Let us now praise famous horses
Ihave never ridden a horse in my life. But I like them, big, decent, hardworking, sensitive creatures that they are. At my house in West Somerset I know several, and take great pleasure in occasionally feeding them lumps of brown sugar. In the 20-acre field near my orchard there lives Fortinbras, as I call him, or ‘Forty’, a lonely but noble creature, often tortured by flies, who comes at the gallop as soon as he sees me. Then there is Brenda, a lovely brown mare who pokes her elegant head expectantly over the high fence by the road. In the big bottom field live three, a black stallion, a grey-spotted mare and a bay colt, whom I call Frisky. Solemn people say you should never feed animals in this amateurish way, and that to give sugar to horses is wrong. But even the Duke of Wellington, a stern sort of fellow not given to self-indulgence either to himself or to others, fed sugar to his splendid charger, Copenhagen, who carried him for 12 hours or more at Waterloo. He said of the grand mount, ‘There are more handsome horses and faster ones, but for sheer bottom I have never known his equal.’ Oddly enough, Copenhagen, who had been so equable during that long terrible battle, when the Duke finally dismounted and patted his rump, let fly with a hind leg that just missed Wellington’s head. There is a lock of Copenhagen’s hair, in a glass case, preserved in the old Cavalry Club in Piccadilly, looking as if it were clipped yesterday.
West Somerset is a horsey county. I would guess that in parts of it a quarter of the people own one. My own place was converted from a coaching-house by a horse-loving couple half a century ago. They devoted their retirement to hunting, and found plenty of it, stag-hounds, harriers and at least 13 packs of fox-hounds, within easy reach. Relics of their passion survive: a full-length looking-glass for inspecting one’s rig-out just before mounting, and an ancient carved frieze of hunting scenes around the fireplace in the huge drawing-room where I now keep my art library. But one of the stables I have converted to a studio, and no horses come, though sheep break in occasionally.
Horses have played a major role in human history, both collectively and individually, and I treasure details about the famous ones. Napoleon’s favourite charger was Marengo, but he was not a man who respected horses or even spared them. He flogged them on unmercifully in his lust for speed, and there is a vignette of him, galloping alongside his ADC, and whacking the rumps of both with his whip, his aide presumably being too squeamish. The slaughter of horses during his wars was colossal, and particularly severe at Waterloo. After the battle, scores of London surgeons went to the field to attend the wounded, and the horses were not forgotten. Sir Ashley Cooper, then the outstanding man in his profession, attended the sale of wounded horses considered fit only for the knacker’s yard. He bought a dozen of the most serious cases and transported them to his estate in Hertfordshire. Then he began systematically to extract bullets and grapeshot. He managed to save the lives of all 12, and let them loose in his park. Then ‘one morning, to his great delight, he saw the noble animals form in line, charge, and then retreat and afterwards gallop about, appearing greatly contented with the lot that had befallen them’.
My knowledge of horses comes chiefly from the drawings of John Leech, of which I possess a complete set, and the novels of Surtees, especially his two masterpieces, Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour and Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds. Surtees describes the characters of horses, such as Hercules and Multum in Parvo, in considerable detail, and is not afraid to show that horses can be malign and indeed downright dangerous if not ridden by an accomplished and masterful rider. Sir Robert Peel was, I suppose, a practised horseman, according to his time and class. But he took out a London hireling one morning which, unknown to him, had a difficult nature, and was badly thrown, dying in agony a few days later. But the most spectacular Victorian riding accident occurred to Bishop ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce in 1873. While riding with the foreign secretary, Lord Granville, his horse threw him powerfully, and he seems to have died instantly. He had the highest profile of any prelate of his day, and the public were shocked by this unexpected act of God against their best-known ecclesiastic. Lord Shaftesbury noted, ‘This event struck me like an earthquake. I was all but horrorstricken ... absolutely thunderstruck with amazement and terror.’ But Granville was able to assure the bishop’s son that the manner of his father’s death was demure, even solemn — one might almost say prelatical: ‘He must have turned a complete somersault; his feet were in the direction in which we were going, his arms straight by his side — the position was absolutely monumental.’ George V was cursed by a bad horse-fall which occurred when he was visiting the GHQ at the Western Front in France. Indeed he never really got over it, despite or perhaps because of the attention of numerous surgeons and physicians, all of whom he denounced roundly. Falling is inevitable in hunting if you are in any way a thruster, and hardened followers of the sport have plenty of broken bones and other injuries to show for it, and the arthritis which usually follows. A horse is a big animal, and falling from it is a long way to drop. That is the reason I have never taken up this ancient, dignified, romantic but perilous mode of travel.
Until the Great War it was not unusual for an owner to have a favourite horse stuffed, and placed in a prominent position in the stables or even in the mansion itself. But gradually, as owners died and memories faded, and since such triumphs of taxidermy took up a lot of room and collected dust, they were done away with. The only one I know of to survive is the horse on which Lord Cardigan led the Charge of the Light Brigade, whose name, I think, was Ronald. He is preserved at the ancestral home of the Brudenells, in a vast glass case. Most of the horse is a wooden replica, but the head and neck are the original, and a fine-looking beast he was. He must have been a lucky one, too, to survive that devastating event virtually unscathed and return to England to be praised and petted the rest of his life. God bless all horses, who serve us so faithfully and without complaint!
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