Nicholas Rothwell, of the London and Warwick stage in 1694, reappears in an extremely interesting broadsheet advertisement of 1731, announcing that the “Birmingham stage-coach in two days and a half begins, May the 24th.” Although we have no earlier information of this coach, it is probably safe to assume that this, like the advertisement of the York coach already quoted, merely advertised the beginning of a new season, and that winter was still largely, as it had been seventy-six years before, a blank in the coaching world. Rothwell was evidently established at Warwick, and seems to have been the first notable coach-proprietor, the forerunner of the Chaplins, Nelsons, Mountains, Shermans and Ibbersons of a later age. By his old advertisement we see that he catered for all classes of travellers—by stage-coach, private carriage, chaise, and waggon—and that he hired out horses to the gentlemen who still preferred their own company and the saddle to the coach and its miscellaneous strangers. Even the dead were not beyond the consideration of Mr. Rothwell, whose “Hearse, with Mourning Coach and Able Horses,” is set forth to “go to any part of Great Britain, at reasonable Rates.” Unhappily for the historian eager to reconstruct the road life of those times, this old advertisement is almost all that survives to tell us of Rothwell, and fortunate we are to have even that, for such sheets, as commonplace when issued as the advertisements of railway excursions are at the present time, are now of extreme rarity. It would appear, from the rude woodcut illustrating Rothwell’s bill, that his coach was of the old type, hung on leather straps and quite innocent of springs—the kind of coach that Parson Adams, in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, outwalked without the slightest difficulty. It seems to be more up-to-date in the matter of windows, and to be a “glass-coach,” if we may judge by the appearance of the window at which the solitary and unhappy-looking passenger is standing in an attitude suggestive of stomachic disturbance. There are no windows in the upper quarters of the coach, which in that and some other respects greatly resembles the vehicle pictured in 1747 by Hogarth in his Inn Yard.
THE STAGE-COACH, 1783. After Rowlandson.
Rothwell’s coach is drawn by four horses in hand, with a postilion on the off horse of a couple of extra leaders. The practice of using six horses and a postilion is one to which we find allusion in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, written nine years later than the date of this Birmingham coach. The curious will find the description in the twelfth chapter of that novel, where Joseph, recovering from the murderous attack of two highwaymen, attracts the attention of the postilion of a passing stage-coach. “The postilion, hearing a man’s groans, stopped his horses, and told the coachman he was certain there was a dead man lying in the ditch, for he heard him groan.” (That postilion surely was an Irishman.) “‘Go on, sirrah!’ says the coachman: ‘we are confounded late, and have no time to look after dead men.’ A lady, who heard what the postilion said, and likewise heard the groan, called eagerly to the coachman to stop and see what was the matter. Upon which, he bid the postilion alight and look into the ditch. He did so, and returned, ‘That there was a man sitting upright, as naked as ever he was born.’ ‘O J—sus!’ cried the lady; ‘a naked man! Dear coachman, drive on and leave him!’”
Rowlandson shows that in 1783 six horses were still used, and that a postilion continued to ride one of the leaders. It was about this same period that the generally misquoted remark about the ease of driving a coach-and-six through an Act of Parliament grew proverbial. It had originated so early as 1689, when Sir Stephen Rice, Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer and a bigoted Papist, declared for James the Second, and was often heard to say he would drive a coach and six horses through the Act of Settlement. Later generations, knowing nothing of six horses to a coach, and unused to seeing more than four, unconsciously adapted the saying to the practice of their own times.
CHAPTER IV
GROWTH OF COACHING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
All this while the stages had gone their journeys with the same horses from end to end, and travel was necessarily slow. To the superficial glance it would seem that neither the dictates of humanity towards animals nor even the faintest glimmering perception of the possibilities of speed in constant relays had then dawned upon coach-proprietors; but it would be too gross an error to convict a whole class of stupidity so dense and brutal. It is not to be supposed that, at a time when ten-mile relays of saddle-horses for gentlemen riding post were common throughout the kingdom, the advantages of frequent changes and fresh animals were hidden from men whose daily business it was to do with coaches and horses. The real reasons for the bad old practice were many. They lay in the uncertainty of passengers, in the extreme difficulty of arranging for changes at known places of call, and, above all, in the impossibility of those coaches changing whose route between given starting-point and destination was altered to suit the convenience of travellers.
The first hint of quicker travel and of a better age for horses is obtained in this advertisement of the Newcastle “Flying Coach,” May 9th, 1734:—
“A coach will set out towards the end of next week for London, or any place on the road. To be performed in nine days, being three days sooner than any other coach that travels the road: for which purpose eight stout horses are stationed at proper distances.”