Eclipse (10 page)

The horse known as the Byerley Turk may not have been a spoil, as the early histories relate, of the Siege of Buda (1686), because recent research suggests that Colonel Robert Byerley of the Sixth Dragoon Guards was not there. The Turk may rather have been captured at the Siege of Vienna (1683) – the ‘browne' horse, the least valuable among three Vienna captives, that John Evelyn saw parade in St James's Park in 1684:‘They trotted like does as if they did not feel the ground. Five hundred guineas was demanded for the first; 300 for the second and 200 for the third, which was browne. All of them were choicely shaped but the last two not altogether so perfect as the first. It was judged by the spectators among whom was the King, the Prince of Denmark, Duke of York and several of the Court … that there were never seen any horses in these parts to be compared with them.'

Colonel Byerley certainly owned the Turk by 1689, when he took him to Ireland. In spring 1690, they won a silver bell at a meeting held by the Down Royal Corporation of Horsebreeders. That July, Byerley fought at the Battle of the Boyne against the Jacobite forces of the deposed James II, riding the Turk on reconnaissance missions and narrowly escaping capture thanks to the horse's speed. After his side's victory, Byerley returned to England, retired from the army, married, sat as the MP for Knaresborough in Yorkshire, and put his horse to stud. Despite covering what historians consider to have been indifferent mares, the Byerley Turk established an enduring bloodline. He is the great-great-grandfather of the Duke of Cumberland's
Herod. And he appears three times in the pedigree of Eclipse.
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The second of the three lauded founding fathers of the new breed was by repute a pure-bred Arabian. He was descended on his mother's side – for Arabs,
this
is the important part of the pedigree – from a mare called the Mare of the Old Woman.
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While few Englishmen at this time were bothering with the pedigrees of their horses, the Arabs had long been punctilious about them. The Duke of Newcastle wrote, ‘The Arabs are as careful and diligent in keeping the genealogies of their horses, as any princes can be in keeping any of their own pedigrees.' Giving false testimony about a horse's background would bring ruin on oneself and one's family.

We have to assume, then, that the patter given to Thomas Darley, a merchant and British Consul in Aleppo, was genuine. Darley bought his Arabian from Sheikh Mirza II in 1702, and in a letter to his brother a year later described the horse's three white feet and emblazoned face, adding that he was ‘of the most esteemed race among the Arabs both by sire and dam … I believe he will not be much disliked; for he is highly esteemed here, where I could have sold him at a very considerable price, if I had not designed him for England'. The problem was that the War of the Spanish Succession was raging, and Darley was having trouble securing a sea passage for his purchase, although he was hopeful that his friend Henry Brydges, son of Lord Chandos, would be able to take the horse with him on board a ship called the
Ipswich
. Then another problem emerged: the Sheikh changed his mind about the sale. Nevertheless, Brydges made off with the Arabian, who arrived in England at roughly the same time as a letter from the Sheikh to Queen Anne furiously alleging that his possession
had been ‘foully stolen'. The protests had no effect. The Darley Arabian stood at the family estate, Aldby Park near York, until his death in 1730.

Like the Byerley Turk, the Darley Arabian covered mostly unexceptional mares. One of the few good ones was called Betty Leedes, owned by Leonard Childers – pronounced with a short ‘i', not as in ‘child' – of Cantley Hall, Doncaster. Betty Leedes returned to her paddock in Doncaster, and eleven months later gave birth to ‘the fleetest horse that ever ran at Newmarket, or, as generally believed, the world', Flying Childers. Here was the horse that demonstrated what this new breed, the descendants of Eastern stallions on British soil, could do. His portrait by James Seymour shows a prancing, compact, muscular colt, of a type we would assess as a sprinter. But Flying Childers had to race over long distances. In a match against two horses called Almanza and Brown Betty at Newmarket, he was reported to have completed the three-and-three-quarter-mile Round Course in six minutes and forty-eight seconds – about a minute faster than par. He later ran the four miles-plus Beacon Course at Newmarket in seven and a half minutes, ‘covering 25 feet at every bound'. These reports come from the early 1720s, before the publication of John Cheny's first racing calendar (an authoritative record of race results), and may be exaggerated; but we do know that Flying Childers beat Fox, one of the best racers of the day and a winner of three King's Plates, by a quarter of a mile, despite carrying a stone more on his back than did his rival.

By this time, Flying Childers had passed from Leonard Childers's hands to the Duke of Devonshire, and he retired to the Duke's stud at Chatsworth. However, the best racehorses do not necessarily become the best stallions.
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Flying Childers sired some
good horses, but his younger brother, who never raced, sired more, and continued the male line that dominates the bloodstock industry today. Bartlett's Childers, also known as Bleeding Childers because he would break blood vessels in hard exercise, sired Squirt, who sired Marske, who sired Eclipse.

On the maternal side of Eclipse's pedigree is the third of these famous stallions, the one with the most colourful story of all – although some of the colour may be the result of artful tinkering. The Godolphin Arabian was foaled in the Yemen in the mid-1720s, exported to Tunis, and given as a present by the Bey (Governor) of Tunis to Louis XV of France. The horse failed to please the King, and had been reduced (legend has it) to pulling a water-cart through the streets of Paris when he was spotted by a man called Edward Coke, who paid £3 for him. Coke returned to England, but did not enjoy the company of his acquisition for long, dying at the age of only thirty-two. The horse then passed to Francis, the second Earl of Godolphin. The Godolphins were a racing family. Of the first Earl, a prominent politician who died in 1732, it had been said, ‘His passion for horse racing, cock-fighting, and card-playing, was, indeed, notorious, but it was equally notorious that he was seldom a loser by his betting transactions, which he conducted with all the cool calculation and wariness of a professional blackleg.'

The indignity of pulling a water-cart may have been in his past, but there were further indignities for the Arabian at the Godolphin stud at Gog Magog in Cambridgeshire. He was employed as a ‘teaser', the horse with the job – it remains an important though unglamorous role in the breeding industry today – of perking up a mare before the main man, the stallion, came along. The main man at Gog Magog was Hobgoblin, a grandson of the Darley Arabian. But when Hobgoblin met a mare called Roxana, he decided that he did not fancy her. So the Godolphin Arabian, no doubt gratefully, covered her instead, and Roxana duly gave birth to Lath, the best racehorse since Flying Childers.
The parents, having hit it off, met again, this time producing Cade – not as good a racehorse, but the sire of the outstanding Matchem, through whom the Godolphin Arabian male line continues to the present. The Godolphin Arabian also got (sired), this time with a mare called Grey Robinson, Regulus, who won eight royal plates and retired undefeated to stud. There, with a mare called Mother Western, he sired Spilletta – Eclipse's mother.
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Later, in about 1793, George Stubbs painted the Godolphin Arabian, working from an original by David Morier. In the background, next to the barn, is the Godolphin Arabian's friend, Grimalkin the cat. There are various stories about Grimalkin; again, you can take your pick. One is that when the Godolphin Arabian died, in 1753, Grimalkin placed herself on his carcass, followed the body to the burial ground, and after the interment crawled miserably away, never to reappear until found dead in the hay loft. Another version, even sadder, is that the Godolphin Arabian accidentally crushed Grimalkin; furious with grief, the horse would attempt to savage any other cat that came across his path.

The horse in Stubbs's portrait has the thick neck characteristic of a horse at stud, to an exaggerated extent: his crest – the top of his neck – is so high and convex that his back appears to begin halfway between his legs. What kind of horse is he? Some equestrian writers think that he resembles a Barb, a breed of horse from North Africa, and indeed he has been known as the Godolphin Barb.

Is every contemporary racehorse descended, in male line, from a stallion of one of three different breeds, or were the Byerley Turk, the Darley Arabian and the Godolphin Arabian all in fact, as some historians have argued, Arabs? We cannot be sure. The early owners applied the terms ‘Turk', ‘Arab' and ‘Barb' with
little concern for breeding; they meant only a horse of Eastern blood.

Eastern horses were not renowned racers, and of these three, only the Byerley Turk, with his cup at Down Royal, saw a racecourse. Why, then, did the early breeders – grandees and substantial landowners, largely based in Yorkshire – import them? They did so because they esteemed Eastern horses for a quality known as ‘prepotency': the ability to breed true to type, and to maximize in their offspring the attributes of the mares with whom they mated. The theory worked too, getting its most spectacular early demonstration in the career of the Darley Arabian's son Flying Childers.

In the years following the Restoration and in the early years of the eighteenth century, these breeders imported some two hundred stallions who were to appear in the first
General Stud Book
of 1791. Examination of pedigrees shows that the Byerley Turk, the Darley Arabian and the Godolphin Arabian should not get all the credit, and that many others made significant contributions, even though their male lines expired. You can easily see, for example, the influence of Alcock's Arabian: he was grey, and appears in the pedigrees of every grey Thoroughbred.
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And of course half of the credit is due to the early mares, although, as is so often the case with females in history, they are obscure figures, many of them nameless. It seems that they, too, had a good deal of Eastern blood; how high a proportion is a contentious matter. At the end of the bottom, maternal line of Eclipse's pedigree is a mysterious ‘Royal mare'.
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What we do know is that the Thoroughbred, this cross of
Eastern stallions with English mares, transcended its parentage. In the century when the English refined the rules of cricket, and a century before they compiled the rules of football and rugby, they created a new breed of sporting horse, a racer that was bigger, more powerful, and faster.
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Soon after, Thoroughbreds emigrated and founded dynasties in every horseracing country.

Flying Childers had shown what this new breed could do. But Eclipse became the horse who, in his own time and ever since, represented the Thoroughbred's abilities
in excelsis

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The croup is the highest point of a horse's hind quarters. The withers are at the base of the neck above the shoulders.

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Transportees at this time were usually sent to Maryland or Virginia.

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Oakley has probably ignored the pre-exercise tip of Gervase Markham: ‘Then do yourself piss in your horse's mouth, which will give him occasion to work and ride with pleasure.' (From
How to Choose, Ride, Train and Diet, Both Hunting-Horses and Running Horses
, 1599).

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The equestrian expert John Lawrence, writing in the early nineteenth century, thought that oats and hay were a sufficient diet for racehorses. Gervase Markham had recommended also bread, malt and water mash, and the occasional raw egg; and from time to time, Markham said, you should season the horse's meal with aniseed or mustard seed.

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The temptation for present-day stable staff is to spend their free time in betting shops.

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Taking care not to ‘overcook' a horse is one of the key skills of the modern trainer. In particular, the trainer does not put a horse through vigorous exercise too close to a race. As I write, one of the favourites for a sprint race at Royal Ascot, ten days away, has had his last serious gallop. He will gallop again in five days, but will not be asked to stretch himself.

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He appears once eight generations back in Eclipse's pedigree, and twice nine generations back. The formula to describe this inbreeding is 8 [H11003] 9 [H11003] 9.

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Both sides of the family belonged to the valued strain called, in Darley's spelling, Manicha (also sometimes Managhi).

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For example, Brigadier Gerard, rated by John Randall and Tony Morris in
A Century of Champions
as the best British horse of the twentieth century, achieved little success at stud.

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But see Appendix 2.

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A grey horse must have a grey parent, of either sex.

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Only about twenty foundation mares feature widely in contemporary Thoroughbred pedigrees. At one time, it was said that the ‘royal mares' were imported during the reign of Charles II. Now it is thought more likely that most of them lived at the Sedbury stud of James Darcy, who employed them to breed ‘12 extraordinary good colts' each year for the King.

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I am told that Arabs are gentle creatures. Thoroughbreds tend to be less amiable, and more highly strung.