THE TURF TO THE RESTORATION. 73 



running after him with their bull clubs, spattering dirt in each others' faces, that one 

 would think them to be so many Furies started out of Hell for the punishment of 



Cerberus : 



" A ragged troupe of boyes and girls 



Doe pellow him with stones : 

 With clubs, with whips, and many nips, 

 They part his skin from bones." 



Part of the sport consisted in riding the bull home again and the custom lasted 

 until well into the nineteenth century, as I shall have to point out later on. Cock- 

 fighting, of course, went on gaily, and better deserved the much longer life it 

 subsequently enjoyed. Bear-baiting is also among a list of some far more excusable 

 amusements against which the Puritans vehemently objected, for reasons which 

 Macaulay has sufficiently satirised. By 1654 the Council of State had gone so far 

 as to prohibit horseraces, hunting, and hawking matches, and even football playing, 

 under the pretence that these meetings were used by Royalists to plot against the 

 Commonwealth. But no legislation that is not based on public sentiment can ever be 

 enforced, and the Puritans were as powerless to crush the love of sport as they were 

 to prevent the restoration of the Monarch who brought back all its outward forms 

 with a redoubled zest and gaiety. Luckily the Lord Protector himself played at 

 Bowls, at least so it was said without contradiction during a debate in the Commons, 

 so the game which Francis Drake immortalised seems to have been left untouched 

 during the drastic reforms in progress against all other excuses for high gambling. 

 But that all did not go as the Praise God Barebones of Westminster expected is 

 clear from the further enactment of 1657, which decreed that on all winnings from 

 cards, dice, tennis, bowls, cock-fighting, and horses, a fine of double the amount 

 gained should be inflicted, half of which fine was to go to Cromwell. 



It would be most unfair to argue from the existence of this possible source of 

 increased revenues that the stern Protector did not discourage a little quiet gaming. 

 But it may certainly be said that " the wily Cromwell," as he was called by " The 

 Druid " many years before Mr. Morley's biography, knew a good horse when he saw 

 one, even if he did not publicly race, for reasons of State. His private stud was 

 without doubt largely recruited from the Tutbury horses which have been mentioned ; 

 and though not a " racing-stud " in any sense, it certainly contained well-bred 

 animals, which might have raced under less austere conditions, and which were kept, 

 I cannot help thinking, as much for the Protector's own pleasure as for the abstract 



VOL. I. L 



