374 ikinos of tbe irDuntino^jfiel^ 



from Spencer House, St James's, to Pytchley, a distance 

 of seventy miles, for the next day's hunting. He was 

 for ever dislocating his shoulder when out with hounds, 

 and at last he sent one of his whips to Northampton 

 Infirmary to get instructions as to the best and quickest 

 way of putting it in again. What Dick Knight had 

 been to his father, Charles King was to him, and there 

 was no better huntsman in England. Lord Althorp 

 kept a stud of thirty hunters and spent ^5000 a year 

 in hunting the Pytchley ; but a bad fall in November 

 1 8 17 so injured him that at the end of the season he 

 resigned the Mastership to his old friend Sir Charles 

 Knightley. 



He was a keen all-round sportsman, and at one time 

 the Prize Ring had no more ardent patron, but then that 

 was in the palmy days of Belcher, Pearce (The Game 

 Chicken), Gully and Cribb, when the British boxer was 

 at least as worthy an object of public admiration as the 

 Roman gladiator or the Spanish matador. Moreover, there 

 cropped up in Lord Althorp the instincts of the ancestral 

 grazier. He had a craze for shorthorns, gave enormous 

 prices for them, and annually lost ;^3000 over them. 



In Parliament his success was extraordinary, though 

 he had none of the gifts which usually win distinction 

 there. The caustic Greville thus refers to him in 

 his ' Memoirs ' : ' The good-natured, popular, liked- 

 and-laughed-at good fellow, more of a grazier than a 

 statesman, without one showy accomplishment, without 

 wit to amuse or eloquence to persuade, with a voice 

 unmelodious and a manner ungraceful, and hardly able 

 to speak plain sense in still plainer language, exercised 

 in the House of Commons an influence, and even a 

 dominion, greater than any leader either after or before 



