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TH1

On Tuesday, 29 May 1660 Charles II was restored to the throne. A week later his attention turned to horse racing and he drew up a deed appointing James D'Arcy (the elder) of Sedbury, as master of the Royal Stud. James D'Arcy was the sixth son of the 4th Lord Conyers of Hornby, near Bedale, who had suffered during the Commonwealth for his Royalist sympathies. The D'Arcy-Conyers family is complex, with dynastic links throughout Yorkshire. Sir Thomas D'Arcy, father of Arthur D'Arcy who wrote to Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIIIth's chief administrator, suggesting Jervaulx Abbey as a royal stud, was executed for his role in the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1537, but subsequent D'Arcys overcame this disaster by a series of advantageous local marriages, which maintained their social position. James married Isabel Wyvill (of Constable Burton Hall) and received the Sedbury estate as part of the marriage settlement. Their daughter Elizabeth (d.1720) married Ralph Milbanke (1689-1748) of Halnaby and a granddaughter Elizabeth (1706-1739) married John Hutton (1691‚1768) of Marske. The marital links were mirrored in the interconnection of their horses, which assumes importance because of the unique nature of their stock [See D'Arcy family tree].

James D'Arcy was immediately commissioned to visit and report on the Tutbury Royal Stud in Staffordshire. James quickly informed Charles that the stud had been dispersed and could not be restored. However, he offered to supply him with "twelve extraordinary good Colts" for the considerable sum of eight hundred pounds a year from his own estate at Sedbury. Charles accepted, but the D'Arcy family was not always paid. His son James (the younger) (1650-1731), later Lord D'Arcy of Navan, spent much of his life failing to persuade subsequent monarchs pay Charles' debt. In effect Sedbury became the Royal Racing Stud and was the stable of the so-called "Royal Mares."

TH2

We know, thanks to historian C.M. Prior, who unearthed original mid-17th century documents and published them in his 1935 book, The Royal Studs of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, that James D'Arcy the elder (1617 - 1673), was appointed Master of the Royal Stud in 1660 by Charles II, and was directed, within a month of Charles' restoration in May of 1660, to assess the royal stud at Tutbury, and take possession of it.

Tutbury was an ancient site, the hill on which the castle was located had been the site of a hill fort before the birth of Christ, shaped and reinforced by waves of conquerers. At first wood, a motte and bailey stone castle was built by the Norman de Ferrars family, which was demolished and rebuilt several times over the course of various wars of royal succession, and served as the principal residence for the Earls of Lancaster, but fell into disrepair at the end of the fifteenth century. Despite its decay, it was one of the grim structures in which Mary, Queen of Scots, was confined during her unhappy days as captive of Queen Elizabeth 1st. Mary's son, King James I, later used it as a hunting lodge, replacing the main structure within the walls in 1631. The stud at Tutbury was located in the area around Tutbury Castle, divided into paddocks called Castlebay, The Trenches, Tockley, Rolleston, Little Parke and Obholme.

The Tutbury stud had been established by Henry VIII, one of several developed to breed horses for use by the court. The royal studs were greatly augmented by George Villiers, favorite of James I, who served as the king's Master of the Horse, and who secured and imported horses from the royal studs of Spain and Italy. Other animals were gifts from various European royal houses, and from rulers in Africa. England's monarchs also made gifts of horses from their stud to their counterparts across the channel. The royal studs also included horses presented by the subjects of England's monarchs, some of whom had been developing their own "breed" of horses at their estates throughout England, and some of these horses may have been of entirely native stock.

The English civil war had an impact on horses in the country, not only through mortality during battle, but through theft and acquisition as opposing armies took and lost various geographic areas. In 1649, soon after the victorious Oliver Cromwell took power and the Commonwealth was established, Cromwell directed his agents to make a survey of the royal stud at Tutbury, which listed 140 head of mares, colts and fillies, but no breeding stallions. Records show he retained seven horses from the royal stud at Tutbury, gave some as gifts to various supporters, and ordered the rest sold.

In 1660, D'Arcy was told by the restored Charles II to go to Tubury and "take possession thereof for His Majesty's use, and dispose thereof in such a manner as formerly ye same have bin used, or shall be now thought most meet for His Majesty's service, in the breed of his Colts and Horses, to show your good discretion." D'Arcy was cautioned in the command to "take care that ye Interest of Major General Morgan be preserved unto him." Major-General Thomas Morgan, who had served under Lord Thomas Fairfax in the parliamentary army, later supported the restoration of Charles II, and was instrumental in bringing about support for Charles in Scotland; his son was Sir William Morgan, the purchaser of the colt later known as Morgan's Dun, grandson of the Burton Barb mare (Family 2). From this Royal Command it appears Major-General Morgan had an interest in some of the horses at Tutbury, probably acquired after its sequestration by Cromwell, and it seems likely as part of his debt to Morgan for his support in the restoration, Charles II was affirming Morgan's ownership of some former royal animals or their descendants.

D'Arcy reported back to the King: "...his Majesty hath no Race [stud], Tutbury being made incapable of it..." and proposed instead that he furnish Charles with an annual number of colts "I'll breed (Having two good Stallions allowed me) out of my own stocke..." for a yearly fee. The deal was officialized in Letters Patent recorded in June of 1661, and the D'Arcy stud at Sedbury Park in Yorkshire -- which came to him via his marriage with the daughter of Sir Marmaduke Wyvill, another early breeder of running horses -- became the most important center of horse breeding in the country.

In 1673 James D'Arcy died and the agreement with the King was not renewed, the post of Master of the Royal Stud being granted to Sutton Oglethorpe, whose appointment did not encompass selling the King any horses. About fifteen years later, D'Arcy's son James, was petitioning King William III to either pay some of the money still owned his family from the reign of Charles II or, alternatively, to provide him with six "good Barbary or Arabian horses" to "supply the great number of breeding mares your Petitioner hath," if the King would undertake to have them shipped from the Mediterranean where "your Royal Fleet [is] lying." This desire for imported stallions was because "in all England he [D'Arcy] cannot be furnished with good stallions but what are of the same kind." All the stallions of common blood in England to which D'Arcy referred, were probably, as Prior points out, "too nearly related to his own mares at Sedbury."

Because D'Arcy presented a nearly identical petition to Queen Anne upon her ascension in 1702, it is presumed the neither the stallions nor the money were forthcoming from King William. Still, the D'Arcy stud continued to be a major influence in the breeding of running horses until the 1731 death of James, the younger, who had been created Lord D'Arcy of Navan (Ireland) ten years earlier.