THE DUKE OF SCHONBERG ON A TYPICAL CHARGER OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
After a painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller
Among the more prominent of the race horse's progenitors in the seventeenth century were the Small Bay Arabian, imported by James I.; Burton's Barb Mare; the Helmsley or Buckingham Turk, owned by the Duke of Buckingham; and of course Charles II.'s Dodsworth, a well-shaped, natural Barb, though foaled in England about the year 1670.
Mention has already been made of the Royal Mares, the majority of which were brought over from Tangiers about the year 1669. Towards the beginning of Charles II.'s reign the annual charge for the horses of the king and queen and those of the officers of the royal household was fixed at £16,640—a sum subsequently denounced by the king's enemies as “extravagant beyond belief.”
That it was a considerable charge to make all must admit, yet it was not necessarily extravagant beyond measure. For in an age when outward ostentation imparted to the court a sort of cachet, an enormous stud of horses, and those the best obtainable, and in addition innumerable costly trappings, were in a sense necessities—the guarantee and stock-in-trade, so to speak, of a court anxious to gain the world's applause and approval, and indirectly the support of other powerful European nations should war break out, as in King Charles's reign it might well have done at almost any time.
Indeed had Charles's court been indifferently horsed, and the king shown signs of reducing his personal expenditure—in other words, had the trumpets metaphorically been blown less blatantly—other European powers would probably have looked up to England with less respect.
Full well Charles must have known this, for in his way he was thoroughly versed in the art of what is sometimes called “international finessing.” His Government knew it better still, with the result that the Government “played up to the king” on the lines adopted by the king in playing up to the Government—both knew that extravagance and display formed the note of the age, and both struck the note firmly with a foot on the loud pedal.
And thus in the reign of the Merry Monarch did the practice that we now sometimes speak of as “bluffing” develop into a sort of art and come to be cultivated carefully.
In the autumn of the seventeenth century Newmarket must truly have been one of the gayest places in England, at anyrate when race meetings were being held there, for it was not unusual for the entire court and cabinet to travel down from London on such occasions, when “jewellers and milliners, players and fiddlers, venal wits and venal beauties would follow in crowds.”