True, in that statue the king is garbed like an ancient Roman, the reason being—I take the following statement from several Irish jarveys, and disclaim all responsibility for its alleged accuracy—that King William adored a foreigner and tried always to look like one! It was, indeed, a jarvey who remarked as we drove past: “Sure, and it is in hunting kit he should be, and on one of Pat Mecreedy's hundred-guinea leppers.” He appeared to be convulsed with mirth at the bare thought that the hero of the Boyne should have been depicted mounted upon a cart horse.
Some even among our historians, however, have averred that this horse is wrongly proportioned. Personally I incline to the belief that the animal is in every detail true to life, and not many years ago the late Viscount Powerscourt declared that he himself had seen used in parts of Holland horses that in every respect resembled this animal of King William's statue.
Is it not likely, therefore, that William III. may have been in the habit of riding a Dutch horse, and that the sculptor copied this horse quite faithfully?
Certainly if the pictures of the period are to be trusted for accuracy, soon after the overthrow of James II. by William of Orange there were horses in plenty of almost exactly this type to be seen in England. Also the harness that was worn by many of the Dutch horses shown in the pictures resembled the harness that was in use among followers of William III., more especially the parts we mean to indicate when we speak of a horse's trappings.
Even the bridles greatly resembled one another in some instances.
Bearing directly upon the story of the horse in history are the descriptions that have been handed down to us of the almost frantic opposition that met the introduction of the stage coach soon after the middle of the seventeenth century.
In some respects these descriptions recall vividly to mind the rabid antagonism some two centuries later to the introduction of the steam engine, not to speak of the objections that are still raised by a proportion of the community to the general adoption of automobilism.
Prior to the introduction of the stage coach into England a four-wheeled carriage with a long, low body had been employed to convey the general public from one part of the country to another, and when the stage coach first arrived many of our wiseacres were quick to prophesy that the death-knell of the nation's greatness had in consequence been sounded!
Perhaps one of the stoutest of the opponents of reform in this respect was a certain Mr Cressett, of Charterhouse, who in the year 1662 openly and in very straightforward language affirmed that the adoption of the stage coach must “entirely ruin the country,” and who in that year wrote a vigorous tract, in which he explained entirely to his satisfaction—also, apparently, to the satisfaction of his partisans—that the amount of harm the introduction of road coaching must inevitably cause to the community at large would be enormous.