Eclipse (15 page)

At last, at York on 23 August, Eclipse met some competition,
and recorded his most impressive victory. It should have been one of Dennis's finest hours. Instead, he was in disgrace.

Late one night at Blewitt's Inn in York, Dennis was apprehended after disturbing in her bed a certain Miss Swinburne, whose screaming had wakened the house. Miss Swinburne was the daughter of a distinguished local citizen, a Catholic baronet. To compromise her honour was a serious affront.

The August issue of
Town & Country
magazine carried the titillating news, dating it 27 July: ‘A certain nominal Irish count, it is said, forced himself into a young lady's bedchamber in the night, at York, in the race-week, for which offence he has been apprehended and committed to York castle.' In its next issue,
Town & Country
amplified the story. ‘The renowned Count K', owner of ‘the celebrated Eclipse', had passed the evening, and early hours of the morning too, at the coffee house, playing the dice game hazard. Returning tipsily to his hotel, he found his room locked. His solution to this problem was to barge the door open, only to discover, in what he had expected to be an empty bed, Miss Swinburne, terrified out of sleep by his crashing entrance. Typically, Dennis saw this as a delightful opportunity, and made a soothing overture.

‘Tis all one to me, my dear, ' he gallantly averred. ‘Sure we may lie here very cosily till morning.'

This proposal was the opposite of soothing for Miss Swinburne, who leaped out of bed and fled into the corridor, ‘naked as she was', yelling in horror. Fellow lodgers came to her aid. Realizing at last that to salvage this situation was beyond his powers of charm, Dennis retreated to his room, where he constructed a makeshift barricade. Miss Swinburne's rescuers gathered outside the door, broke through his defences, and seized him.

The author of
The Genuine Memoirs of Dennis O'Kelly
enjoyed himself when he got to this episode. His account had Dennis, on
arriving in his room, drawing back the silken curtain of his bed, finding Miss Swinburne there, and gazing ‘with astonishment and delight' on her countenance. ‘The chisel of Bonerotto! [
sic
] The pencil of Corregio! [
sic
] Never formed more captivating charms. For some time our hero stood, like Cymon, the celebrated clown, when he first beheld the beauties of the sleeping Ephigenia.' Dennis looked around for some means of identifying the intruder, but found only ‘a fashionable riding-dress, a watch, without any particular mark of distinction, and the other common accommodations of women'. Then, in what is one of the less credible passages of a generally unreliable book, Dennis became suspicious: what if this woman had heard about his vast winnings at the meeting and was out to use her feminine wiles to rob him? Drink exacerbated the dark thoughts typical of the late hour, and Dennis began shouting accusations at Miss Swinburne. When she shouted in return, Dennis immediately sobered up. He tried to calm her, but a crowd had already gathered at the door. He escaped out of the window. No dishonour was done to Miss Swinburne, ‘who was altogether as chaste as she was charming'.

A Late Unfortunate Adventure at York.
Dennis O'Kelly (centre – note the portrait of Eclipse above the bed) tries to get out of trouble with both bluster and cash, while Miss Swinburne swoons.
‘Honi soit qui mal y pense'
says the motto – rough translation: ‘Shame be on him who makes a scandalous interpretation of this.'

The fact that the York meeting had not yet started and Dennis's winnings were still to arrive dents the credibility of this account of his behaviour. The
Town & Country
version rings truer: you can picture the ever-bullish and well-oiled Dennis hoping to seduce the terrified young woman, still trying to win her round as she flees into the corridor, and conceding defeat only when rescuers appear on the scene.

How extraordinary it was, the
Memoirs
added, that Miss Swinburne should have been given Dennis's room. ‘The cause of the young lady's nocturnal invasion could never be rightly accounted for. Beds were, no doubt, scarcely to be obtained by fair means …' Yes; or Dennis's avowal that it was his room was a desperate attempt to soften the offence.

Anyway, there was a stink. A prosecution was mooted. But Dennis, thanks to representations by influential friends, escaped
with a payment of £500 to local charities and an advertisement in the press. On 2 October, the
York Courant
ran the following notice on its front page:

I do hereby acknowledge that I was (when in liquor) lately guilty of a very gross affront and rudeness to a young lady of a very respectable family, which I am now very much concerned at, and humbly beg pardon of that lady and her friends for my behaviour to her, being very sensible of her lenity and theirs in receiving this my public submission and acknowledgement; and, as a further atonement for my offence, I have also paid the sum of five hundred pounds to be disposed of for such charitable purposes as that lady directs; and am content that this may be inserted in any of the public newspapers. Witness my hand this 25th day of August 1770. D. O'Kelly

Dennis may have had to prostrate himself before another.
Town & Country
amused itself in this respect, inventing a letter to Dennis from Charlotte Hayes:

Sir,

Your behaviour at York, which is in every body's mouth, strongly merits my resentment, that the condescension of writing to you is more than you ought to expect. After the many repeated vows you have made, and oaths you have sworn, that I, and I alone, was the idol of your heart, could so short an absence entirely efface me from your remembrance? And was I to be abandoned for the accidental rencounter of a new face? Had she yielded to your embraces, your amour would probably have remained a secret to the world, and I only from your behaviour might have made the discovery. But you are justly punished, did I not share in the loss.

Oh! Dennis, are my charms so faded, my beauty so decayed, my understanding so impaired, which you have so often and so highly praised, as to destroy all the impressions you pretended they had
made upon you! But if love has entirely subsided, surely gratitude might have pleaded so strongly in my behalf as to have excluded all other females from your affections. Remember when in the Fleet, when famine stared you in the face, and wretched tatters scarce covered your nakedness – I fed, clothed, and made a gentleman of you. Remember the day-rules I obtained for you – remember the sums you won through that means – then remember me.

But why do I talk of love or gratitude! Let interest plead the most powerful reason that will operate on you. What a wretch! To fling away in a drunken frolic – in the ridiculous attempt of an amour – more money, aye far more money,
⁷²
than I have cleared by my honest industry for a month – or even your horse Eclipse, with all his superior agility, has run away with in a whole season.

This last reflexion racks my soul. Write to me, however, and tell me of some capital stroke you have made to comfort me, for I

am at present,
Your most disconsolate
Charlotte Hayes
Marlborough Street
September 4th

A print appeared, with the title
A Late Unfortunate Adventure at York
. It shows a crowded bedroom, with a portrait of Eclipse above the bed; in the centre of the room Dennis is making emollient gestures, holding out notes marked ‘500' and ‘1000', while a man threatens him with a pikestaff. An angry woman is holding a swooning Miss Swinburne, beneath a sign reading ‘The Chaste Susanna'. From behind a door peeks another woman, barebreasted.

Nearly twenty years later, following Dennis's death,
The World
reminded its readers of the adventure, alleging that Dennis had commented bitterly – and untruly – that he would never donate another penny to charity. It was also said that he gave an undertaking never again to set foot in Yorkshire. The 1770 York meeting (if he was there) was the last he attended in the county – where, the
Genuine Memoirs
related, ‘he was considered, by the ladies, as satyr; and by the gentlemen, who very laudably entertained a proper sense of female protection, a ruffian'. This was Dennis's reputation outside Yorkshire too, and the ‘unfortunate adventure' helped to cement it. Miss Swinburne recovered her good name; Dennis, among the people who mattered, did not.

One of the people who was to matter most was the owner of a rival to Eclipse for the York Great Subscription (worth £319 10s to the winner). Sir Charles Bunbury, single again after his wife Lady Sarah (née Lennox) had eloped the previous year, was the steward of the Jockey Club, and was on his way to establishing himself as ‘The First Dictator of the Turf'. His entry for the York race was called Bellario. A second rival, Tortoise, came from the stables of Peregrine Wentworth, winner in 1769 with Bucephalus (defeated by Eclipse at Newmarket in April). Bellario and Tortoise had fine reputations, which counted for little in the betting: Eclipse's starting price was 1-20.

The race was run over four miles on the Knavesmire, a stretch of common land that was once the site for executions. York racing week was the north's answer to the big meetings at Newmarket, and the huge crowd at the course included the Duke of Cumberland (nephew of the Cumberland who bred Eclipse), the Duke of Devonshire, the Dukes and Duchesses of Kingston and Northumberland, and the Earl and Countess of Carlisle. One would like to know whether the disgraced Dennis O'Kelly had the brass neck to join them. It would have been a shame to miss this race.

Eclipse set off in his customary position at the front of the field, and this time never allowed his rivals, as he had done briefly at Epsom and Newmarket, to get close to him. Head low, raking stride relentless, he powered further and further clear. At the betting post, a layer shouted that he would take 100-1
on
Eclipse.
⁷³
After two of the four miles, Eclipse was already a distance (240 yards) ahead of the others, and he maintained the gap, coming to the line ‘with uncommon ease'. In one account, Dennis gave a group of men the scary task of standing to form a wall beyond the finishing line to encourage Eclipse to pull up.

Sir Charles Bunbury took the defeat with the lack of grace of a modern football manager. Jibbing at the loss to the upstart O'Kelly, he never accepted that Eclipse was his horse Bellario's superior. And he seems never to have been willing to accept Dennis as his equal – an attitude that was to blight Dennis's Turf ambitions.

Eclipse's 1770 schedule included four further engagements. But he raced only once. At Lincoln on 3 September, he walked over for his tenth King's Plate. Then he returned to Newmarket, where on 3 October he met another of Sir Charles Bunbury's horses, Corsican, in competition for a 150-guinea plate. In the view of the betting market, there was no competition: Eclipse was 1-70.You might have offered those odds about his getting from one end of the Beacon Course to another. He managed it, as did Corsican – only somewhat more slowly. On 4 October, Eclipse yet again scared off the opposition for a King's Plate, and walked over the Newmarket Round Course.

He was due to meet Jenison Shafto's unbeaten Goldfinder
(son of Shafto's Snap, who had twice defeated Eclipse's sire Marske), prompting jokes from O'Kelly about how the rival connections would be ‘gold losers'. But Goldfinder broke down at exercise, and the match did not take place.
⁷⁴

That was the anti-climactic end of Eclipse's career as a racer. He had won eighteen races, including eleven King's Plates. His prize money totalled £2, 863.50 – the equivalent of about £304, 000 today. It is a relatively modest sum: for winning the 2008 Epsom Derby, New Approach won for his owner, Princess Haya of Jordan, more than £800, 000.

However, Eclipse's money-making days were far from over. He had defeated all the best horses of his day. ‘He was never beaten, never had a whip flourished over him, or felt the tickling of a spur, or was ever, for a moment, distressed by the speed of a competitor; out-footing, out-striding, and out-lasting, every horse which started against him, ' the equestrian writer John Lawrence said. John Orton, in his
Turf Annals
, wrote, ‘The performances of Eclipse … have always been considered to exhibit a degree of superiority unparalleled by any horse ever known. 'The racing historian James Rice put it more fancifully: Eclipse ‘never failed in a single instance to
give them all their gruel
, and the need of a spyglass to see which way he went, and how far he was off'. Eclipse was without dispute – except possibly by Sir Charles Bunbury – the champion of his era. Horsemen agreed that he was ‘the fleetest horse that ever ran in England, since the time of [Flying] Childers'.

It was time to set about transmitting that ability to future generations.

⁶⁵
Horses are rarely asked to carry more than ten stone in modern British Flat races. In the championship National Hunt races at the Cheltenham Festival, the horses carry 11st 10lb.