CHAPTER VI. 



THE BILSDALE HUNT. 



" But there is a third hunt which is older than either of these, 

 for while Charles II. was laying the foundations of modern Newmarket, 

 that rascally libertine, the second Duke of Buckingham, was hunting 

 hare and fox, and stag, in the Bilsdale country, which lies between 

 the springs of Esk and Leven, in the north-east corner of Yorkshire, 

 the county of the St. Leger, the land of Black Hambleton, the birthplace 

 of so many forms of sport. Near Ingleby, where lives Lord de L'Isle 

 and Dudley, is the rough, inspiriting moorland, which has descended 

 to the Earl of Feversham from Sir Charles Duncombe, who purchased 

 the estate to which George Villiers retired when he had made even 

 the court of Charles II. too hot to hold him. The hunt showed itself 

 quite impartial in the matter of quarry, throughout its history ; but it 

 is the fox now-a-days that the small pack of some 20 trencher-fed hounds 

 hunt, for stag was abandoned in 1750, though there is a fine poem on a 

 chance run in 1821 to Northallerton. . . . Through his wife, Mary 

 Fairfax, he owned the famous Fairfax Morocco Barb, the Helmsley 

 Turk (sire of Old Buster), and man}*- other thoroughbreds, whose blood 

 is still strong upon the turf to-day. But he abandoned his honourable 

 and courageous wife for the sake of the shameless Lady Shrewsbury, 

 whose husband he practically murdered. From this complicated 

 character, in which blackguardism and immorality of every kind were 

 about equally mixed, the Bilsdale Hunt may be considered fortunate 

 to have preserved only the best traditions, leaving the choice of its 

 more undesirable elements to sporting districts less austere, and a little 

 further to the South." — From a review of an article by the author in 

 " Baily's Magazine," 1901. 



I wrote an article in " The Yorkshire Post " about a year 

 ago on the Bilsdale Hunt, and amongst other letters which it 

 brought forth was one full of contradiction, but giving no 

 grounds and no actual data in the form of an apology to 

 substantiate the " correction." The letter runs : — 



The statements regarding the Duke of Buckingham in Thursday's 

 issue are incorrect. . . . The traditions which exist about him are 

 to a very great extent apocryphal. Certainly he was not the first 

 Master of Hounds in England. A couple of hundred years before 

 Buckingham was hunting Sir Roger Hastings hunted the fox in the 



