A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH TURF. 



was gradually being improved. At such towns as York, Chester, Leicester, Exeter, 

 Winchester, or Salisbury, there were invariably the three great meeting places, the 

 Assembly Rooms, the Cockpit, and the Racecourse. Stakes of small value were to 

 be had in all parts of the country, and the London papers of the time contain 

 advertisements of racing at Nottingham, Kerfall, Boston, Croydon, Coventry, 

 Quainton, Horsham, Mansfield, and Woodstock. There was even a "Jockey 

 Field betwixt Bedford's Row and Gray's Inn, having a full prospect of Hampstead 

 and Highgate." With the idea of improving the breed of horses in all directions 

 for hunters, roadsters, and carriage-horses were all in great demand the system 

 of racin"' with half-breds or "cocktails" was introduced, in which the "half-bred" 



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meant a racer by accident, whereas the racing " cocktail " was a half-bred by 

 design, with a recognised stain in his pedigree. But this was eventually given 

 up for fear of fraud ; for sport gradually became so universal that when Yorkshire 

 was not racing Lincolnshire, both were combined against Lancashire ; and if no 

 better matches were to be had the gentlemen of one Riding in Yorkshire 

 raced their animals with unabated zeal against those of another. Or sometimes 

 the North united all its forces in a raid upon such Southern owners as the 

 Dukes of Argyll, Bedford, Devonshire, Grafton, Richmond, and Somerset, or 

 Lords Godolphin, Harvey, Byron, Dorchester, Rial ton, or Crawford, with many 

 more. 



These men were prominent in other spheres as well as on the Turf; and those 

 days in early August which interrupted the racing upon Yorkshire moors brought far 

 more anxious things to those who happened to be nearer London. For Her Majesty 

 had died suddenly without direct heirs of her body. As you remember, it was for a 

 Latin ode upon the death of her son, the Duke of Gloucester, that young Harry 

 Esmond had been noticed by his tutors ; and you will not have forgotten, either, 

 how nearly that Jacobite plot succeeded which was to have put a certain luckless 

 Royal Highness of the House of Stuart on the throne of England. The thing might 

 have come off, in spite of the unexpectedly sudden illness of the Queen, if the Privy 

 Council, which was hastily summoned, had not been dominated by the presence of 

 three Whig noblemen, whose names were all well known on the Turf. The first was 

 Charles Talbot, Duke of Shrewsbury, called the " King of Hearts," the son of that 

 unlucky Earl who fell in the notorious duel with Buckingham. The second was the 

 Duke of Argyll. And the would-be Jacobites looked glum, indeed, when these were 

 joined by the Duke of Somerset. His Grace was pompously ostentatious to a fault, 



