Stow says, in his Survey of London (1633): “Of old time, Coaches were not known in this Island but Chariots or Whirlicotes.” The whirlicote is described as a cot or bed on wheels, a sort of wheeled litter, and was used as early as the time of Richard II. The first coach made in England by Walter Rippen was for the Earl of Rutland, in 1555. The queen had one the next year, and Queen Elizabeth a state coach eight years later from the same maker. That splendid association—“The Company of Coach and Harness Makers,” was founded by Charles II. in May, 1667.
English Coach, 1747.
Venomous diatribes were set in print against coaches, as is usual with all innovations, useful and otherwise. Of them the assertions of Taylor the “Water Poet” are good examples. He said that coaches dammed the streets, and aided purse-cutting; that butchers could not pass with their cattle; that market-folk were hindered in bringing victuals to town; that carts and carriers were stopped; that milkmaids were flung in the dirt; that people were “crowded and shrowded up against stalls and stoops”—still coaches continued to be built.
The early English stage-coaches were clumsy machines. One of the year 1747 is shown on the opposite page. With no windows, no seats or railing on top, and an uncomfortable basket rumble behind, they seem crude and inconvenient enough when compared with the dashing mail-coaches which were evolved a century later, and were such a favorite subject with English painters, engravers, and lithographers for many years. Those pictures expressed, as Dickens said, “past coachfulness: pictures of colored prints of coaches starting, arriving, changing horses, coaches in the sunshine, coaches in the snow, coaches in the wind, coaches in the mist and rain, coaches in all circumstances compatible with their triumph and victory, but never in the act of breaking down or overturning.”
A copy of one of those prints of an English mail-coach, in the height of its career, is shown opposite [page 256].
Stage-wagons were used throughout England as a means of cheaper conveyance. They were intolerably slow and equally clumsy. On [page 251] a leaf from an old-time English story-book shows two of these lumbering vehicles, which ill compare with the English mail-coaches.
Coaching days in England have had ample and entertaining record in instructive and reminiscent books, such as: Brighton and its Coaches, by William C. A. Blew, 1894; The Brighton Road, etc., by Charles G. Harper, 1892; Old Coaching Days, by Stanley Harris, 1882; Annals of the Road, by Captain Malet, 1876; Down the Road, etc., by C. T. S. Birch Reynardson, 1875; Coaching Days and Coaching Ways, by W. Outram Tristam, 1888.
We have no similar anecdotic and personal records of American coaching life, though we have the two fine books of modern coaching ways entitled Driving for Pleasure, by Francis T. Underhill, and A Manual of Coaching, by Fairman Rogers, both most interesting and valuable.
We began early in our history to have coaches. Even Governor Bradstreet in his day rode in a hackney coach. John Winthrop, of Connecticut, had a private coach in 1685; Sir Edmund Andros had one in Boston in 1687. At the funeral of the lieutenant-governor in 1732 in Boston there were plenty of coaches, though there were few in New York; the provincial governors usually had one. Watson, in his Annals of Philadelphia, gives a list of all private citizens who kept carriages in that city in 1761—there were but thirty-eight. There were three coaches, two landaus, eighteen chariots, and fifteen chairs. Eleven years later only eighty-four Philadelphians had private carriages. In 1794, when the city had a population of about fifty thousand, eight hundred and forty-seven carriage-owners appear: among them were found thirty-three coaches and one hundred and fifty-seven coachees.