Chapter 10 - Passing the Time with the Aristocracy

Summary

For what makes a good horseman, but the practise of many horses, which according to their severall mouthes, natures, and abilities, exercise eache, and all parts of hormanship, wherin I hope you will prove a proficient, and in your dauncing and weapon also, seeing you ar in the mart, wher both best, and best cheap (computatis computandis) may be had. (John Holles esquire, 1616)

On 9 January 1616 John Holles esquire wrote a letter to his son John, then completing his education in Paris, in which he stressed the importance of good horsemanship as a defining quality of a gentleman but also indicated other skills that he should possess. He framed his advice as a question, the one quoted above. Clearly, the sons of the landed elite should receive a rounded education, one that might highlight the importance of horsemanship but provided them with social graces suitable for the salon as well. And in Baldesar Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, translated into English by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561, they had a code of behaviour to follow. Cavendish certainly knew the book, because in September 1605 his 15-year-old son, William, earned £5 for translating it into Latin and English. Cavendish's nephew, William Cavendish, the expert horseman, endorsed Castiglione's approach to learning life-skills when he wrote about the ‘music’ of training a horse, declaring that he ‘that has not a musical head can never be a good horseman. A horse well dressed moves as true, and keeps as regular time as any musician can.’

Horsemanship

Holles's exhortation to his son, with its emphasis on horsemanship and weaponhandling, reflects the importance of these skills to the landed elite as members of the cavalry in wartime. Indeed, many of Cavendish's contemporaries argued that the fashion for travelling by coach had led to a decline of horsemanship and, as a result, a shortage in the number of gentlemen who could fight on horseback. This did not materialise, but the firearm revolution and the shift in priorities in favour of the infantry did undermine the cavalry's historic role as heavily armoured men-of-war, armed with lances and riding powerful great horses. Even if England lagged behind the continent – Cavendish was still buying lances to supply soldiers serving in Ireland at the turn of the sixteenth century – change was apparent by then.