A HISTORY OF 



THE ENGLISH TURF. 



CHAPTER X 



THE JOCKEY CLUB IN THE DAYS OF CHARLES JAMES FOX. 



" Nobiles, tyrannosque et principes, omnes filios Assyriorum, juvenes forma egregia, duces 

 et magistratus universes, principes principum, et nominates ascensores eguorum.'" 



IN the second half of the eighteenth century we find the Turf illuminated with 

 some of the greatest, and many of the most famous, names in our history. Some of 

 these names, moreover, are useful to the historian of manners as connecting the middle 

 of the eighteenth century with the beginning of the nineteenth. Sir Charles Bunbury, 

 for example, was a famous figure on the Turf and about Town for sixty years : he 

 was eighty when he died in 1821. " Old O." lived as long a life ; and when nearer 

 ninety than eighty years of age he was still wallowing in wealth and wickedness, and 

 regarded by many as one whom it was scarcely decent to name because he refused, out 

 of deference to public opinion in 1808, to discontinue a mode of existence which had 

 been a thing of course among the men of 1768. Such names as these carry us from 

 the days when George III. was a cheerful young King to those of the Prince's 

 retirement from the Turf after the incident of Sam Chifney and Escape. In all this 

 time there was a regular racing set as there is now. It was not, as in Charles II.'s 

 time, dependent on the taste of a monarch. The King, or his brothers, or his sons, 

 might go or stay away, but my Lord March and Sir Charles Bunbury would be there 



VOL. II, HH 



