Eclipse (8 page)

S
UNDAY
, 1
APRIL
1764 was a grey day in London. The cloudiness was disappointing, as it obscured a rare astronomical event that had not been visible from southern England for more than a hundred years: an annular eclipse of the sun. One amateur enthusiast rose early to get to a vantage point on Hampstead Heath, taking various smoked glasses with him, but soon realized that the phenomenon would fail to achieve its proper impact. He abandoned the glasses, and resorted to the homespun device of a wafer with a pinhole, sandwiched between two pieces of white paper. At 10.32 a.m., he observed despondently, the moon was at its central point in its path across the sun, but ‘wanted many degrees of being annular'.
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He looked with envy towards the north-west, where the land appeared to be in much greater shadow. Still, as he noted in his letter to the press, he did get the eerie thrill of experiencing a significant drop in temperature.

Unlike total eclipses, annular eclipses do not obscure the entire sun, but leave visible a ring of sunlight around the intervening moon.
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A correspondent for the
London Chronicle
in March 1764 had offered advance counsel for those suffering ‘fears and apprehensions at so awful a sight. It will be very commendable in them to think at that time of the Almighty creator and Governor of the Universe.' There were no such fears for their royal highnesses Prince William Henry and Prince Henry Frederick (the sons of the Duke of Cumberland's late older brother; Henry Frederick was to inherit Cumberland's title, as well as his Turf enthusiasms) who were guests at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and behaved ‘with the most remarkable condescension and affability'. The princes concluded, perhaps on taking expert advice, that the predictions of the extent of the eclipse by the astronomer Mr Witchell had been only one tenth of a digit awry. They offered him ‘their approbation'.

To the west, the paddock below the tower at Cranbourne Lodge in Berkshire lay in greater darkness. While the sun was obscured, did Spilletta give birth to a foal with a white blaze and a white off hind leg? So we like to believe. Or did the Duke of Cumberland, the foal's owner, simply appropriate the name of an event that had taken place during the same season? Or perhaps the birth was at the time of the lunar eclipse earlier that year, on 17 March? There is no contemporary record to tell us, although Cranbourne Lodge does have a later monument, commissioned by Cumberland's successor as Ranger of Windsor Great Park, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, stating that the paddock below the tower was Eclipse's birthplace. The horse was unlikely ever to have been stabled, as one story has it, in Newham in East London, although he is commemorated in the area with an Eclipse Road and a Cumberland Road. Still less likely is it that Eclipse entered the world at what the racing writer Sir Walter Gilbey described as ‘the Duke of Cumberland's stud farm on the Isle of Dogs'.

The Royal Stud Book has no birth record, but it does contain a race entry for the new arrival. Following what was common practice at the time, when owners regularly offered such hostages
to fortune, Cumberland paid 100 guineas to enter the son of Marske and Spilletta in a match to take place four years later at Newmarket, against horses owned by the Duke of Grafton, Lord Rockingham, Lord Bolingbroke, Lord Gower, Lord Orford and Mr Jenison Shafto. A note of the match also appeared in the 1764
Racing Calendar
. The Stud Book record says that the colt is ‘[By] Mask [
sic
– spellings in the eighteenth century were erratic], out of Spilletta a chestnut colt, with a bald face, and the off hind leg, white up to the hock'.

These notes are the best evidence we have to solve one of the enduring mysteries in racing. When Eclipse became the most famous racehorse in the land, rumours began to circulate that his pedigree was fraudulent. His real father, some said, was not Marske but a stallion called Shakespeare. A painting by J. N. (John Nost) Sartorius showed Shakespeare and Eclipse together – though, to my inexpert eye at least, it is hard to spot the implied likeness between the bulky stallion and the fine-boned racehorse. John Lawrence, an equestrian writer who had seen Eclipse in the flesh, was told by Dennis O'Kelly's groom that Shakespeare, as well as Marske, had covered Spilletta in 1763; others told Lawrence that this double covering was ‘well-known fact', and hinted that bribery had taken place to ensure that Shakespeare be expunged from the story. The connections of Marske, sceptics hinted, had a great deal to gain by promoting their horse as Eclipse's father. Lawrence himself observed that Eclipse ‘strongly resembled' members of Shakespeare's family.

Shakespeare was a good horse, the winner of two King's Plates, and would certainly have been a worthy mate for a mare of Cumberland's. But in 1763 he was standing as a stallion in Catterick. Would Cumberland – or rather, his stable staff – have walked Spilletta from Windsor to North Yorkshire for an assignation?

The following year, Shakespeare moved to stables belonging to Josiah Cook at Epsom in Surrey, near to where Eclipse would
be stabled; he was advertised as ‘15 hands 2 inches high, very strong, healthful, and as well as any horse in England; as to his performances tis needless to mention them here, he was so well known in his time of running to be the best running horse in England'. Perhaps the attempted deception was not by the connections of Marske, but by members of the Surrey racing fraternity? There was certainly no reason – unless he made a mistake – for the Duke of Cumberland, ignorant as he was of the astonishing potential of his colt, to enter a false parentage in his stud book. O'Kelly's groom told John Lawrence the Shakespeare version, but a certain Mr Sandiver of Newmarket, citing the authority of Cumberland's groom, assured him that it was nonsense.

The question, as Lawrence concluded, is of real significance only to those concerned with the accuracy of Thoroughbred records. Parentage by Shakespeare would not devalue Eclipse's pedigree. It is Eclipse, the supreme racer and progenitor, who defines the value of the pedigree.
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Just over a year after Eclipse's birth, Cumberland was dead. The royal racing stable and stud went to auction, and at the 23 December sale of the Cranbourne Lodge stud the chestnut colt (or chesnut, as was the usual spelling) was again ascribed to Marske (the description of lot 29 was ‘A chesnut Colt, got by Mask …').
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The bidder with the most determination to get him was William Wildman.

Described as a butcher in his marriage record of 1741, William Wildman (born in 1718) was not a retailer but a livestock middleman, operating as a grazier and as a salesman at Smithfield, the largest cattle market in the world. His business, which turned over
between £40, 000 and £70, 000 a year, was solid, as was he: he sat on parish committees, and supported charities. And, thanks no doubt to his contacts with the sporting landowners whose cattle he sold, he became a man of the Turf. He leased a stud farm, Gibbons Grove,
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at Mickleham, about ten miles from Epsom. A substantial place, it consisted of 220 acres, a farmhouse sporting a clock tower and parapet, and stabling for sixty horses.

This prosperity notwithstanding, Wildman was a lowlier person than was the norm among leading racehorse owners in the mid-eighteenth century. Yet he achieved a feat that almost all his illustrious competitors failed to match: he attained ownership of three outstanding Thoroughbreds. One gets the impression of a man who was decent, determined and energetic, but essentially cautious. Having acquired these horses, he sold them all.

The first of them was Gimcrack. Commemorated each August by the Gimcrack Stakes at York, Gimcrack was a grey horse no bigger than a pony. Wildman bought him in 1763, for about £35.At first he thought he had made a bad deal, and offered, unsuccessfully, to offload his acquisition for fifteen guineas (or £15 15s). But then Gimcrack started racing. He won seven times in 1764 (when the
Racing Calendar
placed him in the ownership of a Mr Green, who makes no further appearances in any volume). He also won his first race in 1765, a £50 plate at Newmarket, before Wildman, taking a course he was to repeat with Eclipse, sold him. Gimcrack went to Lord Bolingbroke, a prolific racehorse owner and ferocious gambler, for 800 guineas, and was to continue to shuttle between owners. He moved next to Sir Charles Bunbury, whose wife Sarah (née Lennox, and later to elope with Lord William Gordon, an army officer) described him (Gimcrack, not Bunbury) as ‘the sweetest little horse that ever was'; then to the Comte de Lauraguais, for whom he won a wager by covering twenty-two miles in an hour; and then to Lord Grosvenor. He
retired to stud at the age of eleven in 1771, having won twenty-six of thirty-six races.

Another reward of Wildman's prosperity was his commissions from George Stubbs, Britain's greatest equestrian artist – and, you might argue, one of the greatest British artists in any genre. Stubbs painted
Gimcrack with John Pratt Up
for Wildman, showing Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath. Horse and jockey are next to the Beacon Course rubbing-house, where horses were saddled and otherwise groomed, and where Stubbs would later set his most celebrated painting of Eclipse. Gimcrack shows only a grey sheen on his coat, which whitened as he got older; he and his jockey are turning their heads in the same direction, with the lonely look that athletes assume on contemplating exertions to come. The picture hangs in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. A subsequent Stubbs portrait of Gimcrack, one of the painter's best, has the narrative technique you sometimes see in early religious paintings, with different parts of the story appearing on different parts of the canvas: in the background, Gimcrack races several lengths clear of his rivals;
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in the foreground, he is at the rubbing-house, with his jockey dismounted and two stable lads attending to him. (A version of
Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, with a Trainer, Jockey and a Stable-Lad
is in the Jockey Club Rooms at Newmarket.)

Wildman, then, was well in profit on his recent racing transactions when he turned up at Cranbourne Lodge on 23 December 1765, looking to buy inmates of the late Duke of Cumberland's stud.

Eclipse's early life comes to us as legend. Accounts of his birth, his sale, his training, his first race – these, like a good many of the stories about Dennis O'Kelly and Charlotte Hayes, have the flavour of anecdotes that have gained embellishments with circulation. At some point, a historian has written them down. Subsequent
historians have repeated them. We might be tempted to accuse eighteenth-century chroniclers of lax standards, had we reason to be complacent about our own regard for historical accuracy and truthfulness. Nevertheless, given the inclination, twenty-firstcentury reporters can try to gain access to people with memories of actual events, and they have a great deal more documentation to examine. Documentation on Eclipse's connections is sparse, and laconic. In only a few instances are there records to provide correctives to widely published accounts. One of these instances is the Cumberland dispersal sale.

The story goes that William Wildman arrived at Cranbourne Lodge late. Eclipse, his sole reason for attending, had gone through the ring and been claimed by someone else. Brandishing his watch (‘of trusty workmanship'),
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Wildman proclaimed to the auctioneer and assembled bidders that the sale had taken place before the advertised hour, and that every lot should be put up again. John Pond, who was in charge of proceedings, did not fancy doing this; so, to try to pacify the awkward customer, he offered him a lot of Wildman's choosing. This was exactly the compromise Wildman had been angling for. He chose the colt with the white blaze, and paid, according to the first published version of these events, seventy or seventy-five guineas.

It is a nice anecdote, but is it accurate? Wildman may well have missed the start of the auction: one advertisement stated that the proceedings would begin at 10 a.m., while another gave the starting time as 11 a.m. It is very likely that he was aiming particularly to buy the Marske yearling.
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The advice to do so may have come from Lord Bolingbroke, to whom Wildman had sold
Gimcrack; the connection between the two is suggested by the Stubbs portrait, which shows Gimcrack in Wildman's ownership but with Bolingbroke's jockey, John Pratt, on his back. Bolingbroke was at the sale too, of course: he bought Marske, for twenty-six guineas. But Wildman made bids for other horses. He bought a nutmeg-grey colt by (sired by) Moro, for forty-five guineas, and a bay foal by Bazajet, for six. We know of these transactions because the sale document survives; it is in the possession of the Royal Veterinary College. It is that document that tells us Eclipse was the twenty-ninth lot to come under the hammer that day, and that his price was not seventy or seventy-five guineas, but forty-five. The sale raised 1, 663½ guineas in total.

To recap: the legends we have questioned or dismissed so far in this chapter are that Eclipse was born on the day of the 1764 annular eclipse; that his father was Shakespeare, not Marske; that he was born or was stabled in East London; that William Wildman bought him alone at the Cumberland dispersal sale; and that Wildman paid seventy or seventy-five guineas for him. There is another to consider: that the auction was conducted by Richard Tattersall. Then a thrusting young man at the start of his career, Tattersall, who came from a modest background in Lancashire, went on to found, in 1766, the firm of Tattersalls (without an apostrophe), which soon became, and remains today, the largest bloodstock auctioneers in Europe. He also went on to buy, from Lord Bolingbroke, the champion racer Highflyer (a son of Cumberland's great horse Herod), and created numerous further champions by mating Highflyer with daughters of Eclipse. Reports cited Tattersall as one of the promoters of the rumour that Shakespeare was Eclipse's sire. His motive for doing so is obscure. One can see, though, why he was credited with involvement in what was, in hindsight, the most significant bloodstock sale of the era. But there is no evidence that he was anywhere near it. Certainly the advertisements for the sale mention only John Pond. *
We have now met the four most important people in Eclipse's life: a gambler from a humble background in Ireland; a prostitute from Covent Garden; a royal prince; and a prosperous representative of the middle classes. The most famous of all Thoroughbreds is also the most representative of horseracing, the example of how a highly bred animal with a regal background can nevertheless bring into proximity disparate members of society. Racing is still thought of as a toffs' pursuit, yet it offers more varied material for the social historian than any other sport.