Part 6

This, too, is borne out by the speech of Lady Eitherside already quoted. Many servants were needed for the carroch. Massinger speaks of one being drawn by six Flanders mares, and having its coachman, groom, postilion, and footman, to look after it. “These carroaches,” says Croal[22] “were larger and clumsier” than the coaches, “but were considered more stately.” Taylor speaks of the town Vehicle as “a mere Engine of Pride,” and gives a rather ludicrous account of some common women who had hired one of them to go to “the Greene-Goose faire at _Stratford_ the _Bowe_.” The occupants of this carroch “were so be-madam’d, be-mistrist, and Ladified by the beggers, that the foolish Women began to swell with a proud Supposition or Imaginary greatnes, and gave all their mony to the mendicanting Canters.”

Poor Taylor! He felt very deeply on the question of these new coaches which were to put an end once and for all time to his trade. He must have felt that Henry of Navarre’s assassination in 1610 would never have taken place but for that monarch’s affection for his coach; yet in spite of his deep hatred, he was once prevailed upon to ride inside one of them. “It was but my chance” he records, “once to bee brought from Whitehall to the Tower in my Master Sir William Waades Coach, and before I had been drawn twenty yardes, such a Timpany of Pride puft me up, that I was ready to burst with the winde chollicke of vaine-glory. In what state I would leane over the boote, and looke, and pry if I saw any of my acquaintance, and then I would stand up vailing my Bonnet.”

It almost looks as though he had enjoyed his ride!

_Chapter the Fourth_

_INTERLUDE OF THE CHAIR_

“I love sedans, cause they do plod And amble everywhere, Which prancers are with leather shod, And ne’er disturb the eare. Heigh doune, derry derry doune, With the hackney Coaches doune, Their jumping make The pavements shake, Their noise doth mad the toune.”

_Ancient Ballad._

Just as the horse-litter gave way before the coach, so the coach, not long after its appearance, found a serious rival in the man-drawn litter or Sedan chair. When or where this chair came from, or who brought it into use once again, is not known. That Sedan itself was the first place to adopt this chair may be true—the analogy already mentioned holding good—but beyond a few half-serious words in a curious seventeenth-century pamphlet to be quoted in a little, there is no positive evidence whatever. Several writers, indeed, assert that Sedan had nothing to do with the chair for ever associated with its name, but in that tantalising manner which is unfortunately characteristic of former times, omit to state their reason. It has been suggested that _sedan_ was the name of the cloth with which the chair was lined, but if this were so, the cloth most probably took its name from the chair it adorned. But wherever it was first made it is reasonable to suppose that the narrowness of the streets made a smaller vehicle than either coach or horse-litter convenient.

The earliest chair, other than those ancient _lecticæ_ and φορεῖα mentioned in the first chapter, appears to have belonged to the Emperor Charles V, in the first half of the sixteenth century. This, indeed, does bear some resemblance to the common conception of a _chair_, but the first Sedans of some fifty years later resembled nothing so much as a modern dog-kennel provided with two poles. A more unsociable apparatus was surely never built, and yet its almost immediate popularity is easily explained. With the urban streets not yet properly paved and the eternal jolting of the coach, to the accompaniment of such a clatter as must have made speech almost impossible, anything in the nature of a conveyance that made at once for physical comfort and comparative silence would have been favourably received.

There is mention of a chair being shown in England in 1581—just at the time when the country was beginning to show an interest in carriages—but it was not until after the death of Elizabeth that such a novelty was seen in the streets of London. You are not wholly surprised, moreover, to hear that the innovation was due to Buckingham, that apostle of luxury, who probably first saw the chair on his visit to Spain with Prince Charles. Indeed the Prince is supposed to have brought back three of them with him.

At first, of course, there was opposition.

“Every new thing the People disaffect,” wrote Arthur Wilson, the historian, “They stumble sometimes, at the _action_ for the _person_, which rises like a little _cloud_ but soon after vanishes. So after, when _Buckingham_ came to be carried upon Men’s shoulders the _clamour_ and the _noise_ of it was so extravagant that the People would rail on him in the Streets, loathing that Men should be brought to as servile a condition as Horses. So irksome is every little new impression that breaks an old _Custom_ and rubs and grates against the _public humour_. But when Time had made these Chairs common, every loose _Minion_ used them, so that that which got at first so much scandal was the means to convey those privately to such places where they might give much more. Just like _long hair_, at one time described as abominable, at another time approved as beautiful. So various are the _fancies_ of the _times_!”

It is to be noticed that Buckingham, according to this account, was carried upon men’s shoulders. This was the case at first, but such a mode was speedily changed for that of hand-poles—at once safer and more comfortable for the occupant, and certainly more convenient for the men.[23]

John Evelyn disagrees with Wilson and ascribes the introduction of the chair into England to Sir Saunders Duncombe, a Gentleman-Pensioner knighted by James I in Scotland in 1617, who enjoyed Buckingham’s patronage. In his Diary for 1645, he writes of the Neapolitans: “They greatly affect the Spanish gravity in their habit; delight in good horses; the streets are full of gallants on horseback, in coaches and sedans, from hence brought first into England by Sir Saunders Duncombe.” Undoubtedly Duncombe was responsible for the great popularity of the chair in England, and for a time held a monopoly in such chairs as could be had for hire, but it may be that Buckingham suggested this monopoly in the first place, after the temporary opposition to their use had been overcome. Which rather suggests that Spain was actually the first country where they were used, though this is mere conjecture.

In the meantime much was happening to the coaches. They were increasing enormously in number, not only those privately owned, but also those hired out by the day. These latter soon became known as hackney-coaches.[24] They seem to have been put on the streets as early as 1605, but “remained in the owner’s yards until sent for.” In 1633 the Strand was chosen as the first regular stand for such coaches by a Captain Bailey, one of the pioneers of the movement.

“I cannot omit to mention,” writes Lord Stafford, “any new thing that comes up amongst us though ever so trivial. Here is one Captain Bailey, he hath been a sea captain, but now lives on land about this city where he tries experiments. He hath erected, according to his ability, some four hackney coaches, put his men in livery and appointed them to stand at the Maypole in the Strand, giving them instructions at what rate to carry men into several parts of the town where all day they may be had. Other hackney men veering this way, they flocked to the same place and performed their journeys at the same rate, so that sometimes there is twenty of them together, which dispose up and down, that they and others are to be had everywhere, as watermen are to be had at the waterside. Everybody is much pleased with it, for whereas before coaches could be had but at great rate”—one recalls the prices paid by Lord Rutland a few years before—“now a man may have one much cheaper.”

Most of these coaches that were put on to the streets seem to have been old and disused carriages belonging to the quality. Many of them still bore noble arms, and, indeed, it would seem that when the hackneys were no longer disused noblemen’s carriages, the proprietors found it advisable to pretend that they were. Nearly every hansom and four-wheeled cab at the end of the nineteenth century bore some sort of coronet on its panels.

The drivers of these first hackneys wore large coats with several capes, one over the other, for warmth. London, however, seems to have been the only town in which they were to be seen. “Coaches,” wrote Fynes Morison in 1617, “are not to be hired anywhere but in London. For a day’s journey a coach with two horses is let for about 10s. a day, or 15s. with three horses, the coachman finding the horses’ feed.” From the same author it would appear that most travellers still doggedly kept to their horses, and indeed, in some counties a horse could be hired for threepence a day, an incredibly small sum. “Carriers,” he also records, “have long covered waggons in which they carry passengers too and fro; but this kind of journeying is very tedious; so that none but women and people of inferior condition travel in this sort.” These were the stage-waggons which in due course gave rise to the stage-coaches, which in their turn were superseded by the mail-coaches.

A similar movement in France gave rise to the _fiacres_, so called from the sign of St. Fiacre, which adorned one of the principal inns in Paris, in front of which the public coaches stood. In Scotland, too, one Henry Andersen, a native of Pomerania, had in 1610 been granted a royal patent to provide public coaches in Scotland, and for some years ran a service between Edinburgh and Leith. England had yet to follow Andersen’s example, but the hackneys were increasing so rapidly in London that in 1635 a proclamation was issued to suppress them. And it is to be noticed that Taylor’s diatribes were directed more particularly against these public conveyances than against the privately owned carriages, which, after all, could hardly affect his trade. The proclamation was as follows:—

“That the great numbers of Hackney Coaches of late time seen and kept in London, Westminster, and their Suburbs, and the general and promiscuous use of Coaches there, were not only _a great disturbance to his Majesty, his dearest Consort the Queen, the Nobility, and others of place and degree, in their passage through the Streets_; but the Streets themselves were so pestered, and the pavements so broken up, that the common passage is thereby hindered and more dangerous; and the prices of hay and provender and other provisions of stable, thereby made exceeding dear: Wherefore We expressly command and forbid, That, from the feast of St. John the Baptist next coming, no Hackney or Hired Coach, be used or suffered in London, Westminster, or the Suburbs or Liberties thereof, excepting they be to travel at least three miles out of London or Westminster, or the Suburbs thereof. And also, that no person shall go in a Coach in the said Streets, except the owner of the Coach shall constantly keep up Four able Horses for our Service, when required.”

It is dated January 19th, 1635/6, and must have had a considerable, if temporary, effect, for as Samuel Pegge points out in his unfinished manuscript on the early use of coaches[25] it could not “operate much in the King’s favour, as it would hardly be worth a Coach-master’s while to be at so great a contingent charge as the keeping of four horses to be furnished at a moment’s warning for His Majesty’s occasional employment.”

It was then that Sir Saunders Duncombe obtained his monopoly, and, of course, everything was in his favour. The actual patent granted to him belongs to the previous year, but the two are approximately contemporary. From a letter written in 1634 to Lord Stafford, it appears that Duncombe had in that year forty or fifty chairs “making ready for use.” Possibly the whole thing was worked up by Buckingham and his satellites. Duncombe’s patent gave the enterprising knight the right “to put forth and lett for hire” the new chairs for a term of fourteen years. In his petition he had explained that “in many parts beyond the seas, the people there are much carried in the Streets in Chairs that are covered; by which means very few Coaches are used amongst them.” And so Duncombe was allowed to “reap some fruit and benefit of his industry,” and might “recompense himself of the costs, charges, and expences” to which he had, or said he had, been put.

For two years these covered chairs held the advantage, and indeed seem to have been exceedingly popular. There is a most amusing pamphlet, which I have already mentioned, “printed by Robert Raworth, for John Crooch,” in 1636, entitled _Coach and Sedan pleasantly disputing for Place and Precedence, the Brewer’s Cart being Moderator_. It is signed “Mis-amaxius,” and is dedicated “to the Valorous, and worthy all title of Honor, Sʳ Elias Hicks.” “Light stuffe,” the author calls it, and tells us that he is “no ordinary Pamphleteer ... onely in Mirth I tried what I could doe upon a running subject, at the request of a friend in the _Strand_: whose leggs, not so sound as his Judgement, enforce him to keepe his Chamber, where hee can neither sleepe or studie for the clattering of _Coaches_.” It is an interesting little production, both for its own whimsicalities and for the sidelights it affords into the town’s views on the subject of vehicles at the time. It starts with the cuckoo warning the milkmaids of Islington to get back to _Finsburie_. The writer, accompanied by a Frenchman and a tailor, walks back to the city, and in a narrow street comes across a coach and a sedan quarrelling about which of them is to “take the wall.”

“Wee perceived two lustie fellowes to justle for the wall, and almost readie to fall together by the eares, the one (the lesser of the two) was in a suite of greene after a strange manner, windowed before and behind with _Isen-glasse_, having two handsome fellowes in greene coats attending him, the one went before, the other came behind; their coats were lac’d down the back with a greene-lace sutable, so were their halfe sleeves, which perswaded me at first they were some cast suites of their Masters; their backs were harnessed with leather cingles, cut out of a hide, as broad as _Dutch_-collops of _Bacon_.

“The other was a thick burly square sett fellow, in a doublet of Black-leather, Brasse-button’d down the brest, Backe, Sleeves, and winges, with monstrous wide bootes, fringed at the top, with a net fringe, and a round breech (after the old fashion) guilded, and on his back-side an Atcheivement of sundry Coats in their propper colors, quarterd with Crest, Helme and Mantle, besides here and there, on the sides of a single Escutchion or crest, with some Emblematicall _Word_ or other; I supposed, they were made of some Pendants, or Banners, that had beene stollen, from over some Monument, where they had long hung in a Church.

“Hee had onely one man before him, wrapt in a red cloake, with wide sleeves, turned up at the hands, and cudgell’d thick on the backe and shoulders with broad shining lace (not much unlike that which Mummers make of strawe hatts) and of each side of him, went a Lacquay, the one a French boy, the other Irish, all sutable alike: The _Frenchman_ (as I learned afterward) when his Master was in the Countrey, taught his lady and his daughter _French_: Ushers them abroad to publicke meetings, and assemblies, all saving the Church whither shee never came: The other went on errands, help’d the maide to beate Bucks, fetch in water, carried up meate, and waited at the Table.”

The writer attempts mediation, and his offer is favourably received. The combatants explain who they are. The burly fellow speaks first:—

“My name Sir (quoth hee) is _Coach_, who am a Gentleman of an anciente house, as you may perceive by my so many quarter’d coates, of _Dukes_, _Marquises_, _Earles_, _Viscounts_, _Barons_, Knights, and Gentlemen, there is never a Lord or Lady in the land but is of my acquaintance; my imployment is so great, that I am never at quiet, day or night; I am a Benefactor to all Meetings, Play-houses, Mercers shops, Taverns, and some other houses of recreation.... This other that offers me the wrong, they call him Mounsier _Sedan_, some Mr. _Chair_, a Greene-goose hatch’d but the other day ... and whereas hee is able with all the helpe and furtherance hee can make and devise, to goe not above a mile in an houre; as grosse as I am, I can runne three or foure in halfe an houre; yea, after dinner, when my belly is as full as it can hold (and I may say to you) of dainty bitts too.”

Whereupon the sedan chimes in:—

“Sir, the occasion of our difference was this: Whether an emptie Coach, that has a Lords head painted Coate and Crest, as Lion, Bull, Elephant, &c. upon it without, might take the wall of a _Sedan_ that had a knighte alive within it.” I confess, he goes on to say, I am “a meere stranger, till of late in _England_; therefore, if the Law of Hospitalitie be observed (as _England_ hath beene accounted the most hospitable kingdome of the World,) I ought to be the better entertained, and used, (as I am sure I shall) and find as good friends, as Coach hath any, it is not his bigge lookes, nor his nimble tongue, that so runnes upon wheeles, shall scare mee; hee shall know that I am above him both in esteeme, and dignitie, and hereafter will know my place better.... Neither, I hope, will any thinke the worse of mee, for that I am a Forreiner; hath not your Countrey Coach of England been extreemly enriched by strangers?”

Indeed, all your luxuries, he continues, are foreign, your perfumes are Italian, and your perukes made in France.

For some time it seems that Sedan is getting the best of it. Whereas the coach, he argues, has to wait out in the cold streets often for hours at a time, he is many times admitted into the privacy of my Lady’s chamber, where he is rubbed clean both within and without. “And the plain troath is,” he concludes, “I will no longer bee made a foole by you ... the kenell is your naturall walke.” At this moment a carman appears and supports the sedan. Coaches, he says, keep the town awake, endanger the lives of children, and, particularly in the suburbs, “be-dash gentlemen’s gowns.” There then follows a curious piece of dialogue between Sedan and Powel, a Welshman, one of his attendants:—

“_Sedan._ We have our name from _Sedanum_, or _Sedan_, that famous Citie and Universitie, belonging to the Dukes of _Bevillon_, and where hee keepes his Court.”

“_Powel._ Nay, doe you heare mee Master, it is from _Sedanny_, which in our British language, is a brave, faire, daintie well-favoured Ladie, or prettie sweete wench, and wee carrie such some time Master....”

Most of the morning is wasted by such desultory talk, and the street becomes blocked. There comes on the scene a waterman, who, of course, is equally antagonistic to both, and would throw coach and sedan into the Thames if he were not afraid of blocking the stream, and so bringing harm to himself. There follows him a country farmer, who thinks the sedan the honester and humbler of the two, but really knows very little about it. “I heare no great ill of you,” he is good enough to say, but is bound to add, “I have had no acquaintance with your cowcumber-cullor’d men.” Yet in the country he has in his way tried a sedan-chair, which is a “plaine wheele-barrow,” just as his cart is his coach “wherein now and then for my pleasure I ride, my maides going along with me.” But if they both come to Lincolnshire, the sedan, he thinks, will receive a warmer welcome than the coach.

After him comes a country vicar who has no hesitation in accusing the coach of all sorts of robberies. Soon, he cries, you will be “turned off.” You never cared for church, and indeed, during service, you disturb everybody rumbling your loudest outside. Also you are so set up that you will never give place “either to cart or carre.” A surveyor is less personal than the vicar, but has little good to say of the coach, although he agrees with most of the others that for a nobleman of high rank, it is something of a necessity.

Finally the brewer appears and speedily puts an end to the wrangle.

“With that, comes up unto us a lustie tall fellow, sitting betweene two mōstrous great wheeles, drawne by a great old jade blinde of an eie, in a leather pilch, two emptie beere-barrels upon a brewer’s slings besides him, and old blew-cap all bedaub’d, and stincking with yest.... My name is _Beere-cart_, quoth hee, I came into England in _Henry_ the Seventh’s time.”

And the decision of the cart is, of course, that both coach and sedan shall give way to _him_. They are both to exercise great care, and the sedan is to have the wall. And he adds, turning to the smaller vehicle, a sentence which it is difficult to understand.

“You shall never,” he says, “carrie Coachman againe, for the first you ever carried was a Coachman, for which you had like to have sufferd, had not your Master beene more mercifull.”

Such quarrels were very frequent, not only at this time, but right on through the eighteenth century. Swift in one of his letters to Stella mentions an accident due to the carelessness of a chairman. “The chairman that carried me,” he says, “squeezed a great fellow against a wall, who wisely turned his back, and broke one of the side glasses in a thousand pieces. I fell a scolding, pretended I was like to be cut to pieces, and made them set down the chair in the Park, while they picked out the bits of glasses: and when I paid them, I quarrelled still, so they dared not grumble, and I came off for my fare: but I was plaguily afraid they would have said, God bless your honour, won’t you give us something for our glass?”

Swift was the author of an amusing satire on the same subject, wherein coach and sedan were no better friends than of old.

A CONFERENCE BETWEEN SIR HARRY PIERCE’S CHARIOT AND MRS. D. STOPFORD’S CHAIR

CHARIOT

“My pretty dear Cuz, tho’ I’ve roved the town o’er, To dispatch in an hour some visits a score; Though, since first on the wheels, I’ve been everyday At the ’Change, at a raffling, at church, or a play; And the fops of the town are pleased with the notion Of calling your slave the perpetual motion;— Though oft at your door I have whined [out] my love As my knight does grin his at your Lady above; Yet, ne’er before this though I used all my care, I e’er was so happy to meet my dear Chair; And since we’re so near, like birds of a feather, Let’s e’en, as they say, set our horses together.

CHAIR