Part 5

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.”

The coachman, as we learn from the water-poet, was “mounted (his fellow-horses and himselfe being all in a finery) with as many varieties of laces, facings, Clothes and Colours as are in the Rainebowe.” Nor was he over-polite, particularly if the coach he drove was hired. In Jonson’s _Staple of News_ one of the pieces of mock-news to appear in the ideal paper concerns the fraternity:—

“and coachmen To mount their boxes reverently, and drive Like lapwings with a shell upon their heads Through the streets.”

They seem to have thought that their finery allowed them to treat the pedestrians with but scant respect. And no wonder these “way-stopping whirligigges,” as Taylor calls the coaches, surprised the inhabitants. When one of them was seen for the first time, “some said it was a great Crab-shell brought out of _China_, and some imagin’d it to be one of the Pagan Temples in which the Cannibals adored the devill.” For some time, indeed, the coaches must have given the common folk something to think about. A coach rumbling along brought them to their windows, just as the horseless carriage, centuries later, proved a similar attraction. There is a scene in _Eastward Hoe_ which well illustrates this point.

_Enter a Coachman in haste in ’s frock, feeding._

_Coach._ Here’s a stir when citizens ride out of town indeed, as if all the house were afire! ’Slight, they will not give a man leave to eat ’s breakfast afore he rises.

_Enter Hamlet, a footman, in haste._

_Ham._ What coachman? My lady’s coach, for shame! her ladyship’s ready to come down.

_Enter Potkin, a tankard bearer._

_Pot._ ’Sfoot, Hamlet, are you mad? whither run you now?...

_Enter Mrs. Fond and Mrs. Gazer._

_Fond._ Come, sweet mistress Gazer, let’s watch here, and see my Lady Flash take coach.

_Gazer_. O’ my word, here’s a most fine place to stand in. Did you see the new ship launch’d last day, Mrs. Fond?

_Fond._ O God, and we citizens should lose such a sight!

_Gazer._ I warrant here will be double as many people to see her take coach, as there were to see it take water.

My lady’s point of view is put forward by Lady Eitherside in _The Devil is an Ass_. Says she:—

“If we once see it under the seals, wench, then, Have with them for the great caroch, six horses, And the two coachmen, with my Ambler bare, And my three women; we will live, i’ faith, The example of the town, and govern it. I’ll lead the fashion still.”

Contemporary references to coaches, however, are but scarce. The most important of these is Taylor’s own _The World runnes on Wheeles: or, Oddes betwixt Carts and Coaches_, an amusing pamphlet written in prose and not in verse, because the author, as he says, was lame at the time of its composition, and because beyond the three words, broach, Roach, and encroach, he could find no suitable rhymes. Encroach, however, he thinks might have done, for that word, as he explains in his dedication to various companies likely to suffer from the importation of the coach, “best befits it, for I think never such an impudent, proud Intruder or Encroacher came into the world as a Coach is; for it hath driven many honest Families out of their Houses, many Knights to Beggers, Corporations to poverty, Almesdeedes to all misdeedes, Hospitality to extortion, Plenty to famine, Humility to pride, Compassion to oppression, and all Earthly goodnes to an utter confusion.” To the cart he does not object, but for the “hyred Hackney-hell-carts” he cannot find sufficient abuse. His arguments in favour of carts as against coaches are certainly novel, if not entirely convincing as coming from a waterman well used to live passengers himself.

“And as necessities and things,” he says, “whose commodious uses cannot be wanted, are to be respected before Toyes and trifles (whose beginning is Folly, continuance Pride, and whose End is Ruine) I say as necessity is to be preferred before superfluity, so is the _Cart_ before the _Coach_; For Stones, Timber, Corne, Wine, Beere, or any thing that wants life, there is a necessity they should be carried, because they are dead things and cannot go on foot, which necessity the honest _Cart_ doth supply: But the _Coach_, like a superfluous bable, or uncharitable Miser, doth seldom or never carry or help any dead or helplesse thing; but on the contrary, it helps those that can helpe themselves ... and carries men and women, who are able to goe or run; _Ergo_, the _Cart_ is necessary, and the _Coach_ superfluous.”

In fact, the coach, according to poor Taylor, is directly responsible for every calamity from which the country has suffered since its introduction. Leather has become dearer, the horses in their traces are being prostituted, and there is a “universal decay of the best ash-trees.”

“A Wheele-wright,” he continues, “or a maker of Carts, is an ancient, a profitable and a Trade, which by no meanes can be wanted: yet so poore it is, that scarce the best amongst them can hardly ever attaine to better than a Calves skin fate, or a piece of beefe and Carret rootes to dinner on a Sunday; nor scarcely any of them is ever mounted to any Office above the degree of a Scavenger, or a Tything-man at the most. On the contrary, your Coachmakers trade is the most gaine-fullest about the Towne, they are apparelled in Sattens and Velvets, and Masters of their Parish, Vestry-men, who fare like the Emperors _Heliogabalus_ or _Sardanapalus_, seldome without their Mackroones, Parmisants, Jellies and Kickshawes, with baked Swannes, Pasties hot, or cold red Deere Pyes, which they have fro their Debtor Worships in the Country: neither are these Coaches onely thus cumbersome by their Rumbling and Rutting, as they are by their standing still, and damming up the streetes and lanes, as the Blacke Friers, and divers other places can witnes, and against Coachmakers doores the streets are so pestered and clogg’d with them, that neither man, horse or cart can passe for them; in so much as my Lord Maior is highly to bee commended for his care in their restraint, sending in February last, many of them to the Courtes for their carelessnesse herein.”

In another work of Taylor’s, _The Thiefe_, there is a passage of equal interest:—

“Carroaches, Coaches, Jades and Flanders Mares Do rob us of our shares, our wares, our Fares: Against the ground we stand and knock our heeles, Whilest all our profit runs away on wheeles; And whosoever but observes and notes, The great increase of Coaches and of Boats, Shall finde their number more than e’r they were By halfe and more within these thirty yeeres. Then watermen at Sea had service still, And those that staid at home had worke at will: Then upstart Helcart-Coaches were to seeke, A man could scarce see twenty in a weeke, But now I thinke a man may daily see, More than the Whirries on the _Thames_ can be. When Queen _Elizabeth_ came to the Crowne, A Coach in _England_, then was scarcely knowne, Then ’twas as rare to see one, as to spy A Tradesman that had never told a lye.”

It will be seen from the first of these lines, that a difference is made between the coach and the caroche (carroch or carroache). On this point there is a definite statement in the Elizabethan play _Tu Quoque_:—

“Prepare yourself to like this gentleman, Who can maintain thee in thy choice of gowns, Of tires, of servants, and of costly jewels; Nay, for a need, out of his easy nature, May’st draw him to the keeping of a coach For country, and carroch for London.”