The Royal Hunt –Goodbye to all that!
Author: Stuart Buchanan MacWattPublished on: Oct 7, 2004
Travelsleuth Stuart Buchanan MacWatt marks the probable demise of hunting the fox to hounds in the United Kingdom and traces 1600 years of royal hunting history from Offa and King Alfred to Charles, Prince of Wales.
gay,
D'ye ken John Peel at the break of
day,
D'ye ken John Peel when he's far away,
With his hounds and his horn in the
morning.
In The Queen's Speech, (written by Her Prime Minister), at the annual State Opening of Parliament, Her Majesty will announce Her Government's intention to ban hunting with hounds, a bill that will bring to a close some 1600 years of royal hunting in Britain. The Queen's perhaps reluctant signature to this contentious bill will outlaw one of the Royal Family's favourite outdoor sports.
The Prince of Wales chose Highrove as his country seat in Gloucestershire because of its near proximity to a number of Hunts and the Wales scions ride regularly with the Duke of Beaufort's Hunt which has boasted of a first class pack of hounds and a "pompous stable which could accommodate forty horses" since 1682 when the 7th Earl of Worcester was created Duke by King Charles II.
The Windsors will be last of a long line of hunting Royals. Kings have hunted since before King Alfred the Great of Wessex, (849-901), defeated the Vikings at the decisive Battle of Eddington in 878 and was able thereafter to enjoy chasing stags instead of Danes. In those days it was the the stag not the fox that was hunted.
About 640 AD the heathen King Penda of Mercia employed Alwyn as the first recorded royal Master of Hounds in a part of England hunted by the Beauforts to this day. His job was to provide diversionary sport for the King when he was not out hunting down and slaying neighboring Christian kings in the name of Wotan and Thor. Medieval manuscript illustrations attest to King Offa, (r.757-796), whose earthworks to keep the western Celts at bay survive to this day as 'Offa's Dyke', being another early royal addict of the Chase.
King Alfred's grandson Aethelstan, (reigned 925-939), was similarly imbued with passion for the Chase when not fighting Vikings or pacifying turbulent Celts, (themselves no mean hunters). On defeating the King of Wales he levied a ransom of "sharp scented dogs fit for hunting wild beasts".
Saintly ascetic King Edward the Confessor, (reigned 1042-1066), eschewed the joys of the bed with Queen Consort Edith but "delighted to follow a pack of hounds", medieval chronicler William of Malmesbury tells us. It was Edward who first designated Windsor Forest as a royal hunting domain.
King Harold II, who was slain by William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, is pictured in the Bayeux Tapestry riding to hounds. It is possible that William brought a pack of hunting hounds with him from Normandy. It is certain that, after defeating Harold and his Saxon nobles, William transformed hunting in England. He enacted draconian laws to create an exclusive regal hunting preserve and prerogative across the land. The laws were to remain on the statute books for 800 years.
William's infamous Forest Law shot two stags with one arrow. It dispossessed the defeated Saxon nobles and peasants of their land while creating a countrywide arena for the royal amusement of the King and his Norman followers. Politics and royal sport were thus conveniently merged. In his "inordinate appetite for the Chase" the King was ruthless in his measures against any who might interfere. The agisters appointed by the Crown to try offenders in the newly created royal forest courts imposed a death penalty upon poachers. Anyone who killed a royal hound had his eyes put out with the favourite surgical instrument of the day, the red hot iron.
Given the turbulent times for those who wore the crown of England, it is perhaps surprising that the Norman and successor Angevin and Plantaganet Kings had any time to hunt at all. But hunt they did. Hunting throve under the Norman Kings and claimed the lives of two of William the Conqueror's sons, Richard of Normandy, (1081), and William's disreputable successor William II, (1100). Both died hunting in the New Forest, though the arrow that terminated the latter's infamous 13 years of reign was aimed to dispatch hunter King rather than hunted stag.
Plantaganet King Henry II, (reigned 1154-1189) was almost permanently in the saddle, galloping with his attendant court from one end of his Anglo-French realm to the other, sweeping away rebellious barons and demolishing some 375 "adulterine castles". We know little of his hunting activities but he did establish a royal pack of buckhounds under his Chamberlain Osborne Lovel. He held the tenure of the royal estate at Hunter's Manor near the royal forest of Rockinghamin in Northamptonshire. From this time on hereditary tenure of the Manor brought with it the Mastership of the Royal Buckhounds.
from my bed
And the cry of his hounds which he
Peel's 'view hullo' would awaken the
dead
Or the fox from his lair in the
morning.
The royal pack was maintained in hereditary splendour by the Lovels and the Brocas family who served successive Kings and their passion for the hunt. Sir Bernard Brocas had the misfortune to lose his head to the axeman in 1400 for disapproving of Henry Bolingbroke's murder of King Richard II and his usurpation of the crown as Henry IV. The family continued in somewhat straightened circumstances after this until the hard-riding Henry VIII fell out with the family in 1528 and founded his own Privy Pack under the Mastership of George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford. Although George later lost his head in 1536 on the Tower of London chopping board for being the brother of the hapless Anne Boleyn, the Privy Pack was to flourish under royal patronage until King Edward VII finally disbanded it in the interests of economy on his accession to the throne in 1901.
Henry VIII was a fast and furious rider capable of winding 10 or more horses in a day's hunting. During his reign he embarked upon a programme to improve the size and endurance of the native horse, which he considered to be of little use in the Chase and less use for the cavalry. He gave his patronage to three studs which he reinforced by the addition of 25 Spanish stallions, presented to him by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and mares acquired from the Marquess of Mantua in Italy. In this he was ably supported by Cardinal Wolsey who was not the first prelate to enjoy the thrill of the hunt.
Queen Elizabeth, (reigned 1558-1603), inherited all the hunting instincts of her father. The fashion of the times however often required that she remain stationary and shoot stags, that were driven past her, with a richly enamelled crossbow, (a present from her Master of Hounds and favourite, the Earl of Leicester). The Queen, ever short of money, was not above turning her love of this dubious style of 'hunting' imported from France to line her purse with cash. She leased out parts of the royal forests to rich subjects for them to enclose as Parks. It paid her to grant hunting rights within these parks and then invite herself to two week’s free entertainment.
The Queen sat well in the saddle and as frequently amused herself following the hounds. "Her Majesty," wrote Roland White in a letter dated 12 Sept. 1600 to Sir Robert Sidney, "is well and excellently disposed to hunting, for every second day she is on horseback, and continues the sport long." She was then 77 and staying at her palace at Oatlands.
Her successor, James I, has gone down in history as having a near manic love of the Chase. Upon his accession in 1603 he made a leisurely royal progress in the saddle and hunted stags and hare all the way from Edinburgh to London, commandeering a pack of hounds en route. This lust for hunting caused comment at court and grumbles from his subjects. The Venetian Ambassador noted: "He seems to have forgotten he is King except in his kingly pursuit of Stags to which he is quite foolishly devoted.' An unknown critic wrote a more caustic couplet and attached it to the collar of a wandering hound before returning it to the royal kennels:
And cries of men, as well as hounds'..
Charles I, (reigned 1630-1649), and his kinsman Prince Rupert of Bavaria were zestful hunters. The king arbitrarily enclosed Richmond Park for his personal hunting needs. When he died in England in 1686 Rupert left bequests of a pack of hounds and a hunting mare.
After his restoration to the throne in 1660 Charles II made Newmarket his favoured hunting centre and established a pack of hounds there for hunting both hare and the fox which had become popular as a quarry early in his reign. This was a period when the ladies at court tended to be favoured by the King for their riding ability. Although common sweet Nell Gwynne remained firmly on her feet his other mistresses, notably La Belle Stuart, (who left the arms of the King to gallop off into the night with the twice married Duke of Richmond), were accomplished equestriennes.
His brother James, Duke of York , (who later ruled briefly as James II from 1685-1689), was an admirable horseman and every bit as devoted to the Chase as the rest of the Stuarts. Diarist Samuel Pepys, who was Secretary to the Admiralty, complained that even routine business fell sadly in arrears because the Lord High Admiral the Duke of York was out hunting.
and horsemen all hallooing
From an Irish poem, 1679.
It was not until the time of George III, (reigned 1760-1820), that the Hanoverian monarchs ventured out with the Hunt, although it must be said that Geoge II, (reigned 1727-1760), did show some interest in the Royal Buckhounds. In addition to his kennel duties Colonel Negus, the Master of Hounds, had to distribute the King's Plates at race meetings, feed the royal turkeys in Bushey Park and the Royal tiger caged in Hyde Park! He also created Princess Diana's hunting forebear John George Spencer, who maintained a pack of hounds at Althorp, an Earl.
George III became an ardent hunter and liked to be followed by a large crowd of watchers as he rode to his hounds. His son the Prince of Wales and Regent during the King's madness was extremely popular in both the hunting and racing circles, winning the Derby, the Epsom Classic, in 1788.
By the time Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837 the country was a hunter's paradise, although by then for reasons of decorum and modesty few if any women hunted any more. The Queen herself never hunted, though her sons Bertie, Prince of Wales,and Arthur, the Duke of Connaught did so regularly.
Like his own son who later became George V in 1910 and changed the royal name to Windsor in 1917, the future Edward VII took to the Chase with the ancient West Norfolk Hunt before venturing to the galloping fields of England's Shires. Later portliness deterred him from regular hunting however and he took to pheasant shooting. Shooting, like foxhunting , can damage your health. Danish Prince Christian of Schleswig Holstein was accidentally shot by the Duke of Connaught at a Sandringham shooting party in 1892 and lost an eye.
The anti-hunt lobby have spotlighted the royal addiction to what the pro-hunting lobby euphemistically call field sports: hunting, shooting and fishing; three of the pastimes that Britain's Countryside Alliance regard as an integral part of England's historic rural heritage.
In riding to the hounds, Princes William and Harry are carrying on not only a royal, but also a Spencer tradition, (the Spencer Earls first maintained a pack of hounds and were hereditary Masters of the Hunt at Althorp over 200 years ago), though Diana herself was not a good enough rider to have hunted even if she had wanted to.
Foxhunting was not a controversial issue until after the WWII when the League against Cruel Sports stepped in to campaign vociferously against what it considered a minority relic of upper class savagery. Authoress Nancy Mitford once described foxhunting as "indefensible but irresistible", when writing about "the unspeakable pursuing the uneatable".
The sport made an unexpected popular comeback in the 1980s with the arrival of the new weekend ruralists; rich urban entrepreneurial newcomers to the countryside. For social wannabes who could ride a horse the de-rigueur uniform of hunting 'Pink' or black was a great leveller upwards to the landed gentry and princes, princesses, dukes and duchesses in the saddle. A lady riding hard to hounds appears fiercely and sexily elegant when tailored by Huntsman of Savile Row, or Bedford Riding Breeches of New Quebec Street in London.
Prince Charles was an articulate supporter of the 1980s hunt revival. He was a welcome guest of every major Hunt in the English Shires during the foxhunting season between November and March. He is a bold horseman who likes to ride hard, and he found riding to the hounds an "extraordinary thrill" during the winter months before the polo season gets under way in April. His presence in hunting pink kept many of the 230 hunts in England and Wales in a whirl of social ecstasy and financial health. He is a less frequent follower of the hounds since he broke a collarbone when he and horse parted company over a hedge while riding with the local Hunt in Derbyshire.
When they have succeeded in bringing foxhunting to an end, the League against Cruel Sports have threatened to campaign for a ban on the 4 other field sports of shooting and angling. It remains to be seen whether Parliament will have the stomach for that fight.
with my
heart and soul
Let's drink to his health, let's
finish the bowl,
We'll follow John Peel through fair
and through foul
If we want a good hunt in the morning. .
19th century Ballad
Foxes: There is a stable population of an estimated 225,000 foxes in rural Britain. A further 33,000 live in cities. Approximately 425,000 cubs are born each summer and a similar number die each year. Of these up to 25,000 are killed by Hunts, 80,000 are dispatched by farmers and 300,000 die from old age, disease or accident.
Hunts: There are some 230 Hunts in Britain, each with an average of some 120 subscribers. A further 80,000 are involved in following or maintaining the Hunt, of which some 8,000 are directly or indirectly employed.
John Peel: The celebrated huntsman, whose exploits are enshrined in song, hunted for some 40 years in Cumbria, near the Scottish border. Hunting in those parts is done on foot, the fell sides being too steep and rough for horses. Peel died in 1854. John Woodcock Graves, the song’s author, emigrated to Tasmania where he died in 1886.
People, Places & Facilities online
Countryside Alliance
League Against Cruel Sports
BBC Background to Hunting
Horse and Hound Magazine
Hunting Links,UK,Europe, USA
Gaston Phebus Livre de la Chasse; 15c manuscript
John Peel
Samuel Alken Hunting, Coaching and Equestrian Prints for sale
I have now retired to the Isle of Wight. I invite you to share my weekly jottings at Rosemary Lane, my weekly chronicle of the changing seasons and unhurried village life at my country cottage on Wight, my island idyll.
Related Suite101 Topics
British Social History
The Plantaganet Kings
Travelsleuth's Topic of the Month
Inspiring Women Contributing Editor Penny White lives in Melbourne, Australia. She started writing in her last year of a BA at Monash-which was ostensibly going to take her towards a career in Sociology. Fate however, intervened in the form of a class in Fiction Writing.
Her new found passion for writing enables her to use a variety of genres successfully. Many of her short stories have won competitions and been published in newspapers, magazines and journals. Her e-book Inspiring Women is a paeon of praise for a remarkable group of Australian women who have had the courage to follow their own dreams - and succeed.
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