Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [17]
The gallery at Tattersall’s on Sunday nights when Society gathered to look over the horses for the Monday sales was as fashionable as the opera. People did not simply go to the races at Newmarket; they owned or took houses in the neighborhood and lived there during the meeting. Racing was ruled by the three Stewards of the Jockey Club from whose decision there was no appeal. Three Cabinet ministers in Lord Salisbury’s Government, Mr. Henry Chaplin, the Earl of Cadogan and the Duke of Devonshire, were at one time or another Stewards of the Jockey Club. Owning a stud and breeding racehorses required an ample fortune. When Lord Rosebery, having married a Rothschild, won the Derby while Prime Minister in 1894, he received a telegram from Chauncey Depew in America, “Only heaven left.” Depew’s telegram proved an underestimate, for Rosebery won the Derby twice more, in 1895 and 1905. The Prince of Wales won it in 1896 with his great lengthy bay Persimmon, bred at his own stud, again in 1900 with Persimmon’s brother Diamond Jubilee, and a third time, as King, in 1909 with Minoru. As the first such victory by a reigning monarch, it was Epsom’s greatest day. When the purple, scarlet and gold of the royal colors came to the front at Tattenham Corner the crowd roared; when Minoru neck and neck with his rival battled it out at a furious pace along the rails they went mad with excitement and wept with delight when he won by a head. They broke through the ropes, patted the King on the back, wrung his hand, and “even policemen were waving their helmets and cheering themselves hoarse.”
Distinction might also be won by a famous “whip” like Lord Londesborough, president of the Four-in-Hand Club, who was known as a “swell,” the term for a person of extreme elegance and splendor, and was renowned for the smartness of his turnouts and the “gloss, speed and style” of his carriage horses. The carriage horse was more than ornamental; he was essential for transportation and through this role his tyranny was exercised. When a niece of Charles Darwin was taken in 1900 to see Lord Roberts embark for South Africa, she saw the ship but not Lord Roberts “because the carriage had to go home or the horses might have been tired.” When her Aunt Sara, Mrs. William Darwin, went shopping in Cambridge she always walked up the smallest hill behind her own carriage, and if her errands took her more than ten miles the carriage and horses were sent home and she finished her visits in a horsecab.
But the true passion of the horseman was expressed in the rider to hounds. To gallop over the downs with hounds and horsemen, wrote Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in a sonnet, was to feel “my horse a thing of wings, myself a God.” The fox-hunting man never had enough of the thrills, the danger, and the beauty of the hunt; of the wail of the huntsman’s horn, the excited yelping of the hounds, the streaming rush of red-coated riders and black-clad ladies on sidesaddles, the flying leaps over banks, fences, stone walls and ditches, even the crashes, broken bones and the cold aching ride home in winter. If it was bliss in that time to be alive and of the leisured class, to hunt was rapture. The devotee of the sport—man or woman—rode to hounds five and sometimes six days a week. It was said of Mr. Knox, private chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, that he wore boots and spurs under his cassock and surplice and “thought of horses even in the pulpit.” The Duke’s family could always tell by the speed of morning prayers if Mr. Knox were hunting that day or not.
Mr. Henry Chaplin, the popular “Squire” in Lord Salisbury’s Cabinet, who was considered the archetype of the English country gentleman and took himself very seriously as representative in Parliament of the agricultural interest, took himself equally seriously as Master of the Blankney Hounds and could not decide which duty came first. During a debate or a Cabinet he would draw little sketches of horses on official papers. When his presence as a minister was required at question time he would