“The revival of horse racing was almost magical in its effects. Thus we find the Turf rising like a Phœnix from its ashes on the accession of Charles II., to be thoroughly reinstated as our great national pastime during the Merry Monarch's reign.
“To this resuscitation the king extended his powerful patronage and support. His love of the equine race is typified in the soubriquet by which he was popularly known, namely 'Old Rowley,' the name of his favourite hack. It is possible that among all our sovereigns, with the exception, perhaps, of Richard II., King Charles II. alone rode his horses first past the winning post. He was, indeed, a thorough English sportsman who could hold his own against all comers in the chases, on the racecourse and so on.”
The above description approximately sums up the Merry Monarch so far as his fondness for horses and horse racing has to do with this history. Every inch a horseman, he appears to have been gifted with a singular aptitude for controlling almost any animal he mounted, and to have developed in a high degree the instinct, or whatever it may be, that to-day we speak of as the power of judging pace in race riding.
Endowed with nerve, also with physical courage in abundance, it is not surprising that the king should have been looked upon by many of his courtiers almost as a demigod when first he ascended the throne, and that the Duke of Newcastle, who had trained him to horsemanship, should openly have expressed himself as immensely proud of his pupil and his pupil's skill.
In the principal race at Chester the horses used to run five times round the Roody. It was upon a horse running in this race that Charles once staked and lost a small fortune. The meetings he most preferred, however, probably were those held periodically at Newmarket, where to this day the famous Rowley Mile recalls to memory the seventeenth-century's cheeriest monarch, a king to whom horse racing in this country still owes so much.
It was, indeed, King Charles II. who almost entirely rebuilt the stand at Newmarket after the original one had been damaged beyond repair during the progress of the Civil War. It is said that the old race stand was besieged on at least three separate occasions during that long and bloody conflict.
While a certain historic race meeting at Newmarket was in progress, Philip Rotier, the famous sculptor, availed himself of an unexpected opportunity—an opportunity for which he had long waited—to make a sketch of the beautiful Miss Stuart, who was destined to become in the year 1667 the third wife of the third Duke of Richmond.
Miss Stuart's name was at that time in everybody's mouth, the exquisite loveliness of her face being equalled, so it was said, only by the moulding of her figure and the irresistible fascination of her voice and manner. It was this unfinished portrait by Philip Rotier that was subsequently to develop into the figure that to-day we see upon every copper coin—the figure of Britannia with her trident.
“So exact was the likeness,” says Felton, in his notes on Waller, “that no one who had ever seen her Grace could mistake who had sat for Britannia.”
How rapidly the Turf must have sprung into life once more upon Charles II.'s accession to the throne of England may be gathered from the statement that within six years after the date of his coronation, “the glory of Newmarket had again eclipsed itself.” Yet apparently the country's prosperity did not directly benefit. The nobles and the wealthy classes seemed determined at any and every cost to warm both hands at the fire of life in the best and worst meaning of that hackneyed phrase. In Pope's “Imitation of Horace,” the statement is made quite bluntly:—