So great a saint is heavenly Charlotte grown
She’s the first lady abbess of the town;
In a snug entry leading out Pell Mell
(which by the urine a bad nose can smell)
Between th’hotel86 and Tom Almack’s house
The nunnery stands for each religious use;
There, there, repair, you’ll find some wretched wight
Upon his knees both morning noon and night!
However, no businesswoman could afford to be complacent. Rivals were always threatening to challenge one’s status as London’s most fashionable hostess, and the entertainments at MrsCornelys’s soirées or at the Pantheon might lure away customers. One had to innovate.
Accounts of James Cook’s voyages in the Pacific had found an enthralled audience in England. When in 1774 Commander Tobias Furneaux returned from Cook’s second voyage, he brought with him Omai, a young Tahitian, who made a great impression on society. An ode entitled Omiah was addressed to Charlotte Hayes, whom for some reason the poet enjoined to coax Lord Sandwich (‘Jemmy Twitcher’) to secure Omai’s homeward passage.
Sweet Emily, with auburn tresses,
Will coax him by her soft caresses,
And Charlotte win the day;
Old Jemmy’s goatish eyes will twinkle;
Lust play bo-peep from every wrinkle;
But first bribe madam Ray.87
What fired Charlotte’s imagination were the sexual rites of the Pacific islanders. One ceremony involved the deflowering of a young girl in front of an audience of village notables, with a venerable woman called Oberea presiding. Charlotte decided to recreate the spectacle in King’s Place, but to introduce more variety to it: there would be not one virgin, but a dozen (as her definition of virginity was loose, the casting did not present a challenge). She hired a dozen lusty young men, with whom the ‘unsullied and untainted’ nymphs would perform under the tutelage of Queen Oberea, ‘in which character Mrs Hayes will appear on this occasion’. Charlotte’s invitation advised that the rites would begin ‘precisely at seven’. Twenty-three men accepted, mostly including ‘the first nobility’, along with a few baronets, and five commoners.
The spectacle entertained these dignitaries for two hours, and ‘met with the highest applause from all present’. When a collection came round for ‘the votaries of Venus’, there was a generous response. Their blood up, the distinguished gentlemen now got their own opportunity to perform with the young women. The evening ended on a festive note, with champagne and musical entertainment in the form of catches and glees. In the account in Nocturnal Revels, an exhausted but exultant Charlotte, her last guest having departed at four in the morning, ‘threw herself into the arms of the Count, to practise, in part at least, what she was so great a mistress of in theory’.
It was the greatest triumph of Charlotte’s career, her equivalent of the moment in April 1770 when Eclipse galloped clear of Bucephalus. She was established, and rich, recognized as the nonpareil of her profession. She was the companion of the owner of the greatest racehorse of the day. Charlotte and Dennis were at the summits of two of the most important leisure industries in Britain.
75 The road is now Pall Mall Place.
76 Burford was unable to identify Frettext, but claimed that Flagellum was the Earl of Uxbridge.
77 The courtesan who travelled with the army of Alexander the Great.
78 The painting hangs in the morning room at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire.
79 Now the site of the Oxford Street branch of Marks & Spencer.
80 E. J. Burford said that the cheek patch was there; it is invisible in the print I have seen.
81 The previous Duke of York, brother of George III, had once, at the end of a visit, insulted the celebrated Kitty Fisher by leaving her only £50. Kitty, whose usual charge for a night was 100 guineas, illustrated her contempt by placing the banknote between two slices of buttered bread, which she ate for her breakfast.
82 Mrs Phillips retired to Jamaica, where she was elected to the appropriate post of mistress of the revels at carnivals.
83 She is assigned a daughter and a role in the Margate episode in Hallie Rubenhold’s The Covent Garden Ladies.
84 The teenage Emma Lyon, later to become Lady Hamilton, may have danced at Mrs Kelly’s.
85 Hickey was to suffer a similar loss. In 1782, he travelled to India with his mistress, Charlotte Barry; she died the following year.
86 The Golden Lion, at the corner of King’s Place and King Street.
87 Martha Ray was Sandwich’s mistress. In 1779, she was assassinated by a jealous former lover, James Hackman.
11
The Stallion
FIFTY GUINEAS, THE SUM Lady Loveit paid for her romp with Captain O’Thunder, was also the cost of sending a mare to Eclipse. In 1771, it was the highest stud fee in England. Like the modern champions Nijinsky and Secretariat, Eclipse had achieved fame that transcended his sport, and his transfer to a role as a begetter of future champions generated huge interest.88 His sexual attention, Dennis O’Kelly could assume, was a privilege for which owners of mares would fork out an expensive premium.
Eclipse, who had spent most of his racing career in dark stables, now began to enjoy more of the open air. He passed a happy, idle winter in 1770–71, grazing in his paddock at Clay Hill. He put on condition – the equestrian equivalent of a paunch; his neck began to thicken too, slowly transforming him into the imposing, high-crested figure that features in the later portrait by George Garrard (see this book’s colour section).
His new career probably began in February 1771. There were sixty or more mares to impregnate in time to enable them to give birth, after an eleven-month pregnancy, in the early months of the following year. The foals’ official birthdays would be on 1 May. Today, when horses have their birthdays on 1 January, a foal born after 1 May is considered late. Stallions have to pack a lot of virile activity into a short space of time.
Breeders in the eighteenth century did not know a great deal about when their mares would ovulate.89 Then, as now, they brought the horses to the stud and left them there, perhaps for a month. Stallion owners advertised in the Racing Calendar that the mares would get ‘good grass’, at a weekly fee of about five shillings. The mare enjoyed this grass for a day or so before her rendezvous.
One of the first mares to meet Eclipse was not a visitor. Clio, a great-granddaughter of the Godolphin Arabian, was one of several mares bought by Dennis to breed to his stallion; by the time of his death, he had amassed a broodmare band of thirtythree. Clio faced an experience that was little different from what would happen at a contemporary stud farm – the central act is the same, after all. A stable boy led her to the breeding shed, or perhaps to a fenced-off area of a paddock. She would not simply allow the stallion to turn up and ravish her: she required foreplay, a task from which, on a stud farm, the stallion is exempted. In his place, the horse with the unfulfilling job of ‘teaser’ arrived and nuzzled Clio’s hindquarters for a while, until she lifted up her tail and released a small stream of urine. It was a signal that she was in season, although the procedure might go ahead even if she did not give such encouragement. It was also the teaser’s only reward: once Clio had given it, he was led away. Now Dennis’s staff took steps to protect their stallion, binding Clio’s hind legs or tying them to posts, because mares in this circumstance were apt to kick out, and had been known to deal fatal blows to their valuable would-be paramours.
Eclipse and his stud groom approached. Inexperienced as he was, the stallion knew what was on the menu, and as he got close to Clio he let out an unearthly bellow, a neigh transformed into something deep and resonant and scary. He reared, and the staff moved into panicky action. One tried to soothe the mare; another lift
ed her tail; another two, one of them pushing from the rear, guided the half-ton Eclipse towards docking. Once there, he did not hold back, and was done in a few seconds. He rested on Clio for a couple of moments longer, before withdrawing. As Dennis’s was a well-managed stud with a regard for hygiene, Eclipse had his penis and testicles washed before he returned to his paddock – the importance of this procedure would be demonstrated a few years later when the great stallion Herod, bred like Eclipse by the Duke of Cumberland, died following an inflammation of his penis sheath. Eclipse was probably due to be on duty again later in the day.
The mare, calm now, returned to her paddock. Everyone hoped that Eclipse’s sperm was fusing with Clio’s ovum to produce an embryo, but, as this was 1771, they could not scan to check. The best that the stud managers could do was try to maximize Clio’s chances of getting pregnant. They may have arranged for Eclipse to cover her again, the same day or within a day or two. Over the course of the next month, they presented her to the teaser a couple of times more; when she showed no interest, they assumed that she had conceived. While Clio remained in her own paddock, visiting mares would return home at this stage. Their grooms and other staff from their studs would arrive, pay the fees (fifty guineas, a guinea for the groom, and grazing fees) and take them away. If any mares turned out not to be ‘in foal’, Dennis would offer a special deal next season.90
The greater frequency of double coverings is the main difference between the eighteenth-century stud and a modern farm. Now that scanning has reduced the reliance on double coverings, stallions are able to cover more mares. Eclipse, in his first season, covered sixty mares, as well as those owned by Dennis; a leading contemporary sire such as Montjeu, standing at the Coolmore stud in Ireland, covers a hundred mares or more each spring. In 2007, the National Hunt sire Oscar managed, with unflagging virility, 367 different coverings. Some stallions do not even get a holiday. At the end of the season, ‘shuttle stallions’ travel to the southern hemisphere and put in another stint there. It is a busy job; but they have to do it, because the Thoroughbred industry, wishing to preserve the integrity of the breed, has never contemplated the introduction of artificial insemination.
In spring 1772, Clio gave birth to a male foal, named Horizon. By the time Horizon was a yearling, Dennis faced the quandary of all owner-breeders: whether to sell the horse, or train him for racing. If he sold, he earned instant money. If he raced the horse, and other home-bred colts and fillies, he might find that they would show the ability to become valuable stallions and broodmares of the future; on the other hand, he could not afford to give the impression that he was holding on to the best ones and selling only the dross. He held on to Horizon. Two years later, Horizon became the first offspring of Eclipse to race, and won a match over a mile at Abingdon, earning 300 guineas. But his subsequent career was moderate, and he did not graduate to become a stallion.
Such is the story of the vast majority of horses in training, including impeccably bred ones. Great racehorses are rare, only a small percentage of that rare group become successful stallions, and only a small percentage of those successful stallions become part of an enduring line in a Thoroughbred dynasty. In 1771, there were three stallions – Herod, Matchem and Eclipse – who were to join this elite group; and the Eclipse line was to dominate those of the other two by a ratio of more than nine to one.
*
Actually, there were four stallions in this elite group, because Eclipse’s sire, Marske, was still in business – indeed, after fifteen years at stud, he was only now, thanks to Eclipse’s exploits, coming into fashion. As mentioned earlier, William Wildman had bought him from a Hampshire farmer for twenty guineas, and in 1769 stood the horse at the Gibbons Grove stud in Mickleham at a fee of five guineas. That was the year when Eclipse hit the racecourse, winning five King’s Plates and suddenly suggesting that his neglected father might be worth something after all. Wildman raised Marske’s fee accordingly, to ten guineas; by 1772, he was asking for thirty guineas, and was also taking steps to quash a threatening rumour that was circulating, to the effect that a stallion called Shakespeare, and not Marske, was Eclipse’s real father. Wildman’s advertisement for Marske in the Racing Calendar included the statement: ‘Mask [sic] was the sire of Eclipse. Witness my hand, B. Smith, stud groom to the late Duke of Cumberland.’ Most people believed him, but not everyone.
The believers included the Earl of Abingdon. Once again – following his sales of Gimcrack and Eclipse – Wildman decided to offload an asset once its value started to rise, and he sold Marske to Abingdon, who paid 1, 000 guineas for the horse. The Earl, who sported the Wodehouseian name of Willoughby Bertie, bumped up Marske’s stud fee and earned back the purchase price within a season. Standing him at Rycot in Oxfordshire, Abingdon set the fee at fifty guineas, and a year later he doubled it. One hundred guineas was the highest sum commanded by any stallion of the era. The Sporting Magazine claimed that Abingdon demanded 200 guineas for Marske’s services one year, and the equestrian writer John Lawrence trumped that claim with 300 guineas, although there is no corroboration of these figures in the racing calendars of the period. Marske became champion sire91 in 1775, and again in 1776.
His involvement with Eclipse and Marske apart, Wildman remains of interest to us on account of his association with George Stubbs. One of his commissions from the artist was rediscovered recently, and fetched a small fortune. It is a painting of Wildman’s horse Euston, a grey son of Antinous bred by the Duke of Grafton and the winner of twelve consecutive races, including two King’s Plates, in 1773 and 1774. Euston, alert head turned inquisitively, is tall and fine-framed, and carries a jockey wearing crimson silks, which Wildman presumably adopted on passing his original colours to Dennis O’Kelly. The horse is set against a country landscape, possibly Grafton’s estate, with the land behind him falling to a lake with a walled tower on the furthest bank, and beyond that hills rolling into a misty distance. As in many of Stubbs’s paintings with country settings, the horse is posed next to trees – in this case, an oak and a willow, of a slenderness to match Euston’s physique. What is he doing here, ready to race and with a jockey on his back but far from a racecourse? The answer is prosaic, though the effect of the painting is not. Stubbs was not greatly interested in racing scenes, and quite often plopped down his racehorses against backgrounds chosen simply because his clients would find them pleasing. It gives his work an other-worldly, haunting quality.
Stubbs exhibited the painting at his first, 1775 exhibition at the Royal Academy. After the Wildman dispersal sale, Portrait of a Horse Named Euston, Belonging to Mr Wildman passed through several hands, until no one knew, or could discern, the identity of the horse. Only when the painting went for cleaning in the late 1990s was the title revealed. Restored, the portrait went on sale at Sotheby’s in November 2000, and fetched £2.7 million – the third highest price ever paid for a work by Stubbs.
The most touching legacy of the relationship between Wildman and Stubbs is the study – some call it a ‘conversation piece’ – Eclipse with William Wildman and His Sons John and James. It is one of the rare Stubbs paintings of a racehorse and owner, leading you to suppose that he was friendlier with Wildman, a fellow self-made man, than with his aristocratic patrons. It shows family members at ease with one another and proud of their horse, and is especially poignant in the light of Robert Fountain’s evidence, in his essay William Wildman and George Stubbs, that one of these boys and maybe both did not survive their father.92
William Wildman – meat salesman, first owner of Eclipse, and art patron – died on Christmas Day, 1784, aged sixty-six. At his dispersal sale at Christie’s in 1787, the lots formed, however you count them (there were nineteen paintings according to Fountain’s sums, and seventeen according to Judy Egerton’s), the most impo
rtant contemporary collection of Stubbs’s work alongside the Prince of Wales’s. They depicted racehorses, dogs, a lioness and a panther; a series of four paintings may show Wildman and a friend, two hearty men of middle age, as the visitors from the ‘smoaky town’ on a shooting expedition at the estate of the Duke of Portland. The sale included some 150 other paintings, including a Rubens and a da Vinci, and fetched, according to Fountain, the very modest-seeming sum of £665 – a figure that, translated to the present-day equivalent of £67, 000, is insignificant in the context of subsequent valuations.
Marske, also painted by Stubbs (see colour section) following a Wildman commission, died in July 1779. He had sired 154 winning horses, whose 352 victories earned £72, 000. A poet called Samuel Harding, perhaps at the behest of Abingdon, made the following attempt to immortalize him:
Dissolved in tears, ye sportsmen, mourn the loss,
Renowned Rycote bears the heavy cross,
Old MARSK is dead! the King of horses gone,
Sire to Eclipse, who ne’er was beat by none,
Eclipse doth mourn, Transit, Shark, Pretender;
He was their sire. – grim Death made him surrender.
If that effort had been his only memorial, Marske would not have been remembered for long. Fortunately, his descendants did a more eloquent job.
Eclipse stood at stud from 1771 to 1788, and sired, at a rough estimate, 930 colts and fillies. The best of them, and the one who was to continue the male line that is most influential today, came early. In 1772, the Earl of Abingdon, who had not yet bought Marske, sent his mare Sportsmistress from Oxfordshire to Clay Hill. The following spring, Sportsmistress gave birth to a colt, chestnut like both his parents, and with a white blaze like his father’s. Abingdon’s stable staff referred to the foal as ‘Potato’, a name, according to legend, that one lad rendered in writing on a corn bin as ‘Potoooooooo’. The horse became Pot8os. His later owner, Earl Grosvenor, tickled his audience at White’s club by observing, ‘Must say the boy could count, even if he couldn’t spell.’
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