THE REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE AND HER 1Nri.lT.NCK ON RACING. l8l 



Turf long before Queen Anne's accession made his fortune, was one of the most 

 prominent public men of the time, and he shared that high and somewhat dangerous 

 position with his friend Lord Godolphin, raised at the same date to the post of Lord 

 Treasurer, and with the champions of the Tory camp, Henry St. John and his rival 

 Robert Harley. Those names will be sufficient to recall the fact that the resources 

 and the strength of England were being drained by war through all these years, and 

 that the chief supporters of the Turf were busily engaged elsewhere in fighting either 

 their political opponents or their national foes. Yet there was an extraordinary 

 amount of amusement going on all the time, among all classes, and the different 

 manifestations of it may well give us pause for a short time in contrasting the sports- 

 man of Queen Anne with his descendant of to-day. The total population of England 

 and Wales was scarcely more than that which is now watched over by the London 

 County Council alone, and of these five and a-half millions a far smaller proportion 

 than is now the case lived in London or the towns. Luckily for Horseracing the 

 Country was a much greater factor than unfortunately it is to-day. The only house 

 between the Duke of Marl borough's residence and Hyde Park Corner was that in 

 which the owner of the Godolphin Arabian lived when he was not at (iog Magog. 

 Bolingbroke resided in Golden Square, where the rental of a great house with 

 stables in 1705 was but/" 60. Beneath a new steeple that had just been affixed to 

 Wren's church of St. James's, Piccadilly, Dick Steele was going home, a tritle 

 unsteady, to Prue in Bury Street, where Swift paid eight shillings a week for a 

 dining-room and bedroom on the first tloor. 



" Seven thousand a year, girls, and all for us ! " cried the beauties of Charing 

 Cross, when Bolingbroke began to draw his salary as Minister of the Crown. At 

 thirty-six Henry St. John had touched the zenith of his fortunes. Before the 

 century's close a Minister of twenty-five was master of England. In 1700. Robert 

 Walpole had married, succeeded to his great inheritance, and entered Parliament as 

 the member for Castle Rising, in Norfolk. Men did not wait too long in those days 

 either in public life or in their private affairs ; and though they did not do so many 

 things as the more cautious youths of this young twentieth century, they did what 

 lay to their hand much harder, and when we meet Charles James Fox at a period 

 of Turf History to which I must confess to looking forward with an impatience which 

 I fear my readers may share for other reasons, we shall find that they could be 

 fairly versatile as well. The supple, strong, and brilliant style of Bolingbroke's 

 English prose is hardly, for example, the kind of acquisition you might expect from 

 VOL. I. I! U 



