Chapter XXV

THE list of equestrians is long and distinguished. Lord Mansfield rode up from Scotland to London when a boy, on a pony, and took two months over the enterprise. Dr. Skene, who left town in 1753 in the same fashion, reached Edinburgh in nineteen days. His expenses, having sold his mare on arrival for eight guineas—exactly the sum he had given for her—amounted to only four guineas.

This, indeed, was the usual plan to purchase a horse for the journey and to sell it on arrival; a method so canny that it must surely be of Scots invention. It had the advantage that, if you found a good market for your nag, it was often possible to make a profit on the transaction.

But it behoved the purchaser to make some inquiry as to the previous owners, as no doubt the Scotsman, leaving London with one of these newly bought mounts, discovered, after some embarrassing experiences. He went gaily forth upon his way, and nothing befell him until Finchley Common was reached. On that lonely waste, however, he met another horseman; whereupon his horse began to edge up to the stranger, as though to prevent him from proceeding. The Scotsman was at a loss to understand this behaviour, but the other traveller, thinking him to be a highwayman, was for handing over his purse forthwith. This little difficulty explained away, our friend resumed his journey, presently meeting a coach, when the performance was repeated. This time, however, blunderbusses were aimed at him, and, the nervous passengers being in no mood to hear or understand explanations, he had a rather narrow escape of his life. At Barnet he sold this embarrassing horse for what he could get, and continued his journey by coach.

It was in 1756 that Mrs. Calderwood of Coltness travelled to London from Edinburgh in her own post-chaise, her sturdy serving-man, John Rattray, riding beside the vehicle on horseback, armed with pistols and a broadsword by his side. She set out from Edinburgh on the 3rd of June and reached London on the evening of the 10th—an astonishing rapid journey, it was thought. Let it not be supposed that the armed serving-man, or the case of pistols the good dame carried with her inside the vehicle, showed an excess of precaution. Not at all; as was instanced near that suspicious place, Bawtry, in whose neighbourhood a doubtful character whom they took to be a highwayman made his appearance. However, when John Rattray began talking ostentatiously about powder and ball to the post-boy, the supposed malefactor was nonplussed; and on John Rattray furthermore “showing his whanger,” the fellow made off. And so Cox—and Box—were satisfied. Strangest of all travellers, however, was Peter Woulfe, chemist, mineralogist, and eccentric, whose specific for illness was a journey by mail-coach. He indulged this whim for years, riding from London to Edinburgh and back, until 1803, when the remedy proved worse than the disease, for he caught cold on these bleak miles and died.

John Scott, afterwards Earl of Eldon and created Lord Chancellor, left a record of his early travels along this road—surely it were better named the Road to Fortune! He left school at Newcastle in 1766 to proceed to London on the way to Oxford, and travelled in a “fly,” so called because it did the journey in the previously unheard-of time of three days and four nights. This “fly” had probably once been a private carriage, for it still bore the motto, “_Sat cito_, _si sat bene_”—that is to say, “Quick enough, if well enough”—exquisitely appropriate, however, to that slow pace. Young Scott had noticed this, and made an impudent remark to a fellow-traveller, a Quaker, who, when they halted at Tuxford, had given sixpence to a chamber-maid, telling her that he had forgotten to give it her when he had slept at the inn two years before. “Friend,” said he to the Quaker, “have you seen the motto on this coach?”

“No,” said his companion.

“Then look at it,” he rejoined, “for I think giving her sixpence now is neither sat cito nor sat bene.”

It is astonishing, indeed, how many future Lord Chancellors came from the North. Lord Chancellor Campbell, who as a boy came up to London from Fife in 1798, was among the early arrivals by mail-coach. At that time his father was the admiration of his Fifeshire village, for he was the only one in the place who had been to London. Every one, accordingly, looked up to, and consulted, so great a traveller. He had seen Garrick, too, and was used to boast of the fact, although, it is to be supposed, with discretion and amid the inner circle of his friends, for play-actors were not yet favourites in the dour Scottish mind. Great was the excitement when young Campbell left home. The speed of the coaches had been accelerated, and they now began to reach London from Edinburgh in two days and three nights. Friends advised him to stay in York and recuperate for a day or two after a taste of this headlong speed, lest he—as it was rumoured had happened to others—should be seized with apoplexy from the rush of air at that rate of travelling. But, greatly daring, he disregarded their advice, and came to town direct and in safety.

When railways were introduced, they meant much more than cheap and speedy travelling; they prefigured a social revolution and an absolute reversal of manners and customs. The “great ones of the earth” were really great in the old days; to-day no one is great in the old exclusive sense. Every one can go everywhere—and every one does. Dukes travel in omnibuses and go third-class by train because there is no fourth. If there _were_, they would go by it, and save the difference.

The judges kept up the practice of going on circuit in their carriages for some little while after railways had rendered it unnecessary; and barristers who used to post to the assizes were for a few years unwilling to be convinced that it was quite respectable and professional to go by train. The juniors were the readiest converts, for the difference in cost touched them nearly. The clergy soon embraced the opportunity of travelling cheaply, for the cloth has ever had, at the least of it, a due sense of the value of money.

Dignified and stately prelates therefore speedily began to look ridiculous by contrast, and the old picture in _Punch_, once considered exquisitely humorous, of a bishop carrying a carpet-bag, has lost its point. Samuel Wilberforce, when elevated to the Bishopric of Oxford in 1845, was probably the first Bishop to give up his coach and four and his gorgeous lackeys. He rode, unattended, on horseback, and scandalised those who saw him. How much more scandalised would they have been to see bishops ride bicycles: a sight not uncommon in our time.

In the vanished era, only those who could afford it travelled; in the present, only those who _cannot_ afford it go “first.” Jack is as good as his master—“and a d—d sight better,” as the Radical orator said. Caste, happily, is breaking down, and their privileges are being stripped from the governing cliques who for centuries have battened on the public purse. Perhaps it was because they had a prophetic fore-knowledge of all this that the titled and other landowners so strenuously withstood railways at their beginning. They sometimes opposed railways so successfully that great trunk routes, planned to go as direct as possible between two points, were diverted and made circuitous. When the Great Northern Railway was projected it was proposed to follow the highway to the North as nearly as possible, and to go through Stamford; but the Marquis of Exeter opposed the Bill as far as it concerned his own property, and procured a deviation which sent the main line through Grantham, with the results that Stamford languishes while Grantham is made to flourish, and that the short-sightedness of the then Marquis has wofully affected the value of his successor’s property. If the thing were to do again, how eagerly would the Company be invited to take the route it was once forbidden!