Eclipse
Page 18
On the racecourse, Dennis’s energy was undiminished. In 1786, his racer Dungannon, who had come second in the Derby three years earlier, narrowly defeated the Prince of Wales’s Rockingham in a valuable Newmarket match, made more valuable still by the heavy betting on the outcome. The losers, reported The Times (then the Daily Universal Register), complained about the rough tactics, or ‘cross and jostling’, of Dungannon’s rider. There was a rematch the following spring, when Rockingham was in the ownership of a man called Bullock (the Prince, suffering one of his periodic financial crises, had sold his stable), in a race that also featured the Duke of Grafton’s Oberon and Sir Charles Bunbury’s Fox. The Times contributed to the build-up: ‘The grand sweepstakes on Tuesday comprehends more first-rate horses than ever ran together before. Vast sums are depending on this extraordinary contest, and the odds are perpetually fluctuating. Dungannon was the favourite, but the tide is turned towards Rockingham.’
On the eve of the race, Dennis withdrew Dungannon. It was not a popular move. The Times said, ‘The Duke of Bedford was 1200 [guineas] minus on account of O’Kelly’s Dungannon not starting on Tuesday, and the minor betters, who had laid their money play or pay, suffered in proportion. Illness was pleaded, and the horse ordered into the stable. Turf speculation daily becoming more and more precarious, since occasional indisposition is as readily admitted at Newmarket as on the stage.’
Very few racegoers believed in Dungannon’s ‘indisposition’, was the implication. It is the charge that the writer John Lawrence was also to make: that the well-being of Dennis O’Kelly’s horses tended to reflect the financial interests of their owner. The Duke of Bedford and others had lost the money they had bet, and others – not named by The Times – must have gained. ‘Whatever bears the name of Rockingham seems somehow or other to have dupery inseparable from it, ’ the paper observed, casting aspersions both on the horse and on a former Prime Minister, the late Marquis ofRockingham (who had died in 1782).Yet the paper also reported that Dennis had lost at least one bet on the race, having predicted, incorrectly, that Rockingham would not be able to lead from start to finish. Moreover, he lost money overall at the meeting: ‘In the last week’s business of Newmarket, according to public report, the Duke of Bedford was minus, Lord Egremont was minus, Mr O’Kelly was minus, even the Duke of Queensberry was a little minus. We should be glad, therefore, to know, who was major on the occasion; – or is it on the turf, as we know it often happens in a gaming table, that when £10, 000 have been lost in an evening, not a single person is to be found who has won a guinea?’ We should treat this report with a little scepticism – The Times’s next mention of the affair certainly indicates that its reporting was fallible: ‘The report of O’Kelly’s being expelled the Jockey Club, in consequence of not suffering Dungannon to start after being led to the post, is not true. O’Kelly, for a number of years past, has been an example to the turf for fair play, and punctuality in payments.’
The comments on Dennis’s character were questionable (if they were not meant ironically), and the implication that he was a Jockey Club member was wrong. Later, the paper suggested that Dennis, plagued by ill health, was planning to quit the Turf. But, controversial to the end, he carried on racing. In 1787, thirteen horses ran in his colours. His colt Gunpowder came second in the Derby, and his filly Augusta, bought at the Prince of Wales’s dispersal sale, came second in the Oaks. In October, he and the Duke of Bedford made an unsuccessful bid for the colt that had beaten Gunpowder at Epsom, Lord Derby’s Sir Peter Teazle.
Dennis’s affliction, which was no doubt the reason why this once vigorous man was beaten up so badly by Dick England, was gout. In this, at least, he joined the upper crust: gout, a.k.a. the ‘English malady’, was ‘the distemper of a gentleman whereas the rheumatism is the distemper of a hackney coachman’, in the view of the patrician Lord Chesterfield. Perhaps that observation gavesolace to Dennis as he endured his agonies. Gout is an accretion of uric acid that forms crystals in joints, particularly in the feet, so that the slightest movement or touch produces excruciating pain. One pictures Dennis, his swaddled feet resting on a stool, extravagantly complaining of his lot and, frustrated at his immobility, furiously shouting at his family and servants. Only Charlotte got kind treatment.
We are inclined to be callous about gout, and to laugh at the bibulous old man with the inflamed extremities. Like a hangover, gout is a joke ailment, a comic comeuppance for high living. Evidence about its causes certainly suggests a link with the extraordinary indulgences of the eighteenth-century lifestyle. A typical dinner of the time was, in the words of historian Liza Picard, ‘a nightmare of meat and poultry’, with course upon course of beef, pork, chicken, hare, pheasant and snipe; interludes of seafood such as crayfish and turbot; and heavy puddings to follow. Then there was the drink. One bottle of wine was an almost teetotal quantity. William Hickey, inviting some good-time girls to an evening party at an inn, selected them on the basis that ‘each … could with composure carry off her three bottles’.121
Six bottles, of wine that was sometimes fortified with spirits, was not an unusual portion. The wine might be kept in lead casks or sweetened with lead sugar, which probably triggered various illnesses, gout among them.
The eighteenth-century sufferer could console himself with the thought that not only was gout classy, it was also, according to medical theory of the time, a guard against other diseases. This was a sad illusion, particularly in cases of overweight people such as Dennis. Always bulky, Dennis ballooned in later years, although he may not quite have weighed in at the twenty stone that the Whitehall Evening Post assigned to him. Obesity would have brought with it additional problems such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart trouble.
Shortly after the October 1787 meeting at Newmarket, Dennis’s illness attacked him ‘with determined violence’, the Genuine Memoirs said. He repaired to his house in Half Moon Street, Piccadilly, where a physician called Dr Warren attended to him. Warren would have intervened little up to now, prescribing simply oils for the inflamed areas of Dennis’s anatomy and recommending that Dennis limit his alcohol intake – to the trifling amount, say, of a pint of wine a day. Now, more drastic measures were called for: bleeding to realign Dennis’s humours, quinine to steady the nerves, laudanum to ease the pain, and perhaps some bespoke herbal medicines.
Unsurprisingly, these treatments did not effect an improvement. Dennis sank into a lethargic state, and, showing little apparent discomfort, slipped towards death. He passed away on 28 December. The Genuine Memoirs concluded, ‘As his career was a lesson of wonder, so was his death an example of imitation.’
115 Another version has it that she arrived on a ship from the West Indies.
116 In 1784, Dick England fled the country after shooting a man called Le Rowles (or, possibly, ‘Rowlls’) in a duel. He returned twelve years later to face trial. After support from the witness box from the Marquis of Hertford and Lord Derby, who surprisingly described him as ‘a very civil, well-bred, polite gentleman’, England got away with a verdict of manslaughter and a sentence of a year in Newgate. On his release, he enjoyed a comfortable old age, and died ‘peacefully in his bed’ at eighty.
117 A second sister, unnamed in the papers, married someone called Sterne Tighe. See Appendix 3.
118 The current spelling is Canons.
119 This was ‘The South Sea Bubble’. Investors bought into the South Sea Company, and into other companies, with the blind enthusiasm that was to greet internet stock nearly three hundred years later. Then the realization dawned that these companies – like a good many internet ventures – were unprofitable. Panic selling ensued, and fortunes were lost.
120 The descent of
the clan O’Kelly from Milesius (after whom Dennis named one of Eclipse’s sons), the King of the Celts in the sixth century BC, may be apocryphal; but there is a more certifiable line from Cellagh, an Irish chief living in the ninth century AD. The O’Kellys ruled for seven hundred years over a kingdom corresponding roughly with what we know as Connaught.
121 Pris Vincent, one of the women, performed her party piece at the end of the evening: urinating from distance at a target. For the particular amusement of another guest, Lord Fielding, she stood on one side of the table, and appointed Hickey to hold a champagne bottle at the other side. Lifting her petticoats, she aimed a stream of piss so accurately ‘that at least one-third actually entered the bottle’, Hickey admiringly reported. He added, ‘Lord Fielding was near suffocation, so excessively did it excite his mirth’.
15
The 14lb Heart
DENNIS O’KELLY – ROGUE, madam’s companion, and Jockey Club reject – got a distinguished send-off. He was buried with ‘great funeral pomp’ on 7 January 1788 in the vault of the Cannons church, Whitchurch, where he still lies. Officers of the Westminster Regiment of the Middlesex Militia attended, along with eminent neighbours, who all enjoyed a slap-up dinner afterwards, with a liberal supply of wine.
The farewell from the public prints was, as Dennis might have expected, mixed. Under the heading ‘O’Kelly is dead’, the Whitehall Evening Post announced that it had received two unprintable obituaries, the first overly eulogistic, the second overly hostile. The paper’s own verdict leaned towards the second position. One could not expect a man who had made his fortune on the Turf, the paper pronounced, to be morally scrupulous; but one might have hoped that a colonel in the militia would have observed the behaviour of a gentleman. Disaster could not soften Dennis O’Kelly, ‘nor prosperity sublime’. He was, though, a generous, undiscriminating host, ‘as unambitious in his company, as easily contented, as if he had ended life as he began it – as a chairman in the streets’. On the subject of Charlotte, the Whitehall Evening Post held its nose: ‘Had [O’Kelly] left the [Fleet] prison a better man than hefound it, virtue might have thought it something – but it was not so, unless a man is better by such an addition as Charlotte Hayes.’
The World Fashionable Advertiser chose the period of mourning to remind readers of Dennis’s embarrassing incident with Miss Swinburne at Blewitt’s Inn, York. It had another colourful anecdote to share: that one room of Dennis’s villa at Clay Hill was full of portraits of young ladies, ‘the most remarkable for their faces and manners – in the seminary which Charlotte Hayes once kept for religious education’.
The Times122 could not make up its mind. Dennis offered to the poor an example of how they must never despair of gaining wealth, was the paper’s conclusion a few days following his death. He had bought Cannons, and then a further portion of the estate, without requiring a mortgage. There, Charlotte Hayes could enjoy ‘her pious age’. However, any dissector of Dennis’s corpse would find ‘all inflammation, all corruption’. On the Turf, where success was synonymous with criminality, Dennis was ‘as Sir Isaac Newton was among the philosophers – at the head of his science’.
Then the journalist wrote something puzzling: ‘That O’Kelly was a chairman, and afterwards a marker at a billiard table, has been reputed under a very orthodox sanction; but we have every reason to believe that such an assertion is altogether heterodox, though it is to be found in a piece of biography written by myself.’
The claim that stories of Dennis O’Kelly’s early life were mythical is not shocking. But was the author saying that he had already written The Genuine Memoirs of Dennis O’Kelly (which were certainly published some time that year, 1788)? It would have been fast work – although hacks were expected to turn round such opportunistic books with great speed. The exuberant, cynical tone of the Genuine Memoirs tallied with the journalist’s cheerful admission in Dennis’s obituary that he had reproduced unreliable accounts of our hero’s life.
Later, The Times decided that it was Dennis O’Kelly’s supporter. Referring to the scurrilous stories about Dennis in the World Fashionable Advertiser, it lambasted ‘A certain affected morning print, remarkable for its incautious, groundless and calumniating assertions’, and thundered, ‘THE WORLD is a lying WORLD!’ ‘Is it possible, ’ The Times asked, forgetting its earlier portrait of Dennis, ‘that in a country, nay in an age like this, it should be necessary to revive the ancient adage, De mortuis nil nisi bonum [One should not speak ill of the dead]?’
The Genuine Memoirs were both satirical and adulatory, both scurrilous and discreet. The anonymous hack commissioned to churn them out may well have haunted the Covent Garden milieu of Dennis, Charlotte and their associates. While offering plenty of evidence of Dennis’s bad behaviour, he summarized him as a paragon. While revelling in Dennis’s crudities, he advised his tender readers that he had omitted ‘uninteresting coffee-house anecdotes; attempts at wit; nocturnal broils; and, the indecent intrigues of public and private brothels. A life so variegated as was that of Colonel O’Kelly, must have abounded with the common occurrences of such scenes; but we hold it highly improper that they should be presented to the general eye. They are fit only for the depraved contemplation of sensual and dissipated minds, and are in our opinion more injurious to virtue and society in general, than even the example of practical immorality.’
All the newspapers were intrigued by Dennis’s will. It was a document (dated 11 October 1786) that proved his devotion to Charlotte Hayes. He wanted her to be secure, and comfortable. ‘Into the proper hands of Charlotte Hayes, called Mrs O’Kelly [the phrasing is another hint that there was no formal marriage], who now lives and resides with me’, Dennis bequeathed an annuity of £400, secured against the rents at Cannons, where Charlotte could live if she wished. He ordered that she should have the run of Cannons, and – suspecting that her parties might be boisterous? – specified that she should not be liable for any damage to thefurniture. He left her various personal effects: a large diamond ring and other jewellery, as well as a silver tea pot and a coffee pot, along with silver plates and two silver candlesticks. He gave her his carriage and carriage horses too. Charlotte also inherited, with Dennis’s brother Philip and nephew Andrew, Dennis’s most valuable possession of all: Eclipse. They were to share the stud fees, as well as any fees generated by the stallions Dungannon, Volunteer and Vertumnus; if these horses were not to enjoy stud careers, they were to be sold, to Charlotte’s, Philip’s and Andrew’s benefit. Philip got the broodmares, with the bonus that ten of them could be covered by the O’Kelly stallions free of charge, after which he would have to pay the market rate.
Dennis’s will confirmed the stories that, disillusioned by the refusal of the Turf aristocracy to admit him to their inner circles, he had fallen out of love with racing. He ordered that all his racehorses be sold; moreover, he specified – this detail was widely reported – that if either Philip or Andrew should bet on horses, make matches, train horses or race them, ‘or be engaged or concerned in any such matters in any shape or manner or upon any account or pretence whatsoever, then … they shall forfeit and pay unto my executors123 and trustees the sum of £500 of lawful British money to be by them deducted and retained for their own use and benefit out of the property’. Andrew ignored this clause, with impunity.
The dispersal sale, on 11 February 1788, was the final proof that Dennis could match anyone in management of Turf affairs, if not in social acceptability. Conducted by the bloodstock auctioneers Tattersalls, it fetched in excess of £8, 000 – some thousand pounds more than had changed hands at the sale of the Prince of Walesâ�
�™s stud the previous year. The Prince, having come to a new financial arrangement with his father George III and wasting notime in returning to the Turf, was among the buyers. He spent as extravagantly as he had before his enforced disposal, paying 1, 400 guineas and 750 guineas for two sons of Eclipse, Gunpowder and King Heremon; he also bought the Eclipse fillies Scota (550 guineas) and Augusta (150 guineas).124 According to Theodore Cook (in Eclipse and O’Kelly), there was not to be a racing sale of comparable influence for another seventy years.
The sale was supposed to clear Dennis’s debts. But he had not been as flush as he thought.
By now, Eclipse was feeling his age. Like his gout-afflicted late master, he was having trouble with his feet: his coffin bones (they are in the hooves) were ‘very much rounded and diminished’.125
When Andrew decided to transfer the O’Kelly stud from Clay Hill to Cannons, Eclipse was too disabled to make the fifty-mile walk, and became the first horse in Britain to travel by means of others’ efforts. Philip O’Kelly devised for him a prototype horsebox, a four-wheeled carriage with two horses to draw it. John Oakley, who had ridden Eclipse on his racecourse debut at Epsom, is reputed to have accompanied his charge; ‘and when (like other travellers) he chose to take a glass of gin or aniseed for himself, he was directed to furnish his old friend Eclipse with a lock of hay, and a drop of the pail’.126