GEORGIAN STAG-HUNTING 39 



as little as she did. By this arrangement he could ride 

 constantly by the side of the chaise and entertain her, 

 ' whilst others were entertaining themselves with hearing 

 dogs bark and seeing crowds gallop.' The most and the 

 best were made of one or two slow dragging stag-hunts, 

 whilst Sir Robert was keeping the field in order, or enjoying 

 himself at the tail of hounds. But Lord Hervey puts it in 

 a modest wa5^ 'The queen herself,' he says, 'was enough 

 prejudiced too on this side [war], till Sir Robert Walpole 

 un warped her from it, and made her see how much this 

 inclination jarred with her own interest.' This strange 

 Paul and Apollos planted and watered to good purpose. 

 ' Madame,' Walpole was able to say to the queen one 

 morning in 1734, ' there are 50,000 men slain in Europe 

 this year and not one Englishman.' Surely that entitled 

 ' le gros homme,' as the king called him, to laugh his heart's 

 laugh at coarse jokes and in coarse company. To call 

 spades spades, and take the world as he found it. 



As far as I can make out, George I. and George II. con- 

 fined their hunting operations to the parks, but George III. 

 was a stag-hunter of a very different mettle. His sport is 

 conscientiously recorded by the ' Brooksby' of the day in the 

 ' Sporting Magazine.' The scribe's style feels the century ; it 

 is elaborate and artificial. Still, in his own Court Newsman 

 sort of way he manages to tell us a good deal about the 

 stag-hunting. Here is his account of a run with a deer 

 called Compton : ' Lord Sandwich and his prime minister, 

 Johnson [the huntsman], on October 1, 1797, afforded such 

 a specimen of the superiority of stag-hunting as can scarcely 

 be found in the records of sporting history. Ux^on his 

 Majesty's arrival at Ascot Heath on the morning already men- 

 tioned, the deer Compton was liberated below the Obelisk, 

 and going off with the most determined courage and inex- 

 pressible speed, bid a seeming adieu to all competition. The 



