394 A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH TURF. 



Bill, was one of the hardest riders to hounds that ever crossed a horse. He was 

 also considered to be rather an unscrupulous bettor, in days when Robert Ridsdale 

 and half-a-dozen bookies generally controlled such transactions. But the "Jesuit of 

 the Ring," as the Duke was called, was not responsible for much that was attributed 

 to him, in spite of his friendships with Sam Chifney and Billy Pierse. His third son, 

 Lord Harry Vane, married Lady Dalmeny, who, as Lady Catherine Wilhelmina 

 Stanhope, was one of the bridesmaids at the wedding of Queen Victoria. Before 

 Lord Harry Vane succeeded to the Dukedom he bought Battle Abbey from the 

 Websters, the historic estate which had previously belonged to Lord Montagu 

 of Cowdray, a famous Turfite of the seventeenth century whose old " Montagu 

 Mare " is to be found in all the pedigrees. The Duchess of Cleveland, who has 

 but lately died, was therefore a very extraordinary link between the past and present 

 history of English Racing, for her son, the present Lord Rosebery, won the 

 Derby as Prime Minister. She was born within those first 

 two decades of the nineteenth century during which Sam 

 Chifney won all his classic races, and within which there first 

 saw the light men famous in such different paths as Tennyson, 

 Browning, Thackeray, Dickens, Beaconsfield, Gladstone, 

 Newman, Ruskin, and D-arwin. Chifney 's only epitaph conveyed 

 his greatest triumph, for it consisted of the words, " Of New- 

 market"; and his friends long afterwards asserted that it was 

 " worth a tenner just to see him canter an awkward horse." 

 Sam's method of suddenly pulling his horse together, and then bringing it along 

 with his own tremendous rush, half a length in the last three strides, was all done so 

 instantaneously that you never realised anything like the visible exhibition of 

 power in horse and man by which Jem Robinson stole his short head on 

 the post. His nephew, Frank Butler, had more of Jem's style than of his uncle's, 

 and very few men have been able to imitate Sam Chifney since. He used 

 to lie straight behind his man so that the unhappy leader never knew from 

 which side the rush was coming. He gained his first Newmarket laurels at 

 the First Spring Meeting of 1805, when he won the New Claret Stakes on 

 Lord Darlington's Pavilion against Arnull on Hannibal, Buckle on Sancho, and Clift 

 on Pc/isse, before he was nineteen, and the betting was 7 to i against his mount, very 

 much as he had startled the Knavesmire crowd by beating Jackson, Clift, and Peirse, 

 on Lady Brongh. After this he went ahead fast, and beat Buckle again in the 



