Aubrey says he invented the game of cribbage and relates that his sisters came weeping to a bowling green at Piccadilly to dissuade him from play, lest he lose their portions.

It has been suggested that the incident, narrated at length in a letter of 10 November 1634 from George Garrard to Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, had something to do with his beginning to seek more serious society.

In 1635 he retired to his estates in obedience to an order of 20 June 1632 enforced by the Star Chamber against absentee landlordism, and employed his time in literary pursuits.

[6] Putnam's Monthly Magazine of American Literature states, At the breaking out of disturbances in 1639, when the Scottish Covenanters advanced to the English borders, many of the courtiers complimented the king, by raising forces at their own expense.

These gallant gentlemen vied with each other in the costly equipment of their forces, which led the king facetiously to remark, that "the Scots would fight stoutly, if only for the Englishmen's fine clothes."

In the action which ensued, the sturdy Scots were more than a match for the showy Englishmen; and among those who particularly distinguished themselves by their shabby behavior, was the splendid troop of Sir John Suckling.

[8] That winter Suckling wrote a letter to Henry Jermyn, afterwards Earl of St Albans, advising the king to disconcert the opposition leaders by making more concessions than they asked for.

In May the following year he was implicated in the First Army Plot, an attempt to rescue the Earl of Strafford from the Tower and bring in French troops to the king's aid.

Alexander Pope, writing in the next century, stated he had died on arriving in Calais, of fever from a wound in his foot caused by a nail having been driven into his boot by a servant who absconded with his money and papers.

[10] He was certainly in Paris in the summer of 1641, when on 3 July Sir Francis Windebanke wrote to his son that Parliament had stopped pensions it had been paying to himself, Suckling and Jermyn.

[6] According to Samuel Pepys's diary (23 January 1666/67), he was persuaded to see "the dancing preparatory to to-morrow for 'The Goblins,' a play of Suckling's, not acted these twenty-five years; which was pretty."

Among the best known of his minor pieces are the "Ballade upon a Wedding", for the marriage of Roger Boyle, afterwards Earl of Orrery, and Lady Margaret Howard, "I prithee, send me back my heart," "Out upon it, I have loved three whole days together," and "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?"