Part 10

But the ever-increasing traffic rendered necessary a much smaller vehicle than these monstrosities for general use, and this led, somewhere about 1670, to the introduction of the _gig_. This was a French invention, which, while no doubt the logical outcome of the _brouette_, bore resemblance to the old Roman _cisium_, and led ultimately to the cabriolets, once so popular both in France and England. Certain experiments tending towards a gig had been made earlier in the century with a chair fixed to a small cart. The first successful gig was a slender, two-wheeled contrivance, “the body little more than a shell,” says Thrupp, provided with a hood “composed of three iron hoop-sticks joined in the middle to fall upwards.” It was the prototype of the _calèche_ in France, the _carriole_ of Norway, the _calesso_ of Naples, and the _volante_ of Cuba. Gozzadini describes one of them as “an affair with a curved seat fixed on two long bending shafts, placed in front on the back of the horse and behind upon the two wheels.” They were introduced into Florence, he says, in 1672, and “so increased in numbers that in a few years there were nearly a thousand in the city.” An early gig of this kind is preserved at South Kensington. It is a forlorn-looking vehicle. The body is curved, but there is no hood. The seat is absurdly small and “beneath the shafts are two long straps of leather and a windlass to tighten them—this apparatus was, no doubt, to regulate the spring of the vehicle to the road travelled over.”

The gig speedily underwent several minor changes of form. In France it was known as _calèche_[35] or _chaise_, in England, as _calash_, _calesh_, or _chaise_, in America as _shay_. Unfortunately there is small mention of them in contemporary writings, and one is left to suppose that for some time they did not, except in certain cities, prove serious rivals to the _berlins_ and other four-wheeled chariots. It may be that the _berlin_ itself was taken as a model from which these lighter carriages were evolved. You had first the big double _berlins_ for four people, then you had a _vis-à-vis_ for two or more persons facing each other. Later the front part of the carriage would be cut away for the sake of lightness. When not covered such a vehicle as this seems to have been known as a _berlingot_. Two could travel in these _berlingots_ sitting side by side, “while a third person might travel uncomfortably in front on a kind of movable seat, which was not much patronised; for it was not only dangerous, but what was much worse in the eyes of the grand court gentlemen who used them—ridiculous.” There was also evolved a smaller and narrower _berlin_ with the front cut away and capable of holding only one passenger, called the _désobligeante_. The bodies of the ordinary chaises, which seated one or two people, seem to have differed from those of the older _berlins_ in being placed partly below the frame. There were no side doors, but one at the back which opened horizontally. When and where all such changes were made, however, it is impossible to say. The accounts, such as they are, are often contradictory, and the same names used to describe what are obviously not identical carriages. But the two-wheeled gig having appeared there was nothing to prevent improvements of every conceivable sort or shape, and innumerable hybrid carriages appeared, some of which are only known by name.

There is mention of a truly remarkable calash which was tried in Dublin in 1685. Exactly who the inventor was is not known, but Sir Richard Bulkeley interested himself in the experiments, and read a paper on his carriage before the Royal Society. Evelyn was one of those who were present on this occasion.

“Sir Richard Bulkeley,” he says, “described to us a model of a chariot he had invented which it was not possible to overthrow in whatever uneven way it was drawn, giving us a wonderful relation of what it had performed in that kind, for ease, expedition, and safety; there were some inconveniences yet to be remedied—it would not contain more than one person; was ready to take fire every few miles; and being placed and playing on no fewer than ten rollers, it made a most prodigious noise, almost intolerable.”

It is to be deeply regretted that there is no print of this remarkable carriage, but further details may be found in a letter, dated May 5th, 1685, from Sir Richard Bulkeley himself.

“Sir William Petty,” he writes, “Mr. Molyneux, and I have spent this day in making experiments with a new invented calesh, along with the inventor thereof; ’tis he that was in London when I was there, but he never made any of these caleshes there, for his invention is much improv’d since he came from thence: it is in all points different from any machine I have ever seen: it goes on two wheels, carries one person, and is light enough. As for its performance, though it hangs not on braces, yet it is easier than the common coach, both in the highway, in ploughed fields, cross the ridges, directly and obliquely. A common coach will overturn, if one wheel go on a superficies a foot and a half higher than that of the other; but this will admit of the difference of three feet and a half in height of the superficies, without danger of overturning. We chose all the irregular banks, the sides of ditches to run over; and I have this day seen it, at five several times, turn over and over; that is, the wheels so overturned as that their spokes laid parallel to the horizon, so that one wheel laid flat over the head of him that rode in the Calesh, and the other wheel flat under him; so much I all but once overturned. But what I have mentioned was another turn more, so that the wheels were again _in statu quo_, and the horse not in the least disordered: if it should be unruly, with the help of one pin, you disengage him from the Calesh without any inconvenience. I myself was once overturned, and knew it not, till I looked up, and saw the wheel flat over my head; and, if a man went with his eyes shut, he would imagine himself in the most smooth way, though, at the same time, there were three feet difference in the heights of the ground of each wheel. In fine, we have made so many, and so various experiments, and are so well satisfied of the usefulness of the invention, that we each of us have bespoke one; they are not (plain) above six or eight pounds a-piece.”

Why the nobility, gentry, and worthy burgesses of England, Scotland, and Ireland did not go and do likewise, history hides from us. There is no further mention of Sir Richard’s truly remarkable carriage, and one is left to imagine that some of the Irish roads were too bad even for its freakish agility.

On the other hand, they were probably superior to the Scottish roads of the time, even those in the more civilised southern districts. “It is recorded,” says Croal, “that in 1678”—the year after the founding of the Coach and Coach-Harness Makers’ Company in London—“the difficulties in the way of rapid communication were such that an agreement was made to run a coach between Edinburgh and Glasgow, a distance of forty-four miles, which was to be drawn by six horses, and to perform the journey to Glasgow and back in six days!”

Cross-country travelling, indeed, was very bad, and the rough tracks over which the heavy stage-coaches rumbled along would have proved too much for the lighter chariots and gigs which were so popular in town. I may conclude this chapter by quoting an amusing description of such cross-country travelling at the end of the century, taken from Sir John Vanbrugh’s _Provoked Husband_. A family is going in its private coach from Yorkshire to London:—

_Lord Townley._ Mr. Moody, your servant; I am glad to see you in London. I hope all the family is well.

_John Moody._ Thanks be praised, your honour, they are all in pretty good heart, thof’ we have had a power of crosses upo’ the road.

_Lady Grace._ I hope my Lady has no hurt, Mr. Moody.

_John._ Noa, an’t please your ladyship, she was never in better humour: There’s money enough stirring now.

_Manly._ What has been the matter, John?

_John._ Why, we came up in such a hurry, you mun think that our tackle was not so tight as it should be.

_Manly._ Come, tell us all: pray how do they travel?

_John._ Why i’ the auld coach, Measter; and cause my Lady loves to do things handsome, to be sure, she would have a couple of cart horses clapt to th’ four old geldings, that neighbours might see she went up to London in her coach and six! And so Giles Joulter the ploughman rides postilion!

_Lord Townley._ And when do you expect them here, John?

_John._ Why, we were in hopes to ha’ come yesterday, an’ it had no’ been that th’ owld wheaze-belly horse tired; and then we were so cruelly loaden, that the two fore-wheels came crash down at once in Waggon-Rut Lane; and there we lost four hours ’fore we could set things to rights again.

_Manly._ So they bring all their baggage with the coach then?

_John._ Ay, ay, and good store on’t there is. Why, my Lady’s gear alone were as much as filled four portmantel trunks, besides the great deal box that heavy Ralph and the monkey sit on behind.

_Lady Grace._ Well, Mr. Moody, and pray how many are there within the coach?

_John._ Why, there’s my Lady and his Worship, and the young squoire, and Miss Jenny, and the fat lap-dog, and my lady’s maid Mrs. Handy, and Doll Tripe the cook; that’s all. Only Doll puked a little with riding backward, so they hoisted her into the coach-box, and then her stomach was easy.

_Lady Grace._ Oh! I see ’em go by me. Ah! ha!

_John._ Then, you mun think, Measter, there was some stowage for the belly, as well as th’ back too; such cargoes of plum cake, and baskets of tongues, and biscuits and cheese, and cold boiled beef, and then in case of sickness, bottles of cherry-brandy, plague-water, sack, tent, and strong beer, so plenty as made the owld coach crack again! Mercy upon ’em! and send ’em all well to town, I say.

_Manly._ Ay! and well on’t again, John.

_John._ Ods bud! Measter, you’re a wise mon; and for that matter, so am I. Whoam’s whoam, I say; I’m sure we got but little good e’er we turned our backs on’t. Nothing but mischief! Some devil’s trick or other plagued us, aw th’ day lung. Crack goes one thing: Bawnce goes another. Woa, says Roger. Then souse! we are all set fast in a sleugh. Whaw! cries Miss; scream go the maids; and bawl! just as thof’ they were struck! And so, mercy on us! this was the trade from morning to night.

_Chapter the Sixth_

_EARLY GEORGIAN CARRIAGES_

“May the proud chariot never be my fate, If purchased at so mean, so dear a rate. Oh, rather give me sweet content on foot, Wrapt in my virtue and a good surtout.”

GAY’s _Trivia_.

Few new private carriages seem to have been designed during the earlier decades of the eighteenth century, although improvements and small alterations were constantly being carried out. There is an isolated reference to a _sociable_ built apparently in Germany, and the _four-wheeled chaise_, or _chariot à l’Anglaise_, which was to be so popular thirty or forty years later, put in an appearance about this time. Of the sociable little enough can be said. The particular carriage mentioned from its small size would appear to have been built for the royal children. It was a low-hung, open carriage over a single perch, and with seats facing each other. The four-wheeled chaise was a small chariot with a wide window in front.

Gray, writing to his mother in 1739, speaks of the French chaise in which he was making the grand tour with Horace Walpole.

“The chaise,” he writes, “is a strange sort of conveyance, of much greater use than beauty; resembling an ill-shaped chariot, only with the door opening before instead of the side. Three horses draw it, one between the shafts, and the other two on each side, on one of which the postillion rides, and drives too: This vehicle will upon occasion, go fourscore miles a day, but Mr. Walpole, being in no hurry, chooses to make easy journies of it, and they are easy ones indeed; for the motion is much like that of a sedan, we go about six miles an hour, and commonly change horses at the end of it. It is true they are not very graceful steeds, but they go well, and through roads which they say are bad for France, but to me they seem gravel walks and bowling-greens; in short, it would be the finest travelling in the world, were it not for the inns.”

Such a chaise as Gray describes came to be known as a _diligence_, while in England the one-horse chaise was more frequently spoken of as a _one-horse chair_. Contemporary prints of carriages, however, are scarce, and for the most part show only the larger coaches.

These coaches were of two distinct patterns. There were the large square coaches of Charles II’s time, but there was also a new type of coach or chariot which had a curious backward tilt to the body. From a superficial examination of such a carriage, it would appear impossible for the seats to have been horizontal, and, indeed, one wonders why this form was adopted. The result of this backward tilt was to leave a space between the coachman’s box and the carriage-body itself. Here one of the grooms sat or sprawled as best he could. Four, five, or even six other grooms stood uncomfortably huddled together on a seat or slab at the back. These men must have added considerably to the weight of the coach, and certainly did not make travelling any swifter; but how necessary they were is shown by a letter of the period in which one nobleman’s servant in London informs another in Essex that my lord is resolved to set out. The Essex man is bidden to have “the keepers and persons who know the holes and the sloughs” ready to meet his lordship “with lanterns and long poles” to keep the coach on its way. So many accidents happened even on the shortest journeys that five or six men were necessary to put the coach aright. A road, such as we think of one now, simply did not exist. You had often to drive across fields in tracks which exceedingly heavy waggons had made. In 1703, to take another instance, the King of Spain, then in this country, was journeying from Portsmouth to Windsor. The difficulties he experienced on that occasion were recorded by one of the attendants.

“We set out at six in the morning to go to Petworth, and did not get out of the coaches (save only when we were overturned or stuck fast in the mire) till we arrived at our journey’s end. ’Twas hard service for the prince to sit fourteen hours in the coach that day without eating anything and passing through the worst ways that I ever saw in my life; we were thrown but once indeed in going, but both our coach, which was the leading, and his highnesse’s body-coach would have suffered very often if the nimble boors of Sussex had not frequently poised it or supported it with their shoulders from Goldalmin almost to Petworth; and the nearer we approached to the Duke’s house the more unaccessible it seemed to be. The last nine miles of the way cost us six hours’ time to conquer them, and indeed we had never done it if our good master had not several times lent us a pair of horses out of his own coach, whereby we were enabled to trace out the way for him.”

After reading such an account, it is difficult to understand why any one preferred coach to horseback on a cross-country journey. No wonder Gay was goaded to ask:—

“Who can recount the coach’s various harms, The legs disjointed, and the broken arms?”

“In the wide gulph,” he says in another place,

“the shatter’d coach o’erthrown Sinks with the snorting steeds; the reins are broke, And from the crackling axle flies the spoke.”

Yet, according to Swift, Gay was not so averse to the coach in his later years. Writing to him in 1731, the Dean says:—

“If your ramble was on horseback, I am glad of it on account of your health; but I know your arts of patching up a journey between stage-coaches and friends’ coaches: for you are as arrant a cockney as any hosier in Cheapside.... You love twelve-penny coaches too well, without considering that the interest of a whole thousand pounds brings you but half a crown a day.”

“A coach and six horses,” he goes on to say in another letter, “is the utmost exercise you can bear, and this only when you can fill it with such company as is best suited to avoid your taste, and how glad would you be if it could waft you in the air to avoid jolting.”

There is preserved a chariot of this period which is probably typical of a nobleman’s carriage of the time. It was built for one of the Bligh family, possibly the first Lord Darnley, about 1720. It is a small carriage, curved curiously in a fashion which recalls some of the French furniture of the period. The body is slung upon leather braces, there is a single wide perch, and there are small elbow springs under the body at the back. It is very elaborately ornamented, and still keeps some of its pristine magnificence. A curious point about the Darnley chariot, to which some people have wrongfully ascribed a much earlier date, is the length of the door, which reaches nearly a foot below the bottom of the body. A similar peculiarity is to be seen in another coach of the period which was built in 1713 for the Spanish representative at the time of the Peace of Utrecht. Here “the quarters rake towards the roof considerably, the roof over the doorway is arched upwards, the upper quarters are filled with large glasses of mirror plate glass.... The wheels have carved spokes and felloes.... There is a hammercloth cushion in front and a footboard supported by Tritons blowing horns.” Another Spanish coach, with spiral spokes and similar peculiarities, is preserved at Madrid. This elongated door seems peculiar to the period and may have followed upon a desire to hide the steps, though the lowness of the carriage made more than one or two of these unnecessary. Many of the Spanish coaches of this time, by the way, were without the coach-box, postilions only being employed—the story being that a certain Duke of Olivarez found that his coachman had heard and betrayed a State secret. There was, I believe, actually a law passed in Spain forbidding coachmen altogether.

French coaches were very resplendent. “When I was in France,” writes Addison in one of the earlier _Spectators_, “I used to gaze with great Astonishment at the Splendid Equipages and Party-Coloured Habits, of that Fantastick Nation. I was one Day in particular contemplating a Lady, that sate in a Coach adorned with gilded Cupids, and finely painted with the Loves of _Venus_ and _Adonis_. The Coach was drawn by six milk-white Horses, and loaden behind with the same Number of powder’d Footmen. Just before the Lady were a Couple of beautiful Pages that were stuck among the Harness, and, by their gay Dresses and smiling Features, looked like the elder Brothers of the little Boys that were carved and painted in every corner of the Coach.” The boys “stuck among the harness” obviously were resting in that space which was made by the back-tilting of the body.

The Viennese coaches of this time seem to have had a very great deal of glass about them, but the Turkish coaches had none. Writing home from Adrianople in 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu says:—

“Designing to go [to Sophia] _incognita_, I hired a Turkish coach. These voitures are not at all like ours, but much more convenient for the country, the heat being so great that glasses would be very troublesome. They are made a good deal in the manner of the Dutch coaches, having wooden lattices painted and gilded; the inside being painted with baskets and nosegays of flowers, intermixed commonly with little poetical mottoes. They are covered all over with scarlet cloth, lined with silk, and very often richly embroidered and fringed. This covering entirely hides the persons in them, but may be thrown back at pleasure, and the ladies peep through the lattices. They hold four people very conveniently, seated on cushions, but not raised.”

They were, it would seem, mere covered waggons, and, indeed, in another place Lady Mary speaks of them as such. Turkey possessed also “open gilded chariots,” but in these the women were not allowed to drive.

Russia, too, at this time possessed coaches, and we read that Peter the Great in his trans-European journey travelled with “thirty-two four-horse carriages and four six-horse waggons.” One or two particulars are forthcoming of the royal coach-house. It contained but two coaches, with four places in each, for the use of the Empress and a smaller, low-hung carriage, painted red, for the Emperor. This was replaced in winter by a small sledge. Peter, however, was not fond of his carriage. “He never,” says Waliszewski,[36] “got into a coach, unless he was called upon to do honour to some distinguished guest, and then he always made use of Menshikof’s carriages. These were magnificent. Even when the favourite went out alone, he drove in a gilded fan-shaped coach, drawn by six horses, in crimson velvet trappings, with gold and silver ornaments; his arms crowned with a prince’s coronet, adorned the panels; lacqueys and running footmen in rich liveries ran before it; pages and musicians, dressed in velvet, and covered with gold embroideries, followed it. Six gentlemen attended it at each door, and an escort of dragoons completed the procession.”

It is difficult to conceive the appearance of this fan-shaped coach, but it must have been almost startlingly magnificent, just the kind of carriage for the Russian Buckingham.

In the imperial collection at Petersburg are preserved one or two Russian carriages of this period. “One,” says Bridges Adams, “is close, made of deal, stained black, mounted on four wheels, the windows of mica instead of glass, and the frames of common tin: the other is open, with a small machine behind of the shipwright-emperor’s invention—its purpose to determine the number of miles traversed on a journey. In the same collection,” he adds, “is the litter of Charles XII used at the battle of Pultowa.”

In England glass seems to have been reserved for the private coaches. For the commoner hackneys a substitute had been found. “For want of Glasses to our Coach,” wrote the inimitable Ned Ward in _The London Spy_, a book whose outspokenness unfortunately must, I suppose, have prevented its reprinting in modern days, “we drew up our Tin Sashes, pink’d like the bottom of a Cullender, that the Air might pass thro’ the holes, and defend us from Stifling.”

If, however, contemporary plates are singularly scarce, and the historians have little to say of the period, there is a new source of information to be tapped, at any rate in this country, in the advertisements which just now began to fill whole pages in the periodicals. Of these I may quote one or two. One deals specifically with the question of glass windows:—