His remarks, too voluminous to reprint in extenso, contain in one place the observation that “by this rapid mode of travelling”—at the period in which he wrote it took approximately three days to get from London to Dover, even in fine weather—“gentlemen will come to London upon the slightest pretext, which but for these abominable coaches they would not do but upon urgent necessity.”
Nor would the impending evil, in his opinion, end there, for, lashing himself gradually into a fury, he went on to maintain that “the gentlemen's wives” would come too, and that no sooner would they find themselves in London than they would “get fine clothes, go to plays and treats, and by these means get such a habit of idleness and love for pleasure that they would be uneasy ever after.”
Poor Mr Cressett!
Surely he must have been an ancestor, or at the least some early relative, of the notorious Mr Wightman who, just before the first London and Brighton railway was laid down, wrote a book in which he “proved” beyond refutation that no locomotive steam engine could by any possibility be propelled at a speed greater than about half the speed of the fastest of the coaches then on the road!
We smile indulgently at all this now, yet, when all is said, have we changed so very greatly since those dark and peculiar ages—since the epoch that we now refer to so complacently as “the good old times”? (sic).
The narratives of the remarkable experiences of many of the travellers in those early coaches would make up almost enough letterpress to fill a volume. For from the very outset the public stages became the unlawful prey of half the rascals with which a vast tract of the whole of England at that time teemed. Coaches were plundered almost daily, and while sometimes blood was spilt intentionally, often this happened rather by accident.
Charles II., who used his influence to help on the development of the stage coach, appears at times to have become frankly impatient with the ultra-conservatism of the bulk of his nobility and of the aristocracy who strove hard to check the progress of the new form of locomotion.
Whatever Charles's shortcomings may have been—and we know that he had many—he had enough of nous to be able to foresee the enormous advantages that would be derived from the general adoption of the public stage.
Consequently he encouraged the importation of stallions and the breeding of animals of the stamp best adapted for coach work.