foreign policy spending and to a lavish lifestyle at home, the government of Queen Elizabeth I was deeply in debt.  Dutch creditors, from whom the English had raised funds in the recent past for expenditures, would now only loan money to England at a then exorbitant fourteen percent interest rate!  Borrowing money to pay for a navy was simply out of the question.

And oddly enough, both Elizabeth and Cecil knew, that they couldn’t ask Parliament to pass a tax increase, because for some odd reason, at that time Parliament took extreme pride in the fact that the English people were the lowest taxed people in all of Europe and Parliament generally only passed tax increases in times of war.  The Queen could only get funding through a tax increase if England actually was invaded not to prevent England from being invaded by preemptively building a strong naval infrastructure.

Cecil was reported to have often said that, “Lack of money is the principal sickness at court.”

But fervently desiring to strengthen the Royal Navy, and with tensions between England and Spain rising by the day, William Cecil frantically set about thinking of new ways to raise money and protect the Queen from imminent invasion.

As luck would have it, one day, William Cecil overheard some London merchants talking about lotteries that had recently been held in the Dutch cities of Antwerp, Utrecht, Ghent and Bruges.  In these cities tickets had been sold to citizens, and a lottery awarding a grand prize to a single winner had been held to help finance improvements to the fortifications surrounding the cities.

After further quizzing the merchants who had travelled to these Dutch ports to gain more information the idea for England’s first National Lottery was born.

However, when Cecil first proposed the idea of a “National Lottery” to the Queen, Elizabeth was not impressed.  Not wishing, as a woman, to appear weak before her subjects, Queen Elizabeth believed that by holding a “Lotterie Generall” she would appear to be pandering to the riffraff of society in a desperate attempt to raise money for the Crown.

It took much persuasion and charm on the part of William Cecil to convince the Queen in August of 1567 to hold a National Lottery, and it was Elizabeth who would only accept a lottery at all if the price of a ticket was set at the aristocratically suitably high price of ten shillings.

Queen Elizabeth I

In her Proclamation of August 23, 1567 Queen Elizabeth stated that, “Proceeds from the Lotterie Generall were for the reparation of havens (harbors) and strength of the realme towards other such publique goode workes.”

In the wake of the Queen’s Proclamation it was hoped that 400,000 lottery tickets would be sold and that a profit of 100,000 Pounds would be made for harbor repairs and the building of ships.  The plan was to give 370,000 of the expected 400,000 entrants at least half a crown, or approximately 25% of their original bet back, while 30,000 entrants would earn prizes valued at greater than ten shillings.  The rest of the money would be kept as profit by Cecil and Elizabeth and used to strengthen the Royal Navy.

The only problem is that the Lotterie Generall proved to be wildly unpopular!  Most of the general public simply didn’t trust the lottery.  

Tickets for the Lotterie General went on sale all across major cities in England, Scotland and even Ireland on August 24, 1567.  Elizabeth dispatched 3,500 Merchant Adventurers to towns and cities all over the realm to generate ticket sales and stir up excitement for the upcoming lottery, but the public’s reaction remained lukewarm at best.

Tickets for the Lotterie Generall were on sale from August 24, 1567  until May 1, 1568, but there was so much confusion about when the actual drawing would be held that the Lord Mayor of London had to issue his own proclamation stating that the, “drawing will be held no later than June of 1568 without very great and urgent cause.”

But the Lord Mayor of London proved to be wrong.

Queen Elizabeth ordered the drawing to be put off many times in a repeated effort to sell the hoped for 400,000 tickets.

Part of the public's disillusionment with the lottery came from the fact that people at Elizabeth’s own court had leaked out that the Queen wished to sell nearly a half a million lottery tickets.  Critics quickly figured out that an entrant's chance of winning a prize more valuable than the actual entry fee was about 1 in 16,000.  Today, we are a society conditioned to gambling and taking risks with long odds, but in Elizabethan England, in a society where many things were still done on a barter system of goods and services, the idea of spending so much money on a game of chance was both alien and ungodly to many.

But ungodly, or not, the drawing of the Lotterie Generall went forward.  Elizabeth decided, in one last ditch effort to raise even more funds, to hold a carnival of sorts on the first day of the drawing.

On January 11, 1569 amidst a circus-like atmosphere and the blaring of trumpets the drawing of the winners of Queen Elizabeth’s Lotterie Generall began in a wooden house constructed especially for that purpose in front of the old St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Old St. Paul's Cathedral in the 1500's

Inside the Cathedral money lenders chased last minute fraudulent ticket sales, food and souvenir vendors hawked their wares.  The ale flowed water and prostitutes did a brisk business.  On the day of the drawing there were large crowds and drunken brawls outside the drawing house and much anticipation and excitement.  After all, the lottery had been over a year and a half in the making!

Little did the assembled crowd that came to witness this event outside St. Paul’s Cathedral on January 11, 1569 know, but the drawing would, in fact, continue until the end of May 1569!

About 35,000 of the expected 400,000 printed tickets had actually been sold, so that the first thing officials had to do was figure out the math required to cut the expected prizes down to about 1/8th their originally declared value.

Also, the way that the lottery worked, in theory, was that people would purchase a ticket and then write their name and address on that ticket so that they could be contacted by royal officials if they won.  However, many people wishing to remain anonymous, had simply written either their initials, or a biblical quote on their individually numbered entry slip and forgone writing an address down at all!

In fact one winner, a man named Thomas Watson who was the holder of a ticket number that is unrecorded simply wrote, “The head of a snake is garlic with good meat,” whatever that meant.

Another winner, William Sientlinger who purchased ticket number 230,364 wrote, “In God I hope and a fart for the Pope!”  Maybe the idea of a lottery simply violated William Sientlinger’s Protest ethos, but if so..why did he buy a ticket in the first place?!

In the end, after a drawing that dragged on for nearly half a year, a first prize winner for Queen Elizabeth’s Lotterie Generall was declared, but unfortunately, that person’s identity has been lost to history.

An Early Lottery Ticket Similar to that Used in 1567

Almost everything about Queen Elizabeth I’s Lotterie Generall of 1567 proved to be a failure.  The lottery did not raise enough money to improve any ports or to build any new ships.  Sir William Cecil did eventually raise the money he wanted, but to do that, he had to go on bended knee to London’s wealthy merchants and beg for a loan in return for many political concessions.

Not surprisingly, Queen Elizabeth would never hold another major lottery and for a few hundred years, national lotteries in general remained pretty unpopular.  Perhaps,  Queen Elizabeth I and Sir William Cecil ruined the idea of national lotteries for hundreds of years, or perhaps, Queen Elizabeth and Sir William were visionaries who were centuries ahead of their time.

Just like the name of the grand prize winner of the Lotterie Generall of 1567 the answer to that question remains lost to history...