Eclipse (19 page)

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 important 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.'

In a five-year career from 1777 to 1782, Pot8os won numerous races at Newmarket, including two Jockey Club Plates and two prizes worth 700 guineas each, and he also enjoyed three victories in a race called the Clermont Cup, all by walkovers. At ten, he retired to Grosvenor's Oxcroft Stud in Cambridgeshire. By that age, most twenty-first-century stallions have been at stud for six seasons. Nevertheless, Pot8os had time to sire 172 winning sons and daughters, among them Waxy, who continued the Eclipse male line from which a huge majority of contemporary Thoroughbreds descend.

Pot8os's defeated opponents included another son of Eclipse, King Fergus. Out of a mare called Creeping Polly, King Fergus was sold by his breeder, Mr Carver, back to Dennis, and forged a racing career of moderate distinction, with highlights including several valuable matches at Newmarket. He seemed
unlikely to become a prized stallion, and passed an unsuccessful spell at stud in Ireland before returning to England, where he caught the eye of an owner and breeder called John Hutchinson. Like the jockey and trainer John Singleton,
⁹³
Hutchinson was a horseman of modest birth who had managed to climb the social rankings. Starting out as a stable boy to Sir Robert Eden, who bred Eclipse's dam Spilletta, he went on to train for Peregrine Wentworth, owner of Eclipse's defeated opponent Bucephalus, and rose to become an owner and breeder. He took a liking to King Fergus's ‘wonderfully clean legs' and ‘mak' an' shap' (he meant, one supposes, the horse's conformation), judgements that were to prove sound. The stallion sired numerous good horses, including Hambletonian – the hero of
Hambletonian, Rubbing Down
, widely considered to be George Stubbs's greatest painting. Through Hambletonian, the line continued to the great and undefeated St Simon (born in 1881); the Prince of Wales's Derby winner Persimmon (b. 1893); the Italian champion Ribot, twice a winner (in 1955 and 1956) of the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe; and Alleged, another dual Arc winner (1977 and 1978).

You can see how rare it is to make an enduring mark in bloodstock breeding. Eclipse is the most influential sire of all time thanks to only two of his hundreds of sons. While some others did well at stud, their male descendants, sooner or later, flopped, and their male lines died out.

Breeders of the era could not foresee these developments. All they had to go on were the performances of Eclipse's sons and daughters on the racecourse. What particularly strikes the contemporary observer is that Eclipse sired three of the first five winners of the Derby:Young Eclipse (1781), Saltram (1783), and Sergeant (1784). But the Derby was not yet the most prestigious horse race in the world. It was a new contest, and over what was, by the standards prevalent when Eclipse was racing, a short dis
tance. For breeders, the victories confirmed the impression that although the progeny of Eclipse were speedy, they did not necessarily have ‘bottom'.

In the 1770s, Eclipse faced competition as a stallion from highly regarded rivals such as Matchem and Snap, about whom the breeding adage went, ‘Snap for speed, and Matchem for truth and daylight' – truth and daylight in this context meaning soundness and stamina. Then there was Marske, Eclipse's own father. Marske was succeeded, following his two years as champion sire, by Herod, who held the title from 1777 to 1784 and who handed over the crown to his son, Highflyer, champion from 1785 to 1796, and again in 1798. (King Fergus managed to intervene in 1797; one historian thinks that Pot8os, another Eclipse son, was the true champion in 1794.) The writer John Lawrence introduced the now-insignificant Goldfinder as another competitor: ‘The produce of Eclipse ran too generally and exclusively to speed; and that, in toughness and continuance, they were greatly surpassed by their competitors on the course, the stock of King Herod and Goldfinder.' Eclipse was in fact never champion sire, finishing runner-up to Herod and then to Highflyer every year from 1778 to 1788.

How could this be? Eclipse's celebrity, and the subsequent records of his descendants, make his failure to win a single sire's championship appear extraordinary. Every contemporary reference to Eclipse indicates that he was a household name: the Seabiscuit, the Red Rum, the Desert Orchid of his day, only with a far more awesome reputation as a racer. The flamboyant, dodgy personality of his owner, Dennis O'Kelly, heightened the mystique, as did Dennis's talent for hype. Yet the words of John Lawrence – one of Eclipse's greatest admirers – hint that a few observers may have been able to separate their awe for Eclipse from their assessment of his progeny. There were also class considerations: some men of the Turf preferred not to do business with a scandalous Irish upstart.

Richard Tattersall, who had supported the rumour that Shakespeare was Eclipse's sire, was gleeful when a colt called Noble won the 1786 Derby. Noble, who had started at the huge price of 30-1, was a son of Tattersall's stallion Highflyer, and defeated the favourite, Eclipse's son Meteor. Eclipse had had his day, Tattersall exulted. Described in a nineteenth-century history of the Jockey Club as ‘an auctioneer, though of excellent repute' (the same work characterized Dennis O'Kelly as ‘a disreputable adventurer'), Tattersall was hugely proud of Highflyer. He built a mansion called Highflyer Hall, and was pictured there, bluff of countenance and sporting a wide-brimmed hat, standing in front of a painting of the horse and with his hand resting on a document bearing the instruction ‘Highflyer not to be sold' (see colour section).When Highflyer died, in 1793, Tattersall's tribute to him – more touching than Harding's ode to Marske – was this gravestone inscription: ‘Here lieth the perfect and beautiful symmetry of the much lamented Highflyer, by whom and his wonderful offspring the celebrated Tattersall acquired a noble fortune, and was not ashamed to acknowledge it.'

Tattersall and his contemporaries would have expected the Herod and Highflyer male line, and that of Matchem, to have surpassed Eclipse's in later generations. But Eclipse has come out on top – by a distance. It is estimated that 95 per cent of contemporary Thoroughbreds are Eclipse's male line descendants. A check of the lists of top contemporary stallions suggests that the percentage may be even higher than that: the representatives of the Herod and Matchem lines are sparse. How did Eclipse become, in the words of racing historian Arthur FitzGerald, ‘the most influential stallion in the history of the Thoroughbred'?

Herod and Highflyer have a good deal to do with it. Georgian breeders noted that uniting the Herod and Eclipse lines was a remarkably effective ‘nick' – a cross that produced outstanding racers. At his death, Dennis O'Kelly owned nine daughters of Herod, whom he had bought to breed with Eclipse
and with Eclipse's sons. The nick also worked the other way round, when Herod covered Eclipse's daughters, and it worked when Herod's son Highflyer covered Eclipse's daughters.
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‘Send me your Eclipse mares, ' Richard Tattersall said, ‘and you shall have the best racehorses in England as a result.' It was no vain boast; and it offered a formula for the breeding of champions for years to come.

⁸⁸
In the TV sitcom
Cheers
, a husband whose broody wife was demanding constant sex complained, ‘Even Secretariat gets a break now and again!'

⁸⁹
The breeder is not the provider of the stallion. To breed is to own broodmares, and to produce a foal by sending a mare to a particular stallion.

⁹⁰
Today, when the science of breeding is more accurate, stud owners usually give a live foal guarantee, offering a free subsequent mating if the first one is unproductive.

⁹¹
The sire whose offspring earn most money through racing.

⁹²
There is a fuller discussion of this painting in chapter 18.

⁹³
See chapter 8.

⁹⁴
I apologize for neglecting the female role in my discussion of Eclipse's male descendants. His daughters are also significant presences in pedigrees. Horses, of course, inherit half their genes from their fathers and half from their mothers, so there is no reason to treat the sire as more important. However, a successful sire produces hundreds (these days, thousands) of offspring, whereas a successful dam produces, if she is particularly fertile and robust, about ten. Moreover, the Thoroughbred is an inbred animal, so the male line saturates pedigrees to an ever greater extent as the generations continue. That is why the Eclipse male line is so important.

I
N THE LAST QUARTER
of the eighteenth century, one world began to make way for another. Concepts of citizenship, alien to Britain's royalist traditions, fuelled revolutions in America and France. Wars transformed the map of Europe. Industrialization gathered pace, bringing with it a more turbulent social structure. The press became a mass medium. There was a new imaginative atmosphere: in place of the earthy humour of Henry Fielding, there was the fine moral discrimination of Jane Austen, and the robust intellectual conservatism of Samuel Johnson was followed by the Romantic idealism of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Gentlemen and ladies were expected to behave with far greater decorum than had their scandalous predecessors. There was a new notion of personality. Observing the likes of Charles James Fox, William Hickey and even Dennis O'Kelly, you get the impression of a certain selfconsciousness, as if these men were playing a game or had adopted roles: the flamboyant statesman, the rake, the sporting dandy. While the ideal of the British sporting gentleman persisted, a new ideal, of sincerity to the true self, came to inspire people's behaviour.

One risks bathos by appending horseracing, aptly described
as the ‘great triviality',
⁹⁵
to this list. But remember the scene on Derby day. No other sport has so many ties to so many levels of society. It was bound to change too.

In essence, the eighteenth-century gentlemanly pursuit became a mass entertainment, and more professional – more industrialized, if you like. Three men were at the heart of the transformation of racing, driving innovations that continue to shape the sport today; and they were all Eclipse's contemporaries.

In about 1750, a group of sporting gentlemen took to meeting regularly in the Star and Garter pub in St James's. Calling themselves the Jockey Club, they established a race to be staged during the spring meeting at Newmarket, where they acquired premises: ‘A contribution free plate [the entrants did not have to pay a fee], by horses the property of the noblemen and gentlemen belonging to the Jockey Club at the Star and Garter in Pall Mall, one heat on the Round Course, weight eight stone, seven pound.'