[79] The palace at Newmarket was built by this monarch for the purpose of enjoying the diversion of hunting—no races having been held upon the heath till the succeeding reign.
With the Restoration came the palmy days of the Turf. Regular meetings were established at Newmarket, and various other parts of England; silver cups and bowls of the value of one hundred pounds were presented as royal gifts, and, more than all, the light of royal favour shone upon it in shape of Charles the Debonair and Mistress Eleanor Gwynne. William III. had no taste for racing, and died by a fall from his horse. Prince George of Denmark, on the other hand, was warmly attached to the Turf, and promoted its interest by every means in his power. We are indebted for many royal plates to his influence with his consort Queen Anne. George I. was no sportsman; in his reign, however, the alteration in the royal plates took place, by which a sum of one hundred guineas was substituted in their stead. Shortly after George II. ascended the throne, arose a morbid yearning after legislating for the Turf. Some of the acts enacted were mischievous; very many were very silly; one was good:—“That no plate or prize of a less value than £50 should be run for, under a penalty of £200.” It was during this reign that the Darley and Godolphin Arabians were brought into this country,—two horses from whom have descended all the most celebrated racers that adorn the annals of our turf. This is the period at which the genealogy of our unrivalled thorough-bred horse then, was naturalized, and it is the date whence I think it most convenient to begin my notice of English racing.
Even a notice so confined as this is beset with obscurities that few would conceive possible. As an instance, I will adduce the case of an old and well-informed inhabitant of Epsom, who some years ago published a very clever history of that place. He starts somewhere about the Conquest, and never halts for want of materials as he goes on, till he comes to the great stumbling-block, concerning which he shall speak for himself:—“When the races on Epsom Downs were first held periodically, we have not been able to trace; but we find that from the year 1730 they have been annually held in the months of May or June, and about six weeks previous to which the hunters’ stakes are occasionally run for on the Epsom race course, at one of which, in 1730, the famous horse Madcap won the prize, and proved the best plate-horse in England.”
To return, however, to the reign of George II., though we find little bearing on the business of the Turf to be gleaned from its records, it introduces us to the great forefathers of our thorough blood, and stirs one of the most interesting questions in our domestic natural history—the problem of the seed or origin of the English thorough-bred horse. A brief search through the stud-book will convince the inquirer that, almost without exception, our great racers were and are descendants of the Darley and Godolphin Arabians: I use the latter term merely because its conventionality now identifies those celebrated animals. They were both, as has been stated, imported in this reign: the question that I would here investigate applies equally to each, but, for the sake of simplifying it, I will treat it with reference to the latter only. “That he was a genuine Arabian,” says the stud-book, “his excellence as a sire is deemed sufficient proof;” a little further on we read, “It is remarkable that there is not a superior horse now on the Turf without a cross of the Godolphin Arabian, neither has there been for several years past.” The probable date of his arrival in this country was 1725, or thereabouts. Hundreds of Arabs had preceded him as sires, their introduction for that purpose having been a very general speculation from the time of Charles I. That the indigenous island breed had thereby been rendered good service, there can be no doubt; but that the Turf derived any signal advantages from the importations is more than problematical.
Are our celebrated strains of racing blood derived at all from an Arab source, and, if so descended, are they excellent consequently, or of accident? As regards the first moiety of the inquiry, a work has just appeared in Paris, the production of a gentleman of some literary celebrity[80], relating to the genealogy of the horse so long known to us as the Godolphin Arabian. His statements go to show that he was a pure Barb, presented, with seven others, by the Bey of Tunis to Louis XV., about the year 1731. All the portraits I have ever seen of him certainly go to strengthen this reading of his descent, and proclaim him not of Asiatic origin. The date is an erroneous one, as he was a sire in England in the year in which he is said to have reached France; but we must be content with very vague data in all that concerns our subject a century ago. As to the second division of the question, after-time must furnish the means of replying to it, if it be ever answered. My bias is to a belief that there exist families of the horse in the East possessed of a perfection infinitely surpassing any generically inherited. This I have attempted to demonstrate in a work upon which I am at present engaged, some portion of which has been already published.[81] The fact (of which I was made conscious by authority beyond question) that the Imaum of Muscat, one of the most powerful sovereign princes of India, expended ten years of active search, backed by the enormous bribe of ten thousand pounds, before he could procure a descendant of a line sufficiently pure to present to King George IV., seems to establish the truth of the theory to which I profess being inclined. All that we learn from our knowledge of the almost religious veneration with which the genealogy of the horse is treated in the East, goes to the like confirmation. “It is remarkable that there is not a superior horse now on the turf without a cross of the Godolphin Arabian,” I leave the reader to interpret as his own reflections may lead him.
[80] M. Eugene Sue.
[81] Annals of the British Turf, from the Introduction of Eastern blood to the present Time. The first century concluded in the Old Sporting Magazine.
Shall I venture, at the hazard of pursuing my theory “ultra fines,” to offer one more example in support of it? That no structural organization available to the eye, no individual excellence in the parents, influence, in our raising stock, the performances of their offspring, are truisms taught by every stud in the kingdom. All that exist among us, descended from the great forefather of the Turf, are capable of producing offspring of equal pretension, as regards the root from which they are sprung. Far different was the result in relation to the importations of Eastern blood contemporary with the Godolphin, and the same it has been with all more recently introduced. Enough, at all events, has been adduced, if not to prove my position, to warrant me, at least, in its assumption, as well as for offering it to the consideration of those who hold the subject to which it relates of sufficient interest to engage their attention.
From such speculations on the origin of the British racehorse, we will turn to the annals of his exploits,—a theme more generally attractive, though intrinsically less important. Here, to begin with the early worthies of the turf, all is as obscure as is the genealogical problem with which we have been already engaged. Of the performances of Childers, detailed, as they are, with all apparent microscopic observations of the seconds’ hand, I am convinced that we know rather worse than nothing. In a recent work of more than an ordinary character on the subject to which it addresses itself (Lawrence’s History of the Horse), Childers—Flying Childers, as he was designated par excellence—is stated to have been a chestnut, whereas he was a rich bay with four white legs. The same slovenly style, no doubt, attaches to the records of the early performances, as well as to the more recent attempts of equestrian historians. Again, the only criterion by which we can estimate them is, when we can refer to a timed race, because, knowing little of the principals, we cannot be supposed to have a better knowledge of the pretensions of their contemporaries. Now, even in our day, when all the appliances for chronometrical accuracy are so vastly improved and multiplied, we rarely hear of the time of a race being kept at all, even accidentally: it is never done by authority, or on a principle deserving of confidence.
We know that the taste, in the middle of the last century, inclined to long distances, and repeated exertion—six and eight-mile heats being events of constant recurrence; and yet we are required to believe that there existed at and previous to that time a flight of speed unknown to our degenerate days. Moreover, by far the greater portion of the early racers were undersized, Galloways as the old Calendars have them in every page; and stride is, save in rare exceptions, indispensable to a high degree of swiftness. In the absence of any actual data as to speed, worthy being confided in, it may not be inconvenient to relate a performance of one of the first-class horses of that period; and, by contrasting it with a match against time, done by a contemporary hackney, some deduction may be drawn of the qualities of the racers of that era.