Eclipse (24 page)

When at liberty, Charlotte spent much more of her time in London than in Epsom. She lived in a newly acquired property in Half Moon Street, Piccadilly, where, as she began to take life more easily, she delighted especially in the company of her pet parrot. Polley had been procured by Dennis from Bristol, and had cost fifty guineas – the sum that was Eclipse's highest covering fee. (One report says that Dennis paid 100 guineas for Polley.) Owing to her rarity, and to her reputed status as the first parrot to be bred
in England,
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Polley was credited with miraculous abilities. She sang a variety of tunes, on request, beating the time with her wings, and if ever she made a mistake, she would return to the appropriate bar, and resume. According to the
Gentleman's Magazine
, her repertoire included ‘the 114th Psalm, “The Banks of the Dee”, “God Save the King” and other favourite songs'. What Eclipse was among horses, another report enthused, Polley was among parrots.

In the 1780s, Dennis – born in about 1725 – entered what was considered to be old age. Life expectancy during this period was a little more than thirty-five years. While that figure reflects high levels of infant and child mortality, it also shows why people who lived into their late fifties and beyond were thought to be doing especially well. Not until the twentieth century, and then only in affluent societies, did the biblical lifespan of three score years and ten become a feasible standard. Charlotte Hayes – roughly Dennis's contemporary, and destined to live for another thirty years – was in 1780 ‘that experienced old matron', in the words of William Hickey.

So, in his late fifties, Dennis began to assume elderly habits. Whatever the Jockey Club thought, he was leaving behind the anarchic life of the blackleg, and he was no longer in tune with some of his old associates, Dick England among them. One evening in the 1780s at Munday's coffee house, Dennis and a certain Lieutenant Richard were comparing notes about what a vile scoundrel England was. An eavesdropper reported the conversation to England, who was elsewhere in the house. England came charging into the room, took on both Dennis and the Lieutenant, and beat them up. Dennis was so bruised that he was unable to leave the premises, and had to accept the hospitality of the proprietor, Jack Medley, who gave him a bed for the night. Unwisely,
Dennis and the Lieutenant sued. The case came before the King's Bench, where England pleaded guilty; the judge, ruling that the defendant had been severely provoked, awarded only one shilling in damages.
¹¹⁶

It was inevitable that a man enjoying Dennis's successes would find an extended family popping up and making claims on his charity. For the most part, he did the right thing. In the early 1770s, he had brought his brother Philip over to England, and put him in charge of the stables and stud at Epsom. Philip arrived with his wife, Elizabeth, and son, Andrew Dennis, who received a fine education at Dennis's expense. Although Andrew would inherit the O'Kelly talent for controversy, he gained more ease in society than Dennis ever enjoyed.

The
Genuine Memoirs
said that Dennis also helped two nieces. Who they were is not clear, because they receive no mention in the notes about the family in the O'Kelly papers, lodged at the University of Hull. One of the documents, an importuning letter to Dennis, refers to ‘your sister Mrs Mitchell' and her daughter ‘Miss Mary Harvey', who had travelled to England with Philip. Again, this is puzzling. Dennis's sister Mary married a man called Whitfield Harvey, so perhaps Miss Mary was the daughter of that marriage (before a second marriage, to Mitchell).
¹¹⁷
The letter writer is Thomas Gladwell, who was married to Dennis's cousin. With what must have been lack of tact, he said that ‘friends were not pleased with my marriage', and reported that ‘I could have
made a more advantageous match'. Gladwell was struggling to get by on a clerk's wages of £30 a year. ‘Hearing of your goodness of heart to all your relations and others who have applied to your assistance emboldened [my wife] to lay this state of our circumstances before you. Be pleased to grant us some relief.' Dennis kept the letter, but whether he responded to it is doubtful: Gladwell mentioned three previous requests that had received no acknowledgement. Another letter in the collection is from a family member recommending one Patrick O'Fallon, and presuming on ‘the general good nature of your character' to request that O'Fallon be found some ‘small place', perhaps in the Custom House.

By this time, Dennis was considerably, though precariously, affluent. He owned various properties and a good deal of land in Epsom, as well as a substantial racing operation; and he owned, or at least rented, properties in London too. Sometimes, he raised cash through leasing arrangements, and he also went in for subletting. The O'Kelly papers include an aggrieved letter from James Poole, writing to say that he is ‘by no means satisfied' with the condition of a house he let to Dennis several years earlier: it ‘has been turned into separate habitations for poor persons', who have left it in a state of disrepair. Poole demanded that the house be returned to its original state, and that the overdue rent be paid.

Of the Epsom properties, only a barn from the Downs House stables survives. But Dennis's last and most impressive acquisition still stands. Cannons
¹¹⁸
in Edgware had been, in the early part of the eighteenth century, the site of an ostentatiously grand palace built by James Brydges, Duke of Chandos. A drawing in the British Library shows a colonnaded structure of overweening vulgarity. There were ninety-three servants in the house; in the grounds were storks, flamingos, ostriches, blue macaws, eagles and, at one time, a tiger. By reputation, this was the model for
‘Timon's Villa' in Alexander Pope's
Epistle to Burlington
(‘At Timon's villa let us pass a day / Where all cry out, “What sums are thrown away!”') – although scholars are inclined to accept, at least partially, Pope's denial of the connection. Some of Chandos's expenditure nevertheless resulted in achievements of enduring value. He appointed George Frideric Handel as composer in residence: Handel wrote the eleven Chandos Anthems to be performed in the adjoining church, Whitchurch, where he played the organ; and
Acis and Galatea
, his wonderful masque (or chamber opera), received its first performance in the Cannons grounds.

Cannons (now spelled Canons) in Edgware, the villa built by Hallett, the last home of Eclipse and of Dennis O'Kelly. The house is now part of the North London Collegiate School for Girls.

If you were going to spend a fortune at this time, you did not want that fortune to be secured by South Sea stock. Unfortunately, Chandos was an investor in the apparently booming South Sea Company, and he took a heavy hit when the share price collapsed.
¹¹⁹
He carried on, undaunted, but bequeathed family finances that were seriously in the red. In 1747, the second Duke sold Cannons, with the result that the palace, completed just twenty-five years earlier, was broken up and dispersed. The marble staircase went to Lord Chesterfield's Mayfair house – which was later demolished too. According to a history of Cannons, the eight Ionic columns in front of the National Gallery in London are from the Cannons colonnade. The ornamental gates stand at an Epsom mansion called The Durdans. A cabinet-maker called William Hallett bought the estate, and built a more modest villa there, of Portland stone.

In 1785, Dennis bought Hallett's villa, with some of the grounds, and the following year he struck a deal for the remainder of the estate. A document in the London Metropolitan Archives tells us that the second purchase cost him £10, 500. He took
possession of a park some two miles round, containing between three and four hundred deer, with lakes and avenues, as well as smallholdings with cows, sheep and horses.

Horace Walpole, that barbed critic, disapproved of Hallett's taste, referring to his decorations as ‘mongrel chinoise'. The third Duke of Chandos also had criticisms of the new Cannons house: ‘The kitchen [is] not much larger than a Tunbridge kitchen, and smokes and stinks the house infernally. The only way of letting the smoke out, for none goes out of the chimney, is through the window, which lets it in again at the window above it.'

In spite of these drawbacks, the villa Dennis bought and subsequently lived in was a smart place. In the basement were a housekeeper's room, kitchen, scullery, butler's pantry, ice-house, servants' hall, dairy and larder, with cellars for wine, beer and coal. The ground floor contained a library, a breakfast parlour, a dining room, a grand saloon of forty-five feet by twenty-one feet, a drawing room, a stone hall and a stone staircase. There were six bedchambers and a dressing room on the first floor, and a further six bedchambers, for servants, on the attic storey. Today, this house is part of the North London Collegiate School for girls.

Dennis was slowing down, without mellowing. The company he kept at Cannons was ‘more select' than that of his former days, consisting of ‘people of the first class of his own sex' as well as ‘unexceptionable' female friends. He was demanding and difficult with his brother Philip, and he berated his nephew, Andrew, for the kind of behaviour in which he himself, when younger, had specialized. His friends had to endure boorish joshing. With one, O'Rourke, Dennis would bang on monothematically about how he possessed the superior Irish lineage;
¹²⁰
the
Genuine Memoirs
said
that O'Rourke (‘whose soul was made of fire!') put up with it.

On the racecourse, Dennis's energy was undiminished. In 1786, his racer Dungannon, who had come second in the Derby three years earlier, narrowly defeated the Prince of Wales's Rockingham in a valuable Newmarket match, made more valuable still by the heavy betting on the outcome. The losers, reported
The Times
(then the
Daily Universal Register
), complained about the rough tactics, or ‘cross and jostling', of Dungannon's rider. There was a rematch the following spring, when Rockingham was in the ownership of a man called Bullock (the Prince, suffering one of his periodic financial crises, had sold his stable), in a race that also featured the Duke of Grafton's Oberon and Sir Charles Bunbury's Fox.
The Times
contributed to the build-up: ‘The grand sweepstakes on Tuesday comprehends more first-rate horses than ever ran together before. Vast sums are depending on this extraordinary contest, and the odds are perpetually fluctuating. Dungannon was the favourite, but the tide is turned towards Rockingham.'

On the eve of the race, Dennis withdrew Dungannon. It was not a popular move.
The Times
said, ‘The Duke of Bedford was 1200 [guineas] minus on account of O'Kelly's Dungannon not starting on Tuesday, and the minor betters, who had laid their money play or pay, suffered in proportion. Illness was pleaded, and the horse ordered into the stable. Turf speculation daily becoming more and more precarious, since occasional indisposition is as readily admitted at Newmarket as on the stage.'

Very few racegoers believed in Dungannon's ‘indisposition', was the implication. It is the charge that the writer John Lawrence was also to make: that the well-being of Dennis O'Kelly's horses tended to reflect the financial interests of their owner. The Duke of Bedford and others had lost the money they had bet, and others – not named by
The Times
– must have gained. ‘Whatever bears the name of Rockingham seems somehow or other to have
dupery
inseparable from it, ' the paper observed, casting aspersions both on the horse and on a former Prime Minister, the late Marquis of
Rockingham (who had died in 1782).Yet the paper also reported that Dennis had lost at least one bet on the race, having predicted, incorrectly, that Rockingham would not be able to lead from start to finish. Moreover, he lost money overall at the meeting: ‘In the last week's business of Newmarket, according to public report, the Duke of Bedford was minus, Lord Egremont was minus, Mr O'Kelly was minus, even the Duke of Queensberry was a little minus. We should be glad, therefore, to know, who was major on the occasion; – or is it on the turf, as we know it often happens in a gaming table, that when £10, 000 have been lost in an evening, not a single person is to be found who has won a guinea?' We should treat this report with a little scepticism –
The Times
's next mention of the affair certainly indicates that its reporting was fallible: ‘The report of O'Kelly's being expelled the Jockey Club, in consequence of not suffering Dungannon to start after being led to the post, is not true. O'Kelly, for a number of years past, has been an example to the turf for fair play, and punctuality in payments.'

The comments on Dennis's character were questionable (if they were not meant ironically), and the implication that he was a Jockey Club member was wrong. Later, the paper suggested that Dennis, plagued by ill health, was planning to quit the Turf. But, controversial to the end, he carried on racing. In 1787, thirteen horses ran in his colours. His colt Gunpowder came second in the Derby, and his filly Augusta, bought at the Prince of Wales's dispersal sale, came second in the Oaks. In October, he and the Duke of Bedford made an unsuccessful bid for the colt that had beaten Gunpowder at Epsom, Lord Derby's Sir Peter Teazle.