Eclipse (26 page)

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

One of the prints carried a twee account of the move in the form of an epistle from Eclipse to his son, King Fergus:

I set out last week from Epsom, and am safe arrived in my new stables at this place. My situation may serve as a lesson to man: I was once the fleetest horse in the world, but old age has come
upon me, and wonder not, King Fergus, when I tell thee, I was drawn in a carriage from Epsom to Cannons, being unable to walk even so short a journey. Every horse, as well as every dog, has his day; and I have had mine. I have outlived two worthy masters, the late Duke of Cumberland, that bred me, and the Colonel, with whom I have spent my best days; but I must not repine, I am now caressed, not so much for what I can do, but for what I have done.

I am glad to hear, my grandson, Honest Tom, performs so well in Ireland, and trust that he, and the rest of my progeny, will do honour to the name of their grandsire,

Eclipse

Cannons, Middlesex

P.S. Myself, Dungannon, Volunteer, and Vertumnus, are all here. Compliments to the Yorkshire horses.

Andrew saw that Eclipse did not have much time left. In December of that year, 1788,
The Times
reported that ‘The French King has sent over an eminent anatomic drawer to Captain O'Kelly's seat at Cannons, in order to make a minute and complete figure of the celebrated horse Eclipse. He is now there, where it is intended he shall remain a fortnight.' This man may have been Charles Vial de Sainbel,
¹²⁷
a thirty-five-year-old veterinarian who had been a victim of political machinations at the Royal Veterinary College in Paris.

It was Sainbel – now living in a London house once occupied by Sir Isaac Newton – whom Andrew hastened to fetch just two months later when, on the morning of 25 February 1789, Eclipse fell ill with colic. This intestinal affliction often causes terrible pain for horses, and can be fatal. On arrival at Cannons, Sainbel gave the suffering Eclipse laudanum, and tried the generic treatment of bleeding. He would have punctured a vein in the horse's neck, and
allowed up to five pints of blood to drain out. Despite this attention (possibly because of it), Eclipse continued to decline, and died on 27 February, at seven o'clock in the evening.
¹²⁸

Sainbel performed a post-mortem, and satisfied himself that Eclipse had been beyond the reach of medicine. ‘I infer that the reins [kidneys] performed their functions in a very imperfect manner, and that the animal died in consequence of the affections of these viscera, and of a violent inflammation of the bowels, ' he wrote later. Eclipse had a large heart, Sainbel noticed. He weighed it: it tipped the scales at 14lb.This unusual size, a good five pounds heavier than standard, has been taken as one explanation for Eclipse's stamina. But Sainbel and Andrew wanted further explanations, and they agreed to offer a detailed anatomical study. The first ever work of its kind, it would confirm Eclipse's status as the paragon of the breed, and it would fix that status for posterity.

So it was a funeral of the flesh only when Eclipse was interred at Cannons. ‘A large assembly' enjoyed cakes and ale as they paid tribute to the horse. Eclipse, like his father, received a poetic eulogy. The last line was a dig at Eclipse's rival stallions, and no doubt at Richard Tattersall, owner of Herod's son Highflyer and author of the taunt a few years earlier that Eclipse ‘had had his day'.

Praise to departed worth! Illustrious steed,

Not the fam'd Phrenicus of Pindar's ode,
¹²⁹

O'er thee, Eclipse, possessed transcendent speed

When by a keen Newmarket jockey rode.

Tho' from the hoof of Pegasus arose

Inspiring Hippocrene, a fount divine!

A richer stream superior merit shows,

Thy matchless foot produced O'Kelly's wine.

True, o'er the tomb in which this fav'rite lies

No vaunting boast appears of lineage good;

Yet the Turf Register's bright page defies

The race of Herod to show better blood.

Eclipse sired 344 sons and daughters who were winners on the racecourse; their victories totalled 862, and their earnings exceeded £158, 000. Their prizes put him second in the sires' championship for eleven consecutive years, from 1777 to 1788. While he was never leading sire, he was certainly the most profitable sire of the time. Dennis O'Kelly boasted that Eclipse had earned him £25, 000 – and he may not have exaggerated grossly.
¹³⁰

The press reported that Matchem – who was the most celebrated stallion when Eclipse started his career, and who eventually commanded a fee of fifty guineas – had earned stud fees of £17, 000.

Eclipse was to surpass Matchem subsequently, too. For the next fifty years, their male lines were of similar importance to breeders, with Matchem's, if anything, slightly favoured. But that changed, and is a historical curiosity now. Matchem is not the tail male (male line) ancestor of any of the current top thirty sires in Europe; and of only one, Tiznow, in the US list. The only sire in either list with a male-line descent from Herod is Inchinor. The fifty-eight others all descend from Eclipse.

¹²²
Newly christened; the paper had begun publishing as the
Daily Universal Register
in 1785.

¹²³
They were William Atkinson of Pall Mall, an apothecary, and Thomas Birch of Bond Street, a banker.

¹²⁴
Augusta travelled to and fro bewilderingly. Bred by O'Kelly, she was sold to the Prince, bought back, and sold at the dispersal sale; but she ended up at the O'Kelly stud at Cannons.

¹²⁵
From
A Short History of the Celebrated Race-horse Eclipse
by Bracy Clark.

¹²⁶
From William Pick's
The Turf Register and Sportsman and Breeder's Stud Book
.

¹²⁷
This was how the English styled his surname, St Bel. He wrote later that he had made studies of Eclipse when alive. See chapter 21 for more on Sainbel.

¹²⁸
He was nearly if not actually twenty-five (though his contemporaries would have said that he had not reached his twenty-fifth birthday, which they assigned to 1 May).That was a pretty good innings. Herod died at twenty-two, and Highflyer at twenty. Eclipse's long-lived contemporaries included his father, Marske, who survived to twenty-nine, and Matchem, who achieved the great age of thirty-three. Among more recent champions, Nijinsky lived to Eclipse's age of twenty-five, while Secretariat died at nineteen.

¹²⁹
Pindar's first Olympic ode refers to this horse, with which Hiero of Syracuse won an Olympic crown.

¹³⁰
A back-of-the-envelope calculation, based on Eclipse's advertised stud fees and numbers of coverings, gives a career total of about £22, 000.

A
NDREW DENNIS O'KELLY
, the guardian of the O'Kelly and Eclipse legacy, was an altogether more refined figure than his uncle Dennis. A portrait from 1784, when Andrew was in his early twenties, shows an urbane young man who has benefited from the education that Dennis, and Philip his father, lacked: fine of feature and of dress, he gazes assuredly at the viewer with almond-shaped eyes.

Unlike his uncle too, he became a figure of the establishment. The Jockey Club, as if compounding the snub to Dennis, accepted Andrew into membership after Dennis's death, and the Jockey Club ruler Sir Charles Bunbury, who had owned only one racehorse sired by Eclipse, sent mares to the O'Kelly stallion Dungannon. Other leading men of the Turf to use the stud included the Duke of Grafton, the Duke of Bedford, Lord Grosvenor, Earl Strathmore and the Prince of Wales. Andrew was a confidant of the Prince's, and had influential political friends. He had cultural interests: he was among the subscribers to a printing of the complete works of Handel, and he held a concert at Cannons with Nancy Storace – who had sung Susanna in the first performances of Mozart's
The Marriage of Figaro
– among the soloists.

Yet Andrew could not cast off the O'Kelly talent for controversy, and he spent a good part of his life enmeshed in disputes and legal complications. One of his earliest tangles with the law concerned his behaviour in the Middlesex Militia, the county force in which Dennis had risen, with the help of patronage and of his wallet, to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Andrew joined the militia's Westminster Regiment too, and was a captain when Dennis died. In 1793, an officer called Thomas Gordon agreed to transfer his lieutenant colonelcy in the regiment to Andrew for £200; Andrew was to pay Gordon a further fifty guineas should the regiment remain embodied a year later. Such clauses were typical of the time. Most sales agreements involved caveats and bonuses of various sorts – the purchase of a horse might require an extra payment if the horse won a particular race, for example. It is no wonder that the Georgians were such a litigious bunch.

Andrew enjoyed his rank for only three years until, in 1796, he faced a court martial. The charge, heard at Horse Guards in St James's, was that, while billeted in Winchelsea, he and fellow soldiers – among them his cousin, Philip Whitfield Harvey
¹³¹
– had

appropriated government coal from the barracks for the house where Andrew was staying. Andrew's companions swore before the court that they had not realized that the coal was unaccounted for; that they had not realized that the coal was assigned to the men in barracks; that the quantity of coal they had taken was small; and that Andrew was absent for three of the five months when the offences were alleged to have taken place. This testimony did not impress the court. It found Andrew guilty, ruled that he should be dismissed from the regiment, and fined him £100, reserving judgment only on how much compensation he should pay for the coal. A letter from Charles Morgan, writing on behalf of the King, softened the sentence but not the essential blow:

I take the earliest opportunity of acquainting you, that His Majesty, graciously taking into consideration all the circumstances of the case, and noticing, moreover, that of 18 articles of charge preferred against you, only one had been established to the satisfaction of the Court Martial, that very slender evidence had been offered in support of others; and that several had been entirely abandoned, did not think it necessary that the said sentence should be carried into execution; but his Majesty at the same time judging that it will not consist with the upholding of discipline in the said regiment, or tend to promote a respectful attraction from the men towards their Officers, that you should retain your Commission of Lieutenant Colonel in the corps, was pleased to express his Royal intention of giving direction, through his Majesty's Secretary of State, to the Lord Lieutenant of the County of Middlesex, for displacing you from the Westminster regiment of Militia.

I am, Sir, your most obedient, and very humble servant, Charles Morgan.

It was a lofty, conclusive dismissal. But, while the court martial was reported in
The Times
, it made no dent in Andrew's reputation. Ejection from the regular forces was shameful; ejection from a county militia was not so grave.

Another incident shows that Andrew's talent for plunging himself into disputes was not always accompanied by sound insight. He intervened on the road from Epsom to London when he came across a stalled coach in which one of the passengers, a guards officer, was shouting at the coachman. Andrew took up a position on one side of the coach, with a companion on the other, and whipped the coachman and his horses on towards town – actions that resulted, predictably, in the coach's careering into a ditch, with injuries to both the coachman and the officer's female companion. When the coachman sued, the court heard that the guards officer had taken the young woman, Miss Williams, to
the races, had got drunk, and on the journey home had become abusive, charging the coachman with being in league with highwaymen. The judge, ruling that the officer's behaviour had been ‘barbarous', fined him £100. Andrew escaped censure.