Part 8

“When my Lord Protector’s coach,” wrote Misson, a Frenchman then on a visit to England, “came into the Park with Colonel Ingleby and my Lord’s three daughters, the coaches and horses flocked about them like some miracle. But they galloped (after the mode court-pace now) round and round the Park, and all that great multitude hunted them and caught them still at the turn like a hare, and then made a lane with all reverent haste for them, and so after them again, and I never saw the like in my life.”

Cromwell’s desire to play coachman once led to an accident which might have been serious. The particulars are given in a letter from the Dutch Ambassador to the States-General, dated October 16th, 1654:—

“His Highness, only accompanied with secretary Thurloe and some few of his gentlemen and servants, went to take the air in Hyde Park, when he caused some dishes of meat to be brought, when he had his dinner; and afterwards had a mind to drive the coach himself. Having put only the secretary into it,” he whipped up “those six grey horses, which the Count of Oldenburgh had presented unto His Highness, who drove pretty handsomely for some time. But at last, provoking these horses too much with the whip, they grew unruly and ran so fast that the postillion could not hold them in, whereby His Highness was flung out of the coach upon the pole.... The secretary’s ankle was hurt leaping out, and he keeps his chamber.”

“From this,” comments Sir Walter Gilbey, who quotes the letter, “it is evident that when six horses were used a postillion rode one of the leaders and controlled them; while the driver managed the wheelers and middle pair. When four horses were driven,” he continues, “it was the custom to have two outriders, one to ride at the leaders’ heads, and one at the two wheelers’. In town this would be merely display, but on a journey the outriders’ horses might replace those of the team in case of accident, or, more frequently, be added to them to help drag the coach over a stretch of bad road.”

It is just possible that this coach which was overturned by Cromwell’s faulty driving is at present in existence, repaired, of course, and redecorated, and, incidentally, painted by Cipriani, as Mr. Speaker’s coach. This undoubtedly belongs to the period, and one writer actually commits himself to the statement that the two are identical. A commoner report assigns the Speaker’s coach in the first place to Lenthall, Cromwell’s Speaker. Whatever be its history, the coach is a fine example of Jacobean work. It is of carved oak, the body being hung upon leather braces. The workmanship, Mr. Oakley Williams thinks,[28] is Flemish. Cipriani’s work, added late in the eighteenth century, is still in good preservation. Five people can comfortably sit inside. “The Speaker,” says Mr. Williams, “presumably occupied the seat of honour alone. Opposite him sat his Chaplain and the Sergeant-at-Arms. For the accommodation of his other attendants ... a low bench is arranged across the floor of the coach, with a semicircular space for the legs of its occupants scooped out against either door”—relic, of course, of the boot. “The coach,” he continues, after mentioning that the Speaker always has his own arms painted on the side of the body, and is allowed an escort of a single Lifeguardsman, “weighs two tons one hundredweight and several pounds, yet for all its size it so beautifully hung and balanced that an able-bodied man was able without undue effort to draw it out for my inspection. Its coach-house is one of the vaults in the inner courtyard of the House of Lords.” Both origin and subsequent history of this coach, however, are wrapped in an impenetrable mystery.

Cromwell’s mishap naturally gave the Royalist writers an opportunity for satire. Cleveland wrote the following lines:—

“The whip again; away! ’tis too absurd That thou should lash with whipcord now, but sword. I’m pleased to fancy how the glad compact Of Hackney coachmen sneer at the last act. Hark! how the scoffing concourse hence derives The proverb, ‘Needs must go when th’ devil drives.’ Yonder a whisper cries, ‘’Tis a plain case He turned us out to put himself in place; But, God-a-mercy, horses once for aye Stood to ’t, and turned him out as well as we.’ Another, not behind him with his mocks, Cries out, ‘Sir, faith, you were in the wrong box.’ He did presume to rule because, forsooth, He’s been a horse-commander since his youth, But he must know there’s a difference in the reins Of horses fed with oats and fed with grains. I wonder at his frolic, for be sure Four hamper’d coach-horses can fling a brewer; But pride will have a fall; such the world’s course is. He [who] can rule three realms can’t guide four horses; See him that trampell’d thousands in their gore; Dismounted by a party but of four. But we have done with ’t, and we may call The driving Jehu, Phaeton in his fall. I wish to God, for these three kingdoms’ sake, His neck, and not the whip, had giv’n the crack.”

Evelyn met with a similar mishap, but fortunately escaped injury. He, too, was accustomed to ride in Hyde Park, and on one occasion is grumbling that “every coach” there “was made to pay a shilling, and a horse sixpence, by a sordid fellow who had purchased it of the State, as they called it.”

Such experiments as were being made in this country were in the direction of a safer and swifter vehicle than those in general use. So early as 1625, one Edward Knapp had been granted a patent for “hanging the bodies of carriages on springs of steel.” Apparently Knapp was wholly unsuccessful, but forty years later Colonel Blunt, working upon similar lines, produced several carriages which, if not entirely satisfactory in themselves, led the way towards a wider appreciation of the problems in question. If, as seems probable, he was identical with the Blunt or Blount of Wicklemarsh, near Blackheath (afterwards Sir Harry Blount), who had travelled extensively in Turkey and elsewhere, it may be that he had brought back with him several continental curiosities. We hear, indeed, of a French chariot in his possession. In 1657 the Colonel was making experiments with a “way-wiser” or “adometer” which exactly “measured the miles ... showing these by an index as we went on. It had three circles, one pointing to the number of rods, another to the miles, by 10 to 1000, with all the subdivisions of quarters; very pretty,” opines Evelyn, “and useful.” This seems to have been the first instrument of the kind, and is overlooked by Beckmann in his account of such contrivances. The Colonel’s work was brought to the notice of the newly formed Royal Society, and a committee was formed to investigate it. The first model shown to this committee was of “a chariot with four springs, esteemed by him very easy both to the rider and the horse, and at the same time cheap.” The Committee also examined the designs of Dr. Robert Hooke, a distinguished member of the Society, and Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, who “produced the model of a chariot with two wheels and short double springs to be driven by one horse; the chair of it being so fixed upon two springs that the person sitting just over or rather a little behind the axle-tree was, when the experiment was made at Colonel Blunt’s house, carried with as much ease as one could be in the French chariot without at all burthening the horse.”[29] Dr. Hooke showed “two drafts of this model having this circumstantial difference—one of these was contrived so that the boy sitting on a seat made for him behind the chair and guiding the reins over the top of it, drives the horse. The other by placing the chair behind and the saddle on the horse’s back being to be borne up by the shafts, that the boy riding on it and driving the horse should be little or no burden to the horse.”

The Colonel continued experimenting both with the older coaches and a new light chariot. In 1665 Mr. Pepys was taken to see an improvement of his on a coach.

“I met my Lord Brouncker, Sir Frederick Murrey, Dean Wilkins, and Mr. Hooke, going by coach to Colonel Blunt’s to dinner.... No extraordinary dinner, nor any other entertainment good; but afterwards to the tryal of some experiments about making of coaches easy. And several we tried; but one did prove mighty easy, not here for me to describe, but the whole body of the coach lies upon one long spring, and we all, one after another, rid in it; and it is very fine and likely to take.”

A few months later Pepys saw the new chariot itself.

“After dinner comes Colonel Blunt in his new chariot made with springs; as that was of wicker, where in a while since we rode at his house. And he hath rode, he says, now his journey, many miles in it with one horse, and out-drives any coach, and out-goes any horse, and so easy he says. So for curiosity, I went into it to try it, and up the hill [Shooter’s Hill] to the heath [Blackheath], and over the cart ruts, and found it pretty well, but not so easy as he pretends.”

The Colonel persevered. At the beginning of the next year the Royal Society’s committee met again at his house to consider, says Pepys, “of the business of chariots, and to try their new invention, which I saw here my Lord Brouncker ride in: where the coachman sits astride upon a pole over the horse, but do not touch the horse, which is a pretty odde thing; but it seems it is most easy for the horse, and, as they say, for the man also.”

Others were also at work upon carriage improvement, and in 1667 the Royal Society “generally approved” of a chariot invented by a Dr. Croune. “No particulars of the vehicle are given,” says Sir Walter Gilbey, “we are only told that ‘some fence was proposed to be made for the coachman against the kicking of the horse.’” In the same year, Sir William Pen possessed a light chariot in which Pepys drove out one day. This, he says, was “plain, but pretty and more fashionable in shape than any coaches he hath, and yet do not cost him, harness and all, above £32.”

All such experiments were undoubtedly in the direction of a light, swift carriage, such as was built about 1660 in Germany by Philip de Chiesa, a Piedmontese, in the service of the Duke of Prussia. Indeed, it is quite possible that Colonel Blunt either possessed, or had seen, one of de Chiesa’s carriages, which were none other than the famous and popular _berlins_.[30]

So far Germany had been taking the lead. Her State coaches were the most wonderful in the world, and her coachbuilders were designing lesser coaches for the ordinary folk. But the _berlin_ was the first of these lesser carriages to catch the public fancy, and enjoy more than a local success. Now the _berlin_ differed in the first place from previous carriages in having two perches instead of the single pole, “and between these two perches, from the front transom to the hind axle-bed, two strong leather braces were placed, with jacks or small windlasses, to wind them up tighter if they stretched.” The bottom of the coach was no longer flat, and these braces of leather allowed the body to play up and down instead of swinging from side to side as before. Here, then, you had an entirely new principle.

“In the Imperial mews at Vienna,” says Thrupp, “are four coach berlins, which, I think, may belong to this period. They are said to have been built for the Emperor Leopold who reigned at Vienna from 1658 to 1700, and Kink describes this Emperor’s carriage as covered with red cloth and as having glass panels; he also says they were called the Imperial glass coaches. It is possible that the coaches have been a little altered from the time of their construction, but I consider that in these four we have the oldest coaches with solid doors and glasses all round that exist in Europe. Whether they are identical with the Emperor Leopold’s wedding-carriages matters much less than the influence the _berlin_ undoubtedly had upon the coach-building of that period. It was the means of introducing the double perch, which, although it is not now in fashion, was adopted for very many carriages both in England and abroad, up to 1810. Crane-necks to perches were suggested by the form of the _berlin_ perch; and as bodies swinging from standard posts suggested the position of the C spring, so bodies resting upon long leather braces suggested the horizontal and elbow springs to which we owe so much. The first _berlin_ was made as a small _vis-à-vis_ coach—small because it was to be used as a light travelling carriage, and narrow because it was to hang between the two perches, and was only needed to carry two persons inside. It was such an improvement in lightness and appearance upon the cumbersome coaches that carried eight persons, that it at once found favour, and was imitated in Paris and still more in London.”

These early _berlins_ were not nearly so gorgeous as the heavier coaches which they gradually supplanted. Red cloth and black nails had taken the place of the gilt ornamentation and crimson hangings of the previous generation.[31] Only on festivals, we learn, the black harness “was ornamented with silk fringe.” The coaches used by the Emperor himself had leather traces, but the ladies of his suite had to be content with carriages the traces of which were made of rope.

The glass windows which were such a conspicuous feature of the _berlins_, were also used in the larger coaches, finally, as I have said, eliminating the boot. Mr. Charles Harper thinks that the first English coach to possess them belonged in 1661 to the Duke of York. At first these windows seem to have caused trouble, and there is the ludicrous incident mentioned by Pepys, of my Lady Peterborough who “being in her glass-coach with the glass up and seeing a lady pass by in a coach whom she would salute, the glass was so clear that she thought it had been open, and so ran her head through the glass!” Lady Ashly did not like the new invention, because, as she said, the windows were for ever flying open while the coach was running over a bad piece of road. Lady Peterborough’s misfortune was tribute indeed to the maker!

In this matter of the glass it would seem that Spain had taken the lead, and it is quite possible that Spain invented the first two-seated chariots. In 1631, thirty years before the first _berlin_ was made, an Infanta of Spain is reported to have traversed Carinthia “in a glass-carriage in which no more than two persons could sit.” What this was like we do not know. It may have had rude springs, and been built from the common coach models to a smaller measurement; it was certainly bootless, and framed glass or mica took the place of curtains. In France the first coaches to have glass windows, according to M. Roubo, created something of a Court scandal in the time of Louis XIII. The glass, he says, was first used in the upper panels of the doors, but was soon extended to the whole of the upper half of the sides and front of the body, so making of the carriage literally a glass-coach.

You may learn more of the English seventeenth-century carriages from Pepys than from any other writer; nor is this a matter for wonder. Pepys had a knack of knowing just exactly what posterity would desire to know. From his Diary, we learn incidentally that the watermen were still endeavouring to regain their lost prestige and custom, but by this time coaches had enormously increased in number—in 1662 there were nearly 2500 hackneys in London alone—and thenceforth they are hardly heard of. To be any one, moreover, you had to have your private coach. Doctors, for instance, found it very well worth their while to keep a coach, though, as Sir Thomas Browne told his son, they were certainly “more for state than for businesse.” On the other hand those who were well able to keep a private carriage occasionally preferred the use of a hackney, and sometimes at times when they had no business to do so. Mr. Pepys, with clear ideas upon the dignity and responsibilities of rank, was indignant at any such foolery. He was told, he recalls in one place, “of the ridiculous humour of our King and Knights of the Garter the other day, who, whereas heretofore their robes were only to be worn during their ceremonies and service, these, as proud of their coats, did wear them all day till night, and then rode into the Park with them on. Nay, and he tells us he did see my Lord Oxford and Duke of Monmouth in a hackney-coach with two footmen in the Park, with their robes on; which is a most scandalous thing, so as all gravity may be said to be lost amongst us.”

The private coach, too, was the last luxury to be given up after financial embarrassment. So we have Lady Flippant, in Wycherley’s _Love in a Wood_, saying, “Ah, Mrs. Joyner, nothing grieves me like the putting down my coach! For the fine clothes, the fine lodgings,—let ’em go; for a lodging is as unnecessary a thing to a widow that has a coach, as a hat to a man that has a good peruke. For, as you see about town, she is most probably at home in her coach:—she eats, and drinks, and sleeps in her coach; and for her visits, she receives them in the playhouse.” No lady’s virtue, according to this cynical dramatist, was proof against a coach and six.

At the time of the introduction of the light, two-seated chariots, ordinary private coaches were also changing in shape. In Charles I’s reign they had been both very long and very wide; in his son’s time they became much slenderer and less unwieldy. Alterations in this direction were possibly suggested by the ubiquitous and most convenient sedans, and, indeed, there is an allusion to this change of shape in Sir William Davenant’s _First Day’s Entertainment at Rutland House_, in which, during a dialogue between a Russian and a Londoner, the foreigner says: “I have now left your houses, and am passing through your streets; but not in a coach, for they are uneasily hung, and so narrow that I took them for sedans upon wheels.”

Stage-coaches, however, remained just as huge and just as gorgeous as ever. They were built, more particularly in Italy, in the old fashion—unenclosed and curtained. Count Gozzadini describes a State coach built in 1629 for the marriage of Duke Edward Farnese with the Lady Margaret of Tuscany, and as we shall see in a moment, this differed only in the details of its ornamentation from the State coach in which Lord Castlemaine made his public entry into Rome sixty years later.

The body of the Farnese coach, says Gozzadini, “was lined with crimson velvet and gold thread, and the woodwork covered with silver plates, chased and embossed and perforated, in half relief. It could carry eight persons, four on the seats attached to the doors, and four in the back and front. The roof was supported by eight silver columns, on the roof were eight silver vases, and unicorns’ heads and lilies in full relief projected from the roof and ends of the body here and there. The roof was composed of twenty sticks, converging from the edge to the centre, which was crowned with a great rose with silver leaves on the outside, and inside by the armorial bearings of the Princes of Tuscany and Farnese held up by cupids. The curtains of the sides and back of the coach were of crimson velvet, embroidered with silver lilies with gold leaves. At the back and front of the coach-carriage were statues of unicorns, surrounded by cupids and wreathed with lilies, grouped round the standards from which the body was suspended; on the tops of the standards were silver vases, with festoons of fruit, and wraught in silver. In the front were also statues of Justice and Mercy, supporting the coachman’s seat. The braces suspending the body were of leather, covered with crimson velvet; the wheels and pole were plated with polished silver. The whole was drawn by six horses, with harness and trappings covered with velvet, embroidered with gold and silver thread, and with silver buckles. It is said that twenty-five excellent silversmiths worked at this coach for two years, and used up 25,000 ounces of silver; and that the work was superintended by two master coachbuilders, one from Parma and the other from Piacenza.” Lord Castlemaine’s procession into Rome contained three hundred and thirty coaches, of which thirteen were his own property; and of these two were State coaches. These likewise were not properly enclosed, and had no glass.

“They were hung,” says Thrupp, “inside and out, with beautifully embroidered cloths, the one coach with crimson, the other with azure-blue velvet, and gold and silver work. The roofs were adorned with scroll work and vases gilt; under the roof were curtains of silver fringes, and the ambassador’s armorial bearings. The carriage of the principal coach was adorned in front with two large Tritons, of carved wood, gilt all over, that supported a cushion for the coachman between them, and from their shoulders the braces depended. The footboard was formed by a conch shell, between two dolphins. In the rear of the coach were two more Tritons, supporting not only the leather braces of the coach, but two other statues of Neptune and Cybele, who in turn held a royal crown. Below Neptune and Cybele, and projecting backwards, were a lion and a unicorn, and several cupids and wreaths of flowers. The wheels had moulded rims, and the spokes were hidden by curving foliage carving. The second coach had plainer wheels and fewer statues about it.”

They may have been magnificent, but they were certainly not very beautiful. Much the same, too, might be said of those coaches in which foreign ambassadors made their public entry into London. In 1660 Evelyn saw the Prince de Ligne, Ambassador-Extraordinary from Spain, make a splendid entry with seventeen coaches, and a month later Pepys was watching “the Duke de Soissons go from his audience with a very great deal of state: his own coach all red velvet covered with gold lace, and drawn by six barbes, and attended by twenty pages very rich in cloths.”

In this year, 1660, there was a proclamation against the excessive number of hackney-coaches, and two years later Commissioners were appointed “for reforming the buildings, ways, streets and incumbrances, and regulating the hackney-coaches in the city of London.” Of this body Evelyn was sworn a member in May, 1662. Pepys, however, never found any difficulty in obtaining one when he desired, and, indeed, of late years, pressure of business had made a hackney-coach an almost daily necessity. Finally, he found it cheaper to possess one of his own, and the story of this coach is particularly interesting, and may be told in some detail.