James Merry, on the other hand, was a typical semi-educated Scot, game to the backbone, but not up to the standard then required in a gentleman. He came, indeed, before his time; had he lived to-day, a baronetcy, or certainly the Victorian Order, would have been his reward.
It has been the lot of few men to own such horses as Thormanby, Dundee, Scottish Chief, MacGregor, Sunshine, Doncaster, and Marie Stuart, and despite the fact that no suspicion ever rested on James Merry’s fair name, it is an open secret that when MacGregor was backed for more money than any Derby favourite before or since, the Ring told him, “If he wins we are broke”—and he did not win.
Devout Presbyterian though he was, he succumbed, alas, on one occasion, to French blandishments, and ran a horse on the Sawbath. Summoned by the “Elders” of Falkirk to explain the terrible lapse, he freely admitted his sin, and only obtained absolution by presenting the entire siller to the Kirk.
But no reference—however superficial—to the Turf in the sixties would be complete without one word of homage to the great Englishman who did so much for the honour of old England both in sport and politics. Not that his greatest admirer can place Lord Palmerston in the front rank either as a diplomatist or an owner of racehorses, though none can deny him the marvellous combination of attributes that endeared him to his countrymen, whether in office or opposition, as when crying “hands off” when his prerogative as Prime Minister was being tampered with; or when leaving a debate to come out and shake hands with his trainer; or when at Tattersall’s watching the fluctuations in the betting over his hot favourite, Mainstone, for the Derby; or when twitting his political opponent (Lord Derby), whom he had just replaced as Prime Minister; or, again, whilst watching Tom Spring or John Gully punching in the ring long before any of us were thought of. Ah, there was a man; an Englishman without guile, and of a type well nigh extinct!
Lord Palmerston never attained pre-eminence on the Turf, and when Mainstone—as was suspected—was tampered with before the big race, and when, on a later occasion, Baldwin broke down in his training, he decided to abandon the sport; what more noble than the letter he wrote to Lord Naas giving him his favourite to place at the stud? No auctioneering, no huckstering—but a free gift such as only a great Englishman would have conceived.
And who that frequented the Curragh meetings in the long-ago sixties has not admired the noble form of this same Lord Naas (assassinated in ’72 in the Andaman Islands), accompanied by those stalwart Irishmen, the late Marquises of Conyngham and Drogheda?
England must indeed “wake up”—to quote a phrase as old as the hills—if such records are to be maintained, and seek—perhaps in vain—for other giants such as these mighty dead, if we are to be what we were in sport and politics amongst the nations of the earth.
For like the ripples on a placid lake before some great convulsion of nature, a Cromwell is succeeded by a Charles, and the Palmerstons make way for less sturdy clay, and then the great upheaval comes, which ends in chaos, or the prosperity that is associated with “a great calm.”
Whether these momentous events will occur, simultaneously with the establishment of a Duma, and a great penny daily in Jerusalem, and the abandonment of historical English and Scottish seats for castles on the Rhine, it would require a modern Jeremiah to foretell, but the pendulum is oscillating ominously, with a throb that is not to be mistaken.
Lord Falmouth, whom no earwig ever ventured to associate with a fishy act, holds the proud distinction of never having backed his opinion in his life, if we except the threadbare tale that every biographer sets out as if it were not known to everybody, of how he once bet sixpence, and paid it in a coin surrounded by diamonds.