Eclipse (41 page)

There are three flaws in Tattersall's reasoning. First, while Shakespeare was the winner of two King's Plates, and while Marske was inconsistent, Marske did win a Jockey Club Plate; his two defeats by the outstanding Snap were no disgrace. Second, fathers do not dictate the hair colouring of their offspring, either in equine or in human breeding; indeed,
the same sire and dam may produce variously coloured foals. Marske mated, indisputably, twice more with Eclipse's dam Spilletta: their daughter Proserpine (1766) was bay; their son Garrick (1772) was chestnut. Third, why should Dennis O'Kelly's groom have possessed any authority in the matter? Eclipse was born at the Duke of Cumberland's stud.

William Taplin, in
The Gentleman's Stable Directory
(1791), asserted that the Duke of Cumberland and his groom were uncertain whether Marske or Shakespeare was Eclipse's sire, but resolved the issue by calculating that ‘the time of the mare's bringing forth (during the great Eclipse) coming nearest to the day she was booked to have been covered by Marske, to him was attributed the distinguished honour of getting one of the first horses of the known world'. Taplin seems to be saying that Marske's more recent covering of Spilletta is evidence that he was the father. That evidence demonstrates nothing, and perhaps what he means is that Marske covered Spilletta eleven months (a horse's gestation period) before the birth.

This must be the meaning of ‘she came to Marske's time' in John Lawrence's account, the fullest summary of this problem. In
The History and Delineation of the Horse
(1809), Lawrence wrote:

It has always been taken for granted, that he [Eclipse] was a son of Marske, a fact, beyond the power of man to ascertain. Eclipse's dam was covered both by Shakespeare and Marske, and she came to Marske's time, so the honour was awarded to him. If I recollect awright, she had missed by him the previous year. But the circumstance of a mare coming regularly to her time, determines nothing, since they are so uncertain in that respect, in which I have repeatedly known variations from a week or ten days, to two or three weeks. Great stress was laid upon the supposed likeness of Basilius, one of the earliest sons of Eclipse, to old Marske, and indeed the resemblance appeared to me strong; but I could discover no common family resemblance between Eclipse and his presumed full-brother Garrick. On the other hand, I think Eclipse strongly resembled the family of Shakespeare, in colour, in certain particulars of form, and in temper. Nothing can be more unimportant than these speculations, and Eclipse's pedigree would suffer no loss of honour or credit, should Shakespeare be placed at the head of it; which horse had more of the Darley Arabian in him, than Marske, and in all respects, was equally well-bred, and full as good a runner. Shakespeare, like Marske, was a great-grandson of the Darley Arabian, through Hobgoblin and Aleppo, and his dam the little Hartley mare, the dam also of Blank, was a grand-daughter of the same Arabian, and out of the famous Flying Whig. One or two of the sons of
Eclipse, still alive, appear to me strongly to resemble the Shakespeare.

It is necessary, however, to subjoin the late intelligence on this subject, with which I have been favoured by Mr Sandiver, of Newmarket, which goes to assert, on the authority of the stud-groom, that Eclipse's dam really never was covered by Shakespeare. On this I can only observe, that in the year 1778, I was frequently in the habit of visiting Old Eclipse, then at Epsom, on which occasions I often discoursed the subject of the disputed pedigree, with Colonel O'Kelly's then groom, who assured me that the mare was covered by Shakespeare, which account I also had from various other persons, as a well-known fact. And to conceal nothing, it had been reported, that a groom had been bribed to ascribe the get of Eclipse to Marske, there being a strong interest in the reputation of that stallion.

You would have thought that the evidence of a groom at the Duke of Cumberland's stud, where Eclipse had been born, would be more authoritative than that of a groom working for Dennis O'Kelly, who acquired the horse six years later. But Lawrence appears to have given the accounts equal weight. He went on to reproduce the J. N. Sartorius picture – presumably commissioned by someone keen to make a point – of Shakespeare and Eclipse. We, no longer believing that a father invariably stamps his appearance on his children, cannot accept likeness to one sire or lack of likeness to another as evidence of paternity.

In 1763, when Eclipse was conceived, Marske and Spilletta both lived at Cranbourne Lodge, where the Duke of Cumberland had his stud. Shakespeare was standing at Catterick, North Yorkshire. Would Cumberland's staff have sent Spilletta to Yorkshire to be covered by Shakespeare, and then put her to Marske; or have put her to Marske, and then sent her to Shakespeare? Either option seems eccentric. But what convinces me that Marske was Eclipse's father is that the earliest records say he was. The Royal Stud Book at Windsor contains a note of the following entry for Cumberland's ‘sucker' (foal) in a match at Newmarket:

Mask [
sic
], out of Spilletta a chesnut colt, with a bald face, and the off hind leg, white up to the hock. First spring meeting. Match against the Duke of Grafton's colt, by Doctor; Lord Rockingham's colt, by the Godolphin Hunter; Lord Bolingbroke's colt, by Damascus; Lord Gower's colt, by Sweepstakes; Lord Orford's colt, by Feather; Mr Shafto's colt, by his Hunter.

The 1764
Racing Calendar
also noted the forthcoming match for ‘RH the Duke's C. [colt] got by Mask, his dam by Regulus'. Cumberland and his
competitors, the entry stated, would each advance 100 guineas for the race, to be run on the Duke's course, with the racers carrying 8st 10lb, during Easter week in 1768.

The next document is the catalogue of the sale of the late Duke of Cumberland's stud on 23 December 1765. Lot number 29 is ‘A chesnut colt got by Mask', knocked down to William Wildman for forty-five guineas. Eclipse. There were eighteen broodmares in the sale. Of those covered in 1765, seven had been to Marske. None had been to Shakespeare. There is no record of Cumberland's ever having sent a mare to Shakespeare.

In 1764 and 1765, no one had any reason to tamper with the records. Marske was an unfashionable stallion; his siring of an ungainly chestnut yearling was not going to improve his profile. Only when Eclipse started racing did Marske's value soar.
Then
, his connections had a strong incentive to promote him as Eclipse's sire; but not six years earlier. So the match book entry and sale document are probably truthful.

The Shakespeare rumours did not compromise Marske's career. Sold by Wildman to the Earl of Abingdon, Marske went on to command the extraordinary covering fee of 100 guineas. He was champion sire in 1775 and 1776.

Bartlett's Childers

Marske was a son of Squirt, who was a son of Bartlett's Childers. A full brother (by the Darley Arabian, out of Betty Leedes) to the great Flying Childers, Bartlett's Childers (born in 1716) tended to break blood vessels in hard exercise, and was sometimes known as ‘Bleeding Childers'. He never raced. There is a tiny doubt that he ever existed. However, contemporary references to him in the racing calendar of John Cheny and in the stud book of Cuthbert Routh, a Yorkshire breeder, argue in his favour. Cheny wrote that ‘many gentlemen of honour' asserted that there were two Childers brothers.

Spanker Mare

Betty Leedes, dam of Bartlett's Childers, appears in the
General Stud Book
as the daughter of Cream Cheeks, and as the granddaughter of the Spanker Mare. Bred by James Darcy (son of Charles II's master of the stud), the Spanker Mare (born in about 1665) was the product of a mating between Spanker and his mother, the Old Morocco Mare. The Spanker Mare thus had
the Old Morocco Mare as her mother and grandmother; in the formula of bloodstock breeding, she was inbred to the Old Morocco Mare 2 [H11003] 1 (two generations back as well as one generation back). (Spanker was also Betty Leedes's grandfather on her sire's side.)

Some historians find this close inbreeding distasteful, and question whether James Darcy would have indulged in it. The Thoroughbred Heritage website suggests that it is ‘more likely' that the Old Morocco Mare mated with a horse called Young Spanker – her grandson. But Lady Wentworth, author of
Thoroughbred Racing Stock
, insisted that the mother/son union accorded with ‘the Arab principle' – than which, in her book, there could be no higher.

The Spanker Mare, daughter of the incestuous union, supposedly gave birth to a full sister to Cream Cheeks called Betty Percival. In 2002, researchers at the Department of Genetics at Trinity College, Dublin, published their account of tests of two horses tracing back in the female line to Betty Percival, and of one tracing back in the female line to Cream Cheeks. The DNA of the Cream Cheeks descendant did not match that of the Betty Percival descendants. The finding meant that Cream Cheeks and Betty Percival had different dams.

Which was the daughter of the Spanker Mare? There was already evidence that it was not Cream Cheeks. In
Early Records of the Thoroughbred
(1924), C. M. Prior quoted Cuthbert Routh's claim that Cream Cheeks's dam was ‘a famous roan mare of Sir Marmaduke Wyvill's'. Routh and Wyvill were neighbours.

Does this finding remove incest from Eclipse's background? Not necessarily. Another of his ancestors is Charming Jenny, a third daughter of the Leedes Arabian and the Spanker Mare.

The Dam's Side
The Cumberland Dispersal Sale Catalogue

The entry, with original spelling, reads: ‘A chesnut Colt, got by Mask, his dam by a full brother to Williams's Squirrel, his great grandam by Lord Darcey's Montague, his great great grandam by Hautboy, his great great great grandam by Brimmer. 'You will notice that the grandam's generation is missing. The entry should read: ‘his dam by Regulus [or should it? – see below], his
grandam
by a full brother to Williams's Squirrel', etc. The compiler of the catalogue seems to have got the pedigree confused with the similar one of a mare in the sale, Miss Western.

Spilletta (sometimes spelled ‘Spiletta')

According to the stud book of her later owner, the Duke of Ancaster, she was a chestnut, not a bay as recorded in the
GSB
.

Born in 1749, Spilletta was officially the daughter of the stallion Regulus, and out of a mare called Mother Western. But in 1754, the year of her unsuccessful racing season, she was listed in Reginald Heber's racing calendar as a daughter of Sedbury. John Pond, in his 1754 racing calendar, hedged his bets, listing her as Sedbury's on one page and as Regulus's on another. Our justification for assigning her to Regulus is that this is the more recent version, and the one that became accepted.

Mother Western

Spilletta's breeder, Sir Robert Eden, certainly did mate Mother Western with Sedbury to get a filly called Miss Western (born in 1746). She was also bought by the Duke of Cumberland; it was her pedigree that got confused with Eclipse's in the dispersal sale catalogue.

Mother Western's sire is officially Easby Snake (or ‘Smith's Son of Snake'). But in the earliest records of Miss Western's racing career, her dam (Mother Western) is listed as by ‘Sir Marmaduke Wyvill's Scarborough Colt'. This is the version in both Pond's and Heber's 1751 racing calendars; Heber maintains it in 1752, but Pond switches to ‘a full brother to Mr Williams's Squirrel' – Easby Snake. Again, the later version became the one that was perpetuated.

In this case, there is a reason to doubt the official version. In the 1748 and 1749 editions of Cheny's racing calendar, there are announcements for races involving two of Sir Robert Eden's colts: the colts are out of mares, or more probably a mare, whose sire is the Scarborough Colt. Sir Robert owned only a few horses. It is possible that this mare is Mother Western. If so, one can only be baffled at why the record of her sire changed. As we have seen, however, this sort of thing happened a lot.

Implications

As I have explained, I do not believe that Shakespeare was Eclipse's sire. But what if he were? Like Marske, he was a great-grandson in the male line of the Darley Arabian; he was also a great-grandson of the Darley Arabian in the female line (i.e., he was inbred to the Darley Arabian 3 [H11003] 3). His presence in Eclipse's pedigree would increase significantly the number of strains of
the Darley Arabian in modern Thoroughbreds. It would also reduce the number of strains of the Lister Turk, who does not appear in Shakespeare's background.

The removal of the Spanker Mare from Eclipse's pedigree would, disappointingly, delete two strains of Old Bald Peg – the Spanker Mare's great-grandmother on the father's side, and grandmother on the mother's side (3 [H11003] 2). (Or the Spanker Mare may – see above – have been the daughter of Young Spanker, in which case the inbreeding to Old Bald Peg would be 4 [H11003] 3.Young Spanker appears in only one contemporary record, and not in the
General Stud Book
; we know nothing of his female ancestry.)

Old Bald Peg is an iconic horse for historians of the Thoroughbred. Of pure Eastern blood (the
General Stud Book
describes her as the daughter of an Arabian and a Barb mare), she lived at Helmsley in Yorkshire. She was the property of the Duke of Buckingham and then, when Helmsley was seized by the Commonwealth, of Thomas Fairfax, Oliver Cromwell's commander-in-chief. Later, Buckingham found his way back to Helmsley, thanks to a marriage with Fairfax's daughter. By sending Old Bald Peg's daughter, the Old Morocco Mare (born in about 1655), to the Darcy stud to meet the Yellow Turk, Buckingham bred Spanker, the outstanding racehorse of Charles II's reign.

Old Bald Peg is at the root of what pedigree experts call family number six. The numbering system was the invention of an Australian researcher called Bruce Lowe, who at the end of the nineteenth century traced back the tail female lines of winners of classic races, and numbered the lines to reflect their successes. Tail female descendants of Tregonwell's Natural Barb Mare had won the most classics, and went into family number one; the Burton Barb Mare was at the root of family number two, and so on. (Eclipse descends in tail female from a Royal Mare listed as the tap-root of family number twelve.) The list went down to number forty-three. However, the genetic evidence cited above appears to show that Cream Cheeks, Bartlett's Childers's mother and therefore Eclipse's great-greatgreat-grandmother, may not have been Old Bald Peg's tail female descendant, and therefore was not a member of family number six. Her removal diminishes the influence of that family, and of Old Bald Peg on pedigrees in general.