Chapter II: Part 2

A most luxurious English carriage of the fourteenth century is shown in the Louterell Psalter. This was obviously evolved from a four-wheeled waggon. Five horses, harnessed at length, drew it, a postilion with a short whip riding on the second, and another with a long whip on the wheeler. The tunnel-like body was highly ornamented, and its front decorated with carved birds and men’s heads. The frame of the body was continued in front as two poles, and underneath, hanging by a ring and looking rather ludicrous, is shown a small trunk. Women only appear in this carriage, the men riding behind it.

“Nothing,” remarks M. Jusserand, “gives a better idea of the
encumbering, awkward luxury which formed the splendour of
civil life during this century than the structure of these
heavy machines. The best had four wheels; three or four horses
drew them, harnessed in a row, the postilion being mounted on
one, armed with a short-handled whip of many thongs; solid
beams rested on the axles, and above this framework rose an
archway rounded like a tunnel; as a whole, ungraceful enough.
But the details,” he goes on to say, speaking of the carriage
shown in the Louterell Psalter, “were extremely elegant, the
wheels were carved and their spokes expanded near the hoop
into ribs forming pointed arches; the beams were painted and
gilt, the inside was hung with those dazzling tapestries, the
glory of the age; the seats were furnished with embroidered
cushions; a lady might stretch out there, half sitting, half
lying; pillows were disposed in the corners as if to invite
sleep, square windows pierced the sides and were hung with
curtains. Thus travelled,” he continues with a touch of
picturesqueness, “the noble lady, slim in form, tightly clad
in a dress which outlined every curve of the body, her long,
slender hands caressing the favourite dog or bird. The knight,
equally tightened in his _cote-hardie_, regarded her with
a complacent eye, and, if he knew good manners, opened his
heart to his dreamy companion in long phrases like those in
the romances. The broad forehead of the lady, who has perhaps
coquettishly plucked off her eyebrows and stray hairs, a
process about which satirists were indignant, brightens up at
moments, and her smile is like a ray of sunshine. Meanwhile
the axles groan, the horse-shoes—also heavily nailed—crunch
the ground, the machine advances by fits and starts, descends
into the hollows, bounds altogether at the ditches, and falls
violently back with a dull noise.”

Other gaily decorated carriages, surprisingly like our modern vans, though on two wheels, are shown in _Le Roman du Roy Meliadus_, another fourteenth-century manuscript preserved in the British Museum, but only the richest and most powerful of the nobles could afford to keep them.

“They were bequeathed,” says M. Jusserand, “by will from one
another, and the gift was valuable. On September 25, 1355,
Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady Clare, wrote her last will and
endowed her eldest daughter with ‘her great carriage with
the coverture, carpets, and cushions.’ In the twentieth year
of Richard II, Roger Rouland received £400 sterling for a
carriage destined for Queen Isabella; and John le Charer,
in the sixth [year] of Edward III, received £1000 for the
carriage of Lady Eleanor—the King’s sister.”

These were fabulous sums, when it is remembered that an ox cost about thirteen shillings and a sheep but one shilling and five pence.

Now it may be that such a “great carriage” as is shown in the Louterell Psalter was identical with the _whirlicote_ in which, according to Stowe, Richard II and his mother took refuge on the occasion of Wat Tyler’s rebellion.

“Of old time,” says this honest tailor, who himself witnessed
the introduction of coaches into England, “coaches were not
known in this island, but chariots or whirlicotes, then so
called, and they only used of princes or great estates, such
as had their footmen about them; and for example to note, I
read that Richard II, being threatened by the rebels of Kent,
rode from the Tower of London to the Mile’s End, and with him
his mother, because she was sick and weak, in a whirlicote,
the Earl of Buckingham ... knights and Esquires attending on
horseback. But in the next year [1381] the said King Richard
took to wife Anne, daughter to the King of Bohemia, that
first brought hither the riding upon side saddles; and so was
the riding in whirlicotes and chariots forsaken, except at
coronations and such like spectacles.”

From this it would appear that the _whirlicote_ (which may, as Bridges Adams suggests, have been derived from “whirling” or moving “cot” or house) was identical with the _chariot_ or _chaer_. Unfortunately the translators of Froissart, who mentions the incident of Richard’s ride from the Tower, cannot agree upon the correct word to render the original _charette_. _Charette_, _chariette_, _chare_, _chaer_ (Wicliffe), and _char_ (Chaucer) all occur in the early chronicles, and there seems no means, if, indeed, there is any need, of differentiating between them. All were probably waggons modified for the conveyance of such passengers as could afford to pay highly for the privilege. One fact, however, suggests that there were at any rate two different kinds of carriages in England at this time, for we read that the body of Richard II was borne to its last resting-place “upon a chariette or sort of litter on wheels, such as is used by citizens’ wives who are not able or not allowed to keep ordinary litters.” With this in mind, it is difficult to agree with Sir Walter Gilbey when he says[15] that the _chare_ was a horse litter, though it is fair to add that he acknowledges an opposite view.

The _charette_ is obviously the French form of _caretta_, which was the carriage in which Beatrice, the wife of Charles of Anjou, entered Naples in 1267.[16] This vehicle is described as being covered both inside and without with sky-blue velvet powdered with golden lilies. Pope Gregory X entered Milan in 1273 in a similar carriage. The _caretta_ was probably an open car “shaded simply by a canopy.” In the next century, the _Anciennes Chroniques de Flandres_, a manuscript belonging to 1347, shows an illustration of Ermengarde, the wife of Salvard, Lord of Rousillon, travelling in a four-wheeled conveyance remarkably like the ordinary country waggon of to-day.

“The lady,” says Sir Walter Gilbey, “is seated on the
floor-boards of a springless four-wheeled cart or waggon,
covered in with a tilt that could be raised or drawn aside;
the body of the vehicle is of carved wood and the outer edges
of the wheels are painted grey to represent iron tyres. The
conveyance is drawn by two horses driven by a postilion
who bestrides that on the near [left] side. The traces are
apparently of rope, and the outer trace of the postilion’s
horse is represented as passing under the saddle-girth, a
length of leather (?) being let in for the purpose; the
traces are attached to swingle-bars carried on the end of a
cross-piece secured to the base of the pole where it meets the
body.

“Carriages of some kind,” he continues, “appear also to have
been used by men of rank when travelling on the Continent.
_The Expeditions to Prussia and the Holy Land of Henry,
Earl of Derby, in_ 1390 _and_ 1392-3 (Camden Society’s
Publications, 1894) indicate that the Earl, afterwards King
Henry IV of England, travelled on wheels at least part of the
way through Austria.

“The accounts kept by his Treasurer during the journey contain
several entries relative to carriages; thus on November 14,
1392, payment is made for the expenses of two equerries named
Hethcote and Mansel, who were left for one night at St.
Michael, between Leoban and Kniltefeld, with thirteen carriage
horses. On the following day the route lay over such rugged
and mountainous country that the carriage wheels were broken
despite the liberal use of grease; and at last the narrowness
of the way obliged the Earl to exchange his own carriage for
two smaller ones better suited to the paths of the district.

“The Treasurer also records the sale of an old carriage at
Friola for three florins. The exchange of the Earl’s ‘own
carriage’ is the significant entry: it seems very unlikely
that a noble of his rank would have travelled so lightly that
a single cart would contain his own luggage and that of his
personal retinue; and it is also unlikely that he used one
luggage cart of his own. The record points directly to the
conclusion that the carriages were passenger vehicles used by
the Earl himself.”

It is to be noted that the carriage of the Lady Ermengarde was a Flemish vehicle. Flanders, indeed, seems to have shared with Hungary the honour of playing pioneer in carriage-building throughout the ages, and long after the general adoption of coaches in Europe, Flemish models, and also Flemish mares, were freely imported into the various countries.

Another carriage of this time is described in a pre-Chaucerian poem called _The Squyr of Low Degree_, in which the father of a Hungarian princess is made to say:—

“Tomorrow ye shall on hunting fare,
And ride my daughter in a _chare_.
It shall be covered with velvet red,
And cloths of fine gold all about your head;
With damask white, and azure blue,
Well diapered with lilies new;
Your pomelles shal be ended with gold,
Your chains enammelled many a fold.”

The pomelles no doubt were “the handles to the rods affixed to the roof, and were for the purpose of holding on by, when deep ruts or obstacles in the road caused an unusual jerk in the vehicle.” One notices that lilies were apparently a common form of decoration on these early carriages, but it is to be regretted that the accounts in general are so scanty.

We come to the litters.

Of these the commonest, both in England and on the Continent, seem to have been modifications of the Roman _basterna_. Generally they were covered with a sort of vault with various openings. Two horses, one at either end, carried them. The great majority held only one person. Thrupp describes them in some detail.

“They were,” he says, “long and narrow—long enough for a
person to recline in—and no wider than could be carried
between the poles which were placed on either side of the
horses. They were about four to five feet long, and two
feet six inches wide, with low sides and higher ends. The
entrance was in the middle, on both sides, the doors being
formed sometimes by a sliding panel and sometimes simply by a
cross-bar. The steps were of leather or iron loops, the latter
being hinged to turn up when the litter was placed on the
ground. The upper part was formed by a few broad wooden hoops,
united along the top by four or five slats, and over the whole
a canopy was placed, which opened in the middle, at the sides,
and ends, for air and light.”

Isolated references to these horse-litters are scattered throughout the old chronicles, but afford meagre information. William of Malmesbury states that the body of William Rufus was placed on a _reda caballaria_, a horse-litter, the name of which suggests its origin. According to Matthew of Westminster, King John, during his illness in 1216, was removed from Swinstead Abbey to Newark in a similar vehicle, the _lectica equestre_. Generally, however, the horse-litter was reserved exclusively for women, men being unwilling to risk an accusation of effeminacy. So, in recording the death of Earl Ferrers in 1254, from injuries received in an accident to his conveyance, the historian is careful to explain that his Lordship suffered from the gout, which was why he happened to be in a litter at all.

As time passed, the litter rather than the wheeled carriage became the state vehicle. Froissart, writing of the second wife of Richard II, describes “la june Royne d’Angleterre” as travelling “en une litere moult riche qui etoit ordondée pour elle.” Margaret, the daughter of Henry VII, journeyed to Scotland, it is true, on the back of a “faire palfrey,” but she was followed by “one vary riche litere, borne by two faire coursers vary nobly drest; in wich litere the sayd queene was borne in the intryng of the good townes, or otherwise to her good playsher.” But on the Continent new improvements were being made in wheeled carriages, and when in 1432 Henry VI wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury and other high dignitaries of the Church, with regard to the widow of Henry of Navarre, he ordered them to place two _chares_ at her disposal, rather than the litter to which one might have thought she would be entitled. Sir Walter Gilbey translates the word to mean a horse-litter, but Markland, in his paper on the _Early Use of Carriages in England_ (_Archæologia_, Vol. XX), differentiates between the two, ascribing a more ceremonial use to the litter, and this seems to me to be nearer the truth. Both vehicles, for instance, are mentioned by Holinshed in his description of the coronation ceremony of Catherine of Aragon in 1509. The Queen herself rode in a litter of “white clothe of golde, not covered nor bailed, which was led by two palfreys clad in white damask doone to the ground, head and all, led by her footman. Over her was borne a canopie of cloth of gold, with four gilt staves, and four silver bells. For the bearing of which canopie were appointed sixteen knights, foure to beare it one space on foot, and other foure another space.” But the Queen’s ladies followed her in _chariots_ decorated in red, and the same thing is true of Anne Boleyn, who in 1533 rode to her coronation in a litter, but was followed by four chariots, three decorated with red, and one with white. Such chariots probably resembled those to be described in the next chapter; the point to notice here is that they were being used now, and although the litters still continued until the time of Charles II—Mary de Medicis, the Queen-Mother of France, entered London in 1638 in a litter, though she had travelled from Harwich in a coach, and as late as 1680 “an accident happened to General Shippon, who came in a horse-litter wounded to London; when he paused by the brewhouse in St. John Street a mastiff attacked the horses, and he was tossed like a dog in a blanket”—the wheeled carriage once again became the vehicle of honour, and at the coronation of Mary in 1553 a chariot[17] and not a litter was used by the Queen. This had six horses, and was covered with a “cloth of tissue.” Whatever its discomforts may have been, it cannot have been less dignified than the litter which it had, now for all time, supplanted.

_Chapter the Third_

_INTRODUCTION OF THE COACH_ (1450-1600)

“Go—call a Coach; and let a Coach be called:
Let him that calls the Coach, be called the Caller!
And in his calling, let him no thing call,
But Coach! COACH!! COACH!!!”

_Chrononhotonthologos._

Both horse-litters and early wheeled carriages seem to have had some pretensions towards comfort. They afforded protection against the inclemency of the weather; there had been certain rude attempts at suspension, and the soft cushions helped to minimise the unpleasant joltings to which every carriage was liable. When, however, the renaissance of carriage-building occurred, people seem to have been but little more progressive than they had been centuries before. There were, as I have already hinted, still two factors which militated against a speedy adoption of such vehicles, more comfortable though they undoubtedly were, as now began to be made—the state of the roads, and the dislike of anything bordering upon the effeminate.

The roads had become no better. Even those most eager to welcome the new carriages must have been dismayed at the state of the country, not only in England, but in every European country. As one writer of the sixteenth century complains, the roads, “by reason of straitness and disrepair, breed a loathsome weariness to the passenger.” Nor is this writer a solitary grumbler: there are numerous complaints. In 1537 Richard Bellasis, one of the monastery-wreckers, was unable to proceed with his work: “lead from the roofs,” he reports, “cannot be conveyed away till next summer, for the ways in that countrie are so foule and deepe that no carriage [cart] can pass in winter.” Indeed, no one seems to have looked after the roads with any care, either in the fifteenth or the sixteenth century. Yet there were, in this country, repeated bequests for their preservation. Henry Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, a sufferer himself, left one hundred marks to be bestowed on the highways in Craven, and the same sum on those of Westmorland. John Lyon, the founder of Harrow School, gave certain rents for the repair of the roads from Harrow and Edgware to London. This was in 1592, and Lyon’s example was speedily followed by Sutton, the founder of the Charterhouse. There was, indeed, legislation of a kind, but in general the roads were in a terrible condition, and for a long time, so far as men were concerned, the saddle remained triumphant.

And for an even longer time continued that prejudice against carriages which led to the framing of actual prohibitive laws. Even women were occasionally forbidden the use of coaches, and there is the story of the luxurious duchess who in 1546 found great difficulty in obtaining from the Elector of Saxony permission to be driven in a covered carriage to the baths—such leave being granted only on the understanding that none of her attendants were to be allowed the same privilege. So, too, in 1564, Pope Pius IV was exhorting his cardinals and bishops to leave the new-fangled machines to women, and twenty-four years later Julius, Duke of Brunswick, found it necessary to issue an edict—it makes quaint reading now—ordering his “vassals, servants, and kinsmen, without distinction, young and old,” who “have dared to give themselves up to indolence and to riding in coaches ... to take notice that when We order them to assemble, either altogether or in part, in Times of Turbulence, or to receive their Fiefs, or when on other occasions they visit Our Court, they shall not travel or appear in Coaches, but on their riding Horses.” More stringent is the edict, preserved amongst the archives of the German county of Mark, in which the nobility was forbidden the use of coaches “under penalty of incurring the punishment of felony.” So, also, we have the case of René de Laval, Lord of Bois-Dauphin, an extremely obese nobleman living in Paris, whose only excuse for possessing a coach was his inability to be set upon a horse, or to keep in that position if the horse chanced to move. This was in 1550. In England there was a similar feeling of opposition. In 1584 John Lyly, in his play _Alexander and Campaspe_, makes one of his characters complain of the new luxury. In the old days, he says, those who used to enter the battlefield on hard-trotting horses, now ride in coaches and think of nothing but the pleasures of the flesh. The once famous Bishop Hall speaks bitterly of the “sin-guilty” coach:—

“Is’t not a shame to see each homely groome
Sit perched in an idle chariot roome
That were not meete some pannel to bestride
Sursingled to a galled hackney’s hide?
Nor can it nought our gallant’s praises reap,
Unless it be done in staring cheap
In a sin-guilty coach, not closely pent,
Jogging along the harder pavement.”

Possibly the same idea is to be found in the framing of a Parliamentary Bill of 1601 “to restrain the excessive use of coaches,” which, however, was thrown out. So again in 1623, the delightful though sadly biased water-poet, John Taylor, is lamenting the decadence of England, due, according to him, to the growing custom of driving in coaches.

“For whereas,” he says, “within our memories, our Nobility and
Gentry would ride well mounted (and sometimes walke on foote)
gallantly attended with three or four, score brave fellowes in
blue coates, which was a glory to our Nation; and gave more
content to the beholders, then [_sic_] forty of your Leather
tumbrels: Then men preserv’d their bodies strong and able by
walking, riding, and other manly exercises: Then saddlers
was a good Trade, and the name of a Coach was Heathen Greek.
Who ever saw (but upon extraordinary occasions),” he goes
on to ask, “Sir _Philip Sidney_, Sir _Francis Drake_, Sir
_John Norris_, Sir _William Winter_, Sir _Roger Williams_,
or (whom I should have nam’d first) the famous Lord _Gray_
and _Willoughby_, when the renowned _George_ Earle of
_Cumberland_, or _Robert_ Earle of _Essex_? These sonnes
of _Mars_, who in their time were the glorious Brooches of
our Nation, and admirable terrour to our Enemies: these, I
say, did make small use of Coaches, and there were two mayne
reasons for it, the one was, that there were but few Coaches
in most of their times: and the second is, they were deadly
foes to all sloth and effeminacy.”

To Taylor, indeed, and probably to every one of his fellow-watermen, a coach was always a “hell-cart” designed on purpose to put an end to his own most worthy calling. But less biased poets than outspoken Taylor gave tongue to an opposition which continued for nearly two centuries. Gay, for instance, looked on the vastly improved vehicle of his day as no more than an excuse for extravagant display:—

“O happy streets, to rumbling wheels unknown,
No carts, no coaches shake the floating town!
Thus was of old _Britannia’s_ city bless’d,
Ere pride and luxury her sons profess’d.”

And again:—

“Now gaudy pride corrupts the lavish age,
And the streets flame with glaring equipage;
The tricking gamester insolently rides,
With _Loves_ and _Graces_ on his chariot’s sides;
In saucy state the griping broker sits,
And laughs at honesty, and trudging wits.”

Perhaps he is thinking of some personal inconvenience, rather than of mere unnecessary luxury, when he asks:—

“What walker shall his mean ambition fix
On the false lustre of a coach and six?”

And so late as 1770, the eccentric Lord Monboddo, who still maintained the superiority of a savage life, refused to “sit in a box drawn by brutes.” It is, of course, easy to magnify such opposition to coaches as followed on the grounds of mere luxury and display, but in the earlier history of the coach, to which we are now come, it is a factor which must by no means be neglected. The coach, like every other novelty, had to fight its way, and if one is inclined to believe, after reading such accusations as there are of the earliest coaches with their magnificent adornments and numerous attendants, that the owners altogether deserved the reproaches of their more Spartan fellows, it may be well to recall Macaulay’s words. In his sketch of the state of England in 1685, when coaches were still lavishly adorned, he says of them: “We attribute to magnificence what was really the effect of a very disagreeable necessity. People in the time of Charles the Second travelled with six horses, because with a smaller number there was great danger of sticking fast in the mire.” And what is true of 1685 is certainly true of 1585.

Buckingham is supposed to have been the first man to use a coach and six in this country, though this is by no means certain. Of him a well-known story apropos of this question of undue luxury is told. “The stout old Earl of _Northumberland_,” it runs, “when he got loose, hearing that the great Favourite _Buckingham_ was drawn about with a Coach and six horses (which was wondered at then as a _novelty_, and imputed to him as a _mastring pride_) thought if _Buckingham_ had six he might very well have eight in his Coach, with which he rode through the City of _London_ to the _Bath_, to the vulgar talk and admiration.... Nor did this addition of two horses by _Buckingham_ grow higher than a little _murmur_. For in the late Queen’s time there were no coaches, and the first [had] but two Horses; the rest crept in by _Degrees_ as men at first venture to _sea_.”[18] Yet what may have been true of Buckingham, whose love of luxury was notorious, need not have been true of those other owners of coaches, who were constantly travelling about the country.

Finally there is the other side of the question to be remembered, and, as M. Ramde quaintly points out in his _History of Locomotion_, the very luxury which people so disliked had a beneficent effect; for “after the development of the use of carriages, and their frequent employment by the court and nobility, the liberty to throw everything out of the window became intolerable! Thus the carriage of luxury has been the cause of cleanliness in the streets.”

Now it must be understood that the coach proper differs from all earlier vehicles in being not only a covered, but also a suspended carriage. The canopy has given place to the roof, a roof, that is to say, which forms part of the framing of the body; and the body itself is swung in some fashion, however primitive, from posts or other supports. Further, it seems reasonable to suppose, on the analogy of the _berlin_ and the _landau_—two later carriages which took their names from the towns in which they were first made—that the first coaches were built in a small Hungarian town then called Kotzee. Yet it is to be observed that Spain, Italy, and France, in the persons of various enthusiasts, have claimed the invention—their claims being mainly based on such similarities as may be observed between the real coach and the earlier cars and charettes.[19] Bridges Adams, indeed, not to be outdone, hazards the suggestion that England might also be included in such a list by reason of her invention of the whirlicote, though he is obliged to admit that nobody knows _exactly_ what a whirlicote was like. It is probably due to these patriotic gentlemen that several rather ludicrous suggestions have been made to explain the derivation of the word _coach_, which has a similar sound in nearly all European languages. Menange rashly suggests a corruption of the Latin _vehiculum_. Another writer puts forward the Greek verb ὀχέω, to carry. Wachten, a German, finds in _kutten_, to cover, a suitable explanation, and Lye produces the Flemish _koetsen_, to lie along. This last, perhaps, is the most reasonable suggestion of those unwilling to give the palm to Hungary, for not only were the Flemish vehicles well known before the introduction of the new carriage, but there is also some confusion, at any rate, in this country, between the two words _coach_ and _couch_, both being found in the old account books. Even in the sixteenth century the word seems to have bothered people. There is an amusing reference to this point in an early seventeenth-century tract called _Coach and Sedan Pleasantly Disputing_, of which I shall have more to say in the next chapter.

“Their first invention,” says a character in this dialogue,
“and use was in the Kingdome of _Hungarie_, about the time
when _Frier George_, compelled the Queen and her young sonne
the King, to seeke to _Soliman_ the Turkish Emperour, for aid
against the Frier, and some of the Nobilitie, to the utter
ruine of that most rich and flourishing Kingdome, where they
were first called _Kottcze_, and in the _Slavonian_ tongue
_Cottri_, not of _Coucher_ the French to lie-downe, nor of
_Cuchey_, the Cambridge Carrier, as some body made Master
_Minshaw_, when hee (rather wee) perfected his Etymologicall
dictionarie, whence we call them to this day _Coaches_.”

It is also to be noted that the first English coaches, so called, were probably not suspended at all, but merely upholstered carts for reclining—in fact nothing more than the old chariots. In the second half of the sixteenth century, practically every pleasure carriage in England, though not on the Continent, was called a _coach_ or a _carroche_. Consequently it is difficult to give a date for the importation of the first real coach into this country. Indeed, it is impossible to say with any degree of certainty precisely when carriages of the suspended type were first made. Such early accounts as exist are at once fragmentary and obscure, and the few illustrations little better than caricatures with a perspective reminiscent of that in Hogarth’s famous example of false drawing. It can only be repeated that the hammock slung from the four posts of a waggon, such as we have seen existed amongst the Anglo-Saxons and possibly was also in use in parts of Europe, may have provided the idea of permanent suspension as a means to comfort, and that such scanty evidence as there is goes to prove that the carriages exported from Hungary towards the end of the fifteenth century seem to have been the first _coaches_ to be built.

So early as 1457 there is mention of such a carriage, given by Ladislaus, King of Hungary, to the French King, Charles VII. The Parisians who saw it described it as “branlant et moulte riche.” What this “trembling” carriage was like there is no means of discovering, but it certainly suggests an attempt at suspension, and may perhaps be taken for the earliest coach to be recorded by history. This obviously was Hungarian, and Hungary is again mentioned in the same connection by Stephanus Broderithus, who relates that in 1526, “when the archbishop received intelligence that the Turks had entered Hungary, not content with informing the King of this event, he speedily got into one of those light carriages which from the name of the place we call kotcze, and hastened to His Majesty.” And apparently these light carriages were actually used for military purposes, Taylor avowing that “they carried soldiers on each side with cross-bowes,” this being the best purpose to which he considered the coach had ever been put or was likely to be put in the future. All this is clear enough, but Beckmann, in his _History of Inventions_, mentions another circumstance which strengthens the evidence: “Siegmund, Baron de Herberstein, ambassador from Louis II, to the King of Hungary, says in his _Commentarie de rebus Moscoviticis_, where he occasionally mentions some travelling-stages in Hungary: ‘The fourth stage for stopping to give the horses breath is six miles below Taurinum, in the village of Cotzi, from which both drivers and carriages take their name, and are generally called cotzi.’”[20]

Very probably these new Hungarian carriages were seen in most European countries before 1530. “At tournaments,” says Bridges Adams, “they were made objects for display; they are spoken of as being gilded all over, and the hangings were of crimson satin. Electresses and duchesses were seldom without them; and there was as much rivalry in their days of public exhibition as there is now [1837] amongst the aspirants of fashion in their well-appointed equipages at a queen’s drawing-room.”

What did these early coaches look like? Shorn of their hangings, they must have resembled nothing so much as the hearse of to-day. The first illustrations show no signs of suspension, and portray what appear to be gaudily decorated waggons, and that in effect is what they were. The first coach makers of Hungary, like their predecessors, were certainly content to take for their model the common agricultural waggon of Germany. Indeed, Hungary seems to have played pioneer in this respect at a very early date. Von Ginzrot, in his work on early vehicles, gives an illustration of a closed passenger carriage which bears more than a superficial resemblance to the later coaches. “The body,” says Thrupp, “is a disguised waggon; the tilt-top has two leather flaps to fall over the doorway, and the panels are of wicker-work.” It would have been quite easy, he continues, to use such waggons, as had been the case long before, for passenger traffic, “by placing the planks across the sides, or suspending seats by straps from the sides”; and he further mentions an oil painting at Nuremberg, of two waggons “with carved and gilt standard posts both in front and behind the body”—an interesting stage in the transformation from rude cart to private coach. There is a detailed and technical description of these waggons in Thrupp’s own book, but it will be enough here to notice that they were generally narrower at the bottom than at the top, as were the first coaches, and that the four wheels were nearly of the same size. Working from such a model, the Hungarian artificers produced a comparatively light, though large, four-wheeled carriage with some pretensions to grace of line, a roofed body, broad seats, and a side entrance. The body, however, was not completely enclosed by solid panels, which only took the place of the curtains at a later date. Carvings and other ornamentation followed on the owner’s rank and taste. And towards the end of the sixteenth century, if not before, the actual body was suspended on straps or braces. There are preserved at Coburg and Verona one or two coach-bodies which show signs of the iron hoops by which they were hung. The earliest of these was built for Duke Frederick of Saxony in 1527, and Count Gozzadini, in a slim folio which he privately printed some sixty years ago, describes a coach-body built in 1549 which still shows traces of its heraldic ornamentation on the framework.

“This coach,” says Thrupp, acting as the Count’s translator,
“was built under the direction of an Italian at Brussels,
for the ceremony of the marriage of Alexander, the son of
Octavius Farnese, Duke of Parma, with a Portuguese princess.
The wedding took place in 1565 at Brussels. There were four
carriages Flanders fashion [? charettes] and four coaches
after the Italian fashion, swinging on leather braces. The
chief, or state, coach is described as being in the most
beautiful manner, with four statues at the ends, the spokes of
the wheels like fluted columns. There were seraphims’ heads
at the end of the roof and over the doorway, and festoons of
fruit in relief over the framing of the body. The coachman was
supported by two carved figures of lions, two similar lions
were at the hind wheel, and the leather braces that supported
the body and the harness were embossed with heads of animals.
The ends of the steps were serpents’ heads. The whole of the
wood and ironwork was covered with gold relieved with white.
The coach was drawn by four horses, with red and white plumes
of feathers, and the covering of the body and of the horses
was gold brocade with knotted red silk fringe. The cushions of
gold-embroidered stuff were perfumed with amber and musk, that
infused the soul of all who entered the coach with life, joy,
and supreme pleasure.”

Truly a Southern notion!

What is apparently the oldest coach to be preserved practically intact is to be seen at Coburg. This coach was built for a particular occasion—the marriage of John, Elector of Saxony, in 1584. The body is long and ornate, and is hung from four carved standard posts surmounted by crowned lions. The wheels are large—four feet eight inches and five feet—and the roof is at a slightly higher level than the lions’ heads. Mounting steps must have existed, but have been lost.

Not unnaturally the advent of these coaches followed upon the commercial prosperity of each country. Germany seems to have imported a number of carriages from Hungary, and made others from Hungarian models, but even more prosperous than Germany at this time was Holland, which probably possessed more coaches than any other country in Europe. Here there would have been native designs to follow and improve upon, and, as I shall show in a moment, it was probably from the Netherlands that the first coach was imported into England. Antwerp, for instance, a superlatively rich city in the sixteenth century, is credited by Macpherson with having no less than five hundred coaches —and so five hundred scandals, according to the local philosophers—in 1560, at which date London had but two, and Paris no more than three. Of the French trio of _carosses_, as they were called, one was the Queen’s property, a second belonged to the fashionable Diana of Poitiers, and the third had been built for the use of that corpulent noble who has already been mentioned. Some Italian towns possessed many, others none. There is preserved at the Musée Cluny in Paris a Veronese _carriole_ built in the sixteenth century by Giovanna Batta Maretto, with panels painted by a distinguished artist of the time. Verona, indeed, seems to have had many coaches. But it was easily surpassed by Ferrara, which so early as 1509 is credited with the possession of no less than sixty coaches, the whole of these forming the Duke’s procession on the occasion of a state visit from the Pope. And, as Thrupp points out, these sixty carriages were not litters or cars, as might be supposed, but coaches, for it is particularly mentioned by the historian that “the Duchess of Ferrara rode in a _litter_, and her ladies followed her in twenty-two _cars_.” Spain had apparently no coaches until 1546, and here again there was considerable opposition to their use. Yet although England, France, and Spain seem to have been behind other countries in taking to the new carriages, all three possessed a flourishing, if not very large, coach-building trade before 1600.

Here, perhaps, we may consider the introduction of the coach into England in rather greater detail. “It is a doubtful question,” remarks Taylor in his ill-natured way,” whether the divell brought _Tobacco_ into England in a _Coach_, or else brought a _Coach_ in a fogge or mist of _Tobacco_.” Apparently he had an equal dislike for both coach and tobacco. But although we owe to the water-poet such contemporary satirical writings on the subject as there are, he is not to be trusted as an historian. Taylor, indeed, is a very bad historian, not so much on account of his inability to see two sides of a question, as because, like many another poet, he has made of exaggeration a fine art, and allowed his memory to play second fiddle to his inclinations. It is to the worthy Stowe that we must turn for the facts. Stowe liked the coaches little better than did Taylor, but his training had made him exact, and we may take it for granted that he is more or less correct when he says that the first coach to be seen upon British roads belonged to the year 1555. Curiously enough, this is the date of the first General Highways Act. The preamble of this Bill stated that certain roads were “now both very noisesome and tedious to travel in and dangerous to all passengers and carriages [carts].” The local authorities were empowered to compel parishioners to give four days’ work every year to the repairing of the roads, though how far such orders were carried out it would be impossible to say. The merit of actually introducing the coach is given by Stowe to Henry Manners, second Earl of Rutland, who caused one Walter Rippon to build him a carriage from some foreign, most probably Dutch, pattern. This Earl of Rutland had borne the Spurs at the coronation of Edward VI, and in 1547 had been made Constable of Nottingham Castle. He had received the French hostages in 1550 at the time of the treaty which followed on the loss of Boulogne. It is to be regretted that neither in his correspondence nor in the family account-books preserved at Belvoir is there mention of either Rippon or his coach. There is, indeed, the “Book of John Leek of riding charges carriages [carts] and forrene paymentes” in 1550, and another book compiled by Leek’s successor, George Pilkington, in the following year, but all travelling entries concern only horses and the cartage of goods. In 1555 “George Lassells, Esquyer” was “Comptroller to the householde” and paid “to Edward Hopkynson for ij ryding roddes of bone for my Ladye and other thinges, xxij_d_,” but there is no mention of any carriage for his Lordship’s own use. What is more unfortunate is that there are no account-books of the Manners family between 1559 and 1585, and it is not until 1587, when a fourth Earl of Rutland was head of his house, that this significant entry occurs:—

“Coach, a newe, bought in London, xxxviij_li_.xiij_s_.ij_d_.”

To go back to Rippon, it is not known who he was. He is supposed to have built a coach for Queen Mary in 1556, and in 1564 the first “hollow turning coach” with pillars and arches, for Queen Elizabeth, though precisely what is meant by a “hollow turning” coach it is difficult to conjecture. This same Rippon twenty-four years later built another coach for the Queen, which is described as “a chariot throne with foure pillars behind, to beare a crowne imperiale on the toppe, and before two lower pillars, whereon stood a lion and a dragon, the supporters of the armes of England.” It cannot have been very comfortable, and Elizabeth seems to have preferred another coach brought out of Holland by one William Boonen, who about 1560 was made her coachman, a position he was still occupying at the end of the century. This Boonen was a Dutchman, whose wife is said to have introduced the art of starching into England, whence followed those huge ruffs so conspicuous in all the Elizabethan portraits. Boonen’s coach could be opened and closed at pleasure. On the occasion of the Queen’s passing through the town of Warwick, she had “every part and side of her coach to be opened, that all her subjects present might behold her, which most gladly they desired.” This coach is described as “on four wheels with seven spokes, which are apparently bound round with a thick wooden rim secured by pegs. It is precisely such a vehicle,” adds the anonymous historian in the _Carriage Builder’s and Harness Maker’s Art Journal_, “as is now [1860] used by the brewers, with a tilt over it, which opens in the centre on one side, and would contain half a dozen persons.” On the other hand, one may safely assert that no brewer’s cart was ever decorated in the same way, for the framing of Elizabeth’s carriage was of wood carved in a shell pattern and gilded. “The whole composition,” runs another account, “contains many beautiful curves. The shell-work creeps up to the roof, which it supports, and which is dome-shaped.... The roof is capped by five waving ostrich feathers, one at each corner, and the fifth on the centre of the roof, and springing from a kind of crown.” The driver’s seat was apparently a kind of movable stool, and two horses were used. Even this coach, however, of which there is a print by Hoefnagle, dated 1582, cannot have been very comfortable, and in 1568, when the French ambassador obtained an audience, Elizabeth was complaining of “aching pains” from being knocked about in a coach driven too fast a few days before. “No wonder,” comments one historian, “that the great queen used her coach only when occasions of state demanded.” Whenever possible, indeed, she used her horse. “When Queen Elizabeth came to Norwich, 1578,” wrote Sir Thomas Browne a hundred years later, “she came on horseback from Ipswich, by the high road to Norwich, in the summer time; but she had a coach or two,” he added, “in her trayne.”

In the print just mentioned there is shown a second coach, which is perhaps a better example of the carriage of the period. One sees again its hearse-like appearance, though the top is broader than the bottom, and the body is partially enclosed; but there is one peculiarity which deserves particular mention. This was a small seat which projected on either side, between the wheels. It was known as the boot. Here sat the pages or grooms or the ladies in attendance. Taylor, of course, has his fling against it. The booted coach, he says, is like a perpetual cheater, wears “two Bootes and no Spurs, sometimes having two paire of Legs and one boote; and oftentimes (against nature) most preposterously it makes faire Ladies weare the boote; and if you note, they are carrried backe to backe like people surpriz’d by Pyrats to be tyed in that miserable manner, and throwne overboard into the Sea. Moreover, it makes people imitate Sea-crabs, in being drawne Side-wayes, as they are when they sit in the boote of the Coach.” The boot, however, was already tending to disappear in Taylor’s day. How it originated is not clear. It was always uncovered, whence followed much hardship, particularly if the weather was unfavourable. Nor can one think that it was very capacious. There is an early seventeenth-century pamphlet entitled _My Journie_, in which a stout old lady is put into the boot of a coach, and cannot move. When going uphill all the passengers are supposed to get out and walk, but the old lady, once settled, refuses to budge, and, indeed, cannot be extricated until the end of the journey. There is further mention of the discomfort in a boot in 1663, when Edward Barker, writing to his father, a Lancashire squire, complains of his troubles in the side seat. “I got to London,” he says, “on Saturday last, my journey was noe ways pleasant, being forced to ride in the boote all the waye, yͤ company yᵗ came up wᵗͪ mee were persons of greate quality as knightes and ladyes. My journeys expence was 30 _s._ This traval hath soe indisposed mee, yᵗ I am resolved never to ride againe in yͤ coatch. I am extreamly hot and feverish.” The monstrous width of these early coaches followed, of course, on their projecting side seats, which only entirely disappeared when the coach had come to be completely enclosed and provided with glass windows.

It may be that the boot in process of time was metamorphosed into the large, deep, four-sided basket which was strapped to the back of public coaches in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and, indeed, this basket seems to have been called the boot in eighteenth-century stage coaches. It was probably in such a basket-boot as this that Mr. Pepys put his great barrel of oysters, “as big as sixteen others,” which was given him in 1664.

An interesting point in this connection is that those who travelled on the seatless and presumably most uncomfortable roof of a coach plying for hire, paid more for the privilege than did those who rode in the boot.

However greatly the chroniclers may differ as to the date of the actual introduction, and others besides Taylor disagree with Stowe, there seems no doubt that by 1585 many of the nobility and some wealthy commoners owned private coaches, and, indeed, certain enterprising tradesmen, as will appear, let other coaches on hire at so much per day.

“After a while,” says Stowe, “divers great ladies, with
a great jealousy of the Queen’s displeasure, made them
coaches and rid them up and down the countries, to the great
admiration of all the beholders, but then little by little
they grew usual amongst the nobilitie and others of sort, and
within twenty years became a great trade of coach-making.”

Indeed, every one of any wealth was eager to possess them. A private coach settled any doubts as to your quality. It was a new fashion, a new excitement. “So a woman,” says Quicksilver, the rake, in _Eastward Hoe_, “marry to ride in a coach, she cares not if she rides to her ruin. ’Tis the great end of many of their marriages.” And again, in Ben Jonson’s _Alchemist_ it is said of the Countess that she

“... has her pages, ushers
Her six mares—
Nay, eight!
To hurry her through London, to the Exchange,
Bethlem, the china-houses—
Yes, and have
The citizens gape at her, and praise her tires.”

Even the plain country-folk seem to have been smitten with the new toy, for toy it was to them. “Has he ne’er a little odd cart,” asks Waspe in _Bartholomew Fair_, “for you to make a coach on, in the country, with four pied hobby-horses?” Any shift for a coach, thought he, and no doubt voiced public opinion.

The first owners of coaches appear to have been those who had travelled abroad. So early as 1556, Sir Thomas Hoby, who had been our ambassador to France, possessed a coach and offered to lend it to the Lady Cecil. The account-book for 1573 of the Kytson family, of Hengrave, in Suffolk, mentions another early coach. “For my mʳᵉˢ [mistress’s] coche, with all the furniture thereto belonging except horses—xxxiiij_li._xiiij_s._ For the painting of my mʳ and mʳᵉˢ armes upon the coche—ij_s._vj_d._” In 1579 the Earl of Arundel is said to have brought a coach into England from Germany, and this coach is interesting from the fact that certain historians have credited it with being the first coach in England. How such a tradition arose is not clear, but it may be that this German coach had certain features which more nearly approached those of the later Stuart, fully-enclosed, coaches. Further details are to be found in the Manners notebooks, and these afford a glimpse of the methods adopted by the coachmakers, not yet a large body, of the day. In the notebooks of Thomas Screven, 1596-97, after an item for twenty-eight shillings for three-quarters of “scarlet sleves and labelles for his L[ordship’s] parlyament robes” comes another of six shillings “to my Lady Adeline’s coachman,” and one, just below, of greater interest:—

“Item paid to Wm. Wright, coachmaker, in parte of xl_li._ for
a coache now made, xx_li._”

After that, in the 1598-99 book comes an item to “the Countess of South[ampton’s] coachman that wayted on my Lord to Dertford, v_s._” This suggests the growing popularity of the coach, more especially as there is another disbursement in the same year to the Countess of Essex’s coachman. Then follow from November 25th, 1598, details of the expenses of the new coach for my Lord’s own use—which apparently took considerable time to furnish.

“Item for ij paire of new wheeles for the coache, tymber
worke and iron work, and setting them on the axeltrees,
iij_li._xiij_s._iiij_d._; payntinge them in oyle colour,
vj_s._viij_d._; a new pole for the horses to drawe by,
ij_s._vj_d._; a paire of springe trees, iij_s._iij_d._”

The provender bill for six horses is given, also an item “for setting up the coach horses at dyvers times at Walsingham Howse, iiij_s._; at Hatton Howse, xij_d._; at Baynardes Castle, ij_s._; dressing and oyling the coach, ij_s._”; while the most necessary whip costs Mr. Screven twelve pence. Other payments are six shillings for two new bearing braces for the “double hanging” of the coach—here at any rate is definite mention of suspension, a fact which might suggest that, after all, either Rippon’s or Lord Arundel’s coach had been of the suspended type—four shillings for a long spring brace, two shillings and sixpence for a new “wynge,” and sixteen pence for two “bearing raynes.” The new coach, however, is not ready in time for his Lordship, who thereupon hires one with three horses to take him “to the Court at Nonesuch, 23, 24, and 25 of September, at xvj_s. per diem_.” Meanwhile payments for his own coach continue. For four “skynnes of orange colour leather goate” he pays various sums; for the timber work, for more painting, for a covering in “black lether,” and for making the “curtaynes, and setting on the firinge, and making the blew cloth cover” a sum of twenty-six pounds, nineteen shillings, is expended. Nor is this all. My Lord was evidently determined to make his coach as gorgeous as possible. Nine yards of “marygold coulour velvet for the seat and bed in the coach” were required, and each yard cost twenty-three shillings. The quilting for the bed cost forty shillings. In addition, there was a lace of “crymosin silk” and no less than “v elles of crymosin taffaty for curtaynes,” costing three pounds fifteen shillings; also “9 yardes of blew clothe for a cover.” Then, of great interest, comes the final entry:—

“Item, paid to Ryly, embroderer, in full for embrodering
iij sumpter clothes of crymosin with his L[ordship’s] armes
thereon at large, and vij otheres embrodered onely with great
peacocks, with carsey for the garding and tasselles and
frynge, 14 July, lxiiij_li._”

Mr. Ryly was well paid for his work[21].

From such details it is possible to imagine what this and other coaches of the time were like. You figure a huge, gaudy, curtained apparatus with projecting sides and incomplete panels, large enough to contain a fair-sized bed, hung roughly from four posts, and capable of being dragged at little better than a snail’s pace—“four-wheeled Tortoyses” Taylor calls them—along roads hardly worthy of the name. Twenty miles a day was considered good going. Says Portia, in the _Merchant of Venice_:—

“... I’ll tell thee all my whole device
When I am in my coach, which stays for us
At the park gate; and therefore haste away,
For we must measure twenty miles to-day.”