The horse in history / by Basil Tozer.

  • Tozer, Basil, 1868-1949.
Date:
[1908]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The horse in history / by Basil Tozer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    314/404 (page 258)
    powerful European nations should war break out, as in King Charles’s reign it might well have done at almost any time. Indeed had Charles’s court been indifferently horsed, and the king shown signs of reducing his personal expenditure—in other words, had the trumpets metaphorically been blown less blat- antly—other European powers would probably have looked up to England with less respect. Full well Charles must have known this, for in his way he was thoroughly versed in the art of what is sometimes called “international finessing. His Government knew it better still, with the result that the Government “played up to the king” on the lines adopted by the king in playing up to the Government—both knew that extrava- gance and display formed the note of the age, and both struck the note firmly with a foot on the loud pedal. And thus in the reign of the Merry Monarch did the practice that we now sometimes speak of as “bluffing” develop into a sort of art and come to be cultivated carefully. In the autumn of the seventeenth century Newmarket must truly have been one of the gayest places in England, at anyrate when race meetings were being held there, for it was not unusuaT for the entire court and cabinet to travel down from London on such occasions, when “jewellers and milliners, players and fiddlers,