Persons of the first rank (ladies we presume), in France, frequently sat behind their equerry, and the horse was often led by servants. When Charles VI., wished to see, incognito, the entry of the queen, he placed himself behind his master of the horse, with whom, however, he was incommoded in the crowd. Private persons in France, physicians, for instance, used no carriages in the fifteenth century. In Paris, at all the palaces and public places, there were steps for mounting on horseback.
Carriages, notwithstanding, appear to have been used very early in France, as appears by an ordinance issued in 1294, for suppressing luxury, and in which the citizens were prohibited from using carriages. About 1550, there were at Paris, for the first time, only three coaches; one of which belonged to the queen; another to Diana of Poictiers, the favourite mistress of two kings, Francis I. and Henry II.; and the third to René de Laval, a corpulent nobleman, unable to ride on horseback. Henry IV. was assassinated in a coach; but he usually rode through the streets of Paris on horseback. For himself and his queen he had only one coach, as appears by a letter which he writes to a friend, which is still preserved: “I cannot wait upon you to-day, because my wife is using my carriage.”
Roubo, in his costly treatise on joiners’ work, has furnished three figures of carriages used in the time of Henry IV., from drawings preserved in the King’s Library: from them it is seen those coaches were not suspended by straps, that they had a canopy supported by ornamental pillars, and that the whole body was surrounded by curtains of stuff or leather, which could be drawn up. The coach in which Louis IV. made his public entrance about the middle of the seventeenth century, appears from a drawing in the same library to have been a suspended carriage.
Our national chronicler, John Stowe, says coaches were first known in England about 1580; he likewise says, they were first brought from Germany by the Earl of Arundel, in 1589. Anderson places the period when coaches began to be used in common here about 1605. It is remarked of the Duke of Buckingham, that he was the first who was drawn by six horses, in 1619. To ridicule this pomp, the Earl of Northumberland put eight horses to his carriage.
Things are altered now when we have carriages of every description—for the high and low, the rich and the poor. Vis-a-vis,—an open carriage chiefly constructed for the benefit of conversation, as its name implies. Landau, landaulets, phætons, chaises, whiskeys, cabs, fiacres, &c., &c., are but names adapted to different purposes, and constructed nearly upon the same principles as coaches, but some of them close, others open, some to be opened or shut according to the weather, or taste of the passengers, and calculated to contain an indefinite number, from two to six persons; nay, there are the jolly good omnibuses running in every town and village in the kingdom, the generality of which are constructed to carry twelve inside and eight outside passengers.
The number of hackney coaches which ply in the streets of London have been augmented from time to time, since their first establishment in 1625, when there were only twenty. Coaches, cabs, omnibuses, &c., now plying, amount to nearly three thousand.
To prevent imposition, the proprietors of these carriages are compelled to have their names painted on some conspicuous place of the carriage, and their number affixed in the inside, as well as the out. This regulation has become absolutely necessary of late years, on account of the numerous frauds practised by the coachmen.
We read that in Russia there are employed clumsy, but very convenient sorts of carriages, so constructed as to be either closed or open, and to hold a bed or couch, called brichka, with which persons can travel even for two or three thousand miles without much inconvenience, except it be over the rough stones of their towns, owing to the superior accommodations of either lying down or sitting; this change of position renders a journey less irksome, without which it would prove intolerable. In Russia, from Riga to the Crimea, at least, post horses are furnished by the government, and entrusted to subalterns in the Russian army to provide them.
Coaches for hire were first established by public authority in France, as early as 1671. There are employed in the streets of the capital no fewer than three thousand hackney coaches. As early as the year 1650 Charles Villerme paid into the royal treasury fifteen thousand livres, for the exclusive privilege of keeping and using fiacres in Paris.
Post chaises were introduced in the year 1664.