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Marius Kwint
to prove the social usefulness and cultural legitimacy of the circus in the face of
doubts about its legal status. By demonstrating that his horse would volunteer its
life for its master and country, Astley was making a fairly straightforward
ideological point about the need for loyalty to the crown in a time of frequent war
and apparent sedition. 18
Nevertheless, during Astley’s time several new and important complexities were
emerging in the prevailing world view. As Keith Thomas has shown in his book
Man and Natural World, orthodox accounts of human supremacy over the brute
creation were no longer taken for granted by the latter half of the eighteenth
century. 19 By the later 1780s, scientists and sentimental observers alike were
beginning to credit the beasts with sympathetic intelligences of their own, no
longer simply regarding them as benchmarks of human beings’ comparative
greatness, as God-given exemplars of certain moral characteristics from which
people should learn (as in the medieval bestiary book), or as mere objects to be
exploited. Astley’s and his colleagues’ achievements seem to have contributed a
little to the shift in perceptions during this decade. Conventions of horse-breaking
had themselves been modified by humanitarianism since the later seventeenth
century, and Astley strongly advocated the newer wisdom. Choose a horse, he
advised in his best-selling riding manual The Modern Riding-Master of 1775,
“with Eyes bright, lively, resolute and impudent; that will look at an Object with a
Kind of Disdain. We may discover by the Eye his Inclination, Passion, Malice,
Health and Indisposition; the Eye is the most tender Part of the Frame.” Any
obedience was to be valued, “therefore if somewhat tractable the first Morning,
take him into the Stable, and caress him; for observe this as a golden Rule, mad
Men and mad Horses never will agree together.” 20 The calm of a good horse
reflected well upon its owner, although those animals that rebelled against this
contract and their supposedly docile natures became all the more liable to savage
punishment.
Even before the advent of the sublime aesthetic in the circus arena during the
1800s, there were moments when the apparently intractable horse was to be
welcomed. One of the most enduring clowning routines from the early circus was
The Taylor to Brentford. This was a parody of a foppish and jumped-up tailor who
had, according to urban legend, failed to persuade his horse to carry him to vote
for the radical John Wilkes in the Middlesex election in 1768. Ending with the
horse chasing the tailor round the ring, it became a standard in circuses until the
late nineteenth century, being adapted to various national and topical contexts. 21
The Taylor was also adopted more widely as a figure of speech about the supposed
relations between master and servant. One memoirist of English high politics in
the reign of George III, for example, explained that he knew from the start that
the joint ministry of the radical Charles James Fox and Lord North would never
last, “for he was court when Mr Fox kissed hands, and he observed George III turn
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