Partial to tall horses, he expressed a wish that his nobles should not ride cobs, deeming such animals to be out of keeping with the majesty of the court.
It was probably for this reason that he strove to encourage his subjects to ride tall horses.
Then, though several historians appear to take it for granted that the Turkish horse was unknown in England until the arrival of the famous Byerley Turk in 1689, we may rest assured that Turkish horses were here in James's time, and probable before his time. Blunderville is only one of the early writers who say so in so many words. Incidentally he mentions that fully a century before the Byerley Turk was brought over he himself had seen “horses come from Turkey, as well into Italie as thither into England, indifferentlie faire to the eie, tho' not verie great nor stronglie made, yet very light and swift in their running, and of great courage.”
Also we read that about the year 1617 “half-a-dozen Barbry horses” were brought to England by Sir Thomas Edmonds and stabled at Newmarket in the royal paddocks.
A quaint description is to be found in the works of several of the writers in James I.'s reign of an accident that befell the king in December of the year 1621 as he was riding after dinner, an accident that in spite of its undeniable grotesqueness might well have proved disastrous.
The king, it seems, had “gone abroad early in the day, and to Theobald's to dinner.” He appears to have enjoyed his dinner at Theobald's greatly, and to have decided quite suddenly, as soon as the meal was over, that he would like “to ride on horseback abroad.”
The accident that presently was to occur is attributed by different writers to different causes, the most charitable of the reports being to the effect that the king's horse stumbled and threw his royal master on to the frozen surface of the New River “with so much violence that the ice brake and he fell in so that nothing but his boots were seen.”
Sir Richard Young, who chanced to be riding just behind him, instantly sprang off his horse and succeeded with the help of a friend, though only with great difficulty, in dragging the dripping monarch “out of the hole and his undignified predicament.”