Part 9

Long ago, Mr. Pepys had dreamt of owning a private coach. “Talking long in bed with my wife,” he writes on March 2nd, 1661-2, “about our frugal life for the time to come, proposing to her what I could and would do, if I were worth £2000, that is, be a knight, and keep my coach, which pleased her.” Times were bad, however, and although Pepys enjoyed many a ride in a friend’s coach and witnessed Colonel Blunt’s experiments, the great idea did not mature. But one of his particular friends, Thomas Povey, M.P., who had been a colleague of his on the Tangier committee, himself the owner of at least one coach, seems to have kept Pepys’s ambitions astir. This was more especially the case in 1665, at which time Mr. Povey had purchased one of the new and already fashionable chariots. This excited Pepys’s admiration. “Comes Mr. Povey’s coach,” he records, “and so rode most nobly, in his most pretty and best-contrived chariot in the world, with many new contrivances, his never having till now, within a day or two, been yet finished.” Povey was something of an inventor himself. Evelyn calls him a “nice contriver of all elegancies, and most formal.” The necessary money was apparently not forthcoming for a year or two, but in April, 1667, Pepys had a mind “to buy enough ground to build a coach-house and stable; for,” says he, “I have had it much in my thoughts lately that it is not too much for me now, in degree or cost, to keep a coach, but contrarily, that I am almost ashamed to be seen in a hackney.” Accordingly, Mr. Commander, his lawyer, was bidden to look for a suitable piece of ground. The idea had now taken definite shape, and Pepys was committed. “I find it necessary,” he says, “for me, both in respect of honour and the profit of it also, my expence in Hackney coaches being now so great, to keep a coach, and therefore will do it.” The next entry shows the first of his disappointments:—

“Mr. Commander tells me, after all, that I cannot have a lease of the ground for my coach-house and stable, till a lawsuit be ended. I am a little sorry, because I am pretty full in my mind of keeping a coach; but yet,” he adds philosophically—the date was June 4th, 1667—“when I think of it again, the Dutch and French both at sea, and we poor, and still out of order, I know not yet what turns there may be.”

So the summer passed, and “most of our discourse,” he admits, “is about our keeping a coach the next year, which pleases my wife mightily; and if I continue as able as now, it will save me money.” At the beginning of the new year Will Griffin was ordered to make fresh inquiries about the most necessary coach-house, but nothing seems to have been done until the autumn. Then Pepys, more or less it would seem on the spur of the moment, chose a coach for himself, and immediately disliked it. No one seems to have given him the same advice. Some ladies, for instance, Mrs. Pepys amongst them, preferred the large old-fashioned coaches. Others wanted the latest thing from Paris. Says Mrs. Flirt in _The Gentleman Dancing-Master_: “But take notice, I will have no little, dirty, second-hand chariot, new furnished, but a large, sociable, well-painted coach; nor will I keep it till it be as well-known as myself, and it comes to be called Flirt-coach.” Her friend, Monsieur Paris, shrugs his shoulders. “’Tis very well,” says he, “you must have your great, gilt, fine painted coach. I’m sure they are grown so common already amongst you that ladies of quality begin to take up with hackneys again.” It was felt, no doubt, that fashion in carriages as in everything else would speedily change. Mr. Pepys must have found considerable difficulty in making up his mind. The new chariots were small, light and, so far as he knew, most fashionable; but possibly they were not quite to his taste, and equally possibly they might not be fashionable in ten years’ time. Also they perhaps lacked the solid dignity of the older carriages, and were less likely to attract public attention—two important considerations. In the end, however, he seems to have chosen a large coach of the old style. Mr. Povey saw it, and poor Pepys knew at once that a dreadful mistake had been made.

“He and I ... talk of my coach,” runs the Diary for 30th October, “and I got him to go and see it, where he finds most infinite fault with it, both as to being out of fashion and heavy, with so good reason, that I am mightily glad of his having corrected me in it; and so I do resolve to have one of his build, and with his advice, both in coach and horses, he being the fittest man in the world for it.”

Accordingly on the following Sunday, “Mr. Povey sent his coach for my wife and I to see, which we liked mightily, and will endeavour to have him get us just such another.” Mr. Povey thought that his own coachmaker had a replica for sale. Pepys thereupon went down into the neighbourhood of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, found the man, but learnt to his disgust that the coach had been sold that very morning. At the end of the week, however, in company with his friend, he “spent the afternoon going up and down the coachmakers in Cow Lane, and did see several, and last did pitch upon a little chariott, whose body was framed, but not covered, at the widow’s, that made Mr. Lowther’s fine coach; and we are mightily pleased with it, it being light, and will be very genteel and sober; to be covered with leather, but yet will hold four. Being much satisfied with this, I carried him to White Hall. Home, where I give my wife a good account of the day’s work.”

Having bought the coach, it was necessary to complete the arrangements about a coach-house, and in the same week Pepys fared forth again for the purpose.

“This afternoon I did go out towards Sir D. Gauden’s, thinking to have bespoke a place for my coach and horses, when I have them, at the Victualling Office; but find the way so bad and long that I returned, and looked up and down for places elsewhere, in an inne, which I hope to get with more convenience than there.”

This not proving satisfactory, Sir Richard Ford was persuaded to lend his own coach-yard. Then follow in quick succession the other entries:—

“_28th November, 1668._—All the morning at the Office, where, while I was sitting, one comes and tells me that my coach is come. So I was forced to go out, and to Sir Richard Ford’s, where I spoke to him, and he is very willing to have it brought in, and stand there: and so I ordered it, to my great content, it being mighty pretty, only the horses do not please me, and, therefore, resolve to have better.”

“_29th November._—This morning my coachman’s clothes come home and I like the livery mightily.... Sir W. Warren ... tells me, as soon as he saw my coach yesterday, he wished that the owner might not contract envy by it; but I told him it was now manifestly for my profit to keep a coach, and that, after employments like mine for eight years, it were hard if I could not be thought to be justly able to do that.”[32]

“_30th November._—My wife after dinner, went abroad the first time in her coach, calling on Roger Pepys, and visiting Mrs. Creed, and my cozen Turner. Thus ended this month, with very good intent, but most expenseful to my purse on things of pleasure, having furnished my wife’s closet and the best chamber, and a coach and horses, that ever I knew in the world; and I am put into the greatest condition of outward state that ever I was in, or hoped ever to be, or desired; and this at a time when we do daily expect great changes in this office; and by all reports we must, all of us, turn out.”

“_2nd December._—Abroad with my wife, the first time that ever I rode in my own coach, which do make my heart rejoice, and praise God, and pray him to bless it to me and continue it.”

“_3rd December._— ... and so home, it being mighty pleasure to go alone with my poor wife, in a coach of our own, to a play, and makes us appear mighty great, I think, in the world; at least, greater than ever I could, or my friends for me, have once expected; or, I think, than ever any of my family ever yet lived, in my memory, but my cozen Pepys in Salisbury Court.”

“_4th December._—I carried my wife ... to Smithfield, where they sit in the coach, while Mr. Pickering, who meets me at Smithfield and I, and W. Hewer and a friend of his, a jockey did go about to see several pairs of horses, for my coach; but it was late, and we agreed on none, but left it to another time: but here I do see instances of a piece of craft and cunning that I never dreamed of, concerning the buying and choosing of horses.”

There were plenty of horses to be had, it seems, but either Mr. Pepys did not like them or he was afraid of being cheated. “Up and down,” he is recording a week or so later, “all the afternoon about horses, and did see the knaveries and tricks of jockeys. At last, however, we concluded upon giving £50 for a fine pair of black horses we saw this day se’nnight; and so set Mr. Pickering down near his house, whom I am much beholden to, for his care herein, and he hath admired skill, I perceive, in this business, and so home.” So the horses were changed, and for a while Mr. Pepys was obliged to revert to the despised hackney, his “coachman being this day about breaking of my horses to the coach, they having never yet drawn.” Towards the end of the month the new horses were ready, and their master made his first ride behind them on a visit to the Temple, though later in the day he was again using the old pair, “not daring yet to use the others too much, but only to enter them.” Then, before the new year, came the first mishap.

“Up, and vexed a little to be forced to pay 40s. for a glass of my coach, which was broke the other day, nobody knows how, within the door, while it was down; but I do doubt that I did break it myself with my knees.”

At the beginning of February another misfortune is recorded:—

“Just at Holborn Circuit the bolt broke, that holds the fore-wheels to the perch, and so the horses went away with them, and left the coachman and us; but being near our coachmaker’s and we staying in a little ironmonger’s shop, we were presently supplied with another.”

Accidents of this kind were continually happening. Glasses smashed, bolts broke, and, what seems incredible, doors were lost! Even so late as 1710, a reward of 30s. was offered for a lost door. “Lost,” runs this remarkable advertisement, “the side door of a Chariot, painted Coffee Colour, with a Round Cipher in the Pannel, Lin’d with White Cloath embos’d with Red, having a Glass in one Frame, and White Canvas in another, with Red Strings to the Frames.”

To return to Pepys. In a month or two another matter connected with his coach was occupying his attention. There were some people who did not think that a man in the comparatively humble position of Secretary to the Admiralty had any right to possess a coach, even though, in its owner’s estimation, it might be “genteel and sober.”

“To the Park,” he is recording in April, “my wife and I; and here Sir W. Coventry did first see me and my wife in a coach of our own; and so did also this night the Duke of York, who did eye my wife mightily. But I begin to doubt that my being so much seen in my own coach at this time, may be observed to my prejudice, but I must venture it now.”

This was no idle fear, for in a while there was printed an ill-written and scurrilous pamphlet called _Plane Truth_, _or Closet Discorse betwixt Pepys and Hewer_, in which the following passage occurs:—

“There is one thing more you must be mightily sorry for with all speed. Your presumption in your coach in which you daily ride as if you had been son and heir to the great Emperor Neptune, or as if you had been infallibly to have succeeded him in his government of the Ocean, all which was presumption in the highest degree. First, you had upon the fore-part of your chariot, tempestuous waves and wrecks of ships; on your left hand, forts and great guns, and ships a fighting; on your right hand was a fair harbour and galleys riding, with their flags and pennants spread, kindly saluting each other, just like P[epys] and H[ewer—his chief clerk].”

How far Pepys’s carriage was decorated is not known, though this description does not tally in the least with Pepys’s own. In any case, he took no notice of such attacks, and so far from making his coach less conspicuous, arranged to have it newly painted and varnished.

“_19th April, 1669._—After dinner out again, and, calling about my coach, which was at the coachmaker’s, and hath been there for these two or three days, to be new painted, and the window-frames gilt against next May-day, went on with my hackney to White Hall.”

A few days later he gave orders for some “new sort of varnish” to be used on the standards at a cost of forty shillings, this being in his view very cheap. Indeed, “the doing of the biggest coach all over,” he learnt, “comes not above £6.” On his next visit to the coachmaker, he was surprised to find several great ladies “sitting in the body of a coach that must be ended tomorrow ... eating of bread and butter and drinking ale.” His own coach had been silvered over, “but no varnish yet laid on, so I put it in a way of doing.” A few hours later he called back again,

“and there vexed to see nothing yet done to my coach, at three in the afternoon; but I set it in doing, and stood by till eight at night, and saw the painter varnish it which is pretty to see how every doing it over do make it more and more yellow: and it dries as fast in the sun as it can be laid on almost; and most coaches are, now-a-days, done so, and it is very pretty when laid on well, and not too pale, as some are, even to show the silver. Here I did make the workmen drink, and saw my coach cleaned and oyled.”

And so eager was he to have it without delay that his coachman and horses were sent to fetch it that very evening, and on the following gala day, May 1st,

“we went alone through the town with our new liveries of serge, and the horses’ manes and tails tied with red ribbons, and the standards gilt with varnish, and all clean, and green reines, the people did mightily look upon us; and, the truth is, I did not see any coach more pretty, though more gay, than ours all the day. But we set out, out of humour—I because Betty, whom I expected, was not come to go with us; and my wife that I would sit on the same seat with her, which she likes not, being so fine: and she then expected me to meet Sheres, which we did in Pell Mell, and against my will, I was forced to take him into the coach, but was sullen all day almost, and little complaisant; the day being unpleasing, though the Park full of coaches, but dusty and windy, and cold, and now and then a little dribbling of rain; and what made it worse, there were so many hackney-coaches as spoiled the sight of the gentlemen’s; and so we had little pleasure.”

Henceforth Mr. Pepys, in spite of sundry warnings from his friend Mr. Povey and others, continued to use his coach, and although perhaps as he grew older, his coach was less brilliantly adorned, there seems no reason to suppose that he ever regretted its purchase.

Though it is not my intention to speak in any detail of public conveyances, a word must be said here of the stage-coaches,[33] which made their appearance on English roads in 1640. These were large coaches, leather-curtained at first—glass does not seem to have been used until 1680—and capable of seating six or eight passengers. Their chief feature was the huge basket strapped to the back.

“There is of late,” says Chamberlayne in his well-known _Present State of Great Britain_ (1649), “such an admirable commodiousness both for men and women, to travel from London to the principal towns in the country, that the like hath not been known in the world; and that is by stage-coaches, wherein one may be transported to any place sheltered from foul weather and foul ways, free from endangering of one’s health and one’s body by hard jogging or over-violent motion on horseback; and this not only at the low price of about a shilling for every five miles, but with such velocity and speed in an hour as the foreign post can make but in one day.”

Of course, there was opposition to these public coaches. In 1662, when there was not a round dozen of them, one writer was already exhorting their extinction on the ground that simple country gentlemen and their simple country wives could now come to London without due occasion, and there learn all the vice and luxury that were rampant. So in 1673, in a singular production called _The Grand Concern of England_, amongst the many proposals set forth for the country’s good, was one “that the Multitude of Stage Coaches and Caravans be suppressed.” One or two pamphlets of no particular interest appeared, both for and against these coaches, but it may be sufficient here to observe that they steadily increased in numbers and maintained their existence until the mail-coaches finally superseded them.

One other public carriage of this time also deserves mention. This was the _carosse à cinq sous_, which appeared in the streets of Paris in 1662. The history of this primitive omnibus is well told by Mr. Henry Charles Moore.[34]

“The leading spirits in this enterprise were the Duc de Rouanès, Governor of Poitou, the Marquis de Sourches, Grand Prévôt, the Marquis de Crenan, Grand Cup-bearer, and Blaise Pascal, the author of _Lettres Provinciales_. The idea was Pascal’s, but not being sufficiently wealthy to carry it out unaided, he laid the matter before his friend the Duc de Rouanès, who suggested that a company should be formed to start the vehicles. Pascal consented to this being done, and the Duc set to work at once to prevail upon members of the aristocracy to take shares in the venture.” After obtaining a royal decree, “seven vehicles to carry eight passengers each, all inside, were built, and on March 18th, 1662, they began running. The first one was timed to start at seven o’clock in the morning, but an hour or two earlier a huge crowd had assembled to witness the inauguration ceremony, which was performed by two Commissaires of the Châtelet, attired in their official robes. Accompanying them were four guards of the Grand Prévôt, twenty men of the City Archers, and a troop of cavalry. The procession, on arriving at the line of route, divided into two parts, one Commissaire and half of the attendants proceeded to the Luxembourg, and the others to the Porte St. Antoine. At the latter place three of the twopenny-halfpenny coaches were stationed, the other four being at the Luxembourg. Each Commissaire then made a speech, in which he pointed out the boon that _carosses à cinq sous_ would be to the public, and laid great stress on the fact that they would start punctually at certain times whether full or empty. Moreover, he warned the people that the king was determined to punish severely any person who interfered with the coaches, their drivers, conductors, or passengers. The public was also warned that any person starting similar vehicles without permission would be fined 3000 francs, and his horses and coaches confiscated.

“At the conclusion of his address, the Commissaire commanded the coachmen to advance, and, after giving them a few words of advice and caution, presented each one with a long blue coat, with the City arms embroidered on the front in brilliant colours. Having donned their livery, the drivers returned to their vehicles and climbed up to their seats. Then the command to start was given, and the two vehicles drove off amidst a scene of tremendous enthusiasm. The first coach each way carried no passengers—a very unbusinesslike arrangement—the conductor sitting inside in solitary state. But the next two, which were sent off a quarter of an hour after the first, started work in earnest, and it need scarcely be said that there were no lack of passengers. The difficulty experienced was in preventing people from crowding in after the eight seats were occupied. At the beginning of every journey the struggle to get into the coach was repeated, and many charming costumes were ruined in the crush. Paris, in short, went mad over its _carosses à cinq sous_, and the excitement soon spread to the suburbs, sending their inhabitants flocking to the city to see the new vehicles. But very few of the visitors managed to obtain a ride, for day by day the rush for seats became greater. The king himself had a ride in one coach, and the aristocracy and wealthy classes hastened to follow his example, struggling with their poorer brethren to obtain a seat. Many persons who possessed private coaches daily drove to the starting-point, and yet failed to get a drive in one for a week or two.

“Four other routes were opened in less than four months, but at last the fashionable craze came to an end, and as soon as the upper classes ceased to patronise the new coaches the middle and lower classes found that it was cheaper to walk than to ride. The result was that Pascal, who died only five months after the coaches began running, lived long enough to see the vehicles travelling to and fro, half, and sometimes quite, empty.

“For many months after Pascal’s death the coaches lingered on, but every week found them less patronised, and eventually they were discontinued. They had never been of any real utility, and were regarded by the public much in the same light as we regard a switchback railway.”

And, indeed, it was a century and a half before the next omnibus was tried.

So then, at the middle of the century, when heavy and slow stage-coaches were making their appearance on the English country roads, and the unsuccessful _carosse à cinq sous_ was being tried in the streets of Paris, the success of the _berlin_, the _brouette_, and other chariots, was in process of remodelling men’s ideas upon the most feasible carriage for town use. The older coaches, as I have said, were still retained for particular occasions, and, indeed, continued to be built with more ornamentation than ever before. The very spokes of the wheels were decorated, paintings appeared on the panels, and every inch of the coach made as brilliant as possible. France in particular possessed carriages of the most gorgeous possible description. These were not only entirely gilded over, but in some cases actually bejewelled. The richest stuffs lined their interiors, and masters painted their panels. Immense sums were spent. There is preserved at Toulouse a carriage of this date which shows most of these features. The interior “is, or rather was, lined with white brocade embroidered with a diaper of pink roses, the roof being lined with the same, while its angles are hidden by little smiling cupids gilded from top to toe. The surface of the panels is, or rather was, a piece of opaque white, exceedingly well varnished, and edged with a thick moulding of pink roses; the foliage, instead of being green, was highly gilded and burnished.”