Eclipse (7 page)

The doomed Charles I (1625 to 1649) maintained these lavish standards. ‘There were daily in his court 86 tables, well furnished [with 500 dishes] each meal, ' an observer noted. Regular spring and autumn race meetings began at Newmarket in 1627. In 1647, Charles was held captive in the town before being moved to various other locations, and eventually to the scaffold.

Emphasizing the royalist nature of racing, Oliver Cromwell's republican government banned it. However, race meetings resumed, and flourished as never before, under Charles II (1660 to 1685). Or, as Alexander Pope put it,

Then Peers grew proud in Horsemanship t'excell,
Newmarket's Glory rose, as Britain's fell.
²⁵

Having established the Newmarket Town Plate, the new King first visited the town in 1666, bought a house there two years later, and, with the previous palace in disrepair, expanded his property to become a new home for himself and his court. His various
mistresses, Nell Gwynn among them, lodged nearby. Charles conducted sporting, state and amorous affairs during two extended visits each year, coinciding with the spring and autumn meetings. Everyone had a gay time, as the diarist John Evelyn recorded: ‘I found the jolly blades racing, dancing, feasting, and revelling, more resembling a luxurious and abandon'd rout, than a Christian court.' An accomplished horseman, Charles would sometimes ride races himself, and win – entirely on merit, according to the courtier Sir Robert Carr. ‘I do assure you the King won by good horsemanship, ' Sir Robert insisted. Charles rode about the town on his hack, Old Rowley. The name came to be applied to him, and later to the Rowley Mile course.

William III (1689 to 1702) owned a horse with the proud name of Stiff Dick. In a celebrated match in 1698, Stiff Dick defeated the Marquess of Wharton's Careless, hitherto considered invincible. William's sister-in-law and successor, Queen Anne (1702 to 1714), was one of the most enthusiastic of all racing monarchs, and founded the racecourse at Ascot. (The Queen Anne Stakes is run on the first day of the Royal Meeting.) Anne was pregnant eighteen times, suffered numerous miscarriages and stillbirths, and saw no child live beyond the age of eleven. She consoled herself with horses and food. The two pursuits proved incompatible: she grew too heavy for any horse to carry, but she continued to ride to hounds in a specially constructed horsedrawn carriage. Following her death, an ungallant vicechamberlain noted that her coffin was ‘almost square'.

George I (1714 to 1727) and George II (1727 to 1760) took little interest in the Turf. But Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, did. In addition to military affairs, Cumberland's great enthusiasms were gambling, hunting and racing. As a boy, he would play cards with the ladies of the bedchamber, winning or losing up to £100 in an evening. His appointment on returning from Culloden as Ranger of Windsor Great Park, where he employed demobilized soldiers to construct the lake known as
Virginia Water, gave him a base from which to develop all three pursuits. The park contained 1, 200 red deer, which Cumberland and his guests would hunt on Tuesdays and Saturdays, those present at the kills qualifying for tickets that entitled them to enter their horses for certain races at Ascot (the fortunes of which, moribund since Anne's death, revived under his patronage). During lulls in the hunt, Cumberland and friends such as the Earl of Sandwich – he who liked to snack while working at the Admiralty on a piece of meat between two slices of bread – would get out their dice. Members of the public, who previously had entered the park to collect firewood, were barred, on the grounds that they would disturb the deer that the royal parties wished to pursue. It was an unpopular edict.

William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland
by George Townshend. Horses of this era had to put up with a number of notably fat men, among them Cumberland, Dennis O'Kelly and the future George IV.

From his base at Cumberland Lodge, the Duke began to develop the Windsor Forest Stud, at nearby Cranbourne Lodge. In 1750, he acquired a brown horse from a Yorkshireman called John Hutton in exchange for a chestnut, and named the new arrival Marske.
²⁶
It did not appear to be a momentous deal: Marske's sire, Squirt, had at one time been considered so worthless that he was saved from execution at Sir Harry Harpur's stable only as a result of a groom's pleading. Marske himself turned out to be a good, but not outstanding, racer. As a four-year-old he won a 100-guinea plate at Newmarket in the spring, and a 200-guinea match against Lord Trentham's Ginger in the autumn. He had just one race the following year, and came third. In 1756, he lost two expensive matches worth 1, 000 guineas each to the Earl of Sandwich's Snap, one of the fastest horses of the day. He may have got injured after that, as in October he failed to keep a date to race against Thomas Panton's Spectator, with Cumberland paying a forfeit. Instead, Marske went to stud. This second career did not prove illustrious either, and by the time of Cumberland's death in 1765 Marske was commanding a covering fee – the fee that
breeders would pay for their mares to mate with him – of only half a guinea.

Another purchase, from Sir Robert Eden in Durham, was a chestnut filly called Spilletta. She, too, saw the racecourse for the first time at the 1754 Newmarket spring meeting. Against three opponents, she finished last, and that was the end of her racing career. She retired to stud, where she also failed to shine. By 1763, she had produced only one foal.

Marske and Spilletta – not, from a breeder's point of view, a marriage made in heaven – mated in 1760, without issue. Three years later, they gave it another go. This time, Spilletta became pregnant.

Cumberland, meanwhile, was pursuing his own pleasures. Unlike current members of the royal family, he would travel about with substantial amounts of cash, a lot of which ended up in the pockets of Dennis O'Kelly, Dick England and their fellow gamblers. When someone came up to him with a pocket book he had lost at the races, he insisted that the finder keep it, even though it contained several hundred pounds. ‘I am only glad that it has fallen into such good hands, ' Cumberland said, ‘for if I had not lost it as I did, its contents would now have been scattered among the blacklegs of Newmarket.' After his death, a soldier in his employment gained permission to wear one of his suits as mourning clothes, and found a concealed pocket containing banknotes to the value of £1, 751. But Cumberland also gave away his money to more worthy recipients, donating £6, 000 a year to charities.

His increasing disability as a result of the wound he had received at Dettingen, and his prodigious weight (thought to have been up to twenty stone), did not blunt his taste for high living.
²⁷
But his health deteriorated. He required regular medical
attention; during one operation, he held a candle to assist the surgeon hacking away at abscesses in the wounded leg. His father, George II, died in 1760 (he was on the lavatory at the time), repenting that he had treated Cumberland harshly and acknowledging him as ‘the best son who ever lived'. At George's funeral, Cumberland, who had suffered a stroke, cut a sorry figure. According to the report of Horace Walpole, ‘The real serious part was the figure of the Duke of Cumberland … his leg extremely bad, yet forced to stand upon it near two hours; his face bloated and distorted with his late paralytic stroke, which has affected, too, one of his eyes; and placed over the mouth of the vault into which in all probability he must himself so soon descend; think how unpleasant a situation! He bore it all with a firm and unaffected countenance … sinking with the heat, he felt himself weighed down, and turning round found it was the Duke of Newcastle standing on his train to avoid the chill of the marble.'

Cumberland was, however, enjoying some success on the Turf. In 1758, his mare Cypron had given birth to a foal named at first Dapper Tartar, later King Herod, and later still simply Herod. In a match at Newmarket in 1764, Herod met Antinous, owned by the Duke of Grafton. Both owners were formidable gamblers, and by the time the race got underway bets worth more than £100, 000 were depending on the outcome. Herod won. He defeated the same opponent again the following year, this time in a match worth 1, 000 guineas.

However, the thrill of betting huge sums of money at Newmarket on Herod's first match against Antinous may not have been what the doctor ordered. Cumberland suffered two fits, and was in such a bad way that the London papers announced his death. He recovered, but death was on his case. On 31 October 1765, he arrived home in Upper Grosvenor Street, London, and ordered coffee. When it arrived, he complained of a pain in his shoulder, and began shivering. The King's physician, Sir Charles Winteringham, was sent for. As physicians then were wont to do,
he advised bleeding.
²⁸
This treatment had no effect, of course, and Cumberland died soon after. He was forty-four.

‘When the melancholy news of the Duke of Cumberland's death reached Windsor, ' the
London Chronicle
reported, ‘it was received with the utmost concern by all ranks of people, and especially by the labourers on His Royal Highness's works, who cried out they had lost their greatest benefactor.' One is inclined to soften a little towards Butcher on reading this account. But the historian Theodore Cook, writing 140 years later, was unmoved: ‘To the common people he was invariably indifferent, and they were his sincerest mourners after he was dead.' Cumberland lay in state in the Painted Chamber at the Palace of Westminster, and on 10 November was buried, following a twenty-one-gun salute, in the royal vault at Westminster Abbey.

Cumberland left plate, pictures, furniture and other effects valued at £75, 000, as well as the most significant collection of bloodstock ever to be assembled. There were private sales (among them one for Spilletta, to the Duke of Ancaster), and two auctions. On 19 December, at Hyde Park Corner, the racehorses came under the hammer of John Pond. Herod fetched the largest sum, going to Sir John Moore for 500 guineas. The lots included another horse who will re-enter our story: Milksop, so named by Cumberland because he was nursed by hand, his dam (mother) having refused to suckle him.

On 23 December, Pond supervised the sale of the Cranbourne Lodge stud. Marske was lot number 3, knocked down to Lord Bolingbroke for twenty-six guineas. Several of Marske's offspring were also in the sale. One of them was lot 29, a chestnut yearling. The colt had a white blaze on his face and a white ‘stocking' – white colouring below the knee – on his off (right) hind leg. His name was Eclipse.

¹⁸
From Theodore Cook's
Eclipse and O'Kelly
(1907).

¹⁹
One report has Caroline on her deathbed reflecting unmaternally about Frederick:‘At least I shall have one comfort in having my eyes eternally closed. I shall never see that monster again.'

²⁰
Quoted in
Bred for the Purple
(1969) by Michael Seth-Smith.

²¹
We shall visit this scene again, because one of William's men, Colonel Robert Byerley, rode into battle on a horse who was to become one of the foundation sires of the Thoroughbred.

²²
Quoted in the
Dictionary of National Biography
.

²³
In the event of the King's death, the Regent would reign until the future George III came of age.

²⁴
Quoted in
Royal Thoroughbreds
(1990) by Arthur FitzGerald.

²⁵
Explaining these aberrant lines, the eighteenth-century racing writer B.Walker reassured his readers that Pope's jaundice stemmed from ‘an infirm state of health, a figure he was not thoroughly satisfied with, and in consequence an unsocial tendency to lead a recluse life, detached from those splendid meetings instituted in almost every country'. It was certainly impossible to imagine a well-adjusted person frowning on the sport so.

²⁶
After the Yorkshire town where Hutton lived.

²⁷
Horace Walpole observed him at a dinner party:‘He was playing at hazard with a great heap of gold before him. Somebody said he looked like the prodigal son and the fatted calf both.'

²⁸
Bleeding was based on the theory of the four humours: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood. The aim was to restore the humours to their proper balance.