In the 1650s, one of the most admired riding schools in Europe was run by a man who could not go home. William Cavendish, Marquess and later Duke of Newcastle, had commanded a king’s army and lost, and the price of backing the losing side of the English Civil War was exile. He settled in Antwerp, rented the house of the late painter Peter Paul Rubens, and did what horsemen do with grief and time: he built a riding hall and went to work. The horsemanship of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, would end up mattering far longer than his war did.
From Court to Battlefield
Cavendish was born in 1592 into one of England’s wealthiest families, and his life ran through the centers of power. In 1638 he was appointed governor to the young Prince of Wales, the future Charles II, and among his duties was teaching the boy to ride. Whatever else the monarchy later remembered him for, a king’s seat on a horse was partly his work.
When civil war came, Cavendish raised and financed royalist armies in the north of England, spending his own fortune at a rate that alarmed even his friends. The catastrophic royalist defeat at Marston Moor in 1644 broke the cause in the north, and Cavendish, judging his war over, left England for the continent. He would not see home again for sixteen years.
Antwerp: A Famous School on Borrowed Money
Exile ruined him financially and made him, oddly, immortal in our field. In Antwerp he leased Rubens’s house, built his manège, and acquired horses on credit that he trained to a standard that drew spectators from across Europe. Visiting nobility came to watch the exiled Englishman work, and accounts from the period treat his school as something between an academy and a wonder.
The Restoration brought Charles II to the throne in 1660 and Cavendish home at last. He was made Duke of Newcastle in 1665 and spent his last years at his English estates, still breeding and training horses, until his death in 1676. His second wife, Margaret Cavendish, was a prolific and famous writer in her own right, and her biography of her husband is one reason his life is unusually well documented for a horseman of any century.
The Horsemanship of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle
The books are the legacy. In 1658, still in Antwerp, Cavendish published a lavish treatise in French, La Méthode Nouvelle et Invention Extraordinaire de Dresser les Chevaux, illustrated with engravings that are still reproduced today. After his return to England he wrote in his own language: A New Method, and Extraordinary Invention, to Dress Horses appeared in 1667. To dress a horse, in the usage of the day, meant to train one.
What set Cavendish apart on the page was his insistence on arguing from the horse’s nature, the same ground Xenophon had worked from two thousand years earlier. He wrote about memory, habit, and repetition, about horses learning through consequence rather than through force alone, and he was scornful of trainers who mistook cruelty for method. Read honestly, he was still a man of his century: his framing of reward and correction is blunter than ours, and passages of his practice would not survive modern scrutiny. He sits between eras, considerably gentler than the Naples of Grisone a century before him, rougher in spots than what Pluvinel had urged in Paris a generation earlier.
His technical fingerprints are real. His work on circles, asking the horse to bring its shoulders in and move its haunches out, is part of the ancestry that historians of equitation commonly trace for the shoulder-in, the exercise La Guérinière would systematize decades later. Exactly how much the Frenchman owed the Englishman is still argued. That they are links in one chain is not.
That chain has not stopped growing. At Ocean View Stables in Daly City, the Leyden Horsemanship program still starts where Cavendish did, with the horse’s nature, and our natural horsemanship lesson program rests on the same conviction: a horse trained through understanding outlasts one trained through force.
What He Settled
England had translations before it had a master. Thomas Blundeville had adapted the Italian school into English a century earlier, so English readers were not strangers to the manège. What Newcastle supplied was different: a major work written from inside the art at its highest level, by an Englishman, in English, out of his own school and his own hands. It is widely regarded as the first great English-language contribution to classical horsemanship, and it proved the discipline could think in English rather than merely translate into it.
The honest footnotes belong here too. Scholars stay careful about how far his printed method matched his daily practice, and any master’s account of his own gentleness deserves the same skepticism as any memoir. But the established facts stand on their own: a royal student, a school famous across a continent, two major treatises, and a permanent place in the chain that runs from Naples and Paris to the classical schools still riding today.
He lost a war, a fortune, and the better part of two decades to exile, and he spent the exile teaching horses. The war is a footnote now. The books are still on the shelf.
If the written tradition interests you, follow the branch that crossed the Atlantic and reached California in our history of the vaqueros.
The principle Cavendish argued for in 1658 still rides in Daly City. Book a lesson with Zachary Leyden at Ocean View Stables and feel what training from the horse’s nature actually means.