are is the man with the honor of having a dog breed named after him. Of course there is Charles II of England, who gave his name to the King Charles spaniel, so strongly were the little particolored dogs associated with him and his court. Enamored of the eponymous creatures, Charles could sometimes put canine concerns above those of the state. Samuel Pepys noted at a 1666 council meeting: “All I observed there was the silliness of the King, playing with his dog all the while and not minding the business.” Charles was dog-mad but perpetually unlucky: a July 1660 announcement declared “[H]is Majesties own Dog . . . doubtless was stoln, for the dog was not born nor bred in England, and would never forsake His master. . . . Will they never leave robbing his Majesty! Must he not keep a Dog?” Self-pity ran high among the Stuarts.
Then there is the Dandie Dinmont terrier—named after a dog-owning farmer in Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering—a breed seen rarely these days, looking like a cross between a long-haired dachshund and a border terrier, with a jaunty tuft of fur atop its proud head. The Lucas terrier, another low-to-the-ground, rough-coated specimen, takes its name from Sir Jocelyn Lucas, 4th Baronet, the twentieth-century Tory politician who refined his Sealyham terriers so far as to establish them as a different breed, one that would be, in his memorable words, “death to rats.”
Read Full Article »