THE accession of Henry VIII. to the throne, in 1509, marked the beginning of a great development in the breeding and rearing of valuable horses, for that erratic monarch, whatever his failings may have been—and that he had a few failings we have reason to know—was at heart a sportsman in the true meaning of the now frequently misused term.

We read that soon after ascending the throne “he took steps to arrange for the importation from Italy, Spain, Turkey and elsewhere, at regular intervals, of the best stallions and some of the best mares procurable.” That done, he set to work to establish at Hampton Court the Royal Stud which later was to become so famous, and among the many horses he received as gifts—the majority from men anxious to keep in favour with a monarch so all-powerful—were the famous mares “perfect in shape and size” that Francesco Gonzaga, the Marquis of Mantua, sent over in 1514, a gift to which he soon afterwards added “a Barb worth its weight in silver” which he declared he had taken great pains to secure.

That Henry was deeply gratified is obvious from his remark that he “had never ridden better trained horses,” and that “for years he had not received such an agreeable present.”

As time went on, and the Royal Stud steadily increased, the fame of Henry's horses spread not only throughout the kingdom, but also across the seas and into remote parts of the Continent, with the natural result that presently attempts were made to obtain surreptitiously foals known to have been bred in the famous paddocks.

Henry, upon hearing this, became extremely angry, and this knowledge it probably was that in a measure prompted him to render illegal the exportation beyond the seas of mares or horses bred in England, and, in addition, to threaten with severe punishment anyone discovered making the attempt.

There cannot, indeed, be any doubt that before the passing of this Act many horses had been sent abroad from various parts of the country, and that in consequence the British stock probably would soon have depreciated in value had Henry not thus effectually put a stop to the practice at the outset.

Yet we are told that in spite of this the king's act greatly annoyed several of the more powerful of his nobles, even that in some of the provinces it led almost to open rebellion, many men of private means having been in the habit of considerably augmenting their fortunes by secretly exporting horses upon what was in those days deemed to be rather a large scale.

So strong, indeed, did the feeling throughout the country gradually grow, that in a short time it was decided to present the king with “a request”—presumably what we should to-day term a petition—in the hope that he might thereby be induced to revoke his rather arbitrary order.

Whether the request ever was presented does not appear, but certainly Henry did not revoke the order.

On the contrary, soon after prohibiting the exportation of horses beyond the seas he issued a supplementary edict which in effect rendered the exportation of horses to any foreign port, with the exception of Calais, a very grave offence; while the “exportation” of horses into Scotland, and even the bare act of selling to any Scotsman any horse without having first obtained the king's permission to do so, became an act of felony alike to vendor and purchaser.

Of course so unjust a law as the latter soon stirred up a strong feeling of resentment amongst Henry's subjects; yet in spite of their bitter complaints they were compelled to comply with it.

Thus it soon came about that men who had been living comparatively in opulence before the passing of these laws now found themselves reduced to genteel poverty, whereupon, as if to add insult to injury, Henry passed yet another statute—27, Henry VIII., c. 6.

This statute enacted that all farmers in receipt of a certain stated income, also all owners of parks, as well as certain other persons, should rear and keep a specified number of brood mares, of a height not less than thirteen hands, the penalty for failing to comply with the order being fixed at forty shillings a month.

The statute in addition commanded that upon every park of not less than four miles in extent—this is understood to have meant four miles in circumference—at least four mares should be kept, the same fine, forty shillings a month, to be extorted from all who failed to keep the law.

That these laws, though severe and unjust, achieved their purpose we may conclude from the statement that soon after they had been passed there were to be found in England five times more horses ready to be put into the field in a case of emergency, and that these horses were all of great value.

Yet once again an attempt was made to induce Henry to revoke his laws forbidding the exportation of horses, and again the attempt proved futile. The Scottish nation in particular felt deeply aggrieved at what they somewhat naturally deemed to be an insult paid to them by the king, but Henry, beyond threatening that if the complaints continued he would put a stop to them in rather a forcible manner, paid no heed whatever. And at just about this time it was that a number of Lowlanders were, so it is alleged, severely punished for purchasing horses of Englishmen in defiance of Henry's command.

And still the king remained unsatisfied. He had openly declared that he would transform England into the foremost country in Europe for valuable and well-bred horses, and to facilitate his doing so he presently passed another statute.

In this statute he commanded that stoned horses under fifteen hands were not to be put to pasture in any wood or forest in certain counties (which he mentioned), the penalty for breaking the law to be forfeiture to the Crown, while in certain other counties the law was to apply to horses under fourteen hands.

Yet another statute which he drew up—33, Henry VIII., c. 5—enacted that dukes and archbishops must maintain seven stoned trotting horses for the saddle; marquises, earls and bishops, five; and viscounts and barons with incomes of not less than 1000 marks, five.

In the same way subjects with an income of 500 marks were each to maintain two of these trotting horses for the saddle, while men with an income of 100 marks, whose wives should “wear any gown of silk, or any French hood or bonnet of velvet, with any habiliment, paste or egg of gold, pearl or stone, or any chain of gold about their necks, or in their partlets, or in any apparel on their body,” were by the law compelled to maintain one saddle horse, severe penalties being inflicted if they failed to do so.

I have somewhere seen it stated that these Acts were repealed by Edward VI., but they were not. They were developed by William and Mary, and further developed by Elizabeth. Upon each occasion the renewal and development of these statutes caused bad blood and brought forth threats of retaliation, but the latter were not carried out.

That the obvious injustice of laws so arbitrary should have created friction, is not to be wondered at; yet the benefit that subsequently accrued to the country through passing them was enormous.

Indeed it is more than likely that if Henry VIII., William and Mary, and Elizabeth had given way to the demands of a great body of their subjects between three and four hundred years ago, England would not have become famous above all other countries for its horses, as it is to-day.

It was in the reign of Henry VIII. that riding matches first began to acquire popularity, and to attract the attention of the “bloods” of about that period. Several descriptions of the way in which such matches were arranged and carried out are in existence, and perhaps a brief account of rather a famous match that was ridden by Richard de la Pole, the third Duke of Suffolk, against Seigneur Nicolle Dex, will here prove of interest.

The Duke of Suffolk—“Blanche Rose” as his intimate friends called him—was the third son of John de la Pole, his mother being the Lady Elizabeth Plantagenet, Edward IV.'s and Richard III.'s sister.

In the year 1517, soon after the Duke had returned to Metz, the popularity of the turf began suddenly to increase, and thus it happened that the Duke presently became the possessor of a horse said to be “very swift and of extreme value,” of which he boasted that it could beat all comers. It was while talking thus in Metz one day that Blanche Rose was taken at his word by the Seigneur Nicolle Dex, who declared without hesitation that he could and would himself produce and ride a horse against the Duke's “from the Elm at Avegney to within St Clement's Gate,” for the sum of eighty crowns “and win easily.”

At once Blanche Rose accepted the challenge, promising at the same time that he too would ride his own horse, and forthwith the stakes were handed to “an independent and neutral person” by each of the contestants.

Arrangements having been made that the match should be run early in the morning of St Clement's Day, May 2nd, we read that, “a ce jour meisme que l'on courre l'awaine et le baicon au dit lieu St Clement,” the two riders, accompanied by many of their friends, went out through St Thiebault's gate, which had been opened before the usual time to suit their convenience, “and so passed into the field for the race.”

There was much wagering on the result, and, as we should to-day express it, the Duke's mount was hot favourite. That Seigneur Nicolle was no novice in race riding is made manifest by the statement that he had taken the precaution to have his horse shod with extremely light shoes, also that “he came into the field like a groom, in his doublet and without shoes, and with no saddle but with a cloth tied round the horse's belly,” whereas the Duke wore comparatively heavy clothing and rode in a heavy saddle.

The Duke's horse, however, jumped away with the lead and retained it during the first half of the race, “but when they were near St Laidre his horse lagged behind, so that the Duke urged him on with spurs until the blood streamed down on both sides; but it was in vain, Nicolle gained the race and the hundred and sixty crowns of the sum.”

Several writers tell us that Nicolle Dex had trained his horse on white wine, but the truth would seem to be that he himself trained on white wine. We are informed, in addition, that the horse was not given any hay.

“Le dit Seigneur Nicolle n'avoit point donne de foin a son chevaulx, ne n'avoit beu aultre chose que du vin blanc.”

What the horses of four hundred years ago were chiefly fed on is uncertain. We know that usually they were given hay, but we find mention made repeatedly of “horse bread.” Probably this horse bread resembled the modern oil cake upon which cattle is fed, for we read that it tended to make the horses' coats “soft and glossy,” an attribute of oil cake of which horse dealers are well aware.

It seems hardly necessary to mention in this connection that in Henry VIII.'s time, and indeed down to a much later period, the art of training horses, as we understand it to-day, was practically in its infancy. Also we are able to infer that it was quite a common practice to give a horse a drink of water just before running him in a race, and that what we to-day allude to as the art of judging pace in connection with race riding probably had never been even thought of.

In Henry VIII.'s reign the habit of naming horses after their breeder on their previous owner would appear to have come into vogue rather largely, and from that time onward, for some three centuries and a half, to have remained in vogue. After that it became customary to name race horses in rather a grotesque manner.

I have by me a list of names of race horses almost all of which must have been animals well known in their time. It would be interesting to hear what Messrs Weatherby would say if we asked them to-day to enter a mare to run under the name “Pretty Harlot” or, better still, “Sweetest when Naked”!

Among Henry VIII.'s famous barbs we find several mentioned by name, and we read incidentally that “during four or six days the king rode both Altobello and Governatore, but preferred Governatore.”

The Marquis of Mantua had been renowned for his skill in horsemanship, as well as for the famous stud of horses that he possessed, for some years before Henry VIII. came to the throne, and this stud is said to have reached the acme of its excellence about the year 1517, when Gonzaga, as the Marquis was generally called, received many more requests for the service of his stallions than he was able to accede to.

Many, if not actually the majority of the horses that proved most successful upon the turf during the sixteenth century are said to have been descendants of the stock bred so carefully and with so much discrimination by Gonzaga or by King Henry, from which we may conclude that the assertion made often that until the reign of Queen Anne there were no race horses in this country worth speaking of is erroneous.

It is said, apparently with truth, that Gonzaga became extremely angry when, in the year 1515—only a few months after he had presented Henry with the valuable horses already referred to—Ferdinand of Arragon sent Henry “a gift of two most excellent horses,” with the message that he, Ferdinand, believed they would be found to outclass even the fine horses already in the royal stables at Hampton Court.

An apparently trivial incident such as this helps to show how thoroughly in earnest the men of fortune must have been who early in the sixteenth century devoted much time and attention to the breeding and rearing of valuable horses. It has been alleged that the Marquis of Mantua made his initial present of horses to King Henry solely in order to ingratiate himself in royal favour; but the anxiety he clearly displayed upon several occasions when gifts of horses were sent to Henry by men of rank and fortune leads to the belief either that Gonzaga must have been of a jealous nature, or else that he was inordinately proud of his own stud and extremely desirous that its high reputation should be maintained.

The value of the two horses sent over by Ferdinand is said to have been approximately 100,000 ducats. That would seem to be an impossible sum to have paid in a period when money was worth many times more than it is to-day; but when we read that both horses were richly caparisoned (regio ornatu) we may well suppose that the sum named included also the cost of trappings.

Under the circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that Ferdinand of Arragon—Ferdinand the Catholic, as he was popularly called—should have been deemed insane by a great body of his subjects when it became known that he had sent so extravagant a gift to King Henry, his son-in-law.

So prevalent, indeed, was this impression, that reasons were at once put forward to account for the alleged lack of intellect. Thus the incident of his having been poisoned two years before by his new queen, Germaine de Fois, was mentioned amongst possible causes, the serious illness that followed having proved almost fatal.

Particulars of this attempt upon the life of Ferdinand the Catholic are to be found in one of the letters of Peter Martyr, though the writer of the letter does not seem to think that any insanity with which the king may have been afflicted towards the close of his life can have been due to the cause assigned. Indeed in one of these letters he directly attributes the king's death to over-indulgence in hunting and matrimony, either of which, as he says, is liable to hasten dissolution in a man over sixty years of age!

Not content with the very large and valuable stud that he now possessed, Henry found it necessary in 1518 to send “a Bolognese gentleman” out to Italy to choose still more horses for him there, special instructions being given to him that the best animals he could find in Italy must be bought at once, irrespective of cost, and shipped across to England without undue delay—an order that the Bolognese gentleman “obeyed implicitly and to the king's great satisfaction as well as to his own.” There may well be a hidden meaning in the last words!

We do not hear anything more that is of interest and that has to do with Henry's stud until the year 1526, when we read that “eighteen of the finest of his horses were sent by King Henry VIII. as a gift to Francis I.” The reason he sent so many is not stated, nor are we told if these were chargers, race horses or great horses.

After that the sending of gift horses apparently became an established custom amongst men of rank and of wealth, as well as amongst potentates, so much so that persons of quality vied one with another in sending gifts of valuable horses to their friends.

The last present of the sort received by Henry VIII. consisted of twenty-five Spanish horses sent to him by the emperor, Charles V., in 1539.

Hunting is known to have been one of Henry's favourite amusements, and in a despatch dated 10th September 1519, written by Giustinian when Venetian Ambassador to England, we are informed that when Henry hunted he invariably rode several horses, or, in the words of the despatch, “never took that diversion without tiring eight or ten horses, which he caused to be stationed beforehand along the line of country he meant to take.”

From this and similar statements it has been inferred that the hounds Henry hunted with ran some artificial line, that otherwise the horses could not have been stationed “beforehand along the line of country he meant to take.” The probability, however, is that the king's horses were stationed at different points all over the country to be hunted, for it seems impossible that the king, heavy man though he undoubtedly was, could alone have ridden eight or ten horses to a standstill in a single day's hunting!

Indeed in Henry III.'s reign the men who hunted regularly most likely rode more than one horse a day, just as most hunting men do now. At that period the sport was, of course, very different from our modern foxhunting, and from the descriptions of it that have been handed down to us there is reason to believe that plenty of Henry's nobles hunted not because they were fond of the sport, but because they deemed it diplomatic to appear to be wholeheartedly as devoted to the chase as the king himself most certainly was.

Yet the king apparently was not hoodwinked as easily as he may have appeared to be, or feigned to be, for upon more than one occasion he availed himself of opportunities to make some of his sycophants look remarkably ridiculous in public.

In this connection an interesting little story is narrated of Sir Miles Partridge, a knight who figured rather largely in Henry VIII.'s reign. Apparently Sir Miles had more than once writhed in silence beneath the king's gibes, though all the while impatiently awaiting an opportunity to retaliate in a dignified way.

The opportunity came at last, when the king, in a merry mood, suggested to the knight that he should dice with him. This happened at about the time when the monasteries were being dissolved, and Henry's coffers were in consequence unusually well replenished. At first the king won persistently; then suddenly his luck deserted him, with the result that in the end he lost control of his temper and with an oath shouted at Sir Miles that he would stake upon a single throw of the dice the great bells of St Paul's against a hundred sovereigns.

The dice were thrown, and Sir Miles won, and the bells, described by a chronicler of the period as “the greatest peal in England,” were taken away and melted down, to the knight's unfeigned delight.

It is said that the king never forgave Sir Miles Partridge for this. Later Sir Miles was charged with some criminal offence and imprisoned, and in 1551 he was beheaded on Tower Hill.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the horse continued to figure largely in romance, and thus it comes that we find horses, fictitious and otherwise, playing important rÔles in the works of fiction of the principal authors of about that period.

Ariosto's immortal narrative of “Orlando Furioso,” written towards the close of the fifteenth or in the beginning of the sixteenth century, has given us “the little vigilant horse,” Vegliantio, called Veillantif in the French romance, where Orlando appears as Ronald.

Then we have “the horse of the golden bridle,” Orlando's remarkable charger, Brigliadoro, whose speed equalled Bajardo's; also Sacripant's steed, Frontaletto, “the horse with the little head,” that was capable of doing many extraordinary things. Sacripant, who was King of Circassia, and a Saracen, held secret consultations with Frontaletto, and the horse could understand its master's every word.

Rinaldo's horse, Bajardo, made famous in Ariosto's celebrated book, was a bright bay and very fast, and at one time it had belonged to Amadis of Gaul. When Malagigi, the wizard, found it in the cave guarded by “a dragon of great size,” he at once, at considerable personal risk, attacked the dragon, which in the end he succeeded in slaying.

According to the legend, Bajardo is still alive, but under no circumstances can man approach it, nor will any man ever do so. Though Bajardo figures in several stories, it occurs first in “Orlando Furioso.”

The original of Rinaldo was the son of the fourth Marquis d'Este, and Malagigi was Rinaldo's cousin. The habit of drawing fictitious characters to resemble closely living persons, or well-known persons of a previous period, was very prevalent among the writers of the sixteenth century, and therefore it often is difficult to disassociate the real from the fictitious character.

This may be said too of the horses that we come upon in some of the better-known of the old-world romances.

Indeed in several stories that could be named, the famous chargers of notable princes can be recognised under several assumed names.

With the close of Henry VIII.'s reign—that is, in 1547—we come to an end of what was without doubt a period in which the horse played a more conspicuous part than it had done since the Norman Conquest. Upon ascending the throne Henry had found the condition of horse breeding in this country in rather a bad way. With others, as we have seen, he had set to work in earnest to improve, to the best of his ability, the breed of English horses, and though some of the statutes that he enacted—also some of the methods to which he had recourse in order to accomplish his object—undoubtedly were drastic, directly and indirectly they helped to bring about the improvement he desired, and for this the nation still owes him a debt of gratitude.

Henry's fondness for the chase was equalled only by the keen interest he took in the rather primitive horse racing of his period, and trustworthy chroniclers tell us that one of his most cherished ambitions was to see established in England a stud of the fastest horses the world had ever known.

When we bear in mind his fondness for horses of all kinds it seems strange that he should not have been a first-rate judge of a horse. Of knowledge of a horse's anatomy he had practically none, for which reason his ignorance in this respect has been contrasted with the knowledge that Wolsey possessed. Once, indeed, when taxed with ignorance upon this point by one of his nobles he laughed heartily and admitted the impeachment.

The order, already referred to, that horses should not be sent across the border, or sold to Scotsmen, almost completely crippled the horse-breeding industry north of the Tweed. True, some of the more powerful of the Scottish clans still owned valuable breeding stock, yet so strictly were Henry's laws enforced that the chiefs even of those clans were, with but few exceptions, unable to buy English stallions or to obtain their services at any time during Henry's reign.

As a well-known Scottish historian has aptly put it, “Henry VIII. practically ruined Scotland so far as that country's prosperity had to do with the rearing of horses for the field, an unfair form of oppression that many Highlanders, and also Lowlanders, have not yet quite forgotten.”

Perhaps it is worth mentioning here that so far as we are able to judge from the records of the early historians the men of Scotland have not, as a body, ever proved themselves to be such finished horsemen as the English, and more especially the Irish.

This statement is not made in the least in a captious spirit. Why should it be? Probably the reason the Scotch are, as a nation, less finished horsemen, is that they are men of large bone, considerable weight and great physical strength.

Historical records serve to show that no race of men so built ever has been particularly famous for finished horsemanship. For a man to be a finished horseman need not necessarily possess great physical strength, and the man of heavy build almost invariably finds himself at a disadvantage when on horseback by comparison with the man of spare frame, small bone and “flat” thighs. Though this is something of a truism, several of our early historians apparently forgot it.

A study of the world's history makes it clear that the tribes, races and nations especially renowned for their horsemanship have been composed for the most part of men of small stature.