The A team of royal Guns

Diggory Hadoke reveals the eight royals he would include in an all-star shooting team

- Diggory Hadoke

Gunmakers have long touted their connections to royalty. Even the names they give their guns borrow from it, with old catalogues chock-a-block with Royal, Regal and Crown models. Indeed, fieldsports have long been a passion of British monarchs and their families. The New Forest was planted in 1079 as a hunting reserve for William I, so the king could indulge in his favourite sport of hunting deer.

Perhaps inadvertently, these royal hunting habits laid the foundations for the conservation of the environment at the expense of the needs of agriculture and human habitation.

Ancient kings valued forests teeming with deer at a time when, if left unchecked, the old story of habitat loss and poaching could quite easily have sent the native deer species the same way as the lynx, boar and wolf, all of which were extinct in mainland Britain by around 1700.

Instead, they have maintained some fabulous habitat, which has provided hunting and shooting grounds for generations of royal sportsmen from William the Conqueror to William, our future King. In between, shooting obsessed monarchies the world over have been customers of our best gun and rifle makers, seeking the very finest sporting kit with which to engage their preferred quarry.

If we were to construct a historic line of royal Guns for an all-star team, it might look like this.

1 Maharajah Duleep Singh and sons

The resident of Elveden on the Norfolk-Suffolk border, the last king of the Sikhs was brought to England as a 15-year-old. His sons Victor (pictured below, first on left) and Frederick were both fine Shots and took part in shooting the record bag of 10,807 partridges and 5,771 pheasants at Highclere in 1895.