If, then, we please to pronounce for that event as the true beginning, and allow 1848, the year when one of the last coaches, the Bedford “Times,” was withdrawn from the London and Bedford road in consequence of the opening of the Bletchley and Bedford branch railway, to be the end, we have the beginning, the growth and perfection of the old coaching era, and its final extinction, all comprised within a period of a hundred and ninety-one years.
Wheeled conveyances are generally said by the usual books of reference to take their origin in this country with the introduction of Queen Mary’s Coronation carriage in 1553; but, so far from that being correct, mention of carriages is often found in authorities of a period earlier by almost two centuries. Thus, in her will of September 25th, 1355, Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady Clare, bequeathed her “great carriage, with the covertures, carpets, and cushions,” to her eldest daughter; and carriage-builders at the close of Edward III.’s reign charged £100 and £1000 for their wares. Carts were not unknown to the peasantry; Froissart tells us that the English returned from Scotland in 1360 in “charettes,” a kind of carriage whose make he does not specify; and ladies are discovered in 1380 travelling with the baggage in “whirlicotes,” which were cots or beds on wheels, or a species of wheeled litter. We have, by favour of one of the old chroniclers, a fugitive picture of Richard II., at the age of seventeen, travelling in one of these whirlicotes, accompanying his mother, who was ill.
But such instances do not prove more than occasional use, and it certainly appears that when Queen Mary rode from the Tower of London to Westminster on her Coronation Day, September 20th, 1553, in her State coach, she thereby revived the use of carriages, which, for some reason or another, had fallen into disuse since those early days. Her coachmaker, by a grant made on May 29th in the first year of her reign, was one Anthony Silver.
We may seek the cause of wheeled conveyances going out of use in the two centuries before this date in the steady and continuous decay of the roads consequent upon the troubled state of the kingdom in that intervening space. Rebellions, pestilences, foreign wars, and domestic strife had marked that epoch. The Wars of the Roses themselves lasted thirty years, and in all that while the social condition of the people had not merely stood still, but degenerated. Towns and districts were half depopulated, and the ancient highways fell into disuse. It is significant that the first General Highway Act, a measure passed in 1555, was practically coincident with the reintroduction of carriages.
Queen Mary’s Coronation carriage—or, as it was called in the language of that time, “coach”—was drawn by six horses, less for reasons of display than of sheer necessity, for, with a less numerous and powerful team, it would probably have been stuck fast in the infamously bad roads that then set a gulf of mud between the twin cities of London in the east and Westminster in the west. Only three other carriages followed her Majesty on that historic occasion, and the ladies who attended rode horseback.
Two years after this new departure mention is found of a “coach”—still, of course, a carriage—made for the Earl of Rutland by one Walter Rippon, who in the same year appears to have built a new one for the Queen.
The next patron of carriages seems to have been Sir Thomas Hoby, sometime Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the French Court: that Sir Thomas who lies beside his brother, Sir Philip, in their magnificent tomb in the little Berkshire village church of Bisham, beside the Thames. He owned a carriage in 1566.
The progressive age of Elizabeth now opens. In 1564, six years after her accession, she was using a carriage brought over from Holland by a certain William Boonen, himself a Hollander. Boonen, indeed, became her Majesty’s coachman, but his services cannot often have been required, for, if we are to believe Elizabeth’s own words to the French Ambassador in 1568, driving in these early carriages, innocent of springs, must have been as uncomfortable as a journey in a modern builder’s cart or an ammunition-waggon would be. When his Excellency waited upon her, she was still suffering “aching pains, from being knocked about in a coach driven too fast a few days before.”
Little wonder, then, that the great Queen used her coach only when occasions of State demanded. She journeyed to her palace at Greenwich by water, between Greenwich and her other palace of Eltham on horseback, and to Nonsuch and Hampton Court and on her many country progresses in like manner, resorting only to wheels with advancing years. How bad were even the roads especially repaired for her coming may be judged from a contemporary description of her journey along that “new highway” whose “perfect evenness” is the theme of the writer. “Her Majesty left the coach only once, while the hinds and the folk of a base sort lifted it on with their poles.” Majesty must have been sore put to it to look majestic on such occasions, and in the bad condition of all roads at that time we find a new significance in the courtliness of Sir Walter Raleigh, who at Greenwich threw his velvet cloak upon the ground for Elizabeth to walk over.
Elizabeth was an accomplished horsewoman, and it is not surprising, under these circumstances, that she made full use of the accomplishment, continuing on all possible public occasions to appear in this manner. On longer journeys she rode on a pillion behind a mounted chamberlain, holding on to him by his waistbelt just as ladies continued to do for centuries yet to come. The curious in these things may find interest in the fact that the modern groom’s leathern waistbelt, which now serves no practical function, is merely a strange survival of that old necessity of feminine travel. The commonly-received opinion that Elizabeth objected to carriages from the supposed “effeminacy” of using them receives a severe shock from her carriage experiences, which make it quite obvious that travelling in the earliest of them was only to be indulged in by persons of the strongest frame and in the rudest health. She who mounted on her palfrey before her troops at Tilbury, when the Armada threatened, could justly claim that though but a woman she had the spirit of a King—aye, and a King of England—quailed before the rigours of a carriage-drive.