A HISTORY OF SURREY ' Rob. Cecyll ' below. 1 The lord admiral was still lord lieutenant ; Sir George More, as he had become, was his deputy ; Sir William More was gone in 1600. But Sir George was never of quite the same im- portance as his father in the county, though he played some part at Court. Surrey again got an earl in 1603. Thomas Howard, son of the last Earl of Arundel, grandson of the last Duke of Norfolk, was restored in blood as Earl of Arundel and Surrey by James, and recovered most of the ancient Arundel property and some of his ancestral position. He was ultimately created Earl of Norfolk in 1 644. He was lord lieutenant of Surrey in 1635. He was a Romanist, as might be expected from his ancestral relations with the Tudors. Surrey had gained another Parliamentary borough under Elizabeth. The small town of Haslemere had been part of the possessions of the Bishop of Salisbury from the time of Henry II. to that of Henry VIII. It was in the manor of Godalming and in the parish of Chiddingfold, evidence that it was not a place of great importance formerly. But in 1584 Elizabeth summoned it to send two burgesses to Parliament, and in 1596 she incorporated it by charter, declaring therein that the inhabitants had sent members to Parliament since the days before the memory of man. It was pure fiction, meant to cover the deliberate creation of a borough to support the Crown. The manor was in the hands of the Crown. It is possible that neighbouring ironworks had made Haslemere slightly more impor- tant than it had been formerly. It was not of course singular in having its choice of burgesses controlled. The interest of the reign of King James, so illustrious in literature, important in colonial expansion and trade, ominous in Parliamentary strife, is not reflected in Surrey history. The king often resided in the county, at Nonsuch chiefly, but also at Oatlands and at Richmond, and Surrey grumbled as usual under the expenses of royal purveyance. But the most lasting result of the royal residence was the establishment of horse racing in the county. The king used to ride over to witness the sport of ' running horses ' on Banstead Downs. Judging from the old maps the name included what we call Epsom Downs. The old four mile course, finishing near the present grand stand on Epsom Downs, began far away on Banstead Downs as we call them. It is curious how little if anything is heard of horse racing before this date, and how con- stantly popular it remained from the early seventeenth century onwards. James was a lover of sport, but he did not care for unnecessary risks. He found that the holes made by swine rooting in the ground in the Surrey bailiwick of the forest of Windsor endangered his neck when hunting. The Earl of Nottingham wrote to Sir George More and the other verderers of the forest that his highness in his reasonable dis- pleasure ordered his keepers to kill all hogs found in the riding grounds, but to spare the loss to the owners the earl would have them remove their swine and fill up the holes. 8 The consequences of the king's harsh order were evidently averted by his more considerate minister. In 1 6 1 1 1 Loseley MSS, March 25, 1603, vii. D. 82. * Ibid. June 8, 1608, i. 55. 398
