A Fine Collection of Racing Tickets and Passes, the Property of a North Country Collector

YORKSHIRE, York, Trier’s Stand, 1768, a uniface oval gilt-bronze pass, unsigned, from the same die as previous, back named (Marquis of Rockingham, No. 47), 53 x 39mm, 20.34g (W –; D & W –). Pierced for suspension, about very fine, extremely rare, especially so to a British political leader and two-time Prime Minister £500-800

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, A Fine Collection of Racing Tickets and Passes, the Property of a North Country Collector.

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Provenance: Spink Auction 119, 4 March 1997, lot 255 (part).

Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, KG, PC (1730-82), Prime Minister 1765-6 and 1782, lived at Wentworth Woodhouse, Rotherham. Educated at Westminster School, at the age of 15 his father made him a colonel and organised volunteers to defend the country against the Young Pretender, whose Jacobite army had marched into northern England. Without parental consent, Rockingham rode to Carlisle to join the Duke of Cumberland, but with the rebellion put down he went on a Grand Tour of Europe, returning to inherit his father’s estates in 1751. In July of that year he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding and of the city of York, and joined the Jockey Club. His maiden speech in the House, in March 1752, supported the Bill which disposed of Scottish lands confiscated after the Jacobite rising. Rockingham rose in prominence in royal circles in the later years of George II’s reign, but his alliance with the Duke of Newcastle and his Whig supporters was not shared by the new monarch who favoured the Tory Lord Bute. Piqued, Rockingham resigned as Lord of the Bedchamber and in turn George III removed him from the Lord-Lieutenancy in 1762. But in July 1765, thanks to a lack of parliamentary support for Bute and his successor, George Grenville, Rockingham was appointed Prime Minister and recovered the Yorkshire titles he had been deprived of three years earlier. Rockingham’s administration, which included the Irish statesman Edmund Burke, was dominated by the American issue and the repeal of the Stamp Act, but internal dissent within the cabinet led to his resignation in July 1766. Rockingham spent the next 16 years in opposition, but on the local front in 1769 he helped to hunt down the Cragg Vale coiners, a band of counterfeiters based in the Hebden Bridge area who clipped gold coins and two of whose number had ambushed and murdered a coiner who had turned king’s evidence. In March 1782 Rockingham was appointed Prime Minister for a second time, with Charles James Fox and Lord Shelburne serving in his cabinet. But this second term was short-lived as Rockingham died at the beginning of July 1782 from influenza