At once the enthusiasm and excitement of the spectators, especially of the queen, became intense; nor did it abate when they saw Selwyn, still galloping at top speed, neck and neck with the stag, suddenly vault right off his horse's back on to the stag's, “where he kept his seat gracefully in spite of every effort of the affrighted beast to throw him off.”
Thus he galloped on for some yards, the queen and all the spectators wondering what he would do next. They were not kept long in suspense. Of a sudden Selwyn swiftly but calmly drew out his hunting knife. Then he began to prod the animal with its point, first on one side of its neck, then on the other, until at last he succeeded in forcing the stag to gallop round to a point within a few yards of the very spot where the queen sat waiting.
At last, when the animal was very near the queen, its rider suddenly plunged his knife deep into its throat, “so that the blood spurted out and the beast fell dead just by her feet.”
This display is said to have delighted the queen so greatly that she soon afterwards granted Selwyn several favours, and on the monument still to be seen at Walton-on-Thames he is portrayed in the act of stabbing, in the manner described, the stag slaughtered on that memorable occasion. Selwyn died on 27th March, 1587.
Of the famous horses of fiction and romance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one or two more must be mentioned. Don Quixote's immortal squire, Sancho Panza, who, it will be remembered, rode upon an ass named Dapple, was Governor of Barataria.
Though endowed with common sense, and though his proverbs have become historical, he was wholly devoid of what is sometimes called “spirituality.”
Nevertheless Don Quixote and his horse, Rosinante—a name that means literally “formerly a hack”—came gradually to be renowned the world over.
To this day, indeed, “a perfect Rosinante” is the comment not infrequently passed upon a horse that is mostly skin and bone.